I used to introduce this song by telling the audience that it took as long to write as it takes to play it. It's true.
It refers to a night spent in a bar called the Cloud Room which was on the top of the Camlin Hotel in downtown Seattle and from when it was built in 1926 until the year 2000 had a clear view of the Sound. It was glass on three sides. The beers were expensive and the clientele was fancy and a combination of hotel guests and upwardly mobile young people. I was 30.
Bathtub meth hit the party scene in the town where I grew up after I was gone. It's a shitty drug. My exposure to it was to observe the wreckage when I came home to visit- disaster porn. I hadn't seen reasonable adults in nice cloths doing speedy drugs. It didn't register.
It made sense in an I’ve-heard-about-this-kind-of-thing way, but it was really my first exposure to hard drug use that wasn't shameful, criminal and hidey. It was urbane in a so-what way.
You guys are on coke?
Yeah, so what. It’s awesome.
It would be half a decade before I got myself into any such thing.
I was babe in the woods. I was kind of enthralled and not really brave enough to get in the water.
Trouble Hangin' Out
Trouble you’ve been hangin’ out so long, I’m amazed that it’s the first I wrote this song. Trouble you’ve been hanging out so well, life has been so good it’s near impossible to tell you’re there at all, but I see you there tonight. I’m gonna toss this back and move one stool over. Rows of tiny lights across the bridge, city tricks are just for kids, I wont be staying here too long, but then I could be wrong. I’m gonna miss the view from this high off the ground, the way the rain comes off the sound, pretty city girls with five beak loads of twenty dollar bills, the way they smile when I tell ‘em money kills and they say baby you should die so well, but I can tell their hustlers smiles, true all the while to how they feel, they are for real. They say they will but I know they’ll never call. I take no fall. I lose no face. ‘Cause I know I’ve no place in this town. I can see you here tonight. I’m gonna toss this back and move one stool over.
I had finished Mudfence Turnaround when I was travelling back and forth to the Pacific Northwest for the first time. A friend of mine had moved there and had a job that made it possible for him to get me booked in places where I could make some money. I had already almost ended up there. When I was home, in Iowa I got a band together and we made a record to follow Mudfence Turnaround. Pretty good record. You can get it here:
Trouble Hangin' Out is the last track on the album.
