Bill Jenkins - There Is No Lord Up There

Artist: Bill Jenkins

Song: There Is No Lord Up There

Album: Life (1995)

Billy Jenkins is a blues guitarist, composer.

Band-leader, composer, (one-time rehearsal room manager) teacher and guitarist, Billy Jenkins is now in his fifth decade of music making which began with rehearsals in his parent's basement. Billy's early musical experiences were shared with best friend Bill Broad, who he introduced to the music of Frank Zappa, Velvet Underground and Sonny Rollins. They parted ways at 18: Billy heading off "to be a musician"and Broad changing his name to Idol, with the ambition "to be a star".

American readers will be baffled by him; but he is, along with the Princess Royal and Walthamstow dog stadium, one of our national treasures.' Penguin Guide To Jazz On CD

When I was five or six
my grandma fell down a flight of stairs
when I was five or six
my dear grandma fell down a flight of stairs
I knew there and then
that there is no Lord up there

When I was eight or nine
my big sister got attacked
when I was eight or nine
my big sister got attacked
so when Jehovah come selling religion
I sell the blues right back

I had just turned twelve
when some bastard stole my bicycle
I had just turned twelve
when some bastard stole my bicycle
blood drain from my face
heart like an icicle

Yes there is no Lord up there
ask my Grandma, my sister or my bike
yes there is no Lord up there
ask my Grandma, my sister or my bike
yes there is no Lord up there

OH NO...........!

When I was five or six
my grandma fell down a flight of stairs
when I was five or six
my dear grandma fell down a flight of stairs
I knew there and then
that there is no Lord up there

When I was eight or nine
my big sister got attacked
when I was eight or nine
my big sister got attacked
so when Jehovah come selling religion
I sell the blues right back

I had just turned twelve
when some bastard stole my bicycle
I had just turned twelve
when some bastard stole my bicycle
blood drain from my face
heart like an icicle

Yes there is no Lord up there
ask my Grandma, my sister or my bike
yes there is no Lord up there
ask my Grandma, my sister or my bike
yes there is no Lord up there

OH NO...........!

Lynn Miles - It's Hockey Night In Canada

Artist: Lynn Miles

Song: It’s Hockey Night In Canada

Album: Chalk This One Up To The Moon (1991)

Canadian singer/songwriter Lynn Miles, who is known for her plaintive singing and melancholy muse, is often compared to the likes of Shawn Colvin and Lucinda Williams. The Ottawa native entered Carleton University with the intention of studying music, but soon dropped out to write songs and perform at the bars and coffeehouses of Canada's capital city. She independently released a self-titled debut and Chalk This One Up to the Moon in the early '90s. Her song "Remembrance Day" ended up being featured in a Canadian Armed Forces video that depicted the losses of war and was televised nationally. In 1996, Miles released Slightly Haunted on Philo Records. The effort ended up as a year-end Top Ten pick in Billboard Magazine. (New York Times critic Jon Pareles has also praised Miles' forlorn songcraft.) Miles moved to Los Angeles in 1997 and the following year released Night in a Strange Town. Around that time, she also did a guest vocal on fellow Canadian Fred Eaglesmith's Lipstick, Lies & Gasoline album (on the track "Drinking Too Much"). For 2001's Unravel, Miles reunited with longtime collaborator, guitarist Ian Lefeuvre. ~ Erik Hage, All Music Guide

(…) Featuring a dozen of her compositions, Lynn's sophomore album Chalk This One Up To The Moon was released on CD by Snowy River in 1991. Recorded at Sound of One Hand Studios in Ottawa, Bill Stunt, who worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Commission, produced the disc.While her debut set hinted at a songwriterunder development, Chalk This One Up To The Moon provided ample proof that Lynn possessed an exceptional talent for marrying thoughtful lyrics to memorable, hook laden, melodies.
"It's Hockey Night in Canada" was written from the perspective of a girl growing up in Canada, where ice hockey takes over the airwaves and the minds of men from October till May. My father was a hockey coach. The song is about memories I have of walking home through the snow and seeing television sets glowing blue in living room windows. more

It's hockey night in Canada
There is a blue glow in every window
And I am walking home alone again
In the freshly fallen frozen snow

With my heart beneath my duffle coat
My dreams turning to icicles
I wish there was a sunny summer sky
And I was cruising on my bicycle

And I would wait
For all the lights to change to green
And I would race right through
And take it down the afternoon avenue
That's what I would do
But there's just these skating rinks
And the boys always get their way
It seems like it's hockey night in Canada
Almost every single day

They are clearing my street again
Trying to deny the season
And I want so much to disagree with them
But they refuse to hear my reason

There is a zamboni of sorts in all our souls
And the streets of old Montreal are cold
Equal ice time is all we need
To catch our breath and build our speed

And we would wait
For all the lights to change to green
And we would march right through
And take it down the afternoon avenue
That's what we would do
But there's just these skating rinks
And the boys always get their way
It seems like it's hockey night in Canada
Almost every single day

Lauryn Hill - Every Ghetto, Every City

Artist: Lauryn Hill

Song: Every Ghetto, Every City

Album: The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

Lauryn Hill has minor references to youth on a BMX bike and bike theft in this song by Hill gone solo from Fugees and Wyclef Jean.

review

I was just a little girl
Skinny legs, a press and curl
My mother always thought I'd be a star
But way before my record deal,
The streets that nurtured Lauryn Hill
Made sure that I'd never go too far
Every ghetto, every city and suburban place I've been
Make me recall my days in the New Jerusalem
Story starts at Hootaville grew up next to Ivy Hill
When kids were stealing quartervilles for fun
"Kill the guy" in Carter park
Rode a Mongoose 'til it's dark
Watching kids show off the stolen ones
Every ghetto, every city and suburban place I've been
Make me recall my days in New Jerusalem

You know it's hot, don't forget what you've got
Looking back,
Looking back, looking back, looking back
You know it's hot, don't forget what you've got
Looking back
Thinking back, thinking back, thinking back

A bag of Bontons, twenty cents and a nickel
Springfield Ave. had the best popsicles
Saturday morning cartoons and Kung-Fu
Main street roots tonic with the dreds
A beef patty and some coco bread
Move the patch from my Lees to the tongue of my shoe
'Member Frelng-Huysen used to have the bomb leather
Back when Doug Fresh and Slick Rick were together
Looking at the crew, we thought we'd all live forever

You know it's hot, don't forget what you've got
Looking back
Thinking back, thinking back, thinking back
You know it's hot, don't forget what you've got
Looking back
Thinking back, thinking back, thinking back

Drill teams on Munn street
Remember when Hawthorne and Chancellor had beef
Moving Records was on Central Ave.
I was there at dancing school
South Orange Ave. at Borlin pool
Unaware of what we didn't have
Writing your friends' names on your jeans with a marker

July 4th races off of Parker
Fireworks at Martin stadium
The Untouchable P.S.P., where all them crazy niggers be
And car thieves got away through Irvington
Hillside brings beef with the cops
Self-Destruction record drops
And everybody's name was Muslim
Sensations and '88 attracted kids from out-of-state
And everybody used to do the wop
Jack, Jack, Jack ya body
Nah, the Biz Mark used to amp up the party
I wish those days, they didn't stop
Every ghetto, every city and suburban place I've been
Make me recall my days in New Jerusalem

You know it's hot, don't forget what you've got
Looking back
Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back
You know it's hot, don't forget what you've got
Looking back
Thinking back, thinking back, thinking back

Thinking back, thinking back, thinking back
(To end)

Bob Dylan - Buckets of Rain

Artist: Bob Dylan

Song: Buckets Of Rain

Album: Blood on the Tracks

A tender folk ballad with dobro guitar and a suggestive stanza by a master singer-songwriter with an unrivaled resume of over 700 songs. If you consider Blood on the Tracks in its historic period, a wistful Viet Nam War perspective didn’t much fit into surrounding disco craze, but it was Bob’s best album in years.

THE ALBUM’S FINAL SONG, bucket full of rain, seems conciliatory in tone. The simple brief lines help Blood on the Tracks end of a positive note, and there’s even a bit of imagistic language – little red littlered bike – that resembles william carlos williams famous poem “The Redwheelbarrow”. The concluding word are shooting: “Life is sad...”

Dylan said about lp “You’ve got yesterday today and tomorrow all in the same room”

From Michael Gray’s excellent book, the Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, about Buckets of Rain (from Blood on the Tracks):

The closing track on the Blood on the Tracks album, this is an immensely likeable, modest song of barbed sanity ACUTO BUON SENSO. A blues- structured work, it also neatly NETTAMENTE METTE INSIEME conflates other old song titles within its lyric, as when Dylan sings

‘Little red wagon, little red bike / I ain’t no monkey but I know what I like’.

In a genre so riddled ENIGMATICA with sexual innuendo INSINUAZIONI and double entendre as the blues, it’s sometimes hard to know whether a phrase or a line belongs in the nursery ASILO NIDO or the porn shop, and this is a good example. One long-term Dylan collector was told years ago that the phrase ‘little red bike’ was a blues term for anal sex: which certainly puts a different perspective on Dylan’s lyric. But it is not a common blues term: there isn’t a single ‘little red wagon’ in Michael Taft’s Blues Lyric Poetry: A Concordance.

‘Little Red Wagon’ is, however, a recording by the pre-war blues artist Georgia White, and by a happy coincidence the very next track she laid down at the same session is called ‘Dan the Back Door Man’.

I’ll never hear that song quite the same again.

From the official Bob Dylan lyric site:

Little red wagon
Little red bike
I ain’t no monkey but I know what I like.
I like the way you love me strong and slow,
I’m takin’ you with me, honey baby,
When I go.

Buckets of rain
Buckets of tears
Got all them buckets comin' out of my ears.
Buckets of moonbeams in my hand,
I got all the love, honey baby,
You can stand.

I been meek
And hard like an oak
I seen pretty people disappear like smoke.
Friends will arrive, friends will disappear,
If you want me, honey baby,
I'll be here.

Like your smile
And your fingertips
Like the way that you move your lips.
I like the cool way you look at me,
Everything about you is bringing me
Misery.

Little red wagon
Little red bike
I ain't no monkey but I know what I like.
I like the way you love me strong and slow,
I'm takin' you with me, honey baby,
When I go.

Life is sad
Life is a bust
All ya can do is do what you must.
You do what you must do and ya do it well,
I'll do it for you, honey baby,
Can't you tell?

Nada Surf - Whose Authority

Artist: Nada Surf

Song: Whose Authority

Album: Lucky (2008)

Nada Surf's new Jonathan Krisel-directed video for "Whose Authority," from the forthcoming Lucky, stars Michael C. Maronna, who you should all remember as the elder Pete from The Adventures Of Pete and Pete. Classic. Here, instead of dealing with his pain-in-the-ass kid brother or doing those sensitive wise-beyond-his-teenage-years voice overs, he's working as a bad-ass bicycle messenger delivering packages around Manhattan after leaving his Brooklyn crib. En route he disrupts pigeons, chats with other two-wheeled friends, kicks over traffic cones, knocks on buses, and narrowly escapes collisions with taxi doors before heading back over the Wiliamsburg bridge and calling it a day. Yes, home to that cool place MTV told us about. Gosh we hope Kyp says hi this time.

review

“There are some particularly luminous moments here, including the back-to-back punch of "Whose Authority"” - Allmusic

Everyone’s right and no one is sorry
That’s the start and the end of the story
From the sharks and the jets to the call in the morning

Everyone’s right and no one is sorry
That’s the start and the end of the story
From the sharks and the jets to the call in the morning
And life is just bits anyway

Look alive see these bones
What you are now, we were once

Try as they might, no one’s immune to
Misfiring and acting on the wrong clues
And thinking it’s time to redo redo

I feel rain in the movies and the talk before the screen lights
I hear strings in the park
I don’t like to call her right unless its too late at night
I mostly just think in the dark

Look alive see these bones
What you are now, we were once
But just like we are
You’ll be dust
And just like we are
Permanent

You were too tired to eat
Too hungry to sleep
Just imagine the speed
It’s just what you need

Look alive, you see these bones
What you are now, we were once
And just like we are

You’ll be dust
And just like we are
Permanent

The lights in the city are more or less blinking
Which side of the story decides what you’re thinking
We’re a moans and cold faces
We’re squinting, we’re hurrying
We take inventory
We’re digging, we’re burrying

Do you remember when the lines blow?
Do you remember when it failed
Do you remember when we went to your house?
Remember ringing the bell?

Look alive, see these bones
What you are now, we were once
Just like we are
You’ll be dust
And just like we are
Permanent

The lights in the city are more or less blinking (look alive)
Which side of the story decides what you’re thinking (see these bones)
We’re moans and cold faces (what you are now)
We’re squinting, we’re hurrying (we were once)
We take inventory
We’re digging, we’re burrying

Do you remember when the lights low?
Do you remember when it failed?
Do you remember when we went to your house?
Remember ringing the bell? [2x]

Look alive see these bones [2x]

Memory Tapes - Bicycle

Artist: Memory Tapes

Song: Bicycle

Album: Seek Magic (2009)

Moniker-crazed one-man-band Dayve Hawk splits the difference between his Weird Tapes project (dancey, electro) and his Memory Cassette project (hazy, wistful) with Memory Tapes (dancey, yet wistful!). After the incredible, New Order-style single "Bicycle", we now get news of the debut Memory Tapes LP, dubbed Seek Magic and out in a very limited edition September 29 via Acephale.

To start, the record is primarily being released on vinyl-- first run records will be light blue with some special "white/blue haze" LPs thrown in just in case you didn't get the idea that this shit is fucking hazy. (Pitchfork)

‘Bicycle’, the album’s first single, is a retro-minded collision of propulsive beats, layer upon processed layer of Hawk’s hauntingly soft vocals – like The Knife producing Neil Young – and a closing guitar solo, lifted straight from the grooves of New Order’s Technique, which cranks an already celestial song into some kind of dark-hearted disco supernova. more

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Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee - Bicycle Boogie

Artist: Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee

Song: Bicycle Boogie

Album: Key To The Highway, Sittin In With Sessions (2007)

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