I am quite possessive about my songs, in part because lyrics and singing are natural, but playing musical instruments is not. Posting “Empire State” and now “Surrealistic Pillow” is an exposing experience. But since both will be part of forthcoming serialized vampire thriller My Blood, now is as good a time as any to share them. Coincidentally, this one, like the other, is 1979 vintage.
Every lyric tells a story, but “Surrealistic Pillow” has one, too.
Hitchin’ a Ride
In early August 1979, I hitchhiked from Maine to California. My original plan was to bicycle across country, and I had all the necessary gear when starting my journey, a few days after my 20th birthday, in mid-July. I rode the first 80 kilometers in heavy rains and camped out in the woods, of which there is abundance in the appropriately named Pine Tree State. Foul weather forced a detour to the University of Maine Orono, a sprawling, quaint campus of about 11,000 students during the school year.
There I made friends with a co-ed whom I really wanted to bed. She was flighty, and her moods swung a wide arc of emotions. Needy best described her. I spent hours listening to her problems while hoping for reward, but she was obsessed with some frat guy who lost interest when he got only so far before she said no to sex. Which she regretted. I wanted to solve that problem for her.
I wasted a few weeks in Orono, ending in disaster. Still hoping for summer sex, I lent the co-ed my Schwinn Super LeTour II, which she wrecked in a car collision. Oh, yeah, she wasn’t even scratched. Chaos enveloped this woman, a swirling maelstrom of destruction. A couple years older, I would have known to keep my distance.
With my bicycle decommissioned, I counted my losses, told everyone I was headed south to pick blueberries (a lie), swung my panniers over one shoulder, grabbed my sleeping bag, and headed for the open road. I would hitchhike, setting new destination and goal: Santa Monica, Calif., to sleep on the beach.
Each night’s destination was a college campus, where I could sleep on a dorm couch, shower, and move on. Five days after climbing into the first car, my last ride dropped me in Pasadena, Calif., on a Thursday evening around 9:30. Thumbing a ride beneath an underpass, a couple returning from scuba diving gave me a lift in the back of their pickup truck. I asked for drop off at the nearest college, which was California Institute of Technology, they told me.
Sights and sounds of Southern California overwhelmed my sense of orientation: The palms reaching into the night sky, highway overpass supports that differed from those on the East Coast (presumably because of earthquakes), and streets spacious and wide.
When we arrived at the campus, the couple chatted up front as I hopped out and then they offered other accommodations. The man planned to housesit for his parents, and he invited me to come along. I vividly remember scrounging a can of Heinz vegetarian baked beans from the cupboard, which I grubbed while watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
The house sat high up a ridge, with expansive view of the city below. Seeing me at the window, my benefactor said that Los Angeles rests in a basin. “One day an earthquake will cause the city to sink”, he said.
The next morning, as my benefactor prepared for work, I asked where I could get a job. I had 35 cents in my pants pocket and no means of acquiring food. He drove me to the local unemployment office, where I was assigned day work within the hour: Helping to clean up and paint an elementary school. Like other Southern California secondary institutions, the place was open air. Kids walked to class outdoors. Being from Maine, such a thing was unimaginable, because of cold and snow. I had arrived in paradise.
Two more surprises followed. The school paid me in cash at the end of the work day. One of the teachers asked if I had a place to stay. I shook my head. He shook keys—to the teachers’ lounge, where he led me. He gave permission to sleep there over the weekend, and did I.
The entire experience exhaled openness that fit my stereotypes about California. Open-air school, open-minded teacher, open-ended day pay. That is not the California I experience today—in a state where hitchhiking is a crime and intolerance defines attitudes about tolerance. Meaning: You can say whatever you want as long as it doesn’t defy the group mind.
Back in 1979, the teacher’s trust meant something else. How was he to know I wouldn’t rob and run, once given keys to the school? I rewarded his trust, keeping the lounge clean after cooking on the stove but spending little other time there other than to sleep and to write one song lyric on a typewriter. Yes, I am guilty of taking a sheet of paper! Criminal!
Words to Print
My lyric-writing style is storytelling. and typically about women. This was particularly true when I was a horny, young buck. For the verse that follows, the bicycle assassin inspired the concept, thinking about a young women caught up in emotions beyond her control. The story here, if you can’t sort it out, is a teenager’s obsession with Jefferson Airplane album Surrealistic Pillow, which released 13 years earlier. That was a life-time past to a 20 year-old.
To give flavor of age in the lyric, I referred to the record player as a gramophone, which means more in 2014, when vinyl records are making modest comeback after being displaced by CDs during the 1980s and 90s. But in 1979, everyone listened to vinyl, so the context in which I wrote the lyric is changed dramatically. The discovery of the record would be interpreted differently now. It’s an event that could occur,
Later that year, or perhaps early 1980, I put melody to verse. So “Surrealistic Pillow” is a song now. A little footnote: For years I used a revised version of the last stanza, which in this century I reverted to the original. The cast-aside: “The song of the rabbit becomes more than habit/More addiction than a part of her”.
The reason I surface this song, “Empire State”, and perhaps others now: My age when writing the lyrics is same as my daughter’s now, and it’s closer to that of the characters in My Blood. I want to resonate with and remember being 20 years-old.
Surrealistic Pillow
Up in the attic, she spies the chest
Holding memories of the past
Grandmother’s notebook, her favorite souvenir
At the bottom, the greatest treasure at last
So realistic
Surrealistic
A pillow to lay her emotions upon
So realistic
Surrealistic
Dreams
So realistic
Surrealistic
All her emotions are brought to play
At the hand of the dreams from yesterday
The cover faded pink is stained blue
It lies upon the gramophone
The sound is scratchy, words remain clear
In the darkness, she listens alone
It’s…
So realistic
Surrealistic
A pillow to lay her emotions upon
So realistic
Surrealistic
Dreams
So realistic
Surrealistic
All her emotions are brought to play
At the hand of the dreams from yesterday
So realistic dreams
Surrealistic dreams
The airplane brings her to new heights
She listens in and out each night
More than habit, the song of the rabbit
Is addiction more than a part of her
She finds it…
So realistic
Surrealistic
A pillow to lay her emotions upon
So realistic
Surrealistic
Dreams
So realistic
Surrealistic
All her emotions are brought to play
At the hand of the dreams from yesterday
©1979 Joe Wilcox
Note: The lyric’s copyright is one of this blog’s exceptions: All Rights Reserved. Because the work as presented here is only partial. Melody is missing.
Photo Credit: Andrew Crusoe