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Home » Walking (and singing) those lonely streets

Walking (and singing) those lonely streets

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day I was thinking how very many songs there are about loneliness. So I did a search, and the following video came up. Even though it’s supposedly about loneliness, the video made me smile. The lead singer’s 80s hair. And that beginning to the video – the woman doing gymnastics on the cars. Could anything be more 80s?

So tell me if you think this guy actually looks the least bit lonely:

Then again, loneliness can be a frame of mind, and people can be lonely in the midst of fame and fortune and women throwing themselves at them (I wouldn’t know personally, but I hear tell). The singer in that video, Britisher David Coverdale, ended up marrying the woman in the video two years later, but only two years after that they were divorced:

The video includes, besides band’s stage performance, appearances by model Julie E. “Tawny” Kitaen, who was married to Whitesnake’s David Coverdale from 1989 to 1991. Her notable sex-appeal was immediately recognized, having memorable unchoreographed scenes dressed “in a white negligee, writhing and cartwheeling across the hoods of two Jaguars XJ” which belonged to Coverdale (white) and Callner (black). Coverdale recalls that he even brought choreographer Paula Abdul to the set to show some moves to Tawny, but only to positively exclaim that she couldn’t “show her anything.”

But that video isn’t why I’m writing this post, you’ll probably be happy to learn. It was these lyrics from it that repeatedly caught my ear:

‘Cause I know what it means
To walk along the lonely street of dreams

And here I go again on my own
Goin’ down the only road I’ve ever known
Like a drifter, I was born to walk alone…

Isn’t that pretty much this one, not music-wise but lyric-wise?:

What a difference a decade and a half makes (the songs are more than two decades apart, but the video for the first song was made some time later). No more playful cavorting with a gymnastically inclined woman. No more halo of hair. Beat up old cars rather than Jaguars. Black makeup on the eyes. But the words are so similar:

I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known…

I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Where the city sleeps
And I’m the only one, and I walk alone…

But, just as in the other video, the singer is hardly alone. You’ve got the band (not to mention the cameraman who must be there too). The visible threesome is trudging along, singing about how they’re alone. But at least you believe it possible that these guys may not be exactly living the high life.

For me, though, the best lonely street song is Leonard Cohen’s “Boogie Street”:

No street in this next one – there’s some lonely, though. For those of you who are only familiar with the disco iteration of the Bee Gees, this is from considerably earlier (1970). Twins Robin and Maurice are 20 years old here, and Barry three years older. Sharp suits on Robin and Barry:

Just for fun, here’s the same song in a Bee Gees concert six years later. Quite a few changes, of the sartorial and tonsorial variety, and also demeanor-wise, although this is still before the Saturday Night Fever explosion. I kept the final song on also, because it’s such fun:

Comments

Walking (and singing) those lonely streets — 97 Comments

  2. Yes, Whitesnake, back to my youth. Coverdale and Tawny Kitaen were together a few years and that video was a pretty big deal at the time. Later on Kitaen was married to major league pitcher Chuck Finley until she went crazy on him and got arrested for DV.

    Coverdale of course was also the second lead singer of Deep Purple so me thinks he was never too lonely if you know what I mean.

  5. I appreciate your work; may I help just a little ?

    Regarding “of the sartorial and hirsute variety”, I believe that the word you wanted was “tonsorial” rather than “hirsute”.

  8. Sic Transit:

    I knew there was another word but just couldn’t come up with it. Thanks.

    Although the Bee Gees were also very hirsute, as we discovered in the disco era of the unbuttoned shirt.

  9. I thought it was interesting that Green Day would cover “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” a classic going back to 1933, which has been performed by everyone from Bing Crosby to Nat King Cole to Marianne Faithfull to Diana Krall to Amy Winehouse.

    Turns out I was wrong. Green Day nicked the title from a painter who nicked the painting from an earlier painting by Edward Hopper. The first lines are close:

    “I walk along the street of sorrow” — 1933
    “I walk a lonely road” — Green Day

    Into this orgy of nicking, the Britpop band Oasis has accused Green Day of nicking the music for “Boulevard” from the Oasis hit, “Wonderwall,” (the title is from a George Harrison album, though Oasis made no secret of that).

    I wouldn’t mind much except Green Day either doesn’t know the earlier classic song or won’t mention it (legal reasons?). Green Day has sold a ton of records, but I’ve considered them idiot leftist punks since their album, “American Idiot.” Their idea of a political statement was to chant onstage, “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA”

    Needless to say, “American Idiot” has been made into a Broadway musical and Green Day has already been inducted into the “Rock and Rock Hall of Fame.”

    O tempora o mores.

  10. For third-person loneliness, it’s hard to beat the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.”
    ____________________________________

    All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
    All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
    ____________________________________

    Good questions. We’re not doing any better fifty years later, almost certainly worse.

  13. In my experience, loneliness certainly can stem from literal isolation, and in the COVID era, of course, this is tragically—to the point of literal suicide—obvious.

    But far more often, as far as I can tell, loneliness consists of feeling that no one thinks or feels as you do. No one shares your hopes or dreams, or can even really identify with them. In marriage, I’m convinced, most affairs aren’t about sex; the sex comes from feeling understood by someone else, and is why the concept of “emotional affair” is a thing. News flash: there really are intimate relationships that don’t include sex!

    Steve Winwood wrote explicitly about feeling lonely in “Hearts on Fire,” telling a woman he’d only recently met about “a thousand limousines, and his women for free.” It’s not clear this stranger knows who she’s talking to until she quips “When you see a chance, you’d better take it.” I haven’t seen this documented anywhere, but I believe this is the story of Winwood meeting his second wife, and the fact that he was a world-famous musician not being why she loves him. And that makes all the difference in the world.

  14. huxley, yes Green Day are a joke. They doubled down on stupidity when appearing at some televised festival years ago and doing their “resistance” in front of the big number 88 on either side of the stage — which, if anyone doesn’t know, is skinhead and Aryan Nation speak for “Heil Hitler!” (H being the 8th letter in the alphabet). Numbers often tattooed on exposed necks.

    Meanwhile, Neo, you just have terrible taste in popular music. Whitesnake were immediately a Spinal Tap level bad joke when they appeared, fitting in with the worst hairband bad metal of the MTV 80s, and the BeeGees?

    The BeeGees humilated themselves forever by appearing in that ridiculous Sgt Pepper movie that flopped at the box office, but their music was already laughable way before that. “Stayin’ Alive” could be enjoyed only when taken with a heavy dose of cocaine-inflected irony, like most disco of the time. It was the perfect music to accompany John Travolta comedy-act Jerry Lewis as Buddy Love-level dance routines, inescapably connected to his “Escape from YMCA” Village People dress-up in faux-butch “Urban Cowboy” drag on a mechanical bull as the perfect answer to the scary image of American Male played by Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry and such crude neo-Neanderthal offshoots as Charles Bronson who were just too scary for 13 year New Jersey girls to ever process.

    But then, I guess one has to remember that you and some here liked the Four Seasons. I didn’t even know any teenage girls back then who preferred them to the dreamy Beatles or the bad boy Stones — certainly not after Frankie Valli was seen on television, resurrected 20 years later as Frankie Goes to Hollywood with an irrresistable paen to painfree anal penetration “Relax!”, a big hit in disco clubs right there with “Tainted Love” as AIDS came onstage to twist the irony sideways but not quite turn it upside-down.

    All right. I guess typing can be fun.

    The Rolling Stones actually have a decent song available on Youtube called :Living in a Ghost Town.” I hadn’t paid any attention to them for a long time but a couple years ago they did a blues album of covers that turned out to be pretty good. Mick Jagger can still sing when he’s not running around the stage and posing like Dorian Gray. “I Can’t Quit You”, the old Otis Rush song, now with Eric Clapton on guitar, is amazing. Keith and Mick are vampires, no doubt, and I’m glad they still exist, no longer worried about taking money from kids.

    See? I make myself vulnerable by liking something in public (more or less). Now someone here can say, but Mozart! Bach! But that’s all aural wallpaper to me by now. Let’s move up through the years to Olivier Messiaen.

    “Quartet to the End of Time,” which he composed in a concentration camp in WWII, or if you just want piano, “Visions de’la Amen.” I think there’s even a version on Youtube played by two women, as Messiaen saw into the future and made sure these boxes would be checked.

  16. Try this for loneliness:
    “All By Myself” by Eric Carmen, repleat with extended piano solo based on Rackmoninov’s plantif Piano Concerto #2.

  18. Immortal lyrics written by kids, set to their simplistic A-B-A music. Great.

    I recently ran across a reference that defines adolescence as ending at age 35, but do not have it at my fingertips to post.

    I prefer post-adolescent lyrics and poetry. Maturity has value, or so it used to be thought. But we keep moving down the age scale: let 16 year-olds vote; heed a Greta Thunberg about our planet.
    Pretty soon we will be in a new make of “Lord of the Flies”, not fiction this time, but Red Guards instead.

  19. “All By Myself” by Eric Carmen, repleat with extended piano solo based on Rackmoninov’s plantif Piano Concerto #2.

    rhg: For humor, try “All By Myself” covered by the 21st C. classical musician comedy team, Igudesman & Joo. For piano, violin, voice and facial expressions.

    –Igudesman & Joo, “All By Myself”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzHBANJ83Gs

  20. miklos;

    Terrible taste in music?

    You don’t seem to understand the post. First of all, I knew nothing about Whitesnake or this song till yesterday, and the video was put up here because I think it’s funny. I am no fan, and I think the post makes that clear. I’m far from a fan of Green Day either. I am, however, a big fan of the Bee Gees, as are many people whom you perhaps admire. You might be surprised how many rock icons consider them supremely gifted.

    I don’t care for musical snobbery, though.

    Nor do I care if people make mistakes. The Bee Gees hated that Sgt. Pepper project and tried to stop it but weren’t allowed to back out. They’ve mocked it themselves for decades.

    Your mileage obviously differs greatly on popular music.

  21. Yes, Neo, you have terrible taste in posting just popular music. There is a great deal more music out there! Which I have previously pointed out you ignore in favor of attention on the ballerina performing to it. I don’t care for ballet, but I care about the music to which it is put.
    There is great jazz, great Bluegrass (both America-born), supergreat Classical like Beethoven’s Ninth.
    As to lyrics, listen to Handel’s Messiah, extremely more complex than anything cranked out by the Bee Gees, and created fully in a very short number of days. It’s OK to do..some of the lyrics are taken from the Old Testament!

  22. Can you imagine how social we had to be? We give birth to these kids who take 14 years to grow up to the stage where they might be able to take care of themselves. Even 14? How about 40 years? So the mothers and the kids have to be protected like crazy.. This means lots of other people around. Large family compounds of 50-200 people. To be social is in our marrow. And now we are being deprived of this absolutely essential ingredient of humanity. Damn. No wonder people are going loopy!

  23. Somehow I imprinted this “walking lonely streets” song from a one-hit wonder band in the sixties:
    ___________________________________

    I’m back on the street again
    Gotta stand on my own two feet again
    I’m walkin’ that lonely beat again
    Rememberin’ when, mm
    Rememberin’ when

    –The Sunshine Company, “Back On The Street Again”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58xIGyP-ito
    ___________________________________

    I still find it charming. By the time I looked for a copy it was a collector’s item.

    Wiki tells me the song is now categorized as “Sunshine Pop,” a label record collectors created for the mid-sixties SoCal subgenre of bands such as the “Mamas and the Papas,” “Spanky and Our Gang” and the “Association.”

  24. I saw Green Day / Boulevard and thought “Hmm, maybe they are not the twits I’ve always seen them as.” But alas. Their chant is ok but they really should not have taken the title of a great song as theirs.

    I actually haven’t heard much of their music. What I’ve heard seemed pretty ordinary pop-punk. But I’ve thought poorly of them since reading in a pop music magazine about their performance at a record store, as part of which they trashed the place.

  25. Cicero:

    You have demonstrated several things here, but in addition to your musical snobbery you apparently haven’t read the links I previously suggested (in a comment on the Nyro thread) that run counter to what you’re saying. It doesn’t reflect well on you.

    Rather than go through the same response all over again, I’ll just refer you to the first one, which occurred just a few days ago here and contained links to follow in which I discuss classical music that I happen to like or to be interested in. For example, there’s a link there about Chopin’s music, one about Janacek, and one about Bach and Glenn Gould (in particular the Goldberg Variations).

    But I will add something I’ve said before to other commenters: the sum total of my knowledge or even my preferences is not contained in these posts. You might find this hard to take in, but I actually like plenty of genres of music, including some about which I’ve never written. I write about aspects of things that interest me and on which I currently have something I wish to say, for whatever reason. This post is not really about music so much as lyrics and videos and the fact that loneliness is a big big issue for people, an issue that is often explored in popular music.

    If you don’t happen to like that topic, fine. But trying to tell me I have terrible taste and should share your obviously superior taste and write about the topics you decree important isn’t really going to get you anywhere.

  26. I always liked “Lonely Street” by Andy Williams. I was 12 or so when it came out and didn’t know how uncool it was. 🙂

    Forty or so years later, ca 2000, browsing the cutout 99-cent cassettes in a record store, I saw one by a band called Courage of Lassie, which had a track called “Lonely Street.” So I risked the 99 cents, and it turned out to be a pretty good album. And it was the same “Lonely Street.” And like so many recordings, it’s on YouTube:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdgEL6tdw9E

  27. huxley:

    What’s sunshiny about The Mamas and Papas?:

    All the leaves are brown
    And the sky is gray
    I’ve been for a walk
    On a winter’s day…

    But I guess they were dreaming of sunny California. Although California isn’t all that sunny in the winter. It can be downright rainy and cold.

    I never even heard of that song you linked, but that album cover is a classic, isn’t it? The heads in the flowers?

  28. neo:

    It’s wiki’s fault! Or the record collectors…
    ____________________________________

    Sunshine pop originated in California in the mid to late-1960s, beginning as an outgrowth of the California Sound[3] and folk rock movements. Rooted in easy-listening, advertising jingles, and the growing drug culture, the music was characterized by lush vocals and light arrangements similar to samba music.

    Most of the acts were lesser-known bands named after fruits, colors, or cosmic concepts that imitated popular groups like the Beach Boys, the Mamas & the Papas, and the 5th Dimension. In some ways, the genre is similar to baroque pop through being elaborate and melancholic, but it crossed into folk-pop and Brill Building styles. It may be seen as a form of escapism from the turmoil of the times.

    The A.V. Club’s Noel Murray writes: “sunshine pop acts expressed an appreciation for the beauty of the world mixed with a sense of anxiety that the good ol’ days were gone for good.”
    ____________________________________

    It’s a feature, not a bug.

  30. Neo,

    I shouldn’t have said you have terrible taste in music. I apologize. I think I was suffering here from a memory of your affection for the Four Seasons whom I really disliked when I was 12 years old, on my afternoon paper route riding my bicycle listening to Top 40 AM radio rain or shine. I completely spaced on your love of Laura Nyro whose music I also appreciate and adore.

    I’ve found that just a couple of years difference in ages can mean that one either was receptive to Phil Spector and Brill Building music, plus maybe the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean, or believes that rock music requires guitars

  31. I never even heard of that song you linked, but that album cover is a classic, isn’t it? The heads in the flowers?

    neo: I knew them from the “heads in the sun” album cover, but no matter!

    Maybe you’re ready for this — my favorite “so bad, it’s good” song from 1967, “The Flower People.” It’s truly terrible. Probably not up to the exacting standards of Sunshine Pop either. However, it charted modestly well on the West Coast. Also, there is walking on the street.

    The singer, Marcia Strassman, went on to a more promising acting career and played Julie Kotter on “Welcome Back, Kotter.” RIP 2014.
    _________________________________________

    The flower children are blooming everywhere
    Walking up and down the street
    Heading for somewhere

    The flower children don’t want no sympathy
    As they know where they’re going
    Just you wait and see!

    They just want to be wanted
    They just want to be free
    Why can’t we just love them
    And let them be?

    –Marcia Strassman, “The Flower Children”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F12o9j73dc

  34. I just want to thank Griffin for the reference to “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” one of the great songs of all time. It’s in the repertoire of Mr Whatsit, a pianist, and his musical partner, an astonishing soprano, and I defy anybody not to ache at the sound and the lyrics and the truth of it.

    And also I join Neo in defying musical snobbery. I don’t care who made the music or if what they did is cool or hip or sophisticated. If it touches your heart, it’s song.

  35. huxley:

    Apology accepted.

    But I still think the Four Seasons were just great. By the way, I’m not that old (although the details are a heavily guarded secret, any astute reader of this blog can probably make an accurate ballpark guess). I started to like the Four Seasons when I was quite young, right at the start of their hit-making streak. Valli’s voice sometimes put me off a bit when it bordered on shrieking, but I loved their harmonies very much and their songs were so infectious, with such a great beat.

    In terms of groups of the times, I was also very fond of the Left Banke, the Hollies, the Kinks, and the Zombies, as well as some hits of the Beach Boys. Harmony, harmony, harmony, plus.

  36. Neo, thanks for Cohen and other lonely songs. I was a lonely boy in the 60s. Best “lonely” rock band then – pretty much hands down.
    The Doors
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgHaGrZkkv4
    (This version has some cool faces turning into skeletons from the album cover)

    People are strange
    when you’re a stranger
    Faces look ugly
    when you’re alone
    Women seem wicked
    when you’re unwanted
    Streets are uneven
    when you’re down

    I recall walking around in SoCal in winter drizzle, singing People Are Strange.
    Often. Also other songs of theirs:
    The End: There’s danger on the edge of town; Ride the king’s highway, baby
    Weird scenes inside the gold mine; Ride the highway west, baby
    Ride the snake, ride the snake …
    The killer awoke before dawn; put his boots on

    LA Woman: Are you a lucky little lady in the City of Light?
    Or just another lost angel? City of Night, City of Night …
    If they say I never loved you; You know they are a liar
    Driving down your freeways; Midnight alleys roam
    Cops in cars, the topless bars; Never saw a woman so alone

    Riders on the Storm: His brain is squirmin’ like a toad
    Take a long holiday
    Let your children play
    If you give this man a ride, sweet family will die
    Killer on the road

    With the most memorable piano ‘rain’ (by Ray Manzerak). Karoke music not good enough to get the loneliness of spacey Doors music, tho I tried singing it once.

    Reminding me – I miss the earth so much, I miss my wife
    It’s lonely out in space; on such a timeless flight
    Rocket Man by Elton John, the first hit of his I really liked.
    Tho Madman Across The Water is underappreciated.

    All the leaves are brown Yes, they all were. I’d sing Mamas and Papas, too.
    I also like the 4 Seasons: Dawn, go away I’m no good for you. It was one of the three albums I first bought (gift for older sisters), along with Herman’s Hermits and Gary Lewis & the Playboys — all of which I recalled along with last month’s Red Rubber Ball post. Kind of Sunshine Pop, which I also like.

    My kids had me learn the Boulevard of Empty Dreams thru Naruto anime, with Gaara. Lots of lonely young super ninja fighters. (Manga comics)
    https://youtu.be/Kpu4hcTNDSc

    Lots of other good music above in other comments – but not all so lonely.
    My mother loved Roy Orbison; I like him too. But she could sing his songs much better than I. She and her 4 kids from her first (of 3) husbands would sing songs in a Rambler station wagon when she had vacation visitation rights. My 3 sisters more often sang more than I.

  37. Probably not very interesting, but I happened to be in the courthouse back in the 80’s when the Bee Gees were sued for allegedly stealing “How Deep Is Your Love”. (They won the case.)

    I was serving on another jury and on my break I peeked through the door of the courtroom and caught a back view of them being sworn in, resplendent with their long hair and 3 different pastel colored suits.

  38. Tom Grey:

    I thought of including that Doors song, too – a big favorite of mine (“People Are Strange”) – but the list was getting too long.

  39. More than once I have reflected (to myself) on the fact that American (and English) songs celebrate — or at least commemorate — loneliness, loss, and heartache. And this is from the very best time of their life! These are the kinds of themes I would expect from an 85 year-old in a retirement home, widowed for 10 years, and without kids and grandkids coming to visit her. Not from late teens or young twenties in the wealthiest and healthiest times in history! I think we need translations of songs from yak-herders sitting around yak-dung fires with temperatures in the teens and no electricity or roads for a hundred miles. Now THERE’S some serious loneliness.

  40. Oliver T:

    I would very much have liked to have seen those suits.

    If you look at early Bee Gees concerts, they often wore great suits, always au courant for the times in England. Some brocaded. Later they got more casual, and then of course in the disco era they dressed for that part, too. They later said it was a form of costume and not what they ordinarily wore. Even later, they tended to wear all black, very sharp though. Mo had great hats when he was bald.

  41. There’s a good documentary on HBO Max titled the “Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart”. At the center of it is Barry Gibbs who is quite lonely now because he is the last remaining brother. Maurice died in 2003 at age 53 and Robin died in 2012 at age 62. [Of course Andy died years before]. Barry says he would trade all the hits to have his brothers back.

  42. Physicsguy Loved Simon &Garfinkle for years. Got to them from folk
    I got from the “rock, I am an island” song that singer would have lots of friends when TSHTF. He was an island due to the competencies he cultivated.
    But I’m a Kipling fan and “Tommy” seemed apt in those days.

  43. While one-hit wonders are notorious anyone who maintains a following in popular music over a period of time is communicating to somebody whether you or I like them or not. It is not common in my experience for people to buy a recording or attend a concert because they have a gun pointed to their head.

    And even one-hit wonders may have struck a nerve, if only briefly. For example one of the most memorable recordings from my youth was Napoleon XIV’s poignant and touching, “They’re Coming to Take Me Away Ha-ha”. It may even fit into today’s theme though neo is probably put off by the lack of three-part harmonies.

  44. miklos – “The Beach Boys had guitars but their attack was “soft.” ”

    Not always. “Fun Fun Fun” starts off with a hard-charging guitar riff, ripped off from Chuck Berry. But absolutely brilliant lyrics from Brian Wilson.

  45. Montage:

    The story of the Bee Gees is quite fascinating to me for many, many reasons. There is an enormous amount of documentary footage on YouTube: previous documentaries, many interviews with them and other people talking about them, record cuts, recording studio footage and audio, videos of young people today listening to their songs and reacting to them, tons of Bee Gee performances going all the way back to childhood when they were regulars on Australian TV and right through the beginning years of the 21st Century, as well as Barry performing alone a few times in the last few years. I plan some posts on the Bee Gees, so Bee Gee haters and Bee Gee lovers get ready!

  46. F:

    Methinks perhaps you never were a teenager?

    Seriously, the teen years can be very very lonely. Solitude is not required for loneliness, nor are solitary people all lonely. Plus, some teenagers are ostracized by their peers. Loneliness transcends age.

    Also, older people are often lonely, but they’re less likely to buy recordings.

  47. The hands-down, best song about elder loneliness. Plus street walking!
    __________________________________________

    You know that old trees just grow stronger
    And old rivers grow wilder every day
    Old people just grow lonesome
    Waiting for someone to say, “Hello in there, hello”

    So if you’re walking down the street sometime
    And spot some hollow ancient eyes
    Please don’t just pass ’em by and stare
    As if you didn’t care, say, “Hello in there, hello”

    –John Prine, “Hello In There”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF9eIWIk70o

  50. Most Westerners, who know of the Japanese haiku, also know the seventeen syllable rule of haiku. Few, however, know that a seasonal reference is also required.

    Songs about loneliness don’t require a reference to walking the streets, but it’s surprising how many fill that bill.

    Makes sense, though. One is not as apt to feel lonely in one’s home as walking the streets, where one is likely to meet people but feel no connection.

  53. neo: Great minds think alike!

    Though I’m not sure about the Frost poems, which seem more about being alone than lonely.

    When I was young, I moved to Boston with a girlfriend to find tech work and to rejoin my college gang who ended up there. Then a year later, my girlfriend broke up with me, my college friends all moved away and I was flat alone in that big city. It was the first time. It cut like a knife.

  54. Neil Sedaka, Solitaire.

    I have liked “Lonely Days” since I was a little kid. I had that on a 45.

  56. There are people who only like a certain type of music and then there are people who like music. Just as there are people who like to read a certain type of book and then there are people who just like to read. And those 2 groups will never understand each other.

  57. huxley – drat, that probably invalidates every haiku I’ve ever written.

    Philip Sells: Keep trying! The crucial thing IMO is that something must happen in the haiku for the reader — a delicate burst of connection.

    The first haiku book I read was a translation of the greats — Basho, Issa, etc. — into English. The translator, Harold Stewart, didn’t bother with 17 syllables. He felt that made sense for Japanese, but not English. So he choose to fit his translations into two lines of iambic pentameter! Worked fine.

    Here’s an American haiku I rather like. It’s 17 syllables but 5-5-7 instead of the traditional 5-7-5. It’s wintry, still and alone.
    _____________________________

    Full moon on new snow,
    and in the corner
    an open can of white paint.

    –Billy Collins (former US Poet Laureate)

  59. Artfldgr: Definitely 80s, but I had never consciously listened to Whitesnake (how Freudian!) before and it was better than I expected.

  60. HUH? – nobody has mentioned Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence”?

    Applause for Griffin for Hank Williams “I’m so lonesome I could cry”.

    Other lonesome songs would be:
    The Who “Behind Blue Eyes”
    Eagles “Desperado” covered so beautifully by Linda Ronstadt
    Willie Nelson “My Hero’s have always been Cowboys”
    Neil Diamond “Solitary Man”
    Conway Twitty “It’s only make believe”. Glenn Campbell covered this song.

    Skeeter Davis “End of the World” most people heard the Brenda Lee version
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sonLd-32ns4&ab_channel=TheOldrecordclub

    Kris Kristofferson “Loving her was easier than anything I’ll ever do again”.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztuXo9BuNAk&ab_channel=EJICCA

    Gilbert Sullivan “Alone again, Naturally”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_P-v1BVQn8&ab_channel=valliseasons1

  61. Neo,

    Yes, the Zombies in particular with lead singer Colin Blunstone. They’re a band whose collected works really repay listening; Also, they were the rare band of that era whose compositions were keyboard rather than guitar-based.

    I also liked the Kinks quite a bit for a number of years. I saw them live twice, the first time in the Reed College gymnasium where my girlfriend stood less than ten feet away from Ray Davies. The Kinks certainly knew how to put on an entertaining, high energy show. It seemed they ran somewhat out of gas creatively in the 1970s, but pop music is a simple form that’s hard to replicate with inspiration forever.

    Your mention of the Left Banke of course brings to mind their beautiful hit song “Walk Away Renee.” They followed this up with “Pretty Ballerina” but then nothing else seemed on the same level, which was too bad. It really seemed like a missed opportunity.

    Back to the Four Seasons: hey, I somehow I can’t help enjoying Lou Christie’s “Lightning Strikes” as well as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by the Tokens, so I’m not entirely averse to weird male vocal stylings.

  62. Well I won’t say I was never a teenager, but I will say that any loneliness I felt as a teen paled in comparison to some of the privation I had seen with my own eyes, privation that others lived under, and that made me think it was terribly self-serving of me to feel any “specialness” over supposed deprivation — or loneliness.

    I return to the theme of my comment: are American teens any lonelier than teens in the rest of the world? A ten year-old goatherd in Kenya lives for days at a time with only his goats — does he even know what the word lonely means? His total possessions are probably a pair of trousers his parents bought out of a mission barrel in the market and a walking stick. He has siblings back in the shamba, but they don’t go out with him and his goats.

    Having been exposed to some of this when I was 13, I felt a little selfish thinking my life was particularly difficult or lonely. And since I lived outside the USA for a while in my early teens, I was never as exposed to American popular music, so lots of what is being discussed in this post is outside my ken.

    Still, I think we live in good times, and have since at least the end of WWII.

  63. F:

    As I said, being alone is not the same as being lonely, and vice versa. A goatherd who might live the rest of the time in a village with lots of relatives and quasi-relatives, and a loving family, would not necessarily be lonely at all amidst his goats (also with the satisfaction of knowing he’s engaged in work that is helping his family). Contrast to an American teenager whose parents might be divorced, who might be an only child, whose custodial parent is working all the time, and whose friends tease him a lot because he’s not especially popular, and you have a recipe for tremendous loneliness.

  64. F:

    I think you hit closer to the mark about the angst suffered by American teens. After all, western teens know all there is about life and aren’t half addled by hormones and not fully developed brains (sarc).

    But here is progress, now there is gender dysphoria, “Woe is I, born in the wrong bod die.”

    But their lonely mess and angst sells downloads (records in the olden times). Some things don’t change.

  65. Neo: I would very much have liked to have seen those suits.

    In my memory I see one as light green and the other maybe a yellow (?!)

    Come to think of it, there may have only been two of them, since as you mentioned
    Maurice didn’t have much hair.

  66. FOAF: “Fun Fun Fun” starts off with a hard-charging guitar riff, ripped off from Chuck Berry.

    You probably know that the Beach Boys also appropriated Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” when they wrote “Surfin’ U.S.A.”, and after legal action gave Berry credit as a co-author.

  67. Neo. WRT the lonely goat herd…… Wait. Did I just say that?
    Well, anyway, the ten-year-old goat herd doing something useful for his family is going to have a different view of things, or feeling about himself. Lonely means nobody seems to care The goatherd knows people back in the ville care. That’s being alone instead of being lonely.

    Also, knowing he’s doing something useful…. I suspect a lot of teens know they’re not much use to anybody. Babies are at least cute.
    I have a lot of teachers in my family, various generations. They usually say, if their experience or the experience of colleagues runs that way, that farm kids are the best cohort to have in high school.
    Problem is, it’s a chore to get a kid to be good enough at something that he knows he’s producing value of some kind.
    There was a kid in our church some years ago who was having issues. He was maybe ten. We were getting ready for the Easter overflow with chairs at the end of each pew. I told him we were going to have a lot more people than usual and some of them might be old. We needed to make sure the chairs were lined up with the pews so the older people wouldn’t have a hard time, or maybe trip. He should go check the line up. He was all over it, checking, moving by the millimeter. Finished up with posture as if he’d left the coat hanger in his shirt.

    Beat standing around wondering if his father “Bad Jeff” was going to be out of jail this weekend.

    I suspect most of us feel lonely when growing up, to one extent or another. I’d hate to be the kind of lonely that a lonely song hits me hard. Rather say…for a lonely song, that’s pretty good. Hits the bulls eye.

  69. The classic example of it to me, is Edward Hopper’s classic Night Hawks

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nighthawks_(painting)#/media/File:Nighthawks_by_Edward_Hopper_1942.jpg

    This looks like a fairly good summary of Haiku:
    https://www.classroompoems.com/rules-for-writing-haiku.html

    Before she got involved with the Whitesnake guy, Tawny was known for a movie appearance in Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak, a silly fluff piece by French director Just Jaekin, based very very loosely on the character Sweet Gwendoline, by classic bondage artist John Willie. It’s tame even by Willie’s 40s & 50s standards. Kind of a french action-comedy.

    She also was in a less-than-spectacular reboot of the TV show WKRP in Cincinnati</i.

  70. So, how’s about “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)”? [He believes himself bereft and holds an expectation of loneliness to come.]

    Ok, it doesn’t work out that way, but still, in that moment this thing sounds as lonely as it gets to me.

  71. Oliver: most music is recycled to some extent. Though yes Surfin USA is awfully close to Sweet Little Sixteen.

  73. Huxley,

    I can’t even wait to check out those haiku books. I’ve had a fascination with haiku since a young age. And I typically loathe poetry otherwise.

    Though I am not sure how I feel about an American poet changing the pattern and still calling it haiku. I will try to be open minded!

  75. There have been a number of good catches here, some outside the pop rock box; some others, right in the bull’s eye if unexpectedly. I’m thinking of Griffin’s 1st suggestion in particular for the latter, and his Hank Williams suggestion for the former.

    Of course, the way Neo set it up, the focus is more on aloneness and feelings of lonesomeness per se, rather than broadening to feelings of loss and lonely longing as would be typical of songs of romantic loss or longing.

    Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonedome I Could Cry” (per Griffin) fits Neo’s category nicely (except for the street); whereas Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight”, has the word “lonesome” in it and involves a lonely walk along the highway, but is a specific and romantic, not generalized in-nature lonesomeness.

    I have not looked carefully, but I did not notice the old standard “Stardust” mentioned. Perhaps like the “One more for the Road” Sinatra tune mentioned in a previous comment, it only marginally qualifies, being a romantic ballad.

    One song I as a young child in the early 60’s heard performed by my uncle and father, was a song from their own childhoods: Tumbling Tumbleweeds. They did it as a simple guitar duet, one singing lead baritone and playing rhythm, the other singing harmony and playing lead. No fiddles, no drama, just a relaxed for-the-family delivery. The kind of thing done out at grandma’s when when someone would ask, “Did the boys bring their guitars? Mom would like to hear them play”

    It was one of the many hundreds of songs they knew. And their version was the only one I knew existed. It occurs to me as I write this that there are probably a hundred tunes that I know only through them, but which must be published and publicly performed songs preserved somewhere.

    Anyway, based on this surmise, I just looked for a link to the official or the original. Sorry. They are all crap. Cringe inducing, nearly clownish, Movietone performances of folks strutting around in padded shoulder cowboy shirts.

    Even the 1934 or 6 original is just barely tolerable for long enough to get the gist. Too damned earnest, or whiney or something.

    I’m glad I never knew of the movie cowboys who did it.

  76. Maybe I missed a previous mention but , Roy Orbison “ Only the Lonely “ and “Cryin”

  77. DNW: I remember (and liked) that song: “…riding along(?) with the tumbling tumbleweeds….”
    I think it was on an “album” (which consisted of multiple 78 RPM disks) by Gene Autry, which was part of my parents’ small record collection.

  78. Griffin, DNW: Don’t know if you’ve heard of the Cowboy Junkies, a Canadian band, who who took off in the 1980s with a stunning, moody, hypnotic album, “The Trinity Session.”

    The album was so-called because it was recorded in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto. They only used one microphone. They were in rebellion against over-produced music and man, did it sound good. Balm to the ears.

    Anyway. Their covers of “I”m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (Hank Williams) and “Walkin’ After Midnight” (Patsy Cline) were epic. They stand up to the originals IMO, though much different. The “high lonesome sound” of Bill Monroe, but underwater.

    –Cowboy Junkies, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJt9KFyJnbk

    —-Cowboy Junkies, “Walkin’ After Midnight”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg6Uw2cGhQE

    I can’t recommend the album enough. It also rewired my ears so I could hear country music for the first time.

    The Junkies went on to a distinguished career and are still working strong in 2021.

  81. Keith, “Only the Lonely” was my Orbison link, “Cryin’” is also one of my favorites from him.

  83. Well this is the last word! Except no road in the song. (sarc)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh_9QhRzJEs

    I’m So Ronery
    Team America

    I’m So Ronery
    So ronery
    So ronery and sadry arone

    There’s no one
    Just me onry
    Sitting on my rittle throne
    I work rearry hard and make up great prans
    But nobody ristens, no one understands
    Seems like no one takes me serirousry

    And so I’m ronery
    A rittle ronery
    Poor rittle me

    There’s nobody
    I can rerate to

    Feel rike a bird in a cage
    It’s kinda sihry
    But not rearry
    Because it’s firring my body with rage

    I’m the smartest most crever most physicarry fit
    But nobody else seems to rearize it
    When I change the world maybe they’ll notice me
    But until then I’rr just be ronery
    Rittle ronery, poor rittle me

  84. om: Here’s a bank shot off Team America’s “I’m So Ronery.”
    ___________________________

    I’ve been around the world
    Had my pick of any girl
    You’d think I’d be happy
    But I’m not
    Ev’rybody knows my name
    But it’s just a crazy game
    Oh, it’s lonely at the top

    Listen to the band, they’re playing just for me
    Listen to the people paying just for me
    All the applause-all the parades
    And all the money I have made
    Oh, it’s lonely at the top

    Listen all you fools out there
    Go on and love me-I don’t care
    Oh, it’s lonely at the top
    Oh, it’s lonely at the top

    –Randy Newman, “Lonely At the Top”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wjbjfm6ui3c
    ___________________________

    It’s an early Newman song, when his career was just starting to gain traction. Story goes that Frank Sinatra called him in to write some new material for Sinatra. This is the song Newman chose as a demo.

    And that was the end of the Sinatra-Newman collaboration.

  85. “Oliver T. on January 4, 2021 at 2:31 pm said:

    DNW: I remember (and liked) that song: “…riding along(?) with the tumbling tumbleweeds….”

    “Drifting …” which you by now have remembered.

    “I’m a roaming cowboy, riding all day long
    Tumbleweeds around me sing their lonely song
    Nights underneath a prairie moon
    I ride alone and sing a tune
    See them tumbling down
    Pledging their love to the ground
    Lonely but free I’ll be found
    Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds ..

    So that is a lonely song at least; with traveling.

    One difference from what must be the official version was that they drew out “drifting” as ‘driffff – ting along’ with the tumbling tumbleweeds. Drawing out the first two words for 3 ( I guess) beats and then compressing “with the tumbling tumbleweeds” I cannot get used to the real version. LOL

    I also realized in writing these comments that there is a big difference between playing a song, and in performing one for audience effect. These songs I heard, were for family and friends audiences who, except for a core of elders and kids, would be filtering in and out of the parlor or the back porch, appearing back now and then to make a request they had heard the boys play 20 years before.

    This probably accounts for my preference for a much more relaxed, less intense, and less self-conscious delivery than the “real” versions offer.

    “DNW, Oliver T:

    I remember that one! “Sons of the Pioneers” also did “Cool Water,” which fascinated me when I was a kid.”

    Haha As a little boy watching my father sing it I wanted to cry at the thought of him trekking across some water-less waste with old Sal or Blondie; both whom of course had been gone probably to the packing house for half-a-dozen years before I came along. Of course there were horses next door and across the street, so it was not hard to imagine.

    Dad! Dad! Come back Shane!

    So, that was another all the kids would demand , as well as an uptempo version of “Cimarron Roll On”. Which, drum roll, is another arguably lonely song.

    Looking today, I have not found a version on the internet I can bear to listen to. But, there is a Sons of the Pioneers version that is somewhat analogous, having however less bass drive in the rhythm line. LOL With one old electric guitar and a Gibson J45 on mic or clip-on pickup they could make the floor shake and the children dance. The official version has the harmonizing passages I see. Though in much of it they seem to be singing in unison.

    “Lonesome Road”, is another one that might qualify if we expanded Neo’s category a bit. The first time I heard that was about 15 years ago when they were both quite old men. They just pulled it out of a hat and gave it a bluesy swing treatment, and I had no idea until about a year ago that it was not some 19th century relic they had heard from an old uncle or something. Apparently it was quite well known and covered during the 40’s.

    So: Tumbling Tumbleweeds; Cimarron Roll On; and Lonesome Road .. all sort of in the expanded circle … kind of.

  86. Dwight Yoakam doesn’t say he’s lonely, but he’s heartbroke and in the vicinity.
    _______________________________________

    I’m a thousand miles from nowhere
    Time don’t matter to me
    ‘Cause I’m a thousand miles from nowhere
    And there’s no place I want to be

    I got heartaches in my pocket
    I got echoes in my head
    And all that I keep hearing
    Are the cruel, cruel things that you said

    –Dwight Yoakam – A Thousand Miles From Nowhere
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLprAUar11U
    _______________________________________

    DNW: I enjoy your memory posts.

  87. DNW & huxley–
    Thanks for the posts about “Tumbleweeds”. I was going to guess Sons of the Pioneers, if not Autry. (The only two cowboy artists I heard when I was a tot.)

  88. “500 Miles” is a 60s folk song I’ve loved since I first heard Peter, Paul & Mary sing it. It’s by Hedy West and was based on fragments of a song she heard her uncle sing when she was growing up in North Georgia.

    It’s about loneliness, shame and having to leave home. Desolation.
    _________________________________________

    If you miss the train I’m on, you will know that I am gone
    You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles
    A hundred miles, a hundred miles, a hundred miles, a hundred miles
    You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles

    Lord I’m one, Lord I’m two, Lord I’m three, Lord I’m four
    Lord I’m five hundred miles from my home
    Five hundred miles, five hundred miles, five hundred miles, five hundred miles
    Lord I’m five hundred miles from my home

    Not a shirt on my back, not a penny to my name
    Lord I can’t go home this a-way
    This way, this way, this way, this way
    Lord I can’t go home this a-way

    –Peter, Paul & Mary, “500 Miles”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCwj1GMKB44

  89. For the musical pleasure alone — apart from the gathering together of our historical inheritance of traveling songs — listen to F. Schubert’s song cycles “Die Schoene Muellerin” [ https://youtu.be/tr9TiIc1hc8 ] and “Winterreise” [ https://youtu.be/c8UDOmUcxCk ], Mahler’s “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen” [ https://youtu.be/VS_E0TxC3dI ], and Vaughn William’s setting of R. L. Stephenson’s poems in “Songs of Travel” [ https://youtu.be/7KOH2G984nI ].

    More traveling stuff here than strictly taken loneliness as such, though there’s loneliness in there too (“Einsamkeit”, for instance).

  90. It seems some forms of music are better suited to evoking loneliness than others. I would say country and folk more than rock.

    I can’t think of any classical music for loneliness except maybe the section of Khachaturian’s “Gayne” which Kubrick used to excellent effect in “2001” to convey the stark isolation of space:

    –Gayane Ballet Suite (Adagio) (2001: A Space Odyssey Soundtrack)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhYhREdQBn0

  91. huxley on January 5, 2021 at 6:03 am said:

    “500 Miles” is a 60s folk song I’ve loved since I first heard Peter, Paul & Mary sing it. It’s by Hedy West and was based on fragments of a song she heard her uncle sing when she was growing up in North Georgia.

    It’s about loneliness, shame and having to leave home. Desolation.”

    I followed the leads in your comments and see that Hedy West stitched her song together from “patches” of a song or songs sung by her grandfather.

    I had never heard the Peter, Paul, and Mary version. But I suppose that anyone at least 4 or 5 in 1963, would have heard the Bobby Bare version when it first came out as a country crossover hit. And I doubt that anyone over thirty has not heard it, or part of it, at some point in time..

    You are probably right that songs of lonliness and estrangement from current conditions, along with a longing for home, is thematically common in country music. It is in a sense natural to a pioneering people who at the same time have strong family roots and usually positive relationships with those close to them.

    The holiday dysfunction stories so beloved of Hollywood, and the attitudes reflected in the parent child relationships of so many left liberal personalities, seem to represent an attitude toward life and emotional fulfillment less likely to produce this kind of material.

    The Bobby Bare lyrics version comports rather well with Neo’s criteria, albeit being a little too specific with regard to the object of longing that accompanies the subject’s feelings of loneliness and estrangement in those indifferent and even alien seeming public spaces … i.e. streets.

    But as you note, wanting to go home and to be with loved ones in familiar places ( perhaps to find it still somehow inaccessible as in Joe South’s famous tune) is very common in county music.

    Wayfaring Stranger is a fairly good example which should have occurred to me before … though it looks longingly forward to reunion , rather than dwelling impressionistically on the bleak present. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FYdoEbzI2d8

    I don’t know enough about poetry, much less foreign poetry, to kmow if this is a common theme throughout the world, or not.

    I would suppose that along with assumed individualism, certain kinds of familial and interpersonal bonds and values are also requisite and must exist; along with social conditions which sometimes promote migration and travel- at least commonly enough for it to exist in the general consciousness as a theme. You cannot however be a values nihilist and make it work. [Though of course you can be one and still emit a wail of existential anguish. But , since it is presumptively as meaningless as the wailer’s own appetites and fears, it is just, ex hypothesi, noise without claims of objective resonance.]

    Now, it has been a long time since I read “The Wanderer”. But without putting too fine a point on it, it too seems to me to track a cultural theme that in one manifestation or another goes way back in ours.

    “Oft to the Wanderer, weary of exile
    Cometh God’s pity, compassionate love ….

    And happy the man who seeketh for mercy
    From his Heavenly Father, our Fortress and Strength”

    Country music and its broader themes, have a long history in “Anglo Saxon” culture.

  92. Aber ach, DNW! Ours is that time in which our betters have seen fit to cancel The Odyssey altogether; a mere piece of tripe, we’re told, good for nothing and [N]o-body.

    Nobody. (irony aside)

  95. Oliver T.:

    That’s a great Lileks post about the Bee Gees. However, it’s an HBO documentary, not Amazon. Lileks is right: they were brilliant, and they were taken for granted (or hated).

    Now their music is having a renaissance of sorts online with “reactors” on YouTube, which is how I began to rediscover it. I plan a number of posts, some about them and some about other groups, based on what I’ve learned in the past few weeks.

    However, something else – Lileks mentions David Bowie. He may not know that Bowie patterned a song after a Bee Gees song, and many other musicians admired them. See also this and this. There are plenty more.

  96. Neo,
    Thank you for your reply. I actually don’t listen to music much anymore, but a couple of my favorites by the Gibbs Brothers are “The Night the Lights Went Out in Massachusetts” and An Everlasting Love” by Andy.

  97. Going over the comments again and again, as I am stuck here uploading a “for family” video to Rumble – because Facebook (on which I have a picture of a running deer, basically) was “posting” all night and did not ever get there; and because Google Drive is something I’m not sure I trust anymore.

    Just hoping I can fix it so that the Rumble vid can be limited access — I’m not out to tarnish the memory of my “kin folk” or to subject their memory to ridicule by making public a video done for sentimental reason of two octogenarians – one with arthritic hands – taking a stab at revisiting songs they played 40 and 50 years before. *Music being the thread relevance reference*

    About 90% there now.

    But here is the deal: lonely streets aside, music itself, is regenerative and uplifting; even if it only resonates for personal or sentimental reasons; even if you have to listen partly through the generous veil of memory, erasing the mistakes and skating past the clams. It might be your kid playing the recorder, or your mother playing Christmas carols, or a couple of old men getting together one holiday to see if they could knock out a couple of tunes they last played with any practice many decades before.

    And maybe, even the Bee Gees. Though I’ll take that on the say so of others.

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