Odd Songs #001: Bette Davis Eyes (She's Got...Greta Garbo Stand Up Thighs)

She's got Bette Davis Eyes:

(The Kim Carnes version from 1981 is the hit version and the one that most people will know; I think it's the definitive version, too, although the original by Jackie DeShannon is really interesting for other reasons, of which more later).

I've thought about this song an uncommon amount of times this year, for some reason (there was a cover version by Kylie on the radio a few months back for some charity thing, I think that might have been the initial reminder). Not that a reason is needed, it's a fantastic song. Anyway, the aforementioned line - "she got...Greta Garbo stand up thighs, she got Bette Davis eyes" has been one of my favourites out of all Pop for ages now and it turns out that I've misheard it all along. It'll just have to be my favourite mondegreen from now on.

The actual line is "She's got Greta Garbo's standoff sighs, She's got Bette Davis eyes", according to all the lyric sites and listening to the song again, I'm not sure how I've misheard it all these years. Coincidentally, I heard the Jackie DeShannon version earlier this year and it turns out there's another line - "She's precocious, and she knows just, What it takes to make a pro blush" - that has changed from the original, too ("what it takes to make a crow blush" as originally written, must either have been mistranscribed or deliberately changed when Kim Carnes came to record her version).

As the song has a lot of great lines, I wondered if there were any other changes from the original. So, to YouTube!

Here's the original version, written by Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon, performed by Jackie DeShannon in 1974 (brace yourself if you've not heard this before, it's musically very different to the Kim Carnes version, although fans of polka piano are in for a treat):

Jackie DeShannon definitely sings "Greta Garbo's standoff sighs" too. Damnit. Sorry Jackie, I think my line is better.

As for the "what it takes to make a crow blush", on consulting the authority that is Wikipedia, it's an old American midwest saying that may not have been familiar to whoever arranged the Kim Carnes version. I don't think I buy that story, I think it's much more likely that it was deliberately changed.

I say that because I'd've done the same. The original line, although I'd not heard it before, does make sense in the way these folk sayings do; it will be hard to tell if a crow is blushing, because it is already jet black (well, that's my interpretation). But in the context of the song - "she's pure as New York snow", "she'll tease you", "she'll unease you", "she's precocious", and so on - "what it takes to make a pro blush" is more apt. It fits the atmosphere of the song better.

I think Kim Carnes voice lends "make a pro blush" a real earthiness and I reckon that was why it was changed; it sounded better and would make perfect sense to listeners.

It's all around a great job as cover versions go. It's recognisably the same song, but the arrangement is so radically different that it's virtually a rewrite (Bill Kuomo, who wrote and played that distinctive synth line on the Kim Carnes version, should have got a part songwriter credit if you ask me). It's the very exemplar of how to do a cover version. Well done Kim! (and all others involved etc. etc.)

What other covers are out there, I wonder? Well, there's the afore-noted Kylie version:

A perfectly workable hi-NRG version, but it's obviously a cover of the Kim Carnes arrangement (including the distinctive synth line). Also to be noted: Kylie seems to have be inhaling helium in parts of this song. Hey, I'm not judging, just sayin'.

Taylor Swift does a version (to be honest, I think Taylor Swift can do anything if she wants to - it'll turn out she's some sort of superpowered alien or something):

Here she is doing a live version (well, that's what the audio is, dunno what significance the still picture has) and it is of course another cover of the Kim Carnes version. Someone must've gone back to the original, surely?

But what's this? HOLD THE PHONE! Alvin and the Chipmunks do a cover:

Well, that was as awful as expected. What was the fucking point of that, Alvin? That was just a straight speeded-up version of the Kim Carnes arrangement with even sillier voices than on the Kylie one. It actually sounds a bit sordid and creepy, especially Alvin's singing on the last few fading lines.

Seems there's someone called Dean Ray. Yeah, news to me. Anyway, he was on the Australian X-Factor and he looks a bit "rock" (black leather jacket, rock hair, plays own guitar). I wonder what his take on the song will be?

Oh. He just does the synth bit on acoustic guitar. Some unnecessary vocalising. Actually this might be even creepier than the Chipmunks' version.

There's loads more covers; Brandon Flowers has been doing it at gigs for ages and there's seemingly a never-ending stream of self-recorded sensitive acoustic people that I've never heard of having a go at it. But hang on...

...Gwyneth Paltrow does a version??

Actually that wasn't bad. Nothing new in terms of adding to the (Kim Carnes) arrangement, but a decent enough vocal. I can't tell if her mis-timing the first line is deliberate or not, maybe that was part of the performance (in whatever film this was) or maybe she genuinely did just start half a beat too early.

Seems nobody uses the Jackie DeShannon arrangement at all now, though, which is a bit of a shame. Even the piano covers are covers of the Kim Carnes arrangement. Well, apart from this one, I don't think it's based on anything in either arrangement:

That's called the Aphex Twin approach to cover versions, I think.

Anyway, enough of Bette Davis and her eyes for now. It's made a nice change to write about something light. Yeah, gonna do some more stuff like this. Don't worry, you don't have to read it.

Need to do stuff.

Any stuff, really.

Now I'm more under control, I recognise why I was making myself so isolated and weird (part selfishness, part fear and all counter-productive is the short answer to that) but I'm not sure why it seems so difficult to resume normal life. I suppose I've let myself get into this comfort zone and I'm reluctant to disrupt it. But I need to see people again. Got to make the effort.

It's guilt, of course, I still feel like I let everyone down, even though there's no real reason to think it, but hey, it's one of my things. I'm apprehensive how people will react, I suppose. And everything's changed so much; the stuff that used to define my life to a large extent is no longer there. I suppose it's inevitable really; more than half my waking hours for the last twenty years or so have been in one way or another devoted to work, and now they're not. It's a wrench, that's for sure. There's certainly a new sense of freedom, sometimes even of optimism, but you wonder where the time goes. And of course, being me, I feel guilty for not using all this time more constructively. Guilt guilt guilt.

Anyway, I'm going to have to change as before I know it I'll be into another self-absorbed, unhealthy rut. So I'm determined to see people this week. I'm a bit apprehensive about it - everyone's going to be so understanding and nice that I could well burst out crying - but I'll just have to handle whatever comes. I think I'm on top of it enough now.

Fingers crossed...


[Edit @ 22/09/2016:  Now this is the sort of thing that I meant to write when I started this, but got sidetracked]

2 weeks on...

...and how things have changed.

For the better, I should add. Even though I knew it was only pride and stubbornness that was stopping me getting help, it was still impossible to actually overcome these (irrational) things alone. I'm sure that everyone else could probably see what was going on too (I'm lucky to have people around who will take notice of such things) and of course in the end it was an outside intervention that pretty much forced me to take action.

Now I'm on the road, it seems pointless to fight it, I might as well embrace whatever it brings along; there might be some interesting new experiences to be had. And (the initial couple of days aside) it's been good so far. Much less edge. It'll be interesting to appraise the situation once the course is through; as I think it's been pretty effective so far, I would imagine I'll be getting a repeat prescription but maybe with a tapering-off. We'll see.

The thing I'm most glad about is that despite being pretty off it for the three months April-May-June (whilst deluding myself to the nth degree that I was 100% with it), I don't seem to have harmed my memory or capacity to think at all, which - given that I wasn't eating or sleeping properly either, especially towards the end - is a fuck of a relief. The couple of days after the 4th July, I wasn't sure what was going to happen to be honest; there were still elements of the real and not-real getting mixed up. But that all passed. I can look back on the whole scene with remarkable clarity now and separate pretty clearly the real bits from the hallucinatory bits.

I will come back to this again and again, I'm sure, because the hallucinatory bits were very interesting indeed and not necessarily just absurdist crap. There were two definite states of consciousness that I was able to move freely between on that night - call them "real" and "dream" - and I realise that some of the "dream" stuff was tempered by the outside influence of the "real" stuff, but some of the things I saw (and realised) were big, about as big as they come. Big Ideas.

Trouble is, some of these ideas were a bit too big for me to grasp at the time, so although I can recall certain aspects perfectly, I've only got a vague notion of some of the other concepts that were flying around at the time. And I'm sure some parts of it have either gone for good; there was a lot going on that night and even at the time I realised that - at best - I was only tenuously aware of some of the bigger concepts. I could feel things slipping and sliding in the memory even as they were happening, so I'm guessing my recall might not be completely accurate.

It's not like I entered an altered state and saw the face of God or encountered some sort of universal truth or anything, but the ideas I was having and the things I was seeing did seem to represent the whole of everything; all that had gone before, all that is now and all that will happen in the future - all of that formed a kind of continuum: analogous to the electromagnetic spectrum rather than a timeline. I think that was the crux of it anyway, that all past, present and future events, people, things, all co-exist and are actually part of a larger body, one of whose dimensions is time. When I wrote earlier of having the sensation of being able to move between two different states, it was as though I could alter the physical properties of my body to shift between the "real" and the "dream"...I know, it doesn't make much sense and I'm describing it incredibly badly. I'll have another go one day, maybe I can get it down a bit more clearly, given a bit more processing time.

So...yeah.

Well, that was unexpected.

I suppose I should write something about it.

But it's going to be brief. Maybe to be expanded upon later (maybe not).

Those three months (from the start of April until the start of July) which I thought were surely helping me to get better; seems they were just an interlude. The 4th July, I can pretty conclusively say, was the actual nadir.

Details...maybe another time. I can never forget some of the stuff I saw that night though.

It was enough of a jolt to actually get some medical help, though. I can't deny that I've been quite forcibly resisting medicalisation in general (and medication in particular) for this but fuck that, I was wrong.

Can't deny that the first three or four days were a nightmare - racing thoughts, nausea, no appetite, almost impossible to sleep - but those side-effects passed and it just somehow works. I can't say I'm never depressed anymore, and that's a good thing - I don't want to be excessively controlled - but I'm getting there. I'm getting to a place where not everything has to be shite (but haven't lost my critical faculty; I still recognise that 99% of what goes on in the world is shite, it's just that I don't necessarily need to be part of it anymore).

Clear as mud, there. Better explanation when I'm ready, whenever that might be.


[Edit @ 22/09/2016:  This probably represents the peak of my madness and it's not as bad as I thought, which is a relief!]

...And back in the room

Been awhile.

Don't know if that's good or bad really. Bad I think, have had some bad days the last week for some reason; I've been avoiding writing.

Which of course defeats the purpose of this thing in the beginning (if indeed that was it).

I tell myself I'm avoiding putting the whole thing down because I want it to be coherent, but that's never going to work. Although every day I can identify maybe one or two things that point to something, they're often vague and offer no clue as to where they might fit in (considering the mind as analogous to a jigsaw), it's not like there's ever going to be a time when I understand it all.

Part of it is because even now, even after all this time, I'm sure there's things I'm not admitting to myself, or not allowing myself to know. It's a bit like the brain has put a superinjunction on certain things; I know that they're there but I can't access them (and to stretch the analogy, there could be a level above that, like when a separate superinjunction is taken out to stop the reporting of the existence of the original superinjunction; I would be completely unaware of these, of course).

Some of it is just because I'm ashamed to admit it. I spent such a long time suppressing everything and not showing emotion that it's still difficult to express things, certainly in public. This is public, right? Rhetorical question, it's public only in the sense that it's possible for people other than me to see it, but as nobody knows who is writing it, and I haven't told anyone, then I think it probably occupies a space somewhere between private and public.

Sometimes I think I might be holding back from writing things simply because of the fact that other people can see it (whether by accident or design) and might guess who's writing. This is so unlikely that I don't even know why I consider it (or for that matter, why it would be a Bad Thing if it happened).

In any case, it would have been easy just to set up this sort of thing and just not publish it, or keep it readable only to myself, but I don't think that would have satisfied whatever need it is that I have to...express...something.

It's not the first time I've written this, but I'm sure some of these entries are going to make a lot more sense to me at some point in the future.