Fire to Burn

Year 5000

I grew up in the desert mountains of Oregon. Vast wide lands of sandy dirt, jagged lava rock, gnarled twisting trees, and high snowy peaks. It was a barren, amazing landscape. The lonely paved roads hid dusty passages into the desert where a person could (in those days) do almost anything unnoticed.

Years later, Brooklyn, NYC: The guy upstairs had a rent-controlled apartment (for non-New Yorkers: This means he paid maybe 1/3 what I paid and the landlord was not able to raise the rent or throw him out). Despite this boon, he treated the place like a dump. It was really gross. Then he went on rent-strike. Dumb dumb dumb — he was later kicked out for failure to pay his rent. Anyway, he received “coffee” packages from San Francisco that had a bundle of cannabis in the middle. I forget exactly how I wound up there with him, but after a few hits of this stuff, I was zonked. I hadn’t been high in years, nor had I been writing rock songs. I went downstairs as soon as I could get away and wrote this song. I don’t normally smoke pot, but when I do this sort of thing happens.

The lyrics are about that desert landscape:

I came out here with a head in a bag hoping to hide it away.

The more I thought, the more the gods hoped I’d do it another way:

Into the flames.

Into the flames.

Into the Fire, into the Fire to burn.