Bobby Sichran

Notes to Peddler In Babylon

Peddler In Babylon has sort of a narrative structure, more like a novel or a film than your typical record. Since people don’t generally listen to music for narrative structures and themes that move across the entire work, I don’t mind throwing in some notes. I intend these as food for thought, not authoritative interpretations.
Peddler is the story of an American man who suffers a crisis of faith. The crisis forces him from his home and family and he hits the road in search of something to believe in, whether that be religion, country, community, the Almighty Buck, or another human being.

Who You Be establishes this theme with a John Ford motif: using the language of a Western gunslinger, the narrator cannot discern who or what to trust and demands something to reveal itself. The bridge: “Guard my tongue [from evil], my lips from [telling] lies that I say just what I mean…” In the faithless world the narrator inhabits, doubt is understood as weakness and weakness is inevitably exploited and may lead to getting killed. These songs are essentially prayers, but to who or what? “The Devil I’m told is in the e-t-c” flips the cliche that “God is in the details.” The song ends on a note of doubt.
Cigarettes & Coffee provides some backstory. Something happened to the man—an infidelity, perhaps—to drive him from his home and family. He lights out for the Promised Land, hitching a ride with three kids bound for Los Angeles. The meaning of the number three is well known and need not be explained here. Yet something has gone wrong on the way to California, and the man finds himself working menial jobs far from home and family “for less than green card pay.” In the USA, a green card is what entitles immigrants to work legally. Cigarettes and coffee represent reliance on stimulants to keep on when there is no light at the end of the tunnel. The song is supposed to sound like a desert highway or a loud industrial center.
Jah Guide is about wandering and humbling yourself. The song implies the guy is following Jah less because he loves and believes in Jah and more because he is afraid of himself. In other words, it is not a real religoius experience. You can hear the prairie wind in the synthesizer.
Calling All Cars describes a search for the transcendent. The song imagines mobilizing the police and sending out search teams for the elusive spirit They burn down the forest in the hope one bush is not consumed, because that would be a sign of His Presence. The destruction of the forest is beside the point to them. They seek out lepers since if the lepers were cured, that would be a sign of His Presence as well. But the lepers keep their hands in their pockets, refusing to confirm or deny. Then they use video cameras, assuming that a mechanical device can compensate for the lack of subjective vision. However, the objective video is useless since it must be interpreted by people, and thus is subject to misinterpretation. In the end, the last best hope is through physical contact with both earth (twigs and dirt) and another person (as your lover comes upon you). But even then, there has to be a will and desire: "yes, yes I wanna.”
Peddler In Babylon is about exile and loss of innocence. Once you’ve been to Babylon, you never go back to Zion. The exiles from Jerusalem viewed their exile as the worst possible thing that could happen. Yet 70 years later, the majority chose to stay in Babylon rather than go back. How did the worst possible outcome get to be so comfortable? I always remembered this quote from James Joyce’s Ulysses:
What selfevident enigma pondered with
desultory constancy during 30 years did Bloom now,
having effected natural obscurity by the extinction of
artificial light, silently suddenly comprehend?
Where was Moses when the candle went out
With the extinction of artificial light, a softer, purer light becomes discernible. But the reverse is true: The artificial light can obscure the comprehension of an otherwise “selfevident enigma.” If we cannot perceive something self evident, our perception is dull but we may not know it's been dulled, and so we assume we are seeing all there is to see. What made Babylon exile, then, was the inability to comprehend what had formerly been selfevident. In this sense, the exile was not voluntary, because those exiles lacked the ability to perceive an option thus they could not freely choose to stay or return. Yet in a sneaky way, a person may have an interest in dulling his perception in order to avoid having to make a difficult decision. For example, one that may be morally correct but require great sacrifice. All the songs on Peddler are about the inability to perceive the natural light and that inability's consequences.

Code Of The Road is about struggling with the loss of innocence in exile. There’s a need to be true to one's own code in a morally hostile environment in order to avoid being dragged into the muck: “I didn’t do what you liked, but I did what was right.” This song was influenced by, among other things, The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyon. “A pot of gold is waiting at the rainbow’s end, but you’ve got to go down to get to it, my friend” is kind of vulgar, but it makes the point. The music is supposed to sound like a guy getting his face beat in, the synths overtaking him.
Loving Pauper is a cover of a classic Jamaican record from the 1960s about the pressure lack of funds puts on a relationship. The singer is able to provide the necessities: food, shelter, and clothing. It’s the desire for luxuries that risks tearing them asunder, and the man sounds like he is in checkmate. Do honesty and love make up for the lack of consumer goods? Depends on the girl, I guess. I liken this song to the guy having a flashback alluding to how his family fell apart.
They Killed The Buffalois a flashback into American history. Imagine our guy taking a cigarette break and pausing to consider how this huge country came to be, the type of men and women who left civilization, got on leaky boats, and “left behind the Law that they did know” just to see how far they could go. “They craved for flesh so they killed the buffalo” alludes to the Children of Israel’s nostalgia for the fleshpots of Egypt. They were willing to trade freedom for slavery because in slavery the food was better and there was no risk of starving. Here, they took the risk and found vast herds of meat waiting for them. The destruction of the buffalo herds and the American Indians prefigures the destruction of the forest in Calling All Cars.
Black Haired Maiden is about a guy who goes to the West to reinvent himself, sort of like Doc Holliday. In My Darling Clementine, Doc was a chief of surgery in Boston before becoming a gambler in Tombstone, Arizona. There’s also a little bit of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim here. Why is the guy concealing his identity? Why is he so concerned about saving his soul? Why is he always whistling “Deck The Halls”? Who is the Black Haired Maiden he clings to in his heart, refusing to let go of? Where did that piano part come from? The rhythm here is known as the Bam Bam riddim in reggae.
I Wish You Were My Baby is in the style of Muddy Waters. It suggests an absent, invisible feminine force “stronger than wine, more wreck than a Holy War.” “I listened to the whispering wind till the whispering wind blew too soft and died”. Note that in many languages, the words for “wind” and “spirit” are identical. It is an answer to the fleshpots of the previous song—“they could set me in chains and I’d call myself free” implies the desire for material things is based not on turning one’s back to the spiritual, but as a consolation prize for the loss of perception of it. This guy, in the hostile environment of the Old West, is fighting to hold on to himself, really.
I Know I Swore, But…The climax of Peddler in Babylon, I Know I Swore is based on those country gospel records of the 30s and 40s where the singer relates a religious experience. Here, he recounts a dream in which he is taken to heaven and accused of a reverse Faust, breaking a deal with the Lord rather than the devil. The Lord promises peace of mind in exchange for the soul, but the singer cannot keep up his end of the bargain. Rather than get angry, the entire Heavenly Host starts weeping over the loss of this one man. When people sell their soul to the devil, they always seem to chicken out and hire some hotshot Philadelphia lawyer to get them off. I thought in this reverse scenario, the guy pleads nolo contendere and accepts his consequences alone. If you break a deal but accept the consequences, you are not really breaking the deal since the penalties are part of the original deal. What are the consequences, anyway? In the Bible, the consequence for breaking a covenent with God is…exile.
Song of the Open Road was adapted from a Walt Whitman poem by a Buffalo singer named Bob O’Brian. The song’s about finding peace of mind in the here and now, taking things as they come, and being open to wherever “the long, brown path” leads. Maybe the guy really “won’t cry or whimper no more,” maybe he has found more “faith in things unseen,” but what are those things unseen? And is he just saying all this to get elected?