Maybe it’s OK that lyrics aren’t etched in stone
When I talked to Glen Campbell in 2008, something felt wrong. His recall for details from 1965 was as clear as his sweet voice. But he struggled with details regarding “Meet Glen Campbell,” the record he’d just recorded and released. He referred to the album’s producer as “my friend” but couldn’t come up with Julian Raymond’s name. At that point, I began to hear “Meet Glen Campbell” differently.
I was initially irked by the album’s most miniscule of lyric changes. Campbell tweaked the chorus of Tom Petty’s “Walls” from “I can’t hold out forever, even walls fall down” to “I can’t hold on forever, even walls fall down.”
My complaint was the two-letter change altered the meaning of the line. You hold on to something you already have, and you hold out for something you don’t.
Long before “singer-songwriter” was even a phrase, songs were routinely heard, modified and sent back into the world with altered lyrics. I don’t have any set guidebook for interpreting lyrics, due in part to the fact that songwriters I’ve talked to over the past 20 years have different feelings themselves. Tom Waits told me he prefers a song be complete, lacquered and hung on the wall. When it’s done, it’s done.
In his early 20s, Loudon Wainwright III had no problem singing “chronologically I know you’re young,” and “come up to my motel room, save my life.” When he re-recorded “Motel Blues” at 61, he considered changing the line but didn’t.
“When a 22-year-old guy sings ‘Motel Blues,’ it’s different than when a 61-year-old guy sings ‘Motel Blues,’ ” Wainwright says. “There’s a certain desperation. A different vibe.”
Wainwright then laughed and changed the subject.
When Eric Taylor was a mainstay in the Montrose singersongwriter scene, he performed his song “Whooping Crane,” which contained the line “You think I’m uptight but I’m not, it’s just that I look around for a whooping crane and I can’t find one.”
Years after writing the song, he just whacked the verse with the line, saying it made him feel “silly.”
“Uptight,” Taylor said, “it’s just a word that has moved on for me.”
His friend Lyle Lovett covered “Whooping Crane” in 2009 and kept the line as it originally was.
“It fits him, that’s him,” Taylor said. “Lyle is just so precise about how he does things. And he did it in a way that’s fine with me.”
But sometimes such changes pester me more than others.
I love country singer Patty Loveless’ work, though I was bothered when she changed a line in a Richard Thompson song. His line was, “Well, my head was beating like a song by the Clash.” Hers was “Well, my head was spinning just a little too fast.”
I’ve come around on Loveless’ version, believing now no real foul was committed. Originally I thought Loveless was advised that her base of country-music listeners wouldn’t get the cultural reference to a British punk band from years ago. But the effect of the song is different. “A song by the Clash” is so specific that it carries a particular meaning, irrespective of the listener. And I don’t believe in coddling listeners. In our present culture of certainty, we too often define ourselves by what we know. I prefer definition by what we don’t know, as it implies an inclination toward new connections. Especially with information so easily attainable. Music doesn’t need to be prechewed before being served.
That said, I realized “a song by the Clash” is a piece of information about the narrator. And as a narrator of the song, Loveless reframes it to her sensibility.
Initially I assumed Campbell was messing with Petty’s “Walls” for trivial reasons. Maybe he heard it wrong, or perhaps it was a matter of meter. “Out” and “on” have the same number of syllables, but the latter possesses a more jabbing succinctness. “Out” lingers a whisper of a moment longer.
But then a year or so after I talked to Campbell, he went public with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. After a farewell tour, he spent time at home and then in an Alzheimer’s care facility. Campbell died Tuesday at age 81.
Having seen dementia work its ugly effects on family and family friends, I heard Campbell’s version of that Petty song differently the moment he revealed his condition. I won’t ever know his state of mind while recording the song. But I know before Alzheimer’s becomes all consuming, it leaves its host with traces of the information that become more difficult to recall. The effect on the afflicted is frustrating and disheartening.
So Campbell took a small liberty with one word in a song not many people know. And whatever his intention, that change became subtly heartbreaking to my ears. He wasn’t holding out for something he already had. He was trying to hold onto something he already had.