Track #3: Dirty White Coats
What are the lessons from Dirty White Coats? There are a couple. One is Dylan’s credo, “First thought, best thought” and perhaps the other is that simple is often better. Listen, the song is really not very complicated. Although many great songs, when picked apart and laid bare on the stones are about as simple as this. Two chords with a third thrown in there whenever you want it. C to F.
But the way I played them just had this groove. It had a spirit. And so I decided I didn’t need anything else and that could be the song. This little progression is very old. And yet one good thing about time is that sometimes it passes for the best. Because I would play this thing to myself and long, simply long, to hear a powerfully recorded version with strings and keys and things in there that would give it some sweetness and some melancholy and some triste, you know? La tristeza. Sadness.
How long ago was this? Like all of these tunes, back in 2006. Long time ago. I first erected some of the frames and the timbers in the Winter of 2006 and would strum them on my acoustic guitar. Upstate, by myself, I demo’ed the song for the first time. I used my keyboard to create some string settings. I think I had selected something like a calliope sound or some kind of Farfisa sounding organ. The drum beat was this standard 120 thing that the keyboard did which actually gave it a nice pep, a nice little momentum. (ed note: like your dad, you’re constantly using the modifer ‘little’ to connote some kind of small, intimate, personal beauty, are you not?)
Once again I felt compelled to write a bridge and this is one of those times where not only was it too much, it took you completely out of the song on some bizarre sideroad that really wasn’t very helpful. Just a small minor-key moment that was kind of boring in its predictability But the aha moment. The thing that you discover and it beats your heart a little faster for understanding what it could be and what it might become. That happened coming out of the bridge and into that part where I sing “I’ll take you back” and I heard this backing vocal in my head and I doubled it on my 8 track and it was very lovely. It brought many things home for me in that song. E and I listened to it driving back from upstate and it put a smile on my face.
The other thing about this tune are the lyrics. There are some images in this song that are very personal and very painful and very beautiful. I won’t share all of them but these are some lyrics that I feel I really connected with. That I tapped into something. My favorite part of the song is the third verse.
Let me just tell you how it is in hospitals if you don’t know. They do not seem like places where people would logically ‘get well’. Just on the surface. You are stuck full of needles and tubes and machines are making noises. Light is coming in from the hallway, from the windows. Strange smells, strange groans. It’s very hard to fall asleep in that kind of place. Very hard to actually get real rest.
Let’s say you finally fall asleep. Well, it won’t last. Because the nurses need to check your vitals every so often and that wakes you up and then as the sun is rising the doctors start making their rounds. Here is how doctors are: they are well schooled. They exude smug self-satisfaction. They don’t really listen because most of the time it’s nothing even when it might not be and you’re probably being too dramatic and whiny about it and they went to school for a long time so why should they know your case file, why should they be briefed on what’s ailing you, they should just look at the file and then you can have this weird disjointed conversation with a new doctor every morning and every f-ing time you can tell them the same story and the good thing is that they’re completely inconsistent and won’t really know nor, truthfully, seem to care about what’s ailing you and perhaps they’ll contradict themselves and regardless, I shit you not, it really does not feel like they’re listening. There’s this dazed dreamy look in their eyes as they hold their clipboards. And the whole time you’re thinking, “This doesn’t make sense. They don’t seem like they actually care about whether you’re feeling better or getting better.” And nothing happens on time and there’s this weird compulsion to silence and submission to authority but this authority in question is the combination of passive uncaring doctors and passive uncaring insurance companies and agitated irritated nurses. And they have to keep taking blood but maybe you have smallish veins and so that means that, after a few days of being in the hospital and maybe you already have a line in but they need to draw blood from somewhere else they keep sticking you with a needle and sticking you and sticking you and looking for a vein and maybe this was just at that very moment when you might fall asleep and they’re sticking you and they’re sticking you and they’re sticking you and all it does is cause more pain and you’re wondering, “When. When will I feel better?”
So that’s what the song’s about.
Chords: C/Cmaj7 – F Chorus: G-F-C
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Wendy
