My Bird Eats Turkey

Slash Brannon was a poet much admired in Jambox circles. His brother David and all the Earwacks cats dug his words, too. I copied a few of his poems in one of my oldest notebooks in the hopes of preserving some of heir mad frantic glamour. I knew I couldn't rely on Slash himself to preserve them, since he was hell bent on self destruction from birth.

One of our first projects together, after we decided to start recording every Monday night, was My Bird Eats Turkey, a poem by Slash Brannon that came up one way or another, perhaps by browsing through my old notebook.

We used the first line of the poem as it was, to set the rhythm of the lines to follow, which the poem didn't, more meandering than song. Then Fojammi went nuts on it, in a process that I think I contributed to as much as I could, but since I don't really play keyboards, in ways that probably either resulted in minor structural parts or else chaos.

I worked on adapting the lyrics, throwing as much of myself into as I wanted to. We recorded it a few different times before we made the take you hear below, with George Crider and Peter Wood helping out with the Low chorus:

The lyrics go something like this:

Lillian slipping within crisp whirlpools gripping within concern
Lazily beans aligns with the main screen thinks about the curves

Low low low
That's about as low
As a fellow ought to go

Everything's happenin' and everything's changing and every thing's going by
I don't know nothing that I can't remember and I can't exactly remember

Patiently patiently waiting to awe the carnivore of all time
My bird eats turkey for breakfast every day
Never asks for bacon, I know just what she'll say
She'll say:

This was perhaps the best of all the pieces we did together at this time. Fojammi totally knocked it out of the park on this, and I was really happy with some of my ideas for the vocals, though it was never really fully realized, since I could never get it quite right in one live take with no overdubs.

This poem was written for a waitress at Duff's restaurant in the West End, where we all worked off and on in the late 1970s. She was a beautiful crazy blonde named Kate Brune, and we were partying over at her apartment one night when Slash heard her say "My bird eats turkey."

We were all in love with her, she was so incredibly cool and smart and older and sexy. She was like Dorothy Parker to my romantic young eyes, and if I had been older, or had even looked as old as I was, I would have tried to get together with her. But we were all teenagers and she was at least 21 or 22 years old, so it was like howling at the moon to even think of such a thing.

Download "My Bird Eats Turkey"