(This page originally appeared on the old official JS website back around 1995)
"Astronauts of the Future
Listen! Look! Touch these words.
Written when I, like you, was alive
Watching you through unborn Eyes
Written in days of Chaos
and this is Love in the Age of Chaos
And These are the explosive years
Chaos and Order intersecting
Jagged Light o'er a Turner Ocean
...and there's a breathless
Quantum
Hush ... "
-PAUL KANTNER (from "Millennium Beyond")/ 1994
"WOODEN SHIPS" -commentary by PAUL KANTNER
So there we are in the middle of Big Blue, Atlantic style...on
Crosby's boat, the Mayan. Grace and I had flown in, via seaplane,
with pontoons and everything, and met David in some cove of some
atoll somewhere between Florida and the Bahamas [Bermuda Triangle and
all]. Just off tour, we had a stash of acid-laced, chocolate chip
cookies that Crosby just had to eat. He didn't know they were laced.
The dose was benevolent and minor, we saw no need to inform the
"cookie monster" that he was heading for another alternate quantum
universe. Later in the day we found him face down in the sand, fully
conscious...communing...happy.
So David had this piece of music--water music to my ear--that he
had been unable to write lyrics to...and he loved the water and wooden
ships so much that I put together the pieces and out came "Wooden
Ships".
Originally entitled "Positively Negative", it related, in an
apocalyptic kind of science fiction way, to making a good thing out of
nuclear holocaust... it combined hippie dreams and taking care of
business.
I purloined the Jefferson Airplane intro from my first ever
songwriting attempt called "Fly Away", written in my college years:
"Fly away where the mornin' sun goes high
Fly away where the wind blow sweet and young birds fly"...
[a vague reference to a Ewan MacColl song/ poem that I was
impressed by at the time of the writing (circa 1962)]...
"Take a sister by the hand
Lead her far from this foreign land
Let her see where you go, how high you fly."
Stills, ever Stills, added the morbid and dark, "Horror grips
us..." verse that I mildly disagreed with. In my utopian concept I
had no' horror', no 'anguished cries', no 'human feeling dying', only
hippie optimism and a sweetly naive idealism [rhymes with imagination]
childlike hope for the future, whatever it held, and no particular
reflection on the past.
Crosby added some ocean stuff for the CSN ending..."fair winds
blowing off and lee shores" kind of musing, while, for the Airplane
ending, I used a phrase the came from my mishearing of the Byrds "Go
Ride the Lear Jet." With McGuinn and Crosby, et al,
mumble-harmonizing that lyric, it dyslexified into my brain as, "Go
Ride the Music" and as it often is, a new lyric was born.
And so we sailed...
"WE CAN BE TOGETHER"/ "VOLUNTEERS"
-commentary by PAUL KANTNER
This song cycle began as a series of chord changes that later
became the chorus ["We can be together..."]. "Around the campfire"
one day Crosby suggested this ancient banjo-fiddle lick that
complemented beautifully and later became the verse for "Together" as
well as the basic lick for the whole of "Volunteers". I've been
searching for the original folk song that was this lick for
twenty-five years now, but have to remain content with the DNA memory
code that tells me that this lick came from some ancient Irish or
Scottish jig that I have been unable to track down. Can any of you
out there help me with this?
Onward...much of the lyric content of the first verse ["We are
all outlaws... through "dangerous dirty violent and young"] was
inspired by and amplified upon, or came directly from, graffiti on
various walls around town and country, much of it from Berkeley,
politically angry, yet in an adolescent fashion [T.S. Elliot's "the
hidden laughter of children in the foliage" comes to mind]. In the
same mode are later verses: "We are forces of chaos...up against the
wall, motherfucker..."
"Tear down the walls" is a particular draw directly out of
Freddie Neil, an extraordinary folk singer of the immediately earlier
generation--the Bleeker and MacDougal crowd out of early sixties New
York and a particularly powerful influence of much of what I do still.
"WON'T YOU TRY/ SATURDAY AFTERNOON"
-commentary by PAUL KANTNER
This began in the acid-tinged spirit of the celebration itself.
Coming out of the exhilaration of the actual event, and combined with
the Crosby influenced interest in Indian raga music...the
extraordinarily powerful E modal chord strum...there was an article in
the San Francisco Chronicle, detailing the events of the day with the
genteel exuberance that Ralph Gleason found in the company of these
sweet, gentle flower children. This one had to do with the San
Francisco Human Be-in. I'm nearly pretty sure that it was 1966.
Temporal timelines were nearly irrelevant then. One moved among
several, totally different alternate quantum universes in those days,
seemingly at will, and time was not really a consideration. Nor
sequence. Nor continuity.
A particular incident with Neil Cassidy was a prime example of
this in practical operation. One night in 1964 or early '65, at
Frank's flat on Hayes Street, I watched and listened to Neil as he
carried on at least seven totally different conversations with
different people in sequential madness over a period of five or six
hours. True chrono-synclastic infindibulum! It was similar to
watching a chess master carry on twelve different games at the same
time. And he would always return to the exactly proper, pinpoint spot
in the conversation that he had left fifteen minutes earlier. It was a
true microcosm of what was to occur on a grander scale, societally, in
the coming years.
Know what I mean?!?
Anyway, we played the park. Ralph wrote the celebratory
article. In the exhilaration fallout of the following week, I gleaned
words, ideas, phrases from Ralph's writing and bleshed them with my
own idealistic 'hippie' dreams writing and that particular modal scale
[using only firsts and fifths in the chords, no thirds..this allows
you to sing through both major and minor scales within the context of
the modal chord] that would also later appear in songs like "The
Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil", "We Can Be Together", "Blows
Against the Empire', "Ride the Tiger" and, more recently, "I'm On
Fire".
To even the most cursory observation, acid played a big part in
the thrust of this song: acid as metaphysic, acid as sexual
revelation...a great mix!
"BLOWS AGAINST THE EMPIRE" -commentary by PAUL KANTNER
This began as a conscious further step into science fiction,
after the previous successes of "Have You Seen The Saucers" and
"Wooden Ships". I had written several snatches of ideas for songs
about hijacking a starship and sailing off to the stars. Airplane
hijackings were all over the news in the late 60's, frowned upon, and
a perfect subject to irritate the appropriate people.
A sort of advanced "Wooden Ships"...or as Crosby twinkled
"Wooden blips on the radar, very free..."
The concept of fucking in space, in zero gravity, offered all
sorts of mind explorations. I still explore this subject, as recently
as the song , Millennium Beyond" written in 1994. It gives whole new
meaning to the concept of velcro!
Originally "Blows was meant to be tracks for the next Airplane
album; but Jack and Jorma were busy ice-skating in Scandinavia and
so, unwittingly, gave joyful birth to my so-called solo career, though
only by fortuitous accident.
It happened like this.
I wanted to make some tasty demos to show everybody what the
song was about and there was an innovative studio, Pacific High
Recording, right behind the Fillmore West, off Market Street. For
some unexplained reason Grace chose to help me by playing this very
grand, Grace style piano., near totally off the top of her head. Very
little rehearsal. She just sort of joined in and followed my chords
beautifully. There were many miscues and mistakes but they blended in
well in the free-form modal tone structure that was the heart of the
piece. All big, rich chords, both rhythmic and elegantly elegiac at
the same time. She does a thing playing octaves with her left hand
and rich chords with her right hand that always impressed me.
By this time in our karass, Marty, Grace and I had developed a
habit of sneaking looks at each others' notebooks, exchanging
collections of lyric ideas. Marty and Grace gave me all sorts of
loose lines and ideas. This opus was really a blend of all our lyrics
and seemed to take on a life of its own. The lyrics literally fell
together.
The first step was "Hijack". David Crosby (again) had given me
a beautiful gift of an open D tuning [DADDAD] that was very sitar like
in it's preponderance of drones when you played a fretted melody
against them. There were also traces of Appalachia and the good ole
Saxon/Irish/Scottish. I dropped the low tuning even lower down to an
open C tuning [CGCCGC] and Grace's chording against the run up the
neck was just delightful for me. I've always done best in
collaboration. I love to see the creation of that third,
unpredictable element that appears when it works. For me, here, it
really worked and in it's own transcendental way, laid the groundwork
for Grace and my burgeoning romance, and, ultimately, our daughter,
China...(thanks, David!)
Anyway, like I was saying, the lines fell into place on their
own.
"The summer was dry...righteous poison...reason..."
Anti-establishment drug lyrics...just to set 'em off...bug
'em...fuck with "em. God, it was so easy to bug "em. And they
deserved it so much...still do...Newt Gingrich...lordy...is this Monty
Python or something?
Then it got political...
"Y'know I remember the 23rd of November..."
That's a reference to the day after the John Kennedy
Assassination, November 23rd, 1963. That was the day it all
turned...for me!!!..The meaning of it all and the accompanying release
didn't occur or hit home until that next day. Personally, for me,
this was the flashpoint, the linchpin, of our generation. Before
that, we were virgins on an innocent, naive world landscape.
Oddly, without Kennedy's death, and the subsequent government
handling of the truths of that moment, the 60's, our beloved sixties,
would never have blossomed so thoroughly as they did. It was a late
bloom for a decade, 1964 or so, abetted by Beatles, acid and sexual
anarchy and it pushed over some clouded line into a universe of "Damn
the Torpedoes". Why a huge group of seemingly innocent, middle class
children would so willingly plop 500 micrograms of an unknown
substance into their little American bodies is still beyond both the
historian's and the metaphysician's grasp. Previous restraints to
behavior dissolved. This was a generation raised on television, an
oddly shared experience in that many children were all doing the same
thing at the same moment--watching Howdy Doody or Crusader Rabbit or
whatever. This translated into some Vonnegutian, mutual mental bond
approaching science fiction when seen through the optic of mass
communication and shared experience.
We stepped beyond the pale. Bravely, with little personal
concern. Why?!? Frontiersmen and women of the mind. Exploring,
searching out the previously forbidden. Testing it! Trying it!
Constantly evaluating. My Catholic education balance well with this
process. Looking for the Light!
N.B. After all my times and years of search, I am left with Gertrude
Stein's words:
"There are no answers There never were any answers
There will never be any answers That's the answer!"
Now, to some, this might appear infinitely depressing,
un-Christian, sad, morose or indefinite. To those who rely on Jesus
for answers, or Buddha, Mohammed, Krishna, Allah, whatever--this might
be misconstrued as blasphemy, heresy or the like.
For me, it represents a wholesome, pragmatic, Teutonic, nearly
Ostrogothic outlook, nay, even stimulus, that demands of the
participant unbounded responsibility for their own actions and life.
Jeez, that sounds ever so Jesuit.
So as it evolved:
Grace wrote and gave me "Sunrise" in the wake of our budding
romance and added the chorus lines to "Starship":
"Spilling out of the steel glass
Gravity gone from the cage.
A million pounds gone from your heavy mass
All the years gone from your age."
...the womb/cage of Earth, gravity, terra firma
Post Einstein, Faster-than-Light, Time Differential...
One day in Crosby's LA canyon house we sat down with a banjo and
guitar and began jamming in D and Crosby just rolled out the lyrics to
"Have You Seen the Stars Tonight" and there it was. In the studio we
piled the harmonies together to make it the sweet little voyage that
it was.
Then came the overdubbing...we were at Wally Heider's studio on
Hyde Street in San Francisco, in studio C, which was one of the most
vocal and piano friendly studios on the west coast at the time.
Coincidentally, there were a huge number of other people doing stuff
at Heider's at the same time. On occasion of their breaks in their
own recording they would wander into the studio, listen to what we
were doing. More often than not, they would say "I could put
something on that." And we were in a position to let them.
So here comes Harvey Brooks playing a monster bass part on
"Starship". He played it on some weird guitar system that I had in
the studio for experimentation. It lowered the signal of a guitar an
octave to allow you to play bass parts on a guitar. Hence the facile,
lightning finger touches that Harvey contributed. And the 'machine'
allowed the bass to be present, powerfully, without upsetting the ever
so fragile twelve string/piano combine.
And Garcia, oh Garcia!...he was getting into pedal steel at the
time and I just gave him free rein to go in and make music, make
sound, make thunder. And he did!
Then Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann with delightful percussion
madness.and both Crosby and Graham Nash and David Freiberg singing
background harmonies to the skies with me and Grace, Peter Kaukonen
even...!...the parade was like being in the heart of Kubla Khan at the
height of the empire...delightful and ...'beyond all numbers'...
"SKETCHES OF CHINA" -commentary by PAUL KANTNER
Definitely one of the strangest song/places that I've gone with
my guitar. A basic sweet chord pattern C Em7 Am7 G [The sevenths
are crucial to the scale here].
A total lyrical structure of the imagination. No seeming
connect to anything in this quantum, a blend of ancient and now.
You're gonna be here now, not yesterday
Act on that! It's the only thing that is, really is. The
future is not yet here, the past is already gone. And there is no
machine that can take you to either...yet. The time paradox prevents
that.
But, as George Coates might say, "Now Here can be NoWhere, if
you're not careful
"...If you go out in the woods today..."
And there's always a lady
...and they ameliorate...
This song also relates to our discovery of the Oriental , of
martial arts, in search of the forbidden zones.
"MARTHA" -commentary by PAUL KANTNER
In true alternate quantum universe function, "Martha" began as
an attempt to cop the Byrd's "So you Want To Be A Rock and Roll
Star"--the rhythm, the feel...and then it became a three-finger
picking thing and got gentler, and stranger. I'll often start playing
a song I like to get into the music zone. Things like "Guantanamera"
or "Carlos Fonseca".
The real Martha was the sixteen year old daughter of the mayor
of Sausalito, an ethereal being. She ran away from home and Crosby
hid her out. Even the FBI, called in by her father, were unable to
locate her. She was friends with Girl [of "Quicksilver Girl} fame and
Catherine James, the daughter of Travis Edmonson and Dion James, two
Hollywood folk singers who had both achieved levels of fame in an
earlier age. Catherine would later become Skip Spence's girlfriend
for awhile. The three of them together were an overwhelming delight
just to be around.
There is no world for the metaphysic of our connection, not
muse, not lover, not teacher, not playmate ... yet all of those and
more. The connection to Martha and Girl remains till this day. I
haven't heard of Catherine in years. ...a shame. Martha lives in
Bolinas, that out-of-the-way alien landing ground in outer Marin
County and she works in the film world and is an artist to this day.
Girl was married to David Freiberg for years and is now married to
Mick Brigden, who works at Bill Graham Presents.
THE NICARAGUA TRILOGY: -commentary by PAUL KANTNER
"MARIEL" "MADELEINE STREET" "THE WHEEL'
This cycle began when I read a story about a woman named Nora
Astorga and the Sandinista Revolution. She had been a corporate
lawyer under the regime of Anastasio Somoza, in Nicaragua, prior to
the revolution. But she secretly supported and worked for the
Sandinistas from inside the 'belly of the beast'. She was a
beautiful, vibrant woman as well and, as such, enflamed the heart of
one of Somoza's generals. He pestered her for a long time to become
his lover. At some point she consented to his visiting her in her
apartment in Managua. Unbeknownst to him, several Sandinista soldiers
were hidden in her bedroom. When the general got there, they jumped
out and tried to capture him to hold him hostage in order to get some
of their companeros released from jail. He put up a furious fight and
they ended up killing him. At that point Nora had to flee to the
mountains and join the guerillas for a long time, until July 19, 1979,
the date of the success of the Revolution.
The general also happened to be a CIA connection, so when Nora
was appointed as the Nicaraguan consul to the United States, she was
turned down by the Reagan administration because of the general's CIA
connections. She subsequently became the representative to the United
Nations, an appointment over which the United States held no sway. It
was about this time that I came across her story.
I was impressed with her braveries, her stance and the look in
her eyes. I wrote a song, "Mariel" in which I lionized her history in
the poetic persona of the fictitious "Mariel".
She came to visit San Francisco in the mid eighties, at the Rev.
Cecil Williams' Glide Memorial Church. I took the opportunity to meet
her through the National Lawyer's Guild, who sponsored her speech,
When I finally met her I expressed my admiration and she was
amused that anyone would write a song about her. I said I would love
to play in her country with my band of the time , the Kantner Balin
Casady Band. She just said, " Well come on down." Just that...no
hassle, no red tape, just "Come on down. We're having our celebration
of the revolution in July, the 19th," she said. "You could play for
all our people."
So I convinced my band to go to Nicaragua. They were a little
hesitant, since it was the center of a war zone, but they slowly
agreed. Then, a young American named Benjamin Linder, became one of
the first American civilians to be murdered by the Contras there,
where he was installing water purification technologies for the people
of northern Nicaragua. At that point, the band got understandably
cold feet and I just said, "Well. I'll go alone.! And I did.
And I had the most marvelous time, met some truly inspiring
people--poets, soldiers, musicians, comandantes and priests...from El
Presidente, Daniel Ortega and is wifely person, Rosario Murillo, to
the peasants of a rural commune in the northern mountains.
The entire story is in my book "Paul Kantner's Nicaragua Diary"
[Little Dragon Publ].
When I returned from Nicaragua I was enflamed with the
camaraderie and bravery that I found there and I proceeded to write
several songs relating to my experiences there.
"MADELEINE STREET" was one of the first and celebrated the
human feelings I came across there, from the atmosphere of this
besieged people, in their musics, in their bars, at their
celebrations. "Madeleine Street was a fictional creation, attempting
to embody these feelings into an imaginary street where that combined
all the best aspects of a joyous, liberated people.
It also spoke of my joy at being included in these celebrations.
Ortega mentioned that one of the songs that they had listened to, as
students and as revolutionaries, had been "Volunteers". Sometimes
life does come full circle.
Madeleine also is a very oblique reference to Marcel Proust's
madeleine and the life changing experience he had while consuming a
madeleine cookie while entranced by the beauty of a young woman
passing through his life.
Marty contributed the Hemingway-spirited first verse:
"For all of us who like to stay out late at the cafe
And all of us who do not want to go to bed
And everybody here who needs a light for the night
As an insulation against the darkness."
Oddly, to my optic, there was something very San Francisco-ish
about the whole of the Nicaraguan situation. That 'us against the
world' feeling, interconnections amongst all the seemingly disparate
groups of people, all with a sweet hope for the future in their
hearts. ...And the attraction that Nicaragua became for people from
all over the world. I cordially met the ambassador from Greece; I
shared cigarettes with the head of the Beijing Opera Association on
our late night auto trip up near the war zone, north to Matagalpa;
Kris Kristofferson was there with his daughter, Tracy, and we toured
much of the country together.
At one point, after the celebration, our guide took us north, to
a commune of campesinos and visiting Puerto Rican sympathizers, there
for the coffee harvest. We were hanging out, talking with everyone
and listening to music when Margarita Clarke, our escort, suggested
that Kris sing a song for the people. Kris, a bit shy, demurred, but
finally, after some more encouragement, he agreed. Only, as he was
going into the building with a guitar, he turned to me and said, "If I
do it, you got to, too."
"Oh God!" I said to myself. I hadn't played solo for years and
was terrified at the prospect. But I knew there was no way that I
could get out of it. So I just pushed ahead and did it. I sang a
slightly reworked version of "America" and followed it with
"Volunteers". Everybody clapped and I was greatly relieved. I gained
a confidence there that I brought back with me. It allowed me a
freedom to perform, when I came back, that I had not had before.
I bleshed with a Nicaraguan musician, Luis Enrique Mejia-Godoy
(who wrote the music for "Carlos Fonseca") and his band, Mancotal,
named after a Nicaraguan volcano.. Luis informed me that the
government bought instruments and amplifiers for his band...now,
that's my kind of government!!!
"THE WHEEL" came to me after I had returned and had been exposed
to the poetries of Central American revolutionaries like Roque Dalton,
Tomas Borge, ("Carlos Fonseca"), Ernesto Cardenal, and, in particular
a young, dead, revolutionary Guatemalan poet named Otto Rene Castillo.
One piece, "For The Good Of All," stood out immediately for me and I
got permission from Margaret Randall, who had translated the poem, to
use some of the lines in "The Wheel":
"Freedom is like Wheat, it must be planted softly
And watered everyday and it must be protected till it
Multiplies and fills the mouth of the Wind
And the hunger of All becomes invincible."
As time went on their were other songs that related either
directly to my Nicaraguan adventure or were inspired by the feelings
generated there. Specifically, "FUTR2 (the Windows of Heaven)",
"Borderland", "Let Me Fly", and later, with more of a stretch, "I'm
On Fire", "Shadowlands" (urban guerilla warfare), "The Light" and
"Millennium Beyond" all owe something to my experiences with the
Nicaraguan people.
There are three versions, so far, of "FUTR2", the first dealing
with Rosario Murillo, the second having to do with my serial killer of
Republicans, and the third, so far, relates to weaving "Lightning
Rose" from the Jefferson Starship album, "Freedom at Point Zero" into
a later incarnation, where she existed on a far more benevolent plane,
a searcher, an explorer.
"DCBA-25" -commentary by PAUL KANTNER
In a very mundane way we were sitting around contemplating
(Jack's plumbing or something), idly strumming the chords D C B A ,
and under the influence of the insidious LSD-25. Figure it out...
One day, at the Geary Temple, next to the Fillmore, we were
rehearsing. I brought out the finished song and presented it to the
band. We were in an excellent improvisational mood that afternoon and
the band never played this song better than in this first,
improvisational rehearsal. We were never able to recreate whatever it
was that happened on that first day. It goes that way sometimes.
Sometimes, even, you only get to hear a song once...when it
comes into your mind and you don't have the tools or the time or
temperament to write it down. Indeed, to take the time to find stuff
to remember it would completely change the situation and distract from
the song. So all you can do is enjoy it as it's goin' by. And you
never see or hear it again, can't remember it and have to just be
satisfied with the foggy memory of the experience. It's sort of
like...at you child's early birthday parties. You can spend most of
your time recording the event on videotape and becoming some sort of
"recorder' of the party...and you miss the actual party itself...or
you can participate in the party, cutting the cake, helping with
presents and being a part of the party...or it's like scientific
observation in quantum mechanics. Just by observing the reactions,
you change the numbers of the experiment ...I do go on...
Some things you get. Some things you get only once.
"COME UP THE YEARS" -commentary by PAUL KANTNER
...referred to girls like Martha, Girl and Catherine. You could
get in trouble in those days with 15 year old girls, but not in San
Francisco. They were wiser than us in many ways and acted as
teacher/waif/acid sex goddess/playmate/explorer...
"RIDE THE TIGER" -commentary by PAUL KANTNER
Further into the Orient we go...Bruce Lee, acupuncture, Byong
Yu, Tae Kwan Do, white flower oil, communism, Mao, Kung Fu shoes,
tunics and pants, art ...and on and on.
This also had to do with J. Edgar Hoover's paranoid reference to
communism, something to the effect that "...once you get on a tiger's
back (or take hold of a tiger's tail), you don't dare get off or let
go (implying that the tiger will then eat you).
In this case it was a white tiger, perhaps modelled after the
one in the San Francisco Zoo.
Byong Yu, Grace and my Tae Kwan Do teacher, gave us the
reflection on the differences between Asian and western cultures...a
tear, observed by westerners is often, perhaps, likely to be analyzed
in terms of carbon content, or water or salt content ( given the
western, scientific mindset). A tear, observed in the Asian context,
Mr. Yu would say, is more likely to be viewed in terms of compassion,
empathy, love and loss and the like.
Mr. Yu could, from a standing stillpoint, jump six feet in the
air and kick you in the head going over, if he wanted to.
Grace was responsible for the lyrics:
"Black wants out of the streets
Yellow wants the country
Red wants the country back..."
And I added, naturally:
"White wants out of this world!"
"SHADOWLANDS" -commentary by PAUL KANTNER
A "Lightning Rose" alternate quantum universe... Rose's early
years, when she was a young girl, fresh to the city. Disillusionment
... abuse...hard life...eventually turns to a Portrait of the Artist
as a Serial Killer...of Republicans.
I once had the opportunity to work briefly with one of my
heroes, Ronnie Gilbert of the Weavers. Before I played her any of my
songs I gave her a sort of caveat, telling her I wrote pretty wierd
songs sometimes and that this one dealt with falling in love/sex with
a woman/girl on the edge and that it dealt with a serial
killer/huntress of Republicans. Without missing a beat Ronnie spoke
up, "I can think of a few Democrats she could put on her list." I
knew I was home, free with Ronnie. Rose has since widened her pale to
include politicians in general.
I think I am exploring/expressing my feminine nature here!!!
"THE LIGHT" -commentary by PAUL KANTNER
This song started out with the idea of trying to search out the
genesis of ideas. Where do ideas come from? How do they get into the
mind? How do they translate into actual works?
[If they come from God, as one folk singer once said, He must be
a really weird guy.]
Is there an actual physical genesis somewhere in the universe?
Ideas have the power of a true force of nature, changing our
environment in huge ways.
Example: Large moments: Henry Ford and the automobile,
Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone, Hitler, Napoleon etc.
On a lesser scale, though of measurable import: plumbing,
vodka, hairbrushes.
The song begins with space travel, proceeds obliquely through
love, conversation, questions and ends up the first chorus with a
variation on another piece of graffiti I found on some wall somewhere
: "Go out and stuff the universe into your eyes!"
2nd verse: delves a bit more into my love affair with my serial
killer girlfriend, verging on universe questions ala Stephen Hawking
and the joys of sex and intellect together.
After a bit of instrumental comes a bit of a twist on Gertrude
Stein and answers and then...
3rd verse: into the future and the power of ideas...still no
concrete answers...then a musing of what some things might be like in
"my perfect world ; "Teachers get paid more than baseball players" is
the key line. Then a step through the fire to the other side, beyond
the pale, pagan bonfire ceremonies, sex, drugs and rock and roll.
...falling in love with a woman on the edge. Like I said, the girl in
the song is the serial killer of "Shadowlands", who is also the focus
of love in the song:
"I'M ON FIRE" -commentary by PAUL KANTNER
It started with riffing on a calypso song played against a
backwards, inside out drum track that I had built on my Linn drum
machine, then turned around so that the three beat became the one
beat. Then I experimented using the two as the one, then using the
two-and as the one. Get the idea. I got so taken up with it, playing
the keyboard part on my Korg M-1, that one of my neighbors called the
police because I was playing so loud.
"Falling in love in times of war" is a major theme here and came
to me from my Nicaraguan journey. Falling in love in wartime is so
totally different than falling in love in normal times. You are both
depending on each other for your actual life at times. Tension is an
element in the air much of the time and the fine edge of terror lends
a deliciousness to life in the borderline.
By comparison, when the wartime edge is removed, the love affair
often fizzles as you are relegated to the ordinary concerns of normal
life and 'the thrill is gone": of battle, of adrenaline, of mutually
accepted terror.
Last Updated: 15 October 2000