Here's yet another song from that 11/13/98 show, making twelve out of fifteen songs now posted.
I already did a "minor secrets of" write-up about "... and I Will Be with You" when I recently posted the music video and I don't have too much to add in way of minor secrets, except:
This was one of the few songs from that era that came "music first," that is, we had the basic guitar figure and structure and were fooling around with it for a stretch before I decided it what it was going to be about and stuck in lyrics to that effect. Usually I come up with the song (and the music and lyrics develop together "organically" on the couch) and present it to the band, saying, okay guys, do your worst. Before the lyric-sticking happened, we had been playing it at sound checks, and the title we knew it by was "A Rat on a Bun" -- sung like a-rat, a-on, a bun -- because the T shirt I was wearing when I introduced it had that phrase and a picture of a girl with a rat in a hot dog bun. (Don't ask, no idea.) The name stuck. So that's why the set lists of that era always list the song as "RAT." If you were wondering about that, now you know.
When Chris Appelgren and I did the layout of the lyric sheet for Revenge Is Sweet, we did it in prose form rather than as verse, as though each song were a chapter of a little novel that happened to rhyme and scan, and I always got a kick of how that looked with the bridge here: Going all the way, kid. No need to fake it. Half-drunk. Half-naked. Half-awake'll make it all right.
And you know, this album is a bit novel-y as much as it's anything. Eat your heart out, Mr. Bukowski.
Posted by Dr. Frank at January 4, 2018 09:27 PM