Chevy w/Balding Tires
Released 2004
10 songs, 9 vocal, 1 instrumental, each taking place in Riverside, CA and environs. Beautifully packaged in three-panel cardboard digipak. Booklet includes lyrics and additional text. Download available in both mp3 and flac (lossless) formats.
Tracks:
Listen using the play button next to the mp3 download links.
Lyrics:
Chevy w/ Balding Tires
The wheel's tight in my sweating hand
We met inside this desert land
You used to love my metal band
Made with friends from the high school.
You left my life like borrowed money
My muscles ache and my nose is runny
I get a look that's harsh and funny
From a low-riding Camaro
With feathered hair and jacket black,
I cruise your family's cul-de-sac
You must have not have gotten back
From your rent-a-room parish
So I hit the 215
I light one up and scope the scene
Inside my Flaming Red Machine
That my mom calls a Chevy
Got my bottle underneath my seat
The pedal's heavy underneath my feet
That smell from last night's turned to sick from sweet
And it's stuck in my memory
Your pastor told you Rock was wrong
Your parents say I don't belong
And I would sing a rebel song
About loving you truly
But since the tune's a total loss
I'll raise some Hell beneath that cross
That's right, I'll tell the flock's big boss
That you once dated a black guy
In the distant parking lot
Through densest haze of harshest pot
The cracking sound of smoke and gunshot
When your car enters view
I see projections on my mind
Of kissing lips and your behind
But on this day my heart will find
A most impertinent vengeance
The glass door's open and there's people coming out
I drop my bombshell in the form of a shout:
"Hey, let me tell you what your daughter's about!"
Mother lives her worst nightmare.
If you had heeded up my warning
And dropped the bloody crown-of-thorning
Perhaps this hellish Sunday morning
Might never have happened
But instead you dropped me cold
Like stale bread or cheese with mold
But I'm no longer twelve years old
And I shouldn't be messed with
A Man and His Laboratory
I earn a more than measly keep in Behavioral Science.
I can explain the human lust for death and violence
When I administer my of tests
With electrodes on subjects' chests
The way they twitch is a window into their brains
The Lab's home to quite a cast of whores and liars
The passers-by mistake these sounds for screeching tires
Because when they get an answer wrong
Their voices sing a howling song
And I feel the rising heat of a Bunson flame
I'd put some paltry, paltry odds on the chance that I love.
I cover my hands and my heart in a rubber glove
Don't kiss my thin pink lips
I got blood on my fingertips
From the little white mice I keep in a cage
While others stroll these halls in olive drab
Smoke pours from the sheet-metal doors that lead to my Lab
Don't expect to see my findings in popular journals
I keep all my kernels of wisdom well hid
Let the world sing praise to my nemesis, Dr. Duran!
From my vantage I see these events unfold in my plan
When I hold my conference he'll come and expect an ovation
I'll watch him bleed perspiration when he's strapped to my chair
And when I'm gone, gone, gone and done with my trials
Keep a few of my living cells in jars and vials.
Replicate me there and then
Into my government-funded den
And let the ill of the world know I'm back in the Lab
When My Wife Takes Me by My Hand
When I first saw this dust and these hills
These orange groves and these social ills
I kept to my family
As if I didn't notice
In my mind that fateful bottle speaks
There's a blank where there should be the next week
My legal status was too drear bleak
To collect unemployment
For 2 months, I went underground
Stole every liquor bottle in this town
But in March I heard sounds
And they pushed my heart open
I see that opening door and my son
My mother-in-law shot words as if from a gun
Across the room was a mirror
And I hummed a song
Each day then, I'd try my luck
To go to the groves piled in the back of a truck
Twice a week under the fence I'd duck
And spend my day singing
In my mind would flow forgotten words
I pictured myself as if among the birds
It was my great uncle's voice that I heard
Calling me from Sonora
Every night I'd bounce from bar to bar
On foot or in my neighbor's car
I heard accordions playing
When I mixed beer and Tequila
And then one morning I woke by a wall
I heard my heart let fly a mourning call
My mind started to slip
And I pictured my wedding
I'm now fluent in the local tongue.
My skin is leathered where it once was young.
If I once had a song, it's been sung
By some other singer
In this Valley there's no rolling fields
Just pickup trucks with their hulking wheels
With tips I earn my family's meals
And my wife does nails.
Last year I bought myself a car.
I hold my keys and hear a gut guitar.
It's as true as all these sounds from afar
That each day I'm dying
But when my wife takes me by my hand
This foreign body in this foreign land
My head becomes quiet
And I settle down
The Man from Manila
She serviced Clark Air Base.
I got half in my pocket
She got hit when she held out
Shot abroad like a rocket
Private Ralph Bumgarner
Partisan of the Nighthawks
My face is a mystery to you
But I'll give you a little shock
Five years from that minute
My English is broken
Santa Ana blows around my neck
As if the man's name's spoken.
Wipe oil from my eyelids
Get the smell of gasoline
My lungs suck my cigarette
My nights pass without dreams
She sees me in supermarkets
Our eyes meet at stoplights
No words pass between us
But my visage must haunt her nights
In his eyes she sees me
She reflects in my gaze's glass
Bearing down on their bedroom
He'll feel the inescapable past
The hills rise about me
Devoid of all plant life
I am one among refugees
She another new Phillipine wife
Fifteen minutes have finished
I enter the grease pit
It's as if God's speaking
When there and then I behold it
"Go Dragons" on bumper
USAF on window
Dread name on the invoice
Burning pink white and yellow
Of all the ways a man can die
Death squads and Turkish jails
Of this color I deprive him
Within days his brakes will fail
I see her tears well before me
They reflect my killing hands
I'm idea made flesh
Of the methods of this desert land
Cigarettes and motor oil
Black rags and radios
I could give my mind to regret
Or comfort her at the funeral
To an Angry Pot Farmer
I just got in from Detroit
Now that it's winter you got better weather
I'm in a funny kind of stage of my life
Where I'm getting it together
For the last 3 years I've been bouncing
In and out of retail
Living with connections
Who were bouncing in and out of jail
All hail parental authority!
These words now can fill my heart with glee
Because now I'm beginning to see
Or that's what I'm told
The old man said it was here
Or in school or the street
So I packed up my bags
And put my old hiking shoes on my feet
God himself put these hills in this heat
Or so my uncle tells me
This pure mountain air is far sweeter
Than the stuff my friends sell me
So when I got on that plane
And when I landed at Ontario
I knew I'd come to a cross of some sort,
Or at least I hoped so
And when we drove up that hill
And to the San Bernardinos ascended
I knew then that I got my big break
And that my old life had ended
I left the cabin by the Lake
Took uncle's Bible and a pup tent
The weatherman said it would be
The clearest weekend that God ever sent
Gone from my mind were those nights
I spent in a maze
Wandering from this thought to that
In a smoky haze
But then I caught me a scent
A little different than these greenest needles
And taking form in my focus, barbed wire
Where I expected birds and beetles
So now I see me your face
And I offer my story
I'll assume that this is all grown for clothes,
Rope, oil and the nation's glory
When you open your eyes, I'll be gone
As if I didn't exist
And should I speak of what I've seen on this day
Then let me slit my wrists
"You better say all your prayers.
You've met your end in these forsaken hills
Your wandering ways have led you
To my orchard that cures every ill
God invented the shotgun for me
To protect what's mine
And if no body is found
Then the law says that there's no crime."
The Desert
I turned 29 on the fifth of last August
And I've hit the end
I got a house on the other side of the highway
And a few of my high school friends
When I hear the jets on that runway
At the Base just past dawn
I see pictures coming back in my memory
And in a minute they're gone.
When I came back from the Desert
And I got my loan
I spent six months in my brother's apartment
Then I got a job wiring telephones
My friends would drink and go dancing
At one of a series of bars by the Base
This went on another seven months
And then I saw your face
With MGD in my veins for my courage
I stepped into the crowd
I felt a pressure in my chest from their bodies
"Achey Breakey Heart" blared aloud
In the burning light on that dance floor
Halfway down that line
With your long black hair suspended in the warm air
While the summer Lake Perris moon shined
I caught a glimpse of the desert
With that foreigner's blood in the sand
My mind came back to this country
You caught a glimpse of my signaling hand
Heard a woman's voice singing
About a marriage and a home
Our eyes met. Then you turned to face me
And we stood on that floor alone
It might have been the air in that moonlight
Or it could have been my beer
But my heart swelled and sang inside me
I dropped my guard and whispered in your ear
You spoke to me in some language
That I'd heard but couldn't comprehend
I let go of your hand and I left you
And I thought about the desert again
My house has lost some value
And I put up a fence
When I hear the Spanish tones of my neighbors
I can feel the air growing tense
When I see the plain of that desert
I feel the muscles tighten in my hand
I hear the tone of your whisper beside me
On the burning Moreno Valley sand
Target Practice
If I'd followed my father and studied
My position would be dim and muddied
But a pistol is concrete and clear
If you're willing to use it
On the pedestrian mall next to City Hall
The AME hits a wailing note
Not one soul is around who would hear my sound
As their picket signs puncture my throat
Loafers kick in my chest without bulletproof vest
On my back looking up at the sky
I'm coming loose from my skin. Both my lungs lose their wind
And red puddles wash over my eyes
Got my radio loud
I'm at 2nd and Lime
"Take a look at this crowd
At that house with the trespassing sign."
Fifty-eight of our city's fine flower
In a night of illicit cheer
Grab the goods, wait an hour
Me and the boys having us free beer
I walk into the school, to uphold the law's rule
After passing unchecked up the stair
On the walls, in the books of this place
They're displaying my face and my long feathered hair
In the conference room I see counselors in gloom
And my mind turns all fuzzy and fried
"The delinquents aren't here, but we heard of your beer
And your father will be notified."
On the bench, on the grass
Paper bags and bloodshot faces
Grab the unopened glass
Sweep them out from these public spaces
He chides me with empty abstractions
Says I'm filled with the rankest reaction
A pistol is concrete and clear
If you're willing to use it
I put a club to his hands and a kick to his glands
By a blank University wall
With his tag half begun and a limp for a run
In the distance he shuffles and falls
I shut off my lights. I'm overcome by the night.
I picture phrases of fluorescent green
So I finish his part with some words from my heart
A good many degrees past obscene
Have a beer in the car
The dawn shines on the station
Homeward bound by the bars
In decay and dilapidation
He offered me symbols and signs
In the place of cold steel
But this city's distinctions and lines
Hit my head with the real
Up above me my ceiling is turning
My interior organs are churning
But in the afternoon I'll have time
For my target practice
Out and Upward
Textbooks and applications
The absent face of my mother
Hot wind in the window
In the room a slow smother
My father offers up Cal State:
"You could leave but you shouldn't.
If she were here she would second it."
But I know she wouldn't.
We're all National Honor
He looks military
I picture father's face knotted
Like he has dysentery
Six beers and two dances pass swiftly
It's a wild night
Within four months I'm starting to show
I move to Fort Wainwright
So now I have a wedding band
Yes, with my hand
I write my future for me
But on this longest winter night
My mother's light
Shines autonomously
I've started buying meals
My daughter's in day care
My husband eyes the officers' club
But he's going nowhere
I'm working at Walden's
I am an assistant
In my mind his face is tensing
It's making me distant
By April it's obvious
I'm making better money
He thinks we'll make it on his salary
It's striking me funny
The table's turned over
I can hear the kid screaming
I'm in the car on the highway
Alone with face beaming
So now I make my place
In my own space
Like some northern sea-bird
My mother took this street
With her own feet
She walked out and upward
I've been a manager two months
It's something like probation
I can afford an apartment in Ballard
It's a kind corporation
I pull 50-hour weeks
I've come close to quitting
But I've had my fill of behavior
That smacks of wrist-slitting
A fifty-something man in my face
I give him the refund
My mother's picture on my windowsill
My mind moribund
It's in the air in this strip mall
This is foul theater
It's all too clear I'm a stooge
I'm a bottom-feeder
The Caddy
They said to keep my mouth locked shut
Give them clubs and watch them putt
But this is better than what
I used to take at school
And it was hard to make it out
But I heard my mother shout
When I stood upon that platform
In early June
My brothers both have gone to stay
On out in Chino, locked away
My mother makes a point of smiling
When we meet
But I can see a different face
When we leave them in that place
And we sit beside each other
Driving home
Last Sunday we were praying
My mother started swaying
And I could hear the pastor saying
Something about Israelites.
"We're living in Egyptian heat.
There's a plague upon these streets
Though we will never claim defeat
When we're still breathing."
Gold watches and leather bands
White gloves upon right hands
In the distance I see sands
And grab an iron
And then I swear I hear that word
They check to see if I have heard
Our eyes meet and then they turn
Their heads away
In my mind's my teacher's face
He said he'd help me find my place
In the reality of race
In service industries
I shouldn't set my sights too high
He'd hate to see my dreams all die
And he swears it would be a lie
To tell me different
The quivering air is hot and quiet
The landscape turns a bleeding violet
I plant that iron in his eyelid
And he falls shaking
I can hear my mother's breathing
I feel his bleeding spirit leaving
I hit the streets with asphalt heaving
And I'm gone
I'm hearing footsteps on the floor
Behind our thin apartment door
I'll no longer keep the score
Or carry clubs
I'll be in my orange suit
By white guards with leather boots
When my mother comes to see me
Every week |
