The red bells beckon you to ride
Middle Cyclone album cover
In between “Furnace Room Lullaby” and “Deep Red Bells,” Neko Case released her second original murder ballad, “Make Your Bed.” The song appeared on Canadian Amp, an EP featuringa few covers, one traditional folk song, and two originals. “Make Your Bed” is a fine murder ballad – not a masterpiece, perhaps, but a solid take on the traditional murder ballad. The plot: two men, one woman, a betrayal, an evil deed, and a river.
“Make Your Bed,” Neko Case
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We’re in familiar territory here and the song’s roots are underscored by the traditional folk song that Case covers on the same album — the popular murder ballad “Poor Ellen Smith.”
“Poor Ellen Smith,” Neko Case
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This is a fine, satisfying pairing of murder ballads old and new, and all seems well and good and understood with the murder ballad experience that Case provides on Canadian Amp.
But…
In my last post, I asked how Case could hear a song like “Knoxville Girl,” ponder the lyrics — man repeatedly goes to town, seeks out a woman, brutally murders her, throws her in a river — and, given her history, not think “Green River Killer”?
So I also have to ask: how could Case writea song like “Make Your Bed,” pen the lyrics – man waits for a young girl, brutally murders her, throws her in a river – and not have been thinking “Green River Killer”?
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| From The Seattle Times. In 1982, when the first Green River Killer victim, a 16-year-old girl, was found by playing children, Neko Case would have been eleven turning twelve and was living in Tacoma, Washington. |
Like “Poor Ellen Smith,” you can hear Case’s “Make Your Bed” as a song sung from the perspective of a tormented, condemned man who has split into two men – one seems rational and innocent, but one is mad with murder.
Did you come here to meet him my dear?
You’re surprised to find only me.
Well I put him to rest at the bend in the river,
And the same I require of you.I’m thick with disease in my madness.
Only one thought pacifies me.
That the murky black water grinds your bones to sand
When the catfish have stripped off your hide.
You’re surprised to find only me.
Well I put him to rest at the bend in the river,
And the same I require of you.I’m thick with disease in my madness.
Only one thought pacifies me.
That the murky black water grinds your bones to sand
When the catfish have stripped off your hide.
That is, when heard this way, “Make Your Bed” is not about a woman who goes to the river to meet her lover in secret only to find that her lover has been killed by another jealous man who also intends to kill her. Rather, it’s about a woman who goes to the river to meet a man and finds out too late that he is a murderer – overcome by sickness, he’s already killed his (innocent) self (the “him” in the song) and now he’s going to kill her too. (In police documents, the Green River Killer stated that “around 50” of his victims actually asked him if he was the Green River Killer. He said he told them no, but that he was going to kill them anyway.)
As we saw, this is the same scenario Case sets up in “Furnace Room Lullaby,” in which the murderer and his victim share the same fate, both silenced and trapped in the basement by the murderer’s demons:
Into the beams you’ve gone
I’ve gone, you’ve goneI’m wrapped in the depths of these deeds that have made me
I can’t bring a sound from my head though I try
I can’t seem to find my way up from the basement
A demon holds my place on earth ’till I die
I’ve gone, you’ve goneI’m wrapped in the depths of these deeds that have made me
I can’t bring a sound from my head though I try
I can’t seem to find my way up from the basement
A demon holds my place on earth ’till I die
(Case has a whole repertoire of songs that are about people and animals going mad, victimizing others, and becoming victim to their own madness — “Dirty Knife” and “The Tigers have Spoken”being just two representative and stellar examples.)
This is also, I think, the same scenario that Case sets in “Deep Red Bells,” in which the “red bells” refer not only to the victims (as I speculated last time), but also to the murderer. Or, more specifically, to his madness and to his demons, which obliterate his identity as a human being. These bells “beckon” him to ride and “beckon” his victims to ride with him; they also “ring the tragic hour” of their deaths – “ring like thunder,” in fact. Let’s listen again.
Seen this way, the “I” in the refrain “deep as I have been done” refers to them both, murderer and victims, and to their forever intertwined fate.
This “I” also, of course, refers to Case herself, as witness and as chronicler of what happened between the murderer and the murdered — and to her song, which is her account of the experience that she shared with them as a young girl. She shared it from a safe distance. Nevertheless, she too has been “done deep” by it.
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| Neko Case, playing murder victim on the cover of Furnace Room Lullaby. |
In the end, then, the “red bells” also refer to Case and to her song – and to murder ballads in general – which also “beckon [us] to ride,” perpetually “ringing like thunder” the “tragic hour” of the deaths that they chronicle.
CODA
Case’s body of work, particularly “Deep Red Bells,” resonates loudly for me because I, too, grew up in the shadow of a serial killer. “Mine” was Ted Bundy, who killed many of his victims and disposed of their bodies in the areas where I grew up, and where I now live again. Bundy murdered his first known victim when I was five years old, he was first arrested when I was six, escaped from prison when I was seven, was caught and tried again when I was eight, sentenced to death when I was ten, confessed to his crimes in horrific detail during my teens (during this time he also “assisted” police in the hunt for the Green River Killer who was active), and was executed when I was eighteen. As a girl through my teenage years I was so familiar with him from newspapers, television, stories people told, and my own imagination that I felt like I knew him a little bit. At least enough to be forever looking out for him, or others like him, and that’s saying something.
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| Ted Bundy, whose face I knew well as a girl. |
To this day I can list almost everything in this photograph from memory, having been absolutely struck and riveted by it as a girl when I saw it in the papers:
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| Items found in Ted Bundy’s car when he was apprehended in my hometown. |
Many of Bundy’s victims have never been found, although he’s identified the general areas where he left them. One is the very area I live in again now. As a girl, it’s something I would think about almost every time I spent time in the woods, which I often did, and that I think about now when I go on a simple hike. Or hear certain songs.
So, deep red bells…yes. Yes, I know what you mean. They do ring like thunder. Thank you, Neko Case.
“Maybe, Sparrow” Neko Case
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