X – "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts" (1983)

I must not think bad thoughts!

I must not think bad thoughts!

I must not think bad thoughts!

Have you met my landlord, Mr. Macbeth?

From act 2, scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Scottish play:

Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more!

Macbeth does murder sleep,” the innocent sleep,

Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,

The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

Chief nourisher in life’s feast . . .

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Signs that read as follow were posted all over my apartment building yesterday:

Please be aware that the fire alarm will be sounding off 4/4/2024 between 9 AM to 5 PM.

I’ve been going to bed too late and waking up too early the last few days, but I was sleeping soundly this morning when the fire alarm went off at 8:55 AM – a slightly premature start.  My landlord – let's call him “Mr. Macbeth,” shall we? – couldn’t have waited until 9:00 AM to begin the testing?

There’s a speaker directly over my bed, so the fire warning came through loud and clear.  Click here to hear it.

I would have thought three or four repetitions of the recorded message would have been plenty to test the system.  But I swear they played the warning at least a hundred times.  

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The rest of the day was just as bad.

I spent the next hour on the phone trying to figure out how to file my federal income tax return without also filing my state return.  (TurboTax wants me to pay $64 to file a state return, but my state has a free website that I’ve used for years – it works very well.  I thought about saying the hell with it and just paying the damn $64, but after wasting half an hour on the phone with them, there was no f*cking way I was going to give another penny to TurboTax.)  

The next half hour was spent on the phone with my online brokerage.  I was trying to do an online transaction so I would have enough cash to pay my income taxes, but I kept getting error messages.  So I had to call a rep and do the transaction over the phone.

It’s been a l-o-n-g time since I’ve been in a fouler mood than I was in at the end of that call.  (Like maybe two or three days?)  

Winning at trivia would have cleansed my palate of the bad taste the first half of the day had left in my mouth.  My team got off to a great start – we had a perfect score and a decent lead at the halfway point – but we inexplicably screwed up a relatively easy question about the Liberty Bell, and ended up out of the money.  Poopy!

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Upon my return home from trivia, I found this e-mail from my landlord in my inbox:

Good morning. 

I hope this finds everyone well.  We were informed today that, as part of the fire alarm testing, we need to enter each apartment.  Originally, they thought they could perform the test without.  They will only crack your door open.  Confirm they can hear the alarm sounding.  Then they will close the door. 

Apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Please reach out to the office with any questions or concerns. 

Sincerely, 

[Mr. Macbeth] 

That e-mail didn’t specify what time this will all take place, but I’m betting on 8:55 AM.

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I can assure you that there is no need for the maintenance staff to open the apartment doors to hear the alarm – that motherf*cker is plenty loud enough to hear through the door.  

I can only imagine how long it will take the maintenance staff to go to each and every one of the several hundred apartments in my 18-story building, unlock each door, open it, stick their head in to verify that the speakers in each apartment are working, and then close the door and lock it before moving on to the next unit.  (Hopefully they’ll use the stairs to go from floor to floor rather than waiting for an elevator, WHICH CAN TAKE FOREVER.)

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“I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” was released in 1983 on X’s fourth studio album, More Fun in the New World.  That album was produced by Ray Manzarek, who is best known as the co-founder and keyboard player of the Doors.

Click here to listen to “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

X – "The Have Nots" (1982)

Here we sit

A shot and a beer

After another hard-earned day

NOTE:  Unlike the singer of today’s featured song – which is the 11th and next-to-last song I’ve chosen to include in the inaugural class of the 2 OR 3 LINES “SILVER DECADE” HALL OF FAME – I was never a shot-and-a-beer kind of guy.  I was more of a beer-and-another-beer-and-yet-another-beer-or-two kind of a guy.  But a lot of my misspent youth was misspent in dive bars like those listed in “The Have Nots.”  The bars I hung out in were great places to get drunk cheap.  They were not, however, good places to meet women.  (No place is perfect, I guess.) 

The following post is a slightly edited version of a post that originally appeared on my wildly popular little blog on April 30, 2019.

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The first line of the chorus of today’s featured song is “Dawn comes soon enough for the working class.”  Ain’t that the truth, bub!

Dawn came soon enough for me when I was a college student and had a succession of summer jobs that started at seven o’clock every morning – unloading trucks, unloading rail cars, driving a water truck on a road construction job . . . you get the picture.

Dawn comes even sooner if you’ve been up until all hours the night before drinking beer at Nina’s Green Parrot in, Galena, Kansas – where it was legal for 18-year-olds to imbibe 3.2% beer.  

The late lamented Nina’s Green Parrot bar

Legally, 3.2% beer was considered to be a non-intoxicating beverage, but let me assure you that if you drink enough – I usually drank two quarts in the bar, and got a tallboy can to go for the drive back home – it does the job.

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I didn’t grow up poor, but almost.  My family had enough to take care of the necessities, but there was no money for luxuries like fancy restaurant meals or vacation trips.  

My parents grew up during the Great Depression, and their families were poor – especially my father’s family.  (My father’s father died in 1934, when he was only 38 years old.  He left behind a widow and eight children – they were aged 15, 14, 12, 11, 9, 6, 3, and 6 months. )

I don’t think my mother – whose family lived on a farm in northwest Arkansas – had it quite as bad.  But the early part of her life was difficult.  (Her mother got pregnant when she was only 16.  She and my mother’s father were married a few months before my mother was born in 1926, but he died in an influenza epidemic before her first birthday.)

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I’ve always been fascinated by books about people living on the margins of homelessness and hunger.  George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London is one such book.

Orwell moved to from London to Paris in 1928, when he was 25.  His economic situation started to become difficult when became seriously ill the next year and couldn’t work.  Then a young woman he picked up and brought back to his lodgings stole his money. 

To get through periods of unemployment, Orwell had to pawn his clothes.  For example, he would pawn his overcoat for a few francs when spring arrived, hoping that he would be able to accumulate enough money to redeem the coat before cold weather returned.

He eventually got a job in a restaurant, working almost eighteen hours a day, seven days a week to earn a pittance of a salary.

Orwell was so poor that he only owned one pair of black socks.  He applied black shoe polish to his feet so the bare skin wouldn’t show through the holes.

*     *     *     *     *

“The Have Nots,” which was released on X’s third studio album (Under the Big Black Sun) in 1982, is about blue-collar types – perhaps unemployed, or perhaps making just enough to get by on – who spend too much time and money in bars.

We’re talking about the kind of regulars who spend so much time drinking that they not only know the barmaids by name, but who play cards with them when the bar isn’t busy.  

(Come to think of it, a friend and I used to play cards at the house where the two cousins – one male, one female – who were bartenders at our regular Kansas bar lived after that bar closed at midnight.  But I was a college student, and the dead-end summer jobs I had would last only a couple of months before it was time to go back to school.  My life was nothing like George Orwell’s.) 

“The Have Nots” is notable for its recitation of the names of a number of dive bars in Los Angeles and elsewhere – most of which have been closed for years.

For example, there’s the One-Eyed Jack, and the Hi-D-Hi, G. G.’s Cozy Corner, the Stop & Drink, the Get Down Lounge, and a Detroit joint called The Aorta Bar – which called itself “Detroit’s Main Vein.”

One final note about “The Have Nots.”  The last line of the song’s chorus – “This is the game that moves as you play” – is the epigraph to the precocious Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero.  (Ellis was a 21-year-old college student when his novel was published in 1985.)   

The title of Less Than Zero was taken from Elvis Costello’s famous 1977 song. 

Click here to listen to the “The Have Nots,” which I usually listen to several times in succession when it comes up on my iPod.  It’s just that good, boys and girls.

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

X – "I See Red" (1983)

At five past two, I don't feel sad

But then I see you 

AND I SEE RED!

"I See Red" was released in 1983 on X's fourth studio album, More Fun in the New World.  That album (and the three that preceded it) were produced by Ray Manzarek, who was the keyboard player for the Doors.

Like most X songs, "I See Red" was co-written by the group's two singers, John Doe (who was born John Nommensen Duchac) and Exene Cervenka (who was born Christene Lee Cervenka).  

Exene Cervenka then

Doe and Cervenka were married in 1980, which was the same year that X's first album, Los Angeles, was released.  They got divorced five years later.

Shortly thereafter, Exene married actor Viggo Mortensen, the star of A History of Violence and Eastern Promises.  The couple had a son in 1988, as did John Doe and his new wife.  According to Exene,

[John Doe's] daughter and my son were born in the same hospital delivered by the same doctor on the exact same day.  You can’t plan something like that.  It just so happened the he and his wife had sex and me and my husband had sex on the same day and nine months later it happened.  How do you plan that?

Exene Cervenka now

In 2006, Exene moved from Los Angeles to Jefferson City, Missouri, where she turned a barn into an art studio where she created collages from "found objects" – or what most people would call trash.

Here are a few of Exene's works:

In a recent interview, Exene talked about her love of junk:  

It's really sad when you go into a thrift store and you see a box of photos that have been thrown away by someone's family.  I've been going to thrift stores since I was 12 and that was my first mind-opening experience: seeing all of this antique type stuff that was just for a quarter.  "Here's Grandpa's old overalls."  I'm like, are you kidding me?  It's people's lives, just being discarded like that.

While I think that stuff is inherently beautiful visually, I think it has this other power because it has life.  It's real, not manufactured crap. . . .

I'm trying to get rid of [all the junk I've collected] because there's way more than I can ever use in a lifetime of art.  And I didn't know why I was keeping it.  But when I used to look on the ground, the garbage was different.  Now I look on the ground and all garbage is the same.

It used to be that you'd look down and think "Oh, what is this? It's an old horse racing form!"  Or a political thing from Philadelphia or place mats from a chicken place that only existed in rural Kentucky. 

Click here to read a Rolling Stone article about an amazing garage sale Exene once held.

Here are a few shots of the stuff that was up for grabs at that garage sale.  There was vintage clothing:

There were dolls:

There were old paperbacks and magazines:

And there were lots and lots of pocket knives:

Before she left Jefferson City a few years ago to return to southern California, Exene recorded a solo album titled Somewhere Gone at local legend Lou Whitney's recording studio in Springfield, Missouri.

The late Lou Whitney

I grew up just an hour from Springfield, and I'm pleased to hear that Exene recorded an album there.  But in my humble opinion, the acoustic country-folk songs of Somewhere Gone don't hold a candle to the punk music X was recording 30-plus years ago.  Those four Ray Manzarek-produced albums are hard to beat. 

Here's "I See Red":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: