Album: Jewels For Sophia
Year: 1999
. . .
Robyn Hitchcock’s final album on a major label, Jewels For Sophia, took three years and three major cities to put together, and featured a lot of guest stars, including Jon Brion, Grant Lee-Phillips, Scott McCaughey, Kurt Block and — of course — Peter Buck.
Some of it was recorded in London, some in Los Angeles, and some in Seattle, and maybe that’s why it felt kind of disjointed to me. That said, it still had a couple of great songs on it, including one of his best songs ever, the jaunty “Viva! Sea-Tac,” which rides on a Young Fresh Fellows rhythm section (whom you might remember I saw open for Robyn way back in 1986) and a Peter Buck guitar riff.
People flocked like cattle to Seattle
After Kurt Cobain
And before him the rain
Hendrix played guitar just like an animal
Who’s trapped inside a cage
And one day he escaped
As you can probably tell from the title, “Viva! Sea-Tac” is one of Robyn’s most joyful-sounding songs, and features a sing-along chorus.
Do you want to pay for this in cash?
Viva! Seattle Tacoma, viva viva Sea-Tac
Viva! Seattle Tacoma, viva viva Sea-Tac
Viva viva viva viva viva Sea-Tac
They’ve got the best computers and coffee and smack
It’s a killer chorus, full up all the way, with a tremendous stop-time in order to emphasize the joke at the end. And that’s topped by what just might be my all-time favorite Robyn Hitchcock couplet:
And the Space Needle points to the sky
The Space Needle’s such a nice guy
But he never knows…
There was a point in the mid-2000s where Rox and I went to Seattle every year to visit Jimmy and Tim, who had moved up there, and even when we didn’t go up in the Space Needle, Robyn’s anthropomorphizing of a mid-century modern tourist trap built for the World’s Fair the year I was born — the tallest building west of the Mississippi for awhile — totally played in my head every time we saw it.
It’s just so much fun. As is Robyn’s rant at the end of the song:
Long live everything in Washington State
Including everybody
May they live to a million years
May they reproduce until there’s no room to go anywhere
Clustered under the Space Needle
Like walking eggs with arms and legs
After which he exclaims “Alright, we can probably stop” as the song sputters to an end.
In a way, “Viva Sea-Tac” is a warm-up for Robyn’s recordings with the Venus 3, two-thirds of which played on “Viva! Sea-Tac,” which were some of the most fun recordings of his career (and just around the corner!).
“Viva Sea-Tac”
“Viva! Sea-Tac” Performed live, acoustically, 2012
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