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(written Dec 10, 1980)
A very appropriate title, and possibly a good alternate title
for this album! We were, in late '80, indeed about to embark
on one wrong turn after another, leaving first the hardcore and
then the pop scenes behind, eventually sinking into a swamp of
our own creation by the mid '80s, unnoticed, unseen, unknown,
and unmissed.
We'd just dumped Mike in the fall of '80 - our second mistake
(the first was letting Jack get away a year earlier). The "Look
Again" album had, as the year waned, proved itself unmarketable.
Our master plan had failed, and we noticed that attendance had
been dropping off a bit during the last six months. It was a
disturbing time, and I wasn't feeling much like writing.
For some reason, as November turned into December I began to
write furiously, not really knowing why. I had about three songs
done when I heard the news about John Lennon . . .
Of course, five minutes after hearing about that I discovered
that Darby Crash had also died, and this song wrote itself.
The opening riff is stolen from the Germs' "Gimme Gimme",
there's a melodic riff stolen from the Beatles' "Help"
(about 1 1/2 measures' worth), and at the end I started singing
lines from Lennon's "Starting Over" and the Germs'
original fadeout to "Forming" - both of which were
left out of the final mix, unfortunately.
Darby is "the one whose name was washed away by stars more
visible", and the third member of this "trilogy of
infamy" is JFK, whose assassination helped create Beatlemania
in America, and whose dabbling in Southeast Asia would unite
a generation against an unpopular war. Hence the line about the
ghosts of all the dead soldiers who "will not be denied
the right to ask him why they had to fight".
My songwriting flurry continued throughout December, though
all subsequent songs came out sounding a bit too much like vintage
Beatle outtakes from 1963. It seemed appropriate at the time,
but this batch was used against me later by fellow band members
as proof that I was losing my touch. Hell, by that point,
I'd lost everything.
.
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