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.