Dandy Warhols – "Bohemian Like You" (2000)

I really love your hairdo, yeah
I'm glad you like mine, too,
See we're looking pretty cool

[NOTE: I gave birth to 2 or 3 lines on November 1, 2009.  That means we'll be celebrating my wildly popular little blog's tenth birthday in just a few weeks.

I've decided to devote October to resurrecting some of the most significant 2 or 3 lines posts from its first year – which was probably its best year.  

Without further ado, here's a cleaned-up version of only the sixth post to appear on 2 or 3 lines.  It was originally published on December 5, 2009.]

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Eight or nine years ago, while I was walking through the music department at Borders after getting my hair cut, I heard the then-new Dandy Warhols' CD (Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia) playing on the in-store sound system.

The first song from that CD was great. The second song was great. So I  immediately bought the CD:

If you knew me well, you'd know how out of character this is for me. I rarely respond immediately to new music – I have to hear it several times before it starts to grow on me. Plus I'm kind of cheap. (I don't buy books, I go to the public library. And I don't buy many CDs – I borrow them from my friends and my kids, or I go to the public library.)

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David Allan Coe, an "outlaw" country-western singer who claims he spent time on death row for killing a fellow prison inmate who demanded oral sex from him, had a big hit in 1974 with his recording of the Steve Goodman song, "You Never Even Called Me By My Name." 

Coe said that Goodman told him he was sending him the perfect country and western song to record. But after reading the lyrics, Coe told Goodman that a song that failed to mention the singer's mother, trains, trucks, prison, and getting drunk could not purport to be the perfect country and western song. 

So Goodman wrote this new verse for the song:

I was drunk the day my momma got out of prison
And I went to pick her up in the rain
But before I could get to the station
In my pickup truck,
She got runned over by a damned old train

*     *     *     *     *

If you were writing the perfect Los Angeles (henceforth, "L.A.") song, what are the analogous key elements that you would just have to mention? 

It's been a few years since I've been to L.A., but I used to travel there frequently, and so I feel qualified to offer my list:

1. An obsession with physical appearance.

2. Cars. (Anyone who grew up listening to the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean and reading Hot Rod magazine knows that cars are a crucial part of L.A. culture.)

3. Wannabe actors/musicians who wait tables (preferably at a restaurant featuring vegan food, or food from an obscure third-world country) while waiting for their big break.

4. Romantic/sexual relationships where money or career advancement is the primary motivation for at least one of the parties.

By that definition, "Bohemian Like You" is pretty much the perfect L.A. song.

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The lines quoted at the beginning of this post cover the physical appearance element. 

By the way, remember I said I had just gotten a haircut when I heard this CD for the first time? I'm such a creature of habit that I've gone to the same woman for haircuts for about 25 years – if she's booked up when I call, I'll wait a week or two. Before that, I went to her ex-husband for 10 years or so until he went into a different line of work. (They used to have a shop in a small town about 30 miles from where I live – and I would drive there in rush-hour traffic rather than take a chance with someone different.) 

The Dandy Warhols in 2003

And speaking of being a creature of habit, have I told you that I've made myself the same dinner almost every Monday and Tuesday night since 1992?

*     *     *     *     *

Here are the lines about cars:

You got a great car
What's wrong with it today?
I used to have one, too

Here's the part about working in a restaurant until you get a movie role or your band makes it big:

So what do you do?
Oh yeah, I wait tables, too
No, I haven't heard your band
Because you guys are pretty new

And last but certainly not least, here are the lines about the mercenary relationship:

Who's that guy just hanging at your pad
He's lookin' kinda of bummed
Oh, you broke up that's too bad
I guess it's fair if he always pays the rent
And he doesn't get bent
About sleeping on the couch when I'm there

*     *     *     *     *

Raise your hand if you think you know the gender of the singer and the person he is talking to, boys and girls. Who thinks we have two guys? Who thinks it's two girls? And who votes for one of each? (Don't cheat and watch the music video before you answer.)

It beats the hell out of me. The talk about cars would make you lean toward two guys. That would make it likely that the sexual relationships in the song were gay, but gays (at least according to popular stereotypes) are not into cars like straight L.A. guys would be.

The talk about hairdos would ordinarily make you think we had two chicks here, but this is L.A. we're talking about–- so it could still be two guys, or one of each gender. 

The Dandy Warhols in 2018

The fact that the two characters work at a restaurant and are in a band doesn't help us figure out their respective genders at all.

What about the guy just hanging at the pad? How does he fit in?

I'm guessing that the singer is a male and the person he is discussing hairdos with is a female – and there's no threesome involving the guy who has to sleep on the couch when the singer (presumably younger and better-looking than the guy on the couch, who is probably only allowed any privileges whatsoever because he pays the rent) spends the night.

But if you think the song is about two guys or two girls, I can't say you're wrong. Anything is possible. (The music video agrees with me.)

Forget it, Jake.  It's L.A. – anything's possible.

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By the way, the song never mentions Los Angeles (or Hollywood or Beverly Hills or even the beach). The Dandy Warhols are from Portland, Oregon, so maybe the song's about Portland.

Naaaaaah. It's about L.A. One hundred per cent chance it's about L.A.

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A final note. If you don't understand the references to "Bohemian" and "urban Bohemia," you can read all about it here. It's a French thing. ("Boho" is short for "Bohemian.")

Click here to watch the official "Bohemian Like You" music video.

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

X -- "Nausea" (1980)

Today you're gonna be sick, so sick
You'll prop your forehead on the sink
Say oh Christ, oh Jesus Christ . . .

I've been thinking for months that I should do a post on a song from X's first album, Los Angeles (released in 1980), but I just couldn't decide which song to choose. (I take decisions like that very seriously, you know.) But given the events of the past week, the choice had to be "Nausea."

We arrived at my mother-in-law's Cape Cod house for our annual family vacation a week ago Saturday. Sunday morning, my wife woke up with terrible stomach pains and uncontrollable vomiting, and we took her to the emergency room.  The doctor diagnosed her problem as diverticulitis and sent her home with antibiotics, an anti-nausea medication, and Vicodin. 

But she was no better Monday night -- if anything, her nausea was worse -- so we went back to the emergency room. She was admitted to the hospital that night and wasn't released until Thursday, after a few days of an intravenous anti-nausea cocktail had worked well enough for her to be able to tolerate solid food.

They have cool barf bags at hospitals these days.  My wife went through quite a few of them:

X's original members were Exene Cervenka (vocals), John Doe (bass/vocals), Billy Zoom (guitar), and DJ Bonebrake (drums). I have a funny feeling none of those names appear on official birth certificates.  Cervenka and Doe were married from 1980 until 1985, and later she married and then divorced actor Viggo Mortensen.

X was a great punk band, but didn't want to be just a punk band -- they wanted to be a commercial success as well, and their music suffered a bit as a result.  I think their first two records were their best.

Along with Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, and several other bands, X was featured in Penelope Spheeris's documentary about the Los Angeles punk scene, The Decline of Western Civilization, which was released in 1981 but shot in 1979 and 1980. I saw this startling and very compelling movie when I was living in San Francisco.  I would guess that all or most of those bands played at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco, but I never went there -- one more dumb mistake I made.

Here's "Nausea":

Here's X performing the song in The Decline of Western Civilization:




Here's a link to iTunes if you'd like to buy "Nausea":

Here's a link to Amazon for "Nausea":

The Doors -- "The Crystal Ship" (1967)

The crystal ship is being filled
A thousand girls, a thousand thrills
A million ways to spend your time

The Doors' debut album (The Doors) was released the first week of 1967 – that's 42 years ago. If I were to really think about that, my whole day would be ruined.

One reason I always liked the Doors was because Jim Morrison had a relatively low voice, and so did I. When I was singing along with the radio, I couldn't reach the high notes in a lot of my favorite songs – but that was never a problem with a Doors song because Morrison and I had similar vocal ranges. (Speaking of my singing along with the radio . . . I remember one long drive when my father suddenly turned the car radio off. When I protested, he said "We can either listen to the radio, or listen to you.  But not both.")

Jim Morrison

"Light My Fire" wasn't the first song released as a single from The Doors – "Break on Through (To the Other Side)" was.  I assume that was because "Light My Fire" was over seven minutes long.

Six months after the album was released, a more radio-friendly 2:52 version of "Light My Fire" was created, and became one of the most unforgettable hit singles of the AM radio era. It is #7 on VH1's "100 Greatest Songs of All Time"and was one of the few rock songs included in NPR's ranking of the 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century (which included, among other things, "West Side Story" and "Rhapsody in Blue"). When you come across The Godfather Part II on television, you have to watch it, and when you hear "Light My Fire" on the radio, you have to listen to it.  

"Light My Fire" was #1 on the Billboard "Hot 100" for three weeks. Jose Feliciano's cover version reached #3 only a year later, and an astonishing variety of others have covered the song since then – including Patricia Barber, Nancy Sinatra, Shirley Bassey, Stevie Wonder, Al Green, B. J. Thomas, Type O Negative, and Massive Attack. (Massive Attack's version samples the "Light My Fire" covers by Jackie Wilson and Young-Holt Unlimited.)

(I need a pair of leather pants just
like those Jim Morrison wore)

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The B-side of "Light My Fire" was another song from The Doors – "The Crystal Ship." 

 I didn't own the album until many years later, and I'm not sure when I first heard "The Crystal Ship." I must have heard the entire album played by friends during college, but I don't remember hearing "The Crystal Ship" until the early 1980's, when I was living in San Francisco and it was played regularly on a local classic rock station.  

It's a classic Jim Morrison song – which can be good news and bad news. Morrison, who considered himself first and foremost a poet, was influenced by William Blake, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Joseph Campbell, and the "Beat Generation" writers. (The name "The Doors" came from a line in the Blake poem, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell": "If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.") 

Morrison took himself just a tad too seriously, and he wrote a lot of crap. But his lyrics are like no one else's, and the Doors' best songs are unique and really get under your skin. If you're in the right mood – nostalgic, or longing for something that you can't quite get a grip on – a song like "The Crystal Ship" is just what the doctor ordered.

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Some people interpret "The Crystal Ship" as a drug-trip song – of course, that's the default interpretation for any 60's or 70's song that you can't make sense of. (What is a "crystal ship" anyway? I have no clue, but it sounds awfully fragile.) 

The other explanation you'll find is that the song is Morrison's good-bye to a former girlfriend. (I suppose it's a bummer when a rock star dumps you, but having him write a song or two about you before the breakup is pretty cool.)

I don't really care what the song means. It's a gorgeous two and a half minutes of dreamy, loopy music and dreamy, loopy words. The studio recording is perfectly arranged and executed – especially the way Morrison's voice crescendos into the last stanza, peaking on the word "crystal."

Click here to listen to "The Crystal Ship."

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

Click here for a video that combines a pretty good live performance of the song with some very interesting photos of Morrison and the other Doors.

System of a Down -- "Lost in Hollywood" (2005)

They take you, and make you

They look at you in disgusting ways

You should have never trusted Hollywood

Life can be pretty random. 

If you don't think so, just look at your husband/wife or boyfriend/girlfriend. (That's assuming you have one, of course).  How did you meet him/her?  

The odds are that the meeting was such a fluke, seemingly mere happenstance – perhaps the result of the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil – that a slight alteration in any one of about a million events would have caused enough of a divergence in your paths that you would never have encountered one another. 

Of course, some would say that fact that there were incredible odds against that particular outcome actually taking place is the best proof that it was not the result of chance, but destiny.

That explains how I became aware of today's featured song.

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Like much of the music I have on my computer, I got System of a Down's Mesmerize CD through my local public library. 

I don't recall ever hearing the band's music on the radio or seeing anything about them on TV.  I can only assume that I searched for and requested Mesmerize because I came across the name of the band or the CD on some music review site – maybe on a "Top 100 CDs of 2005" list or something like that.

After downloading the CD, I don't recall ever listening any of the songs on it until last Saturday, when we were buried by the Mother of All Snowstorms.  Somehow five songs from Mesmerize had ended up on my iPod shuffle, and came up while I was shoveling the driveway.  (Four of them were great, and the fifth wasn't bad.)

This is the final song on the CD, and it's about an archetypal "young man from the provinces" who goes to the big city to seek his fame and fortune. 

 Unfortunately, we know what happens to all those strays who end up in Los Angeles: they end up working as waiters in vegetarian restaurants, playing in bands that never get any real gigs, and checking out each other's hairstyles.

I'm a sucker for songs about Los Angeles. Forget the traffic and the tacky, temporary-looking buildings, and the generally ugly, dried-out landscape – it's the center of the popular culture world, and popular culture is so much more important than serious culture.  (Sorry, New York City!)

Click here to listen to "Lost in Hollywood."  It's a stick of dynamite from beginning to end.

Click here to see System of a Down performing the song live in Rio de Janeiro in 2015.

And click on the link below to buy "Lost in Hollywood" from Amazon:

Dandy Warhols -- "Bohemian Like You" (2000)

I really love your hairdo, yeah
I'm glad you like mine, too,
See we're looking pretty cool


Eight or nine years ago, while I was walking through the music department at Borders after getting my hair cut, I heard the then-new Dandy Warhols' CD (Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia) playing on the in-store sound system.

The first song from that CD was great. The second song was great. So I  immediately bought the CD:

If you knew me well, you'd know how out of character this is for me. I rarely respond immediately to new music – I have to hear it several times before it starts to grow on me. Plus I'm kind of cheap. (I don't buy books, I go to the public library. And I don't buy many CDs – I borrow them from my friends and my kids, or I go to the public library.)

*     *     *     *     *

David Allan Coe, an "outlaw" country-western singer who claims he spent time on death row for killing a fellow prison inmate who demanded oral sex from him, had a big hit in 1974 with his recording of the Steve Goodman song, "You Never Even Called Me By My Name." 

Coe said that Goodman told him he was sending him the perfect country and western song to record. But after reading the lyrics, Coe told Goodman that a song that failed to mention the singer's mother, trains, trucks, prison, and getting drunk could not purport to be the perfect country and western song. 

So Goodman wrote this new verse for the song:

I was drunk the day my momma got out of prison
And I went to pick her up in the rain
But before I could get to the station
In my pickup truck,
She got runned over by a damned old train

*     *     *     *     *

If you were writing the perfect Los Angeles (henceforth, "L.A.") song, what are the analogous key elements that you would just have to mention? 

It's been a few years since I've been to L.A., but I used to travel there frequently, and so I feel qualified to offer my list:

1. An obsession with physical appearance.

2. Cars. (Anyone who grew up listening to the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean and reading Hot Rod magazine knows that cars are a crucial part of L.A. culture.)

3. Wannabe actors/musicians who wait tables (preferably at a restaurant featuring vegan food, or food from an obscure third-world country) while waiting for their big break.

4. Romantic/sexual relationships where money or career advancement is the primary motivation for at least one of the parties.

By that definition, "Bohemian Like You" is pretty much the perfect L.A. song.

*     *     *     *     *

The lines quoted at the beginning of this post cover the physical appearance element. 

By the way, remember I said I had just gotten a haircut when I heard this CD for the first time? I'm such a creature of habit that I've gone to the same woman for haircuts for about 25 years – if she's booked up when I call, I'll wait a week or two. Before that, I went to her ex-husband for 10 years or so until he went into a different line of work. (They used to have a shop in a small town about 30 miles from where I live – and I would drive there in rush-hour traffic rather than take a chance with someone different.) 

The Dandy Warhols in 2003

And speaking of being a creature of habit, have I told you that I've made myself the same dinner almost every Monday and Tuesday night since 1992?

*     *     *     *     *

Here are the lines about cars:

You got a great car
What's wrong with it today?
I used to have one, too

Here's the part about working in a restaurant until you get a movie role or your band makes it big:

So what do you do?
Oh yeah, I wait tables, too
No, I haven't heard your band
Because you guys are pretty new

And last but certainly not least, here are the lines about the mercenary relationship:

Who's that guy just hanging at your pad
He's lookin' kinda of bummed
Oh, you broke up that's too bad
I guess it's fair if he always pays the rent
And he doesn't get bent
About sleeping on the couch when I'm there

*     *     *     *     *

Raise your hand if you think you know the gender of the singer and the person he is talking to, boys and girls. Who thinks we have two guys? Who thinks it's two girls? And who votes for one of each? (Don't cheat and watch the music video before you answer.)

It beats the hell out of me. The talk about cars would make you lean toward two guys. That would make it likely that the sexual relationships in the song were gay, but gays (at least according to popular stereotypes) are not into cars like straight L.A. guys would be.

The talk about hairdos would ordinarily make you think we had two chicks here, but this is L.A. we're talking about–- so it could still be two guys, or one of each gender. 

The Dandy Warhols in 2018

The fact that the two characters work at a restaurant and are in a band doesn't help us figure out their respective genders at all.

What about the guy just hanging at the pad? How does he fit in?

I'm guessing that the singer is a male and the person he is discussing hairdos with is a female – and there's no threesome involving the guy who has to sleep on the couch when the singer (presumably younger and better-looking than the guy on the couch, who is probably only allowed any privileges whatsoever because he pays the rent) spends the night.

But if you think the song is about two guys or two girls, I can't say you're wrong. Anything is possible. (The music video agrees with me.)

Forget it, Jake.  It's L.A. – anything's possible.

*     *     *     *     *

By the way, the song never mentions Los Angeles (or Hollywood or Beverly Hills or even the beach). The Dandy Warhols are from Portland, Oregon, so maybe the song's about Portland.

Naaaaaah. It's about L.A. One hundred per cent chance it's about L.A.

*     *     *     *     *

A final note. If you don't understand the references to "Bohemian" and "urban Bohemia," you can read all about it here. It's a French thing. ("Boho" is short for "Bohemian.")

Click here to watch the official "Bohemian Like You" music video.

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: