The Turkey Song

I lost The Turkey Song for a while and was in a panic about it, but now I've found it again. It wasn't on my YouTube channel. I didn't have one back then. This is from my daughter's YouTube and it's Caitlin's first video. I think she's five or six. I see her now, and she's 13 years old and a young woman and near as tall as I am, and. . . This is one of the many things I try not to think about - that the time has blurred by so fast, and I now find myself in an age group which is sometimes described as "elderly". I hate that term - don't like the term "senior" either, unless pronounced "senor" with a Mexican accent. Don't like "granny", it screams of rocking chair and grey hair in a bun, and NO ONE has that any more, not even women in their 90s! And yet I will gladly take the "senior" discount at Denny's because - one thing that IS typical of me as an elder (not-ly) is that I am extremely cheap. As for the rest of it, that melancholy feeling that life is passing far too quickly and I don't understand most of it and a lot of things are only getting worse, the only thing for it is to hang on for the ride. . . If I stop to think too much of dreams that died, or of things I tried for and tried for that just failed no matter what I did, and the rather pathetic attempts I made to get up and try again, I get very depressed. So as much as I can, I just stay in the day. That's my crest, my escutcheon, my battle-cry: STAY IN THE DAY. Now it's time for me to go to bed.

The Breck girl of horses

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Einstein disguised as Robin Hood: or, why Dylan is a freaking genius

They're selling postcards of the hanging

They're painting the passports brown

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors

The circus is in town

Here comes the blind commissioner

They've got him in a trance

One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker

The other is in his pants

And the riot squad they're restless

They need somewhere to go

As Lady and I look out tonight

From Desolation Row.

Cinderella, she seems so easy

"It takes one to know one," she smiles

And puts her hands in her back pockets

Bette Davis style

And in comes Romeo, he's moaning,

"You belong to Me I Believe."

And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend

You'd better leave."

And the only sound that's left

After the ambulances go

Is Cinderella sweeping up

On Desolation Row.

Now the moon is almost hidden

The stars are beginning to hide

The fortune-telling lady

Has even taken all her things inside

All except for Cain and Abel

And the hunchback of Notre Dame

Everybody is making love

Or else expecting rain

And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing

He's getting ready for the show

He's going to the carnival tonight

On Desolation Row.

Ophelia, she's 'neath the window

For her I feel so afraid

On her twenty-second birthday

She already is an old maid

To her, death is quite romantic

She wears an iron vest

Her profession's her religion

Her sin is her lifelessness

And though her eyes are fixed upon

Noah's great rainbow

She spends her time peeking

Into Desolation Row.

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood

With his memories in a trunk

Passed this way an hour ago

With his friend, a jealous monk

NOW, he looked so immaculately frightful

As he bummed a cigarette

Then he went off sniffing drainpipes

And reciting the alphabet

You would not think to look at him

But he was famous long ago

For playing the electric violin

On Desolation Row.

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world

Inside of a leather cup

But all his sexless patients

They ARE trying to blow it up

Now his nurse, some local loser

She's in charge of the cyanide hole

And she also keeps the cards that read

"Have Mercy on His Soul"

They all play on the penny whistle

You can hear them blow

If you lean your head out far enough

From Desolation Row.

Across the street they've nailed the curtains

They're getting ready for the feast

The Phantom of the Opera

In a perfect image of a priest

They are spoon-feeding Casanova

To get him to feel more assured

Then they'll kill him with self-confidence

After poisoning him with words

And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls

"Get outta here if you don't know"

Casanova is just being punished for going

To Desolation Row.

At midnight all the agents

And the superhuman crew

Come out and round up everyone

That knows more than they do

Then they bring them to the factory

Where the heart-attack machine

Is strapped across their shoulders

And then the kerosene

Is brought down from the castles

By insurance men who go

Check to see that nobody is escaping

To Desolation Row.

Praise be to Nero's Neptune

The Titanic sails at dawn

Everybody's shouting

"Which side are you on?"

And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot

Fighting in the captain's tower

While calypso singers laugh at them

And fishermen hold flowers

Between the windows of the sea

Where lovely mermaids flow

And nobody has to think too much

About Desolation Row.

Yes, I received your letter yesterday

About the time the door knob broke

When you asked me how I was doing

Or was that some kind of joke?

All these people that you mention

Yes, I know them, they're quite lame

I had to rearrange their faces

And give them all another name

Right now I can't read too good

Don't send me no more letters no

Not unless you mail them

From Desolation Row.

They're selling postcards of the hanging
They're painting the passports brown

Here Dylan immediately establishes a macabre atmosphere of heartless exploitation. Human execution has become the subject of postcards, a cheap and superficial means of communicating usually associated with vacations. Passports are similarly associated with travel (being "transported") and escape, a theme running through the entire lyric. That the passports are painted brown means that they are blurred, defaced, shat upon, or otherwise rendered invalid. Might it also be a weird twist on "painting the town red'? 

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town

The sailors swarming the beauty parlour might be there to ogle women, or to become them, transforming themselves in garish drag. It's our first hint of a sense of dislocation: no one seems to be in the right place. "The circus is in town" is a familiar cliche (and let's not forget he grew up in a small town, in which the circus was a very big deal), which Dylan turns on its head: this motley parade will lead us to a hellish place from which there is no escape.

Here comes the blind commissioner
They've got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants

It's worth mentioning that "they" are never identified. I remember hearing someone say, "They've shot John Lennon." Facelessness and blank masks and constantly-shifting identities inflame the lyric's rampant paranoia. The "blind commissioner" is some sort of deposed authority figure reduced to dragging along helplessly behind a circus performer walking a tightrope, while simultaneously masturbating.

And the riot squad they're restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row.

The police are out there and looking for trouble, hoping for a good riot. Like juvenile delinquents, they're hanging around waiting for something to happen. Desolation Row seems forever on the point of exploding in apocalyptic violence. "They need somewhere to go" speaks of a lost traveller, one of the many figures in this song who is dislocated and "a stranger everywhere". "Lady and I" adds a sudden incongruous but very Dylanesque romanticism: or is it Our Lady, Mother of God that he speaks of?

Cinderella, she seems so easy
"It takes one to know one," she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style

Cinderella portrayed as good-time girl is remeniscent of a line from an Auden poem: "And Jill goes down on her back." Bette Davis gives her a touch of old Hollywood glamour, but we can see her posturing as if her body is for sale. And hey, how about that line "it takes one to know one"? Just what is she implying about the songwriter - has he similarly sold himself to the public - or does it have nothing to do with him?

And in comes Romeo, he's moaning,
"You belong to me I believe."
And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend
You'd better leave."

Enter Romeo, stage left. But doesn't he belong with Juliet? Apparently not, but he doesn't belong here either. "Someone", that notorious "they", is telling him to leave. Wrong play, perhaps? And doesn't Romeo end up dead? Whereas Cinderella ends up transformed. In a manner of speaking. And who is the "someone" telling Romeo to get lost? Some stray Prince who's just as much out of place?

And the only sound that's left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row.

"Ambulances" implies twenty-nine harrowing violent movie scenes that we never get to see because we don't have to - it's all condensed down into a couple of lines, a few sirens wailing (and after the fact - they've already gone). "Something" has happened, but we're never told what. Cinderella is like the fairy tale in reverse: she ends up sweeping the street, back to her rags and tatters, and tricks.

Now the moon is almost hidden
The stars are beginning to hide
The fortune-telling lady
Has even taken all her things inside

Dylan does this, he suddenly and dramatically varies the tone so that the lyric is shot through with beauty. The fortune-telling lady is a magical, almost paranormal figure, her palm-readings and Tarot cards (more about that later) predicting a future that seems, at best, uncertain. But it's so late, so dark, so spooky out that even she has to protect her wares.

All except for Cain and Abel
And the hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody is making love
Or else expecting rain

Impenetrable lines, but they inexplicably work, like all genius does: Biblical references pop up constantly in Dylan's writing, so Cain slew Abel, perhaps raising Cain in the process, and the hunchback is just another grotesque soul seeking "sanctuary". And the next two lines are Dylanisms just as surely as "he not busy being born is busy dying". They seem to say: choose life/Eros, or choose dullness and the conventional life with its boring expectations, where everything is "right as rain".  Or is this really about Noah's flood and its inevitable culling of the sinful?

And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing
He's getting ready for the show
He's going to the carnival tonight
On Desolation Row.

Another Biblical reference, but a sardonic one: the figure whose name is synonymous with selfless help and even personal risk is now reduced to just another performer, donning the motley for the "show". And Biblically, the Samaritan was at the bottom of the heap socially, almost an untouchable, which is what gave Jesus' parable such punch.

Ophelia, she's 'neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid

This is a strange one, but then, the characters on Desolation Row just get stranger. Unlike Cinderella who turns tricks, Ophelia goes crazy while Hamlet seduces his mother. And 'neath the window - is that some sort of weird inversion of Romeo and Juliet? (By the way, what DID happen to Romeo?) This is someone who has apparently died before she even had a chance to live.

To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness

"Lifelessness is the Great Enemy & always wears a hip guard—he is very hipguard," Dylan wrote in Tarantula, and if you can figure THAT out, you've nailed these lines. The iron vest sounds like medieval torture, or else kinky. This whole poem/song is about the sin of lifelessness or, perhaps, the deathwardness of the eternal Show. "Her profession's her religion" is a little too opaque for me to fathom, as her profession isn't the same as Cinderella's. 

And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah's great rainbow
She spends her time peeking
Into Desolation Row.

Ah, Bob! You know more about the Bible than the average monk or Catholic priest. "Expecting rain" may well be a reference to the Great Flood, but here the flood is over and the rainbow has appeared.  "Peeking into" means that Ophelia has been cast out and has to "peek in", as in some great existential peep show. Funny that both she and Romeo stand beneath windows, on the outside looking in.

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk

You can try to pull this apart or leave it alone, but it pulls apart like a wishbone and spills weirdness like a cornucopia. 

Einstein, being the ultimate enigmatic genius, is headed for the carnival dressed up like Robin Hood, some sort of ancient folk hero who fires arrows, robs from the rich and gives to the poor. But he's already gone, folks, he passed this way an hour ago and you missed him. Memories in a trunk - another version of the iron vest, the lifelessness of self-suffocation? And why is his friend so jealous, and of what (and why is he a monk? Maybe it just scanned, we don't know.)

Now, he looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet

This implies some sort of hobo in disguise, a fraud, somebody who gets off on sniffing sewer gas or else is a kind of health inspector. Reciting the alphabet implies childishness, or the failure of the greatest mind in human history.

You would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row.

Interesting that Einstein really was a quite gifted violinist. That line "famous long ago", three little words, Bobby, you really can spit them out, became the title of a book, and everybody knew where the title came from, it was just self-explanatory. The author of e=mc2 is now nothing but a musician standing on a street corner in a neighborhood which might be called degraded.

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They are trying to blow it up

This stanza really chills me. It is past grotesque: it's harrowing. Who the fuck is this Dr. Filth, why are his patients (like Ophelia) so sexless? Where is the riot squad when you need them? Is the leather cup sort of like Baudelaire's image of a woman's vagina (so stomach-turning I can't reproduce it here)? For surely the literate Dylan would have read Baudelaire. And it's obvious that sexlessness is next to lifelessness.

Now his nurse, some local loser
She's in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
"Have Mercy on His Soul"

There are those who would say this is Joan Baez, the great unnamed saint of the Row. Even Joan Baez thought it was Joan Baez. Calling her "some local loser" (and what in fuck's name is a "cyanide hole"? That's quite possibly the worst thing I ever heard of) seems harsh, but then come those two impossibly tender lines, which Baez quoted in Daybreak as "I also keep the cards that read have mercy on his soul". She might also be the same person as the fortune-telling lady taking all her things inside (because it might rain?). In the song She Belongs to Me, which as usual might be about Baez or might be about his first wife Sara Lowndes, Dylan portrays a lady full of mystical power ("she can take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black"). 

They all play on the penny whistle
You can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough
From Desolation Row.

"Blow" could be taken a couple of ways. Sexual? A drug reference? Or just "blow"? Pennywhistles imply innocence, childhood, and being too poor to afford a real instrument. Pennywhistles are irritating, shrill and unmusical. It's also never clear whether we are ON Desolation Row, looking INTO Desolation Row, or trying to get the hell OUT of Desolation Row. Dylan's camera darts all over the place.

Across the street they've nailed the curtains
They're getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
In a perfect image of a priest

Who is whom here, and whom is who he appears to be? No one. The curtains are already nailed up for this ghastly dumbshow (and remember how in old gangster movies they say "it's curtains for you"?) Nailed-up curtains certainly aren't fancy and won't open and close like normal ones. They're crude, and - nailed in place like so many of the crippled characters. But it is also, as in the Catholic Church, a feast day, a holy celebration. And thus the Phantom, some sort of spiritual kin to the aforementioned Hunchback of Notre Dame, is wrapping himself in priestly raiment. Enough clergy here to start a monastery.

They are spoon-feeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words

The cast of this thing grows ever bigger, and each character is somehow laden. Spoon-feeding Casanova might allude to cooking heroin, or it might not. It might allude to feeding a baby, or it might not. He is traditionally a legendary lover and seducer. There's a weird take on sexuality in the song, of exploitation (the blind commissioner whacking off, Cinderella selling herself, Ophelia in her kinky iron maiden) and the uglifying of something that should be beautiful, even sacred. (Dylan is nothing if not a romantic.) And we're back to that amorphous, vaguely disturbing "they". Whoever they are, they are not too damn friendly.

And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls
"Get outta here if you don't know"
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row.

If Romeo has been cast out, if he's in the wrong place, my friend, then surely Casanova is going to be out on his ass soon. The skinny girls are - what? Models? The Andy Warhol crowd Dylan hung out with? I wonder if this whole thing isn't about being tossed out of Eden, except that this is nobody's idea of the garden. Or if Casanova really is a heroin addict, perhaps the law has caught up with him?

At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do

Here we get into the most delicious paranoia, a macabre vision straight out of a sweating, gasping film noir/spy movie. Who ARE these people - part of the unnamed "they"? Agents of WHAT? And I love that line "come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do". Are these people - "everyone" - really smarter? Or do they just carrying a burden of subversive, secret knowledge? 

Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row.

The heart-attack machine is the most sadistic thing I have ever heard of: not a defibrillator, but the opposite, something that GIVES you a heart attack. And then the kerosene. . . This is like "after the ambulances go", a couple of words slamming us against the wall. No mention of a fire or of someone starting a fire, but we don't need that, we already know. Insurance men in their dull facelessness seem to foreshadow the infamous, soulless figure, Mr. Jones, the epitome of the "establishment'. And let's not get into "escaping to", it's just too convoluted.

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody's shouting
"Which side are you on?"

Nero is the one who fiddled while Rome burned. The Titanic is a mite obvious, but like all of this bizarre imagery, it works. "Everybody" is "nobody" and could be anybody, and the question they're shouting, "which side are you on?", is one Dylan heard and had to try to answer or ignore for his whole life. And is no doubt still dealing with. (What do the lyrics mean?)

And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers

This seems like a blatant contrast of intellectual elitism with simple, life-loving joy, not so much a mockery as a dismissal of violence and hate: so that yes, even in this song there is some sort of breath of hope. I see the fishermen and calypso singers all jumbled in with the mysterious ugly horrific vivid incendiary images of the song as in a Picasso painting, where everything is happening at once. But if you really want to dig (man), the singers do the same thing Bob does, and the fishermen echo Jesus' famous words, "I will make you fishers of men." Holding flowers is either a hippie thing, or a garden thing, take your choice.

Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row.

Unlike Ballad of a Thin Man, this song does have unexpected beauty strewn through it. Is Desolation Row a choice, a punishment, a purgatory leading on to greater glory, or to eternal damnation?  Is it just the bizarre baffling imagery of a genius on acid who hadn't slept in about 45 days? We know it is compelling, and hard to get away from. But it's not over yet. As with all great works of music, there is a coda. 

Yes, I received your letter yesterday
About the time the door knob broke
When you asked me how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?

I am virtually certain, though I cannot provide proof, that he chose "broke" to rhyme with "joke". But then, a broken doorknob does imply not being able to get in or out. "Was that some kind of joke?" dismisses all possibility that the asker even cares, or only cares in order to get something. The question has a sardonic Positively Fourth Street feel to it. What's it to you? You got a lotta nerve.

All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they're quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name

Thus does the artist casually create and destroy his own universe, so that all the characters come out looking like versions of himself. As for "give them all another name", remember his nickname in high school was Zimbo. The old saw "all the characters are really me" is even more of a stretch than what I'm doing here.

Right now I can't read too good
Don't send me no more letters, no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row.

It's well-known that Bob really can't read very well, he's always been blind as the proverbial fruit bat, so maybe this is one line we can take literally. Don't forget "here comes the blind commissioner/They've got him in a trance." But "don't send me no more letters, no" means he's cutting himself off from contact with people. And - oh, this is a good one! - what was in the very first line of this thing? POSTCARDS. But typical of Dylan, they aren't sending postcards, but selling them. So the old saw "I'll send you a postcard" becomes, sardonically, "I'll sell you a postcard."

Bob Dylan's masterpiece, if that's what this is, reflects his profound ambivalence about the vertiginous and devouring carnival of fame, his own fame in particular: he lied about working in carnivals as a boy, then found himself IN one, magnetically attracting a horde of sycophants, sociopaths and losers.

But which character IS he, anyway? The most likely contender, in my mind (and this is MY essay, so I can surmise if I want to) is Einstein disguised as Robin Hood: genius in the guise of folk hero. Costumed poseur, lost troubadour shifting from identity to identity, the figure comes closer than any of the others to a self-portrait of the most unlikely Nobel winner in the history of the prize, that enigmatic gift to the world, Bob Dylan.

Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize: if you don't like it, shove it up your nose!

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Writers have their hearts ripped out

Since I finally figured out how to use the video camera, mainly to photograph all the wildlife in the back yard, I'm experimenting with other stuff, mainly ads for my doomed novel, The Glass Character. Maybe I'll have fun with it; maybe I won't. I like the idea of the screen beside me, and the fact these are silents means I can blather on as much as I want. I know what it is to be rejected (stomped into the ground a few hundred times?), so this scene spoke to me in particular.

Good kitty!

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Diamonds and Rust: a love that lasts a lifetime

The Nobel Prize for Literature is yet another step towards immortality for Bob Dylan. The rebellious, reclusive, unpredictable artist/composer is exactly where the Nobel Prize for Literature needs to be.
His gift with words is unsurpassable. Out of my repertoire spanning 60 years, no songs have been more moving and worthy in their depth, darkness, fury, mystery, beauty, and humor than Bob’s. None has been more of a pleasure to sing. None will come again.

- Joan Baez


Oh, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Joan Baez. She was the queen of folk music then and now. She took a liking to my songs and brought me with her to play concerts, where she had crowds of thousands of people enthralled with her beauty and voice. People would say, "What are you doing with that ragtag scrubby-looking waif?" And she'd tell everybody in no uncertain terms, "Now you better be quiet and listen to the songs." We even played a few of them together. Joan Baez is as tough-minded as they come. Loyal, free minded and fiercely independent. Nobody can tell her what to do if she doesn't want to do it. I learned a lot of things from her. A woman of devastating honesty. And for her kind of love and devotion, I could never pay that back.

- Bob Dylan

Halle-freakin'-lujah: this one's for you, Bob

For Bob Dylan: on winning the Nobel Prize for Literature

I hear you won the Nobel Prize

The trophy goes with your blue eyes

But you don’t care too much for trophies, do ya?

I heard your thunder at my door

You shook the beams and cracked the floor

And woke me with a howling Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

You wrote some songs, you wrote them well

You cored my soul and gave me hell

It made me quiver when I listened to ya.

We sang your songs down by the lake

The loons all cried like William Blake

And flamed the sky in shining hallelujah.

Hallelujah.

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

I can’t say why I feel this way

You’ve been my brother all the way

It hurts when this much truth is blowin’ through ya.

You said the things I could not say

The pain will never go away

A blazing sad refrain of Hallelujah 

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Blowhard: why Trump looks exactly like Willie the Whale

Sometimes I just need cute

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Blah, blah, blah: Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Leonard Cohen

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

So what on God's green earth could these two songs have to do with each other? One is nothing but blah-blah-blahs pasted together with the "moon-June-Saskatoon" cliches of bad love songs (and no. . . it doesn't actually have Saskatoon in it. Which makes me think of Peter Lorre in the Spike Jones version of My Old Flame: "No. . . it couldn't have been Moe. . .").

I love the Blah-Blah song, which was written by George and Ira Gershwin for a movie called Delicious in 1931.  But I am also irritated by it, mainly because nobody knows how to sing it. I've suffered through several YouTube performances, all of them awful except one (and I posted it already - I'll have to look it up). Almost everyone "blah-blahs" as if they don't remember the words. They roll their eyes and wring their hands and rack their brains and look as if they want to run offstage with embarrassment. But the joke is - and maybe people were cleverer in 1931 - THE WORDS DON'T MATTER. Nobody pays the slightest bit of attention to them. Furthermore, most love songs have crappy words anyway, so crappy they're interchangeable. There's a blueprint that most songwriters stick to, and it's tried and true, and banal and dull, and it works. 

OK then, whoof. How did I get from this blah-blah-blah thing to Leonard Cohen?

I think I am the last person on the planet who does NOT like Hallelujah. I just don't. The tune isn't. . . too. . .bad, but the lyric is a stinker. But that shouldn't be a problem, and do you know whyyy?

No one has ever noticed it.

No one has ever noticed this lyric ("it goes like this"), and I say this because people are constantly wanting to have it sung at weddings, or at confirmation services, or at baptisms. Why? Because it has the word "hallelujah" in it, probably sixteen or eighteen or twenty times.

It's not a dirty song or anything, but it's just all wrong: a typical angsty, brooding, narcissistic, self-involved, dark, vaguely profane, masturbatory Cohen thing. I'm not sure I want to hear that anywhere, let alone in church.

I read somewhere on a web site - Mormon or something - that the choir was asked by the minister to sing Hallelujah at a service. Everyone was on-board and very enthusiastic about it, because they all loved the song. They didn't have time to go over it at choir practice, but hey - they all knew the tune anyway! And they loved that chorus: Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, etc. Surely with a refrain like that, it must be a truly holy song.

Instead, it was more like: HOLY SHIT! The choir director, just as she was passing out the sheet music before the service, happened to just glance at the words, and the lines "you saw her bathing on the roof. . .she tied you to a kitchen chair, she broke your throne and she cut your hair. . . "

Actually, that IS pretty scriptural. Bathsheba liked to take her bath in public, especially if sexually-rampant men were watching.  And anyone familiar with scripture knows what happens next. (Adultery, anyone?). And didn't somebody get a hair cut at about that time? It was David, wasn't it? Or not. And I'm not too sure he was tied to a kitchen chair.

So they sang something else. They did Praise God From Whom All, or Blessed Be The, or I Praise Thy Whatever (or whatever they do in the Mormon church). And afterwards, everyone ran up to the choir director and said, "Awwwww. Why didn't you do Hallelujah?"

What the fuck do people think this song SAYS, anyway? True, it's sort of scriptural, but it was Samson who had the haircut, not David, losing all his strength to that wily succubus, Delilah. So scriptural accuracy is compromised, sliced and diced for his own convenience, but perhaps Cohen realized no one was going to notice it anyway. No one was going to notice any part of it except the refrain, and the word that's repeated sixeen times (or eighteen, or twenty-four, depending on how long the fade is).

I've written often about mondegreens, those misheard/mistranscribed words that swarm all over internet lyric sites. Bizarrely, the SAME mondegreens seems to be replicated over and over again, on every site. I don't know how this happens, unless there is a Badly Transcribed Song Lyric Central somewhere that has all the lyrics with all the errors, all the time.

I know they're mondegreens because I listen to the original version, with the original artist, sometimes more than one version, just to be sure.  So kids, it really ISN'T "s'cuse me while I kiss this guy". 

Hallelujah doesn't qualify as a mondegreen, at all. It's not misheard. It's an ignored lyric, or a disregarded lyric, or a lyric with an erroneous assumption attached to it that it will be a Truly Holy Song because it has the word Hallelujah repeated so many times it's like machine-gun fire. So in the church I used to go to, and suffered through (especially in the choir, which was abysmal), one woman said, "I'd really like to do the Leonard Cohen song, Hallelujah," and everyone went "ohhhh!" and "yeah!" and chimed in with enthusiasm. The choir leader said he'd order the sheet music. 

I said something about the lyrics being kind of inappropriate, and, conversation-wise, the floor dropped about 37 feet. I disappeared and vaporized as surely as that supposedly-holy Leonard Cohen lyric. I no longer existed because I wasn't chiming in, and besides, I was just being "negative" like I always was, spoiling things. (This was because I didn't want a six-voice version of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus, bawled off-key by people who couldn't sing a note. But the congregation thought it was simply wonderful.)

Hallelujah was never sung in my former church, for some reason, but I did see a very famous, viral video of a priest singing it at a wedding - and by the holy, all the lyrics were changed! Suddenly there was no one being tied to chairs, no haircuts, no one splashing around naked on a rooftop. It was all rendered extremely bland and weddingy. But what are the chances Leonard Cohen was ever consulted about this? And I am sure that when churches and wedding/baptism planners FINALLY get to the point of glancing at the lyrics and realize it's about an adulterous affair, they just get a pencil and start to work. "Oh, then, we can just sing our OWN version of it."

Last time I checked, that was extremely illegal. At very least, it's unethical, particularly for a church. Even some normal, ordinary songs like hymns can't be sung in church, at all, because of copyright. Not everything is in the public domain, and casually butchering a Leonard Cohen song is just not a good thing. 

I don't like this song, but I don't think it should be naively gutted just to sanitize it. Either go with the naked chick and the haircut, or forget about it.

Or maybe, instead of the David and Bathsheba thing, everyone should just go like this:

Blah blah blah blah blah blah-blah-blah

Blah blah blah blah blah blah-blah-blah

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, do you?


ADDENDUM. As usual, there is More To The Story.

A cold and broken Hallelujah: singing priest removed from YouTube
Wednesday, April 30, 2014

By Denise O'Donoghue
Reporter

The singing priest is no more - his video has disappeared from YouTube. Fr Ray Kelly’s rendition of Hallelujah was pulled following a copyright claim by Sony ATV Publishing.

Sony ATV Publishing own the rights to the original Leonard Cohen song.

The video had gained over 30m views on YouTube since it was uploaded to the website earlier this month, making Fr Kelly an instant star.

Fr Kelly recently revealed he was meeting with Sony to discuss a record deal.

Although the original video has been removed, other videos of his performance are still available on YouTube.

The Oldcastle parish priest surprised newly-weds Leah and Chris O’Kane with a personalised version of the Leonard Cohen song. He received a standing ovation before returning to the pulpit to deliver the final prayer.

Fr Kelly's fame led to him appearing on the Late Late Show and he is jetting off to New York to perform a concert on May 13 at The Town Hall on 123 West 43rd Street.

(I can't decide which of the Ten Commandments he broke here: Thou Shalt Not Steal, or Thou Shalt Not Write and Perform Sappy, Maudlin Lyrics to a Song by a Well-Respected, If Overly-Commercialized Poet? Or is it. . . Thou Shalt Not Gut a Popular Song and Casually Substitute Dreck of Your Own and Thus Become World-Famous Overnight, Not That You Care Because You're A Priest and Above All That Worldly Stuff? Moses would've needed a few extra tablets for that one.)

OH GOD! More verses. As I listened to a few of the recorded versions, I kept hearing extra stuff. It's kind of dirty, too, making the song even MORE inappropriate at weddings where nobody even thinks of sex, for Christ's sake (what is the matter with you?). Some versions have these verses, some don't. Did Leonard Cohen really write these, or was it that dirty old Irish priest? You know about priests, don't you? Dirty things.

Baby, I've been here before
I've seen this room and I've walked this floor (you know)
I used to live alone before I knew ya
And I've seen your flag on the marble arch
And love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah...

There was a time when you let me know
What's really going on below
But now you never show that to me, do ya?
But remember when I moved in you
And the holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah...

Maybe there's a God above
But all I've ever learned from love
Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya
And it's not a cry that you hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah...
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah...
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah
Hallelujah, hallelujah

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