Music

Charles Thomas Samuels

drumkit - gerald dowd
bass guitar - john abbey
electric guitar and keyboards - scott ligon
vocal and electric guitar - robbie fulks
strings - jubal fulks
accordion - john williams
backing vocals - k.c. mcdonough and ingrid graudins

Shortly after Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni died (6-30-07), I was reading a book called Encountering Directors. The writer, Charles Thomas Samuels, had drummed up some grant money and gone around the world to meet one by one with a sizable cohort of the best living film directors: Hitchcock, Lean, Visconti, Fellini, Clair, Olmi, Bresson, and many others, including the big two aforementioned. Samuels had a style that comes off on paper as probing, cerebral, sometimes presumptuous, and not infrequently hairsplitting, going beyond challenging questions into pointed arguments over "implausible" bits of dialogue and sound effects and the worth of this or that film. In person his style seems to come off worse yet, and while many of his subjects project politeness and good humor, some give back, and Fellini in particular explodes into amazing invective, in a drama that drags on for twenty-some tense pages. That Mr. Samuels -- who killed himself not long after -- was very bright and exceptionally committed to his craft seems to have hindered his capacity for animal enjoyment, and to have led him into a cul-de-sac of carping one-upsmanship. Or am I over-analyzing? There is no basis for most of the biographical and character details in this song, but as it says, they virtually had to be invented: as far as the Internet knows, this once-promising young writer never lived!

Lyrics

Charles Thomas Samuels
Died a disappointed man
Senseless to the scholarship he loved
Wild his widow grieved that morn
Then the rain, such sad clichés
And did the figures of his reviews
Ever get the news?

Daddy’s in a coal mine deep underground
Mama’s in a sweatshop getting thin
Brother's in a film school way uptown
Christ how the analysis rolls in

“It should by now be fair to describe
Our parents as cowards and failures
Slog though they did through the bullets and the mud
At Utah and Omaha Beach, inter alia
Soon they returned to their caves
Of freezer food, night school, and howling TV
And so we turned to the masters of a battered but wiser...
Old Europe”

In his office on Via Margutta
With Satyricon fresh in the can
Fellini
Is receiving
An earnest young man
With his notebook his only weapon
Is a hero foolhardy or brave
It doesn’t occur to
The auteur to
Behave

A discreetly done bit of embroidery
Is laudable
But a bearded nun will now and forever be
Implausible

Implausible
Implausible
Implausible
Implausible

Charles Thomas Samuels
Came to in a yellow room
Snowflakes swirling senselessly outside
Corkscrew creatures pulsed and swarmed
Through the IV in his arm
And the sky as though it were night
Went to black-and-white

The scene above
Has the weakness of
Never happening
But when facts are few
We are forced into
Imagining

Guitar Chords/Tab

Guitar chords/tab are not available for this song