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Flatfoot

A quirky little piece. I was starting to get the knack of recording -- the sound is pretty good. Although I'll win no prizes for my guitar playing, it actually hangs together better than I thought on first listen, with only a few blown notes. Something strange is happening in the beginning, where the guitar sounds out of tune, but later seems to correct itself. I wasn't good enough to tune on the fly, and I don't seem to be bending notes, so I don't know exactly what's happening there.

What's it about? Damned if I know. "Flatfoot" was American criminal/gangster slang, dating back to the '30s (and probably earlier). It originally applied (I think) to beat cops. Pounding the pavement in cheap, government-issue shoes cannot be good for one's arches.

So that seemed like as good a reason as any to repeat the word like an incantation at the start of each verse/chorus, accompanied by the spidery guitar line, increasingly ominous bass, growing sense of dread, and whispers and groans. The rest of the song is just your standard adolescent angst:

Mysterious stuff being put in boxes, said boxes then being put in storage . . . diaries and their "dirty looks" being burnt . . . uh-oh. . . . thinking . . . thinking . . . thinking . . .

I'm trying to remember if I've possibly forgotten something incriminating of value in storage somewhere . . . thinking . . . thinking . . . thinking . . .

OK, there were three times I've had to buy storage space:

#1. Beer was involved.

#2. Actually that one was kind of funny. This guy had an acreage out of town with a bunch of sheds that he was renting out. So somebody had given me a couple of hundred pounds of moose meat that I had no room for. It was 30-below that week, so I figured I could stow it there until I could find a friend with some spare freezer space. Then I kind of forgot about it until late in August.

Needless to say the moose did not age well. You practically needed a gas mask . . . yeah, yeah, we've been over this again and again. I had utterly no idea you were storing your favorite neon-green leisure-suit there. Yes, I know that it was well-and-truly a "Chick Magnet."

I've sent it for dry-cleaning more times than I can count, and they just can't seem to get the stench of Death out of it. Must be the way it reacts with polyester.

#3. Just speaking hypothetically, what do you suppose the Statute of Limitations on something like that would be?

So! Conscience clear! Whew!

We never had this convo. Right?


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42. Flatfoot 41. Save It For Later 40. Lech! 39. Who Do You Know? 38. Money, Guns And Blood 37. Warning Shots 36. Telephone Sex 35. Problems 34. Glide Path 33. Come A Day 32. Sylvie Pts. 3&4 31. Thicker... [Read More]

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on September 5, 2010 7:40 PM.

The previous post in this blog was This Is Why They Call It Blackmale.

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