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Re: (TV) Waterloo, Stalingrad, Calais, etc,
At 7:17 AM -0400 4/29/01, secretX wrote:
Tom reads books on historic military battles. Some of those battles end
up in his songs. Most of his songs are about at least two overlapping
situations (in dream terminology: the manifest content and the latent
content). Sometimes historic themes illustrate what's going on in his
life. Does he generally view romance as a battle? "Waterloo" is a term
for a defeat of any kind. "Postcard from Waterloo" is about a romantic
defeat as well as a battle. (They eventually got back together.)
Interesting to read this; in the context of the recent discussion of
the meanings of "Waterloo" and "Stalingrad" I was going to mention
that Tom often uses military references in his songs,"Foxhole" and
"Words from the Front" being two obvious examples. Also, there's
something downright martial about the sound of a lot of his material;
if "Venus de Milo" isn't, at least in some part, a march, I don't
know what it is.
In fact, I think it's the martial quality of a lot of the Television
and Verlaine material that drew me to it. I realized a while back
that a good deal of the music I like has this feel. Other examples
would include some of Warren Zevon's material, such as "Johnny
Strikes Up the Band" and "Boom Boom Mancini"; Zevon also references
military matters directly in some songs, e.g., "Roland the Headless
Thompson Gunner." I suspect this aspect of my musical taste might
have something to do with that fact that the earliest music I was
exposed to included a healthy (or should that be unhealthy?) dose of
war-related material. My father is a military history buff, and a
record I heard over and over as a child was a Folkways recording of
ballads of the Civil War.
- Jesse
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