Pay no attention to Alice

Pay no attention to Alice, she's drunk all the time, hooked on that wine,

Bunches of it,

And it ruined her mind.

Pay no attention to Alice, they say she's a sot, sane she is not, but she loves it.

And it's all she's got.

She made that apple pie from a memory,

Made them biscuits from a recollection that she had.

She cooked that chicken too long but she don't know that,

Oh what the hell, it ain't too bad.

Don't talk about the war, I was a coward,

Talk about fishing and all the good times raisin' hell.

Empty that one down, we'll get another one,

It's getting late, you might as well.

Though we ram your car into a ditch, man don't sweat it,

I know Ben down at the shell station and he'll get it out.

Alice, put your ashes in that ashtray, I swear woman,

You're gonna burn down the house.

Pay no attention to Alice, she's drunk all the time...

 

Small Hours

 

Not facts but truths

"What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt." (Leslie Bangs, Stranded, 1979)

"...it unties the ligaments of my frame"

 

It resembled the forgotten courtesan who took a harp, did her best at playing on the strings, and made her songs many in order to be destroyed. Isaiah 23:16: “Take a harp, go about the city, thou harlot that hast been forgotten; make sweet melody, sing many songs, that thou mayest be remembered.”

 

Gary Cooper, always here

 

Gary Cooper is shown playing piano. He took lessons as a kid but had to be paddled to practice. He plays stumblingly now.

Honky Tonks and Slow Sad Music (II)

His was a music of dangerous, wild abandon, and for a few years there in the seventies, Stewart cut a string of ferocious, magnificent recordings, some of them hits: "She's Actin' Single (I'm Drinkin' Doubles)." "Drinkin' Thing. " "Out of Hand." "Your Place or Mine." "I Had to Get Drunk Last Night." "Single Again." "Shady Streets." "In Some Room Above the Street." "Stone Wall (Around Your Heart)." Comparisons were frequently made to Jerry Lee Lewis, but to these ears Gary was more of a countrified Roky Erickson: a voice that came screaming from another dimension, and one that contained more than a hint of madness. Perhaps the only singer with phrasing as perverse is Bob Dylan, himself a Stewart fan. While touring with Tom Petty in Florida, Dylan went out of his way to meet him, confessing that he'd played Stewart's ode to marital malaise 'Ten Years of This' over and over, the record casting a spell over him. But then it was easy to be bewitched by Gary. (Jimmy McDonough, LITTLE JUNIOR, KING OF THE HONKY-TONKS, 2004)

Honky Tonks and Slow Sad Music

"There's a strain of soul music collectors refer to as 'deep soul,' a particularly pathos-laden genre that seems to explore the utmost limits of heartache, despair, and personal adversity. The songs Johnny Paycheck recorded for the independent Nashville label Little Darlin' between 1966 and 1970 are pretty much the country-music equivalent; it simply doesn't get any deeper than this." (Michael Klausman, Other Music)

“'Deep Soul occupies precisely the same role as Greek tragedy did in those far off days,' [Dave Godin] wrote in a sleeve-note to the first volume. 'It is cathartic; a form of therapy through art.' Godin also compared Deep Soul to grand opera, the only other form of Western Music he thought capable of generating the same emotional intensity."

[Aubrey] Mayhew had attended a Johnny Paycheck gig in Secacaus, N.J., and recalls: “Two girls were at a table and I went over and started talking to them,” Mayhew said. “During his break, Paycheck came over. We all ended up going out after the show. Paycheck was driving. We had no idea where we were. We went down this long road and came to a pier on the seashore. It was 5 in the morning. There was a sign that said ‘Point of No Return.’ “I looked at Paycheck, he looked at me. He was drunk. I wasn’t. I said, ‘Paycheck, you’ve just reached the pint of no return.’ We took the girls home, went to the hotel and wrote the song. It had to be pretty important to turn down two pretty-looking women.”

"…like listening to a piano player tickling a few last chords on the ivories in the wee hours of the morning" (IV)

                

"…like listening to a piano player tickling a few last chords on the ivories in the wee hours of the morning" (III)

"…like listening to a piano player tickling a few last chords on the ivories in the wee hours of the morning" (II)

 

"…like listening to a piano player tickling a few last chords on the ivories in the wee hours of the morning"