Every week, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 43-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
The dogs in the song represent the nightmare scenario in David’s illo. When I wrote the lyrics in the late ’80s, the dogs in question were less specific, yet still scary. This sort of adaptability through the ages can happen with lyrics. Not in any kind of mystical foreshadowing way, but if they’re allowed to morph and apply to futures as yet unknown, nouns can be metaphors.
This phenomenon is probably easier to accomplish when writing in a poetic way, which I was at that time (late ’80s), living in the north of England, attending poetry events organized by the fellow who put on our show and later that night seemed to think we should get married. Which we did not, but I did stick around in the town because it was the end of the tour and David was off to travel in Europe for a number of months and I didn’t have any big reason to return to Canada.
The guy who put on the show wanted me to attend one of his poetry meetings, which I reluctantly did, but the weird thing was that after I read whatever lyrics I felt best suited to passing off as a poem, the guy totally ripped it to shreds most gleefully. I did not see it coming.
Between the dogs representing longstanding fears you just can’t shake and the jilted poet guy decimating my lyrics being the sneak-attack realization of why I doubt I’d ever go to another poetry meeting, there’s a vast chasm in terms of importance. From what David’s illo shows to the dogs arriving poetically through my dalliances, including the one with the heavy-handed drummer on this live version of the song in Montreal, circa mid-’90s, where I can’t help but recall the semi-articulated tension in the band that made it feel like the dogs might trot up at any minute to take a sniff of the frayed emotions onstage.
“The Dogs” from Water Cuts My Hands (K, 1991) (download):