The Terror Fabulous

Okay, a short story for you all today- this is part of the Big Important Novel that I noticed can work as a stand-alone piece, and it’ll teach you how to play the guitar part for a really great song.

“My God, that gives me such a boner.”
She meant my guitar, the EDS-1275. We were in my room, possibly cell, above the coffee house. We had, until this point, always stayed at Adele’s- my motivation being shame at my whole situation vis living. A young woman who often made it clear, even when it wasn’t appropriate, that her parents were millionaires and her childhood home was ‘a honest to God fuckin’ mansion’, deserved to be somewhere finer. Not, I should point out, in strictly bourgeois surroundings but in and amongst genuine aesthetic beauty, suitable to her idiom (for example, the Vatnajökull glacier).
“You wanted to see it… so… there.”
“How old is it?”
“Forty-one years. Some parts, like the tone control knobs, have been replaced but the body’s still solid mahogany.”
“Forty-one years… This is American history. It is a manifestation of our collective will.”
“It’s really just an instrument- I know to a lot of people it’s important, or ‘iconic’ or whatever, but it’s a tool to accomplish a certain task.”
“Then you should play it.”
“It’s late and if I play it through the amp I’ll wake Mr. Rosenberg-”
“It’s a tool to accomplish a certain task, und that task is making girls go all wet und quivery over othervise boring guys like you.”
“It’s not meant to be played acoustic-”
Adele held me around the waist and whispered “One song and you can fuck me wherever you want.”
“Is that anatomy or geography?”
She held up four fingers in front of my face.
“Okay, you want to play hardball, fine: there are four parts of me which can make you have an orgasm. For every second that goes by where you aren’t playing a song your access to one of them gets revoked. One, tw-”
I played. It was an intro in the chord C. I knew that she knew the song. It was important to us both.
“Two, one, two, three, four.”
I’m going to skip ahead to the next day with the two of us and my guitar and her drums in her apartment, mic-stands carrying Shure SM-58s in front of us and a formation of amplifiers behind.
Adele’s drums came in on the ‘four’ and I played the intro over after tap-dancing over the switches on a DS-1 and Bigmuff, then in G.
Adele, standing upright at her drumkit, leans into her mic. I’ve written out the chords above the lyrics and the strumming pattern should be pretty easy to pick up if you listen to the original.

C                    G
The only girl I've ever loved
C                      G
Was born with roses in her eyes
C                        G
But then they buried her alive
            D              C
One evening nineteen-forty-five
              D             G
With just her sister at her side
         D                C
And only weeks before the guns
             D             G
All came and rained on everyone
            D             C
Now she's a little boy in Spain
        D                  G
Playing pianos filled with flames
         D                C
On empty rings around the sun
            D            C      G
All sing to say my dream has come

Three days from then I had this girl from work, Lauren, come over to Adele’s to fill in the trumpet part. I didn’t exactly imply that since I was her assistant manager she was obligated to do so, or that I would be playing the thin, incomplete sound of just me and Adele in my head when I next came to plan the week’s shift patterns. There was no coercion involved is what I’m saying.
Laura is small and timid. She is plain in thought and deed. Adele didn’t like having her in a place that was primarily hers and secondarily ours, but understood that the song was incomplete without its brass section. She, Adele, bought pizza and two four-packs of Mike’s Hard Lemonade when was she was feeling more accommodating, approx two hours before Laura arrived. I would speculate that Adele and Laura (I’ve actually forgotten her second name) have contrary approaches to ‘life’.
Laura’s contribution begins during the chorus.

                C             G
	But now we must pick up every piece
	       C               G
	Of the life we used to love
	        C
	Just to keep ourselves
	   G                D
	At least enough to carry on

After three go-rounds we broke so Laura could use the bathroom and Adele could open her third Mike’s of the morning. When Adele was satisfied that Laura was out of earshot she approached me, indicating through body language that she would prefer that the conversation be kept between us only.
“I don’t want to sing this any more.”
“You’re a great singer-”
“I think you should sing this.”
“I’ve got zero stage presence and your voice is so beautiful-”
“One: we’re in mein apartment, two: it’s not about having a beautiful voice- thank you for that by the way- it’s about what’s right for the song. Ten years of vocal coaches trying to make me sing like Whitney Houston isn’t what we need here.”
“I’m really not much of a singer. I’ve never really tried anything but metal-”
“This song’s totally metal. It’s got war und death und circuses. Und it’s not like I’m asking you to sing ‘Hallelujah’ here.”
The Jeff Buckley version being a male vocalist’s Crucible.
“I’ll give it a go… How are circuses metal?”
“Insane Clown Posse.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about when I talk about metal.”
On this particular beat Laura returned from the bathroom.
“Hey, whateveryournameis, Hunter’s going to take the vocals from here, ‘kay?”
Laura nodded and picked up her trumpet.
“Okay, I, uh, let’s pick it up from the second verse.”

[verse]
C                        G
And now we ride the circus wheel
C                              G
With your dark brother wrapped in white
C                       G
Says it was good to be alive
           D               C
But now he rides a comet's flame
             D            G
And won't be coming back again
                D             C
The Earth looks better from a star
              D                   G
That's right above from where you are
          D                C
He didn't mean to make you cry
                 D                G
With sparks that ring and bullets fly
         D                 C
On empty rings around your heart
               D                 C       G
The world just screams and falls apart 

[chorus]
	                C             G
	But now we must pick up every piece
	       C             G
	Of the life we used to love
	        C
	Just to keep ourselves
	   G                D
	At least enough to carry on

On Tuesday night, the Daily Grind is mostly cleared of its regular users and it becomes a feasible location for semi-formal poetry and acoustic guitar jams. Two tables at the far end of the cafe are pushed aside and a stage manifests itself through collective agreement. We had never tried amplified instruments, or any drum louder than a Bodhran, maybe a Djembe. Adele’s twenty-two by eighteen inch bass drum and sixteen by sixteen floor tom shook the brickwork and dislodged torrents of plaster from the ceiling, her ride cymbal tore in to the ether like a hyena on a fresh kill.
Laura had been supplemented by Saul, who bought a trombone into the mix, and I was joined by Lawrence, who bought his own Fender Jaguar but needed to borrow one of my practice amps. Adele had taken Laura, Saul and Lawrence aside during our first rehearsal to point out that they were by no means in the band. She and I were the band, she told them. She and I, she said, were subjects of a Truth-Event incompatible with their objective Knowledge of a Situation. It didn’t have to make sense, she said.
We had added a few more songs. Adele had insisted on Body Count’s Cop Killer, which allowed me, in the name of fairness, to politely suggest that she sing I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone by Sleater Kinney, which started the fake-band on a topic Lawrence summed up as ‘let’s rep Portland’ leading us to add The Thermals’ Pillar of Salt, with me on vocals and the keyboard parts rendered in brass; the Exploding Hearts’ Modern Kick with Adele on vocals and me backing her up on the choruses; the Wipers Over the Edge and Potential Suicide. We capped the set with our own take on our city’s one unquestionable contribution to music, the Kingsmen’s Louie Louie, spun out from Black Flag’s cover that appeared on The First Four Years and using Henry Rollins’ lyrics but played at double time with an almost Ska-punk horn section. Adele exercised her presumed right to unlimited executive veto when the Dandy Warhols were suggested (I think it was Bohemian Like You), and inflexibly enforced rules that she had made up to exclude Modest Mouse (of Seattle) and The Shins (Albuquerque) on the grounds that they weren’t technically from Portland (nobody knew, or mentioned, that Sleater Kinney are from Olympia).
So we set up after the last bad white slam poet. He wore a Crass t-shirt and had bought a table of sycophants that constituted half of the audience. I counted sixteen people, then counted “Two, one, two, three, four.”
The final verse is a little more difficult. The chord changes come at a faster pace and you’ll be using chords, like C6 and E-Major, that don’t appear at any other point in the song.

[verse]
    G      A     C6   C      G
And here's where your mother sleeps
    G    A  C6  C               G             D
And here is the room where your brothers were born
G A   C6   C      G
Indentions in the sheets
            G A    C6   C               G       D
Where their bodies once moved but don't move anymore
            C      G       C     G
And it's so sad to see the world agree
            C                G               D
That they'd rather see their faces filled with flies
G   A    C6  C       G          D              G
All when I'd want to keep white roses in their eyes 

(at verse pace)
C  G  C  G  C  D  C

(In rapid succession)
Em, Am, G (let ring)

This isn’t the story where the group of young misfits playing the music they love find that their sense of genuine fun has won over the otherwise jaded crowd. The white slam poet’s friends stayed throughout our half-hour set but the remainder of the audience moved in and out, mostly for cigarettes. People came and left. In all I would say that thirty people saw us play. Applause was brief and polite.
You’ll notice when playing the song an organic unity between the lyrics and music even when playing alone on a acoustic guitar. They fit together, neither privileged above the other. This is especially apparent on the original recording, when instead of processed signals running through micro-circuitry the fuzz on the guitars is lovingly sculpted from dust and vacuum tubes, and more so if you commit what my literature professors called ‘biographical fallacy’ and, god forbid, imagine that the song you are hearing was made by people at a particular place and time and that qualities unique to those people and their environment may show up in the ‘text’. You may notice a fundamental disconnect between yourself and your friends playing this song as if you were somehow entitled to do so and the people, so very unlike yourselves, who produced that unity of form and function- who wandered off during pit stops on tour and arrived at shows eight hours late, picked up and threw down instruments mid-set, paced the rooms of 156 Grady Street in Athens Georgia with a mind wired open by coffee and cigarettes. Jeff Mangum’s unaffected sensitivity leaving its last mark on DAT tape before it all stopped being fun.

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