This life is bittersweet. . . again

Now all of the planes have landed
The soldiers are in their beds

Smoke rises from their clothing
And sweet dreams through their heads

Truth faced leaves a strange taste
When joy and sadness meet

A country rain on a city street
This life is bittersweet

The boy with the bloated belly
Hears today's truck arrive

He puts down his baby sister
And makes his way outside

Truth faced leaves a strange taste
When joy and sadness meet
A country rain on a city street
This life is bittersweet

Everyone's a novelist
And everyone can sing
But no one talks when the TV's on...

The lightning flashed, and the thunder rolled
Dark clouds filled the sky

A country rain on a city street
This life is bittersweet 

 

Moxy Fruvous

Post-blog notes. Once again I lost an entire post, with all my thoughts about my favorite '90s pop/folk group, Moxy Fruvous, gone forever. (Barenaked Ladies were a close second, with their anti-rockstar geekster appeal predating The Big Bang Theory by 20 years.) I'm trying to piece it together now, but it's traumatic. What I was going to say was, I never expected to hear this song again. Every so often I'd check YouTube to see if someone had posted it, and though King of Spain and the cutesie My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors ("spilled some dressing on Doris Lessing, these writer types are a scream") were all over the place, this one wasn't. It has a smoky, dust-rising, melancholy Gulf War feeling to it, along with two of the greatest non-Dylan lines in pop music: 

Everyone's a novelist, and everyone can sing

But no one talks when the TV's on

Once again, this predates the cult of narcissism, the American Idol and easy one-click authorhood by twenty years or more. And yet, unlike the Ladies, these boys gradually drifted into obscurity. But that one song, somehow redolent of Jim Morrison's melancholy bleakscape, smolders on.

(And oh. When I went looking for Google images to illustrate this post, most of them were from my blog. From my post. On this. On this song, a while back, two years maybe, or three. So I just pirated my own work. I don't care who pirates mine. I remember when it was a real issue "using" a photo, then Pinterest came along and everybody was stealing everything from everyone. I've used TinEye Reverse Image a lot, trying to find the provenance of certain photos, but all I ever find are different sizes and what web sites it has appeared on. I would hate to be a photographer now. By the way, what possible use is Pinterest? It seems almost as useless as LinkedIn.)

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%2520glass%2520character%2520margaret%2520gunning&ikwsec=Home

From demo tapes to Mrs. Fields: a Canadian success story

(From Wikipedia: Barenaked Ladies) The full band's first commercial release was 1991's The Yellow Tape. It was a demo tape originally created for the band's performance at South by Southwest and was the first recording to feature all five members.^[3] They spent between $2000 and $3000 on it, and sent a copy to all the labels in Canada; they were refused by all of them.^[6] The band turned to selling them off the stage, and wound up selling a lot of them. Word of mouth spread, and people began asking for the tape in local stores. The stores began asking the band for copies of the tape, and the demo tape became a commercial release.^[6] Sales began to snowball based simply on word of mouth and their live shows, and the tape became the first indie release by any band to achieve platinum status (100,000 copies) in Canada.<sup>[2]

OK den. Dis is an example of how someone can "epublish", or take things into their own hands, because the "establishment" has turned them aside over and over again as "not commercially viable".</sup>

<sup>This storylet is carved from a much larger (read: too bejesusly larger) entry in Wikipedia recounting the phenomenal success of the "alternative" Canadian band Barenaked Ladies. Essentially this was a garage band with some very talented kids on-board, and it just evolved. By the time their first "official" album came out (with the nonsensical title Gordon), their star wasn't just rising, it was skyrocketing.


More than any other music of that time, I remember Gordon because we played it to death in the early '90s when my kids were teenagers still living at home, and we all liked it, even my husband who didn't like anything. We loved the goofball lyrics ("this is me in Grade 9") and oddball concepts ("be my Yoko Ono"). We especially loved Steve, the fat guy who danced around wildly in shorts and just seemed to rule in this sublimely dorky Canadian universe.</sup>

<sup>And yes, it was a tape, just like the tapes them guys sold right off the stage. That's kind of like handing out cookies and ending up as Mrs. Fields.


What brought all this to mind? Yesterday I got fiddling around with the lyrics to a superb song, Bittersweet, by another dork-ish band of the same era called Moxy Fruvous. I don't know what MF is doing these days, if anything, but I don't hear of them much (while the Nakes, as I call them, are busy recording theme songs for the likes of the wildly popular sitcom The Big Bang Theory). Moxy Fruvous was obviously a Nake wanna-be, and as far as I'm concerned they never quite made it. The imitation was too obvious in songs like King of Spain ("Once I was the King of Spain/And now I work at the Pizza Pizza")and My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors, often played at literary conventions during lunch break to induce tea-splattering titters.  Anyway, Mox, as I call them, had one really good song and then went who-knows-where.


No, I haven't really kept up with the Nakes cuzzadafact that when Steven Page left (and was since involved in some sort of cocaine sting just before releasing his children's book), I sat there cross-legged for three days throwing ashes over my head. Without Steve and his good-natured goof persona, it just wasn't the same.</sup>

^{Gordon, as I look back on it, was remarkable because it had no duds. You could listen to all of them. Nobody was doing this, this whatever-it-was, dorky high school memories with the odd bit of poignancy around the edges.  I could post any of them, really, but I think I'll pi-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ck . . . this one.}

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

This life is bittersweet

 

Now all of the planes have landed
The soldiers are in their beds
 

Smoke rises from their clothing
And sweet dreams through their heads

Truth faced leaves a strange taste
When joy and sadness meet

 

A country rain on a city street
This life is bittersweet
 

The boy with the bloated belly
Hears today's trucks arrive

 

He puts down his baby sister
And makes his way outside
 

 

Truth faced leaves a strange taste
When joy and sadness meet
A country rain on a city street
This life is bittersweet
 

 

Everyone's a novelist
And everyone can sing
But no one talks when the TV's on...

 

 

The lightning flashed, and the thunder rolled
Dark clouds filled the sky

A country rain on a city street
This life is bittersweet 

 

Moxy Fruvous