i went over chris oxford’s (depressor) house yesterday to record vocals for the upcoming release of the NECRONOMICON 7″. it’s gonna fackin’ \m/!
but we took bong hits and took too long. i had to get to the Z for a show so we ended up just going through his dungeon collection of vinyl that floored me more than the fat bud we just converted to smoke! he had the sickest, most deep, most vast, most nostalgic, (some still unopened), library of emotion from lament to angst. he made me promise not to tell anyone. so the safest place i thought of keeping it is here in myspace blog purgatory.
i pulled out his copy of cocteau twins’ first release ‘garlands’ (my favorite!) and was so excited to see it in vinyl. i only had it as a tape back in the day. i put the record on and he pulled out a piece of paper from inside the jacket. it was the lyrics to ‘wax and wane’ …ok, if you’ve never listened to the real twins, you wouldn’t know how important lyrics are to their songs. nobody knows what the hell she really says! =P i thought at first, ‘kewl.’
then he pointed at the corner of the paper and it said, ‘happy birthday chris! elizabeth fraser’ … WHAT?! he tells me that when kirk was on tour with them, he called and asked kirk to get the words for that song!! and he did!!!
now for the peculiar part…
chris’ email is devilbitesdirty@… in the lyrics that he got from our lady elizabeth, the third line reads:
‘the devil bites dirty’
but in all the later publications of the lyrics i’ve found so far both in print and online, the lyrics read:
‘the devil might steady’
now its our secret.
…
WAX AND WANE
Cocteau Twins 1982
Carrying prose
Broke my real friend
The devil might steady
We wax and we wane
The devil might steady
We wax and wane
(x4)
Licking alms
The devil might steady
Rattling we’ll taste
We wax and we wane
The devil might steady
We wax and wane
(x4)
Caring is a bury gin shot
The devil might steady
Up ’till the wee wanes
Oh, we laugh in their faces
The devil might steady
We wax and wane
(x8)
***
This is a cover version of a song originally written by Lewis Allan in 1939 and made famous by Josephine Baker, Billie Holliday and others. This recording was made during one of the Cocteau Twins’ numerous BBC Radio sessions with John Peel in the early 1980s, and is available on the BBC Sessions compilation.
STRANGE FRUIT
Performed by Cocteau Twins 1983
Popularized first by Billie Holiday 1939
Written by Lewis Allan 1938
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
“While many people assume Strange Fruit was written by Billie Holiday herself, it actually began as a poem by a Jewish schoolteacher and union activist from the Bronx who later set it to music. Disturbed by a photograph of a lynching, the teacher wrote the stark verse and brooding melody about the horror of lynching under the pseudonym Lewis Allan in 1938. It was first performed at a New York teachers’ union rally and was brought to the attention of the manager of Cafe Society, a popular Greenwich Village nightclub, who introduced Billy Holiday to the writer.
Holiday’s record label refused to record the song. Holiday persisted and recorded it on a specialty label instead. The song was quickly adopted as the anthem for the anti-lynching movement. The haunting lyric and melody made it impossible for white Americans and politicians to ignore any more the Southern campaign of racist terror. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, between 1882 and 1968, mobs lynched 4,743 persons in the United States, over 70 percent of them African-Americans.”
