Written by:
Lonnie Irving

Initial release:

Seminal Live, Beggars Banquet BBL102; LP BBL102 CD
[US release: Beggars Banquet/RCA 9807-1-H LP; 9807-2-H CD;(9807-4-H) Cassette. German release: SPV/Rebel SPV 51-3018 LP; SPV 76-3019 CD]

Subsequent reissue:

The Fall 5 Albums, Beggars Banquet, B00DJWUJG6; 19 August 2013 (same version as on Seminal Live; details above)

Date:

19 June 1989

Group on initial release:

Mark E Smith – vocals,; Brix Smith – guitar; vocals Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass, banjo; Marcia Schofield – keyboards; Simon Wolstencroft – drums

Commentary:

A cover of a 1960 C&W trucking song written and performed by Lonnie Irving, who only released three singles before his death in the same year.

“Lonnie had been a truck driver for Hennis Truck Lines of Winston-Saleem NC until 2nd Oct 1959 when he was diagnosed with Leukemia ”

The original version contains the following spoken lyric unused in The Fall’s version:

“This story’s about an ex-truck driver
Bein’ named John James Wall
Before his friends blackballed him and nick-named him pinball
I gathered this story from a truck stop in Gallipolis, Ohio
When this old fellar, I’d say, 70 years old
Asked me to buy him a strong cup of coffee
And a piece of good apple pie
I bought the coffee and the pie for the old fellow
And I’m awful glad I did
Because he winked his eye and smiled and said “My!, My!”
Then I noticed in a few minutes, with trembling hands
He pushed a part of his pie and coffee back
And looked at me with tears running down his poor old
Weather beaten cheeks, and this is what he said…”

The following lines are also missing from MES’s rendition:

“I got four catty-corners, and I missed the sixteen”

A comment on YouTube says of this: “It takes an experienced person to understand the line: As 16 years old kid, hanging out in a small truckstop in Kentucky, I remember seeing many drunks and truck drivers blow their whole pay check on a pinball machine trying to hit the sixteen; they would send me or someone else to get another roll of nickels from the waitress. A forty dollar pay check would not last long, unless they hit the sixteen.”

Similarly, MES added some lyrics,most notably the couplet which goes:

“If oceans was whisky and I was a (dove? duck?)
I’d dive into it and never come up.”

As a commentator ( odyjamess) on Youtube pointed out, these lines are not MES originals but come from the song ‘Jack o’ Diamonds (Rye Whiskey)’ by Tex Ritter. The Fall Lyrics Parade has the animal concerned as being a dove, but Ritter’s song mentions a duck.

The following analysis of the song was published as part of the Gladys Winthorpe series in Reformation! The Webzine, issue no. 2, summer 2008 https://sites.google.com/site/reformationthewebzine/home/issue-002—summer-2008/gladys-winthorpe-30-31

Smith, M. E.: vox
Smith, B. E.: guitar?
Scanlon, C: guitar?
Hanley, S: bass, banjo
Wolstencroft, S: drums
Schofield, M: keyboards

From the much maligned “Seminal Live” mish-mash album of 1989, “Pinball Machine” is a cover of a Lonnie Irving song and was perfectly summarised in Simon Ford’s book as “an achingly sincere song about a life lost to old trucks and pinball machines”. It’s a rare excursion for the group into country music territory [1].

“Pinball Machine” is an unusual song in many ways. MES provides an vocal style never heard anywhere else within The Fall’s immense discography; one review at the time of “Seminal Live”‘s release described it aptly as a “ridiculous country drawl”. Also, the level of his vocals fluctuates a great deal; it’s almost as if he’s wandering around the studio whilst recording them. For example, listen from 0:22 (“If oceans was risky…”) to 0:32 (“… to live on sardines.”). At the start, he’s right at the forefront of the mix, but by the end, he sounds like he’s left the studio and singing them from a cupboard on the other side of the corridor!

The backing music continues the unevenness. It’s very eccentrically mixed – almost in mono, sitting as a big blob just to the right of centre of the picture – and seems to be very low compared to the vocals, even at their quietest. It is primarily made up of the following components:

– A remarkably simple and unadorned drum pattern by Simon which can be summarised as “bass-two-three, snare-two-three”;
– A droning, almost-single note bassline [2];
– Doc Shanley doubling his bass with a twanging banjo which provides another repetitive (and fundamentally textural) line;
– an almost inaudible – and sporadic – rhythm guitar part, mimicking the banjo part and presumably played by Craig (e.g. 0:41 [3]);
– Marcia’s spectral keyboards, which provide a single Wild West-inspired line throughout the song.

Even the structure of the song is unorthodox; apart from the brief introduction (Simon counting time on his hi-hat, Marcia testing her keyboard), the song arrives, continues unaltered throughout the entire duration and then gently stumbles to a halt. The dying notes are then brutally truncated, as if MES had lost interest as soon as he’d finished. As the song comes to that unexpected close, Micro-Listening [tm] students may have noticed a couple of extra noteworthy incidents:

– A few spoken words at 2:45 which are lost beneath MES’s main vocal;
– The emergence at 2:46 of a guitar that wasn’t obviously in the main section; this provides a brief descending outro before becoming a victim to the edit [4].
In summary, “Pinball Machine” is a fantastically eccentric example of the group’s wide-ranging musical versatility!

Notes:
1. I know that early stuff such as “Container Drivers” was described by MES as “country’n’Northern”, but that took country music devices and mixed them thoroughly with The Fall’s love of garage rock noise. “Pinball Machine” is probably the most extreme foray into the entire C’n’W *sound* that the group have done.
2. The only exception to this is at a few choice moments throughout the song to provide emphasis at key points; for example, the three notes at 2:16, perfectly synchronising with the words “most of my”.
3. At times and to add to the oddness of this song, the rhythm guitar part seems to be mixed with MES’s vocals in the left of the stereo space; at others, it’s with the rest of the backing music on the right!
4. Possibly the only appearance of Brix in this song?