An archive of the Change Music Variety Show Blog
Jambox Songs:
Classical Music
Hoochie Coochie Poochie
(Don't Funk With Our) Fame
Plucktress
Rendered Pimpless
Sweet Weaving Dancer
Remember Me
Change Me Blues
Party Right Now!
Believe In Me! (A Foxtrot)
Why Don't You Take It Off?
Coda To The Code of Admirable Puff
My other sites:
Plucktress
I noticed, as I grew older, that nobody can tell you what you need to know when you're young until you are too old to need to know it anymore. When you look back on the very first loves you ever knew, you see things that make you flinch, cringe and sigh. If you have kids you can even feel a kind of heart-pounding panic, just to think that there's no way you can prepare them for the mistakes everyone has to make.
Two of the most fascinating girls I knew as an older teenager were Plucktress and the Thrill, as you see them above in their earthly alter egos. Plucktress was a freewheeling, fun loving hippie chick of the kind that you could find sitting around topless just because she wanted to, smoking an unfiltered camel and swigging from a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, listening to hippie music like Funkadelic or King Crimson. Her background was incredibly adventurous and varied, and she was in love with my best friend Slash and I was in love with her, because she didn't want me.
Thrill, on the other hand, was a more rational choice for a boy such as me to love. She liked me, and felt uncomfortably like family from the first time I ever saw her. Each time we were together stars fell out of the sky and the earth shook for me to the point of absolute terror. Each time we were together, circumstances combined to make seeing her again impossible for me, which rendered even more poignant my adolescent feelings for her. She was perfect for me, I thought, absolutely too perfect for me. In her eyes I saw a quick and early marriage and kids and a dead end world because I wasn't ready for what she had to offer.
You might ask yourself, at this point in my recollections of the emotional excesses of a love-sick puppy dog, what these heavenly creatures might have seen in me. Plucktress saw me as a little brother she loved dearly. Thrill saw me as an unreliable jerk who never called her back after a date and shied away from posing for photos with her. And from these simple little inconsequential relationships grew a grand scheme of what love is and means in my life, many many years later.
But first I wrote this song, Plucktress, which I should have maybe called Thrill, but of the two I knew the Plucktress far better, since we were roommates for a while and pretty close friends of a mostly platonic sort. In this song I contrast and compare unrequited love with love you can never requite.
We come on like a storm
looking you right in the eye
We come on like a storm
looking you right in the eye
And if they ask your name
Tell them you’re a Fearless Fly
And if they ask your name
Tell them you’re sincerely high
Plucktress, give me back my pride,
Why should a girl I love always consider me tied?
Plucktress, laying on her side,
I tried to love you but emotions lied.
But I’m not gonna give up on you
And you won’t give in to me
Tell me when O when will we ever be free?
Baby, come on up and see about me.
You know I’ll always be in love with you
because you tease me so mercilessly.
Thrill came to give me tea
Comfort love and sympathy
I don’t like your society
because you’re much too much too good for me
But don’t think I haven’t thought of you
regrets reread I neglected you
What did I ever do to deserve your love?
Baby, come on up and see about me.
You know I’ll always be in love with you
because you please me so mercilessly.
Love Love, faithless or true
Undeserving or forced on you
You won’t know until it’s through
Who did what or owes how much to who
Maybe I’ve been unlucky in love
Maybe it’s always that way
But I’ll always be ready to enter the fray with you
Baby, come on up and see about me.
You know I’ll always be in love with you
because you tease me so merciless
Please me so mercilessly.
We come on like a storm
looking you right in the eye
We come on like a storm
looking you right in the eye
And if they ask your name
Tell them you’re sincerely high
And if they ask your name
Tell them you’re a Fearless Fly
This was a Jambox song, even though it wasn't a collaboration with Slash Brannon. I don't remember anyone ever thinking much of it, except for the little scat sung part, which Dominic Shaeffer complimented me on once. I got so few compliments on my music that I usually remember every one.
You can download and listen to this song if you want; but it's one song that iif nobody ever listened to it ever again I wouldn't care at all. This is a song I sing to myself, for myself, without any real need to share it with anyone, much like the memories we all hide in our hearts of the loves we once had that taught us how to love. Neither of these conceptual girls taught me everything I needed to know, but without either one of them I would never have been able to love the woman I love right now with all my heart and soul; with the intensity of rock solid conviction.
Because I know that the feeling we call love can come from real love and from the longing for love at once, and being able to distinguish is the essence of true love, final love, never ending love like that of the Gods themselves.
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