YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU’RE IN FOR
Getting late they were spaced with a trace of the old coming down
Ancient fun one and one he said someday we’ll leave this old town
But magazines glamor scenes inbetweens kept them nailed to the ground
And the sounds still waiting to be found
And there were junkies and pushers pimps and hookers
You never know what you’re in for
You can shake it, try to forsake it
But you know you’re gonna take it
You never know what you’re in for
By the time he was nine there were signs of an old melody
He tried to list what he missed just a kiss was it real or more TV
Find a way make it pay you can say a rehearsed passion play
Any day any day
Chorus
But anyway he said hey I’m gonna stay
Baby please don’t cry
Its just rough to stay tough full of lust and be a walking hi fi
I see you and I’m through with that god who demands such a lie
But we gotta get by and we’ll get by
Chorus
SICILY
I was in Sicily reading Henry Miller
You were in New York City you were getting thinner
I was in discos I was listening to Madonna
You were in sweat clothes looking like Jane Fonda
One day I called you because I couldn’t resist
It cost me eighty bucks I don’t think it was worth it
This is the last thing I expected to be
A broken hearted troubadour in sunny Sicily
The night was raining and my window was stuck
My driver took the shore roads to avoid the heavy trucks
While he was telling me about the Mafia
I was thinking ‘bout our wedding what the marriage done to you
Feeling so lonely my esteem so low
Find myself in Italy I’m singing in a disco
This is the last thing I wanted to be
A broken hearted troubadour in sunny Sicily
Looking out my window I see the stars above
I’m closer to Tunisia than to anyone I love
I’ve seen the ruins of the Romans and the Greeks
Compared to my own empire they really look so neat
Some say my songs are long and over complicated
But they’re very personal I say they’re underrated
This is the last thing I expected to be
A broken hearted troubadour in sunny Sicily
TAKE YOUR LOVE AWAY
Well I came down hard like a lead balloon
With a heavy metal band in a padded room
Don’t you know baby jimi hendrix said it all
When you’re banging power chords on your old les paul
Oooh all right
Oooh ahhh everybodys going out tonight
Baby take your love away
She got an uptown walk with a downtown style
When she gets under the covers
I said stay there for a while
In a circus tent I’m down on my knees
Swinging right above me is the girl on the trapeze
Oooh all right
Oooh ahhh everybodys going out tonight
Baby take your love away
I can see the water
I can see the land
I can feel the fire burning in my very hand
Sometimes he’s a woman and she’s a man
They got feelings that they just don’t understand
Oooh all right
Ooh ahhh everybodys going out tonight
Baby take your love away
HARD CORE
(Elliott Murphy / Matt Noble)
There was some kinda party going down in Paradise
When everybody got hungry doesn’t that food look nice
So they ate the apple right down to the core
Adam turned to Eve and he called her a whore
Hard Core we see everything and nothing
But its nothing I didn’t see before
Hard Core when I press your flesh beside me
Show me what love is for
I bought love for money I traded love for hate
I traded trust for suspicion big time mistake
Gimme your hand let me take it in mine
We’ll take a chance on the real thing one last time
Chorus
And I like what you like and you’re right and just what I’m looking for
Is it alright to touch you and just you
Can stop what I’m looking for
Closing all my other doors
Let’s get out of the garden Its getting late
Hurry up they’re shutting the gate
DRIVE ALL NIGHT
Oh won’t you be my night connection
Give me true highway affection
And please don’t ask where we’re going
I’m trying to race the night
And you can drive all night
Drive all night
I got what left I got whats right
Drive all night
I never liked where we came from
And I tried to fight
They need development rearrangement
They need some dynamite
But if you’ll be my reflection
We’ll let our memories die
Chorus
We’ll hit the coast in a Tbird called Teenage
I’m heading out for a psychological clean age
And if they stop you and ask where you going
Just tell ‘em you’re going through
Oh won’t you be my night connection
Give me road map correction
And if the sun starts to catch us
We’ll paint the windows black
Chorus
ON ELVIS PRESLEY’S BIRTHDAY
I can’t say that I love this place where I live
This particular geographic location
But I’ve grown use to it and now I miss it when I’m away
Of course, when I was a child my father would take me with him
Down to the bowery where the bums were
And in the restaurant supply stores
He would buy shiny steel refrigerators and deadly looking stoves
While I begged him to take me to the army navy surplus stores on canal street
To buy some big dead bullets
He wore a short corduroy jacket, an informal hat with a puff of feather
And he talked with his hands in his pants pockets jangling change
Driving in his Cadillac it was Elvis Presley’s birthday
They said it on the radio and my father liked Elvis
And it was wonderful it was wonderful
We drove through the black neighborhoods on Long Island’s north shore When Elvis was alive
My father was from Brooklyn and the depression left its mark
From picking up coal on the railroad tracks
He didn’t have a good word to say about Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Later, I liked elegant hotel bars
Where I could drink under F. Scott Fitzgerald skies
The coolest of the cool
Never a child on Elvis Presley’s birthday
My dead father jangling change
This is an unreal city
You can be anybody you want to be
When you’re alone
CAUGHT SHORT IN THE LONG RUN
Roll down your window you’re crying has got everything steamed
Roll down your window its not as desperate as you make it seem
You’re so young to have seen it
And now your vision is much too old and much too clear
You see I’m friends with that darkness you’ve been seeing
We dated once or twice in earlier years
And I know that you’re trying
And believe me I know th ings get tough
But I’ve seen you when y ou’re dancing with the children
Skip ahead to the lighter stuff
And tonight when they come I’ll say they can’t see you no more
‘Cause they’ll draw out your life through a fine silver straw
And if I was a hero I would have fought them off at the door
And you’re thinking of your family
And you’re thinking its been just a little too long
Because you need some of their innocense and their order
But that mediciine can be much too strong
And we’re holding so tight that we’re falling
And the funny thing is that both are just the same
You see freedom it finds its own amusements
And I think we’ve found a waiting game
Where we torture ourselves for the moment
When the only thing left is to feel
Romantics run free in the darkness
But come the light they’re the first to kneel.
CHORUS
And the lines we have drawn
And the sides we have chose
And my own indecision how badly that shows
And goddamn if I was a hero I would have kept our little world closed
DIAMONDS BY THE YARD
As I lay down with my lady
The sound of the night keep me warm
Living a city life I’m living maybe
But tonight there’s no reason to be strong
Romantic poets guard the darkness
I say my my my all at such an early age
An old man sheds a tear as he opens a locket
Thought his little girl was lost in an Indian raid
Somewhere in these night lights lies the answer
And you can get diamonds by the yard
And Tiffany dreams of a porcelain dancer
And an old black man playing blues guitar
Midnight I surrender
I live beneath your ancient spell
You’ve been my love since I can’t remember
You saved my life with the stories you tell
PARTY GIRLS AND BROKEN POETS
From the peninsula we stare across the bay
From the peninsula we talk of yesterday
Of the parties that are over And who the midnight boys took home
And now I sit and watch street walkers standing next to a pay phone
She took a moonlight swim She glides across the bay
We took a motorcar Said we’d meet you half way
And we waited for an hour And they searched the whole next day
But they never found nobody Some parties just end up that way
When you go out with a bad girl You do things you thought you wouldn’t do
When you go out with a bad boy You do things you thought you couldn’t do
You thought you wouldn’t do
Like a crystal ship, the poets words will stay
Like a teenage nymph, he gave too much away
They use to find him in the morning
With his head held in his hands And he’d be crying about Lolita
He said is anybody gonna understand
He’d talk of Indians He said they never lost their way
But with us white men The magic can just fade away
Some say the opium drove him crazy
Some say the Beaujolais drove him insane
But there’s an Indian girl named Lolita dancing in Mexico in steaming rain
Chorus
There’s not a word of truth in anything I say
But I can’t tell a lie I was brought up that way
All these stories have no meaning Except for what you can see
Of party girls and broken poets They’re not too different from you and me.
Chorus
ROCK BALLAD
When the moon was just right
We could turn off the light and just listen
And we’d pray to the night
And we’d hold on so tight
You could hear crystal stars as they’d glisten
Lovers in vain like to walk in the rain
Like to hear distant trains emotion
And the late radio
We could play it so low
No one must know this devotion
Rock ballad, Rock ballad
You know baby and I used to listen
All night long
To the real slow song
Till her tears were gone
And these jobs and these schools
Teach romance is for fools
And the dram always ends upon waking
And we all kept our cool
Like how hustlers shoot pool
And soon your whole life is spent faking
Cause to try is to fail
And as the wind left your sails
All you heard was the sound of their laughter
But I was running so fast with the wind racing past
All I heard was a voice say go after her
(Chorus)
And these soul clarinets and the feelings we get
Its the song of regret I remember
And we placed our last bet on loves long shot request
And they spun the roulette that September
Now let’s all raise our glass for a drink to the past
And a drink to the last chance taken
And let’s drink once again to our long lost friends
No we can’t let it end the surf’s breaking
BEEN UP THESE STAIRS BEFORE
I’ve been up these stairs before
I’ve stood outside your door
And listened for you while I held my breath
Outside the rain was falling down
But I couldn’t hear a sound
Because I was drowning
In a sea of loneliness
Nights I wake with my sheets soaking yet
Remind myself that I’m not dead yet
There’s a million reasons why
There’s a billion stars up in the sky
And tonight I’m missing you more than I would have guessed
All songs by Elliott Murphy © Murphyland, Except “Gloria” (Van Morrison) and “Wild Horses” (Jagger/Richards) – Lyrics Reprinted by Permission
April
Last Call Records
1999
Tracks 1 – 11 recorded live in Alfalter, Germany on 23 April 1999
Recorded and mixed by Stefan Günther at Powertechnik Studios
Track 12 recorded at Hot-FM Hof, Germany by Otto Geymeier
Mastered by Raphaël Jonin at Dyam
Photos by Vincent Lignier
Live Photos by Ana Alonso
Design by Chloé
Record By Record, Murphy By Murphy: April
By this time Olivier and I were playing a lot of duo shows all over Europe and really enjoying our nightly duel of acoustic guitars and luckily someone made a fine recording of a show in the east of Germany. Finally, I showed my love for covers and April is full of them. Musicians of my generation usually began playing covers live in small clubs and in a way that’s where my rock ‘n roll heart still lies. Nothing gets more real.
Taken from Crossroads magazine.
Elliott Murphy’s second officially released concert album is a first-rate effort, with strong guitar backup by longtime cohort Olivier Durand. Just don’t expect much in the way of surprises. Granted, Murphy serves up a couple of new (for him) rock chestnuts — “Gloria” and the Stones’ “Wild Horses” — but most of the other songs find him on very familiar turf. The lead-off track, “You Never Know What You’re in For,” also opened his previous live CD, and three of the other 11 songs were on that disk as well. Moreover, while these are acoustic versions, they vary little from the original arrangements. A few entertaining spoken intros aside, the concert setting doesn’t add much. In fact, this sounds more like a live-in-the-studio effort than a concert: Either the audience was very small or very quiet or it’s very de-emphasized in the mix. At any rate, you’ll barely know it’s there. That said, it’s hard to imagine a Murphy fan who’d regret adding this one to the shelf. The album, after all, taps some of his best compositions. There are early standouts like “Drive All Night” — Murphy’s “Born to Run,” more or less — and “Rock Ballad,” as well as recent high points such as “Sicily” and “On Elvis Presley’s Birthday,” a recollection of the singer’s father. Note that several European versions of this album are available, and each has a slightly different track lineup. The Spanish edition — the one reviewed here — is the only one to include lyrics (in English and Spanish).
Jeff Burger – AllMusic
CDs
France:
Last Call Records 3054932
Spain:
Dusty Roses Records DR001 (2000)
German:
Blue Rose Records BLU CD0113
Please note: If you have additions or corrections to this discography, please send them to the webmaster.