Lyrics to Prose

On a dark desert highway, with cool wind in my hair, the warm smell of colitas was rising up through the air. Up ahead in the distance, I saw shimmering light. My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim. I had to stop for the night.

There she stood in the doorway. I heard the mission bell, and I was thinking to myself, “This could be Heaven or this could be Hell.” Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way.

There were voices down the corridor. I thought I heard them say, “Welcome to the Hotel California. It’s such a lovely place, with such a lovely face. There’s plenty of room at the Hotel California. Any time of year, you can find it here.”

Her mind is Tiffany-twisted. She’s got the Mercedes bends. She’s got a lot of pretty, pretty boys that she calls friends. How they dance in the courtyard—sweet summer sweat. Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.

So I called up the captain, and said “Please bring me my wine.”

He said, “We haven’t had that spirit here since nineteen sixty-nine.”

And still those voices are calling from far away. They’ll wake you up in the middle of the night, just to hear them say, “Welcome to the Hotel California. It’s such a lovely place, with such a lovely face. They’re living it up at the Hotel California. What a nice surprise. Bring your alibis.”

There’re mirrors on the ceiling, there’s pink champagne on ice.

She said, “We are all just prisoners here, of our own device.”

And in the master’s chambers, they gather for the feast. They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast.

The last thing I remember, I was running for the door. I had to find the passage back to the place I was before.

”Relax,” said the night man. “We are programmed to receive. You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave!”

* * *

As an experiment, I edited the lyrics to “Hotel California” (The Eagles, 1976) into prose, to see how it would look as a story, rather than a song. I still can’t read it silently without singing it in my head. Even reading it aloud requires attentive control to avoid it flowing into the melody. I wonder how it would sound being read by someone who didn’t recognize it right away, or didn’t know the song at all. Maybe I need to get someone under the age of 20 to read it to me.

It’s interesting how as sung, the story seems to make a kind of sense. (At least to me.) But as prose, it’s disjointed and fragmentary. I think the mind tends to fill in the missing context because of the music behind the lyrics, and that makes it make sense to the listener. Although, I’ve heard more than one interpretation of this song from numerous people over the years—it’s about a witches’ coven, it’s about a Satanic cult, it’s about drug addiction—so the context one inserts is varied.

* * *

Girl, close your eyes, let that rhythm get into you. Don’t try to fight it, there’s nothing you can do. Relax your mind, lay back, and groove with me. You’ve got to feel that heat, and we can ride the boogie, we can share that beat of love.

I want to rock with you all night; I want to dance you into day light. I want to rock with you all night. We’re going to rock the night away.

Out on the floor, there’s nobody there but us. Girl, when you dance, there’s a magic that must be love. Just take it slow, because we’ve got so far to go. When you feel that heat, and we’re going to ride the boogie, we can share that beat of love.

I want to rock with you all night; I want to dance you into day light. I want to rock with you all night. We’re going to rock the night away.

And when the groove is dead and gone, you know that love survives, so we can rock forever.

I want to rock with you, I want to groove with you. I want to rock with you girl, and dance the night away.

* * *

That’s the prose version of “Rock With You” (Michael Jackson, 1979). I dropped a lot of repetitive verse from the end, so this is probably only about two-thirds of the song’s length. This is a little easier for me to read without sliding into the melody.

Anyway, that’s enough of this experiment. For the record, I got both these lyrics from the liner notes in my own CD collection. I have very eclectic taste in music.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com