Steve Reynolds Program - Felt Good To Burn
Hear It Is, Your Refuge
Hey, buddies! Yes, this is the little nook of the internet that will NOT mention that thing everybody is making the same three or four jokes about this week. If confused, I’ll just allude to it as the “snoop bladder” and let it lie at that.
Hit an open mic last night for the first time in forever. Did a really dumb series of jokes that flopped and I’m scrapping them forever. That’s what open mics are for, I guess. It was good to see old pals out and about. It’s still so weird to see friends doing bits where they say something like “I just quit my job” and you remember them saying the same setup four years ago. The adverb “just” means absolutely nothing in standup comedy.
OK. Buy cheese this week at the shop and say hi.
Song #23
Felt Good To Burn
by The Flaming Lips
At the time, the release of the major label debut album Hit To Death In The Future Head by the Flaming Lips seemingly took forever. Their previous album, In A Priest Driven Ambulance, may be my most listened-to album of all time, ever since getting a dubbed cassette of it months ahead of its release. Then there was the frustrating anticipation and imagining of what they’d put out on a major label. Young- dumb-and-full-of-beautiful-thoughts me was amped.
However, the Lips had added a piece of the Brazil soundtrack on to “You Have To Be Joking” without getting permission first. It took nearly a year for the legalities to be, uh, “legalitied” before it cleared. When it came out, I happened to be in Houston and had gone to a record store three times, checking if it came in before it finally did. I prepared myself to replace Priest for my new most-listened album.
Hit To Death turned out to be …okay. Priest was sequenced perfectly and had a coherent theme and sound. This one just didn’t. I don’t know if drama (this is Nathan Roberts and Jonathan Donahue’s last Lips album) affected it or what, but it just doesn’t jell, though a few songs are quite good.
One song did fully grab me. “Felt Good To Burn” between the muddled “The Sun” and the might as well be on a Mercury Rev album “Gingerale Afternoon.”* It feels like an interlude, with its slowish pace, almost whispered singing and not much difference between the verse and chorus. Jim DeRogatis, America’s worst major rock critic, called the song “a psychedelic tossoff.” It’s rarely played now.
That’s a shame. Because contained within are some of my favorite storytelling lyrics. It starts with the line “It felt good to burn” which is a more musical version of the first line of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, “It was a pleasure to burn.” As the pleasure in the book is Guy Montag burning books, the singer (I think it’s Jonathan Donahue singing—is that why I’ve put it over other Lips songs?) recounts the thrill of a summer of crimes with a lover.
It would fit on a soudtrack to movie like Natural Born Killers or Badlands – a young couple committing crimes, doing drugs, and having sex (here in a ferris wheel). The “burning” here makes him feel “like a movie star.” Doing out-of-the-ordinary acts that command attention and make people learn your name. The instrumentation of a bassy loop, languid arpeggiated guitar, a tambourine ching-chinging on the basic drum track (with an additional kettle drum doing fills?), and a background chorus played backwards all lead to a deliberate psychedelic fuzziness, not “tossed off,” like that dork DeRogatis claims, but in the service of the capturing of an epic mood in a way words alone couldn’t.
Like these movies, there’s the tragic ending. “But we couldn't have been dead/ Cause you stood up and moaned and said/ ’I wasn't wavin' goodbye, I was sayin' hello.’" I can envision the scene in the movie. The manic pixie nightmare girl looking up at the singer, with memories of their trek showing in flashback. Trying to crack wise until she does the actor’s trick of fixing her eyes at a point far off to simulate death. They burn out instead of fade away. And it feels good.
*”Ginger Afternoon” has some goofy parenthetical title affixed but I don’t wanna look it up.
The Thereupon
This week’s Song I’m Mad I Forgot To Put On The List is “She’s Looking At You” by The Leaving Trains. 1986 pop-punk that blew my high school mind.
I’ve actually got a couple of things coming up. On Feb. 25th , I’ll be doing a Norman Trivia contest at Depot TV Live! at the historic Santa Fe Depot in Norman. Lots of other things going on the show too. Should be fun. And Feb. 27th, I’ll be the feature on the Fair-Weather Friend mic. I’m gonna drop 15 minutes of hot fire— who knows? I may do a bit on the adverb “just.”