//// Cloudbusting Annotated Lyrics PART I - (THE SONG) ////

[rhill@netrun.cts.com (ronald hill)]

- CLOUDBUSTING ANNOTATED LYRICS -

        by Ron Hill, Henry Chai, Doug Alan, David Hsu, and Peter 
Manchester.

        Compiled by Ron Hill

        Last Update: November 5, 1993


VERSIONS

        Including the album version, there are three released versions 
of this song:

        "Cloudbusting (The Orgonon Mix). " An extended remix of the 
original recording, featured on the twelve-inch single.  It's 
misidentified on the US twelve inch as the "Meteorological mix"!
That, as you all know, was the name of the twelve-inch mix
for "The Big Sky", NOT "Cloudbusting"

        The video uses an extended version of the original recording, 
with a brief insert of new music. 
 

QUOTES FROM KATE

        The following quotes are more or less reflective of the quotes 
from Kate on this song.  For more detailed quotes see the book 
Cloudbusting.

        KATE: The last song is called "Cloudbusting," and this was 
inspired by a book that I first found on a shelf nearly nine years ago. 
 It was just calling me from the shelf, and when I read it I was very 
moved by the magic of it.  It's about a special relationship between a 
young son and his father.  The book was written from a child's point of 
view.  His father is everything to him; he is the magic in his life, 
and he teaches him everything, teaching him to be open-minded and not 
to build up barriers.  His father has built a machine that can make it 
rain, a "cloudbuster"; and the son and his father go out together 
cloudbusting.  They point big pipes up into the sky, and they make it 
rain.  The song is very much taking a comparison with a yo-yo that 
glowed in the dark and which was given to the boy by a best friend.  It 
was really special to him; he loved it.  But his father believed in 
things having positive and negative energy, and that fluorescent light 
was a very negative energy - as was the material they used to make 
glow-in-the-dark toys then - and his father told him he had to get rid 
of it, he wasn't allowed to keep it.  But the boy, rather than throwing 
it away, buried it in the garden, so that he would placate his father 
but could also go and dig it up occasionally and play with it.  It's a 
parallel in some ways between how much he loved the yo-yo - how special 
it was - and yet how dangerous it was considered to be.  He loved his 
father (who was perhaps considered dangerous by some people); and he 
loved how he could bury his yo-yo and retrieve it whenever he wanted to 
play with it.  But there's nothing he can do about his father being 
taken away, he is completely helpless.  But it's very much more to do 
with how the son does begin to cope with the whole loneliness and pain 
of being without his father.  It is the magic moments of a relationship 
through a child's eyes, but told by a sad adult.   (1985, KBC 18)


 

ANNOTATED LYRICS

        Peter Reich was known as Peeps to his Dad, which is why the 7 
inch single has "For Peeps" engraved into the runoff groove. He was 
close to his parents.  When he was 10, his mother left them because she 
was a rather independent person and also because she got fed up with 
Wilhem's work.  Thus Peter was very close to his dad after that. 

        The "march" music of the song could have been inspired by the 
"Corps of the Comsic Engineers", in which Wilheim was the general, 
Peter was both lieutenant and sergeant, and their followers were 
soldiers and scouts.  (It is with powerful
irony, therefore, that the footsteps of the government agents in Kate's 
film for "Cloudbusting" are shown keeping time with the music.)  They 
believed they were soldiers fighting against UFO's.

        In the following analysis, quotes from A Book of Dreams are 
given in quotation marks.


 I still dream of Orgonon.

        This should actually be spelled "Organon" (see seperate section 
below).

 I wake up crying.
 You're making rain,
 And you're just in reach,
 When you and sleep escape me.

        KATE: All of us tend to live in our heads.  In "Cloudbusting," 
the idea was of starting this song with a person waking up from this 
dream, "I wake up crying."  It's like setting a scene that immediately 
suggests to you that this person is no longer with someone they dearly 
love.
        It puts a pungent note on the song.  Life is a loss, isn't it? 
It's learning to cope with loss.  I think in a lot of ways, that's what 
all of us have to cope with.   (1989, AP)


 You're like my yo-yo
 That glowed in the dark.
 What made it special
 Made it dangerous,
 So I bury it
 And forget.

        Fluorescent lights and glow-in-the-dark yoyos are very very bad 
for one's "Orgone Energy", so Wilhelm made Peter bury his yoyo.  But 
every now and then Peter would want to play with it anyway, even though 
he knew it was bad for him.  So he would dig it up, play with it for a 
while, and then bury it again.
        "What made it special, Made it dangerous" also refers to 
Peter's father, who was considered "dangerous" by the government.

      But every time it rains,
      You're here in my head,
      Like the sun coming out--
      Ooh, I just know that something good is going to happen.
      And I don't know when,
      But just saying it could even make it happen.

        KATE: And the song is really using the rain as something the 
reminds the son of his father.  Every time it rains instead of it being 
very sad and lonely, it's a very happy moment for him, it's like his 
father is with him again.   (1985, MTV)

        The phrase "...something good is going to happen..." stems from 
a recurrent foreboding, in the book, that "something bad
was going to happen." 


 On top of the world,
 Looking over the edge,
 You could see them coming.

        "He was like a man who was standing on top of the world looking 
over into a new world.  That is what Daddy was like. He had lifted 
himself so he was looking the horizon to a new world, a free and happy 
world.  He stood there on the edge of the universe looking into the 
future. [...] They pulled the ladder out from under him and killed 
him."


 You looked too small
 In their big, black car,
 To be a threat to the men in power.

        The government people came and took Wilhem away when Peter was 
13 (Wilhem also died in the same year).  With regards to the line "I 
can't hide you from the government", I quote a passage that describe 
what happened when the government people FDA agents and a US marshal 
came in "a shiny black car". To get to the Reichs' estate, Orgonon, 
visitors have to pass the abandoned laboratory at the foot of the hill. 
 Wilhem instructed Peter to keep the government people at the lab by 
asking them to wait, and then to call him on the phone, so that Wilhem 
can be prepared.  Peter did as he was told, and as he called Wilhem, 
who was in his study, the government people sneaked up the hill:

          "Daddy! They didn't wait"
          Tears tangled my words making the reciever wet and shiny.  
The car disappered around around the lab up the hill.
          "Daddy! They're coming up! OH DADDY OH GOD THEY DIDN'T WAIT.
        THEY'RE COMING UP DADDY THEY'RE COMING UP!"
          The screen door slammed before the receiver hit the floor. 
Grass was already whipping my legs as I ran up the hill.  [...]
          Everett Quimbly said if you run with your hands open you 
could go faster so my hands were wide open going back and forth like a 
train all the way up to the hill like a train running.  Because if I 
run fast enough maybe I could beat them to he top of the hill and warn 
Daddy.  What did they want?  What did they want? Why did they always 
make us unhappy?

        Actually that time the FDA people just wanted the orgone 
accumulators destroyed.  The actual "capturing" of Wilhem was not 
described.


 I hid my yo-yo
 In the garden.
 I can't hide you
 From the government.
 Oh, God, Daddy--
 I won't forget,

      'Cause every time it rains,
      You're here in my head,
      Like the sun coming out--
      Ooh, I just know that something good is going to happen.
      And I don't know when,
      But just saying it could even make it happen.

 The sun's coming out.
 Your son's coming out.

        When Peter was about 26, he saw the movie "The Fly"
(you know, the one about the scientist who did an experiment which 
caused his own body to be mixed up with a fly's so that he has the head 
and an arm of the fly's).  It had a most profound effect on him:

          In the last scene, a benevolent uncle comforts the 
scientist's widow and son.  He tells the son that his father had 
"touched on knowledge of the future," and, "Maybe someday, in many 
years, the world will understand his contribution," and, "he was ahead 
of his time". [..] Right there in the movie, people were laughing at 
how incredible The Fly was when sitting right there in the middle of 
the crowd was someone who had been through something like that and it 
was real.  It was just more believable in a movie.

        And:

        The first thirteen years of my life always seemed most real to 
me, more real than anything that happened afterwards.  And now, 
suddenly, with the infant soldier fading away in the bright lights 
after the movie, I felt afraid that my life would be empty and lost.
          The last thirteen years were lost and unhappy.  The infant 
was frozen inside me, unable to live.  [..]  It took a movie to break 
my shell, maybe because movies are so close to dreams and I love my 
dreams more than reality.  There had been too much sadness; not enough 
laughter.


(The song ends with the sound of a steam train)

        "(See above for full quote) Everett Quimbly said if you run 
with your hands open you could go faster so my hands were wide open 
going back and forth like a train all the way up to the hill like a 
train running.  Because if I run fast enough maybe I could beat them to 
he top of the hill and warn Daddy."

        KATE: That did all fall apart over a period of about ten bars.  
And everything just started falling apart, 'cause it didn't end 
properly, and, you know, the drummer would stop and then the strings 
would just sorta start wiggling around and talking.  And I felt it 
needed an ending, and I didn't really know what to do.  And then I 
thought maybe decoy tactics were the way, and we covered the whole 
thing over with the sound of a steam engine slowing down so that you 
had the sense of the journey coming to an end.  And it worked, it 
covered up all the falling apart and actually made it sound very 
complete in a way.  And we had terrible trouble getting a sound effect 
of steam train so we actually made up the sound effect out of various 
sounds, and Del was the steam.  [Laughs] And we got a whistle on the 
Fairlight for the "poo poop."   (1991, Classic Albums)

        KATE:  We got so many tapes of steam trains, and they don't 
sound anything like what you'd expect steam trains to sound like.  They 
sounded so pathetic.  So we had to build up all this steam sound and 
big wheels and brakes, you know, coming to a halt and everything.  We 
had to totally exaggerate what the real thing sounded like, so that 
people would realize what we meant.   (1985, BAM)