Current mood:	complacent
Current music:	white stripes - you're pretty good looking (..

live and lyrically intense
The White Stripes - "Isis"
(live in London, December 2001; 3.45mb, 3:32)
Bootleg from a radio broadcast, 2001.

I remember Katie of katura fame wanting to hear the White Stripes cover "Isis" a little while back, and I have graciously but possibly lazily granted her wish. Jack and Meg have covered a few Bob Dylan songs, actually, amongst them "One More Cup Of Coffee" and "Love Sick". I kinda feel that The White Stripes are a step above any of the other bands involved in the whole 'garage rock' thing. This is because Jack White is a particularly talented songwriter who has a gift for a catchy melody and what seems like a fairly good grasp of why rock and roll works, where it's been and what caused it to happen. This is evident in their music, but more obvious in their choice of covers - everything from Dolly Parton to Iggy Pop to Leadbelly to Brendan Benson to Bob Dylan.

"Isis" has to be one of the harder Dylan songs to cover, up there with "Desolation Row" and "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts". I've just bought and read Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One, which is a great book, especially if you have the in-depth musical knowledge a sad pathetic music obsessive like myself has, and thus know what Dylan's talking about half the time. As a book, it's like the X-Files - for every mystery revealed, there's another created; he mentions that he wrote an album based on short stories by Anton Chekhov (and hints that it's "Blood On The Tracks"), and spends some time talking about a new mathematical method of singing that makes no sense to me whatsoever.

He doesn't mention the album "Isis" is from, Desire, at all, but "Isis", in the original form, is a seven-minute epic with swirling, psychedelic narrative lyrics, with the same distinctive violin as on the big hit from Desire, "Hurricane". Structure-wise it's a traditional folk ballad with no chorus, just tons of verses - not that it really needs a chorus. The White Stripes speed it up and cut it down enough so that it's half the size, dropping the middle three verses about pyramids and stuff.

Augie March - "One Crowded Hour"
(live at the Meredith Music Festival, December 2003; 6.04mb, 4:43)
audio from the Drones and Vapid Ditties DVD, 2004.

Sometimes there is a song so incredibly good, on every level - a song that hits me over and over again like it's a hammer - that I have to listen to it constantly, regularly, to try and understand it, to figure out what makes it tick.

One Crowded Hour is one of these songs. I have been listening to it over and over again since I first heard Glenn Richards (the lead singer and rhythm guitarist in Augie March) perform it solo at the venerable Hopetoun Hotel 18 months ago now. I've acquired bootlegs of various performances, I've learnt how to play it myself, I've analysed and memorised the lyrics, I've ranted and raved about it, and it's still not enough. And it's not just me. Listen to the cheers from the crowd upon recognising the song, and remember that this is an unreleased song which maybe had been played live 5-6 times by December 2003.

As a song it's a summation of everything Augie March are about. It starts with fingerpicked guitar, an arpeggio figure they've used on a few of their best songs ("Here Comes The Night" and "Owen's Lament"). Richards sings a verse and the chorus solo - him and the guitar - before the band kicks in, building up the urgency of the piece through the second verse and chorus. Glenn sings an effortless-sounding nagging, catchy  melody. In the verse he uses the rhythm of the way he's phrasing the words to get across the import of what he's singing - very Dylanesque in some ways. A simple but effective rising chord progression contrasts against the notes of the melody in the verse, putting them in different contexts and stopping it from being boring. The chorus melody is fantastic, a subtle variation on the verse melody that's instantly memorable and catchy as fuck, without ever having to force the catchiness by dumbing it down or do anything unnatural (the bridge isn't quite up to the standard of the rest of the song, really, but it's short enough, and doesn't disrupt the rest too much).

The band play it with suitable urgency; a song like this could be a sleepy ballad, but they push it and pull it like they mean every note, with dynamics that constantly seem build and arrangements that seem to be constantly changing; listen to Kiernan's piano playing towards the end if you listen closely.

Of course, it's a summation of everything Augie March are about, and - as good as the melody and performance are - it's the lyrics of the song that are the centre of the music. And these are the best lyrics Glenn's come up with yet - not one fucking wasted line, and enough poetry and heart and skill in the words to bowl me over every time I hear them - there's so many clever lines, so much subtle word play, so many issues and so much philosophical thinking, and allusions to literature. The title being from a poem by Walter Scott called "Answer":

Lyrically, my interpretation of it is that it's about the attractions of infidelity - a night of danger and excitement in a world grown boring through repetition. The narrator justifies his actions by claiming that love is a glorified screw that doesn't hold nothing together, and therefore not worth enough to stop him risking it for one crowded hour of lust; neither does the nowhere music in the nonsense bars do much for him - it's like eating air.

He knows that he has no real chance of anything lasting with the girl who was the only one in the room - she's a pleasure pen built, meant and rent for beady eye[d] boys who use silver spoons (that is, she's rich and ultimately is destined to marry money). And the hour of lust has obviously lead to his wreck and ruin. But ultimately he knows he's a complete bastard who deserves everything he gets; I think the meaning of all that put me in a cage full of lions, I'll learn to speak lion stuff is that it speaks of his ruthlessness and lack of morals (why else would he be versing [him]self in the languages they speak in hell? And also, his six-stringed instrument - being a musician - is a condition that keeps him in a state of adolescent ruin rather than enabling himself to grow as a person, thus leading to the ruthless and immoral behaviour of the rest of the song.

Or something like that. The full lyrics, as best I can make them out, are below.