(Title) Follow the Sound (Sections) The Music, The Way I Play, Home Where the Highway Has No End
For background info about "Follow the Sound," see "1st Instalment, March 25, 2026 - How to Watch 'Follow the Sound'"
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In this instalment -
About song #7 from the "7 Songs" collection, "The Pyramid"
*****Scroll down to below the Transcript to find the link to the song video "The Pyramid"*****
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(Transcript)
About "The Pyramid"
By at least 1978 I was playing the chords to the various parts of The Pyramid as separate things on their own.
I was a fan of bands like Jethro Tull and Yes who by that time were making what people were calling "concept albums," that were lengthy things made up of, not songs, exactly, but all kinds of different stuff that they creatively connected to each other.
So I thought I'd do something like that with my stuff, and, at least once within the piece, I had to use a very awkward method in order to connect one part to the next.
By 1981, I had everything about The Pyramid firm in my mind and I had it all mastered well enough to take it to the studio. The only thing I didn't have was a drummer. I had pictured in my mind that the drummer would need to be versatile with techniques that varied from subtle to outrageous, like Keith Moon of The Who. I even had a sit-down meeting with three drummer candidates that I got from the local Musician's Union. I'll get back to that.
I had the same engineer that I had for "The Train Song" and "Fixed." As I recall, All the parts I played and sang used up somewhere around 12 to 15 tracks on the studio's 2-inch 24-track tape. And I was super happy with the job that the engineer did.
I selected one of the drummers I had talked to and I had given him a copy of the recording that I had so far of The Pyramid, and I told him, "Now, just practice along with this, come up with something and memorize it and then we'll go to the studio with it." That's what I had done with the other drummer I'd used for the other two songs and it was fine.
But this drummer turned out to be kind of uppity. I got the impression he hadn't practiced with the tape at all, maybe hadn't even listened to it, and he sounded as if he was just trying to come up with something there at the studio that day.
If he had practiced, I think he could have done something good. But as it turned out, it just wasn't any good and I couldn't use any of it. After he left the studio that day, me and the engineer tried to do something with his tracks but it just wasn't any good. I couldn't use any of it.
So that's the way it remained. To this day, The Pyramid is a Powerhouse of a song without even having any drums in it.
The reason I called the song "The Pyramid" is because it has four distinct parts like the four sides of a pyramid. The first part is slow and with lyrics, the second part is the same chords as the first part but played at a fast tempo, the third part is frantic and the fourth part is blues.
As for the lyrical part of the song, there are meanings for separate lines of lyrics, but the song altogether doesn't mean anything.
For example, I was living in a town called Kihei on Maui in 1975. And I had seen most of the sights of Maui. And I was getting put off by the way that the whole island was really nothing but a tourist attraction. It seemed to me to be nothing but a Disneyland.
And so I thought of an attraction that was at Disneyland at the time. It was called "America the Beautiful." It was a circular theater with screens all the way around in which they showed a patriotic movie of lots of locations in America, so that the audiences felt like they were actually there and they'd get dizzy when things turned this way and that. In my song, I called it "Land of the Free."
And other lines in the song mean other things. And about the part about keeping change in a pot with a lid on it, I just thought someone could do that and leave it right out in the open, and no one would ever know there's a bunch of money in it. Sometimes , the lines are things anybody can get, like someone stealing a song from someone else, or like the way that my collection of songs make up an anthology of my life, or like the way that lyrics are sometimes lofty, as lofty as the Ionosphere. But all the lines together don't mean anything.
There is one lyrical technique I used ... I wonder if anyone would get it if I didn't tell them? The first word in the first stanza is University. The first word in the second stanza is Ionosphere. U and I. Get it? Like You and I. Get it? OK, OK. Big wow. I know.
Lynn learned to play The Pyramid. She could play it all the way through. She's the only one who ever learned to play it.
I used to try to show people how to play the final blues part. It used to piss them off. The chords themselves are easy enough to play. But what made people mad is that the strumming has to be done in an exact, certain way. They'd get pissed off about that. But once you get the hang of it, it's a natural, easy thing to do.
I brought the song home from the studio. There were some people in my house, some were friends, some were just acquaintances. I put the song on the stereo and said, "Listen to this." And, of course, the song starts off with the slow, mellow strums of the acoustic guitar. By the end of the song, one of the casual acquaintances exclaimed, "Wow! I was expecting to hear something like "Michael Row the Boat Ashore! But this blew me away!" Another said, "That blues part at the end gave me chills!"
Well, I don't know what your impression is. But as you can tell, I'm quite proud of this song.
I hope you like it!
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(To watch the song video, click the link below)
Collection number 2, "7 Songs,"
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