There she was; up in flames

Since the music industry shut down OLGA (On Line Guitar Archives) with threats of legal action, free tab and song lyrics are a little harder to find. I’ve found a couple of sources who appear to have reached some sort of compromise with the blood sucking legal beagles of the record companies and the music publishers. Not that I’m taking sides, you understand. The money grubbing bastards have a perfectly legal right to squeeze poor, old guitar pickers like myself for every last dime. Morally, of course, it’s another issue.

One of the better sites still active, is Roughstock.com; check them out if you’re looking for country tabs or lyrics. Recently, I was on this site looking for the words to an old Bobby Bare tune. I spotted a song called “The Little Brown Building”, recorded by Bare in the early sixties .

The little brown building he sang about was, of course, an outhouse. An outhouse? You know, the little house out behind the big house where you went to relieve yourself. What do you mean, ”Relieve yourself of what?” Where you went to take a shit, dammit. Yes, that too. But, you could do that behind any bush in the yard as long as the neighbours couldn’t see you. Anyway, the first verse of the song goes;
They passed an ordinance in the town
They said we’d have to tear it down
That little old shack, out back
So dear to me
Though the Health Department said
It’s day was over and dead
It will live forever in my memory

It was intended, I recall, as a novelty song. But I also recall thinking at the time “What’s so funny about an outhouse?” You see, at the time the song debuted on radio, we still had ours. No, not the radio, the outhouse. Well, yes, we still had the old Marconi, but we’d stopped using it in favour of getting bleary-eyed watching Cheyenne and Sugarfoot on the big, new radio with the pictures on it. Anyway, another line from the song goes:
It wasn’t fancy built at all,
It had newspapers on the wall
It was air-conditioned in the winter time

Except for the newspaper on the wall bit, that line pretty much describes our outhouse. (We used our old newspapers to start the fire in the coal stove.) Our humble hut was made of barn board; the sizable cracks between boards letting those cold winter winds come whistling through.

Do not laugh. It was not funny. Have you ever had to deal with frost-bite on the ass?

Anyway, as I sat there humming the tune to myself, it brought back memories (as any good country song should) of a time long ago and far away. I think I was in grade eight, which would make it some time around 1957 or 1958.

It happened in the wee hours of the morning, while we were all snug in our beds. The coal stove in the kitchen was banked, the new oil-fired floor furnace turned up just enough to keep the ice off your ass and I was having sweet dreams about my buddy’s older sister Dorothy. That’s when the racket started.

Visions of Dorothy vanished as quickly as if someone had pressed the delete button on some extraterrestrial computer keyboard.

As I blinked my eyes open, wondering why the bedroom light was flickering, I could hear an engine revving up just outside the bedroom wall. It sounded like someone was getting ready to drive a big Sherman tank through the side of the house. It wasn’t a tank, of course, but rather the pumper truck from the local fire hall.

That’s when I noticed the bedroom light wasn’t on, and the light illuminating the room had an eerie red glow. It’s also when I heard my younger brother, Tom, exclaim from the lower bunk: “Holy shit! The shitter’s on fire.”

Even back then, he had a way with words.

I jumped off the top bunk, retrieved my chinos and ran towards the window. (Not much running to do in a small, 9 x 9 room.) I was busy watching the local volunteer fire department put out the raging inferno that was our outhouse when I realized I’d forgotten to check the floor for bodies. No. No. Not dead bodies. My siblings.

Although that may sound silly, when there’s two parents and five kids in a two bedroom house with no basement, you never know where you’ll find one. And a couple of them were very small bodies which created a trip hazard.

Anyway, they put the fire out and we all got back to bed. Unfortunately, I was unable to revive my dream of Dorothy. In the morning, we woke with the dawn to the smoldering remains of our beloved outhouse. Alas. This story has no happy ending.

We’ll ignore the snickers of the other kids at school when the details of the Todd’s terrible tragedy started making the rounds. “Oh, my God. They still have one of them?” Some were more sympathetic. “That’s a sin. They’ll have to walk all the way to town and use the one in the co-op.”

To appreciate the full gravity of the situation, run this scenario in your mind. Your toilet won’t flush. The plumber can’t make it until next spring. You’ve got a spouse and five kids. What are you going to do? No. No. Besides tear your hair out.

Exactly. Run to the neighbours.

Several years ago, I tried to put the incident to music, thinking it might make a good country song. It didn’t work out. I had a title and a verse, but I realized I’d need several verses just to explain to the uninitiated what an outhouse was and how it was used.

Think about it. What is an outhouse, after all? It’s a little hut that sits over a big hole in the ground. And the seat inside has a small hole in it that you sit on after dropping your drawers. There’s usually flies a buzzing and you can find the thing in the dark by following your nose.

Anyway, I’ll tell the tale of the torching of Todd’s outhouse, in verse, in my next post.