Who’ll Stop Lorraine?
I wasn’t so sure this song would ever see the public light of day. First of all, it’s premised around an especially silly pun (which I’m hoping I needn’t explain). Second, until I added a new verse last night as I was recording it, I was afraid it would come off as a dark and threatening sort of thing. I was imagining having to put up another “This is not a murder ballad” kind of disclaimer…
Happily, I came up with a way to end the song that makes it whole… that actually gives it some much needed resolution. An ending that hopefully means I won’t be accused of fostering violence against anyone.
In fact, I was still writing the song as I recorded this very version. At the last moment I found myself doing the chorus and realizing I had to change it, somehow, to reflect that resolution. And even casual listeners will surely hear the hesitation as I delivered the new lines off the top of my head.
Rather than re-record the track, I decided to share that moment of creation with you, my trusted and loyal reader. Also, it was late and I was tired and… after all, this is A Year of Songs… it’s not about perfection. Or even competence.
It’s about keeping going…
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Who’ll Stop Lorraine?
I’ve known Lorraine since we were kids
and I’ve always been amazed
Every time she went too damn far I thought
Who’ll stop Lorraine?
I saw her hunt down Billy Jim
he was doomed from that first day
I saw her rip his heart in two and thought,
Who’ll stop Lorraine?
From the hotel bar to the airport lounge
Everyone knows her name
Over and over I ask myself,
Who’ll Stop Lorraine?
Finally one day I’d had enough
I sat her down looked her in the eye
Lorraine I love you, girl, but straighten up,
‘cause, Lorraine, you’re wreckin’ people’s lives
From the hotel bar to the airport lounge
Everyone knows your name
Over and over they ask themselves,
Who’ll Stop Lorraine?
I never thought Id see a tear in her eye
I never thought I’d see into her soul
but since that day she’s come so far
and God I’ve come to love her so
From the hotel bar to the airport lounge
Everyone knows her name
Over and over they ask themselves,
Whatever became of Lorraine?
(C)2001, TK Major
PS… I also have one from 1994 (that I just now rediscovered — I doubt I’ve read it since I wrote it) called “When Lorraine Comes”… I strongly suspect that one won’t make it into AYoS. (Sample lyrics: “When Lorraine comes / she coughs and shakes her head / she hardly moves in bed / she might as well be dead /When Lorraine comes…” I think you get the drift.)
The engine of desire…
Without lust… could there be rock and roll?
It would certainly set sexual procreation back a few squares, anyhow. And that would put a big dent in the evolution of the species… if young girls weren’t attracted to young guys with high tight pompadours… pretty soon back into the primordial slime with the whole ballgame. Er… so to speak.
Anyhow…
So far, A Year of Songs hasn’t produced too many of what you might call “definitive versions” of my tunes but I’m thinking this one is kind of in the running. (Not, mind you, that it is in any way slick or well recorded. In fact, the vocal is about three times too loud. But, hey, it’s close enough for A Year of Songs.) The “studio version” is pretty definitive, too, in its way, a big, roiling techno-swamp-boogie morass… watch out for the alligators.
This version, though, might seem at first blush to be a bit of a tribute to Brit folk master, John Renbourn — though I tremble to mention his name while talking about my modest efforts. Then again, I don’t have 20 fingers and, after listening to Mr Renbourn’s playing for years, I’m convinced he does. (But he did manage to keep the extras hid, somehow, when I saw him a few times at the tiny McCabe’s guitar shop concert room in Santa Monica in the 80s.)
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March 23, 2006
September 27, 2005
Pretty Little Head
baby I’ve been alone for such a long time
these feelings tearin’ me apart
I got pain in my head and a fire in my loins
and a whole lot of empty in my heart
If you had a thought in your pretty little head
Then maybe we could talk
today we’re alive tomorrow we’re dead
so I think right now we’d better rock
I look in your eyes and I wonder what
is going on in your mind
Are you really where you are
or where you’ll be tomorrow night?
your leg touches mine beneath the table
I feel your hand slide up my thigh
I feel kinda dizzy I feel kinda high
I feel like I’m gonna die
If you had a thought in your pretty little head
Then maybe we could talk
today we’re alive tomorrow we’re dead
so I think right now we’d better rock
(C)1989, TK Major
this first appeared on www.AYearOfSongs.org OCTOBER 29, 2006
reprinted by permission
Someday baby
Sometimes you just see how it’s all going to go down. You look and look and no matter how you look, you see the same end coming.
But not everyone sees it. And when it comes, it hits them hard.
Maybe it’s the sad wisdom born of years of life, death and change, as they say in the comics, but at a certain zoom level, the pain and the pleasure and the sorrow and the joy start developing some kind of symmetry. Not, perhaps, the nice, even, balanced kind… but an inner symmetry that is at once reassuring and sobering.
I’m thinking, of course, of that moment in the narrative of life when a wised up adult tells his or her young and heartbroken lover,You’ll be better off without me, doll. It’s a big world out there. You’re gonna find some guy who really loves you — not a guy like me, always out for number one, looking for the next adventure, the next good time. You’re going to find someone who deserves a fine girl like you…
The funny thing is, after a while, you see it happening. You see one of the perfectly good girls you threw away out on the street with her new number one and they look so happy. A few years later you see them out shopping with the kids, the happy family. At a certain point, you look twice and, if you try real hard, it can almost look good for a few moments.
But that’s their destiny.
lyrics
Someday Baby
someday, baby
you’ll be looking down on me
but don’t you ever think I don’t know
what you’re bound to see
it’s just destiny
it’s just got to be
that’s my prophecy
someday, baby
when you’ve got this
whole thing straight
after you contemplate
maybe meditate
you’ll see that it was fate
it had to be this way
besides
it’s all too late
someday, baby
you’ll be laughing in the sun
I can see you with your Only One
and I know that it just has to be
it’s prophecy
it is destiny
someday, baby
this will all be washed away
that’s what the old men say
but it’ll be okay
a million years from today
it’ll end our pain
someday, baby
youll be laughing in the sun
I can see you with your Only One
and you know it just has to be
it is prophecy
it’s destiny
7/27/98
(C)2008, TK Major
by TK Major
I couldn’t help fall
for a girl named October
her eyes like the sky
when the day’s almost over
her voice like a song
you almost remember
from some other life
some other forever
Why did I lie
why did I say — I didn’t love her
I knew just what that meant
I knew right there and then
that it was over…
ten thousand times
I thought that I might see her
a million nights I lay awake
and remembered
ten billion stars
go on forever
not one chance
we could stay together
Why did I lie
why did I say — I didn’t love her
I knew just what that meant
I knew right there and then
that it was over…
When I was a kid, summers stretched on lazily. I worshipped summer. Long days at the library or playing pool at the Boys Club, and later, hitching down to the beach, body surfing and just hanging out looking at girls and talking about life… the life that didn’t seem to have begun yet.
But, sooner or later, fall would start to sneak into the air and a wistfulness, a longing would overtake me. You’d become aware of the faint perfume of fallen leaves or distant fires (yeah, not only could you hitchike back then, people actually burned leaves to get rid of them… it was a long time ago… don’t try it in your century). And, even when I was a boy, I would feel… old.
And filled with complex feelings I never understood.
The first time I fell hopelessly, obsessively in love — I was 10 — was on a fall-like day at the end of summer. Autumn hung over that day so heavily, I found myself drawn down to my locked-up-for-the-summer grade school. I took the wooden boomerang my dad and I had made in the garage (from instructions in a Reader’s Digest kids book… another thing that’ll never happen in this century. Have you ever been hit by a wooden boomerang slicing in from 120 feet in the air?)
For a few idle hours, I threw the ‘rang in the various ways I’d studied, sending it scooping low to the ground and then watching it rise suddenly, but predictably to come up and back around, running to where it would land as often as I ran away from it as it bore down on me.
There I was toward the end of the day, the sun slanting in, eucalyptus trees wiggling their long, finger like leaves, the distant sounds of other kids on the sprawling grounds and I saw her…
It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen her before. She’d been in my class since 2nd grade, maybe first. But there was something about her long hair and her slim athleticism as she chased her family dog… something I’d never seen before in a girl my age, something that talked to me on an altogether unfamiliar level… something that talked to my genes…
As fate would have it, it was an unrequited love. I even tried getting to her through her best friend, a cute blond I’ll call Lauren. Of course, even though I didn’t know that was how the plotline always goes, I found myself drawn farther into a sweet and innocent puppy love… with Lauren.
For almost two years we were inseparable — except at school, where I had to keep up the fiction that I hated girls. But for endless hours we would walk and talk or just lie next to each other on the grass, looking up at the trees above us.
We ended up going to different middle schools (back then we called them junior highs) and, not too long after, my family moved away. I saw her again when I was 17 and totally full of myself. She was very cute. I thought for a few moments that she would surely fall for the new, self-consciously hip me but it wasn’t to be. I never saw her again…
(C)2005, 2009, TK Major
Catalina at sunset, seen from Long Beach, 2009.
