Play the Jukebox: Swallowed By the Cracks

Tweet

Well, tomorrow is prep day. I should just go to Taco Bell for explosive diarrhea instead of worrying about all that prep. The top ten also starts tomorrow, so today ends the alphabetical jukebox. Unlike the previous songs, this one’s not happy. Swallowed By the Cracks - David + David Steve Goodman told his pal, John Prine, that the record company should put razor blades in the packaging of Prine’s album Bruised Orange (which Goodman produced). That’s how depressing the music was. Ditto this one. Chamber of Commerce music, this ain’t. These two Davids (Baerwald and Ricketts) only made one album, 40 years ago now (and yes, I did use this on the 1986 countdown, thanks for remembering ). If they’d made any more they would have sent a lot of people into therapy. The quasi-title track (“Welcome to the Boomtown,” the only song that cracked the top 40) was about the “glamor” of the drugs in Los Angeles, until “the ambulance arrived too late.” This song, another one that got college rock airplay, is about a trio — a man, his girlfriend, and his best friend — making plans that, as in so many cases in life, fell through. From being a choreographer, actress, and writer, one ran off rather than deal with the failure, one became a store clerk, “and I became this drunken old wh*re.” A friend who worked for a record label (gave me free tickets to see U2 in 1987!!) explained the music business to me one night during a listening party at a local record store: you have about 1% of all the singers, songwriters, and bands in America who ever get heard by anyone “connected” to the industry. Of those few, about 1% get signed, and about 1% of those who get signed actually make a record (like a band from Maine called the Walkers, who broke up by the time their EP was released). So the notion that the dreams of these people leave them “falling so far down like the rest of those clowns begging bus fare back” is hardly new. This song reminds us that, for every one success story, there are a million failures and “what ifs.” Swallowed By the Cracks Written by David Baerwald and David Ricketts Recorded by David + David From Boomtown, 1986 JUKEBOX LYRICS: Telling lies and singing along with the jukebox