The Remastered Bastards

I wrote this song while sitting in my car outside some seedy strip joint in Oklahoma City in 1984. Me, my stripper girlfriend and another stripper girl, were living in cheap motels along the highway, doing the rounds of sleazy tits-n-ass clubs and living day to day off their earnings.

I would occasionally do the odd music gig now and again but basically my purpose at that time was to sit in the strip clubs all damn day and night keeping their money safe, and threatening to shoot any drunks who harassed the girls too much.

So one day I was sitting in the parking lot of some dire strip club smoking a joint and watching the sad bastards going in and out of the place on a slow Sunday afternoon, and I was thinking that life was a bit shit. There was no purpose, and no future. And there didn\u2019t seem to be any real PEOPLE anywhere. The only people I saw day in and day out were the pointless zombies, the drunks and drug addicts, the niggers, the whores, the pot bellied good-old-boys with baseball caps and the filthy-ass bikers looking for any reason to start a fight with them.

There weren't any valuable people anywhere among them, and there was this permeating atmosphere of intolerance and code. If you didn't fit into one of the preconceived notions, if you didn't signal your colours or dress, speak, act and walk a certain way so as to be easily identifiable, then everybody was deeply suspicious of you all around, and that made you a target.

It was a time of evil eyes- everybody scrutinized each other with dread, suspicion and destain, and it felt like you were always just one step away from a violent death, so you moved cautiously with eyes in the back of your head, and slept lightly with one eye open. It was a terrible way to be. I could sense the decay all around. It just felt like my life was slipping away and I was getting nowhere fast.

Anybody Out There ... Sunday, June 9th?, 1984

Is there anybody out there

except the losers and the lost

it is something less than living

in this city where the cost

of dreaming may be too much

for anyone to afford

Is there anybody out there at all today

And you behind those glasses

I bet you've got no eyes

or you'd see that something's missing

from your barber shop disguise

that they gave you at the station

before you got aboard

Is there anybody out there at all today

You think I'm a stranger

well I'm different that is true

but if I'm so unknown here

then tell me who are you

to tell me who I can be

when there's been so much ignored

Is there anybody out there at all today