A Skin Too Few

Jeroen Berkvens' 1999 documentary A Skin Too Few takes its title from a remark Gabrielle Drake has often made about her brother Nick, trying to describe why he found it so hard to cope with the world. This film is everything other Nick Drake documentaries are not - a raw heart-tugging document of a young man's terrible trouble adjusting to the pressures of growing up, being uncommonly talented and unreasonably sensitive at the same time. The film shows testimony from family and close friends and associates, illustrating Drake's slow turn away from the world into his own mind where demons of depression lurked and eventually overpowered him.

Unlike Nick Drake Under Review this film does not rely so much on assessments from other musicians or journalists/biographers. In fact the only other musician we hear from is Paul Weller whom we see in the opening scene in a recording studio w. John Wood and Robert Kirby, two of Drake's very close collaborators. Weller never knew Drake, nor does he have much to say about him, so I wonder why he has to appear at all, but never mind...

Rather, we should be very grateful for what we get from this film instead: a very moving portrait of a man and an artist who was very deeply rooted in a loving, supportive environment, both in terms of family and friends and his fellow professionals in the music world. We follow Drake's life chronologically, virtually from cradle to grave, and the main narrator of this story is his older sister Gabrielle, supplemented by the taped voices of both Rodney and Molly, their parents, telling us of events that Gabrielle did not herself witness.

It is quite interesting to get the whole story of the Drakes' time in Burma and to hear Gabrielle speak of Nick's birth and the easy life of a colonial well-to-do family in the late 1940s - illustrated by home movies of a happy family. Her assessment of Molly as a troubled soul, buoyed up by the love of her husband who made life livable for Molly without strangling her creativity is very poignant. The footage then takes us to Tanworth-in-Arden and inside the magically named childhood home of Nick, Far Leys, where we follow the camera into Nick's room, see his wonderful round window, while the soundtrack plays a home recording of "Hazey Jane I" (in a much more rocking version than the Bryter Layter version - a very cool performance by Nick), the camera then panning to a view of a fruit tree out of the window. The images thus already prefigure the theme of home, longing, escape, failure, return, sadness which structures the whole narrative of the film.

Gabrielle then plays one of Molly's songs, again emphasizing the very strong relation between Molly and her son, both in terms of the similarities of their temper and talent, and in terms of her maternal love. Over the sound of Molly's song we hear the train clickety-clacking, signalling Nick's departure to Cambridge which is the next period to be narrated by the film. The use of the train in image and sound is another unifying feature of the film, recurring throughout...

Brian Wells, a Cambridge friend of Nick Drake's, narrates the next portion, a story of dope smoking, guitar playing - in effect a 3 year holiday for the young men. In contrast, Gabrielle reads from a letter from Nick to his parents on liking Cambridge more than before, claiming to have "thrown off one or two rather useless and restrictive complexes that I'd picked up before coming here". One of course wonders where and when...? Gabrielle's stock of letters from Nick would certainly be superlative material for a sincere biographer to have access to. "River Man" is played over footage of Cambridge streets - people coming and going as the lyrics also detail. On tape Rodney speaks of Nick's Cambridge nostalgia, and of his desire that Nick should have a degree as a safety net, whereas Nick insisted that that was the one thing he would rather not have...

The scene shifts to London as Gabrielle remembers Nick one day coming home to their flat, tossing copies of Five Leaves Left on the bed - to her amazement, since she never realized that he was recording a whole LP. This portion continues with musical testimonials from producer Joe Boyd talking about Nick's skills and reliability as a player, Robert Kirby speaking of his arrangements ('lonely and bleak') complementing the perfect guitar line, which John Wood, the engineer, illustrates on the mixing board (playing the raw tracks of "Chime of a City Clock"). As the song plays on the soundtrack in its fully finished version, the images illustrate the song with night footage of rainy London street, segueing into the well known stills of Drake standing motionless against a wall as other pedestrians rush by.

Next, Boyd talks about Nick quitting touring in frustration over audiences being indifferent or hostile. Wells tells an anecdote about Nick slipping into isolation and depression. One of his most upbeat songs, "When Day Is Done", illustrates Nick's next move "back where you've begun," as the lyrics read. Wells remembers Nick returning home to Tanworth, and his being ashamed at having failed to live and cope in London. Drake was hospitalized, and diagnosed as clinically depressed, whereas Wells sees Nick's condition more as an existential crisis, brought on by the coldness and futility of life as such.

We next hear a recording of Molly, quoting Nick: "I don't like it at home, but I can't bear it anywhere else..." Molly concludes that Nick had "given up on the world", and she recalls her utter inability to help him overcome his sense of acute failure at everything he had ever tried to do. Gabrielle explains it like this: "I never did see a change - it crept up on us..." "He saw more, and he became more silent as he saw more." "That is expressed in his songs and almost nowhere else..." This sequence of the film is very dark, also in terms of images of the night, storms, even featuring Gabrielle dressed in black - all quite effective emotionally, as one understands the tragedy of his family not being equipped to help Drake at all. Love was not enough.

Boyd talks about trying to get Drake to seek help from a psychiatrist, but Nick being ashamed of such a course of action. Later Boyd details Nick's outburst against his lack of success, making an analogy between Nick's anger directed towards Boyd, and the lyrics to the song "Hanging on a Star" ("Why leave me hanging on a star when you deem me so high?") As Nick sings the desolate lyrics to "Know": "Know that I love you, Know I don't care, Know that I see you, Know I'm not there" we pan to the supernatural beauty of the English woodlands in misty, early morning shots, another technique Berkvens uses to great effect, showing the incongruousness between Nick's surroundings and his self-image.

Keith Morris, photographer for the Drake albums, remembers the Pink Moon sessions, especially Nick's almost total silence which contrasts dramatically with earlier occasions where they had worked together. The images taken during that session are shown with no musical accompaniment. The film shifts to Gabrielle reciting Molly Drake's poem "The Shell," describing how both Molly and her son had problems sensing the world directly without the feeling of being imprisoned in a shell - this is accompanied by images of Gabrielle placed in the woods as a stylized, tragic figure herself - obviously practising her actor's craft here...

We are next treated to English woodland and village scenes - evincing the same stylized beauty, as Drake finally sings "Hanging on a Star". The camera takes us again to Nick's room, and a montage of both parents' voices narrates the last night of Nick's life (we see Nick's round window increasingly freeze over during this narration). Molly remembers the final night and next morning - the agony of never having known how dangerous the Triptozol pills were, the inevitability of finding him dead that morning. Gabrielle remembers being in a comedy play in Bristol at the time, and how her parents drove down to tell her of Nick's death. As she tells us this, we see the room scene again, and Berkvens uses the out of the window motif, as Nick sings of the "endless summer nights" (from Pink Moon's "From the Morning"), escaping his shell for good.

Gabrielle's theory of Nick's death is that it was a spontaneous act - whether suicide or cry for help she could never determine... (We see the interior of the Tanworth-in-Arden church as a service ends.) Gabrielle muses on the blessings of having had such a family and the tragedy of losing them. Kirby relates his feeling of being shocked at the news of Drake's death, whereas Wood felt terribly sad, but not surprised...

The closing scene begins with Nick's voice on tape, apologetic that his voice is failing - but he promises to do one more song. Over images of Tanworth "Northern Sky" plays, and suddenly the music is lowered so we hear Nick's naked voice, as we see his headstone in the church yard. The sequence ends with an impossibly beautiful shot of the church in the distance.

Gabrielle closes the film by talking of Nick's recent fame, and the helping quality of Nick's music for so many young people of later generations ("had he only known..."). As "Northern Sky" closes, we end with the Drake family home movies - filled by images of Nick's happy childhood. The soundtrack ends with sounds of waves and moving trains.

I find the film very well made, especially as it allows itself to have a narrative that veers from the straight documentary aesthetics and into techniques borrowed from fiction: the use of leit motifs, colouring, sound effects etc. This enhances the film's emotional impact greatly and it is hard to not be very moved by its otherwise familiar story. I am very impressed by Gabrielle Drake's role in the film which she virtually carries single-handedly - both as a trustworthy narrator and as a great actress using her craft to play on our emotions. The 48 minutes spent with the Drake family are very enriching and enlightening.

Nick Drake Under Review

A few weeks ago my friend Gorm was visiting and spotted a couple of Nick Drake documentary DVDs on my shelf. I had been saving them for special occasions because I knew they would be emotionally challenging to watch and I would want to write about them (as this review bears witness to), and at the same time I hadn't really wanted to watch them for fear of disappointment - the usual syndrome that can hit the ardent fan when someone else dares to provide opinions on and analyses of the sacred object: On the one hand you want there to be as many Nick Drake documentaries as possible, but on the other hand you don't want to watch them because you know they'll be full of nonsense... Anyway, Gorm asked if my wife and I had watched the films, and when I said no, he concluded: Oh, you're not that big a fan, then! Thus challenged, I figured it was high time to actually get started and to deliver the review I rashly promised when I first started this blog named after a line in a Drake song...

The 90 minute Under Review film came out on DVD in 2007 (Chrome Dreams - Director and writer apparently both wish to remain nameless...). It is not sanctioned by the Nick Drake estate, Bryter Music; nor by Drake's record company, Island. Therefore, we are only treated to short snippets of Drake's recordings - I suppose to keep the copyright issues minimized by sticking to the standard fair use clauses. As a result the film contains longer clips by Bob Dylan and Davey Graham than it does by Drake. Of course there is also the matter of Drake never having been filmed live, so we don't get any performance footage either, but then that is a given in any Drake film.

What we do get is a bunch of interviews with people whose lives have in several ways brushed up against Nick Drake's, either because they knew him, or because his music somehow has captivated them. The film is chronological in that it follows Drake's life from childhood to his premature death at 26. It goes into great detail about some aspects of his life, primarily of course the creation of his three completed albums, but also to some extent his personal life. The interviewees thus function as narrators taking us through a mixture of basic information (although a voice-over narrator also provides that type of continuity, esp. in the first third of the film) and personal assessments. The chief narrators of that kind are the two main biographers of Nick Drake, Patrick Humphries and Trevor Dann, plus the only contemporary music journalist who took Drake seriously, Jerry Gilbert (Gilbert conducted the only interview Drake ever gave to a music journalist). Analysis is also provided by Caitlin Moran - columnist and journalist w. The Times, and her husband Pete Paphides - also a music journalist. They represent the younger voices, sanely assessing Drake's significance to our current time and its musical and cultural climate.

The second type of narrators consists of musicians, and again we get two different generational viewpoints: Drake's contemporaries and our contemporaries. Of the first kind are Fairport Convention musicians such as Ashley Hutchings (who 'discovered' Drake) and Dave Mattacks (who played on the Bryter Layter recordings w. Drake), as well as Ralph McTell - who headlined the last gig Drake ever played at. These three provide insightful analysis of why Drake failed as a live performer, but succeeded as a songwriter and musician in the studio. Other older members of the 60s folk scene in the UK are interviewed as well, but good people such as John Renbourn (who teaches us the difference between the blues style vs. the finger picking style on the acoustic guitar) and Robin Williamson of The Incredible String Band didn't really know Drake personally and have little to say about him. Here one sorely misses Linda and Richard Thompson, John Martyn and other, closer, musician friends of Drake.

The younger generation of musicians is represented by one of the relatively few women in the film, Kathryn Williams, who also performs fragments of Drake's songs. Keith James, a singer / songwriter in his own right, also performs covers of Nick Drake songs (some of which he has recorded on CD) and talks about Drake's tuning and playing techniques. A few comparisons are made with another English guitar innovator, Davey Graham, who has been rather more unkindly treated by time. Renbourn and Bert Jansch are of course also mentioned as influences on Drake's playing style, but other than that most of the film's interviewees emphasize strongly how Drake's music really transcends the narrow bounds of the 'folk' label, esp. because of his knowledge of other types of music, classical as well as jazz. As for the analysis of the music of Nick Drake the film is severely hampered by the lack of involvement from the people who really worked with Drake: Joe Boyd, John Wood, Robert Kirby - producer, engineer, arranger of scores, respectively, are all missing as voices...

The final type of interviewees consists of friends and acquaintances, and here we only really get snippets from an elderly couple who knew Drake's parents (but have nothing of interest to say) and a substantial contribution from Jeremy Mason - Drake's old friend (he wrote "Three Hours (to Sundown)" about Jeremy). Mason provides a number of rarely seen photos and lets us see some of his own drawings of Nick - great material, much of which stems from a stay the two of them had in Aix-en-Provence, France. Again, though, one misses more testimonials from (other) friends (where are the women who knew Nick?) and family - but Drake's parents are both dead and his sister Gabrielle is reluctant to talk to most journalists and biographers...

This leads me to my main bone of contention with the film - the role of Trevor Dann. I intensely dislike his bio of Drake, Darker Than the Deepest Sea, which spuriously suggests that Drake's problems all stem from childhood abuse of some unspecified sort (all based on so-called textual analysis of Drake's lyrics). While Dann doesn't voice any such views in this film, he still comes across as a very unsympathetic and snide character who routinely ventures into territory he has little knowledge of. His casual references to Drake's allegedly excessive drug use are left unchallenged by the film makers, whereas many of Drake's friends are willing to testify that these stories are vastly overstated. Further, it quickly becomes clear that Dann is in deep waters himself when one hears him waffle about the role of modal jazz as an influence on Drake, or - even worse - his muddy explanations of the so-called Blake and Tennyson influences in Drake's lyrics (Dann refers to the authority of so-called "lit crit guys", of which he himself admittedly is not one, to back this claim up, but he doesn't provide one specific example). Dann also claims an influence on Drake by James Lovelock's ecological ideas, despite the fact that Lovelock's book Gaia - A New Look on Life on Earth was not published until 1979, 5 years after Drake's death...

Patrick Humphreys comes off as a much less conceited biographer and wisely sticks to contributions of a musical and cultural nature, but as sources go, it is really Jerry Gilbert who is the most interesting narrator and analyst. The film is therefore, on the whole, informative and sober, and it may function well as an introduction to Drake's work and parts of the late 60s, early 70s folk scene in Britain. For the hardcore fan of Drake there is less of interest in the film, and little that one hasn't heard already. The aesthetics of the film can get quite annoying, particularly in the choice of images to accompany the short musical interludes. This footage is invariably bucolic in the early 1960s instances and then gets increasingly political and social as we enter the 1970s - but what is worse is the plodding literalism of the images: when Drake mentions food in his lyrics, we see food; when he mentions a fruit tree, we see rotting fruit; when he mentions the sky - you've guessed it...

Overall, I would recommend that even fans watch the film, but the experience is not really very deep, either emotionally or intellectually. One doesn't get under the skin of Nick Drake - and perhaps that is all for the best...

PS: As a "lit crit guy" I cannot resist mentioning that when Drake's first band (while he was still in school) took the name The Perfumed Gardeners, they were referencing an Arabic erotic classic: The Perfumed Garden, translated by Richard Burton (Sheikh Nefzaoui was the original author). Not much has been made of this curious fact, and I suppose Nick Drake's role in choosing the name is not quite clear. One wonders, though, what the reading of such a book (basically an erotic manual) might have done to a young boy's imagination... Drake's life of the mind certainly still remains largely uncharted, despite much biographical writing and documentary film making.

PPS: Make sure not to miss the extras features, in particular Robin Williamson's tarot reading of Drake's "Character - inner and outer". It is wonderfully 60s, whacked-out hippydom, yet strangely sane and a bona-fide analysis of Drake as a person, bound in a specific time and milieu...

Back in the thick of it

I still haven't gotten back in a proper routine after the Nordic Americanist events over the last two weeks, but every mill needs its grist, not least the publication one. Therefore it is gratifying to have two new book chapters out as a result of 2006's conference going!

Space Haunting Discourse is a volume out from Cambridge Scholars Press, edited by Maria Holmgreen Troy and Elizabeth Wennö from Karlstad U. Maria and Elizabeth put on two excellent interdisciplinary conferences in 2004 and '06 and I participated in both of them. The chapter I have in the fresh volume is on novels about Big Sur, California by Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Richard Brautigan. Maria and Elizabeth have written a comprehensive and generous introduction to the volume which is available as a PDF from the publishers' web site. They give the following description of my piece:

Presence and absence are also features of Bent Sørensen’s “Representations of Big Sur in Late Modernist and Early Postmodernist American Writing.” The textual referent is the actual geographical Californian Big Sur, inscribed with meanings by three writers in such a way that it is rendered absent and instead emphasises loss and disillusion. In effect, his analysis supports David Harvey’s argument that the genius loci, the place of special significance to the individual and the community, “is open to contestation, both theoretically (as to its meaning) and concretely (as to how to understand a place)” (309). Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Richard Brautigan all wrote prose about Big Sur, and Sørensen demonstrates how this locus haunts these texts in three significantly diverging ways: Miller’s locus amoenus, Kerouac’s tremens, and Brautigan’s topos.

Within the short span of seven years, the potential of Big Sur as a locus representing ideas and emotions has been transformed into a fully textualised topos, which can only serve as a vehicle for pastiche and postmodern parody of Brautigan’s modernist precursors’ anxieties. His text is haunted by the intertextual ghosts of Kerouac’s and Miller’s gender and racial values, which are parodied by Brautigan’s incongruous collection of beatnik womanisers and exploiters of both land and Native American (and Confederate) heritages. At the end of the essay Sørensen quotes J. Gerald Kennedy’s remarks on the distinction between a subjective concept of place and a “textual, writerly image”: the difference between the two is not a structural one of “real and fictive” but “between textual scenes and the symbolic experiences of place which they inscribe.” Taking it one step further we could say that Sørensen’s analysis of modernist and postmodernist inscriptions also reflect the epistemological shift in theory as well as the shift in literature from the crypto-religious impulse of modernism to the playful linguistic preoccupation of much postmodernism.

My other new book chapter is an analysis of Uncle Sam as an American icon. It is published in a volume edited by Ari Helo of the Helsinki Renvall Institute, titled Communities and Connections: Writings in North American Studies. That chapter will be integrated in my forthcoming book American Icons: Transgression and Commodification.

Upcoming conferences: Icons and Caddies

Next week will be a busy academic whirlwind tour of two Nordic capitals for me: Helsinki and Oslo. The two main American Studies events of the year are crammed together as consecutive conferences: The Renvall Institute's Helsinki do, The Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference, has reached instalment no. 12 in its fine run (it will be my third time around as a participant). The theme is always broad and this year is no exception: North America - Relations and relationships. My contribution is about the cultural importance of one specific, iconic brand of car: The Cadillac...

I approach this broad topic from a cultural text studies point of view, investigating how the cars are represented as markers of specific identity positions within specific difference hierarchies:

The Cadillac car has long featured in the American imagination as a signifier of cool masculinity, mastery of the road, financial surplus and a predilection for luxury and comfort (cf. the lyrics to ‘Cadillac Man’, quoted below). I propose to analyze a number of cultural texts that construct, establish and eventually subvert these connotations. I am particularly interested in constructions of race and sexual orientation utilizing the vehicle of the Cadillac. Texts to be analyzed include Jack Kerouac’s “fag Cadillac” in On the Road, rock singer and performer Mink DeVille, the persona of James ‘Thunder’ Early (played by Eddie Murphy) in the 2006 movie Dreamgirls, and various rock ‘n’ roll lyrics featuring comparisons of Fords and Caddies…

Well I’m the king of the road
Ain’t got no place to go, no place I call home
Seen the world from behind this old wheel
Driving away from those feelings I feel

- Cadillac Man

After a few days in Finland we'll relocate to Norway for the big European American Studies event under the auspices of the EAAS. Here my presentation is in connection with my on-going project on American Icons, more specifically some icons of transgression, associated with the 1960s. I'll give a paper on two celeb-criminals, two very different cultural texts, Patty Hearst and Charles Manson:

All iconic representations of actual persons (living or dead) are caught in a dichotomy between elements of normality/familiarity and elements of transgression. Manipulation of representations of celebrities or famous persons into hero- or other-images can either constitute adversarial or collaborative icon work. In adherence with the conference theme of “E Pluribus Unum or E Pluribus Plura” it would be interesting to examine iconic images that are meant to be particularly transgressive of normality and challenge stereotypical images of American wholesomeness. I propose to look at specific collaborative, yet provocative representations of two 1960s icons of transgression: Charles Manson and Patty Hearst, and to analyze how these particular images simultaneously stylize and sacralize these counterculture (anti)heroes, turning the viewer of the icons from passive consumers into ardent worshippers, consumers or cultural agnostics, all according to our ideas regarding the subjects and symbols in question. The images are reproduced below:

The Will to Submission

On the off chance that someone would get the strange idea from my previous post that I have something against male singers with high pitched voices and a penchant for odd hand movements, I offer this counter-evidence:

Here is the sublime androgyny of Antony Hegarty interpreting Leonard Cohen's "If It Be Your Will". Leonard's song is a celebration and embodiment of the total submission to the will of the Other which a man may have to embrace once in a life time. Antony is in some ways that embodiment of the Other which we rarely have a chance to encounter in real life. We are all enriched by the art of both these individuals who give new meaning to the postmodern sublime in their rags of light...

If it be your will
That I speak no more
And my voice be still
As it was before
I will speak no more
I shall abide until I am spoken for
If it be your will

Everybody's Talkin'

I have a lasting fascination with American music from the 1960s. Many of the marquee songs of the era have become short scriptures for a generation of young folks who wanted change (hey Obama, you think you're so original?) and new values to believe in... Next semester I'll be teaching a short elective where I'll use a great book by Philip Beidler as the textbook - and he uses that phrase "Scriptures for a Generation" as his title, indicating that texts function ritualistically and communally in an orally transmitted culture...

Many such songs are 'auditory icons' in the sense that they are associated with specific filmic images through their use in film soundtracks. Think The Graduate, and hear Simon & Garfunkle's "Mrs. Robinson". Think Harold & Maude, and hear Cat Stevens' "If You Want to Sing Out". Think Midnight Cowboy, and hear Nilsson sing "Everybody's Talkin'"...

But wait a minute. Most Danes who hear "Everybody's Talkin'" these days will be thinking SAS, as in Scandinavian Airlines, because the corporate geeks in advertising have pinned their hopes on lifting the dwindling fortunes of the venerable inter-Scandinavian aviation conglomerate on the charms of this little ditty. The commercials give me vertigo (never a desired effect for an airline) and an acute sense of dislocation (not good either when destinations matter). The malady I am suffering from is space-time compression, a side effect of globalization: any text can nowadays be lifted from its original context and re-injected in a new sphere, worlds and decades from the origin. Mild disorientation usually ensues in individuals who know the history behind the original usage...

The lyrics of the song which make nice sense in the context of the film Midnight Cowboy, detailing the futile dreams of escape of two misfits trying to get out of New York City to soak up some rays in Florida, make somewhat less sense in the commercial, which follows a suited businessman as he wafts through check-in, security, arrival and apparently steps straight off the plane and into a sidewalk eatery in Southern climes... Listen:

Everybody's talking at me.
I don't hear a word they're saying,
Only the echoes of my mind.

People stopping staring,
I can't see their faces,
Only the shadows of their eyes.

I'm going where the sun keeps shining
Thru' the pouring rain,
Going where the weather suits my clothes,
Backing off of the North East wind,
Sailing on summer breeze
And skipping over the ocean like a stone.

Read into a contemporary airport/travel environment the first stanza describes a certain recipe for disaster for the business traveller: acute disorientation, borderline catatonia - you'll never make it to the gate on time... Second stanza: uh-oh, trouble at security, the sunglassed guards have obviously sussed that you feature on every no-flight list known to man... Bridge 1: not exactly the hassle free dream destination depicted in the film, where our business traveller hasn't even packed a cotton-coat, let alone any rain gear... Bridge 2: forgettaboutit - you'll never reach your destination at all - the plane is crash landing on water, Mayday, Mayday...

OK, so the advertising company didn't really pay attention to the lyrics they picked - what they wanted were the feel-good vocals and the sing-along tune. Never mind the queer undertones of the original film, never mind the frustrations and alienation captured in the song's mini-portrait of its dishevelled urban cowboy persona... In the SAS fantasy world we are all wealthy, male professionals jetting across our little uniform globe in safe, sanitized aeroplanes that never have their wheels falling off on landing...

Back to the 60s. Nilsson's versions of the song are in themselves a little strange. Here is the original opening sequence of the film, where soon to be male prostitute, Joe Buck (played by Jon Voight), prepares to get out of Hicksville:



Note the bizarre nasal drone and Roy Orbison falsetto imitation at ca. 2:00 till coda... Now compare with Nilsson's slightly longer hit single version, here recorded for a Beatsploitation Hit-Parade TV-show called Beat Club:



Note the distinctly queer moves Nilsson puts on, attempting a bit of snazzy finger-snapping and hip gyration at ca. 1:00. The foghorn-like moaning comes in the vocal effort already at 1:15 and is redoubled at the coda, where the circular wrist motion also gets a bit out of control... By this time Nilsson was enjoying a mega-hit with the single which had almost transcended the three-Oscar success of the film. Both these versions are cool mementos of an age where music and films like these could enjoy block-buster success.

Nevertheless, there is an even cooler person behind the song "Everybody's Talkin'": the original songwriter, Fred Neil... Compare the Talkin'-light tones with string arrangements of Nilsson's versions to Neil's own stark folk instrumentation, cool guitar solo and deep vocal delivery:



That is a scripture for a generation, folks... Neil was a songwriters' songwriter, having even a master in his own right, Tim Buckley, cover another classic signature song of his ("Dolphins"). For a while in the mid-60s Neil was a powerful presence in the East Coast folk scene, much admired by diverse figures such as David Crosby and John Sebastian of Lovin' Spoonful fame.

Sadly, Neil never made it big as a performer and, after a spell of living in Woodstock, eventually elected to make his own getaway to Florida, quit the music business and slip into obscurity. His life and times are meticulously chronicled at this website. As usual Richie Unterberger has done some of the best musico-cultural archeology on Fred Neil, which can be read in part in this excerpt...

Here is Richie's take on "Everybody's Talkin'":

Fred Neil [the album] is best remembered, however, for the original version of "Everybody's Talkin'." Much slower and more simply arranged than the famous cover by Nilsson, it clearly laid out his wishes to escape the madness of contemporary life -- the city, perhaps, or the music business? -- into a hermetic paradise. (That destination is most likely Southern Florida, where Neil would spend much of his post-1970 life, given the line about going to a place where the sun always shines through rain.)

In 2001 Fred Neil passed away at age 65, after a long battle with skin cancer...

Here is how "Everybody's Talkin'" ends, long after the SAS commercial is over:

I won't let you leave my love behind...

The Big L

Yesterday was my birthday and my wife treated me to two presents in three phases. First she gave me poetry and then a surprise party. Those were the presents - the phases, while related to the presents, are more complicated: The first phase stretched from February 1996 to the present day and promises to continue. The second phase can be pinpointed to have started at almost exactly 3.30 yesterday afternoon, and it could well be over by now (at least the guests have gone home). Anyway, there is no sign that the third phase has started yet, so it may well be entirely mythological...

The poetry was very good yesterday, as it materialised for the first time in the form of a publication that wasn't labelled criticism or theory, but actually 'poetry'. Camelia has always wanted to be a published poet, and I've referred to her as one ever since her first 'academic' piece appeared in 1999. As I recall, that piece referred to Wittgenstein, as does the most recent manifestation of her poetical prowess, Eight Senses Plus One... As I further recall, none of the many interceding works, nor the first and the latest contain the word 'poshes'. This, the critics find surprising and a potential shortcoming, but that is about the only one they've spotted so far. Bah-bah! they say happily and insistently (critics are usually sheep, but rarely as literally as in this case...)

Yesterday, I didn't do a thank you speech, but here it is: Thank you all for contributing, being a captive audience and moving along your merry way with a nice chapbook in hand, bag or pocket!

I'm going to quote one of the poems, not the shortest nor maybe even the best, but the one that riffs on the L word. From Unison:

It occurs to me that cloning sounds a bit like loony baloney. My husband says, quoting John Lennon: "all you need is love." "It's a good beginning," I say. "The letter L has just cloned itself." Accompanied by Bach it turns itself into a (singing) number. More. Or less.

I figure George Clooney is loony-ballooning in there somewhere, but I'll settle for being a fifty-something like most of the great leading men seem to be these days. Fifty, fit and fighting, I embrace the One Big L.

Nirvana No

Sparked off by some of my recent posts on spirituality and quests for insight in relation to the work of Van Morrison and of the Beats, I have started thinking about some of the conundrums Western artists find themselves in when they become fascinated with Eastern belief systems.

Both Jack Kerouac and Van Morrison have frequently referenced Buddhism in their works (novels, poems, songs) In fact, Kerouac read widely in Buddhist texts over a period of several years, and eventually started composing his own sutras, or contemporary versions of sacred texts. Morrison has, of course, dropped references to both Kerouac's novels and to well-known Western popularizers of Buddhism in several of his songs... One key figure in this gamut is Alan Watts, who was English but lived the better part of his active life as a Buddhist popularizer in the USA (he died in 1973). The author of more than 25 books and avid lecturer and broadcaster, Watts' ideas are still being disseminated in today's media, via posthumous book publications, on discs, DVDs and on the Web... At some point Kerouac met and became friends with Watts, and he appears as a character in two of Kerouac's novel, Desolation Angels (as Alex Aums) and Big Sur (as Arthur Wayne). Morrison primarily glosses Watts' work in a song aptly named "Alan Watts Blues" (on Poetic Champions Compose) where the chorus is a rendition of the title of a Watts book: Cloud-hidden Whereabouts Unknown. The bridge lyrics go like this:

Sittin' up on the mountain-top in my solitude
Where the morning fog comes rollin' in
Just might do me some good.

Such sentiments echo very well with a Beat writer such as Gary Snyder, whose translations of Han Shan's Cold Mountain poems, for instance, sound very similar:

I settled at Cold Mountain long ago,
Already it seems like years and years.
Freely drifting, I prowl the woods and streams
And linger watching things themselves.
Men don't get this far into the mountains,
White clouds gather and billow.
Thin grass does for a mattress,
The blue sky makes a good quilt.
Happy with a stone under head
Let heaven and earth go about their changes.

Clambering up the Cold Mountain path,
The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The wide creek, the mist blurred grass.
The moss is slippery, though there's been no rain
The pine sings, but there's no wind.
Who can leap the word's ties
And sit with me among the white clouds?

As a result of Watts' acquaintance with the Beats (he first knew Snyder, who was a serious Zen acolyte and also known to D.T. Suzuki, the first scholar to disseminate a knowledge of Buddhism in English) he wrote a fairly well-known essay titled "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen", originally published as a pamphlet by City Lights Books in 1959, then collected and re-published in the Random House essay collection This Is It in 1962. Here are his definitions of the different mind sets to approaching Zen:

Square Zen is a quest for the right spiritual experience, for a satori which will receive the stamp (inka) of approval and established authority. There will even be certificates to hang on the wall. [Whereas f]or beat Zen there must be no effort, no discipline, no artificial striving to attain satori or to be anything but what one is. [He describes its self-defensive underside] But for square Zen there can be no true satori without years of meditation-practice under the stern supervision of a qualified master.

Not only did Watts identify the typical Western approaches to Zen as Beat or Square, respectively - pinpointing these approaches' short-comings (one is not serious enough and seeks instant gratification, the other is more philosophical than spiritual and caters to the intellect rather than the soul...), but in The Joyous Cosmology (1957) he had already offered a more history of ideas founded account of the difficulties of reception of Eastern religion for a Western mind-set:

The practical difficulty is that Taoism and Zen are so involved with the forms of Far Eastern culture that it is a major problem to adapt them to Western needs. For example, Eastern teachers work on the esoteric and aristocratic principle that the student must learn the hard way and find out almost everything for himself. Aside from occasional hints, the teacher merely accepts or rejects the student's attainments. But Western teachers work on the exoteric and democratic principle that everything possible must be done to inform and assist the student so as to make his mastery of the subject as easy as possible. Does the latter approach, as purists insist, merely vulgarize the discipline? The answer is that it depends upon the type of discipline. If everyone learns enough mathematics to master quadratic equations, the attainment will seem small in comparison with the much rarer comprehension of the theory of numbers. But the transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao-tzu said, "The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day."

The practice of Taoism or Zen in the Far East is therefore an undertaking in which the Westerner will find himself confronted with many barriers erected quite deliberately to discourage idle curiosity or to nullify wrong views by inciting the student to proceed systematically and consistently upon false assumptions to the reductio ad absurdum. My own main interest in the study of comparative mysticism has been to cut through these tangles and to identify the essential psychological processes underlying those alterations of perception which enable us to see ourselves and the world in their basic unity. I have perhaps had some small measure of success in trying, Western fashion, to make this type of experience more accessible.

To illustrate this difficulty I propose to briefly return to the work of first Kerouac, and then Morrison. A poem sequence such as the spontaneously composed Mexico City Blues by Kerouac illustrates the limitations. In this book Kerouac on several occasions riffs on key notions in Buddhist faith, such as Maya (the notion that all, including human suffering, is an illusion - a veil, hiding the true nature of things - namely that no thing exists). He also plays with the idea of Nirvana, a state of grace where the believer has understood that nothing is real, and that Nirvana is the cessation of existence in the world of illusion. In a previous paper I made reference to how a specific sequence of poems approaches Nirvana:

The most discussed and anthologised thematic chorus sequence in Mexico City Blues is the one eulogising Charlie Parker, which rolls from poem 239 through 242 of the collection, and thus forms the coda to the whole book. There are, however, numerous other such chains of choruses with identifiable thematic connections creating coherence across individual pages. A good example of such a chain are choruses 196 through 201, which arise out of a longer, more vaguely interconnected thematic meditation on Buddhist tenets to riff specifically on the notion of Nirvana, and the application of Nirvana as a shade of lipstick, called “Nirvana No”, to barroom girls disturbing or tempting the Buddhist sage in his meditations. Most of the Blues poems are self-contained units, ending as a page gets filled up with text. Poems can however run on, onto the next sheet(s) as illustrated by the identification of chains of choruses discussed above. On the other hand there are many examples of apparently prepared run-on lines ending one chorus, but not being picked up in the next. One good example is the last line in the Nirvana sequence which reads “And they claim”, but we never learn what it is they claim, as the next chorus seems a self-contained meta-poem starting: “A white poem, a white pure/spotless poem” (202). On the whole Mexico City Blues can be said to thematise the quest for purity of mind and belief in a world full of temptations of the flesh, a world where the speaking and writing subject suffers but seeks help and illumination from selected culture heroes, (Buddhist sages as well as Charlie Parker) and as such the collection takes its place naturally among Kerouac’s other confessional works.

One could of course argue that writing the ''white poem" is a means of getting to Nirvana, and that would be a Zen stance. However, the follow-up notion that such a poem has to be "spotless" contradicts the move towards Nirvana, by the poet's getting hung up on achieving perfection within Maya. I think the operation in Kerouac's mind is typical of the Western way of thinking within the box of attainment, quality, perfection. Nirvana is not perfection, but the cessation of the striving for perfection.

Van Morrison's tribute to Watts seems to imagine the trip to the mountain top as a small stay at the spa, a detox of the mind, after which the poet returns to the grind of everyday life and its temptations:

I'm waiting in the clearing with my motor on
it's time to get back to the town again
Where the air is sweet and fresh in the countryside
Well, it won't be long before I get back here again.

This again is similar to the way Kerouac ends his Desolation novels, Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels. The poet returns purified, but with the knowledge that this state will not last. In Kerouac's case the root to the flaw is already laid during the meditations on the mountain top where he has realized that all is illusion, but fails to take the final step of realizing that the suffering caused by this realization is also illusion. In Morrison's case one almost gets the feeling that the cleansing procedure is an established routine, not a one off extraordinary event that might lead to satori...

I end with a video of Watts' Conversation with Myself. There are 2 more parts easily available on YouTube...

Keep it S(h)imple, Shtupid

OK, so I've heard from a few parties about my perhaps overly intellectualized analysis of Van Morrison's song, That's Entrainment, from his new album Keep It Simple. But that was just one way of writing about the record, and as I indicated in my post there is more to be said... This time, though, I'll try to heed Van's own advice and keep it simple.

Van Morrison's output over 4 decades is so massive that it is inevitable that there are repetitions, close similarities between individual songs, obvious influences from other artists, etc. This, on the other hand, need not be considered a weakness in Van's case: One would not consider Manet a lesser artist for the one reason that he kept revisiting the same subject canvas after canvas... Of course popular music with its mass distribution is not the same type of art as fine painting, and artists as diverse as Andy Warhol and Thomas Kinkade, who have little in common other than being extremely popular, have taken a lot of flak over the repetitive and voluminous nature of their production. Perhaps a similar jadedness due to overexposure is why some early customer reviews at Amazon were quite dismissive of Van's new album as repeating earlier songs and providing simplistic lyrics. I tend to disagree strongly with those uninformed opinions...

What I want to try here is to trace where Van is at and where he is coming from on this album. This could be thought of as a type of intertextual investigation in my academic discipline, cultural text studies, but I intend to keep it nonacademic this time around. Intend to, but no promises...

As a starting point I went to the nice Van Morrison News blog to see what people were saying about the new record. First thing I did was steal their signature Van caricature to use for this post - sorry folks, but I mean it as an honest tribute to your work... Next thing I noticed was the little poll fans can take there about which songs are their favourites from Keep It Simple, and although I don't usually like that sort of thing very much, I fell for the temptation to vote and - not least - see the aggregate results. I have four favourite tracks on the album: Soul, That's Entrainment, Keep It Simple, and Behind the Ritual, so I voted for those. I was somewhat torn when the aggregate results of 380 voters revealed that that is exactly what everybody else thinks too! On the one hand, it was a vindication that I was 'right' in some way, on the other I would have liked to be part of a more arcane elite who can 'see' things in a Van album that others cannot, so the slight let-down of being average stung a bit, too... Here are the results as of today: Ritual, 236 (62% of the voters had this on their list), Entrainment, 136, Simple, 133, Soul, 104...

Nonetheless, I want to say a few things even about the less loved tracks as well (I am quite fond of most of them, in fact): The album opener, How Can a Poor Boy, uses a lot of female back-up vocals, and the obvious association to songs outside Van's own repertoire to me is early Leonard Cohen, where jumpy songs such as So Long, Marianne use a similar arrangement. Likewise, both the title and the distinct use of female vocals clearly evoke Nick Drake's song Poor Boy, where the lyrics brayed by the back-up ladies in a mocking manner are "Poor Boy, so sorry for hisself..." Unique to Van's song, however, compared to Cohen and Drake, is his casting himself in the lyrics as a bluesy priest with congregation, flock, anointment etc. This continues Van's rather unfortunate trend to be messianic in his lyrics, perhaps best exemplified by They Sold Me Out from Magic Time where Van is the crucified Christ incarnate, whose robes are divided up among the Roman soldiers and the rest (himself) sold for "a few shekels more"...

I like School of Hard Knocks which continues the album, mostly because of its driving melody and Mick Green's slightly dirty guitar line snaking its way around Van's vocals. There is quite a dead-pan vocal delivery on Van's part, which always helps when he engages in a rant against the music industry, the Press, the fans etc. This type of lyric has become a staple on virtually every Van album from the nineties onward (Professional Jealousy, Big Time Operators, Songwriter, Look What the Good People Done, New Biography, Too Many Myths), and most fans are a little tired of Van griping about his hard career life. One should note that this is not a new theme in Van's production, not by a long shot... Think back to universally loved songs like Saint Dominic's Preview and its lines about the record company and the journalist waiting for sound bites:

And the restaurant tables are completely covered.
The record company has paid out for the wine.
You got everything in the world you ever wanted
Right about now your face should wear a smile.
That's the way it all should happen
When you're in, when you're in the state you're in;
You've got your pen and notebook ready,
I think it's about time, time for us to begin.
And we're over in a 52nd Street apartment,
Socializing with the wino few,
Just to be hip and get wet with the jet set.
But they're flying too high to see my point of view.

And of course there is an old favourite of mine: Drumshanbo Hustle which eventually came out on Philosopher's Stone. This is Van's best anti-corporation rant, and it's funny!

I think I've covered the significance of That's Entrainment pretty comprehensively in my previous post. I will just add that this track has a distinct first-take ambiance (note the live feel of the coda), perhaps with overdubbed hand-claps, but little else added post production. Again I love how Mick Green lets his guitar bleed into distortion for a few seconds before he sequences back into clean picking w. reverb. Van's ukulele (reported in early live performance reviews as a 'small guitar' - which is a bit like calling a cello a very large violin) is a fresh touch that keeps the rhythm section light and bouncy. Van did mandolins on Down the Road, so maybe we are working our way through all the 'small guitars' in the repertoire...

Quite a bit has been made out of Don't Go to Nightclubs Anymore as a paean to senior citizenship and clean living. I don't much enjoy the slow jive type melody and rhythm Van uses here - it's too generic. But let's not forget the tribute element in the song: Jazz standard Don't Get Around Much Anymore is openly cited in the lyrics, and Van recently covered the similarly themed Lightnin' Hopkins song Stop Drinking (on What's Wrong with this Picture, 2003). In his own work, the drinking issue also surfaced much earlier, for instance Got to Go Back from No Guru: "Keep me away from whiskey and porter..."

Lover Come Back is a country nugget which shows what Van's previous Nashville album Pay the Devil could have been (but failed pretty miserably to be). At the same time the song and its arrangement harks back very clearly to Van's mid-80s albums, more specifically the Sense of Wonder, No Guru, Poetic Champions trilogy. The melody, its lilting chorus, the theme of return of the loved one, the humming of the background singers (mixed male and female voices) all resonate with those albums. There is also prominent organ work from John Allair whose stellar retro-Hammond playing adds significantly to the album throughout (Georgie Fame who put a distinct organ stamp on Van's 90s work seems to have gone for good from Van's recordings), and long-time collaborator on guitar, John Platania is also great to have back. And there is lovely pedal steel from Cindy Cashdollar to bring us full circle with that country feel...

Second stand-out track, Keep It Simple, does exactly what its title exhorts us all to do in life as in song-writing. Starting with ukulele strums, the songs builds and circles around its three chord structure. Mick Green goes on fire with distorted guitar in a short solo (I've never heard so much fuzzed-out guitar on a Van song, not even on recordings with Them), there is tasty accordion in the background, but it's Van's vocals that carry the melody forward as all other players are engaged in building the rhythm and the bottom. This must be a first take as well, and the oddest part of the track is that Van clearly sings with a lot of phlegm on his vocal chords. Most artists would have done another take (perhaps after a bit of porter and whiskey) but Van has kept this amazingly vulnerable expression of what the song's lyrics discuss: Keep it simple/And that's that!

End of the Land sounds like a late 90s semi-Celtic song, and Allair does his best Fame-imitation on Hammond to soothe us into a typical Van-lyric about seeking refuge in isolation, communing with nature. We've heard this sentiment and this melody many times before from Van from ca. Avalon Sunset and onwards through Enlightenment and Hymns to the Silence...

Another 'small guitar' gets to open Song of Home - this time a banjo, later supplemented with a mandolin. This again is country anthem time - a bit of gospel and a bit of Celtic harmonies (harbour lights and foghorns appear in the lyrics as echoes of Into the Mystic) are melded in for good measure. This is Ray Charles as a blue eyed Irish Baptist... Irish Heartbeat, One Irish Rover - songs of home are abundant in Van's back catalogue...

No Thing takes a bluesy stroll down pretty tired songlines about routines and repetitions in an aging man's hard working life... We cannot help but like the steel guitar, but the Nashville vocal harmonies that evoke 60s country (Anita Kerr Singers, anyone?) are an acquired taste. Van has been excavating his record collection again before he 'wrote' (channelled) this 'classic' sounding song.

The album draws to a close with two keepers: Soul and Ritual. A great couple... "Soul is a feeling deep within, soul is not the colour of your skin" - those are catchy opening lines to this mid-tempo ramble (broken by another great guitar rave-up by Mick) in which Van casually defines not just the genre of soul, but more profoundly (albeit essentialistically) the soul of man as "the essence from within, where everything begins..." Clocking in at three minutes thirty this is the hit single that obviously will never chart anywhere but in my dreams, but I must admit that this one hits me where it matters the most. It resonates. I already learned it by heart by the third play. Now I sing it aloud at unexpected moments usually misquoting the lyrics: Blue(s) is not the colour of your skin... This is also the first track on the album where Van breaks out his alto sax, and blows a trade mark solo. We have learned to love them, although when those solos first started appearing with regularity around Beautiful Visions and Inarticulate Speech in the early 80s I thought I would never quite settle with them... They seemed a distraction from what Van did best, but now they might be the show case for his best instrumental chops. Certainly, he stands his ground live with the best horn players around - usually the ones he brings on the road with him.

For closers we go Behind the Ritual to find the Spiritual. This song is simplified mastery on the melody side. We begin with a syncopated march time signature, then ringing tambourines and delicately picked guitar signal Van's entry as the Whirling Dervish, high on wine and days gone by. He has already calmly set the scene as that back alley we have been in many times before with Van, usually for jelly roll-related purposes. Here, however, it is clear that the wine is ceremonial, that getting out of our minds is motivated by the spiritual desire to speak in tongues, producing that sound - that jive- that no-one else can understand (it comes out literally as a scatted "blah-blah" for the first time in Van's recorded output (as it often has in live performances) enacting the mystical "speaking all out of our minds"). The song builds as a live tour-de-force, in the ancient manner we have come to expect from Van at least once on each album: Van blows his solo first on sax, the music grows to a full-force gale (call & response: Spiritual! Spin and turn!), then in ecstasy come the scat vocals, upon which Van and co. take it down to pianissimo, pare the sound down, and wind it all up with the simple ukulele chords... We got healed again, we found the spiritual, behind the ritual, in the days gone by.

Van has (as the cover photo signals) become "a man of granite, a man of insight". I am glad he still shares his insight with us and lets us enter into that rich tapestry of distilled influences and variations.

Pierre Akendengué

Late at night I like to watch a French TV-channel called Mezzo (half classical, half Jazz/World). I soon figured out that loads of Francophone, African musicians are totally cool songwriters, singers and musicians, but of course they get next to no exposure or airplay in mainstream music.

Soon after hearing guys like Salif Keita of Mali, Baaba Maal of Senegal, and many others I started looking for their music for downloads, and found a site called Calabash Music which has this stuff. I am not affiliated in any way with them, but was very happy to use their services to get this rather hard-to-find music...

On to Pierre Akendengué - he is from Gabon, by now in his mid-60s (in fact he'll be 65 in two weeks), and obviously has a long career behind him (and a PhD in Psychology!)... Highlights include Lambarena - Bach to Africa which is really uncategorizable. It was co-produced by Hughes de Courson, who talks about the process and concept in this interview. Here is a quote from a comprehensive website on Akendengué, run by Radio France International:

Akendengué’s highly original idea for his next album, Lambarena, was to fuse sacred chants from the equatorial forest region with classical cantatas composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. Akendengué and de Courson’s innovative musical project involved 250 African singers and a group of 50 French classical musicians - and the resulting album was an absolute masterpiece. Respecting the sacred nature of both the chants and the cantatas, Akendengué proved that these two radically different genres from vastly different cultures could be fused to create a totally new sound.

My wife totally digs the Bach-stuff; I prefer his earlier singer-songwriter stuff, for instance his first album Nandipo from 1974. He has a lovely tenor (the vibrato gets addictive with time), and the sparse arrangement with lots of vocal harmonies, and a little nifty percussion soothes my soul... His lyrics were apparently quite militant even back then, and he had rep. as a protest singer:

Pierre Akendengué’s militant lyrics soon earned him a reputation as a protest singer. In fact, the singer’s next two albums did contain numerous tracks about specifically African themes and several songs explicitly calling for African unity, but Akendengué was not happy about being neatly pigeon-holed in this way. The singer felt there was more to his music than radical statements and fought long and hard to change the image which the media had thrust upon him.

Since my Myéné (Akendengué's native tongue) is non-existent and my French not too good, I cannot vouch for what Akendengué expresses in his lyrics, but again according to the Radio France web site:

Soon afterwards, Akendengué set to work on a new album with a hard-hitting theme: the history of slavery. One of the enduring symbols of the slave trade is the isle of Gorée (just off the coast of Senegal) and the musician chose Gorée as the title of his new album, released in April 2006. In 1997, Akendengué had actually visited Gorée and his trip had proved to be an intensely emotional experience. The musician's experiences on the island led to him writing "La chanson de Gorée", which would later serve as a basis for his album about the slave trade. Akendengué claimed he had been motivated to make Gorée as a way of keeping the troubled history of slavery at the forefront of people's minds and encouraging debate. His album also raised other topical issues on songs such as "De la forêt" which evokes the plight of Pygmies in Gabon, currently being evicted from their rainforest home. Akendengué appears to be happy with his new role of spokesperson, using his music to denounce human suffering and injustice across Africa.

Sounds like some worthy ideas to me... Here is "Bekelia" ("Hope") from the Gorée album:



Here is Pierre's web site...

Pierre on MySpace...

That's Entrainment

For years I listened to at least one Van Morrison track every day, often playing one of his songs to energize myself before going in to teach a class or give a lecture. We're talking major obsession, here... so bear with me and this long post.

These days my Van-time comes in waves, on and off. Lately it's been on to an unusual extent, due not only to the release of his latest album Keep It Simple, but also to a belated discovery of his 2002 disc Down the Road which I had not paid particular attention to when it was released (being in a Van slump a the time), but which I now realize contains some really good material. To add to this rather muddled frenzy I have also recently acquired the 3CD version of Still on Top, the better of the several greatest hits packages available on a crammed Van-release market... The advantage of such an eclectic bunch of Van sounds is that one gets hip to connections one might not otherwise have noticed between periods, themes, melodic strands and influences in Morrison's output.

I had in fact written briefly about portions of Down the Road in a piece I published a couple of years ago on the theme of exile and homecoming in Van's songs. Down the Road contains a song that I think is pretty unique in Van's output as far as lyrics go. "Choppin' Wood" (which musically is not very interesting) tells the story of Van's father as an Irish emigrant to the US who eventually came home to Ireland disillusioned and lived out his days in Belfast ("a life of quiet desperation", as Van puts it borrowing a phrase from Thoreau), working the shipyards to feed his family ('choppin' wood' is Van's Walden-inspired metaphor for that grind and routine) yet never giving up his inner life and fascination with America. Van's many heroes have always been literary greats and musical mentors, but this one time we hear about his personal history and the person who moulded him the most. Van often talks about his father in interviews, but usually just about his record collection and interest in blues and jazz music. Recently, though, Van told an interviewer (Barry McIlheney, in the Members only portion of Van's official web-site) a more personal anecdote:

My father used to get this magazine called Jazz Journal and I read a review of a Ray Charles record in that. And my dad used to tune in to AFN, the American Forces Network in Germany, and one night lying in bed after midnight I was listening to AFN and I heard "What’d I Say", and I just knew it was Ray Charles. And I shouted down the stairs, “Is that Ray Charles?”, and my dad shouted back, “Yeah, it’s Ray Charles”. I don’t know how I knew as I’d never actually heard anything by him ever before that night, but somehow I just knew it was him.

I really enjoy how Van's father gets to OK that Van gets a new, musical 'father' in Ray Charles by just 'knowing' him over the airwaves...

My little academic piece on Van was mainly about how a stream of references to exile and homecoming and all the questing that lies between runs through Van songs covering 5 decades and also shades and shapes his album covers, the names he gives to his production companies, touring bands, and every aspect of his public appearance. The latest albums have done nothing to change that impression - quite the contrary, I see Van's post-millennium work as largely a revisiting and reworking/refining of the same themes. Here is a quote from my article, "The Celtic Ray - Representations of Diaspora Identities in Van Morrison Lyrics":

In numerous songs spread out over his whole recording career, Morrison references his origins, childhood and youth in Belfast, where he was born in 1945. He grew up on Hyndford Street in a lower middle class neighbourhood in Protestant dominated East Belfast. However, his parents were not typical Ulster Protestants: Morrison’s father, George, came from a family with Scottish, Presbyterian roots, and was an electrician by trade, but really more interested in his passionate hobby of collecting American blues, bluegrass, country and jazz records. Morrison’s mother, Violet, unexpectedly developed an intensely religious zeal at the time when Morrison was around 10, but contrary to the norm she channelled her beliefs into Jehovah’s Witnesses activities (hence Morrison’s tribute “Kingdom Hall” on his 1978 album Wavelength). This combination of a worldly father, whom Morrison has repeatedly described as an atheist, and a spiritual mother, would immediately seem to have set Morrison on his subsequent path of vacillation between belief and doubt. The parents seem to have embodied the same polarity of personality facets that Morrison himself exhibits: The father an introverted uncommunicative non-believer, ultimately disappointed with his life in Belfast; the mother an extrovert, performative personality, eager to communicate her views to people even to the extent of trying to convert them religiously.

Other than the rare glimpse of family history found in "Choppin' Wood", Down the Road also contains such nostalgic songs as "The Beauty of Days Gone By", which on later albums such as Magic Time and Keep It Simple has found companion pieces in "Celtic New Year" and "Song of Home," respectively. The title track from Down the Road and the closing track on that album, "Fast Train," are songs of leaving home but never escaping completely, and on Keep It Simple they are echoed in the song "End of the Land". So, the weaving of this strand of longing for belonging is clear even in Van's latest songs, as indeed they have been since the 60s (but you'd have to read my article to get that analysis. You can find it in the book Re-Mapping Exile, available here as an E-book)...

The other strand that runs pretty consistently through Van's songs is his fascination with the spiritual and his ceaseless quest for finding ways of touching the sublime and ineffable. This quest had led him along some strange by-ways, including Scientology and the bizarre esoteric work of Alice Bailey and the reincarnated "Tibetan" sage she channels in her work. Van has also been into Celtic mysticism, gnostic Christianity, Buddhism and other Oriental brands of religion and spiritual techniques. It is perhaps not surprising that he continues to write about such matters, also on Keep It Simple... After all, many such belief systems are exactly attempts at simplifying and clarifying a person's life on Earth (sometimes in preparation for a better afterlife or return, depending on what one expects in terms of karmic rewards).

I said a bit about this in my article too, so you get one more quote for free:

Morrison’s notions of Celtic brotherhood can be seen as a hybrid between American New Age philosophies and Irish identity positions (both identity constructs oscillate between collectivist messages and individualist realisations of them). Morrison’s quest for enlightenment became more and more explicit throughout the eighties as witnessed by album titles such as Beautiful Vision from 1982 and Inarticulate Speech of the Heart from 1983, as well as Sense of Wonder (1985), Avalon Sunset(1989), and finally Enlightenment (1990). Only on a surface level did an intervening album title from 1986, No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, appear to contradict the singer-songwriter’s quest for esoteric knowledge, since that album title is in fact a quote from Krishnamurti, the mystic messiah trained by the Theosophical Society (founded by Madame Blavatsky) to enlighten the world. Morrison songs from the 1980s are glosses of teachings from a number of esoteric, New Age or occult beliefs, including Scientology, whose founder L. Ron Hubbard, is explicitly thanked in the liner notes to Inarticulate Speech of the Heart. The richest vein mined by Morrison in those years is, however, the writings of Alice A. Bailey, whose theories concerning illusion, glamour, maya, and the strange entity known as “The Dweller on the Threshold” – all obstacles to true enlightenment – can be traced on several Morrison albums.

The postulate here is that this hybrid of esoteric knowledge, Irish identity longings, and a cross-cultural musical style and performance, creates the only viable recipe for life for Morrison whose character reflects a contradiction between an extremely shy and private persona, and an extroverted performer persona whose only existence is in the public gaze. Morrison is thus seen to be “Hiding in the Light”, to gloss Dick Hebdige’s 1980 book of the same title, which details the narcissistic paradox of hiding and exposure inherent in subcultural deviance, which seems apt to characterise Morrison’s desires as well. This duality is further mirrored in Morrison’s own internal and external exile positions, and partly explains his continuing quest for identity, figured as a battle between revelation in the form of enlightenment and concealment in clouds of mysticism.

People have not yet made the connection between Eastern mysticism and the lyrics on Keep It Simple, but I'll gladly be the first one to point them out. Most reviewers have commented on the track "That's Entrainment" (which is one of the really sublime songs on the new disc, captivating you with its simple chords, repetitive chorus, Van's vocal riffing and the accompaniment effortlessly laid down in what sounds like a first take) - often wondering what the strange word 'entrainment' might mean. Some reviews offer dictionary definitions (Physics: 'the process whereby two interacting oscillating systems assume the same period'); others like the one in Rolling Stone gloss it as being in a 'trancelike realm'... Dave Heaton in PopMatters makes a full paragraph out of a valiant effort to describe the song and understand the title:

Partly because of the singing, “That’s Entrainment” immediately stands out, one to add to the lengthy list of classic Van Morrison songs. The third track, it’s the first riveting moment of the album, possibly the first from Morrison in a while, where he holds time still like he used to. He starts singing right at the song’s opening seconds, painting a picture of a countryside, then of himself standing in rapt fascination, struck by the pure beauty of an unspecified “you”, seemingly the spiritual force of nature, but sung to like a lover. Handclaps and other hand percussion provide the song’s backbone, as Morrison sings up and down the hills of that countryside, eventually expressing his awe in the terms of classic R&B—when “you” come around, it makes him holler, makes him want everyone to shake their collective moneymaker, shake it on down. At first the chorus of “That’s entrainment” is jarring amidst all this ecstasy and calm, if only because it begs the question, “What the hell is entrainment?” As far as I can tell, it’s all about being drawn in and transformed, the way air forms into a cloud.

Well and good, all - but no cigar, as Freud said to his mother. Entrainment is indeed both "the synchronization of organisms to an external rhythm" and the practice of "the practice of tuning one's brainwaves to a desired frequency", but while I wouldn't put it past Van to have read books about biomusicology and neuroscience, I find it a million times more likely that he once again dipped into his extensive library of Eastern religious esoterica and New Age philosophy. Let's do the same: 'Entrainment', in the esoteric sense of the word, is a concept directly related to music and poetry and the performance thereof. Read this (lengthy, sorry!) excerpt from a home page on Indian music and its function in worship and meditation:

The musical forms, kirtan and bhajan, are essential components of virtually all Hindu worship, as well as of related traditions, such as Sikhism, where they play an indispensable role. More similar than different, both are related to jaapa, or repetition of the Sacred Name, and group participation is usually emphasized. An interesting distinction is that while bhajans are commonly performed as such for listening audiences, kirtan - usually a group devotional practice - requires participation, rather than taking the form of a performance. Kirtan typically employs fewer and much repeated phrases, while a bhajan may contain elaborate verses and melodic improvisations, sometimes with sung mono-syllables (generally, the names of the notes, themselves). Both employ melodic structures based on the Indian classical raaga form, where the emphasis is on rhythm and melody, rather than harmony. And, while kirtans generally take only the names and qualities (guna) of the Divine, bhajans often employ ornately poetical lyrics from the greatest of Indian poets, including Rabindranath Tagore, Tulsidas, the Sufi Kabir, and the great woman saint, Meerabai.

A delightful aspect of kirtan participation is the opportunity for entrainment. Entrainment happens when one object or person comes into rhythmic synchrony with another. Experiments have demonstrated that two clocks placed side by side may begin to tick together after some period of time. Similarly, the strings of one lute may resonate sympathetically in relation to a nearby lute, identically tuned. According to this principle, the members of a kirtan sangha may come into synch with one another during the process of chanting melodically and rhythmically. Further, as the root forms of kirtan typically derive from classical raagas, the melodies may help to synchronize us with Nature or the Cosmos, itself. Also, when we sing or chant, the breath necessarily becomes rhythmic, and this may encourage balance and equanimity. This factor, along with the sounds or meanings of the sacred and ancient words, may have multifarious beneficial effects on the mind, body, and spirit. Also, it is said that one need not even participate in kirtan to derive its many benefits; merely listening attentively to the devotional music may uplift, inspire, and even heal the listener at some level. Stress, negativity, and "self-grasping" may all be let go during participation or listening to kirtan.

"...merely listening attentively to the devotional music may uplift, inspire, and even heal the listener at some level." Did ye get healed? - as Van asked us back in '87 on Poetic Champions Compose (thanks for the correction, Eoin), one of many albums drawing heavily on a mix of literary influences (Yeats) and religious inspiration (Alan Watts' notions of Zen). The above quote gives us the necessary understanding of Van's idea of entrainment: phrases such as 'repetition of the Sacred Name', 'elaborate verses and melodic improvisations, sometimes with sung mono-syllables' are often applied almost verbatim to describe Van's performances. Van also frequently borrows ornate lyrics from great poets, and I am positive that he is familiar with Rabindranath Tagore, the anglophone Indian Nobel Laureate (1913 - the period Van often evokes through Yeats, T.S. Eliot and other modernist poets). So, Van's entrainment is his kirtan (what we get when we sing along) and bhajan (what Van attains when he goes into the zone of private performance)...

Not yet convinced? OK, did you read carefully enough to catch the reference to 'the Sufi, Kabir'? Kabir could easily be one of several inspirations behind Van's "No Guru, No Method, No Teacher", as the paradoxes of some of his poems reveal:

O SERVANT, where dost thou seek Me? Lo! I am beside thee.
I am neither in temple nor in mosque: I am neither in Kaaba nor in Kailash:
Neither am I in rites and ceremonies, nor in Yoga and renunciation.
If thou art a true seeker, thou shalt at once see Me:
thou shalt meet Me in a moment of time.
Kabir says, "O Sadhu! God is the breath of all breath."

Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours.
You will not find me in the stupas, not in Indian shrine
rooms, nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals:
not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding
around your own neck, nor in eating nothing but vegetables.
When you really look for me, you will see me instantly —
you will find me in the tiniest house of time.
Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God? He is the breath inside the breath.

Seeking, meeting, breathing - all vintage Van obsessions... And who translated Kabir's poetry into English? Rabindranath Tagore, of course...

The reference to Sufism on Keep It Simple comes in the most bhajan-like song on the album, the 7 minute long closer, "Behind the Ritual" ('Behind the ritual, you find the spiritual'). Van wails about days in the alley (a familiar locality from many Van songs, usually associated with 'jelly roll'), spent "drinking that wine, making time, and talking all out of my mind" (rituals involving drinking wine and speaking in tongues, anyone? How about the Eucharist and the descent of the Holy Ghost...?) At one point Van refers to himself "turning and spinning in the alley, like a Whirling Dervish in the alley" - and that is your reference to Sufi mysticism - the ritual that a specific Sufi sect devised to achieve entrainment, spinning around your own axis until you attain enlightenment and oneness with God:

In the symbolism of the Sema ritual, the semazen's camel's hair hat (sikke) represents the tombstone of the ego; his wide, white skirt represents the ego's shroud. By removing his black cloak, he is spiritually reborn to the truth. At the beginning of the Sema, by holding his arms crosswise, the semazen appears to represent the number one, thus testifying to God's unity. While whirling, his arms are open: his right arm is directed to the sky, ready to receive God's beneficence; his left hand, upon which his eyes are fastened, is turned toward the earth. The semazen conveys God's spiritual gift to those who are witnessing the Sema. Revolving from right to left around the heart, the semazen embraces all humanity with love. The human being has been created with love in order to love. Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi says, "All loves are a bridge to Divine love. Yet, those who have not had a taste of it do not know!"

Van's pan-esoteric religion has often led him to "pray to the One", go "across the bridge to the other side" (sometimes it's just a stairway leading to Vanlose railway station, but it is all one bridge leading to enlightenment) and "dump" his ego "on the burning ground"... Sufism is just the latest facet this Irish Dervish (a Persian word for the 'ascetic mendicant' - a propos of "Don't Go to Nightclubs Anymore" - whose function is to be a "source of wisdom, medicine, poetry, enlightenment, and witticisms"). Examples of punny wit abound on Keep It Simple - here are two:

"That's Entrainment" puns on the old Musical (retrospective) film That's Entertainment! and not least its punny title song. ("The chase for the man with the face: That's entertainment!")

The mantra, "Behind the ritual, you find the spiritual" reveals and hides at the same time that the word 'spiritual' is a portmanteau of the two words that are key to understanding the album: 'spirit' and 'ritual'...

Keep It Simple is a delightful album that turns a trick or two on you: it ain't as simple as you might think. More to follow...

Mock-pluck Sonnet

OK, this should have appeared on April 1, but since we are still Fools, I guess I can go on and post it. The 'work' originally came about as a comment to my wife's post on Philosophy and Aesthetics: Actant Art: the 'je-ne-sais quoi' as a 'notarikon'. As I have no doubt as to what I prefer, I cast the following 'sonnet' as the taunt of an aesthete to a philosopher:

Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,
Hold in perfection but a little moment.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
Let those who are in favour with their stars
Of public honour and proud titles boast.
Such civil war is in my love and hate.
O! Change thy thought, that I may change my mind,
Plod dully on, to bear that weight in me.
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made,
Yet do they steal sweet hours from love's delight.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
Like to the lark at break of day arising,
All losses are restor'd and sorrows end -
Haply I think on thee, and then my state.

Note how the aesthete is preoccupied with beauty rather than honour and titles, and exhorts the philosopher to 'change thy thought'. The aesthete ends with a transcendent leap, 'like to lark at break of day arising', soaring above the heavy philosopher and disappearing in sheer heavenward bliss...

Of course, the 'sonnet' doesn't rhyme, and the sense it makes is quite fortuitous, for I coupled it together from lines from at least 10 different Shakespeare sonnets, plucking lines almost at random... Why? Read the first letter of each line as a vertical word, as one would in a primitive notariqon, and you will instantly see what I really think of philosophy!

All in good fun... of course. Camelia quite justly responded with a truly Shakespearean insult, calling me a paunchy plume-plucked puttock!