well i was puzzling over this for a while, and somehow seeing them play the other night helped clear it up, even though they didn't actually do this song.
i couldn't decide if it was a plea for hatchet-burying on a personal/professional level (to recently-departed bandmate zak sally? some other strained relationship?) or more geo-political. but now i think it's pretty clearly about alan and mimi.
basically it addresses both the professional/musical (first verse) and personal (second verse) aspects of their relationship, which of course blur together and overlap, and we could read either as a metaphor for the other.
i'd chalked the charlie [watts] and george [harrison] mentions up to cute arcanery, but if we read the song as about them (alan sings that line before mimi joins in), they make perfect sense - she's his drummer, he's her guitarist, they are one anothers' dependable but relatively unassuming bandmates.
the marianne [faithfull] and yoko (overused? so maybe refreshingly inscrutable here) references are a little harder to pin down - their two relationships (with mick and john) were pretty dramatically different - but that may be the point; a relationship (marriage in this case) can be both troubled and completely devoted.
so - that's farther than you can get with most low songs. it's still not really clear how the beatles and the stones buried the hatchet - the beatles did, i guess (but not really until after john's death); the stones never had a major falling-out (that i know of) (and it's not a hatchet-burying between the two groups.) they both get their songs played forever regardless.
well i was puzzling over this for a while, and somehow seeing them play the other night helped clear it up, even though they didn't actually do this song.
i couldn't decide if it was a plea for hatchet-burying on a personal/professional level (to recently-departed bandmate zak sally? some other strained relationship?) or more geo-political. but now i think it's pretty clearly about alan and mimi.
basically it addresses both the professional/musical (first verse) and personal (second verse) aspects of their relationship, which of course blur together and overlap, and we could read either as a metaphor for the other.
i'd chalked the charlie [watts] and george [harrison] mentions up to cute arcanery, but if we read the song as about them (alan sings that line before mimi joins in), they make perfect sense - she's his drummer, he's her guitarist, they are one anothers' dependable but relatively unassuming bandmates.
the marianne [faithfull] and yoko (overused? so maybe refreshingly inscrutable here) references are a little harder to pin down - their two relationships (with mick and john) were pretty dramatically different - but that may be the point; a relationship (marriage in this case) can be both troubled and completely devoted.
so - that's farther than you can get with most low songs. it's still not really clear how the beatles and the stones buried the hatchet - the beatles did, i guess (but not really until after john's death); the stones never had a major falling-out (that i know of) (and it's not a hatchet-burying between the two groups.) they both get their songs played forever regardless.