Show Me the Hero
Recorded
Release history
Also known as
Meetings with Remarkable Men (Show Me the Hero)
Credits
- Written by Harvey Danger, © But Mom I Love Music (ASCAP)/
Famous Music - Recorded at John & Stu’s Place
- Aaron: bass
- Jeff: guitars, piano, organ, theremin
- Sean: lead and backing vocals
- Evan: drums
Lyrics
I had a lovely brunch with Jesus Christ
He said, “Two words about inanity: fundamental Christianity”
The food was very nice
but then He had to go and die for my sins and stick my ass with the check“Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy”1
(Go near an open window and that’ll be the end of me)I bowed before the avatar
He said, “the problem’s clear to me: you never got over Morrissey”
I said “Well, right you are!”
“It’s so much harder to be underfed than under-understood,” he said
Yeah!Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy
Go near an open window and that’ll be the end of me(I can’t explain it)
I went to see Kip Winger!
He said, “In my day we knew how to party; bands today, c'mon, not hardly”
He had a back-up singer (doo doo doo doo)
He said, “The metal scene is a disgrace, but I ain’t got no dog in that race!”Show me a hero, I will write you a tragedy
Go near an open window and that’ll be the end of meDon’t despair, your mother loves you
Don’t be proud, because she has to
Don’t despair, your mother loves you
Don’t be proud, she gotta(And just because it’s meta doesn’t make it any betta!)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, Notebook E (1945). ↩
Quotes
SCN: “Meetings With Remarkable Men” was a last-minute title change that no one in the band has ever once used to discuss the song, me included; after months of dour, slow, chorusless half-songs, we wrote this one in a burst and the album felt finished, focused, fun; Kip Winger was reportedly not amused.10A
SCN: Both songs [“Show Me the Hero” and “Loyalty Bldg.”] are redolent of a very different energy than the rest of the album, probably because in all the furor over the label bullshit, we’d all managed to drop our guards a little, and taken a step back towards one another and remembered that playing music together was the most fun any of us had ever had. That sense of fun can’t be faked, nor can its importance be overstated. It transformed the album from an incomplete, wishful self-portrait to a document of who we really were as a band, for good and ill. It was the final revision. The King James Version.K25
References
- Meetings with Remarkable Men is the title of G.I. Gurdjieff’s 1963 memoir, as well as its 1979 film adaptation.