"Dogwood Cross"

'Moanin' Parade' (C-Side & Petit Mal album, 2000)

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Is “Dogwood Cross” the most obscure song I will cover in this entire newsletter?

Let me backup to a bigger question:

Is “Dogwood Cross” even a song at all?

The track comes from an album made by some neighbors of Tom’s in Sonoma County. These neighbors, as it happens, collected strange instruments. Instruments with names like the Bug, the T-Rodimba, the Water Harp, the Buffoon-a-phone. One had a wall of hubcaps you could whack on. Others brought in a saxophone made of kelp and musical styrofoam. Right up Tom’s alley.¹

Tom started jamming with them, every track improvised, and after a few years they collected the best (“best” being a relative term) on a pair of albums. Saying these were not major-label affairs is an understatement. All the liner notes are in Comic Sans.

“I know our music isn’t for everyone,” nominal leader Gary Knowlton told the local Sonoma County Independent (the only place I could find that wrote about this album). “To some people there’re parts [of this music] that may be annoying. But if there’re things that can be taken as funny, or if the listener can go ‘Wow, that’s interesting’ or ‘Wow, that’s different,’ then there is an audience for [this music].”

Tom adds vocals or keyboards to every track on the first album, Moanin’ Parade. “Dogwood Cross” is a bonus track, and “moanin’” is right. His lyrics here, though, apparently aren’t improvised, even if the music the group plays behind them might be (perhaps that’s why it’s a bonus track: it doesn’t technically fit the all-improvised conceit).

“Dogwood Cross” started as a Bone Machine outtake Tom had originally written with Keith Richards. Seven years before Moanin’ Parade came out—probably before he even recorded this version—he told Jim Jarmusch:

Keith is great ‘cause he’s like a vulture, he circles it and then he goes in and takes the eyes out… I guess we maybe wrote enough for a record, but everything didn't get finished, so -- There was one called "Good Dogwood", about the carpenter that made the cross that Jesus hung on. (Sings:) "Made the other two out of pretty good pine, they all seemed to be doing just fine, but I hung my lord on good dogwood, huh! (40 ton)...And I made my house myself, and I know he likes the workmanship 'cause he's a carpenter himself, and I made the other two out of pretty good pine, they all seemed to be doing just fine, but I hung my lord on good dogwood." 

Dogwood is what the cross was made out of. And they say after Jesus went up to heaven that the blossoms on the dogwood developed a red cross in the bloom, and you can see it in the dogwood blossom. And that wasn't until after He had risen. So, uh, that was a good one.

That’s a fascinating backstory to a fairly slight song. In this recording, Tom mumbles the lyrics so much I assumed they were improvised. I’m guessing he didn’t go in planning to sing this Bone Machine outtake. Perhaps in the moment these unused lyrics clattering around the back of his head came to the front (and the mumbling is because he only half-remembers them). I wish we could hear the Bone Machine version, though it’s not clear he and Keith got as far as recording anything. I do like the “ah-HUH” worker chants he does just after the minute mark.

I have no idea if I’ll write about every song (“song”) on Moanin’ Parade, or its sequel Swarm Warnings, which also features Tom’s contributions. But “Tom wanders into his neighbor’s house because he hears someone playing kelp saxophone” is a hard concept to beat.

1. One of those weird-instrument musicians was Bart Hopkin, who was behind the weirdo-instruments compilations Gravikords, Whirlies & Pyrophones and Orbitones, Spoonharps & Bellowphones that I wrote about here.