Saturday, October 20, 2012

PRETTY BALLERINA







I called her yesterday

It should have been tomorrow; 

Somewhere a mountain is moving.






Afraid it's moving without me;

Was I surprised
 
No not at all.








Pretty Ballerina: Left Banke (Link)
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2 comments:

  1. TCOctober 20, 2012 at 2:05 PM

    Ay caramba, Curtis, you have once again toppled me over the brink into the Time Warp.

    I feel a bit like the Bronson Pinchot character in The Langoliers, in panic on the runway (of the Belfast, Maine airport, oddly enough), as the plane begins takeoff:

    Afraid it's moving without me;

    Was I surprised

    No not at all.

    But still... the Left Banke will live forever (that is, maybe two more weeks) in memory, not only for this memorable ditty but (even more fixating perhaps) for that other lovely bit of knock-off mop-toppery -- almost better in its way, now that I look at it again after all these weary eons, than the real article:

    And I reckon you knew where this was going....

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  2. ACravanOctober 20, 2012 at 3:43 PM

    I had a feeling. I've been on something of a Left Banke rut (or run-off groove) since last summer when, unexpectedly, we met their former guitarist who is now a psychiatrist friend of a psychiatrist-college friend of mine at a July 4th party and he kindly gave me a copy of a LD cd collection, which made me remember a lot of things I hadn't thought about for awhile. I think Pretty Ballerina and Walk Away Renee are their two best songs, but there are a few more and Michael Brown continued making good records in the original Stories and in a little remembered group Caroline and I worked with in the mid-1970s called The Beckies who were terrific. Walk Away Renee really is exquisite and I've read funny stories about how when Michael supposedly engaged a lyricist (as on Walk Away Renee), it was mostly to have company in the songwriting room because he would essentially write the words by indirection, suggestion and correction. It doesn't seem like a bad system and apparently he honored the co-credit for royalty purposes. Growing up, NY-ers I knew were proud that the Left Banke were a local group and they still seem NYC and metropolitan area to me even though they inhabit the universe. Curtis

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