dirty bastard
Release Date: 9/96
Album: KEEP YOURSELF AMUSED
Writer: ADAM MARSLAND
Lyrics:
She's got a face that couldn't keep from twitching
Looks at her thighs, justifies another trip to the kitchen
In her breadbox she hides her letters and rejection slips
It's a casserole of crumbs and chocolate chips
Her friends all know at the sound of the phone
When she sells hello in a broken tone
They will run out of words that are soothing and kind
That won't disintegrate the trait that she's hiding behind
She cries long and hard
Now the devil's in the disaster
She cries long and hard
All her men have feet of plaster
She crieds long and hard
Over a dirty bastard
She's a writer, not a poet, although she's in that class
But she still won't observe the raw nerve that brought her to this pass
And there were princes she decided were frogs and so she looked in reverse
The other men say she's crazy and worthless and she thinks that she's worse
You could say this cliche sounds like the second day of a tawdry affair
But don't tell her that square one is the very next hex
'Cause she's already been there
And she knows what's next
Adam sez:
"Dirty Bastard" was the first song we recorded with Earle Mankey and as the first song of ours to appear on CD (on a 1995 compilation put out by Paul Collins called POP MATTERS) led directly to our getting signed to Big Deal, ironically as a result of a chat room conversation that I had blundered into (and also from our packing out the Roxy on a Tuesday night). Musically, it's complex and a lot harder to play than it sounds; it's one of the better songs on the first album and compositionally I think it's pretty solid, though like everything else on the first album taken at an unnecessarily breakneck tempo. Lyrically, it's the first of many songs written from the female point of view, a character study of an intelligent and dysfunctional person that tries to see things as they really are and not take sides.
The guitar tone on this and a lot of early Cockeyed Ghost songs is directly lifted from Paul Weller's on "This is the Modern World."