Desperation, Redemption and the Price at the Pump
Jon Brion “CITGO Sign” (Demo)
Today, off of a widely-traveled set of bootlegs from the early 90s, we have a demo of “CITGO Sign,” my favorite composition by L.A. pop producer, film-score composer and musical polyglot Jon Brion. I’ve heard this one live probably half a dozen times in the old days, when I used to hit his Friday night gig at Largo–OK, I was the one shouting out the request–and I hope you can hear the magic of this tune beneath the iffy sound quality.
The word “favorite” above is really a way of shoehorning this into the subjective and staying under control. Thing is, I’m convinced that this is objectively the best song the guy’s written, and maybe the best he ever will write.
Given that this is pop music, so totally ephemeral and even maybe insignificant, I’ve always winced at the phrase “criminally overlooked” used to describe some band or cute little ditty. But! I think it’s criminal that this song has never seen it to official release.
The opening 12-string lick shows up and sets the mood, but the song doesn’t fuck around too long before kicking in with some vocals. The verse melody is just the right kind of sing-song catchy. The chorus implies Rock before kicking into something swirling and dramatic. The bridge ups the ante and the outro gets epic for exactly 40 seconds, fadeout inclusive, not a second too short or too long for perfect pop.
Aside from its many formal/structural virtues, “CITGO Sign” nails me every goddamn time because it’s concerned with new love, and hits its mark in describing or suggesting every piece of it: hesitation, relief, awkwardness, comfort, especially open-hearted wonder, the whole gamut. There’s the right mixture of light and dark even–the despondence of the lonely at the start, the tinge of doubt in the final mini-verse…
Maybe the coup de grace is the Brilliant Use of the Mundane. How do you make a gas station romantic? Well, this is how the human brain, and heart, works. Cues, symbols and tokens without any inherent value of their own are imbued with an entire universe of emotion–just because That’s Where It Happened. Brion would cover this theme on the title track to 2001’s Meaningless, his only(!) proper solo album to date. But whereas that tune, not shabby I’d say, was an essay on the topic, “CITGO Sign” is a work of genius with the message wrapped inside, not painted across the face of it, and thus superior.
And with my orientation toward nostalgia, fake and otherwise, this touches my olde East Coasting heart. Yeah, I’ve never held hands with anyone by a CITGO sign. But there was a CITGO station not 15 minutes from my childhood home in Western Mass, and you don’t see many of those in my adopted L.A. home. Knowing that Brion grew up in Connecticut, within an hour of my old haunts, and cut his teeth in the Boston music scene, well, the affinity’s there.
