A Single Angry Word From Tony Hightower. - Buy it now!

Notes on the Songs

Sides of my Shoes | The Waves | A Single Angry Word | Somebody Turns On A Radio | Annex In February | A Toast For Leyna | Low Fire | So The Hell What | I'll Have Fun If It Kills Me | Picaresco* | Dina Doesn't Talk To Boys | Christie Pits Story Наша юридическая компания предоставляет новую услугу регистрация фирмы в Москве . hdmi to dvi converter . осетинские пироги - доставка

Sides of My Shoes

My friend Charlotte and I were arguing about God, and how the Second (Third, Thirteenth, whatever) coming would manifest itself, and she made the point that if someone was going to rewrite the Bible and present it in manifesto form to all the little quote lost souls unquote that quote really required saving unquote, putting it in a book like the last Bible would be the worst way to go about it. If you really wanted to spread the Good Word, where would you put it? Where do people look these days? The only people who would buy a new Bible, even if you could convince people that this was really an update of The Word of the Lord, are those who already believe, and perhaps the crystals-incense-Celestine-Prophecy crowd. That might be enough to ensure a prophet for the publishing company, and a nice healthy run on the New York Times bestseller list, but the Lost would miss it. They'd be too busy working their shit jobs and getting drunk or stoned and Being Busy and stuff. Like it or not, the best information dissemination campaigns come from sneaker ads. If you can get someone to spend two-thirds of the money they have for food and shelter on a pair of shoes (never mind how or where they were made), then your ad people must be doing something right. And if I was God, and I really wanted to get the gospel out, especially in these millennial times, these are the people and the tactics I would use.



The Waves

This song is not about Jodie Foster.

This is basically a transcript of an argument I was having with a friend about what exactly constitutes true love.

I contended [still do] that obsession and getting completely consumed by your desires is as much a part of love as the moment just before they say yes or the Awkward First Kiss.

In a way, this may be the most narcissistic song on the record. It has very little to do with anyone else, really. I was trying to write a song about my really being consumed by my desire for this particular woman (who thankfully took it rather well when I told her), and how I knew it was unhealthy, and I didn't care, I was just kind of willing to give in to it and let it take me wherever it was going. I let my emotions run free for a little while, and it started to string me out. I kept trying to write a song for her, and of course, well, pardon the cliche, but to get out of the eye of the storm you sometimes have to walk through a hurricane.

This song was written whole hog, a fetus born all grown up, except for the bridge, which I stole from the Vapors.



A Single Angry Word

The Blue Moon Saloon was a real place on Bloor Street where this guy Rob used to run the open mike in I guess it would be about 1991 or 2. Rob was going out with my friend Lesley, and I was hanging with this other cat David Sullivan who later became the maitre d' at the world-famous (really) Barberian's Steak House, and so we and the people we hung around with used to go there and I learned how to play guitar on stage in that room. It was long and thin, and the beer was jawdroppingly cheap, and we would fiddle with the terrible sound system until you could hear both your guitar and your voice, and then you'd stand in front of the kitchen and try to outshout the drunks who would wander in & pay for their shots & 50s in dimes & quarters. Fights were an hourly occurrence some nights. One day some asshole stole the sound board (a little four track thing, but hey, it wasn't nailed down), and the place went completely acoustic, and the last time I was ever in there (it was the end of January, and the place was jammed), I played the Frantics' You Scare The Shit Out of Me standing on a table in the middle of the room with no pick and a broken string & my fingers were bleeding by the end, and I remember thinking, this might be the best moment of my life. Two days later there was a padlock on the door, and soon the place was a Forkchops Noodle House or something.



Somebody Turns On A Radio

I will always remember CFTR in Toronto as the radio station playing the soundtrack to my childhood - they played the Bay City Rollers, Peter Frampton, Triumph, Goddo, Stevie Wonder, April Wine, Max Webster, Donna Summer, the hits, man, and I was 8 years old and it was like a world opened up to me through those tinny hand-held transistor radios we used to listen to in the schoolyard. At Shaughnessy Public School in North York, me and my best friend Wesley Williams used to hang out in the back of the schoolyard and make up dances to the funky horn break in Sir Duke during recess and then perform them in Mr. Wilson's Grade 4 class. I'm sure no one else cared (come to think of it, that was about the time I started getting beaten up for lunch money. Hmm.), but man, were we having a ball.

Fast forward 15 years, to a gas station in Vancouver. I'm living in a van on the UBC campus, and writing, busking and working weekend nights. Sometimes it just doesn't occur to you when you take a job like that that it might be dangerous. Ahem. Well anyway, between holdups and drunks trying to gas up and dash (or worse, stay and throw down for their dates), the wall between me and the nuthouse was kept nice & strong by Nightlines with David Wisdom on CBC. This show turned me on to an impossible range of music that I would simply have not known to even look for. For six hours a night, then and for years afterward, I can honestly say I learned something new and utterly fascinating about the world about every 5 minutes. The show is gone now (Mr. Wisdom continues on Radio Sonic, a different and shorter show), but it literally got me out of my own head and into the world, at a time when I was thousands of miles from home, lonely as hell and more lost than I even knew at the time.

As bad as commercial radio is (and it's pretty bad, between the majors monopolizing playlists and many places doing all kinds of shady shit that gives the whole damned industry a bad name), there is still salvation to be had out there. The CBC is still pretty damned good, and community stations (in every town I've ever been in that has them, at least) seem to turn up wacky-assed shit you'll never hear anywhere else. CFTR is all-news now, but I like the fact that they're playing the Clash and Dream Warriors on Classic Rock Stations, and there's still hits radio, providing the soundtrack to the lives of today's 8-year-old future songwriters.



Annex In February

Like my man Mike Weidman says, Some days it's hard just to get out of bed.

There is a certain kind of desperation that is almost joyful at its greatest depth; there's a moment when you realize that there's only one way things can happen so you can maintain your grip on sanity, and that thing is far from a sure thing. There was a time when I used to get a rush from that feeling, that aggressive melancholy, that moment when the stampede chases you to the edge of the cliff and you look back, and realize your choices are jump and pray or hit the deck and hope you don't get trampled. When there's black slush everywhere on the ground and the sun sets at 5:30 every night, it's not like you can find a nice tree or something to stare at. Your heart gets it from every angle, and you wander through the muddy bitterness with nothing but Pandora's near-empty box, looking for a change of socks.

I don't specifically remember writing this, but I do remember feeling like this once. Yeah, for about 20 years.



A Toast For Leyna

I first met Leyna Shark (not her real name, but it is an anagram she liked) in a shelter in Toronto when I was about 20. She had just left the small town she was from because no one could deal with her being gay, and she finally gave up & came to town to seek her fortune. We became extremely fast friends, and pen pals whenever either one of us did any traveling. I remember bringing back a license plate from Texas for her once. She settled down after a while to work in a store on the Harbourfront, and moved into a house with 1700000 cats. Eventually, she moved out to Stratford, and we lost touch. So anyway, I ran into a mutual friend a couple of years ago who told me that she had been killed in a car accident, and I sat on that one for about six months, and then one extremely busy day that I had no time to write anything, this song came out. We drank in a lot of places and met a lot of wacked out geniuses and had some genuinely inspired arguments about politics and love and what it takes to be great, and I'll never run into anyone like her again.

POSTSCRIPT - on July 23, 2000, I got a letter from her. She's actually alive and living in rural England. I've set up an email address if you want to say anything to her.

I wrote a story about this whole episode, which should be up soon.



Low Fire

Some time in the summer, I was talking with a friend in New York (I think it was Anne Husick, if you're keeping score, and who deserves a hearty shout regardless) about how, since the sexual revolution, people haven't needed to be so creative in describing their lustful impulses in public. You don't have to go back to Big Jay McNeely to find a decent metaphor (although you could do worse than that raunchy bastard) - even up till, well at least until Elvis entered the army and Chuck Berry went to jail (& Buddy Holly died, and Jerry Lee Lewis married his cousin, and so on), the greatest songwriters and artistic types of the day had to come up with new and exciting metaphors for the lustful thoughts that enflamed the souls of youth (and everyone else, even if they weren't actually, you know, in touch with their feelings).

But nowadays (yeah, in only like the last 30 years), and especially recently, in this post "I Want Your Sex" and "I Wanna Fuck You Like An Animal" age (to name two completely random songs I once liked or at least danced to and maybe still would), there's just not as much call for songs that don't come right out and say Hey Baby Let's Hump. So Low Fire is my stab at something kind of Mills Brothersish, a period piece on white muslin, done in one take with Mighty Joe Phillips going all Clapton on his 5 string basszilla behemoth.

And hey, it's hard to write a (good) song about this stuff. I mean, what rhymes with horny? Corny? Sigourney? Borneo? (no.) A million words in the English language, and it seems we'll just have to make more.



So The Hell What


This started out as a standard breakup song. I was thinking about Captain Beefheart singing I Will Survive. Go ahead, ask me why. (I don't know, okay? You think weird thoughts in the wake of a breakup. Or at least I do.)

I had just broken up with someone, and I was out drinking with the Broadview Hawks, my Australian Rules Football Team, at some bar out near the airport, and an old drunk guy listened to my sob story all night, and gave me the best gift any old drunk can give an equally hammered newly single fellow: the line "If nobody loves you, then so the hell what?"

I'd love to say I sobered up instantly and wrote the thing on a cocktail napkin that very night, but it took about a year for the thing to solidify into its present form.

This was supposed to be the Internationale or the Battle Hymn of the Republic, some sort of grindy swayish marching 3-minute manifesto that could unify a culture. Every songwriter worth their vowels I think tries at one point or another to write a new national anthem for the nation inside their mind. From Steppenwolf to the Sex Pistols, from Willie Dixon to the Replacements, from U2 to the Rheostatics. I don't want to put anyone down here or anything, but shit, if Simple Minds can write a real anthem, then any of you can.



I'll Have Fun If It Kills Me

It was a party like any other -- no one was acting terribly beautiful, the tapes were fuzzy and hard to hear no matter how loud they were, the only happiness anywhere in the North York split-level with flagstone deck & glasscases with tchotchkes in every lavender shag carpeted hallway was in someone else's mouth. Everyone was 21 & frantically looking for something anything anything & looking for the darkest set of beer goggles they could find so they could settle and still be able to stare at their red eyes in the midafternoon when they finally wake up. Drinking through the alphabet. Oh, that was me, wasn't it? Alone with my notebook at the zoo, watching the animals. Gee, how'd this get written?



*Picaresco

The great Max Metrault wrote this one.

A sparklingly elegant song about drowning your sorrows in drink - and them actually drowning! I remember the first time I heard this song, it unfolded like a beautiful soggy flower pulled from the torn breast pocket of a sad Mexican clown, and I just genuinely hope the fromagesque Gipsy Kings cum Broadway production does this gorgeous jingle something vaguely resembling justice.



Dina Doesn't Talk To Boys

It would be trite to say that this actually happened; shit, it happens every day, to everyone I know, especially damn near every woman I know. I guess this is the flipside to Annex In February, where all those desperate guys who are convinced that this woman that just wandered into their hangout clearly holds the solution to all their problems, or at least the loneliness ones, and if she wanders back out of there again, their shot at Eternal Redemption will be blown, forever.

Maybe guys just like hitting on women they don't know and have no chance of getting to know. Well with an attitude like that, dickhead, it's no wonder you're cruising coffee shops, looking for comparatively well-adjusted people who have the wonderful virtue of not necessarily immediately wanting to be your personal learning experience. Here's a quick free tip, guys: think for a second about the kind of woman that would be actually willing to go out with a guy as obnoxious as you, after only knowing them for a 5 minute chat in a coffee shop or someplace.

Then again, maybe I'm just jealous. Maybe I'm actually one of these losers myself, and I just can't tell.

Maybe there's some women that go back to the construction site where they got catcalled. Could be that there are people that'll leap into the first convertible that issues a wolfwhistle in their general direction. That's not such a bad thing, is it? It's just a matter of picking your spots. I just get the feeling that there are an astonishingly large number of people who are eerily, horrifyingly, stupefyingly bad at picking their spots.



Christie Pits Story

Oh, do I wish I had a beautiful romantic story for this one.

I used to run the open stage at the Cafe Verité on Bloor Street, near Christie Pits Park, a huge beautiful place with sloping hills that go down about 50 feet below street level. The Toronto Maple Leafs of the Intercounty Baseball League (I think it's "A" Ball, if it matters) play there, and it's a great deal to go sit on the hills for free and watch the home team beat up on the St. Thomas Elgins or the Stratford Hillers or someone. Anyway, there's an outdoor pool with a diving board and a nice high (but climbable!) fence, and the walkways were well lit, but there were lots of places behind trees and stuff where you could go to get stoned or, y'know, nuzzle your sweetheart or just go chill, where what little of the city you can actually see seems about a zillion miles away.

I keep hearing that Christie Pits is dangerous, but I haven't heard of anything real bad happening down there in a long time. Sure, there was a famous race riot there once, but that was in the 1930's. I think we can move on now.