Eric Helin Design - Music: The Existential Wanderer

Music & Lyrics: The Exsistential Wanderer

The song is about the brutal murder of gay student Matthew Shepard in Wyoming in October of 1998. What immediately gripped me, when I first heard the news reports, was the statement made by the bicyclist who found Matt’s body. He said, “I thought he was a scarecrow that someone had hung on the fence as a Halloween prank.” Matt was a very small guy and I was gripped by the imagery of a small, ragged scarecrow hanging on a fence, surrounded by the vast emptiness of the Wyoming plains. Apparently, beginning in the 1970’s, for reasons largely unknown, the characters from L. Frank Baum’s fantasy The Wizard of Oz became inextricably linked with gay culture in the United States. The identification eventually became so inseparable, that occasionally, gay men have even been euphemistically referred to as: “friends of Dorothy.” In case you’re not familiar with the story, Dorothy, the main character in the novel, travels to the fantasy land of Oz where she meets 3 friends: a Scarecrow, a Tin Man, and a Cowardly Lion. I won’t bother to re-iterate the complete story in detail here, so I won’t bore those who are familiar with it. Anyway, in this song, Matthew, depicted as the Scarecrow, is cross-referenced with allusions to the Wizard of Oz. If you’re not thoroughly familiar with the story, as well as the characters and the events that take place in it, your appreciation of the song will certainly be limited if you understand it at all.

Matthew Shepard

– TAG –
Now I’m just an existential wanderer
I watch the clouds above me come and go
When your heart’s been broken
And there’s nowhere else to go
Maybe you can see, how I came to be —
Became and existential wanderer

– VERSE 1 –
Just a young lonely scarecrow
Searchin’ for his tin man
A knight in shining armor
To carry him away
And ride into the sunset with his arms around him
Out of the heart of America across the Western plains

– CHORUS –
Now I’ve been searchin’ for a meanin’
Tryin’ to find an answer
Somethin’ to believe in . . .
A reason . . . or a cause . . .
They say it’s “somewhere, over the rainbow”
But . . . can you find a wizard in Oz???

– VERSE 2 –
The scarecrow wandered through
October country late one evenin’
Enticed Fireside’s glowin’ lights
Went in to find some friends
But two wicked witches monkeys
Skittered up and dragged him off
Down a road in the middle of nowhere
Into an evil wind

–VERSE 3 –
He tried to run – they chased him down
Dragged him back and beat him
They roped him to a fencepost when he tied to get away
Then tore him into pieces like creatures from some nightmare
And finally bashed his head in till it shattered like an egg

–VERSE 4 –
In the wee hours of the mornin’
As wind rustled through his clothing
And frost was gently clingin’ to the lashes of his eyes
Freezin’ tears streaked down his cheeks
And when all hope had left him
That helpless little scarecrow just hung his head and died

–VERSE 5 –
People wearin’ emerald spectacles
Walk through this countryside
Tellin’ Munchkin tales of:
‘amber waves of grain’ and ‘spacious skies’
Lookin’ for an emerald city in a land that never was
Where they can declare “an open season” on you” –“ just because”!!

– VERSE 6 –
To all you “friends of Dorothy”
If you’re kind of slow to “get it”
We’re not in Kansas anymore – there’s a witch hunt on the rise
So open up the closets – dust off those ruby slippers
And grab your water buckets
`Cause that witch has got to die!!

Wizard of Oz

[In the utopian “emerald city,” the capital of the land of Oz, everyone must wear emerald glasses so that everyone sees the same thing from the same perspective at the same time. This, is presumably a snide jab at mindless conformity. The Munchkins are a naive little people who inhabit the land of Oz who want everything to be happy and beautiful and refuse to see anything evil.
“Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain” the beginning lines of the song America the Beautiful – extolling the greatness of the USA. Suffice to say the lines in this part are an oblique but pointed criticism of “flag wavers” (depicted as Munchkins in this context). This reference is a howling indictment of the political fantasy that views as reality: “in a land that never was” – Oz never existed and the America that people are taught to believe in (“with liberty and justice for all”) is also a fantasy and never existed either.
“open season” - an idiomatic expression meaning that something or someone may be shot on sight or killed and there is no limitation on the number that may be killed.

“just because” – for whatever reason someone wants to make up, to excuse their actions.