The Fading Of An Old World

Lyrics

[Um, no, I'm just saying when you slip into that half sung half spoken thing that puts like some
Little bit of barbed wire on the words.
How about this?]

The old world's fading fast
When a love fire can't last
I say goodbye to a fading older world
And I don't want to go back to the old world
I don't want to go back to the fading older world
Older world
Can't go back
[Give me a drone
In fact don't make it the root note
Make it another one
Give me something odd
There]
We can't go back to fainting couch and corsetry
We can't go back to pompadour and cummerbund
We can't go back to fainting couch and corsetry

[Am I doing that half talk half singing now?
Okay then I get it
Now just give me a flat drone
Just pick a note and stick with it
Yeah yeah stick with it]

Well, I don't wanna go back to 1950
I don't wanna go back to 1980
When I say goodbye, it's like, well, you know, the fading older world

[Yeah, exactly, done
Give me one more drone, pick a different one
Give me some, one more, a different dissonant than you picked that last time
Just try one more]

Well I don't wanna go back to 1980
Now stick with that, perfect
I don't wanna go back to the fading older world
And I don't wanna go back to nineteen faded no more
I say old world

[Yes, in fact, he, like you mentioned, Lou Reed, in the last 20 years or so, John Cale's actually
Been a bigger influence. That, that thing you were just doing, the John Cale aspect
Of the Velvet Underground.
All four of them, like the whole gang influenced me, but especially lately, I had the chance to play at a tribute to John Cale in New York the other month, and I was so moved by it
I'd have gone anywhere for it, he asked if I would play for John Cale anywhere, anything, and I was so moved, you know
Yes, Cale. Cale, who I think has added so much to modern...
That thing that a lot of the bands and a lot of the musicians want to get to, Cale.
And this stuff we were doing, you know, that aspect of Ravel and Debussy and that and the dissonance and the things...
John Cale certainly... Has anyone explored that more than him in modern pop and rock music?
Yeah, I mean the elements of what's happening in a velvet underground are so, you can lay
Them all out and replicate them and it won't work. It just won't work, it's so
Yeah, it was a chemistry of the, partly because of the subtle things they're all doing.
Yeah, stuff you can't write out.
Yeah.]

[So I want to ask you, your
Is your way of doing things, which is not prescribed in any way, way of doing things in the music world, like you will just show up and play, you seem to be off the circuit or on your own circuit, playing a VFW hall here or a house concert here?
A lot of bars too. A lot of playing old places.
Yeah.
A lot of places.
And is that by design?
You like to keep it on a human scale?
I like small places.
I like--you can make a pop--like, for example,
We just played at FYF the other week.
What I tell them, if I'm playing a festival like that,
A lot of times I'll say, will you give us of the--let's say
They have two or three stages.
I say, will you give us the more intimate one?
So I still work sometimes on a larger scale of a few thousand.
within that Parameter a lot of times. I like to take the more intimate
One some festivals are just too big. Yeah, don't want them
There's a little festival up north called pickathon and they keep the
Customers to about 2500 yeah, it's really cool. Yeah, in fact you can walk from 10 to 10 in a few minutes
So everything's really that scale yeah, yeah, I like the ancient
Size of human scale yeah in music so I like
Yeah, 500 is good.
That's inspiring to me that, you know, sometimes my ambition gets the better of me and I want bigger and more, you know, like.
Well, you know what? If you want to cure it.
You find yourself being run. You find your world being run out of control. You know what I mean?
What's the biggest audience you've ever played for? Did that happen to you and then you kind of backed off?
What's the biggest audience you've played for?
I don't know. 25,000 maybe?
Okay, I was cured. We played a pop festival in Holland in 1979 called Pink Pop and there were 42,000.
And I was, it was just too big to be exciting. It was just not the kind of, there could have been several
There could have been a machine shop on one part of the fairgrounds and you wouldn't have known it
There could have been a textile industry on another part
There was actually a street fight, an actual literal large gang fight
Happening in the middle of the show that I had the misfortune to see
And no one even knew it because it was vast enough a crowd so that
Now, you could have three cities, you could have a black market operation, you could have
Tax fraud going, you could have bombers, you know, going overhead.
You wouldn't notice just because it's too big.
And I noticed another factor.
When it's that big, the audience is too nice to you.
Here's what I noticed.
They liked us too much.
And I wondered why.
And I realized...
-it was too easy to get a response out of them?
-yes, too easy.
Like, other people were nervous. I don't get nervous in situations like that.
Like, for me it was easy.
You just hit them and they hit you back.
I didn't even hit them, I just tap them.
Like, I wasn't even, I was just singing, but what I didn't like was this.
Part of the reason it's too easy is because when I noticed
Is there's a tremor of fear in an audience.
An unspoken tremor underneath all the delight.
Of it and everyone's smoking dope and having a terrific time, when you're among forty or
Fifty thousand people in close proximity, guys without their shirt on, people taking
Too many God knows what kind of drugs, people with gang affiliations, you don't know it
But your body knows it. You're afraid and you want it to go well.
So you actually, check it out, if you're ever in something like that again, be real quiet in it and see if you don't fear underneath all the fun and pretzels for sale and people selling this and that, there's also
And it's not across the board, this isn't true at all times, and it won't be, but when a big act is playing on the main stage and there's a gigantic thing, check out how little communication is going on.
Even if they get a big response, like they're being projected a lot of times nowadays on
A big giant screen, just look at the audience and see what you see.
I saw enough that I didn't like, so then I never wanted to do it again.
Then I played 20,000 a few years later and didn't like that either.
10,000 is a good maximum for me.
I can make that work.
Five more comfortable, 1,000.
And what we're doing right now for the radio and for anyone not watching this,
There's about 12 people in the whole place. Can't beat this for me. I'm as happy as if there were any other number. Maybe happier.
To me it isn't the number, it's who shows up. I'd rather have 12 people who are the right chemistry than 40,000 and have only those 12 plus 39,983 who aren't in there with you.
I'm with you.]

Lyrics

Well the old world is fading fast
The old world is almost dead
I say goodbye to a gigantic but fading old world

The ancient apartment house
Of bricks and mortar
Made in 1880
Well it's still there now
But it's surrounded now by
But just apartment blocks and new stuff

It's not in context anymore
It's not part of a neighbourhood no more
It's not part of an old world
It's just a faded remnant of an older world

Look folks
I don't want to go back to the old days
I don't want to go back to the old world
It had camaraderie and elegance
But I don't want to go back

With its gargoyles
And its ??? symbols
And love of secrecy and torture incidents

Not much argument from any corner I think

The old world had elegance
And camaraderie
I say goodbye
To a fading world

And I get sometimes nostalgic for the old things
But I don't want to go back to the old world
I say goodbye to the old world

I say bye bye old world

I say bye bye
Bye bye
To the old world

Lyrics

[The old world is fading fast
The old world of arrogance
Christy Mathewson would show up for the baseball game in a cape
In 19 teens Douglas Fairbanks, the gallant ???
The cloistered, the stifling]

I don't want to go back to the arrogant fading dowager older world
The chandelier dowager elegant,
Saber and cutlass lead
Lead and mercury
Of mercury
Of elegance
Of the chandelier and the pompadour
And the cumberbund
I don't want to go back
To the fading older world
Of ???
I don't want to go back
To the fading fading older world

The old world is fading
The old world is fading
I don't want to return
To a faded older world

I don't want to go back to the 1880s
I don't want to go back to the 1830s
And the four masted schooner and the cats
The cape
The four mast
The wind
Savoury
And women not voting
And the fainting culture
Corset
And the pompadour
And the cumberbund

We can't go back to the fading elegant four masted schooner
Older world

The old world is fading
The old world is fading
The old world, we say goodbye to the fading old world
Say bye bye old world

I say bye bye old world
I don't want to go back to the old world
I don't want to go back to the old way
Dowager older world
Dowager older world
Dowager

Elegant older world
Elegant etiquette chivalry
Corsetry painting colours
Older world
Lead and mercury
Fainting colours and corsetry
I say goodbye
To the majestic occult world

Gargoyle and corsetry
Fainting colour
The cutlass
I say goodbye to the fading

I say bye bye old world

Lyrics

Well the old world is fading fast
The old world is fading fast
I say good bye to a fading old world

Well the old world may be dead
Well there's remnants still everywhere
I say a good bye
To a fading old world

I don't wanna go back to 1880
I don't wanna go back to 1950
I don't wanna go back to 2005
No

???
???

May there be no dust on my mirror
May there be no dust on the mirror
Memory

I don't, I don't
Follow
I don't want to go back to the old way

But the old way is well again
With majesty
Canvas sales
And granite and lead and iron
The canvas and lead
Of the older world

I don't want to go back to 1730
I almost want, but I don't want to go back
To the grandeur
The camaraderie
The ???

The women had
If they weren't married
They could be hookers
But they could, you know what a spinster was?
It was a dirty word
Just a women who spun
That was sad because that meant she was independent of men
So a woman who spun
That meant sad because she all of a sudden
??? Spinster
That was no good
For guys cause
What about that
These women didn't need
To be controlled any more
That's no good

I don't want to go back to 12 or 13
I don't want to go back to 8
I don't want to go back to 18

I don't want to go back to the glorious 19 teens
Douglass Fairbanks
Charlie Chaplin
And the beautiful etiquette
Of those days
When at a baseball game
If someone hit a home run
They may tip the cap
They kept tip the cap
Maybe, and that's all they did
No smirking, no nothing

But I don't want to go back to 1913
Women could not vote
In 1913
Because they were considered
Sub human
They could still get books published
At the turn of the last century
On the subjects of whether women had souls
And there were a few racial problems

I don't even want to go back to 2013
I want this
That's why I can't sing memory song
I can't sing old songs unless I happen to feel something
Right that minute
I didn't come here to do no memory
Cause I don't want to go back
I like being 64
Once I was 19
I was very precocious and very intellectual
And that made me a depressing dour little 19 year old
I was older then

What's the sign say
Oh it's a gentlemen
??? He has a video screen
And he's asking me to do an ancient song
Very appropriate for this
Have you been listening at all sir?
I mean even a second of this
Speaking the English right?
???
I sing songs in other languages but this one is English

The old world
Say bye bye to the old world
I say bye bye old world
I say bye bye
Bye bye
Bye