On Sunday and Monday, I explored the circumstances of my interest in the music of Dale Lawrence. I referred to the music and songwriting itself but in general did not attempt to analyze it. With a big deep breath, I’m going to take a stab at it today.

Unfortunately for me, it’s the end of a very busy few days and I can feel my exhaustion; so forgive me if this is a little less than laser-focused. While I try to present high-caliber material here, it’s also very much a first pass at things; I can only hope I communicate the basic gist successfully without gazing off into space, stupefied, too many times. I must reiterate that the ideas seen in these essays are deliberately unconfirmed! I will ask for confirmation after I finish recording my mythology, in order to know what’s mine, and what I found looking into the mirror Dale’s music has been for me.

In essence, my understanding of Dale’s songwriting boils down to two things: first, keep it simple, and second, write with a partner. Over time, the partners change, and how the simplicity is expressed changes as well.

In the first phase of Dale’s songwriting, I believe that his primary songwriting partner was Billy Nightshade, the Gizmos mk. II bassist. Without digging the Gulcher re-releases out, I’m pretty sure there are more shared songwriting credits on the material than solo; some of the songs from this period appear to be fully collaborative, judging from stylistic evidence.

A song like Bible Belt Baby (or is it Babies?) is a likely candidate. The song is lyrically both a portrait of a young Midwestern girl’s surprise pregnancy and a punk condemnation of the sociology that helps create the conditions for it, reduced to the simplest pop terms imaginable.

Bible Belt Baby

She was born to yet another
Tellin’ stories of a virgin mother
All that she knew how to do was to try not to die

To elicit both a world of sorrow
Thought alot about what’s for tomorrow
Picked herself apartment and a (quarter new field of rye?)

Chorus:
She was a young one who stopped havin’ fun
Life was all over before begun
Television set and a mass of things
Bible belt babies don’t have to think
Boys get blue and girls get pink and
Bible belt babies don’t have to think

Seventeen and she’s often tryin’
And she shops just to keep from cryin’
Summer gets hot and the winter gets cold and snows

Small-town come-out bible belt baby
If she can she’ll pretend that maybe
Mommy would be in heaven if she had new clothes

She was a young one who stopped havin’ fun
Life was all over before begun
Television set and a mass of things
Bible belt babies don’t have to think
Boys get blue and girls get pink and
Bible belt babies don’t have to think

(instrumental break)

She was a young one who stopped havin’ fun
Life was all over before begun
Television set and a mass of things
Bible belt babies don’t have to think
Boys get blue and girls get pink and
Bible belt babies don’t have to think

(I actually had some lyric corrections to this, possibly from Dale, but they appear to have been mislaid. So I must note that these lyrics contain some excellent mishearings.)

The song structure is perfectly straightforward, and in my notes I have it down as employing three chords, D, A and C. However the staccato delivery of the choruses is very much like the kinds of chorus I associate with songs I think of as “Billy songs,” and something in the way the melody runs also feels like a melody written by a bassist.

As the Gizmos move through time, Dale’s songwriting becomes more and more distinct, presumably the result of a growing ambition and awareness of trying to create a perfect pop song. Of course, on the very first vinyl out the door, 1978’s Never mind the Sex Pistols Here’s the Gizmos, a very young Dale crafted a song he still plays today: Cry Real Tears, a pop masterpiece if ever there was:

Cry Real Tears

I tried to cry real tears for you
but it just doesn’t work and I don’t what else I can do
well I wish I really loved you but it just can’t be
and if I never see ya again it’d be the same to me
and i tried to cry real tears for you

well I seen you yesterday in your blue jeans
but your manners are too nice
and your hair’s too long and clean
and all you like to do is gaze into the television screen
and i tried to cry real tears for you

(break to bridge)

baby baby you know that I’ve tried
and baby baby I’m burning inside
but honey honey, those tears won’t fall
and it ain’t like i don’t know why

your smile’s what made me want to hold your hand
but (somethin) is for cheaters and sorority signs
and if you felt the way you talked I think you’d have to be blind
I know you wanna be my baby I know you wanna wear my ring
but you’re just too well adjusted and you don’t know anything
and I tried to cry real tears for you

and I tried to cry real tears for you

and I tried and tried to cry real tears for you

As the song has been played, the lyrics and delivery of the song have changed dramatically. At one point, the hair became “too short and mean,” for example. Over time, the flippant dismissal of the validity of the pursuit of a conventional lover’s relationship became a plaint of isolation.

The other early pop gem, this one still in performance, I think, is Heartbeat, a straightforward pop-love song, an ideal A-side to Cry Real Tears. The Boatmen have recorded this more than once, never fully realizing the song’s potential. Interestingly, as this song aged, it too became less celebratory and tinged with desperation.

Heartbeat

I love to hear your heartbeat – really beatin’
love to get you things that you’re really needin’
world go round an’
don’t get you started
I can’t let you go ’til I can hear your heart
I’m in love with the way you seem to carry a chip on your shoulder

I love to lose myself girl inside your head now
I love the way you wear the clothes that you wear now
perfect little angel
I could answer all
you could be a queen if you knew how to fall
I’m in love with the sound of your heartbeat not growin’ older

Your heart – understand
I could carry it with me in the palm of my hand

Your heart – will be so glad
makes me glad to think I’m your man

(instr. break)

Your heart – understand
I could carry it with me in the palm of my hand
Your heart – will be so glad
makes me glad to think I’m your man

Yeah and I love to hear your heartbeat – really beatin’
love to get you things that you’re really needin’
world go round an’
don’t get you started
I can’t let you go ’til I can hear your heart
and I’m in love with the sound of your sweet heart
not growin’ older

I love to hear your heartbeat (aah-ah)
I love to hear your heartbeat (aah-ah)
I love to hear your heartbeat (aah-ah)
I love to hear your heartbeat (aah-ah)

The last few songs that the Gizmos recorded – the previously cited The Midwest is Allright, the songs on the 1981 demo such as My Baby Loves Crime and Biscuits & Gravy, represent Dale’s mature songwriting skills in first flower. As such, the songs look back toward the inncocent vigor and snottiness of the Gizmos’ punk heyday and forward at a long adulthood, full of anxiety about the choice being made to pursue a career as a professional musician and feeling the loneliness of being away from home. Another Gizmos song, Rockin’ for Tacos, addresses the topic in the first lines. The song also bears comparison to Margaret Says:

Rockin for Tacos

I think about doin’ this for the rest of my life, for the rest of my life
I think about what it’s goin’ to mean to me
But when the lights go down
and they play that hurt sound
and I start thinkin’ about what I been missin’
and I gotta have the only thing (unintelligible)

And now
we’re rockin for tacos
we’re rockin for tacos
we’re goin’ na-na-na-na
we’re goin’ na-na-na-na

Margaret Says

Margaret’s friends walk in, Margaret’s friends sit down,
I say hello in French, they think I’ve been around
And then we start in to play, I’m feelin’ down on my luck
And then I win a couple rounds, don’t think it means too much

And I’m supposed to be thinkin’ about the rest of my life
And I’m supposed to be thinkin’ about the rest of my life
I’m lookin forward to this – she says “Ready to ride?”
With her hat on her head tilted over her eyes
All these steps I’m takin’ – pictures of my family
That’s what Margaret says when she talks to me

After the Gizmos and prior to Right to Left, Dale worked on quite a few songs in an outfit called the Satellites; I have much less familiarity with these songs and can only comment briefly on them (I do have a CD of them, I’ve just spent less time listening to them and thinking about them). This is one period in Dale’s career where I wonder if he had a regular song-writing partner. I assume he was working with Robert Ray, his partner on most of the Vulgar Boatmen material; but the sound that Dale was pursuing at this time was highly commercial in derivation, and the songs on the Satellites demos CD reflect that, with more covers than is usual and the extremely polished production I noted earlier.

When I listen to these songs, the recordings sound brittle, overworked; it’s as though Dale’s pursuit of a mannered, controlled sound was ill-suited to the material. The sense of restraint, of unresolved tension, which is present in later Vulgar Boatmen material is in these recordings, but it’s in conflict with the cheery, idealizing material. These songs do, however, owe a deep debt to the work of Brian Wilson, and the undercurrent of alienation and anxiety that Wilson brings to his greatest work with the Beach Boys marked Dale’s work after this time.

With the advent of Right to Left, all of the elements that would become the Vulgar Boatmen were in place. Dale’s songwriting reached a lyrical maturity, which emphasizes openness to interpretation. Rather than describing a young girl’s pain at discovering her pregnancy and the subsequent end of her childhood, Dale and Robert Ray move to presenting interior or spoken monologues of contemporary American anxiety.

A person sits in a car late at night, hearing the father of the person the song is addressed to. We don’t know what the father is doing, but it’s late, and he’s audible from inside this car. We imagine the details, screaming, broken crockery.

Morgan, who would later become Margaret, tells her French-speaking boyfriend that he’s supposed to be thinking ’bout the rest of his life. He tells himself he’s looking forward to this – all the steps he’s taken. Won’t do to be rockin’ for tacos if he’s to marry the girl, now. Driving, listening to WDIA late at night he considers the moment, and thinks about the rest of his life.

There’s a famous photo of a very young B. B. King, posing with a battered acoustic guitar on which the call letters of a radio station he performs on have been daubed. WDIA, they say. He’s looking ahead at the camera with youthful enthusiasm.

The diffident, doubt-filled observer at the heart of the Boatmen’s songs is radically unique in rock, a music that has a hard time accommodating doubt and certain kinds of quotidian anxiety. As a teenager, that meant that watching Dale’s performances as he unfurled his commitment as a mature artist to exploring this modality could be frustrating.

As an adult, the terrain that Dale has been exploring offers staying power and artistic integrity and depth. Additionally, the subject matter of the songs is well-suited to Dale and Robert’s studio manner, which emphasizes meticulously controlled performances. I believe others have termed it chamber pop. It certainly eschews the sonic extremes of much rock, and, most contentiously, even that of the band itself in performance.

In discussing the music of the Boatmen with other fans who have seen them in performance, the subject of the tension between the hushed, recital-like quality of many of the studio recordings of the band and the raucous, celebratory, incredibly loud and fearless performances seen live comes up with such predictability I’m surprised there hasn’t been a term coined for it.

Listen to the sample tracks provided at the band’s web site, and then to the live recordings I host locally, which was made at Schuba’s in 2001, especially to the closing numbers. This is, by the way, the band and lineup you can expect to see on the 19th at the same venue, when Wide Awake will be released.

I have long wished that the muscular, daredevil sound of these performances were reflected in more of Dale’s studio-recorded music. However, I have also come to the conclusion that the avoidance of that sound on the Boatmen’s studio works is not an accident of production but a deliberate creative choice, one made with a fully considered aesthetic viewpoint, and that the choice is grounded in Dale’s experience as a recording musician.

The recorded works that most closely capture the louder possibility I hear in Dale’s songwriting are the 1981 Gizmos demos. It’s worth noting that only Please Panic, not recorded in the studio, I think, has made it into regular performance by today’s Boatmen. My personal favorite, My Baby Loves Crime, is not in performance, I think partly because of some awkward lyrical constructions and the flippant subject matter.

Consider that these recordings were followed by a few years of experimentation by Dale before the mature songwriting style of the Boatmen appeared. In my opinion, some of these interim recordings suffer due to a conflict between the recording and performance style and the lyrical and melodic content of the songs.

In performance, the band has the luxury of resolving the tension inherent within the songs, and indeed, in order to get you, dear audience member, to dance, thereby selling beer, they must. In the studio, in order to pursue the goal of making effective art, art that does not compromise or pander, the constrained, controlled sounds provide the psychological backdrop for the vignettes of everyday frustration and reflection that accompany them.

I find it worth noting that this difference between expectation and desire and execution between audience and performer more or less perfectly recapitulates the kind of nuanced portraits of relationships that the songs provide.

I have not addressed or done justice to the newest, and current songwriting partnership that Dale is engaged in. I have too fragmented a picture of the material to address it in detail, and I apologize for the oversight. With Jake Smith playing bass in the current incarnation of the Vulgar Boatmen, and Dale playing in Jake and his wife Freda’s band, The Mysteries of Life, new directions in Dale’s songwriting have clearly emerged, and the newer songs are played in concert at Vulgar Boatmen shows.

I think it’s worth noting that Dale’s work with the Gizmos involved a songwriting partnership with another bassist.

In conclusion, another apology is due: to all of the musicians who have worked with Dale that I have not mentioned by name, I apologize. It’s clear that as Dale works with different groups of players, they influence his songwriting as well. I personally deeply appreciate the time and effort you as individual musicians and collectively have put into working on these songs, from 1978 to 2003. These essays, focusing on Dale, are also appreciations of your individual contributions and should be recognized as such, however absurd it may sound to you as you read this. I thank you: you have enriched my life.

Tomorrow: the big finale, a careful, blow by blow reflection on Wide Awake and who knows what else.