This is the daybreak
And this is the love we make
For love is the law here
You've got to know how I love it, yeah
It's more than a mover
You know it takes all fast all slow
Stone cold wild
Bring the love in son brother man
True nature child
I think I'll sing it
From Atlanta, Georgia to Longsight, Manchester
Everyone ready
So so willing and able yeah, yeah, yeah
For the love you make
I know sis' huh, yeah, wooh !
She built it to make ya
We all love makers anyway
Sister Rosa Lee Parks
Love forever her name in your heart
Forever in my heart, mm, yeah, woh, hey
As I sing on this song
Someone just got rolled on hey
Oh hey, yeah, wooh yeah
New York City to Addis Ababa(baba)
Keep on keeping strong
Keep on keeping on
So why no stack for black
On a radio station in this the city ?
Been going on so long, level on the line
I'm a leaf on the vine of time
Black bones are the original bones
And so this the whole wide world should know y'all
I came to sing this song in your city
Ooh for the dreamers, one more for the dreamers yeah
Lyrics by:
Squire / Brown / Mounfield / Wren
Music by:
Squire / Mounfield / Wren
Written:
1993
Personnel:
John Squire (guitar)
Ian Brown (vocals)
Gary Mounfield (bass)
Alan Wren (drums)
Simon Dawson (keyboards)
Producer:
Simon Dawson.
Engineer:
Initial recording by Mark Tolle and Al 'Bongo' Shaw.
Available on:
Second Coming (6.33)
Crimson Tonight Live EP: Daybreak (8:38) / Breaking Into Heaven (7:03) / Driving South (4:50) / Tightrope (4:39) (September 1995, Geffen, catalogue number of Japanese release: MVCG-13029)
First live performance:
Oslo Rockefeller Music Hall (19 April 1995)
Details:
A song from Second Coming that sounded better fleshed out live than in the studio, with the latter having too much of an unfinished feel. The July 1995 issue of The Guitar Magazine details the recording approach:
It suited Brown ideally, as his preferred writing method is to initially ignore Squire's guitar, and instead take drum loops from the track, feel the rhythm of the loop and sing a melody over the top. Squire then listens to the vocal and adds the guitar overdubs, often completely changing the guitar melody to adapt it to Brown's vocal. It's a process that turns the conventional recording approach on its head.
(The Guitar Magazine, July 1995)
Love is the predominant theme of the song (the word is mentioned a total of seven times), a value which Martin Luther King Jr. worked tirelessly for among the American people, despite the discrimination against blacks. The arrest of Rosa Lee Parks forms the basis of the song. Rosa Lee Parks was a black woman who, in December 1955, refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. She was sitting in the fifth row (the first row that blacks could occupy), along with three other blacks. Soon, all of the first four rows were filled up, and a white man walked on. Since blacks and whites were not permitted to be in the same row, the bus driver wanted all of the blacks to move. The other three blacks complied, but Parks refused. When found guilty on 5th December, Parks was fined $10, plus a court cost of $4, but she appealed. This act of defiance came one year after the Supreme Court's Brown versus Board of Education decision that led to the end of racial segregation in public schools. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was planned - before Rosa Parks' arrest - by E.D. Nixon, president of the local NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Nixon intended to use any arrest as a test case to allow Montgomery's black citizens to challenge segregation on the city's public buses. With this goal, community leaders had been waiting for the right person to be arrested, a person who would anger the black community into action, who would agree to test the segregation laws in court, and who, most importantly, was "above reproach." When fifteen year old Claudette Colvin was arrested early in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat, E.D. Nixon thought he had found the perfect person, but the teenager turned out to be pregnant. Nixon later explained, "I had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with." Parks, however, was a good candidate because of her employment and marital status, along with her good standing in the community.
The Women's Political Council called for a boycott of all buses by every black person on a following Monday. On the afternoon of the trial (which contained the expected conviction and penalty given to Rosa Lee), the Montgomery Improvement Association was formed. The members elected as their president a relative newcomer to Montgomery, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hence, Rosa Lee was the "daybreak" of the Civil Rights movement.* "One more for the dreamers" is a tacit reference to the "I have a dream....." (see Tradjic Roundabout) speech by King, a dream shared collectively by all those suffering discrimination. Despite reprisals against Montgomery's black community (the Ku Klux Klan bombed King's house and burned several black churches), King called for non-violence from blacks: "We must love our white brothers no matter what they do to us". In effect, King was saying that "love" should be "the law" in Montgomery ('Love Is The Law', an Aleister Crowley maxim, would form the basis of The Seahorses’ Love Is The Law). Addis Ababa is the capital of Ethiopia and origin of 'near-modern' humans - Ian explicitly states this in the line "black bones are the original bones". The birthplace of Dr. King - Atlanta, Georgia - is linked to that of the Roses - Longsight, Manchester.
Pressure increased across the country, and on 4th June 1956, the federal district court ruled that Alabama's racial segregation laws for buses were unconstitutional. However, an appeal kept the segregation intact, and the boycott continued until, finally, on 13th November 1956, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court's ruling. This victory led to a city ordinance that allowed black bus passengers to sit virtually anywhere they wanted, and the boycott officially ended on 20th December 1956; the boycott of the buses had lasted for 381 days. Martin Luther King Jr. capped off the victory with a magnanimous speech to encourage acceptance of the decision. The boycott resulted in the U.S. civil rights movement receiving one of its first victories and gave Martin Luther King Jr. the national attention that made him one of the prime leaders of the cause. The progress of the Civil Rights movement was affected by other events, particularly those relating to the Cold War (King was particularly critical of how the Vietnam war was taking attention away from the issue of Civil Rights). The federal government under presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953 - 61) and John F. Kennedy (1961 – 63) had been reluctant to vigorously enforce the Brown decision of 1954, which ruled against segregation of schools but was not uniformly implemented, when this entailed directly confronting the resistance of Southern whites. While John F. Kennedy won a following in the black community by encouraging the movement's leaders, his administration lacked the political capacity to persuade Congress to pass new legislation guaranteeing integration and equal rights. It was not until the Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson (1963 - 68) that the Civil Rights Act was signed, in 1964. This was the most far-reaching civil rights bill in the nation's history (indeed, in world history), forbidding discrimination in public accommodations and threatening to withhold federal funds from communities that persisted in maintaining segregated schools. This was followed in 1965 by the Voting Rights Act, the enforcement of which eradicated the tactics previously used in the South to disenfranchise black voters. This act led to drastic increases in the numbers of black registered voters in the South, with a comparable increase in the numbers of blacks holding elective offices there.
In a May 1995 'Sound On Sound' interview, Simon Dawson said that the incorporation of a Hammond at the end was John's idea, in order to create a "Doorsy kind of feel". Perhaps Squire also had Hendrix in mind. The close of the song emulates the guitar and organ jamming of Hendrix's 'Still Raining, Still Dreaming', from his 'Electric Ladyland' LP. Compare the following two clips:
Daybreak