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By Root 899 0

these things. A lot of those old kings and leaders had many wives and concubines and Hosea the Prophet was even married to a prostitute, and it didn’t stop him from being a holy man. But these were different times and for Swaggart, it was the end of the line. Reality can be overwhelming. It can also be a shadow, depending on how you look at it. As for me, I wondered what this harlot might have looked like that lured this famous preacher into rolling in the muck. A damsel of tempting statuesque beauty? Probably. It would have to be. If you paid any amount of mind to all this Mickey Mouse stuff, the way these hoity-toity people’s doors and windows aren’t shut tight, you might end up in a private lunatic asylum. This incident might have had something to do with inspiring the song, but then again, it’s hard to say. Conceit is not necessarily a disease. It’s more of a weakness. A conceited person could be set up easily and brought down accordingly. Let’s face it, a conceited person has a fake sense of self-worth, an inflated opinion of himself. A person like this can be controlled and manipulated completely if you know what buttons to push. So in a sense, that’s what the lyrics are talking about. The song rose up until I could read the look in its eyes. In the quiet of the evening I didn’t have to hunt far for it. As always, there were a few verses left behind. “There’s a whole lot of people dreaming tonight about the disease of conceit, whole lot of people screaming tonight about the disease of conceit. I’ll hump ya and I’ll dump ya and I’ll blow your house down. I’ll slice into your cake before I leave town. Pick a number — take a seat, with the disease of conceit.”

I finished the lyrics and left the studio, went back to the main house. Wind was blowing through the tall bamboo. The heavy chrome bumper from my old battered Buick was shining in the moonlight. I hadn’t driven that car in years, was thinking of taking it apart and using it for scrap metal sculpture. The dark gully was overgrown with brush and there was a fox or a coyote down there. The dogs were yapping and chasing something. The lights from the main house were glittering like the inside of a casino. I went in, shut ’em off and glanced at one of my guitars which I hadn’t touched in a while. I was reluctant to touch it. Might as well get some rest, I thought, and then I crawled into bed.

The song “What Was It You Wanted?” was also a quickly written one. I heard the lyric and melody together in my head and it played itself in a minor key. You have to be economical writing a song like this. If you’ve ever been the object of curiosity, then you know what this song is about. It doesn’t need much explanation. Folks who are soft and helpless sometimes make the most noise. They can obstruct you in a lot of ways. It’s pointless trying to resist them or deal with them by force. Sometimes you just have to bite your upper lip and put sunglasses on. Songs like this are strange dogs. They don’t make good companions. Again, there were extra verses. “What was it you wanted? Can I be of any use? Can I do something for you? Do I have enough juice? Wherever you’re off to, one thing you should know. You still got seven hundred miles yet still to go.” The song almost wrote itself. It just descended upon my head. Maybe a couple of years earlier I might have rejected it, never finished it. Not now, though.

Another song, “Everything Is Broken” was made up of quick choppy strokes. The semantic meaning is all in the sounds of the words. The lyrics are your dance partner. It works on a mechanical level. Everything is broken or it looks that way — chipped, cracked, in need of repair. Things are broken, then rebroken, made into something else, then broken again. Once when I was lying on the beach in Coney Island, I saw a portable radio in the sand…a beautiful General Electric, self charging — built like a battleship — and it was broken. I could have remembered that image at the top of the song. But I had seen a lot of other things broken, too — bowls, brass lamps, vessels and jars and jugs,