If I could leak this track to you in a Church's Chicken styrofoam side dish container, dear reader, I would. I want this record to leave grease on your lips like runny egg salad.
This is a song from my definitively unfinished "The Bon Vivant" and the first song I wrote after moving to Chicago in 2007. I had been there a few weeks and didn't really know my way around. I was jonesed out for Detroit and its drowsy rhythms.
I kept thinking back to this one weird Sunday in the fall of 06 that seemed to approximate everything I missed about The D. I woke up that morning in a big house in the suburbs. My girlfriend's rich parents were in the Bahamas and we'd camped out the night before. Sugar socks and I planned to spend a languid day together by the pool, drinking her dad's scotch and watching peacocks roam around the backyard while she read The Story of the Eye to me in French. Yes, there were peacocks. And she could read Bataille in french. It was going down like that.
My phone started blowing up around ten and didn't stop for the next half hour. Everybody in the neighborhood was calling me. Shit was going down in the city! Some sketchy dudes got photo Jenny drunk on tequilla and stole her drugs! Where you at, doc? She's hanging out the window of your sun room right now with no shirt on drinking Crown and cursing and throwing your Elton John records out the window! You better get the fuck down here, man. The cops are going to take Jenny away!
So naturally I bailed on honey ankles and our decadent plans to go watch the drama unfold in the D. I sped down Woodward and pulled up in front of the Alphabet building expecting to see fire trucks, ambulances, the Environmental Protection Agency, Bill Bonds and the East Side Cheddar Boys all lined up to witness the horror. Instead, the only person there was Jenny, sitting on the porch of the alphabet building humming Belle and Sebastian with a big smile, cradling my records that I guess she picked up off the street, drinking a tall, perspiring Crown ginger.
"Captain, isn't it a beautiful day?"
"What the fuck, photo? Everybody said you were sauced out, bugging out out here, throwing my goddamn Madman Across the water out the window, look at this shit, and it's scratched, and I had plans today...what the fuck?
"These boys came over last night and I thought they stole my darkness, but its OK, I found it under your bed. Here, I found forty bucks too, but I had to give Madeline ten and you were out of ginger ale. But look, Captain, there's still 23 dollars left. Can we go get some food? Please? Can we go get some tacos? I'm starving?"
The taco spot was closed so we went and got some chicken. The big church across the street had just let out and the place was full of righteous patrons in their Sunday best, their vermillions, their money greens, their canaries. We took our feast back to the hood and started to picnic on the porch, and somebody came around with a radio, and what started with this crazy hyperbolic broad throwing records out the window was reconciled into a spontaneous block party. We got buzzed and Captain Caveman started bellowing on some nostalgia shit. Ay dog...Come on Dog.
Anyway you'll have to indulge the longwinded intro but so few of my songs have backstories, and I do mind pining. Shake your tail feather like it's broken.
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