Neil Young's 'Living with War' list of protest song includes W. Dire Wolff's song, 'Blind Man's Stick'. The song has been in the top 200 for most of 2008 and 2009. The song finally broke into the top 40 at Number 39, the Week of December 22, 2008. It's top position was Number 36 the week of June 29, 2009.
Number 30 the Week of September 21, 2009
Click Here for Blind Man's Stick Page A new remix of the song, 'Blind Man's Stick', was posted August 2007. The original concept was a very roughly handled melody with the acoustic guitars absent mindedly bumping against the microphones. I tried to return to the basics of booming acoustic guitars, tinny overloaded telecasters, and good old gravel in a barrel vocals on this one.
When I wrote the song, I just started strumming some chords and singing a couple lines, then stopping to write down whatever I just sang. It's one of those songs that just fell out of the sky. Music is a visual experience for me. Every song has a couple or a few different movies that start getting projected inside my head. Often times there is the internal dream movie(s) of the story and characters that are represented in a song, and in addition there is also often the story of the musicians or storytellers.
Blind Man's Stick is a story about when a lone soldier comes limping home from an unclear war. As I was writing the song I imagined that the song was being sung in a truckstop at 3 o'clock in the morning. The band is this gruff bunch of longhair yahoos who are drunk and dirty. They are so drunk that their guitars are smacking into the microphones. At first the storytellers seem to project more chaos than melody, but soon it's clear they are touching something very close to their hearts.
Thank you for all of you with a strange sense of ... Wolff