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Bull Gator Blues Lyrics to this one probably require a little explication. Half the
blues songs on earth start, "Woke up this morning. . . . " and I felt
like being a traditionalist. This fellow wakes up thinking that some spirit
or other hain't has pulled a changeling act and exchanged him with a ghost.
Of course, it all boils down to love problems. What doesn't? "Backdoor
pulpwooder": A backdoor man is a woman's secret lover, sneaks through the
backdoor while the steady is away. A pulpwooder cuts cheap wood - slash pine
and sometimes scrub oak - for the paper mills. This wood is chipped into tiny
bits, mixed with some really nasty chemicals in a "beater", then dried
and flattened as it passes through what seems to be miles of a paper machine.
When I was a kid, I used to help keep pulpwood trucks running, a challenging
task that involves lots of Stop-Leak, baling wire, and many prayers. Turpentine
is used to clean gum off chain saws, and chain-oil lubricates the finger-eating
monsters. "Heart of the stump grows hard as marble stone": Pine stumps,
especially longleaf or yellow pine stumps, rot from the outside in, the opposite
of hardwood stumps. The red heartwood of a pine stump turns rock hard as the
gum dries, making what people call "lighter" or "fat" because
this ossified wood burns quickly and is thus good for getting a fire going.
"SCL": The Southern Coast Line railway. Many SCL engines and boxcars
passed along the rail lines of the Deep South. A train usually slows as it approaches
the many trestles that span rivers and creeks. The last lines of the song describe
how a gator takes its prey and drowns it by dragging it under water. The gator
then stores its catch in an underwater "meat locker" to age the treat.
Really nasty behavior, almost as barbaric as we humans. On this song I play the Maybell in C tuning. Sean is playing bass, John Magnie, accordion, and Steve Amadee, a kit. We put down the rhythm tracks, and later I put down the lead track with my Strat through an Echoplex directly into the board. Right before the great drowning scene, you may hear something that sounds like the bedsprings as the backdoor man goes about his business. It is actually the rusty springs in the vibrato cavity of my Strat being picked up by the Echoplex. One of those lucky serendipitous circumstances that seemed just too good to go back and fix. |