Back to Beat!

Alex Mutrux wrote the melody to this song and brought it to the band shortly after Chuck joined the band. I did my best to write a rather lame middle section to give it another part and wrote the words.

Beat was on my mind a lot as a teenager. It intrigued me to think that there was a literate generation of hipsters before the hippies. The only real hippie writer I could think of was Richard Brautigan, who was half beat himself anyway. The second half of the hippie days, the seventies, hadn't really brought about any great minds or writers that I knew of. I surmised that greatness and hipness did not always coincide, and that the culture of beat hipness was more creative and artisitic than hippie freedom from actually producing anything of merit.

In my limitless ambition I envisioned our punk generation as being more like the beats than the hippies, with a vibrant literature (which I would myself provide, of course) and artisitic credibility. I figured maybe creativity just skips a generation now and then. So I proclaimed a movement in my own mind, Back To Beat.

Alex's guitar work on this song is both propulsive and refined. I remember how carefully he crafted his solo. One of our finest moments as a band, it has Kevin Brueseke on drums and Jim Saltsider on bass. Jim sings some backup, and I sing some out-off-key backup too.

She's a modern chick in a modern world
Doing her hair, she doesn't care
He's a modern cat like you see on TV
Cowboys & cars, cruising the bars

Take out your telescope
Put 'em under a microscope
Confess it to the Pope
We're in another world
They're reality and we're not alive
We're shoveling jive
We're in another world
Back to beat

Bangs & mascara & very tight pants
Splittings a chance
Watching her dance
Leather & cool, you're a drug-taking fool
Viewing the jazz with distant romance

Hippies were stupid
But we were smart
We're into Art!
We're in another world
Parker was fine
In the mainline
Tingling spine
Back to beat

The new bohemians - that's us.
It's back to beatnik - or bust.
The cycle of stupidity in the avant-garde will never pass
We've got the best of the past
With which to surpass.

Download "Back to Beat!"