(5) Cowboy Junkies, “Sweet Jane”
OUTFOUGHT
(3) The Clash, “I Fought the Law”
510-159
AND WILL PLAY IN THE FINAL FOUR

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/26/22.

jamie a. lee on the clash’s “i fought the law”

1975.

It might have been earlier or later, but this feels right. I think it was my Aunt Theresa who taught me how to carefully open the small suitcase to take out Mom’s and Dad’s record player. It folded into the suitcase and could be carried to different rooms in our home. I cannot recall what it looked like, just its portability. However, I do remember the second case that carried the small 45 vinyl records. It was red and white with a design of flecks or small leaves as I remember. When I unlatched it and lifted the lid, the inside, too, was red. Inside the records formed a wave that my parents rode in on. That sounds funny and a bit cliché, but a phrasing reflects what I can actually picture. And feel. Music was meaningful to them.
They were high school lovers and then there was me.
I fought the law and the law won.
Their record collection of 45s consisted of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and “Hey Jude.” I adored the labels on these records and imagined myself a designer. Then there was Roger Miller’s “My Uncle Used to Love Me, But She Died.” So queer in a way. The baby queer that I was back then loved the play with language. I like it still. The Monkees’ “Daydream Believer” was one that we all sang out loud. I developed a crush on Davy Jones. LOL. Bobby Fuller’s “I Fought the Law” (1966) was in this mix of the songs I remember loving and singing along to when I was 6, maybe 7.  I love this opportunity to return to it now in my 50s.

I remember these songs so clearly. We lived in the first house my dad built, a modest ranch-style house with a large garage where he worked on cars. Before that we lived in the old house at the back of the property where my great grandmother lived for a long time. I have a vague memory of that house; I think it was bright with windows and yet dingy with light blue walls and peeling wallpaper. Not a lot of walls, though. Old. No running water. Of course, I was too little to remember these details of this old house that speak to the working-class context that framed our lives. Mom tells stories of corralling me in the living room with chairs or in my crib so that she could go outside to pump water for my bath. I was all over the place. Naughty, she described.

Dad had a job at the local gas station; he pumped gas and fixed cars at the station and in our front lawn; later our garage. I remember the gas station sold pop in tall glass bottles and we always got 7-UP to share. Mom didn’t have an out-of-the-house job at first. She stayed home and took care of me and then my brother when he came along two years after I was born.
The laws and social norms pushed Mom out of high school once she was showing her pregnancy. She could not set a bad example for the others in the school. She was considered dirty and hypersexualized. She was pushed out. There were different rules for women and men. Dad, however, got to graduate from high school. Eventually Mom took night classes to get her GED. Then she worked as a cleaner at an office and then as a waitress. Today, I wear her class ring everyday as a reminder of the time, the laws that foreclose dreams, and the fight I have in me.
I fought the law 

My Grandma, Dad’s mom, helped Mom by watching us at her house. I got in trouble a lot because I messed up Grandma’s houseplants. She regularly sent me outside to play with my Aunt Theresa who was nearly two years older than me. It was this same Grandma who also filled Mom’s head with soap opera storylines of deceit and of cheating husbands. Mom was naïve and gullible; what this means to me is that she trusted people and that they betrayed her trust. Mom recounts these stories she was told. She was a teen-age mother stuck with two kids, no high-school education, in an old home with no running water, and in a family and community where she was never given a fighting chance. I learned to fight first for her, later for myself, and then for others.
I fought the law.
Dad had his buddies. He had fun. He tells stories of an ice storm when he and his friends tied a long rope to the back of his old Ford hot rod car. They took turns skiing behind the car on Interstate 94. On their sneakers. Nearly got killed. And he was a smoker. I remember the smell. It burrowed into my clothes and stuck to my hair and, seemingly permanently, in my nostrils. I think I can still smell it. His mom smoked too. She sat in her living room chair smoking, sipped coffee and then bottles of Coke, and watched soaps. These were the days of our lives. Dad stopped smoking when he threw his cigarette out the car window as he was driving and it blew back inside and burned up his backseat. Glad we kids weren’t in there.
Dad is the oldest of seven kids. Two brothers were his “real” brothers who are dead now from various cancers and disease. The younger four siblings were born later with the only Grandpa I remember. One big family with different histories but shared cycles. The law of the land and the law of the father structured who might change these cycles of dis-ease, poverty, and trauma. It was not Grandma’s generation. It was not Mom’s and Dad’s generation. I look back and understand that Mom was caged in ways; Dad, too, was caught up in a cage. Only a bit bigger than hers. Social norms functioned to squish dreams and hurt each of my parents. They were given impossible choices. They didn’t know what they were doing. To each other. To us.
I fought the law.
Still the music played. Throughout the 1970s, Mom and Dad listened to music. The car radio always had something playing. They sang out loud sometimes. Country Western songs mostly. I remember when that stopped. Mom was jealous. Remember those soap-opera stories that Grandma fed her for years? Well, real or not, the storylines stuck. The storylines were ones that Mom and Dad thought about and fought about. They were ones that moved me into action to make peace and hold tight to my frightened brother. We both knew how the story would be played out and we each stepped into the roles that we thought could comfort us.
I remember riding in the backseat of our red Chevy Nova listening to the country station. The song played “Your nobody called today. She hung up when she I asked her name.” Sylvia’s “Nobody” was a song about cheating. It became the background music of the storyline in which the husband is confronted by the wife about having an affair. Mom and Dad were the main characters. Then there was another fight. Mom jealous. Dad angry and violent. In the aftermath of such episodes, the radio was turned off and we drove in silence. The car was filled with a dark mood and no more music. I held my breath and my brother’s hand in the backseat as the car continued down the country road. Farm fields, barns, cows, trees, and a not-peaceful quiet. 

Aunt Theresa and I spent a lot of time in her room listening to music. Chicago was our favorite band (though we did love Seals & Croft, Bread, and the Jackson 5). She was my big “sister” and my best friend. She knew what cages I was trapped in because she was trapped in them too. She loved me and I loved her. Her room was that soft place to land. We listened to love songs. Love found. Love lost. We played games, Barbies, read, and just chilled with the sounds of the music that we came to love. There was that one Dan Fogelberg song about meeting his old lover in a grocery store. Love found again. The song unfolded in story. Aunt Theresa and I knew all the words. Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” was another favorite that we sang in her room and in the way-way back of Grandma’s brown station wagon. Our way back seats folded up so that we looked backwards out the car’s back window. Always moving in a backwards direction or going nowhere. Fast. She and I were in our own little world of song and singing. Other days we hiked through the cow pastures and corn fields to the fence that separated Grandpa’s and Grandma’s farm property and Interstate 94. We sat on the fenceposts and sang songs to the passing cars. We performed the songs after watching Friday late night music videos and other music-centered TV shows like Solid Gold and American Bandstand. “Stop in the Name of Love” was one we sang and danced to, copying the arm movements we saw on TV. We performed but the cars never stopped. We stopped doing these things once my little family moved to another small Wisconsin town about an hour away. She and I would be separated until we got our driver’s licenses. We then faced our growing pains and challenges of relationships and being young women on our own. We tried to know ourselves and also keep knowing each other.
I fought the law and the law won.
Why did every verse end with the law winning? Would there be a chance to win? The Bobby Fuller Four’s song was a bouncy one. The band hailed from El Paso, TX. Considering the US politics in the 1960s, how can fighting the law and the law winning sound so—hmmm….—danceable?!
I fought the law and the law won.
In the early 1980s, I discovered The Clash singing this same song that framed much of my early childhood. Here British punk slams right into Bobby Fuller’s toe-tapping song to invite a much-needed fighting spirit. The difference was palpable. Alas, the law still won.
My friends and I were into music. We bought cassettes from record stores and made each other mixed tapes on our boom boxes. Once we could drive, we borrowed cars to drive the 40 minutes from rural Wisconsin to First Avenue in Minneapolis for the All-Age Danceteria nights. We were 16 and in a brand-new milieu of music, movement, love, loss, anger, and rage. We shouted! We sang! We danced it out!
The Clash lived up to its name. The punk sounds of this familiar song returned me to the quiet car rides when we were silenced and uncomfortable in the storylines of deceit and betrayal that were always followed by violent outbursts and a disempowering silence. The Clash filled me with power.
The music video is what really hooked me. Watching Night Tracks on late Friday nights to see music videos without having to have cable TV was a turning point for me to understand how musicians understood their own music in the context of world politics. The videos were not only documentations of bands performing, but the telling of stories. I fought the law and the law won. The Clash music video centered politics, international conflict, and ended with named wars and invasions. It centered the power of the media, too, in our changing landscape of TV news and entertainment. I was a part of this changing landscape. I wanted to be a part of this story, this storytelling. I wanted to change the stories. I wanted to fight the law. I wanted to win.
I fought the law and the law won.
I keep fighting.

Jamie A. Lee is a queer archivist, activist, and Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Arizona. They are an award-winning filmmaker and founder/director of the Arizona Queer Archives and the Digital Storytelling & Oral History Lab. They also have an amazing NFL football card collection that they started in the mid-1970s. Visit www.thestorytellinglab.io for more about their business.

“ANYONE WHO EVER HAD A HEART: LORRAINE BERRY ON COWBOY JUNKIES’ “SWEET JANE”

1.

“Sweet Lorraine,” recorded in 1940 by Nat King Cole, was the song that inspired my dad to name me. My mother had wanted to call me “Colette.” But in her northern English home, the sophistication of such a name left folks scratching their head. And while I love my name, its long “a” sound makes it feel much less delicate than all of those girls’ names that feature the breathy soft “a” of names like Angela or Ashley.
Sweet Jane is a girl whose name features that same harder a.

2.

When I heard Velvet Underground or later, Lou Reed, sing Sweet Jane as a kid, even though I didn’t understand the lyrics, the song sounded gritty, maybe even dangerous. When I heard it as a teen, still not listening closely to the lyrics, I assumed Lou Reed was singing about drugs.
The scenes of street life in NYC were what made the song cool for me eventually, but even then, I never really heard it as a romantic love song. It wasn’t until Margo Timmins emerged from the shadows of the video playing on MTV that Sweet Jane suddenly became a sensory caress that felt like it was ushering me into the slow-motion erotic catastrophes that was love in the 1980s.

3.

As a child in the 1970s, I would listen to my radio for hours in my room. The goal was to capture the new song I loved so much on my cassette recorder. Each song that wasn’t “it” was great, but in that space between songs when the DJ would be stepping on the intro of the song I wanted, I’d hit the record button. The blackout bingo were those sweet moments when two songs were played back-to-back without interruption, and the second song was the object of your quest. No voice breaking up those first few notes that you knew by heart.  
Watching MTV in the 1980s was the visual component of Radio-Cassette Bingo. Certain images could get you to love a video even if you didn’t like the song or the pretty boys who performed it.  Duran Duran taught me that.
The first time I heard “Sweet Jane,” by The Cowboy Junkies, the shadows pulled me in. That, and Margo Timmins’ ethereal Rapunzel waves of hair, something my own curly head would never accomplish.
It’s only now as I rewatch it that I see the things I missed. The moments when Timmins appears in color. The thorns. The chains. The things you don’t see about love when you’re in your mid-20s.

5.

I asked my husband a few weeks ago to watch Lou Reed perform “Sweet Jane” and then the Cowboy Junkies version. As someone whose music transmits itself in words, I wanted to hear what the guitar player heard.
The next day he unpacked his ivory-colored Taylor electric and sat down with me. “So,” he said, making sure he was tuned, “Lou’s live [“Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal”] version is in E,” and he plays the progression. “That’s where that chesty growl comes from. The studio version—like Mott the Hoople’s, like Cowboy Junkies—is in D, and more bouncy.
“Mott the Hoople added some pop to it with that ascending riff in the chorus....”

6.

In the 17th century, Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit and polymath, formed the connection that intervals in music convey colors. Others built upon his theory. In 1742, Louis Bertrand Castel developed a direct correspondence between specific notes and colors, and suggested the creation of a “le clavecin oculaire“ an instrument that would throw colored light out as it was played. Following his theory, DAG becomes green-violet-red. DABmG, however has the addition of agate, a gemstone that is known for the differently colored variants it produces.
My own synesthesia is not consistent, and disappeared for a long time after childhood. But in the past few years, it’s been back. Textures and tastes align with color. On a recent flight across the Rockies as I journeyed home to my beloved Cascades, toasted marshmallow flooded my mouth as I beheld the endless pillows and pillars below me.
With music, however, I don’t see color. I feel it in my body. Not the ways that a piece of music can cause you to resonate and set off the tinkling of bells in your spinal column. Or the way certain pieces of music make you weep.
I have somatic reactions to music, as if the emotions it sparks create their own physical manifestations. Suffusions that sometimes feel as if a rush of adrenaline has numbed my legs or set off the physiological responses that lead directly to migraine. Some songs inspire anxiety that becomes the sensation of panic attack.
But some songs I feel like an ache.
The Cowboy Junkies’ cover of “Sweet Jane” is one of these.

7.

Lou’s live version does not, however.
Instead, coming in as it does after what might be one of the best intros in live rock history, that one floods me with the razor blade blood pumping out of my heart.

8.

CJ was not the first band to cover the song, and there have been many more versions that have followed. “Sweet Jane” or “Sweet Jane covers” as a search term on YouTube yields dozens.
Diana Gameros and Los Refugios Tiernos, Mott the Hoople, Phish, Hollis Brown, Two Nice Girls, Brownsville Station, and Lone Justice are just some of the many artists who have interpreted the song. (There’s also a lullaby version I wish I had never heard.)
The song always seems to capture an emotion, or a moment in time that the artist was experiencing. It is pliable, labile that way. The most recent version I’ve heard is the one by Miley Cyrus and it scorches like a torch in a nightclub.

9.

Margo Timmins’ soft voice and the sweep and tap of the brushes were not the band’s original mode of play. But after receiving noise complaints about their rehearsal space-garage, they softened the playing and found their sound. In a 2001 article for No Depression, “We realized we had to tone down,” Michael Timmins explained. “One thing fed into the other: Margo began to realize that her singing voice was more effective quiet. We began to realize, if we can get down underneath Margo, the sound will be more effective. Pete picked up brushes – he was just learning to play drums at that point. Everything sort of came down. We learned to play with less volume."

10.

I met Yves in 2006. I’ve told the story elsewhere, but after a week of intense communication, I traveled to Montreal to spend Veteran’s Day Weekend with him. Our first several hours had us both convinced that we had discovered a serious love, but my last hours with him were spent tending to him while he suffered a fatal brain aneurysm.
The night before I met Yves, we talked on the phone. He told me that he was listening to a lot of 80’s music—that that was his mood. He would tell me later that he had been so nervous about meeting me that he had just wanted to get lost in old, familiar tunes. On the phone, I could hear something playing, but it was too faint to be anything other than background noise.
Later, after the events had transpired, I would find the playlist of what he had listened to that night. He was the Web master for his housing cooperative; he maintained a site that contained news about the co-op and playlists of music that the group’s members could stream. Those playlists would remain on the page until he posted whatever new songs had appealed to him. He always entitled his playlists “Playing while we hack.” If you happened to check the page while he wasn’t online, you’d find the most recently archived list, but where a new list should be, it would simply say, “Nothing… Our desktop’s speakers are silent.”
Nick Cave. Tom Waits. Gang of Four. X. Porno for Pyros. The stuff of a “working” song list that you might expect to hear from a man born just a few months before me in 1963.
He was a sound engineer, and I would meet many of the bands he had recorded at his memorial service.

11.

One of those songs on that list was the live version of “Sweet Jane,” recorded in 1973 and included on 1974’s Rock and Roll Animal.
I can’t listen to that version without instantly feeling an ache underneath my breastbone, the faint echoes of a trauma that made 2007 a rough year.

12.

CJ’s complete rearranging of “Sweet Jane” breaks my heart but in much different ways. It reminds me of the way love feels in your twenties, and the casually cruel boys who batter your faith in yourself.
The visual artist who invited me, who had been his lover, down to Berkeley to stay with him for a week. Then he made me sleep on the couch after he changed his mind about his intentions in asking me to fly down to him. Or the photographer who was more angry about the fact that a close friend and I had figured out that he was sleeping with both of us. “You two had no right to talk about our sex life.” As if the spilling of secrets far outweighed the breath-taking act of infidelity that neither of us had expected.  Or the musician who would let himself feel vulnerable with me for a week, and then disappear for weeks at a time in order to emotionally disengage, only to show up again and again at my place of work.
When I finally found a man who wanted to make an emotional commitment, he was a man of science, of facts to quantify, but a man whose connection to the muse came in kitchen chemistry—literally—but in no other way. I married him. And divorced him twelve years later.

13.

Margo Timmins once explained that CJ had originally intended to include “Sweet Jane” on their first album, Whites Off Earth Now! Problem was Timmins’ brother Pete the drummer had only been playing for a short time. When trying to hit the “stop” just before “heavenly wine and roses,” the two of them could not get the timing right.  
The best part of recording the song, she recounts in the video, was getting to meet Lou Reed. She looks starstruck as she recounts it. “Meeting Lou Reed was probably the highlight of my career.” She hesitates at the cliché, and then decides to go ahead. “Lou Reed gave me the soundtrack to my life.”

14.

When Lone Justice fronted by Maria McKee sang “Sweet Jane,” they turned it back into the hard-edged banger that more closely resembles Mott the Hoople’s version turned up to 11. As if Maria is kicking her boots at the CJs, telling them that they may have captured the sweet longing beneath the words with their version, but Sweet Jane was a salty woman, not the dreamy girl Margo channeled. When the song continues into “Walk on the Wild Side,” it’s clear that it’s Lou to whom Maria’s swearing her allegiance.

15.

In CJ’s video of the song, the thorns and chains appear as they are dragged across a bed. It summoned the eroticism of the famous photograph by Imogen Cunningham. I first saw the photograph The Unmade Bed when the artist who would later turn Berkeley into a sad space for me asked me to go to an exhibition with him. I remember being struck silent by the image, the hairpins, the shadows, the feeling that the lovers have just arisen and left love behind.
In the video, thorns, a heavy chain, a necklace, a rose crushed. And the woman’s hand clutching the side of the mattress, that sweet moment when one is the only object of your lover’s attention.
Sometimes, when Margo sings, sweet Jane sounds like sweet chain.
The CJ version whisks us away from the crowded New York City street and plops us right into the emotional territory.

And anyone who ever had a heart
They wouldn’t turn around and break it
And anyone who ever played a part
Oh wouldn’t turn around and hate it.

The CJ song starts with a verse much later in the original song, as if you’ve caught it being played for the thousandth time somewhere. But Margo Timmins’ voice catches your attention, and you hear the song anew.
It sounds like a plea from someone who is chiding a lover for not saying “I love you” more often. I’m not minimizing that sentiment. Unrequited love is debilitating, especially in those years when every emotion feels like the most important emotion you will ever, ever have.

16.

When Lou sings that verse, it’s right after a list of things that “evil mother(fuckers)” will tell you. And he grows angrier as he recounts the list. He blasts those who tell him that “And life is just to die!”
The song is narrated by Jack, who is driving his car, and Jane is in her vest. He’s talking to Jim, standing on the corner, who is really in a rock and roll band. Jack is recalling the past times; he’s a banker, after all, and Jane is a clerk. He has advice for the protesters: ignore the haters who tell them that they’ll never change anything.
Those folks who say that shit never had a heart anyway.

And there’s even some evil mothers
Well they’re gonna tell you that everything is just dirt
Y’know that women never really faint
And that villains always blink their eyes, woo.
And that, y’know, children are the only ones who blush!
And that life is just to die!

17.

It would take four years from age 38 to age 42 before I met Yves. In that time, I had discovered that the same types of men who had been unable to handle their emotions in their twenties were no closer to getting it right in their 40s. Only now, they wanted to “blame me for the rocks and baby bones and broken lock on the garden.”
I hear the heart weariness that Margo Timmins carries as she sings the song. She was 27. It sends its strum straight down to my lower belly, wondering if this time, erotic attraction is going to be enough to keep this goddamned relationship together. Because anyone who ever had a heart wouldn’t turn around and shit on the person with whom they had just made love.

18.

Everyone knows the story of how the Velvet Underground’s version of “Sweet Jane,” recorded on its fourth album, was not the song Reed had meant. The usual issues among band members meant that he wasn’t even in the studio when the song was recorded. But in 1973, he performed the song in all of its glory.
In the video of the performance, his band plays an intro that goes on for nearly four minutes, a demonstration of the players’ virtuosity that lifts the mood. Then Lou starts to sing.
Turns out that the VU didn’t get the intro right.  
Lou Reed once explained to  Elvis Costello that people often get the chord riff central to “Sweet Jane” wrong. And then he pulled out his guitar and showed the chord progression with the “secret” Bm chord. And despite the fact that it’s been repeatedly claimed that Cowboy Junkies version was his favorite cover, it lacks the hidden Bm chord.
It doesn’t make the song any less powerful. It just hits different.
A sweet ache. Not pain.

Infinity.
The guitar player and I met in 2008. We’re still together, finally deciding in 2019 that we should get married. He is a writer, too, and I finally found a man who combined being creative and being stable that had eluded me all those years.
I watch Cowboy Junkies now and I remember those years of the careless boys who broke my heart. Then watch Lou Reed rail against those who would strip us of our hopes and dreams.

You know, those were different times
Oh, all the poets, they studied rules of verse
And those ladies, they rolled their eyes

I like our cover best.

After 23 years of living on the other side of the continent, Lorraine Berry finally made it back to the Pacific Northwest, the place where she grew up. On her Twitter account (@BerryFLW), she frequently posts photos of trees and mountains and has recovered her sense of being right-sized. When not writing about books at various outlets, she is at work on a novel manuscript set in Seattle in the early 1980s. She lives in western Oregon with her husband, two dogs, and three cats. Her current goal is to learn to identify the 1980+ lichens of the PNW.