Vol. 1, No. 1

The Songs

Richard Krueger, "Waltz" (Terpsichore) (lyrics) (bio)
Mary Melena, "Some Loves" (lyrics) (bio)
Patrick McGuigan, "Dynamite" (lyrics) (bio)
Vernon Tonges, "Cass & Amos" (lyrics) (bio)

Lyrics

Waltz
words & music © Richard Krueger

She throws back her head and she laughs
Her hair is as wild as an arsonist's dream
I wake and brush off the cinders, she turns and whispers,
"Ain't life a scream."
And I reach for the floor, and struggle with my shirt over the last cigarette
Ah, she never wastes time, I find it's already burning
I probably should have guessed what that meant.
Then she shrouds herself in a damp sheet
She stands in the moonlight, her eyes start to gleam,
She says "Let's run up the iron escape," and throws up the window
I follow the steam.
And we lie on a rooftop under an infinite ceiling littered with stars
This may not be freedom, but at this point in our century, pal
I'm not sure freedom's gotten us that far

And she starts in on a waltz
The kind you don't hear anymore
Where you grab your best girl
And you lead her out of the door
out on the veranda your head swims with fever, there's a pain in your chest
and the bright paper lanterns around you light softly her breasts

She pulls a bottle of wine from behind a smokestack
the way rain is conjured out of thin air
And I'm feeling more strung out than Jesus three days before Easter -
She hands me a pear.
And then unwinds her gown, dozens of roses appear from nowhere
And I'm thinking out loud when Christ thinks back on the garden,
Does he wonder, should I have taken the dare?

And the city spins round in a waltz
The kind you don't feel anymore
Your face is painted blue, you're hardly breathing at all
And the last thing you remember before it goes gray
Are the bastards who kissed and betrayed you,
the lovers who missed you
And one or two times you got laid.

Ah she'll come and sweep off your hat, she will howl in your alley
She'll lead you back from hell,
She wields the wind with the full force of tenderness,
You pray to God she always will.
She gave you a gift - a song that preys like a hawk on a wing
It's a question of vision, when she lets loose her talons, boys,
that'll be the last time you sing

And in the distance there'll be a waltz
Of things you can't talk of these days
The loves best unspoken, the loves that have been driven away
Love spilt in a barroom
but I'll stand on that bar and raise a glass to the time that would frighten the sober
If they'd only bother to ask -

Ah, what we need here is a waltz... mmm la da ta da ta da da....

Some Loves
words & music © Mary Melena

You were not what I expected you would be
There in all the fire and fury of my dreams
You never swept me off my feet, You didn't carry me away
You couldn't save me from myself, you can't make everything okay

But you hold me though I struggle
'Til I finally settle down
And I fight you, and you let me
Because you know I'll come around

Chorus:
Some love comes like a wildfire moving fast
Some loves level everything they pass
But sometimes love burns slow
Not much on flame, there's not so much show
When you finally find that kind of steady glow
You'd best think twice before you let it go

Well I was waiting for a love to bowl me over
But sometimes love just taps you on the shoulder
And gives a little grin, doesn't have too much to say
If you let that lover in he might just carry you away

And he'll hold you if you let him
And you;ll know him by his smile
If it's been a long time coming
That's how you know it's gonna last awhile

Some love comes like a wildfire moving fast
Some loves level everything they pass
But sometimes love burns slow
Not much on flame, there's not so much show
When you finally find that kind of steady glow
You'd be a fool to ever let it go

Some loves, some loves....

Dynamite
words & music © Patrick McGuigan

Here's the story of a drowning man
Drowned by the darkness in his eyes
Drowned by the moonlight he can't see
In the steaming breath of the north country

Well he went to work when he should have been resting
He was blasting rock and dynamite testing
When you pull that trigger and nothing happens
You better cross your fingers when you look into the hole
When you pull that trigger and nothing happens
You gotta look into the hole as you cross your fingers

Dynamite, dynamite
Dynamite...

Laying on the broken rock
Blood trickling on his face
Thomas can you hear me...Thomas,
Thomas can you stand alright

Dynamite, dynamite
Dynamite, dynamite

When the hard rain's in your face
You can't hardly bear to look
It's kind of like that with the dynamite,
though a little bit harder with the dynamite,
Yes, a little bit harder with the dynamite
Buckshot just like dynamite
Yes, a little bit harder with the dynamite

Dynamite, dynamite
Dynamite

He took his family to the north country
where there ain't no work but the living's cheap
Daddy stands and he points and he calls
And the little boy's pulling on the handle of his bucksaw

He sits down by the stove at night
Laughing with them funny kids
Yeah daddy got pebbles stuck in his face
It feel just like the beads of a rosary

Dynamite, dynamite
Dynamite...

Felt so good with a hammer
You look so good with a hammer
A little bit slower than the dynamite
But a whole lot safer than the dynamite

Cass & Amos
words & Music © Vernon Tonges

Cass & Amos went looking for the Beulah Land
in a rust-encrusted '69 Buick Riviera sedan
Cass started feeling awful strange
as they crossed the Mesabi Iron Range
And the Buick's broken bearings sound like pebbles in a Maxwell House can.

Cass siphoned gas from the broken-down van in a ditch
Amos sold dope to a college kid from Basking Ridge
In Davenport the fuel pump blew. In Moline the head gasket gave way too
& our heroes spent the night inder the Mississippi bridge

"Oh, Amos, my life's up for grabs.
I got me a vision; I got me the crabs.
No bossman ever gave me steady work.
No woman ever looked at me, 'cepting to smirk."
Detritus like us got no home in the land of the free.

Cass cooked Amos a piping hot 3-course meal:
day old bread, bouillon and a can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee.
Cass pissed the fire out and went to sleep.
Amos stared up at the stars & started to weep,
rolling in the sky like a rusty old Buick wheel.

"Oh, Cass, I'm a nullity.
It's just a spiral down the toilet as far as I can see.
Like Jesus on the cross, I'm nailed to my fate."
Then the wine kicked in like a slow moving freight.
Detritus like us got no home in the land of the free.

Artist Bios

Rich Krueger Rich Krueger, a singer-songwriter now based in LA, CA, was born in Brooklyn, NYC in 1960. He has been writing and performing, solo and with his band The Dysfunctionells, largely in Chicago, but also in NYC and Kerrville, since 1985. The Dysfunctionells have also backed up the Holy Modal Rounders at their reunion at The Bottom Line in NYC, and The Dysfunctionells have recorded with Peter Stampfel of the HMR. Rich has a self-produced song demo on CD entitled "Personal Overachievement Rich Krueger" or PORK for short, which is great for leveling an unstable table or chair.

Krueger's narrative style has been compared to Richard Shindell's. Among his tens of fans around the country, he counts Trout Fishing In America, Andrew Calhoun, and Jack Hardy. He is also an MD/PhD neonatologist/neuroscientist (i.e. Doctor Doctor Krueger, your baby's brain specialist) at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. Folk Roots wrote: "Krueger's melodies, phrasing, and carefully-crafted lyrics call to mind the very best singer-songwriters: Elvis Costello, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen. But his vision is very much his own. " And they never exaggerate.

You can visit The Dysfunctionells web site (where this picture was stolen) at: http://www.chitown.com:80/http/music/dysfunct.html

Mary Melena

An Austin-based guitarist who is self-taught in the style of Pierre Bensusan, Mary haunted the outskirts of campfire circles at the Kerrville Folk Festival for years before making her first album - Something Passing Through - on Waterbug in 1998. Though she has written only a handful of songs, each demonstrates a skill that comes with years of careful listening. Melena confesses that "Some Loves" is her first love song. She can be contacted through Waterbug.

Patrick McGuigan

Patrick McGuigan, 30, teaches Spanish in New London CT. He doesn't tour and he rarely performs. If you insist on contacting him, write him at: 1085 Ocean Ave., New London CT 06320. or pmcguigan@groton.k12.ct.us

When asked for a short bio, he wrote:

"I live two blocks from the shore. Sometimes I walk down to the water to drink my mate before the sun comes up. It lays there lapping quietly on the beach, rubbing itself gently on the sand. I sit there on the sea wall and think about my life before I saw salt water. At home I'd seen lakes you couldn't see across, but they don't compare to the ocean. Lakes are like guests of the land, they come and go as the land sees fit. You can't really go anywhere on them either; it's easier just to drive around.

"The ocean on the other hand, answers to no one. It roams miles deep and thousands of miles across. Cardboard with foreign languages washes up on its shores. The first time I saw the ocean I was nineteen. I remember making a little man of driftwood and rocks, a little man with a blue scarf who pointed to America. He was pointing more or less to where I live now, two blocks from the shore."

Vernon Tonges   Chicago's best-kept secret, Vernon Tonges is shy and retiring until he gets behind a guitar (microphone optional). The ballad "Cass & Amos" in this issue was originally released on the cassette album, The Mayor of Chicken Town; he also has a cassette called The Lay of the Minstrel. Both were recorded live in the studio with his band, The Inepti. A few copies of Journey Through Obscurity, which draws on both, have been burned on CDRs and may or may not be available.

Tonges can perhaps best be understood by his liner notes - a manifesto on recording which could be every folksinger's credo:

"Often I read about well-known musicians holing up in a studio, like troglodytes in some self-fashioned chthonic hell, to deliver some perfectly honed bit of rock&roll ephemera. To them I can only say, commingly pity with contempt, there but for the grace of god go a cellblockful of model convicts. In liner notes to my previous opus, I trumpeted our "warts & all methodology"; however, on review, few actual mistakes were heard. Well, we fixed that this time. Like high-tossed spinning doo-doo logs emblazoned against the azure sky, our blunders & misfires announce themselves to the most casual listener.

"Having allied ourselves with entropy itself, we could expect no less. Even as our musicianship crumbles and dissipates, as we grow more hopeless and incompetent in our personal and professional lives and as our long-suffering audience disperses, yet does our aesthetic triumph. We serve a stern muse indeed.

"For our next effort I foresee employing a phalanx of chimps with hammers & power saws as session players. Hopefully I won't even have to show up."

Vernon can be contacted at: vernon@skyparlor.com

Fenario: Folk Music E-zine
©2000 Hugh Blumenfeld
ISSN: 1528-378X