i got introduced to neil young primarily via pearl jam, who did a cover version of "keep on rocking in the free world" with neil young at the 1993 MTV awards show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTTsyk-pyd8
this performance is what rock and roll is supposed to be: old men angry at everything and gasping at one more chance for relevance before fading into obscurity. it's awesome, powerful noise.
after i saw this performance, i went out and borrowed a neil young album from the library and learned all three chords to "keep on rocking," making it one of the first songs i learned on guitar. strange, but i had completely forgotten about that.
other than that, not a huge neil young fan. i listened to harvest at one point or another. looking forward to this "on the beach" album, though judging by all the "blues" songs, i can't imagine dr. roboheathen will enjoy it very much.
wow. i don't know what to say here other than "abject disappointment." this is the first album we've listened to that i really just said, "this is not at all good and those guys at pitchfork are pretentious idiots."
to start with, the lyrics were atrocious. i found myself finishing half the lines in the song...it was as though neil youg didn't give any though to what he was saying, just played mad libs with cliched phrases that rhyme with each other.
at one point in ambulance blues, he even says "It's hard to say the meaning of this song." that's because the song doesn't have a meaning, neil. getting stoned and ranting does not make for good lyrics.
as for the music, i kept thinking about sgt. robo's continual boredom with the blues and for the first time, i, too, felt bored with the blues. it didn't help that the songs were all paced about as fast as a mashed potato sandwich, which made the inevitability of the blues structures just seem soooo daunting. nothing surprising, i found myself just waiting impaitently for the rest of the bad lyrics and the chord progression to resolve itself.
ultimately, i feel as though AT BEST this album can be characterized as boring, lazy, half-assed music by stoned hippies. at worst, it's just plain bad.
but wait! let's hear what neil young himself has to say about people like me who are critical of his music:
"So all you critics sit alone You're no better than me for what you've shown. With your stomach pump and your hook and ladder dreams We could get together for some scenes." -- Ambulance Blues
huh. sorry you feel that way neil. but i don'thave a stomach pump. and i don't have any hook and ladder dreams. i'm also not really interested in getting together with you for some scenes. maybe once you write a song without using about two dozen non-sequiturs. or, you know, just stay sober long enough to say something that even KINDA makes sense.
so there's a lot of context and 'mystery' regarding this album. the most important fact that you should know is that it was released in '74 on vinyl, released again on cassette and i think even 8-track a few years later, and then never released again until a few years ago on cd. so for the longest time, it was basically only available on vinyl. infact, this was one of about 6 neil albums that never made it to cd, until neil reissued 3 of them around 2003 after internet petitions. the reasons he gave were fairly vague...i think the most common one was that he's an analog purist and did not like or trust the digital format, and wasnt willing to burn his comparatively non-hit albums onto a format that would worsen their quality. and remember, downloading music didnt really catch on until the early 2000s, late 90s at the latest (as far as i know...i was a bit behind the times on this). so attaining digitized mp3s from the original vinyl was probably very hard. basically, this album over time turned into a lost, cult classic. i must also add, that of the 6 albums neil refused to allow digital release to, this was definitely the best one. i actually remember seeing that petition, and not signing it, hehe. i'm such an asshole. i purchased this on vinyl in college, for the equivalent of about 4 american dollars. when i came to nyc in the early part of this century and saw this album on sale for 25 american dollars, i was utterly gleeful! F-you, nyc record prices, i won! hahaha. i kinda wanted to keep this album obscure, for fear that it would dilute its 'lost classic' aura. and now that cds are dying out and mp3s are taking their place, it almost seems silly for neil to have released it as late as he did. its like releasing a cassette in 1999 or something. another mysterious aspect of this album is the cover. yeah neil is there, like on his previous 4 album covers (excluding 'harvest,' by far his highest selling album, and also excluding 'time fades away,' which was the follow-up to harvest and released before 'on the beach,' which is also one of the original 6 albums that neil neglected to commit to digital, and is actually still only available on vinyl. and its pretty good, too!), but unlike those album covers where you can see him head on or in profile, he's turned around so that you can only see his back, like he's hiding something, or maybe ashamed. there's beach furniture, some huge buried car part, a headline on a newspaper about nixon resigning...its pretty abstract. i have no idea what it means, nor does the internet as far as i could find. also, when you open up the record, the inside of the record sleeve is the same campy 70s design thats on that beach furniture, probably reminding you that this record somehow belongs in the same weird universe as the cover. its actually pretty cool, as not many records take advantage of that aspect of packaging. i do like this album a lot, but for personal reasons. i'll discuss the music/lyrics and address some of Schnitzel's issues in a later posting (time to leave work)...
the buried (conspicuously american) car and discarded politically-ripe newspaper strike me straight away as representing an escape from the appurtenances of american society.
he's on the beach away from all the noise, and has "dropped out" as it were.
the iconography of the beach being shot from behind has existed in public consciousness for some time. whether the man-against-the-sea-from-behind was new when neil did it, i dun't know.
now granted, i'm a bit biased pro-neil. if i hear a new album or song of his, i'll look for the positive, or try to fit it into what i know about him or how expressive he is. because, simply, he is one of the best composers of 'introspective' and 'idiosyncratic' pop songs i have ever heard, even if this album is not a prime example. i have absolutely no idea how the hell pfork put this one ahead of 'after the goldrush,' an album that i'd put easily in the top 5 of this decade. they put it at 99. they didnt even include 'zuma,' which neil released in '75 and is covered in heavy distortion, and probably the first 'grunge' album ever. if you are new to neil young, i would start you on one of those two albums, they have way more appeal. this album is probably his most confused, weirdest, angriest album, but its still not as good as at least 4 other albums he released in the 70s. this is an album for neil fans. but as i said, if pfork were big neil fans, they'd have put 'after the goldrush' in the top 5, which just makes this choice seem so odd.
but anyway, what i like about this album is neil's confusion. this is an album where, lyrically, neil is railing against some anonymous person or people, who have somehow put him down. he alternates, though, even multiple times within a song, between describing how shitty these people are, and how, eventually, everything will get better. he's stuck in some inbetween phase, where he needs to tell himself that life will all turn out well in the end, and where he just has to express his anger with these people that made him feel the way he does. i hope i'm making sense here. maybe i should pause by ending this paragraph in the correct structure for paragraph ending.
lyrics railing out against people:
'i hear some people talkin me down'
'well all those people think they got it made, but i wouldnt buy sell borrow or trade...to be like any of them'
'you're only real with your make up on'
'its easy to get buried in the past'
'you're all just pissin in the wind'
lyrics that say it'll all get better:
'some get stronger, some get strange, but sooner or late it all gets real..walk on..'
'i'd rather start all over again [than be like people he's 'railin against]'
'i'm deep inside myself but i'll get out somehow'
the track 'walk on' is a great song, i like 'for the turnstiles,' and the last two are incredible, even if they are kind of acoustic and mellow. and although 3 tracks have 'blues' in their name, only 1 is actually close to a standard 12-bar blues.
i know this sounds emo and retarded, but when i feel like everyone in the world or specific people are shit, i find this album consoling. neil is saying pretty much what i want to say, but he's saying it better than i could. and plus, he's wise enough to know that everything is gonna get better sooner or later.
I think ultimately what I will take away from this album is a more precise distinction between what constitutes production, and what is arrangement. Because when I was listening to it, I honestly thought that it was really well produced. But then when I read about the album, and learned that it had been deliberately under-produced, I was confused.
See, to me, the job of a producer is to decide which notes get played by which instruments, in addition to managing the mix. But that definition only really applies to electronic music, where the entire song really is the product of a single man's work (not a woman, never a woman). In that case, the notes themselves, and the process of distributing them amongst the tracks, is the job of the producer.
But what I've learned from reading what you guys wrote and also what is written about the album elsewhere, that aspect of songwriting is not in the purview of production. In instrumental music like this, it seems that production is all about technical recording considerations like acoustics, microphones and mic placements, and the usual panning and fader stuff. And in this case, those aspects are handled with something of a relaxed attitude, to put it politely. Instead, what I was enjoying were the arrangements, and I continue to feel that there is some good musicianship pretty much throughout this album.
I can't really comment on the lyrics because the lyrics to 95% of all songs are all interchangeable to me for the most part. Feeling persecuted by people or feeling empowered to overcome that persecution, there doesn't seem to be too much original thought when you're singing about people "getting you down" and so forth. And like schnitzel said, we're dealing with an additional layer of crazy-ass improvised drugs obfuscating the meanings. But I can understand how hearing Neil sing what you're feeling can be cathartic. It certainly beats writing in your diary or halfheartedly cutting your wrists with a broken-off protractor.
Very surprised to hear Nurse Robowaggle comment on the interesting nature of the music on this album. It sounded VERY standard and boring to my uneducated ear, but I'll def go back and listen to the referenced songs again to hear the interestingness.
As for Disdainty's comments...maybe we should replace this one with "After the Goldrush" a la Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" replacing Zep's "III" ?
naw man, i like this album a lot. and 'after the goldrush' is already on the pfork list - barely, hehe i think its 98 or something. to simplify my views on this album: if you're a neil fan, esp of his more acoustic/country stuff, you will like this album. if you're unfamiliar with neil, this album is probably not the best place to start, as its too mellow, bitter, confusing, and difficult.
i'm really surprised that neither of you commented on his voice. i've never had a problem with it, but thats what seems to turn most people off.
sarge, you make an interesting point about the role of the producer. there are some examples of the 'producer' having huge control over the arrangements as well. phil spector and brian wilson in the mid 60s most likely had control over every note, instrument selection, chord, vocal sound and reverb amount for everything in the mix, much like electronic music producers today and disco producers in the 70s. and those guys (NOT the disco producers, i'm talkin about brian and phil here) were profoundly amazing producers, arrangers, recording engineers (faders and mic placements and whatnot) and one might even argue pop songwriters. (hehe. one *might* even argue that for brain wilson, there is absolutely no argument here. but i digress, abstractly.)
neil young does have some fairly arranged pieces with string sections and whatnot on other albums, and they tend to be my least favorite songs. i do not know who arranged them or even made the decision to put such instruments on there. but yeah, there seems to be none of that on this album.
from wp: "The album was recorded in a haphazard manner, with Young utilizing a variety of session musicians, and often changing their instruments while offering only bare-bones arrangements for them to follow (in a similar style to Tonight's the Night). He also would opt for rough, monitor mixes of songs rather than a more polished sound, alienating his sound engineers in the process."
the backing musicians differ throughout this album. some of them were from his band 'crazy horse', some were from 'the band' (remarkable multi-instrumentalists in their own right), david crosby even makes an appearance. when different musicians play on different songs throughout an album, it almost always causes the songs to sound markedly different, as opposed to the same musicians playing on every song. this probably added to the 'relaxed attitude' sound of the entire record. i have no doubt that it was neil's intention to have the album sound a little haphazard and even 'sloppy.'
Sargent Harmony, here's something you might find interesting. neil is great at throwing in non-traditional rock chords. and by that, i mean chords other than simple minor and major chords, or at least throwing them around in a seemingly random manner, as he did on the first song. i am forever indebted to him for learning the D minor 7 chord...i dont even remember which song i learned it from, he uses it a bunch of times, and in the open position, its very easy to play on guitar (http://www.howtotuneaguitar.org/images/chords/d-minor-7.gif). its gotten to the point where if i were to write a song, i would purposely avoid playing that chord, just because it reminds me so much of neil. even 'built to spill,' the most neil young sounding indie rock band ever, use the minor7 chord prominently on my favorite track of theirs, 'carry the zero.'
today has been the hottest, sunniest day in nyc in a long time. one might even say the first real day of summer. and when i wanted to put on some music, i immediately put on the last two tracks on this album. all i can say is that if you cant put on 'motion pictures' on a hot summer sunday morning, put your hands behind your head, lay back in the blazing sun and turn your thoughts inward...well, then i can only pity you.
pitchfork's top 100 of the 70's + top 100 of the 80's, considered, scrutinized, explored, assailed, defended, appreciated and deprecated, fussed over, held up high, kicked to the curb and held back up again. education by fire and a middle finger to disdain. tea, anyone?
as long as we're at it, let's do this thing again :D
ReplyDeletei got introduced to neil young primarily via pearl jam, who did a cover version of "keep on rocking in the free world" with neil young at the 1993 MTV awards show:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTTsyk-pyd8
this performance is what rock and roll is supposed to be: old men angry at everything and gasping at one more chance for relevance before fading into obscurity. it's awesome, powerful noise.
after i saw this performance, i went out and borrowed a neil young album from the library and learned all three chords to "keep on rocking," making it one of the first songs i learned on guitar. strange, but i had completely forgotten about that.
other than that, not a huge neil young fan. i listened to harvest at one point or another. looking forward to this "on the beach" album, though judging by all the "blues" songs, i can't imagine dr. roboheathen will enjoy it very much.
wow. i don't know what to say here other than "abject disappointment." this is the first album we've listened to that i really just said, "this is not at all good and those guys at pitchfork are pretentious idiots."
ReplyDeleteto start with, the lyrics were atrocious. i found myself finishing half the lines in the song...it was as though neil youg didn't give any though to what he was saying, just played mad libs with cliched phrases that rhyme with each other.
at one point in ambulance blues, he even says "It's hard to say
the meaning of this song." that's because the song doesn't have a meaning, neil. getting stoned and ranting does not make for good lyrics.
as for the music, i kept thinking about sgt. robo's continual boredom with the blues and for the first time, i, too, felt bored with the blues. it didn't help that the songs were all paced about as fast as a mashed potato sandwich, which made the inevitability of the blues structures just seem soooo daunting. nothing surprising, i found myself just waiting impaitently for the rest of the bad lyrics and the chord progression to resolve itself.
ultimately, i feel as though AT BEST this album can be characterized as boring, lazy, half-assed music by stoned hippies. at worst, it's just plain bad.
but wait! let's hear what neil young himself has to say about people like me who are critical of his music:
"So all you critics sit alone
You're no better than me
for what you've shown.
With your stomach pump and
your hook and ladder dreams
We could get together
for some scenes." -- Ambulance Blues
huh. sorry you feel that way neil. but i don'thave a stomach pump. and i don't have any hook and ladder dreams. i'm also not really interested in getting together with you for some scenes. maybe once you write a song without using about two dozen non-sequiturs. or, you know, just stay sober long enough to say something that even KINDA makes sense.
so there's a lot of context and 'mystery' regarding this album.
ReplyDeletethe most important fact that you should know is that it was released in '74 on vinyl, released again on cassette and i think even 8-track a few years later, and then never released again until a few years ago on cd. so for the longest time, it was basically only available on vinyl. infact, this was one of about 6 neil albums that never made it to cd, until neil reissued 3 of them around 2003 after internet petitions. the reasons he gave were fairly vague...i think the most common one was that he's an analog purist and did not like or trust the digital format, and wasnt willing to burn his comparatively non-hit albums onto a format that would worsen their quality. and remember, downloading music didnt really catch on until the early 2000s, late 90s at the latest (as far as i know...i was a bit behind the times on this). so attaining digitized mp3s from the original vinyl was probably very hard. basically, this album over time turned into a lost, cult classic. i must also add, that of the 6 albums neil refused to allow digital release to, this was definitely the best one.
i actually remember seeing that petition, and not signing it, hehe. i'm such an asshole. i purchased this on vinyl in college, for the equivalent of about 4 american dollars. when i came to nyc in the early part of this century and saw this album on sale for 25 american dollars, i was utterly gleeful! F-you, nyc record prices, i won! hahaha. i kinda wanted to keep this album obscure, for fear that it would dilute its 'lost classic' aura. and now that cds are dying out and mp3s are taking their place, it almost seems silly for neil to have released it as late as he did. its like releasing a cassette in 1999 or something.
another mysterious aspect of this album is the cover. yeah neil is there, like on his previous 4 album covers (excluding 'harvest,' by far his highest selling album, and also excluding 'time fades away,' which was the follow-up to harvest and released before 'on the beach,' which is also one of the original 6 albums that neil neglected to commit to digital, and is actually still only available on vinyl. and its pretty good, too!), but unlike those album covers where you can see him head on or in profile, he's turned around so that you can only see his back, like he's hiding something, or maybe ashamed. there's beach furniture, some huge buried car part, a headline on a newspaper about nixon resigning...its pretty abstract. i have no idea what it means, nor does the internet as far as i could find. also, when you open up the record, the inside of the record sleeve is the same campy 70s design thats on that beach furniture, probably reminding you that this record somehow belongs in the same weird universe as the cover. its actually pretty cool, as not many records take advantage of that aspect of packaging.
i do like this album a lot, but for personal reasons. i'll discuss the music/lyrics and address some of Schnitzel's issues in a later posting (time to leave work)...
here's the real mystery: what happened to D's paragraph formatting?
ReplyDeletedid the old innkeeper make off with his carriage returns?
the buried (conspicuously american) car and discarded politically-ripe newspaper strike me straight away as representing an escape from the appurtenances of american society.
ReplyDeletehe's on the beach away from all the noise, and has "dropped out" as it were.
the iconography of the beach being shot from behind has existed in public consciousness for some time. whether the man-against-the-sea-from-behind was new when neil did it, i dun't know.
http://tinyurl.com/y882rgc
now granted, i'm a bit biased pro-neil. if i hear a new album or song of his, i'll look for the positive, or try to fit it into what i know about him or how expressive he is. because, simply, he is one of the best composers of 'introspective' and 'idiosyncratic' pop songs i have ever heard, even if this album is not a prime example. i have absolutely no idea how the hell pfork put this one ahead of 'after the goldrush,' an album that i'd put easily in the top 5 of this decade. they put it at 99. they didnt even include 'zuma,' which neil released in '75 and is covered in heavy distortion, and probably the first 'grunge' album ever. if you are new to neil young, i would start you on one of those two albums, they have way more appeal. this album is probably his most confused, weirdest, angriest album, but its still not as good as at least 4 other albums he released in the 70s. this is an album for neil fans. but as i said, if pfork were big neil fans, they'd have put 'after the goldrush' in the top 5, which just makes this choice seem so odd.
ReplyDeletebut anyway, what i like about this album is neil's confusion. this is an album where, lyrically, neil is railing against some anonymous person or people, who have somehow put him down. he alternates, though, even multiple times within a song, between describing how shitty these people are, and how, eventually, everything will get better. he's stuck in some inbetween phase, where he needs to tell himself that life will all turn out well in the end, and where he just has to express his anger with these people that made him feel the way he does. i hope i'm making sense here. maybe i should pause by ending this paragraph in the correct structure for paragraph ending.
lyrics railing out against people:
'i hear some people talkin me down'
'well all those people think they got it made, but i wouldnt buy sell borrow or trade...to be like any of them'
'you're only real with your make up on'
'its easy to get buried in the past'
'you're all just pissin in the wind'
lyrics that say it'll all get better:
'some get stronger, some get strange, but sooner or late it all gets real..walk on..'
'i'd rather start all over again [than be like people he's 'railin against]'
'i'm deep inside myself but i'll get out somehow'
the track 'walk on' is a great song, i like 'for the turnstiles,' and the last two are incredible, even if they are kind of acoustic and mellow. and although 3 tracks have 'blues' in their name, only 1 is actually close to a standard 12-bar blues.
i know this sounds emo and retarded, but when i feel like everyone in the world or specific people are shit, i find this album consoling. neil is saying pretty much what i want to say, but he's saying it better than i could. and plus, he's wise enough to know that everything is gonna get better sooner or later.
I think ultimately what I will take away from this album is a more precise distinction between what constitutes production, and what is arrangement. Because when I was listening to it, I honestly thought that it was really well produced. But then when I read about the album, and learned that it had been deliberately under-produced, I was confused.
ReplyDeleteSee, to me, the job of a producer is to decide which notes get played by which instruments, in addition to managing the mix. But that definition only really applies to electronic music, where the entire song really is the product of a single man's work (not a woman, never a woman). In that case, the notes themselves, and the process of distributing them amongst the tracks, is the job of the producer.
And by that definition, I thought that these songs were really well-produced. There are a lot of imaginative decisions evident here, and for an album advertised to us as predominantly blues, there's not exactly an abundance of cliché, at least not to the extent that we've come to feel resigned to expecting. For example, right at the 35 second mark of the first song (I listened to the whole album, but this is the example that comes to mind), those are some surprising chords! It had been doing a very standard a-Maj to D-major seven thing up until that point, and now we have a very prominent C#minor chord that doesn't have a damn thing to do with the blues and which is pretty awesome. that, to me, was inventive, high-quality production.
But what I've learned from reading what you guys wrote and also what is written about the album elsewhere, that aspect of songwriting is not in the purview of production. In instrumental music like this, it seems that production is all about technical recording considerations like acoustics, microphones and mic placements, and the usual panning and fader stuff. And in this case, those aspects are handled with something of a relaxed attitude, to put it politely. Instead, what I was enjoying were the arrangements, and I continue to feel that there is some good musicianship pretty much throughout this album.
I can't really comment on the lyrics because the lyrics to 95% of all songs are all interchangeable to me for the most part. Feeling persecuted by people or feeling empowered to overcome that persecution, there doesn't seem to be too much original thought when you're singing about people "getting you down" and so forth. And like schnitzel said, we're dealing with an additional layer of crazy-ass improvised drugs obfuscating the meanings. But I can understand how hearing Neil sing what you're feeling can be cathartic. It certainly beats writing in your diary or halfheartedly cutting your wrists with a broken-off protractor.
Very surprised to hear Nurse Robowaggle comment on the interesting nature of the music on this album. It sounded VERY standard and boring to my uneducated ear, but I'll def go back and listen to the referenced songs again to hear the interestingness.
ReplyDeleteAs for Disdainty's comments...maybe we should replace this one with "After the Goldrush" a la Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" replacing Zep's "III" ?
naw man, i like this album a lot. and 'after the goldrush' is already on the pfork list - barely, hehe i think its 98 or something. to simplify my views on this album: if you're a neil fan, esp of his more acoustic/country stuff, you will like this album. if you're unfamiliar with neil, this album is probably not the best place to start, as its too mellow, bitter, confusing, and difficult.
ReplyDeletei'm really surprised that neither of you commented on his voice. i've never had a problem with it, but thats what seems to turn most people off.
sarge, you make an interesting point about the role of the producer. there are some examples of the 'producer' having huge control over the arrangements as well. phil spector and brian wilson in the mid 60s most likely had control over every note, instrument selection, chord, vocal sound and reverb amount for everything in the mix, much like electronic music producers today and disco producers in the 70s. and those guys (NOT the disco producers, i'm talkin about brian and phil here) were profoundly amazing producers, arrangers, recording engineers (faders and mic placements and whatnot) and one might even argue pop songwriters. (hehe. one *might* even argue that for brain wilson, there is absolutely no argument here. but i digress, abstractly.)
ReplyDeleteneil young does have some fairly arranged pieces with string sections and whatnot on other albums, and they tend to be my least favorite songs. i do not know who arranged them or even made the decision to put such instruments on there. but yeah, there seems to be none of that on this album.
from wp:
"The album was recorded in a haphazard manner, with Young utilizing a variety of session musicians, and often changing their instruments while offering only bare-bones arrangements for them to follow (in a similar style to Tonight's the Night). He also would opt for rough, monitor mixes of songs rather than a more polished sound, alienating his sound engineers in the process."
the backing musicians differ throughout this album. some of them were from his band 'crazy horse', some were from 'the band' (remarkable multi-instrumentalists in their own right), david crosby even makes an appearance. when different musicians play on different songs throughout an album, it almost always causes the songs to sound markedly different, as opposed to the same musicians playing on every song. this probably added to the 'relaxed attitude' sound of the entire record. i have no doubt that it was neil's intention to have the album sound a little haphazard and even 'sloppy.'
Sargent Harmony, here's something you might find interesting. neil is great at throwing in non-traditional rock chords. and by that, i mean chords other than simple minor and major chords, or at least throwing them around in a seemingly random manner, as he did on the first song. i am forever indebted to him for learning the D minor 7 chord...i dont even remember which song i learned it from, he uses it a bunch of times, and in the open position, its very easy to play on guitar (http://www.howtotuneaguitar.org/images/chords/d-minor-7.gif). its gotten to the point where if i were to write a song, i would purposely avoid playing that chord, just because it reminds me so much of neil. even 'built to spill,' the most neil young sounding indie rock band ever, use the minor7 chord prominently on my favorite track of theirs, 'carry the zero.'
neil young does not own the D minor7 chord. who do you think he is, patenting an elemental rudiment for personal gain ... steve jobs??
ReplyDeleteman....
ReplyDeletetoday has been the hottest, sunniest day in nyc in a long time. one might even say the first real day of summer. and when i wanted to put on some music, i immediately put on the last two tracks on this album. all i can say is that if you cant put on 'motion pictures' on a hot summer sunday morning, put your hands behind your head, lay back in the blazing sun and turn your thoughts inward...well, then i can only pity you.