---------------------
The Man and His Wife are living on a farm in West Kansas. The work's hard and the money's OK, but the relationship, it's not good.
On a night that involves some fucking ("Monkey"), the toxic detente they had is broken.
In the morning after the dust has settled, it's agreed: they'll sell the farm and move to Los Angeles ("California"). But it's no good, they sell the farm but they break up before they get to Los Angeles so they are each dropped in LA alone, by themselves. ("Everybody's Song").
The woman there meets a dark shady man nicknamed The ("Silver Rider") guess he'd worked as a cowboy, or maybe he was just a mediocre actor, who gives her in an unconsidered moment the Macguffin of the album title.
And she falls in with him. Theirs is a violent relationship, no uneasy detente or spaces unfilled, it's heavy with menace and violence, loud arguments, thrown glass, the sex is bondage with weapons, stilettos, leather. ("Just Stand Back")
And it gets her killed. The Silver Rider's got some kind of conman scam with The Great Destroyer as the lure in mind; he wants the MacGuffin back from the woman who used to be The Wife, but she's pawned it for clothes, stupid frilly clothes, so he kills her with a jade bludgeon though he probably shouldn't have and he certainly didn't have to ("On the Edge Of").
Two mornings later, Her ex-Husband reads about her found corpse in the LA Times ("Death of a Salesman"), and after stumbling around a bit through the downtown streets, stumbles into the dick's dusty office with the smoked glass insert in the door and the empty hatstand in the corner and it takes him five minutes to hire the detective.
At some point later on, the gumshoe has to go to a law office? A bank? And in this huge waiting room, the mural on the wall is the cover art of the album, suggestive of the 10,000 ft cloud palisades of the California coast. But though the detective quickly susses what's happened, and by whom, The Silver Rider has disappeared.
It's like Chinatown, Jake, there's no saving anybody no retribution for anybody and in the end the gumshoe has the truth and so does the ex husband but so what, and everybody complicit skates, including the Silver Rider, who's last seen entering with shaven head the ziggurat-like monastery of a violent, tattooed, betel-nut chewing sect in Burma.
Cut back to California. The dick in full uniform, cheap dark suit, trenchcoat and fedora, the beach sand in his shoes, takes a "Walk Into the Sea," to cleanse himself of the awful case.
Posts
