LA Blues [Los Angeles Azules]

(Instrumental)

Music by Dave Ryder and Dan McHugh. Copyright 2010. All Rights Reserved.

Info regarding the recording:

This song went through a number of changes before reaching this final form. Originally we were just wanting to play some blues, so we recorded a song that sounds nothing like this one based loosely on Miles Davis’s All Blues. It was difficult to come up with lyrics, and we fiddled with it for ages, dropping it to the back burner, every now and then pulling it out and dusting it off for a new try at something (we tried tons of different lyrics, different ways of singing it, considered possibly turning it into an instrumental and even did a mashup with Guaraldi’s Linus and Lucy – and no we weren’t drunk – but it reached the point where we both said, “you know what? fuck this piece of shit song”).

But one night when I was working on the story, I realized we had no music for the Lotus Eaters part of the story and I got to thinking about the old blues song we had trashed. The thing was, the Lotus Eaters were represented by heroin addicts, and I felt that music for the types of scenes I was visualizing for that chapter of the story should be very slow and dreamlike (the original number was cooking).

So I tried the chords stretched out at a slower tempo, but now the problem was that all of the major and dominant chords didn’t lend themselves very well to a dreamy atmosphere. A light bulb went off in my head when I thought that, and so I tried converting all the chords to minors, and voilà, the song was right.

Except we still had no lyrics. Dan thought an eery organish sound would be cool, so he played a track on the Korg Triton (in one take), thinking it was just some minor orchestration which would be mixed in the background, but it was so cool we agreed it should be the lead instrument. Here is a simplified chord chart:

     LA Blues  6/8

     |G7sus4   |         |G-7      |         |
     |C-7      |C-6      |C-7      |C-6      |
     |G7sus4   |         |G-7      |         |
     |D-7      |D#-7     |G7sus4   |         |
   

“But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song
Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,
Like a tale of little meaning tho’ the words are strong;
Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,
Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,
Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;
Till they perish and they suffer–some,’tis whisper’d–down in hell
Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,
Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.”

– The Lotos-Eaters by Lord Alfred Tennyson

I absolutely love the detail and patterns Atilla Sassy uses in this series of etchings. This piece seemed perfect for our subject (the lotus eaters) – she is even eating a flower in this dreamlike etching.

Obviously a big influence on this album for us were the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and this seems an appropriate time to mention his epic poem Kubla Khan: According to Coleridge’s Preface to Kubla Khan, the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium influenced dream after reading a work describing the Tartar king Kublai Khan. Upon waking, he set about writing lines of poetry that came to him from the dream until he was interrupted by a *person from Porlock.

“And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.”

Of course, there is nothing romantic about opiate addiction, but the heroin problem Cordera has, and the dilemmas it creates for Ulises (and Jessica) are integral parts of the story. Coleridge himself called it a curse, and for someone already of an †indolent nature, it proved a sore hindrance to his art.

*_{The person from Porlock later became a phrase to describe interrupted genius, and the literary critic Walter Jackson Bate recounted that while John Livingston Lowes taught the poem, he told his students “If there is any man in the history of literature who should be hanged, drawn, and quartered, it is the man on business from Porlock.”}

†_{“So I became a dreamer, and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity; and I was fretful and inordinately passionate, and as I could not play at anything, and was slothful, I was despised and hated by the boys.” – Coleridge}