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.