"The imagination betrays the mind
by sabotaging it into becoming a heart"
Blackbird

I wrote the song "Blackbird" in the summer of '94.  I worked at a golf course during the day as a landscaper, and smoked weed and drank beer with my brother and his friends, who had just graduated from high school, in the evenings.  My hours were such that I was exhausted by 8pm.  I had to be at the golf course before dawn.  I rode a motorcycle to work, and the rushing wind was cold enough before dawn that I'd need several layers to keep me warm.  Even in the summer.  It was an early job.  The upside was that I got off work at 2 or 3 o'clock.  So the night started early as well.  The bonfires were still raging when I clocked out for the night.  The walks through the woods to the river were over before dinner.  I'd come home, baked and buzzed, flip my blacklight on, and Nick Cave and Mazzy Star would sing me to sleep.  My girlfriend was in the next county, a short, pleasant drive along the river, but not close enough to see every day.  It was a good thing on every level.  I had my job and my freedom and my time.  There was always the landline, the phone attached to the wall, if we felt like talking.  But it was good not to see her.  Looking back, I wish I'd seen her less.  Her parents didn't like me anyway.

We didn't have The Beatles in the blue-collar Midwestern town I grew up in, so when I wrote "Blackbird," I wasn't thinking about the Beatles song.  The original version of my "Blackbird" had a more complicated chord in the chorus somewhere.  It was more beautiful and subtle than the version that finally broke through the mud, more than 20 years later.  Was it always a duet?  I don't remember.  Probably.  But the only thing that survived from the original version is the chorus, which was simplified due to my inability to remember the nuance in the chords.  The lyrics in the chorus are the same, and the intro, but I updated all the verses in 2007.  I was living in Austin, and re-wrote the song so I could sing it as a duet with a chick I liked at the time, a gothic death-rocker everyone in the Red River district was in love with.  But it didn't go anywhere.

The song had to wait until 2015, when I formed the Arizona chapter of The Wild Bores.  The Wild Bores is my band, which I run like a motorcycle gang.  Since I'm old, and most of my band members are old, nobody can travel out of their local area to play shows with me.  Everybody has kids and domestic obligations.  So I have different chapters of the band in different areas, different rhythm sections around the country I travel to.  There's the SoCal chapter, the Bay Area/Reno chapter, the Colorado chapter, etc.  All with rotating members.  It worked, while it lasted.  But the Arizona chapter was home base.  And this chick was in it:

That's a whole 'nother neverending dead-end story.  You can read some of the morbid highlights of it in "La Catrina" Strikes Again, or Los Angeles To Leadville.  It was a harrowing thrill.  An exquisite waste of time.  The picture above, depicting a pink-haired desert mermaid on the rocks, staring up at the figure of consternation that was me, backlit by the unflinching, righteous sun, says it all.  "Hey yawanna party?"  Not really.  "What if me and my boyfriend join your band?  Then we can all get entangled.  Y'know, drama and/or problems.  Maybe even play some shows."

She turned out to be brilliant.  Her boyfriend was a great musician, and she was exactly the person "Blackbird" was waiting for.  The lyric sheet was so old when I finally broke it out, it was moldy.  It had been sitting in my song folder since voodoo vampires stole the absinthe trade from the French in old New Orleans.  But it worked.  The song had been waiting for her.  She was an infant when it was written, literally, and here we were, killing it onstage like a couple serial badasses.  Mickey & Mallory, or Bonnie & Clyde, or Siddhartha & Nancy.  Even though I'm not a Buddhist (though I am an avid Hermann Hesse fan).  We'd all lay on her and her boyfriend's huge bed and watch The Mighty Boosh, which was weird, and pick up piss-stained rollie butts from the enclosed yard where the pitbull slept.  It was a season of mad bong rips, piss-stained rollie butts, and The Mighty Boosh.  And sometimes even music.  The pitbull was a sweetie.  Impossible to control, like a smiling tornado, caged inside a dog, but super-sweet.

Last I heard, she was living in Jerome, still performing as a solo act.  The chick, not the pitbull.  She reached out to me as a friend, and sent me some outlaw weed via USPS when I was a cabdriver in Salida, Colorado, but I wasn't into it.  Woulda been, but yagotta lose the prosthetic doofus.  New boyfriends are a dealbreaker for life.  As they should be.  I'm not cool with it. 

Nobody is.  And they're worthless if they are.

"I don't need a lover,
but I could sure use a friend
Scuba Power until the end"
Scuba Power

"Scuba Power" was the name of the weed we smoked while hiking in the Gulch with Bomber.  It was a good day.  The infinite beginning of the neverending end.

So, what about "Blackbird?"  Does the imagination truly betray the mind, by sabotaging it into becoming a heart?

I'm inclined to think so.  It certainly has been my experience.  Do I miss the casinos, the flashing lights of Vegas?  Putting pomade on my hair in the bathroom of the show, with no way to wash it out for days?  Will I turn into a mic stand of salt, if I keep my eyes fixed any longer, on the headlights glaring at me through the rearview mirror?

Yeah, I dunno.  Yeah but no.  Been there.  Done it.  The songs've all been written.  Tell me love isn't wasted.  Lie to me again.  It amuses me to hear it.

But while we're off the topic, nowhere near the reasons for this article, let's take another exit, on a highway made of exits, into the animated film made by Salvador Dali and Walt Disney in 1945.  Even if it wasn't finished until 2003.  It makes a heckuva music video.

Thanks for listening.

Blackbird

The imagination betrays the mind
by sabotaging it into becoming a heart
does that make us dangerous?
does it make us something we aren't?

Darling,
you are beautiful
the most beautiful woman I've ever seen
how could a pretty girl like you
ever love a monster like me?

Please stop breathing heavy
on my answering machine
your voice is like worms
crawling under my skin
you're kinda cute
for a madman
but I'll never give my heart out
to anyone ever again

   Cuz I am a blackbird
   I can't see
   or hear what you say
   to me
   I am a blackbird
   can you walk away
   from me?

I don't know why boys
are always so creepy
like carnivorous bugs of the night
their amorous advances only make me sleepy
if we're friends,
why do we always fight?

Baby we're not fighting,
I only get a little excited
explaining to you in excruciating detail
how much I love you,
at the top of my lungs
but if you don't like it,
I'll take my drink
and I'll spike it
with cyanide,
then I'll rip out my tongue

Cuz you're in my fleeting moments of pleasure
you're in my long, cold hours of pain
you're in the bright, ostentatious sunshine
you're in the pouring rain

It wouldn't be the first time
my heart deceived me
it wouldn't be the first time
my love wasn't true
and I know it's creepy, baby,
but yagotta believe me,
it bothers me
more than it bothers you

You and your petty excuses
when it's my heart that's ready to break
tighten the knots on my nooses
tear out my heart with a stake
you can break all my bones
one by one
but I swear I'll never confess
you're always broke
and we never have any fun
you're a drunk
and you're always depressed

So get off the floor
I can't take any more
of your half-assed
procrastination
on your way out the door
tune the receiver to a more
appropriate radio station

©1994-2007 Nathan Payne