Saturday, January 21, 2012

High Jump




http://music.yahoo.com/cindy-lee-berryhill/videos/view/high-jump--2139363;_ylt=AtP6BZLqoJ9Gf57yRylXSXzHxCUv

The single from my 1996 album, Straight Outta Marysville. The video is a throw back to the look of the early 80s, with that sort of MTV-party look, or the Marx Bros. famous State room scene. The song came out at a time when Liz Phair, Alanis Morrisette and Courtney Love were yellin' stuff into the studio mic. I dug some of those sounds but it didn't inform whatever I was up to, which I'm not sure just what it was-I was up to from the looks of this vid...

You'll see my partner, Paul Williams acting like the mean, bowl-cut-hair P.E. coach with the clip board, my long time friend and poet Lois Navrkahl is the big lady with the loud clothes at the end and singer-songwriter Joy Eden Harrison is the evening gown diva. The film maker is actually the 'little girl' that gets her stuffed animal out of her locker.

As for the song, it's me grousing about all kinds of people. The first verse is actually about being the first girl on the Vista High School boys track team, most of the upper grade guys were very critical of me being on the team and would play tricks on me, push me down or would ignore me altogether. Most of the guys in tenth grade like me, were pretty supportive and friendly. The worse experience was being pitted against a guy at a meet who jumped about as well as I did, his team mates were really giving him hell for jumping "like a girl". I got so psyched out about him getting harrassed that I couldn't jump worth a crap, and he won.

The second verse was about a small business employer I worked for, a little recording studio. The owner would come in about once a week sit at the big desk and make drawings of himself with very large noses. I wrote the song Damn I Wish I Was A Man when I worked there.

The third verse is me going off about a long ago boyfriend in New York. Heaven help the guy that dates a singer songwriter...

Straight Outta Marysville, is back in print in a digital-only format, at all the usual places.

(the photo credit on the album cover goes to my dad, he used a Brownie camera and took this photo of me age 5 or 6, just outside of Delano, CA on our way to the Sierra Nevada's)

3 comments:

  1. I so love your stuff Cindy....all the very best...here's my blog here on blogspot... http://mlanning.blogspot.com/

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  2. In regards to Paul presence in the video: I might mention that this was filmed just a year after his brain injury happened. He was always a skinny guy but more so here, as he was still trying to get back the weight he'd lost during that month and a half in the hospital.

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