Let’s get one more Halloween appropriate piece in before the holiday.
We’ve featured a lot of words from Dave Moore this month, but not enough of his voice, so let’s get to that with a performance by Dave backed by the LYL Band. Dave’s a founding member of the LYL Band, singing and playing various keyboards with it. Beside his own band, Moore wrote lyrics for other bands back in the beginnings of the Twin Cities punk/new wave/indie rock scene. Around the same time, Dave worked with Kevin FitzPatrick on a well-loved literary magazine “The Lake Street Review.” Besides poetry and songs, Dave Moore has produced the comic “The Spirit of Phillips” for many years.
Besides Dave’s words, voice and keyboards that are often present here, you’ve also read me talking about Dave’s father, Les Moore (he of the Bauhaus name). That should be enough background from me.
I found Moore’s “Did You Miss It” mysterious, in a good way, so let’s let him tell us how it came to be:
“I could have called this ‘3 Moores Stew,’ where the ‘philosophies’ of Dave, Alan and Les collided in my head around the issue of predestination. It’s also an attempt to celebrate first-and-only-take songs.
For my birthday last year (10/17. #67), I got (my hero) Alan Moore’s 1200-pg. novel Jerusalem. Wonderful, literally. Took a while to read such an intricate structure, and parts of it started to show up in my dreams.
Concurrently, I was editing my dad Les Moore’s sermons, typing over 50 transcripts. I’d class him as liberal Methodist, the admirable socially involved 60s Christian. I heard him speak every week till I went off to college & expected that many of his words would bang something up from my subconscious.
The lyric starts in Alan-psychogeography-zone, where one of his characters is choking to death for hundreds of pages as reality is explicated.
The joke of the chorus is also from Jerusalem, shared by Sir Thomas More with another shade. How could you miss the free will you didn’t have?
2nd verse (‘more hairy’) extrapolates Alan’s simultaneous beauty & death across time.
3rd verse (‘Belief’) is Les’s gift of Heavenly beauty despite death.
4th verse (‘Lights go on’) Dave points out you make your own beauty & might as well enjoy it. If it’s yours, you can get the joke.
Unlike most of my mistakes, those in the concluding instrumental are intentional. If everything’s pre-destined, who would bother pre-scripting this? Or could they?”
Dave points out the contrast we get from having LYL Band performances mixed with the more composed stuff here, where I play all the parts. “Did You Miss It” is one of those “first and only takes songs” that we’ve done, were the arrangement and parts are happening just as the recording light is lit.