It just takes a few notes, sometimes only one lingering one, and move over Pavlov, I think I’m gonna drool

I don’t know about you, but I need a little more space between songs, especially when it’s Tom Waits. I get swallowed whole listening to songs like Tom Traubert’s Blues and then comes Burma-Shave right on his heels and I’m telling you, Matilda, I need more than a few seconds between explosions

I have an agile heart. It’s my vanishing knees I have to be careful of.

Maybe some of you know what Burma-Shave is, but I’m going to be all long-winded about it anyway, and I hope you can stand it. Then I’m going to show you how Tom Waits uses it so beautifully it fucking hurts

My dad was a travelling salesman and he loved to drive for both work and recreation. He’d drive all the way to Trout Creek which is about an hour south of North Bay, just so he could fish for a couple of hours, and then he’d come back home. He’d go to Blue Mountain and carve it up for a little while in the middle of any given day, always the oldest guy on the hill, and always the guy with the most style and grace, too.

He loved to drive so much that we took road trips every summer, always to the states because we’d usually meet up with his brother, Uncle Sammy, and Auntie Irene, who was always making up words, or at least she was always getting the right ones wrong as in popular trees and stimulated pearls. Also she invented pantyhose before anybody else because she broke her wrist and couldn’t manage stockings the old way.

They had two kids, Laura and Francis, and Laura was only two days older than me and was completely into everything I was into and she never shied away from my weird ideas and I never shied away from hers which is pretty much exactly what you want when you’re a kid – an active participant who gets the same hoot out of shit as you do. Also she had a pool and could keep up her competitive spirit through twenty plus games of Candyland.

During these epic road trips we’d stay in motels, always with pools. We stopped in the Adirondacks lots of times, usually for more than just one night, and once we went to Virginia Beach and also wherever the Beechnut factory is/was, through a million Marysvilles, lots of Howard Johnson’s and lots of salt water swimming, and taffy, too.

And all along the way were Burma-Shave signs

Not billboards as we know them but just little signs. They were advertisements, in the form of clever little limericks, one line at a time, placed along the road a distance apart. There were maybe between four and maybe eight or so of them in a row and everybody in the car would say them out loud and giggle and die until the next one came and then say it and giggle and die all over again all the way to the punchline, and then the final billboard which was the Burma-Shave logo. I was very little but I can still see them in my head. I really can. Google it and you’ll see why.

Tom Waits talks about Burma-Shave as if it’s a destination, as if the signs are directional, as in Burma-Shave thissaway, but of course the signs aren’t to Burma-Shave at all because it’s not a place.

Unless you a dreamer in search of a ghost that is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uksVqRX9RhY

Tom Waits has written so many lyrical explosions he could make billboards all the way to forever

This one’s from Burma-Shave:

Marysville ain’t nothin’
but a wide spot in the road
Some nights my heart pounds like thunder
I don’t know why I don’t explode