Fever Dreams Pt 3, 4 - Johnny Marr

Lightning People

To start, this is what Johnny Marr had to say about writing this song, which is about the fans and invoking the listening participatory experience as a collective live, which he deliberately framed as "Glam Gospel". Then I will refer you to a high priest's ritual explanation (he's one in terms of his own reference of what a concert actually is)/can be. (-Have you listened to his last two albums? -Fair enough, though concerts run the full gamut it is possible. He's not where I'd go for this type of advice, but he's on far more than he misses.)

This all began with one first concert of a band, ZOOTV on November 3rd 1992 in Vancouver, which is why it is a whole chapter in the iBook. This song was the consummating moment. No one on earth would assume that when they attempted this reciprocity Nick Cave so perfectly describes mind to mind in a stadium, with the full intention of trying to send it out past the stadium and then return it in back to the singer, that something would happen past the stadium with the first person they expected it to happen with. (It only took me 27 years to write to him.) But that is what happened, and it hasn't stopped for thirty years. 

Side note: when Bono tweaks lyrics by one word it means something.

Step on a fast train, step out of the dirty rain baby, we can run from the darkness, in tonight

The original:

Step on a steam train, step out of the driving rain, baby, run from the darkness in the night [changed on occasion to "into light"]

With three simple word shifts (bear in mind Bono borrows like this alot, to create song interplay to broaden his subject/object), he weighted this one line with the first song that bestowed the analogy of the universal unconscious sea ("dirty rain" is in the one verse that made me realize that something might be happening), the one song in his second album acknowledgement of our personal encounter that appeared to reference what had actually transacted face to face (which he deliberately cross referenced to "Grace" and his moon symbology, after I told him what I thought the moon symbolism really was about), and bookended it with the present, which it so happens was released on the date of ZOOTV. "All Because of You" (the "bullet train" song) was on U2's second album subsequent to when I met him in person August 1999, the moment of first encounter being when he signed not his name, but a stop sign with the words, "Just standing at the bus stop waiting for the train to come in". Upon which I handed him this cassette tape for Christmas (with this opener) along with a letter with the rejoinder, "I don't know if you'd know what the train looked like if it smoked you between the eyes."  (The high speed train analogy took off in the universal feedback after the encounter, in tandem with U2 releasing "All Because of You". -Again, key word search iBook, but here, here,  and now here, it so happens, after Jack got handed a letter/flash drive/book by a woman he saw for about 1.5 seconds that unloaded about a massive train scandal, an interaction that only had time enough to say, "That's my book.") 

("Stay on [topic], stay on [topic]!" - explosion)

Lightning. Why identify collectively as "lightning people"? Well personally, it's because it happened the moment I decided to launch this experiment in a public field, "Valentine's" Eve. "That was when the storm rolled in, lightning and a hail of thunder over and over again, bearing down the deluge, repatriating and assuming the best moment in its sum of history, a spiral thunderclap heralding the first storm of the monsoon season, consummation nigh eleven years ago happened during a violent April storm."

I don't know if you've ever heard the soundwave of a thunderclap occur in a spiral, but it has something to do with being directly above you. It has only happened to me twice. The first was in the iBook (p. 1792), the night of the unicorn dream. How it all ties together. (Do you have any clue how much of an existential obscenity it is to have a thunderclap in snow temperature cold in January on Vancouver Island, let alone a sole lonely one that descends on you in a spiral of sound?) But it gets better, because when I was writing to Martin and I got to a certain climax, right when I typed, "'That was only a possibility in terms of what it might prove with you', lightning just hit less than fifty feet feet away in the alley when I typed that. I jumped out of my seat not quite half a foot, actually turned almost a 180, enough to see it hit out of the corner of my eye." -So there's that. But it's only on p. 41 in the unrevised letter, not the public one. 

Bring it on, my darling,

Bring it on, my lover

Happy Valentine's.

When you hurt me, you hurt yourself.

Hideaway Girl

I did say one of the arch-typical symbols for the feminine side would be rain, and here we have her as "Rainmaker". But really I want to point out the concept behind the title being one of concealment, which was more a forced situation than an autonomous one. 

Speed of Love

The distinguishing concept to this song is that "speed of love" is a transmission like light or sound waves, with "send your mind, I read it now" indicating that it's mind to mind.

Counter Clock World

The distinguishing concept to "Counter Clock World" is that this has taken a really long time to happen, and of course with the letter I demarcated a transpiration timeline of twenty-seven years. This ties in tenuously to "Hideaway Girl" going at the "Speed of Love", because if she runs backwards full tilt that is how she will reach him, as in, "Rainmaker, I'm here to take ya, Run backward at full speed". This is not a new concept, it's come up before with Radiohead a couple of times, (which are yes, in the iBook,  searchable by song title). So we have a historic theme expressed as a defining context of an alternate world (with The Smile along for the ride, as of noon today, writing this at 8:16 am.) This is also, by happenstance, linking into another fairly embedded album that was released on February 25th, Tears for Fears' The Tipping Point, specifically this track, "Long, Long, Long Time". (We are also attempting a time intercept on Arcade Fire's premiere of "The Lightning I, II" today, which also hasn't premiered yet, just in case that might be fruitful. -Happy St. Patrick's Day!)

Rubicon

The song speaks for itself. The title invokes an irrevocable, paradigm shift crossing of, you guessed it, the river.  

It’s all coming, it don’t stop coming to you

It’s all coming, don’t stop coming to you

It’s all coming, don’t stop coming to you

Volition, invention

(It’s all coming, it don’t stop coming to you)

Break into creation

Volition, predication

(All coming, don’t stop coming to you)

Make it through creation

(It’s all coming, it don’t stop coming to you)

Cross over

(It’s all coming, it don’t stop coming to you)

(Already there)

Human

The theme's anchor is the allusion "just too human when you hide", making this about the "hideaway girl". She has faced the sun, and is talking to the sun at the dawn. I predicted the divine masculine would be represented by the sun. 

God's Gift

These next two songs are the twist, I didn't even want to analyse or include them because that's like conferring them context. Since this EP series is so in depth, it is a little too arbitrary to just drop them off the analysis as it may present a bias. If you know the original unedited letter, you know there's quite the volume of distress that had to be gotten through, a real valley of darkness I edited down to just the event, as opposed to the interior mental wrangle. There's an existential paradox, along the lines of the first shall be last and the last shall be first. And the paradox is captured in this song with the gist of the inverted query, what does it mean that you needed this manifestation, a manifesting potential God proof? It doesn't mean you're God's gift, that's for sure. You have to thread that paradox successfully or die. If you come out on your high horse, you're going to die. I'd go so far as to say the annunciation of where the high horse can get you is the following song, "The Whirl", thinking that's the top of the world and you're on top of it. 

The Whirl

 "You reflect the particles as they fall, the darkness and the light" - "Darkness to Light" - Damon Albarn

Not in the clear yet. Not in the clear if you presume this is the appeal and it's fine. The particles respond innately. This song is about the knife edge presented in the upswing of a psychedelic drug trip and whether you're going to sort successfully on the rocket launch (where you're going to sort). But as you can see from the narrative, it's one hell of a whirl.