Jolene

A couple years ago in DC I still thought I could sing and play guitar. One song, Dolly Parton's "Jolene," inspired me. I learned the melody and sat around going do mi, do mi, etc., trying to learn to sing with my mouth open and my throat open, but I don't even have one octave's worth of range out there. So I gave up guitar and singing and moved to Tacoma.



Parton feels old-school in that she cracks actual funny jokes, she gets up there and smiles real big for everyone and tries to give some joy back to the people watching. She performed at the Oscars or the Grammies a while ago. I think the song was about God and love. Anyway, Dolly Parton is real.

Prior to that flirtation with the idea of performing, I'd repeatedly listened to another song named "Jolene," by Cake. Cake is a band no one is supposed to actually like. The horns and the lead singer's delivery feel cheap most of the time, and the humor in their music probably doesn't grab people. "The Distance" probably turned a lot of people off.

Anyway, a woman I was crushing on who was from Philadelphia and a fucked-up family sent me the mp3 of Cake performing Jolene live. The girl was into coke, I think. She at least had been a member of the "coke set," a group of Georgetown kids who were rich and existential enough to party hard and try to fuck themselves up enough that they would somehow squash their sense of privilege. This group may or may not have actually done coke and may have existed more in my imagination than anywhere else; I never went to any of their parties. Okay, all I know for sure is she was a member of the Cake set.

But anyway the girl, who was also petite and French and looked like she needed a friend, got me into "Jolene" and I've always grudgingly respected Cake as a result. In the live version, the singer tells the lighting guy to turn off all the lights and instructs everyone to hum along with him during a breakdown. You believe, listening in, that the audience is with him. It's easy enough, he asks them to sing "oohs," and I think he picks three notes in a row, do re mi, so even the worst singers can get in on the game.

Later, he does a James Brown thing too where he yells for the horns and guitar to come back.

So yeah, here's Cake's "Jolene." Not the live version that I fell hard for but you might still get the idea.



Eventually, the French chick stopped wearing short skirts and cut her hair. She took a gig as a bicycle messenger and may have become a lesbian -- she at least started reading Mexican anarcho-feminism, and she participated in the hunger strike to help get Georgetown's cleaning crews a living wage. To protest the war in Iraq she joined a tent city in the main square on campus.

I hate to press the point too hard to the paper but it's fun to think that it's the same Jolene that Dolly and Cake are singing about. They both sort of love her but they can't get her to behave.