4. MAURICE TANI: RADIO CITY
From the album "The Crown & The Crow's Confession"
Written by
Maurice Tani; Tanitone Tunage (ASCAP)
Maurice Tani: Vocals, guitars; Mike Anderson:Bass; Jim Pugh: Piano; Trey Sabatelli: Drums
This really is nowhere
There’s a red dirt scratch up the mountainside
8 miles long and one car wide
My old Buick at the top
In a gravel parking lot
There’s a 50-foot trailer and a hundred foot mast
A 50 thousand watt clear channel blast
Across six western states
I’m a voice without a face
Graveyard shift –Midnight to six
All night drivers and urban hicks
I’m pullin’ down the feed
But I’m burying the lead
Out in the distance I can see the lights
Dotting the horizon on the clear nights
Are you listening?
We’re taking calls
This is Radio City
Top of the hour –it’s the Lovers Line
But no caller’s had a heart as broke as mine
I whisper in your ear
As if only you can hear
I say things I should have said
I go where I feared to tread
But I know that it’s too late
To negotiate
Out in the distance I can see the lights
Dotting the horizon on the clear nights
Are you listening?
We’re taking calls
This is Radio City
I was a fool to flee from love
Don’t know what I was scared of
Look at where I am
This really is nowhere
A million words won’t win you back
A million tears have turned my heart black
Still the words leak from my pen
And the tears start up again
Out in the distance I can see the lights
Dotting the horizon on the clear nights
I hope you’re listening
I wish you’d call
This is Radio City
__________________________________________
 MAURICE TANI & 77 EL DEORA:
Maurice Tani is a veteran singer-songwriter and band leader of the Alt-Country and Americana music scenes. He has released six critically-acclaimed albums of original material over the past dozen years.
“I was actually blown away. Maurice Tani writes songs that sound at once familiar, ethereal and beautiful.”
-Robert Sproul, No Depression Magazine
Born and raised in San Francisco, Maurice Tani was too young for the Summer of Love, but was still profoundly influenced by the California culture that gave the world surf guitar, country rock and psychedelic to the singer songwriter types.
Barely into his twenties and hungry for experience, he moved to central Texas to work the hardcore country, blues and rock circuit between Austin and Dallas, playing five sets a night, seven nights a week for months at a time, eventually making connections that led to his moving to New York City just as the punk rock scene of CBGBs and Max's Kansas City was exploding in Lower Manhattan. By 1977 he was back in San Francisco as punk, power pop and new wave was taking hold in the Bay Area and began a stretch of five years and four critically acclaimed albums with ex-Flamin' Groovies front man Roy Loney's band, The Phantom Movers.
Through the rest of the '80s and '90s, Maurice was the lead guitarist and a featured vocalist for Zasu Pitts Memorial Orchestra and Big Bang Beat, two large, 12-18 piece dance bands that gained worldwide exposure from a 2 hour PBS New Years Eve tri-mulcast (2 television stations with different views and FM stereo radio audio all broadcasting simultaneously) that was broadcast annually for many years on public TV around the US and Europe.
Tani has spent the past 15 years as an active part of the California alt-country/Americana scene. Fronting his own bands, Calamity & Main, 77 El Deora, he has produced a series of albums for himself and others. Tani has constructed a repertoire of rye humor and darker romantic rumination often described as Oblique Americana and Twang-Noir, Tani calls it “Supercalifornographic”.
WHAT IS SUPERCALIFORNOGRAPHIC?
Short for “Supercalifornographicexpealidocious”. While rooted in country music, Tani's writing is centered on a West Coast perspective. “Though much of my material is based on fictional characters and situations, I still write what I know”, said Tani. “I'm not particularly comfortable or interested in the rural imagery of tractors, 4x4s or general agriculture common in much country music. What attracts me most about country is the story-telling side of it. My stories are more likely to be centered around an urban experience. I'm a Californian from a large metropolitan area and I write about the things that hold my attention. I think of these songs as a sort of cinema for the blind. Short musical narratives of life on the left coast.” |
