"Devil Woman" Marty Robbins-Devil Woman

Twenty miles south of the American border there is a small town, outside the filth of Tijuana, the drugs and the murders; a charming town where you can eat lobsters on the beach while the sun sets over the pacific and beers sweat in the sand. In white linen pants barefoot in the sand with a striking dark tan and hair wafting in the western wind you can find a senorita; one with jet black hair and tepid brown eyes that clash against her white dress cinched in the waist by a red sash, the loose end dangling around delicate knees. There's a hombre playing a gut string guitar in soiled clothes, a waxed mustache that collects beads of sweat as they roll off his brow while old Fords and Cadillacs drive across dusty streets stopping only for horses ridden bareback. Your senorita is giving and placating, the whites of her eyes look up from her reclined position in the sand to mumble incomprehensible words of love as she cuddles around your arm and strokes the nape of your back with stop sign red nails.

That night you'll visit her sister in a small tin roof shack, she is violent and fiery, demanding and uncontrollable. You make love to her, she leaves ruts in your back with her gnawed, fragmented nails and bite marks on your shoulder; afterwards she smokes in bed and drinks tequila neat in a chipped glass on the opposite end of the bed while she strokes your lower lip with her big toe and squints with demonic countenance.

Afterwards you'll grab the hombre on the beach, drink Tecate out of thin cans while the sun goes down and write this song.

Marty Robbins left a troubled home at the age of seventeen and joined the Navy, during World War Two in the Solomon Islands he taught himself to play guitar. He married a sultry woman named Marizona Baldwin whose first named when uttered takes the wind out of my lungs and the blood from my head. He took the stories from his childhood Phoenix home and turned them into classical American masterpieces. He drove in the Daytona 500, has a star on 6666 Hollywood Boulevard, and added to the myth of the stoic gunfighter roaming through the great arid west.

Before children dreamed of becoming Covenant Elites, their eyes welded to televisions, fingers bloodied by plastic buttons made in Chinese sweatshops, they would listen to the radio with a cowboy hat on and draw on their mothers as the came into the living room. After a restless sleep they'd wake and spend the afternoons running around the yard with companions hiding behind bushes dreaming they were wooden slat doors of a saloon while horses drank cool waters and men sipped warm whiskey. Later when those children ate from the apple they dreamed of those bite marks on their shoulders surrounded by red lipstick, all the while Marty Robbins providing the soundtrack to their fantasies...and in the rare case realities.

"Your Bright Baby Blues" Jackson Browne-Solo Acoustic Vol. 1

I just booked a ticked out to San Francisco for the end of April, while what spurned the trip is a dear friend's wedding I've been feeling the need lately to head out west to the sea and to a point in my life when I was as happy as I ever have or will be. Granted, back then I couldn't have afforded to schedule a T time at Pebble as I just did or have the time to do another drive down the PCH but back then things were (as they always appear to be) much more simple. So in a Blake-ian Songs of Innocence and Experience way I plan on returning with my eyes opened a little wider, a little more crow's feet, trammeled and will expect to view it slightly different than I had before when I was a young Chimney Sweeper.

When I was that brighter-eyed sweeper I drove up the PCH for the first time in an old battered Range Rover and was formally introduced to Jackson Browne. I had known him before and from various works with The Eagles, Roy Orbison, and his eponymous first album which contains another perfect JB song, "Jamaica Say You Will". But for the most part I never delved into his work and wrote him off as part of that whiny, liberal-activist genre of musicians.

That is until I past Hearst Castle peering out through the fog, looked out west across the vast Pacific landscape and heard the first bars of slide from this song. I have never heard it before, never knew it even existed; hearing it with new ears while viewing new scenes through new eyes frozen with beauty. I was in the zone for the first time outside of the athletic field and realized this is what the shamans see in their pursuit for a piece of Brahman, it clicked. The words permeated through the three speakers of out twenty four that worked, Jackson was taking what I was feeling and putting it into words at the exact second I was thinking them, I had no idea how it could be possible but it was unfolding before my eyes and vibrating in the canals of my ears with dreamlike surreal accuracy.

I adore the conversations contained in the lyrics of his songs and in this first verse particularly:

I'm sitting down by the highway
Down by that highway side
Everybody's going somewhere
Riding just as fast as they can ride
I guess they've got a lot to do
Before they can rest assured
Their lives are justified

And then while pondering those thoughts looking out over the Pacific he calls to a separate person of whom the above thoughts were dictated to and asks for a little help:

Pray to God for me baby
He can let me slide

It is frank, outside the character of the first seven lines and the format is repeated for the remainder of the song until the climax in the last line where instead of seeking for redemption and aide from God he asks for her hand. The song's progression, from a random rambling man lost out on the fringe, close to the attainment of happiness that remains just out of his grasp fades into the criticism of his affection until he stumbles into the abyss; then finally comes back in begging nature for her.

Those are just my thoughts which could be 180 out from your own, take what you will from it. But the stripped down acoustic guitar and the neck of a beer bottle slide give the track a haunting feel, the performer just like the narrator is alone sans artifice. This song humbles me, it clears my mind and brings me back to a place where I can feel the blood coursing through my veins. I relax and the world becomes clear, blissful in just sitting there staring out the window be it at Big Sur or the street below my apartment window.

I remember putting it on on Spring day in Manhattan laying in bed with someone I was madly in love with after a long afternoon of wearing ourselves out; sitting up in bed smoking a cigarette those first few bars came through again and while I couldn't be happier she was 180 out with Jackson. Many times over she would break my heart and I could never figure out why I kept falling into the honey trap over and over again, I still don't. But I do know that much like that drive up on the PCH Jackson was telling me something in real time.

"My Rifle, Pony and Me" "Get Along Cindy" -Rio Bravo*

There is not a better musical clip from any movie...ever. I will not do it any disservice by trying to elaborate. The songs are traditional however a great version of "Get Along Cindy" is out there by the legendary Texas musician Bob Wills.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IpEnsdXwFM

I just watched it and have to say something about it. My God the way it opens, Dean laying on the bed with his hat cocked back a hand rolled in his hand, the Duke pouring some coffee and then limping out of a cell to sit down and enjoy, Ricky Nelson sitting on a table with an absurd hairstyle for a cowboy while Stumpy throws in Harp riffs between his missing teeth.

I used to have this same feeling of longing contentment this song and scene exudes when I was living on Perdido Key in a stilt house on the Intercostal Waterway, my front yard the ocean. In the searing mid day sun I would run six miles in the snuff-thin white sand in a short pair of shorts barefoot on a deserted beach. Upon completion I would lay in three inches of water, close my eyes and fall into that trance-like in and out of sleep mode while tiny waves broke over my body until I walked the hundred yards back to the house and laid down again on the couch with the windows open, out of the sun and the ambrosial southern breeze wafting in through the windows.

It was heaven and possibly the reason for my agnostic state of mind as an adult, if heaven is not similar I don't want any part of it. However almost two hundred years ago when the land I resided on was still inhabited by Seminoles and Spaniards I don't think such a scene was possible and the linked one with Duke Wayne, Deano and Ricky was probably a more likely way to spend a lazy afternoon after a strenuous day of work.

I so do wish scenes like this have taken place, that they aren't just in movies or fantasy. In thinking of it it makes me feel as though everyone is a member of the same whole human race, possessing the same problems, desires, needs, wants and when it was all over they relaxed in the same way. Two hundred years ago globalization existed deep down in the DNA of every person walking the planet and we simply just didn't know it. There were cowboys in the jail cell singing songs in standard G-C-D format, Chinese Eunuchs playing harpsichords in segmented triads and Pygmy throat singers on the African planes all releasing the worries and cares of the day. Maybe they supplanted Camels or Kudu for Ponies, spears and swords for rifles but there was always that third imperative part of the mix, the creators and the dramatists of the world theatre.

*I attempt to refrain from linking scenes or anything similar however to my knowledge this is the only example of said songs performed in this style and the only way to gain access to the original content.