find the sun when there's no you

"First Bridge of Summer"
by the Caulfield Sisters

I just tried to cross the first bridge of summer
but the rain was in my eyes
and the mist it hid the towers

I can't tell my east side from my west side
from my east side from my west side

And it's hard to do,
find the sun when there's no you
And you can tow my car away
It doesn't matter 'cause I'm gonna stay
It doesn't matter, I'm not leavin' anyway

I just crossed my eyes to try and see double,
to multiply my troubles
I could times them all by two (one, two),
hide my mood in the bright and blue

I just crossed my fingers 'cause I was lyin'
when you said I was tired of hidin'
tired of being so goddamn law-abidin'

Want to throw a brick through your window,
just to see how far that it might go

And it's hard to do,
find the sun when there's no you
And you can tow my car away
It doesn't matter 'cause I'm gonna stay
It doesn't matter, I'm not leavin' anyway

And it's hard to do,
find a sun that's even when it's due
Ooooooooh Ooooooooh
I'm not leavin' anyway
I'm not leavin' anyway
I'm not leavin' anyway
I'm not leavin' anyway

Pee Shy held its farewell Tampa Bay concert at the State Theater in St. Petersburg on Friday, August 2, 1996. Soon thereafter Cindy Wheeler, Mary Guidera and Jenny Juristo moved to New York City to pursue their major label music career, which ended in mid-1998 when the band broke up shortly after releasing a promising second album (Don't Get Too Comfortable, which led off with what might be considered Cindy's defining song, "Mr. Whisper.") A year later in Central Park, Cindy wore a red dress as she married Sam Fogarino, the record buyer for a second-hand Brooklyn clothing store called Beacon's Closet -- and soon to be known as the drummer for Interpol.

Somewhere around this time is the genesis of "First Bridge of Summer," a song of new love, a new city, belonging, surrender, hope, and the anxious uncertainty that hope can bring.

It was one of the first batch of three songs that Cindy and Mary (musically reborn as the Caulfield Sisters) released on the old mp3.com sometime after January 2000. (The others were "Dumbfound You" and "Shackleton," a since-vanished solo number by Mary.) It might be the happiest song Cindy has ever written, featuring maybe her warmest vocals -- though, as we'll see, it's not without a twinge of wistfulness.

It has a bright, shimmery poppiness on the surface, amplified by some undulating effects-pedal thing that accompanies almost all of the song, giving it a mood utterly unlike anything Pee Shy had done. (Nor does it sound much like anything the Caulfield Sisters have done subsequently.) I have to admit that this song turned me into a puzzled monkey at first. I missed the accordion, which I mistakenly thought was what set Cindy apart as a musician; I misunderestimated the pop surface; I just didn't like it all that much, preferring the dark, brutal survival instincts of "Dumbfound You." (Given the name of this blog, are you surprised?)

I was so wrong. "First Bridge of Summer" is a wonderful, amazing song, maybe my favorite Caulfields song of all time.

Do they still play it live?

If not, it might be because it serves as a painful memory of happier days -- especially if, as I'm totally guessing based on no firsthand knowledge, Cindy wrote it during the period when she was falling in love with Sam and Mary was doing the same with Peter Katis, who may or may not have engineered this song at Tarquin Studios in Bridgeport, Connecticut. (I wish I'd saved the explanation of this song that Mary posted on mp3.com, in which I believe she described both herself and Cindy as "lovesick" during the time in question.) This might be true in a larger sense as well, depending on how you interpret these words:

but the rain was in my eyes
and the mist it hid the towers

Are these "towers" just a generic reference to New York City skyscrapers, or are they specifically the Twin Towers? If the latter, this song becomes fixed on its own emotional Ground Zero, on the time before we knew to call that location by that name -- those unscathed days before America had suffered mass murder on its own soil, and before a terrorist attack handed a dubiously elected president the pretext for unprovoked war; back when New Yorkers, and we as a nation, still possessed some now-lost essential sense of ourselves.

All the more reason to keep this song alive.

Even without any geopolitical undertones, this song gains its strength from a marriage of geography and emotion. Cindy is still trying to find her bearings in an unfamiliar place ("I can't tell my east side from my west side," not even to mention the fact that she's so shaky on the location of this bridge). She's anxious about an absence she knows or hopes is only temporary ("it's hard to do, find the sun when there's no you"). Yet she's found a place where she knows she belongs, hence her bravado about letting her car be towed away.

And let's examine the iconography of the car, shall we? Throughout Cindy's songwriting with Pee Shy we saw the car come up again and again, often as a metaphor for desperation, self-destruction and self-loathing. In "Stigmata," the narrator "slammed on the brakes just to smell of the rubber," throwing her car into a (presumably fatal) spin simply to make her partner yell "I love you." In "Yellow Race Car," a woman speeds at night on darkened streets with no headlights, illegally crossing the double yellow lines until she finally crashes into a tree and "her head took a good bashing" (Is she dead? We don't really find out). In "Ode to Nic," the woman struggling to quit smoking keeps "thinking about driving at a high rate of speed," along with binge-drinking, binge-eating, passionless sex and the sabotaging of her relationship. In her poem "For the Game" she wants to run over the man she loves with a 1978 Monte Carlo. In "Bathroom Floor," another ode to binge drinking, she mistakes the bottle for "a throttle," a means of controlling the speed if not the direction of her life, and winds up vomiting and lying on the cool tile.

Why all these cars? Maybe because cars are deadly, killing more Americans than almost anything else. Cars also can insulate us from the people around us; that's why people become abnormally brave while driving, cutting off and shooting the bird to folks they wouldn't dare to look at cross-eyed in a bar. They can aid passivity, transporting us without much initiative on our part ("don't wake me up until we get there/I want to sleep, I want to dream with the windows down," from "Four Miles").

Cars also are, for the desperate, a means of escape -- the role they famously play in so many Bruce Springsteen songs, although he also showed us how frequently this escape is an illusion (for example in "The River" and "Racing in the Street"). The escape becomes even more fleeting, a mythic glimpse of a non-existent better life, in one of Cindy's most perfect Pee Shy songs, "Smoking Gun," featuring the most perfect of all possible couplets:

Why is there a big car in the sky?
Why's the wind always make it pass you by?

So we have Cindy writing songs about cars for more than four years ("Stigmata" dates from early 1994), but then with the Caulfield Sisters one car shows up exactly one time -- in this song -- and here she is, daring someone to tow it. She makes yet another escape in "Fine," but this time she's walking, and she's confident of where she's going.

Maybe this is simply a matter of moving from Florida, where cars are a necessity, to New York City, where you can get around fine without them and keeping a car is expensive. Yet there's more going on, I think -- certainly in this song. Not only does walking require you to move yourself and take responsibility for your destination (as in "Fine," and in the part of "Smoking Gun" where the woman gives up her illusions and walks away), but in "First Bridge of Summer" renouncing her car is Cindy's way of surrendering any possibility of escape. She has found the place she wants to be, the person she wants to be with, and she's staying.

The rest of the song finds Cindy embracing the possibility of couplehood ("to try and see double, to multiply my troubles"), giving up her outlaw ways ("being so goddamn law-abidin'"), bursting through barriers to pursue intimacy ("Want to throw a brick through your window, just to see how far that it might go").

Then comes the longing for the one who's absent -- one who will probably return, we hope, but at this stage of the relationship it's hard to tell. (I can't decide: does the lyric here change to "find a SONG when there's no you"?) But this isn't heartbreak. This is longing filled with hope, a sweet memory of the sun and a desire to see it shining again.

Finally, the song ends on Cindy's promise of permanence. It didn't come true, sadly, but that all comes after the song is over.

I can't say enough for this song musically, either -- here, for the first time, Cindy and Mary really become sisters, with Mary's backup harmonies and loping bassline defining the song as surely as Cindy's glittering guitar and warm-as-honey lead vocals. That moment when Cindy sings "times them all by two" while Mary sings "one, two" is so captivating it ought to be bottled. The drummer here is Bill Orrico, formerly from Pee Shy's latter years, so this also might be the closest we get to hearing what Three Wheeler sounded like. In any case, it was the last that most of us would hear Cindy and Mary together until they released Songs for Phoebe three years later.

Can you tell I'm kind fond of this song? Maybe that's why tonight, after my dinner of ribs, shrimp and two Hurricane Reefs, it was all I could do to drive around town, listening to it and singing along at full volume.

do you remember the days when the rains came?

Deep in the country, amidst the large white house and barns surrounded by fields, forest, and lake—not a house or a human within shouting distance—a lonely daughter, at the distant bottom of a triad, longed for company. Animals and pets abounded on the pretended farm, but regular society eluded her outside of school, a half hour’s bus ride from home; hence the arrival of "Judy."

So begins "Judy," one of a collection of essays on imaginary friends in the Spring 2005 edition of the New York artsy-type magazine Esopus (that’s Issue #4, the one with the melting ice cream that kind of looks like a turd on the cover). Its author is the enigmatic, approximately 60-year-old Elizabeth Hope Cushing of Cambridge, Massachusetts. As you are no doubt aware, Ms. Cushing is perhaps best known as a generous benefactor of local environmental causes, as a chronicler of the people of Lynn, Massachusetts, as well as of the town’s images and, needless to say, its trees (yes, that’s correct: trees) -– yea, even as an authority on preservation and whatever landscape architect Arthur A. Shurcliff had to say about it; as someone who has served on the occasional advisory council here or there; even, one might say, as an aficionada of fine upholstery restoration.

This would all be well and good, perhaps a footnote in early 21st century short-form imaginary-friend literature, were it not for one happy artistic/musical accident: Ms. Cushing’s essay has become the occasion for yet another wonderful song by our very own Caulfield Sisters.

Here’s the deal: The magazine asked readers to submit essays about their imaginary friends, and then it asked selected musicians to pick an essay and write a song about it. (And what splendid taste the magazine showed in asking the Sisters to take part. The essay writers are an interesting lot, too –- they included Alan Sparhawk from the band Low.)

What the Sisters did with the story is magical. Over Kristin’s spare, metronomic beat comes Cindy’s strumming and a minimalist yet inventive bass line from Mary and, finally, Cindy’s voice, reverbed into a warm glow, a shimmering like the air over hot asphalt seen from a distance in the summer. And here is what she sings:

The lonely daughter’s come to play
(SOMETHING) ships be sailed away
Here you can sit, we’ve made a place
Judy, stay

Judy, stay
We’ll float away
And we can play
Judy, stay

I whispered things you could not say
You killed the loneliness that day
We need a spot to make her place
Judy, stay

Judy, stay
We’ll sail away
Go and stand, she waits
Judy, stay

Oooooooh
Oooooooh
Oooooooooooooooooh

Judy stay
We’ll sail away
She sits and waits
Judy stay

We drove away
Judy stayed
We drove away
Judy, wait
We drove away
Judy, wait

Na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na na
Na na na

Na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na
Na na na

Na na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na
Na na na

Na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na
Na na na

Just before the "Na na na" part begins, the accordion kicks up, and the song surges away on waves of glorious melancholy.

The mood is much like that of "Dumbfound You" but without the bitterness, almost contemplative, and musically is much more complex. It also shows, even more than the more rocking songs like "Box of Glass," just how much Mary and Cindy have grown since their Pee Shy days -– the 'Shy always had to be in motion, either baffling or amusing us or dazzling us with their brilliant wordplay or rockin' our asses off, but rarely if ever did they allow themselves to be this still, be this quiet, and just simply be. (Some exceptions: "Smoking Gun," the Cindy-sung version of Alice Cooper's "Only Women Bleed," and the cover Pee Shy once performed of the Guided by Voices song "Gleemer" spring to mind.) The Caulfield Sisters are confident enough to stay in place and let their music stand on its own.

It’s also interesting to note a lyrical shift at the end of the song: As in Ms. Cushing's essay, the narrator eventually moves away with her family, leaving the imaginary Judy behind. ("Judy sat on the broad front step of the big, old, double-doored entrance, one skinny arm draped across knobby knees, the other waving good-bye as the ancient, wood-sided Ford station wagon, packed to the rooftop, hove out of sight. There was no question of taking her along.") Yet Cindy turns this around: Even as she leaves Judy behind, she begs Judy not to leave: "We drove away/Judy, wait."

Why? Why act as if Judy is the one who’s leaving? It almost suggests someone with abandonment issues –- cutting herself off from those dearest to her, then wondering where they went –- or someone feeling herself in the grip of forces she cannot control, so that her leaving people or them leaving her are emotionally equivalent. (I can relate: When I moved away from the Tampa Bay area I found myself mourning for it and for my friends left behind, as though life had stolen them from me. So maybe I’m projecting a bit?) Or maybe this is one of those cirumstances in which you leave people because you have to, even if it's the last thing you want ("how'd you learn to walk away/when you saw that you could not stay," as Cindy sang in "Smoking Gun").

Or maybe this is just what life does to all of us, shoving us out of wombs and homes and relationships before we’re ready, not just at the end of childhood (in which the wood-paneled station wagon leaves knobby-kneed Judy sitting on the steps in exactly the same way that Christopher Robin leaves behind his much more famous imaginary friends in the Hundred Acre Wood at the end of The House on Pooh Corner, and in the same way that J.R.R. Tolkien said all fairy tales must end with the protagonist back home in the real world he can no longer comfortably live in, bereft and longing endlessly to return to the lost magical realm); but also in the way that life steadily strips parents, siblings, friends, loved ones away from us, until it finally comes to claim our selves, shuttling us off into whatever new home awaits while the only true friend who stood with us in our loneliness remains waving by the double doors.

Eventually, we all learn to move on, make do with whatever we've got left, and bravely face whatever is next, which after all can be much greater than anything we've experienced so far. The Caulfield Sisters certainly don't cling to any idealized, nostalgic past. But once in a while, it's not such a bad thing to look through the rear windshield and remember how we got here and what it cost us.

Judy, stay.

P.S. Don’t just take my word for it. Subscribe to the magazine today! It’ll be the best $17 to $18 a year you ever spent.

P.P.S. Sorry for the long-time, no-write, but all has been eerily quiet on the Caulfields front. Isn’t it amazing how much buzz this band has gotten considering that they don’t perform very often and almost never record anything? Truly a testiment to their greatness, I think.

P.P.P.S. Sleater-Kinney's new album, The Woods, totally fucking rocks, just like everyone's been telling you.