Your Time Is Sand Thursday, June 02, 2005

A commenter below (welcome!) suggests "Snoopy and the Red Baron" and "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" as overcooked historical narrative tunes. I think those point in the right direction, but I was thinking more of prog-rock stuff, even Led Zeppelin. Did they ever write any eight-minute jobs about real historical events? Or just Tom Bombadil-type stuff?

I guess most of the examples that do come to mind are closer to the folky end of the spectrum. David Olney, a singer-songwriter of some renown, has written a bunch of abjectly shitty historical songs. The one that always grates on me is "1917":

The strange young man who comes to me
A soldier on a three day spree
Who needs one night's cheap ecstacy
And a woman's arms to hide him

He greets me with a courtly bow
He hides his pain by acting proud
And he drinks too much and laughs too loud
How can I deny him

Let us dance beneath the moon
I'll sing to you "Claire de Lune"
The morning always comes too soon
But tonight the war is over

He speaks to me in schoolboy French
Of a soldier's life inside a trench
The look of death, the ghastly stench
I do my best to please him

He puts two roses in a vase
Two roses sadly out of place
Like the gallant smile on his haggard face
Playfully I tease him

Hold me 'neath the Paris sky
Let's not talk of how or why
Tomorrow's soon enough to die
But tonight the war is over

We make love too hard, too fast
He falls asleep, his face a mask
He wakes with the shakes and drinks from his flask
I put my arms around him

They die in the trenches, they die in the air
In Belgium and France, the dead are everywhere
They die so fast there's no time to prepare
A decent grave to surround them

Old World glory, Old World fame
The Old World's gone, gone up in flames
Nothing will ever be the same
And nothing lasts forever

I'd pray for him but I've forgotten how
And there's nothing, nothing that can save him now
But there's always another with the same funny bow
And who am I to deny them

Tonight the war is over

I have no special insight into the Gallic soul, nor human nature in general, but I can guarantee you one absolute bet-the-house truth: Nothing even remotely close to that monologue ever crossed the mind of a French prostitute. This song is about as overwritten and underimagined as it gets--Olney can't imagine anything outside the skin of a singer-songwriter so he tarts up the ennui to the point that you expect to see Maurice Chevalier come strolling by between the verses. (I got the lyrics from his home page, by the way. To be fair, he has written some pretty interesting stuff otherwise, including "Deeper Well," covered notably by Emmylou Harris.)

In those terms, I like "Edmund Fitzgerald" quite a bit. For a latter-day sea shanty, it's plausibly salty, and he mentions the families of the lost sailors, which shows an expansive spirit if nothing else. I would post some of Al Stewart's lyrics for a synoptic comparison, but you really need to hear the songs to get the full effect: They look at least as ludicrous as Olney's stuff on the page. Check out "Roads to Moscow" and "Antarctica" sometime. He even makes a song called "Nostradamus" work. (The line about Hitler--"no law does this man observe"--still gives me chills.)

What else? Nothing else. Take care!

@ 8:51:00 PM,

2 Comments:

At 10:19 PM, Anonymous Tim said...

I'm a simpleton in many things, including song lyrics and early 20th century French prostitution. Nevertheless, in the thousands of French prostitutes that no doubt walked the street of Great War Paris, why couldn't one of them have had cheesy monologues cross their mind? After all, we're talking about the French here, and they do love their cheese.

 
At 6:30 PM, Blogger Aaron said...

Have you ever heard The Band's Acadian Driftwood from their Northern Lights - Southern Cross album? That's my favorite historical song.

 

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