Down to Seeds and Stems Again Blues

NYC's Worst-Ever Summer of 1977 -- and Breaking those Bad,Bad, Bad Blues [Music]

In my teen years, Jackie Wilson’s Lonely Teardrops and  Elvis’ Are You Lonesome Tonight?  would judder through my whole thorax region – more than just my heart – lightning striking, delivering  a customized message sent directly to me from the Universe. It was sweet pain, exhilarating, isolated. Buddy Holly’s Think It Over line, “A lonely heart grows cold – and old” would recycle through my mind as I struggled to understand the remarkable changes new hormone imbalances were enforcing on me, my friends, and the entire opposite sex. What did  Fate have in store?

Later, when I was older and more arrogant and deluded, and imagined myself undaunted by any and all life risks whatsoever, I made a series of low-odds, long-shot life judgments that led to both spectacularly exciting experiences and digging myself out of a massive weight of accumulated emotional and psychic pain – pain I inflicted as well as suffered from.  A new music was called for.

There is a subgenre of American music that might be called The Bad, Bad Blues I Brought on Myself. The singer is elegiac and soggy with sentimental yearnings, but also is enlivened by a self-deprecating, self-aware, bittersweet sense of humor. This category includes Jane and Leonard Feather’s 1949 How Blue Can You Get, best known in B.B. King’s 1964 version; Billy Walker and Harlan Howard’s 1964 Down to My Last Cigarette, beautifully covered in the late 1980’s by kd lang;  and Bob Dylan’s 1989 Most of the Time.

I listened to all these songs in the most painful years of my adult life, drawn to that healthy element of humor and self-awareness. But the one I came to consider a kind of anthem was Down to Seeds and Stems Again Blues, a 1971 release by George Frayne and Billy C. Farlow, of the group Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen.

“Well I'm sittin' alone, Saturday night, watching the late late show
A bottle of wine, some cigarettes, I got no place to go
Well I saw your other man today, he was wearin' my brand new shoes
And I'm down to seeds and stems again too

“Well I saw my old friend Bob today, from up in Bowling Green
He had the prettiest little gal that I'd ever seen
But I couldn't hide my tears at all, 'cause she looked just like you
And I'm down to seeds and stems again too

Now everybody tells me there's other ways to get high
They don't seem to understand I'm too far gone to try
Now these lonely memories, they're all I can lose
And I'm down to seeds and stems again too

Well my dog died just yesterday and left me all alone
The finance company drived by today and repossessed my home
But that's just a drop in the bucket, gal, compared to losing you
And I'm down to seeds and stems again too

Got the down to seeds and stems again blues”

Credits -- Written by: Billy Farlow; George Frayne AKA Commander Cody, 1971;Lyrics licensed by LyricFind

This was a strong ballad in 1971, with a remarkable collection of musicians behind the narrative, driving a kind of upbeat misery. The singer had new shoes but then lost his gal, and everything went South for him from there. Everywhere he moved through space, he saw a projection of his lost lover. His go-to anesthetic, full-plant weed, home-grown and not bought on the street, is down to the plant’s least tasty and enjoyable parts. It’s as close to bottom as a soul can get. So close, it’s…amusing. Strangely enough, this was still just another good song to me in the early 1970’s, despite my full engagement in, and commiseration with, this song’s litany of dispossessions and ego deflations, in which I genuinely shared.

Then there came a live performance that moved this song very deep into my heart. It came in one of the worst summers in New York City history – the summer of 1977: when the Mets traded Hall-of-Fame pitcher Tom Seaver, producing a months-long gloom of black smog in the sky emanating from the hearts of four million Mets fans ; when the savagery and unpredictability of the second year of the unsolvable “Son of Sam” serial murders acutely terrorized lovers’ lanes,  causing vigilante posses to form spontaneously in the outer boroughs ( the Bronx,  Queens and Brooklyn);  when multiple lightning strikes crippled New York City’s  electric power, setting off a Blackout marked by random looting, arson, and vandalism. The temperature hit 104 F on July 21st.

Amidst that New York atmosphere poisoned by heartbreak, murder, mayhem, and mob violence, on August 5, 1977, the Commander Cody Band appeared at the Convention Hall in Asbury Park, New Jersey – including a performance that registered in my soul and, when I heard it later, completely hijacked my imagination:

To me, this became a moment of gratuitous, surpassing beauty. It was rough and good-humored, yet pure and sublime, reminiscent of the young Czech women who delicately placed flowers into the barrels of invading Russian tanks in the 1968 Prague Spring. It was a breath of delightful why-panic breezing through all those nasty atmospherics.

Part of the song’s magnified effect, in addition to its contrast to the circumstances of life in that NYC summer, came from changes in the lines to accommodate a female singer. But in one or two spots – such as “there’s other ways to get by,” clearly a stronger personal expression than “get high” – there’s an increased resonating power to the words of the song performed live by Nicolette Larson, Bobby Black, Cisco G, the Commander and his band that night.

From Langston Hughes to Thomas Wolfe to Carson McCullers, “country mice” with serious writing chops have conveyed to their readers an overarching sense of the vibrancy, light, enlightened voices and minds, constantly populating and repopulating New York City. The Down to Seeds and Stems Again Blues arrived in the summer heat wave from a town or galaxy that was not too far away to matter.

New York gives you intimations, voices, rumbles of the seething matrixes of ten thousand thousand souls, every one of them alight and alive. Even the garbage sometimes is beautiful, the huge Staten Island garbage mountain near sunset in clear late-October light. Collecting found objects into a masterpiece collage of genius could not have impressed me more deeply than hearing that song.  Dom De Lillo’s fictional description of the South Bronx billboard miraculously suffused with an image of Saint Esmeralda comes close. The cursive neon-red Pepsi Cola sign in Long Island City, as seen from the Manhattan side of the East River on an incredibly clear, cold night could come close.

I do not believe in magic, but I have always believed in miracles. And miracles of sorts did pop out of nowhere in the weeks after the Asbury Park moment. The city recovered, air conditioning and Broadway lights were restored.  Within a week, the “Son of Sam” murderer was fortuitously  photographed, and then recognized and apprehended. A few weeks after the sublime performance in Asbury Park, I met and fell into a crazy at-first-sight permanent state of love with a young woman I did not meet again for three years. We’ve been together ever since.