So c’mon sweet Mary Jane, all these questions never asked / It wasn’t the first time and it sure won’t be the last / That we been caught in a landslide, as far as I can tell / You gotta heal yourself child, if you don’t nobody will / You gotta please yourself child, ‘cause if you don’t nobody will, so c’mon / Well now some call me Cherokee, some call me Lucky Jim / In a hotel in Saigon with the future rushing in / We got nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide / Much of the same thing, when you reach the other side / But all these colours will be waiting / When we reach the other side, so c’mon / We got nowhere to run, nowhere to hide / It’s like all of these question coinciding / It’s easy say but it’s harder to deal with / It’s easy kill but it’s harder to heal, harder to heal Well now sweet bones of Ahab, it’s a cautionary tale / The father, son, the holy ghost, in the belly of the whale / We got nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide / Much of the same thing, when you reach the other side / But all these colours will be waiting / When we reach the other side, so c’mon / repeat chorus
I was chatting with an old friend and part-time band manager Phil Beddoe outside the Tennessee bar on the Rue du Pont des Arts one summer evening in 2015. He was explaining happily to me how a bonsai tree he had adopted had been rescued from near-death, and was now recovering after terrible neglect by its previous owner.
His friend had been ready just to throw the tree in the trash – but now the poor misbegotten soul was in my friend’s safe hands and on the road back to full health. ‘It’s funny isn’t it, how much easier it is to break things than it is to fix them’ he said. Mmm, so it’s harder to heal. I shared with him that the sentiment that it sounded like a great song, which tickled him. Being an ardent heavy rock fan, Phil spontaneously launched into a wild frenzy of air guitar / air drums a la Alice in Chains, in delighted anticipation of the raucous hit song I promised I would try to write for him.
Ultimately I had to disappoint him with the news that due to circumstances beyond my control it ended up more a Bob Dylan MOR number than a heavy rock banger by Pearl Jam. He tells me he still likes it though.
source
