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Some Magic Buried Deep in My Heart (Take to the Sky)

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Take to the Sky (1992)

Take to the Sky (TV performance, 1998)

Take to the Sky (webcast, 2001)

Take to the Sky (TV performance, 2002)

Take to the Sky (official bootleg, 2005)

Take to the Sky (official bootleg, 2007)

Take to the Sky/Datura (webcast, 2014)

In the wounded aftermath of Y Kant Tori Read, with Atlantic demanding a new record on about six months turnaround, Amos was invited over by her high school friend Cindy Marble, who was living in LA also failing to make it in the music industry. Marble had a piano at her place, and Amos, who had gotten rid of her own piano during her excursion as a rock chick, sat down to play, finding herself so utterly engrossed by her old instrument that she lost track of hours and of Marble. Marble implored her to take the instrument back up, arguing that this was the setting in which Amos felt authentic and genuine. And so Amos rented a piano for the apartment she was sharing with her boyfriend/producer Eric Rosse and began to write.

Unsurprisingly, she began with a song that grappled with her failure. “Take to the Sky,” called “Russia” in its earliest demos, is unrepentantly a rewrite of history in which Amos casts herself as a luckless prisoner of other people’s agendas—”you got me moving in a circle,” she complains, and laments that she’s “so close to touching freedom / then I hear the guards call my name.” As we’ve seen, Amos was far more deeply enmeshed in her role than is convenient for the story she’s telling here. But in this case, Amos pulls off the classic trick of making it all up and having it come true anyway. While she may be fudging the details on how exactly things went wrong, the song is ultimately focused not on a forensic examination of why her previous album sucked but on depicting her own internal landscape in its wake. And so we get a pre-chorus in which Amos offers a litany of heckling voices: “And my priest says / ‘you ain’t saving no souls’ / my father says / ‘you ain’t making any money’ / my doctor says / ‘you just took it to the limit’/ and I stand here / with a sword in my hand,” her once prominent prop hanging limply, dumbstruck by her side.

From here, Amos launches her attack, staring down her critics, which is to say everyone. “You can say it one more ti-yime / what you don’t like. / Let me hear it one more time” she belts, before pivoting to her defiant conclusion: ”then take a seat while I / take to the sky.” It’s simple—far simpler than the versions of the sentiment she’ll express in the next couple of songs that she writes. Indeed, it’s easy to see why this ended up as a b-side: it’s  solid and catchy song, but its unambiguous earnestness would have jarred on Little Earthquakes itself, where Amos’s reclamations of self run more towards the bittersweet than the anthemic.…

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I Never Was On the Fence (When I Was Dreaming)

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When I Was Dreaming (c. 1988 demo)

Dreaming (Al Stewart, 1988)

Ten Cents (Al Stewart, 1988)

Year of the Cat (Al Stewart, 1991, live)

Charlotte Corday (Al Stewart, 1993)

Amos’s primary benefactor in the immediate aftermath of  Y Kant Tori Read was her producer, Joe Chiccarelli. Much as he’d brought Kim Bullard on board for Y Kant Tori Read after working with him on previous projects, he spent a few years hiring Amos for a variety of session gigs while she regrouped from the album. Most of these were relentlessly unglamorous affairs. She did backup vocals on the album Modern Madness by Robert Tepper (a minor rock star who’d scored a hit when his 1985 song “No Easy Way Out” got used in Rocky IV), sang on Sandra Bernhard’s cover of “Little Red Corvette” (“they’re great ‘oohs,’” Bernhard noted six years later), did three tracks on former Wall of Voodoo singer Stan Ridgway’s album Mosquitos, and sang on pioneering Canadian folk musician Ferron’s 1990 album Phantom Center (this last album having been, cheekily, rereleased in 1995 with Amos’s vocals higher in the mix).

The most enduring creative relationship of this period, however, was with Al Stewart. Stewart was a British folk-rock musician who broke out in 1969 with the first mainstream British record to use the word “fuck,” then became known for a chain of longer songs rich with historical references. His biggest hit came in 1976 with “Year of the Cat,” and in 1988, after a four year absence from the industry, he attempted a comeback album called Last Days of the Century, which Chiccarelli produced and Amos played keyboards and sang backing vocals on. Stewart and Amos hit it off, and Amos penned a couple of songs with or for him. 

The first of these was “When I Was Dreaming,” a lightly swinging piano number that never went anywhere save for Amos’s demo of it. The version we have feels slightly unfinished, as though it still needs a second verse, and like it doesn’t quite know what it’s doing. A more finished version of it (with its lyrics essentially completely rewritten but the melody in place) was released as a bonus track for Last Days of the Century in 2007 alongside another Amos co-composition, “Ten Cents.” (The latter being the piece that Amos’s hand is clearest on, to the point that it’s easy to imagine her singing it.) Another composition, however “Charlotte Corday,” made it onto Stewart’s 1993 album. This was a faintly gothic piece about the ghost of Jean-Paul Marat’s assassin, and is at least a pleasant curiosity. (There’s a fourth to talk about, but we’ll come back to that another day.)

The most entertaining intersection of their careers, however, came in 1991 while Amos was in London working to build a profile for Atlantic’s strategy of breaking her out in the easier-to-manage UK market before releasing Little Earthquakes domestically. Stewart’s piano player fell ill the night of a concert, and he hastily rang Amos up asking if she could come to the Royal Festival Hall and play on “Year of the Cat.”…

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I Could Easily Have Died (Distant Storm)

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Distant Storm (1988)

In 1988, Hong Kong movie studio Golden Harvest was in the early stages of attempting an expansion into the US market (a process that would eventually lead to them producing three Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies). To this end, they decided to create an English-language vehicle for Cynthia Rothrock, an American star who had broken out in Hong Kong. The result was China O’Brien, which ended up failing to accomplish this task, instead getting dumped to home video in 1990.

The soundtrack for the film was assembled by David Wheatley and Paul Antonelli, who, when looking to record the song penned for an early sequence, “Distant Storm,” ended up tapping a young L.A. based vocalist whose first attempt at an album had just bombed spectacularly: Tori Amos.

Amos had ben understandably shell-shocked the immediate aftermath of Y Kant Tori Read’s failure. She’s talked about how she “sat on the kitchen floor counting the specks in the linoleum, crawling to the bathroom and back again. For like a month.” She’d regroup soon enough, not least because she had six more albums on her contract with Atlantic and they wanted her to try again, but for the time being she found herself back in the position of a jobbing musician trying to make ends meet. And so she took the gig, with her sole condition being that she’d be credited under the name “Tess Makes Good” so that her own name wouldn’t be associated with further flops.

The song plays over an early sequence in which Rothrock’s eponymous character of China O’Brien resigns from the big city police force after being involved in an incident that killed a young boy and returns to her hometown. It’s on the whole unmemorable filler—a motivational power anthem that in its second verse becomes inexplicably chipper—and Amos offers a competent performance that makes no effort to push against this fact. She collected her paycheck—(different sources report $150 and $300)—and forgot about the job until a fan contacted her five years later having randomly bought the movie and been surprised to hear her voice on the soundtrack.

Recorded in 1988. Never played live or given a release beyond being used in the movie China O’Brien.…

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I Don’t Speak German, Episode 32 – Captain America

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Daniel and Jack take a relaxing detour back into discussing pop culture and consider the Marvel movie Captain America: The First Avenger… along with the MCU more generally, the links between the Military Industrial Complex and Hollywood, how Nazis watch Marvel, the ways fascism is represented in movies, etc.

Content Warning

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Show Notes:

Bisexual Steven Rogers

Steven Atwell: Steve Rogers Isn’t Just Any Hero

Lyndsy Ellis on The Ideology of the First Order and Woke Disney…

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I Saw a Future (China)

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Distance/China (demo)*

China (live, 1991)

China (1992)

China (video, 1992)

China (television performance, 1992)

China (television performance, 1994)

China (official bootleg 2007, Tori set)

China (live, 2009)

China (live, 2015)

An oddity on Little Earthquakes, “China” is a holdover from the Y Kant Tori Read era, where it was recorded under the name “Distance” on a demo tape alongside “Etienne” and “On the Boundary.” This fact makes almost immediate sense when you think about the song, which is about an unsatisfying relationship, in marked contrast to anything else on Little Earthquakes, but very much like most of Y Kant Tori Read. Indeed, its original title played this up further, putting the emphasis on its subject—emotional distance in a relationship—instead of on the deftly shifting metaphor of China, which opens the song in the sense of a country, but in the second verse shifts to china in the sense of dishes.

It’s certainly possible to make too much of this history—the song was, after all, not actually recorded for Y Kant Tori Read, and may well have been deemed musically unsuitable for the project. But it also opens the tantalizing possibility that the Y Kant Tori Read songs were always potentially a lot closer to Little Earthquakes than is assumed. We already noted the degree to which “Etienne” and “Fire on the Side” could have been pressed into service as Little Earthquakes songs, but could things like “Fire on the Side,” “Floating City,” or even something like “Fayth” have thrived as piano-centric pieces? Certainly their later live renditions suggest it possible.

The more baffling flipside, however, is imagining “China” as an overproduced rock mess, given that it is in practice one of the most delicate songs on Little Earthquakes. (Only “Me and a Gun” feels sparser, and, well, “delicate” is not the word for that song.) It ties “Crucify” for the most credited musicians on the album (although two songs have orchestras), but these are all just adding textures in the background of a simple, downbeat piano ballad. It’s worth comparing to “Mother,” the lone song on the album to actually be a straight piano/vocal track, but one that is full of crescendos and moments in which Amos’s vocal take begins to clip the mic. “China” swells occasionally, but save for a couple seconds interlude around the three minute mark there’s not a single moment of aggression or bite anywhere in the song, and imagining otherwise is difficult. It’s worth noting the 1991 Montreux performance, in which this interlude comes with a vocal line in which Amos twice barks “you love to hit me boy” while smashing on the piano before the song slows down again, an addition that practically ruins the song, not least because domestic violence is an utterly shocking escalation for a song that had previously been about emotional withdrawal from a relationship. (The line is not, as some have speculated, a holdover from the Y Kant Tori Read version, or at least it doesn’t appear on the lyric sheet for the “Distance” demo.)…

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I Don’t Speak German, Episode 31 – ‘Dynamite Nashville’ with Betsy Phillips

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In this fascinating new episode, Daniel is joined by Betsy Phillips to talk about her forthcoming book Dynamite Nashville: The KKK, the FBI, and the Bombers Beyond Their Control, the story of three unsolved bombings in Tennessee during the late 50s and early 60s.

Content Warning

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Show Notes:

Betsy’s Twitter

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: The wicked irony behind a new Cobb County home for Democrats

Killing King: Racial Terrorists, James Earl Ray, and the Plot to Assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. by Stewart Wexler

Clarion Ledger: Mississippi Burning Killings: Religious Terrorism? by Stewart Wexler

House Committee on Un-American Activities Ku Klux Klan…

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A Witch Lost in Time (Etienne Trilogy)

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Etienne Trilogy (1988)

Etienne (live, 1996)

Etienne (live, 2002)

Etienne (official bootleg, 2007, Tori set)

Etienne (live, 2017)

We have been returning frequently to the lens of Amos’s eventual reclamation of her Y Kant Tori Read work, mostly in the course of her 2014 tour. And so it’s fitting that we end discussion of that period of her career with the first song from the period that she played live, the album closer, “Etienne.” It happened on April 28th, in her old stomping grounds of Washington DC, about two month into the 1996 Dew Drop Inn tour for Boys for Pele, and five days before she debuted “Cool on Your Island” in a medley with “Hey Jupiter.” It went on to feature twenty-six times over the course of that tour—far from one of the most played songs, but in no way one of the least either, and ahead of multiple songs from all three of her albums up to that point. She cooled on the song a bit past that—those twenty-six performances make up nearly half of the song’s total appearances—but once reclaimed it never entirely left her setlists. 

Of course, “Etienne” marks only a part of the Etienne Trilogy—on the CD it’s saddled with a synth-heavy opening by Amos and Bullard entitled “The Highlands” that spends about 90 seconds stalling for time before Amos’s piano comes in for the main song, and given a bagpipe-based rendition of the traditional “Skyeboat Song” as an outro that, at sixty seconds, is almost perfectly designed to finish just as you locate the remote to turn it off anyway. These excesses serve to ground the song within the album, where it would otherwise be an odd fit for precisely the reason it had such an easy time being integrated into Amos’s later career: at its heart, “Etienne” is a straightforward piano ballad. 

The simplicity of this similarity, however, poses a trap. Asked in a 1998 interview about whether the song represented “more of what you were wanting to do” than the rest of the album, Amos was withering, replying, “Not necessarily, it was more just me at the piano.” When the interviewer attempted to push the point, she firmly rejected the idea of comparing her solo work to “Etienne,” noting that if there was a similarity between it and “Precious Things,” “Waitress,” or “Cruel” then “I wouldn’t have made the four records I just made.” This is a puzzling claim with a questionable understanding of how artistic development works (does she also reject the idea of comparing those three songs to each other?), but it highlights the problems with treating “Etienne” as though it’s some sort of “proper” Tori Amos song orphaned on Y Kant Tori Read. 

Amos eventually threw the interviewer a bone, offering that “‘Etienne,’ as a song, was more of what I was doing before I came to L.A.” We’ve already looked at her pre-L.A. work (or at least, people who back me on Patreon have), and there’s a sense to this: the bulk of those songs are love songs in which Amos seems to be going through a writing exercise of imagining different perspectives and narrators to work with.…

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Much Stronger Than You Know (Cool On Your Island)

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Cool on Your Island (1988)

Cool on Your Island (single mix, 1988)

Cool on Your Island/Hey Jupiter (first performance, 1996)

Cool on Your Island (official bootleg, 2005)

Cool on Your Island (official bootleg, 2007, Tori set)

Cool on Your Island (live, 2011)

Cool on Your Island (live, 2017)

On an album of misfires, “Cool On Your Island” stands out as the song that Amos has most readily accepted and reintegrated into her canon. It is not the first song from the album that she played live—we’ll deal with that next entry as we wrap up this stretch so that we can actually get into the good stuff. But it is the one she has ultimately played the most—seventy-two times over the course of her tours, more than “Girl” (70), “Professional Widow” (57), or “Muhammad My Friend” (42). If you’ve seen a Tori Amos concert, there’s around a one in twenty chance she played it—it’s one of her hundred most common choices (out of a gobsmacking 485 unique songs played live across her career). And it comes the closest to being a song she’s spoken about, if not warmly, at least not entirely coldly, amusingly suggesting in 1998 that “’Cool on Your Island’ works more than anything else, and I wrote that, I think, with Kim Bullard, but you’ll have to check the credits because I’ve been using too much deodorant lately,” and a year later upgrading the assessment to “there are moments that I think were right for the time on Y Kant Tori Read. I think ‘Cool On Your Island’ had moments that were right for 1987, which was when I recorded it.”

What immediately distinguishes “Cool On Your Island” from the other half-dozen songs of frustrated or anguished love on Y Kant Tori Read is that it is sung from a position of strength. It opens with an ultimatum—”if you don’t treat me better / baby I’ll just run away,” and stays in this vein of strength, most obviously in the pre-chorus “come on baby /  I’m much stronger than you know / sometimes / I’m not afraid to let it show.” These lines prove the beating heart of the subsequent live performances, with Amos clearly relishing their delivery, letting her voice jump to a growl, or accompanying the line with an actual fist-pump in the 2011 performance linked above. 

The song is by no means perfect, nor even necessarily great. Its central metaphor is murky—Amos declares that “I can take only so much / cool on your island” before asking, “Is it cool on your island?” But why a cooling breeze on a tropical island (the location is ultimately established by the song’s arrangement, which we’ll come to) should serve either as a mark of a relationship gone sour or, for that matter, a bad thing at all is desperately unclear. Amos is trying to work a double meaning between “cool breeze” and the notion of cool as something disaffected and detached (as evinced by the eventual substitution of “you’re so cool baby” for “is it cool on your island?”),…

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I Don’t Speak German, Episode 29 – Siege Pill 2: Fascistic Boogaloo

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More on the Siege Pill and the Siegepillers this week. 

Content Warning for episode, links, and image below. 

Direct Download / Permalink

Last week’s episode

Transcript of last week’s episode

*

Show Notes:

SIEGE at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/JamesMasonSIEGE3rdEdition

James Mason at the SPLC: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/james-mason

siegeculture.com at the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20180306224025/https://www.siegeculture.com/

Atomwaffen Division at the SPLC: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/atomwaffen-division

PBS and ProPublica, “Documenting Hate, New American Nazis”: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/documenting-hate-new-american-nazis/

“Cleaning Out My Closet,” Joachim Hoch (aka Seth Wallace): https://www.bitchute.com/video/HXqOZZ7kR4jQ/

Angry White Men, “Heel Turn Network Founder Seth Wallace Embraces Christchurch Shooter In Recent Livestream” https://angrywhitemen.org/2019/05/29/heel-turn-network-founder-seth-wallace-embraces-christchurch-shooter-in-recent-livestream/

Angry White Men, “White Nationalists Have Been Quietly Collecting Donations Through A Livestreaming Site.” https://angrywhitemen.org/2019/02/25/white-nationalists-have-been-quietly-collecting-donations-through-a-livestreaming-site/

Chris Cantwell Bowlcast image: https://images.app.goo.gl/ws9gsiTGgCPwDdk59

Chris Cantwell, “Sorry For Spam Posts.” https://christophercantwell.com/2019/02/11/sorry-for-spam-posts/

Chris Cantwell on the Killstream 20190226 (doxxes “Mosin Nagant”): https://christophercantwell.com/2019/02/27/cantwell-on-the-killstream/

Vic Mackey threatens an antifascist on the Bowlcast:

“But as I was saying normally I would advocate to the death against even touching one of those Yentas or anything like that. But I’ll tell you if it’s like locked in a room it’s go time. I’ll tell you in Roblox that would be getting the pistol whip and it would be getting the Bowl.

[…]

“You still have to be really hard. It would be really hard not to do it though. I mean normally because they repulse me and I would never even want to copulate with one of those creatures but it would be really hard not to just seeing the fear in its eyes like a shriveled up battered Yenta just seeing like a disappearing desk wetting itself and just an abject terror.”

GoyTalk.com: http://goytalk.com/

The Gas Station Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/thegasstation/?showall=1

“Sir88” aka Conor Climo messages on Unicorn Riot. https://discordleaks.unicornriot.ninja/discord/user/2002

“Sir88” shares propaganda from the National Socialist Liberation Front: https://discordleaks.unicornriot.ninja/discord/view/360368?q=#msg

HuffPost, “Over 40 People Have Been Arrested As Potential Mass Shooters Since El Paso.” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mass-shooting-plot-arrests-el-paso_n_5d66d1eae4b063c341f9f2da

Nate Thayer on Atomwaffen: https://www.nate-thayer.com/u-s-soldiers-uncovered-in-atomwaffen-division-satanic-nazi-death-cult-terror-group/

Nate Thayer on Cody William Moreash, former leader of AWD: https://www.nate-thayer.com/u-s-soldiers-uncovered-in-atomwaffen-division-satanic-nazi-death-cult-terror-group/

Nate Thayer, “Help Me Identify Nazi White Supremacist “Vic Mackey.” https://www.nate-thayer.com/help-me-identify-nazi-white-supremacist-vic-mackey-who-wants-to-murder-jews-blacks-journalists-and-rape-my-dog-and-murder-me-with-a-baseball-bat/

Angry White Men, “Patrick Little and Paul Nehlen are Feuding Over How to Start a Race War.” https://angrywhitemen.org/2019/04/29/patrick-little-and-paul-nehlen-are-feuding-over-how-to-start-a-race-war/

Goy Talk Twitter: https://twitter.com/Goy_Talk_USA

“Southern Dingo” on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dingvictus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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What About What I Want? (The Big Picture)

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The Big Picture (1988)

The Big Picture (video, 1988)

Pictures of You/The Big Picture (live, 2014)

Selected as the lead single and sequenced as the first track, “The Big Picture” serves as the first and, for many, last impression of Y Kant Tori Read. It’s tempting to offer some snark about how unwise this is, but frankly, survey the other options again. There are certainly better songs, but the bulk of them are the downtempo numbers—”Fire on the Side,” “Floating City,” or “Cool on Your Island,” which ended up being the second single. The overblown production and 80s chintz of Y Kant Tori Read is consistently at its worst on the uptempo numbers, which meant that good choices of high energy lead singles were thin on the ground.

Nevertheless, it means that the album opens on a note that borders on self-parody—two bars of rapid, slightly clappy-sounding drums counting off the sixteenth notes in the song’s 128 bpm, followed by a melodramatic synth stab before Amos attempts a swaggering vocal delivery of “someone smashed my window / broke into my brand new car / last night” in a vaguely New Jersey-inflected accent such that it comes out roughly ”someone broke my winduh / broke into my brand new carrh.” Coming at it with any knowledge of Tori Amos, it instantly sells the album’s reputation as an early career embarrassment. On its own terms, it’s a try-hard effort at 80s synth rock that lands squarely in kitsch. Either way, by the fifteen second mark the entire band’s reputation is already set in stone.

And yet “The Big Picture” is not quite bad either. Musically, there are several interesting components. The highlight is a rattling, neurotic guitar line ripped off from John Parr’s “Naughty Naughty.” But the source material also reveals why Y Kant Tori Read’s take on the riff is doomed and gives a preview of most of the poor decisions to come on the album. Parr’s song is in no way good—it’s a swaggering song about pressuring a woman into sex, with an utterly sickening chorus hook of  “Don’t tell me ‘I don’t want to be a girl like that’ / do you want to see a grown man cry” delivered over a bunch of bland power cords that finally resolves into the riff from the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.” But the opening riff that’s used over the verses—the one that Y Kant Tori Read nicks—is in fact fantastic, and the song has the good sense to let it be, giving it four repetitions completely clean as an intro, followed by four more with a simple drum backing before the vocals kick in, and returning to it regularly. 

Given that they were stealing it from a minor hit from only four years earlier, it is perhaps understandable that Y Kant Tori Read did not lean quite so hard on the riff. But there’s a vast amount of space between the clean groove of Parr’s original and the cluttered mess of “The Big Picture,” where the line is mixed well behind the vocal, drowned behind a deluge of synths, and moved from the harsh, processed twang of Parr’s tone to an anodyne jangle utterly devoid of personality.…

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