Johnny GuitarJohnny "Guitar" Watson starin' at me
Riding on 3 wheels, a woman on his knee
With a leg under a red dress, I wish I could see
Further north a warmth alive & lingerin'
Now Johnny he be havin' lots of women
The reason he be smilin' know to him
On the left the girl in red so innocent
Never sheds her clothes even when she goes to bed
The type of girl responsible foriginal sin
Can't help but wonder where & who she is
And the memory is always getting clearer
For that's 30 years or more I've loved her so
And how I need to know, why she's with him
And I sleep with the light on, in case she comes
And I sleep with the light on, in case she...
Recently as I was waitin' on a dream
She came to visit lost & lonely me
She leaned over the bed & with her lips above my head
She asked if I had seen her Johnny
Oh and I hide my disappointment
'Cause for years I had been hopin'
Oh yea I had been hopin'
That when she came, she would come for me
I hide my disappointment
'Cause for years I had been hopin'
That when she came
she'd be comin' just for me
This is one of my favorite tracks on the new record, and one of the first ‘playful’ pearl jam songs that also manages to say something of substance (or be genuinely fun), which is hard to do in general, let alone for a band that (at least publically) takes itself as seriously as Pearl Jam does.
The contrast between the story told and the music is striking, and deliberate I think. It’s forceful, pushing itself along with an affecting determination, like it’s trying to take the listener somewhere important and is worried they won’t want to follow(force of nature moves the same way,although it’s a slower, sturdier song), especially in the intro, bridge, and outro, which try to give the song a vaguely portentous weight to it. The guitar interplay here is pretty nice, and like much of Backspacer deceptively simple (plus there is that subtle undertone of 70s pimp guitar that just fits the story so well).
But Eddie is the hero on this one. As I’ve said elsewhere, this is one of the most impressive vocal melodies he’s ever written (I especially love the way he comes out of the bridge and into the last verse—amazing), and a stand out on an album full of great ones. There’s the same level of energy and agitation that characterized the best songs on S/T, but the undertone is playful instead of angry, filthy, but clever enough so that it isn’t crass (‘And I sleep with the lights on in case she comes…’ and the brilliant ‘further north a warmth alive and lingering’)
The lyrics tell the story of an thirty plus year fantasy, an obsession the singer had with a beautiful girl he found an album cover. The whole song is about the singer lying to himself—that the girl is ‘real’, that she’s somehow pure and virtuous despite being with a lecherous musician, that she’s somehow innocent even while she’s corrupting his thoughts (I really love the ‘never sheds her clothes even when she goes to bed/the type of girl responsible for original sin lyrics and the way they evoke storytellers like Mark Knopfler and Bruce Springsteen), and that they’ll someday be together. Even at the end of the story, he lies to his fantasy because he doesn’t want to disappoint her
The song gets gradually more frantic as it progresses (listen for the way he exists the bridge and the breakdown at the end), and Eddie chants the final lyrics like a mantra or totem, something he has to hold onto and believe in because the consequences of not doing so are too awful to contemplate. We’ve seen these kinds of climaxes in Pearl Jam songs before—the wordless vocalizations expressing a pain beyond words (see the end of Black, Jeremy, I Got Shit, although that one is primarily musical)—a primal hurt that we might never recover from. But at the same time you can almost see Eddie smiling as he’s singing this one, like he knows how ridiculous this all is—the music and the vocals are playful send ups of past moments in their catalog, acknowledging the direction they’d have taken the song in the past, but not this time.
And in that respect I think Johnny Guitar is other side of whatever coin I Got Shit is on. I Got Shit is a desolate portrait of a man consumed by his fantasy, by an unrequited love that’s destroyed his possibility for anything real. It’s a warning. But Johnny Guitar is ultimately a celebratory song. It alludes to something ominous but then turns into a playful riff on those themes. Rather than warn us, it reminds us that there’s nothing harmful about indulging in, or even celebrating our ridiculous fantasies, that our lives are richer and maybe even healthier for having them providing we recognize them for what they are. In a weird way, the ability to let go and be immature here is a sign of maturity
4 stars.
old thread archived here