|
My Man – Acting for All the World Like George W. BushMy Man
My Man was inspired at one of the hundreds of commemorations for The Downing Street Memo that were held on July 23, 2005. This event was hosted by Representive Barbara Lee, a real hero in my eyes, at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, California. Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in the 70s, was one of the speakers, but it was another speaker who caught my imagination and put the seed for My Man into my head. He was a young military fellow who said, “If you want to speak to the red state people, then you’ve got to talk their language. Why hasn’t someone written a country-western song about Bush?” Well, there was the catalyst. I had already thought to myself that people who believe in the falsehoods and forgeries of George W. Bush are like a wife who has all the evidence that her husband is having an affair–the lipstick on his collar, the reek of another woman all over him–and yet will still believe that he has been true to his vows. I’m full of sympathy for this wife, but what’s to be done? Well, that’s up to her, after all. Now My Man is not really a country-western song, I guess; I guess it’s more blues. And I love the sultry, bluesy voice of April Ash. And there’s something sassy about April that I like very much, too. 
“Sassy” is the word Philip applied to her when he first told me about having seen her at the open mike on a Monday night at the Fox and Goose restaurant and bar in Sacramento. Philip Howard–www.therightmusic.com–is the arranger and producer of the CD of “My Man”. Since we had worked together intensely and over a long period of time on my musical, Howling Twain, I trust Philip to the nth. When Philip provided me with the arrangement, I was concerned about the last few measures, the lead out, because a person hearing the song for the first time would think it was leading into a third verse. I didn’t want a third verse. I wanted only to state the problem, not try to solve it; so I knew that I wanted April to provide me with some conclusive talk over those last measures. In one of the recording sessions, I asked Philip to loop the vamp so that April, in the mood of the end of the song, could improvise some remarks. April was a champ and gave us several. Of those, I chose “Oh, man, am I gonna let him do this to me again?” and “Aw, pass the sugar” with that little laugh of hers. Quite in character, I think, for this woman singing about her betrayal by her man. My Man is definitely a political song, but do not mistake it for a partisan piece. In fact, it is a satirical comment on the very dangers of partisanship as well as, yes, a personal reaction against the blind partisanship of most of my family who are staunch Republicans. But in my loving eyes, my dear mother, a staunch Democrat, was just as blindly wrong as those staunch Republicans. My dad, now, there was a thinker, neither Democrat nor Republican, or sometimes both Democrat and Republican. But in modern times with all the red state blue state hooplah, can we get back to real thinking? My Man is about cheating and some people's willingness to put up with it, for whatever reasons they may have. And please, please, please have no illusions that My Man is a satire on Hillary Rodham Clinton, or indeed has anything at all to do with her marriage, her support of her husband, or her candidacy for President of the United States. Click here to learn more about my thoughts on this complex and private subject. My Man CD available from Lookout Press
Copyright © 2006 Robert Locke, rev. 2008 |