7 Musical Things Meme, Part 1

My homey Dean Shareski, whose name fits Saskatechewan perfectly, tagged me for some sort of meme about something like “7 Things You Might Not Know About Me.”

Like Dean, I already did a similar meme about eight things, so pardon me for fiddling with this one for the sake of self-pleasuring.

I’m going to give it a musical bent.

7 Things You Might Not Know About My Musical Tastes

1. Joni Mitchell Slays Me

I’ve been listening to almost nothing but Joni Mitchell‘s Blue on my drives to and from my weekend work at the radio station for the past two months. I would marry Joni in a heartbeat for the mere pleasure of looking over her shoulder as she wrote her lyrics. They stand right up there with Keats and Shakespeare, *hrumph-hrumph*, mutatis mutandis,  in my book. Add to that the purity of her voice as it navigates the crushingly brave but fragile melodic lines of her songs, and you can add me to the list of those who are, to quote Keats in the “Ode on Melancholy,” “among her cloudy trophies hung.”

God, Blue is perfection. Where to start? “All I Want” should be sung at every wedding:

All I really, really want our love to do
Is just bring out the best in me and you, too….

I want to talk to you
I want to shampoo you

(–that “talk to you” / “shampoo you” rhyme slays me in rhyme, image, and whim.)

I want to renew you
Again and again
Applause, applause,
Life is our cause.
When I think of your kisses
My mind see stars.

I could go on and on, and will a bit more. (But you’ll have to click to read it below the fold:

How about “California,” with its lines,

I met a redneck on a Grecian Isle,
He did the goat dance very well.
He gave me back my smile,
Though he kept my camera to sell.

There’s more to say about “California” – especially the concluding “Will you take me as I am?” plea at the end, which comes as close to an “essential question” and bone-deep prayer to Life as anything anyone could want – but really, you have to hear it to love it.

How about the crushing “The Last Time I Saw Richard”?

The last time I saw Richard
was Detroit in ’68
and he told me
‘All romantics meet the same fate
someday, cynical and drunk,
and boring some stranger
in some dark cafe.

(I’m generally not a drinker, but otherwise I get Richard.)

‘You laugh,’ he said,
‘You think you’re immune -
Go look at your eyes
They’re full of moon

You like roses and kisses
and pretty men to tell you
All those pretty lies, pretty lies
When you gonna realise theyre only pretty lies
Only pretty lies, just pretty lies.’

He put a quarter in the wurlitzer,
and he pushed three buttons
and the thing began to whirr
And a bar maid came by
in fishnet stockings and a bow tie
And she said
‘Drink up now its gettin on time to close.’

‘Richard, you haven’t really changed,’ I said
‘It’s just that now you’re romanticizing
some pain that’s in your head.
You got tombs in your eyes,
but the songs you punched are dreams -
Listen – they sing of love so sweet,
love so sweet
When you gonna get yourself back on your feet?
Oh and love can be so sweet, love so sweet.’

Richard got married to a figure skater
And he bought her a dishwasher
and a coffee percolator
And he drinks at home now most nights
with the tv on
And all the house lights left up bright.

‘I’m gonna blow this damn candle out.
I dont want nobody coming over to my table,
I got nothing to talk to anybody about.
All good dreamers pass this way some day,
Hiding behind bottles
in dark cafes.
Dark cafes
Only a dark cocoon before I get my gorgeous wings
And fly away
Only a phase, these dark cafe days.’

Sheesh. To quote Frank Zappa, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Just go buy or download Blue. And Court and Spark. And Ladies of the Canyon. And Hejira (oh my god, Hejira:

I’m porous with travel fever,
But you know I’m so glad to be on my own.
Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
Can set up trembling in my bones.

I know – no one’s going to show me everything.
We all come and go I know.
Each so deep and superficial
Between the forceps and the stone.

Well I looked at the granite markers
Those tributes to finality, to eternity -
And then I looked at myself here
Chicken scratching for my immortality.

In the church they light the candles
And the wax rolls down like tears:
There’s the hope and the hopelessness
I’ve witnessed thirty years.

We’re only particles of change I know, I know
Orbiting around the sun;
But how can I have that point of view
When I’m always bound and tied to someone?

White flags of winter chimneys
Wave truce against the moon
In the mirrors of a modern bank
From the window of a hotel room.)

I quit. Just listen. (And Joni, if you’re reading this, and despite the charge of bigamy, can we talk?)

2. Gustav Mahler’s Symphony Number 9 (and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and unfinished 10th, plus Das Lied von der Erde - “The Song of the Earth”) was, I’m convinced, penned by (choose your) God or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

I discovered Mahler in Los Angeles in the early ’80s, thanks to the divine intervention of Nat King Cole’s adopted son Kelly, who died of AIDS in the ’90s. Kelly saw me in Ship’s Coffee Shop on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, near UCLA,  one 3 a.m. reading Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, and mistook me for other than straight (no harm done, it’s happened many a time). He sat next to me at the counter and struck up a conversation about literature that led to my impressionable young self declaring Humanities as my major and Mahler and Beethoven as my gods. Then he dumped me when he realized I was woefully immature and, possibly worse, irremediably straight (I didn’t choose this, it’s just me).

Anyway, he lent me his Mahler LP’s and, long story short, after a few failed attempts to hear the divinity, one magic listen to the First (the “Titan”) finally delivered it. This ex-semi-hillbilly ploughed through and memorized Symphonies One through Six, never got Seven and Eight, and to this day considers the Ninth the most perfect artwork he’s ever encountered.

Why? The first movement, to me, captures the full range of Mahler’s emotions as he coped with the news that, at roughly 51 years of age, a terminal heart condition meant a tragically early end to his life. (I don’t care, frankly, about the factual accuracy of this interpretation. If it’s a fiction, which it may be, it works for me. Why not in Art as it is in Religion?)

The murmuring cellos are the murmuring heart. The falling thirds are the tender acceptance of a mortality that can’t be forestalled, and the beautiful expression of the same. The chaos of the middle and end of the movement are the gamut of other emotions – rage, despair, metaphysical searches (against hope) for consolation, on and on.

Then, BAM, the second movement is an entirely funky burlesque that breaks all rules of decorum. Mahler seems to be giving the finger to critics who accused him of lacking skill in counterpoint, so he gives it to them with a vengeance. The guy’s so cool – he goes out of this life not crying, but showing his ass and his scorn in unparalleled sublimity. The second movement rocks.

I don’t particularly care for the third movement, but the final fourth makes its peace with mortality in a way that, musically at least, bridges the way to heaven. It doesn’t end so much as die, quietly and exquisitely. I defy you identify exactly where the performance stops and the silence begins.

To quote Das Lied von der Erde,

Dunkel ist das Lieben,
Ist der Tod.

[Sad is life,
is death.]

3. I would also marry Nick Cave – and I’m straight.

Jesus, where to start.

From his early “Kicking Against the Pricks” LP, Cave reminded me of William Blake in his ability to “marry Heaven and Hell.” (The structure of his song, “The Hammer and the Anvil” on that album is also reminiscent of Blake.)

Cave’s blend of diabolical anger and aggression with angelic tenderness and romanticism (not to mention his deftness at blending Christianity and Eroticism) just does it for me. (Puritan alert: skip the following lyrics – you won’t get their beauty:)

The butcher bird makes its noise
And asks you to agree
With its brutal nesting habits
And its pointless savagery.

Now, the nightingale sings to you
And raises up the ante.
I put one hand on your round ripe heart
And the other down your panties.

Everything is falling, dear;
Everything is wrong.
It’s just history repeating itself.
And babe, you turn me on -

Like a light bulb.
Like a song.

You race naked through the wilderness;
You torment the birds and the bees.
You leap into the abyss, but find
It only goes up to your knees.

I move stealthily from tree to tree;
I shadow you for hours.
I make like I’m a little deer
Grazing on the flowers.

Everything is collapsing, dear;
All moral sense has gone.
It’s just history repeating itself
And babe, you turn me on.

Like an idea,
Like an Atom bomb.

We stand awed inside a clearing,
We do not make a sound.
The crimson snow falls all about,
Carpeting the ground.

Everything is falling, dear;
All rhyme and reason gone.
It’s just history repeating itself
And, babe, you turn me on.

Like an idea,
Like an Atom bomb.

I also love these heretically holy lines from “The Gates of the Garden,” which, again, are so channeling Blake (think “The Sick Rose” or ‘The Garden of Love”). It’s set in a churchyard, in which stand a lover and his beloved:

Leave these ancient places to the angels.
Let the saints attend to their keeping of the cathedrals.
And leave the dead beneath the ground so cold,
For God is in this hand that I hold -
As we open up the gates of the garden.

Won’t you meet me at the gates
Won’t you meet me at the gates
Won’t you meet me at the gates
To the garden

“God is in this hand / that I hold.” Slay me. (Then remind me of the cynicism of Joni’s “The Last Time I Saw Richard”: “All romantics meet the same fate / Someday cynical and drunk …. in some dark cafe…. / Pretty lies.”)

I love Cave’s disdain for modern mediocrity; it rings of Nietzsche:

Back on the street I saw a great big smiling sun,
It was a Good day and an Evil day and all was bright and new,
And it seemed to me that most destruction was being done
By those who could not choose between the two.

Amateurs, dilettantes, hacks, cowboys, clones
The streets groan with little Caesars, Napoleons and cunts
With their building blocks and their tiny plastic phones
Counting on their fingers, with crumbs down their fronts.

I passed by your garden, saw you with your flowers -
The Magnolias, Camellias and Azaleas so sweet -
And I stood there invisible in the panicking crowds
You looked so beautiful in the rising heat.

I smell smoke, see little fires bursting on the lawns,
People carry on regardless, listening to their hands.
Great cracks appear in the pavement, the earth yawns,
Bored and disgusted, to do us down.

Babe
It seems so long
Since you’ve been gone
And I
Just got to say
That it grows darker with the day.

(If you roll your eyes at the apocalyptic nature of the poem, you’re not paying attention to the state of the planet. How many decades does our species have left, based on scientific research? If you say more than ten, I’m inclined to argue. But I hope I’m wrong.)

Cave’s two lectures, “The Flesh Made Word” and “The Secret Life of the Love Song,” are available on CD as well. “The Flesh Made Word” is a stunning bit of prose-poetry theology via coming-of-age personal narrative. He’s one of the best heretics alive.

Coda:

Ah, sheesh. It’s time for a nap. Dean, thanks for starting this. It’s the most impossible post I’ve ever written.

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