Here and There – Adelaide

In a film on The Migrant Experience, one woman who was interviewed explained she felt she was “living on the edge of the world”.  She added she didn’t particularly mind, but she was worried that if she fell off the edge her mother in England wouldn’t know, because the news wouldn’t get to her.  As I recall, the team making the film might have told me she was talking about her life in Perth, which is one of the most isolated cities in the world, but she could have been thinking of Adelaide, the westernmost city in the eastern half of Australia.  Leaving Adelaide by road means that you have to drive through extensive uninhabited and very dry areas (the ‘bush’ as its fondly described).  It can make you feel isolated.  However, despite distance and a sense of isolation I really liked – and still like – Adelaide.

Our family moved to Adelaide from Edinburgh in 1975.  The travel from Edinburgh to Adelaide had been long.  We had made stops in various European and Asian cities, a series of holidays.  Our final stop comprised taking a short holiday in Bali.  From there we flew to Perth to visit a set of relatives and touched down in Adelaide early in November.  It was the beginning of summer, and we had our first experience of living in a world of hot cloudless summer days, and houses with air conditioning.  Just a year earlier, November 1974, we had been snowed on in Scotland!  To add to the almost inevitable disorientation of changing hemispheres, I caught chicken pox from the Perth family’s children.  It wasn’t evident when we left, but by the time we got to Adelaide it turned out to be a bad case.  I was unable to commence work for three months.  It wasn’t a good beginning.

Moving to a new city always requires many adjustments.  However, the first few weeks in Adelaide were weird.  Hastily, we bought a television, so there was something I could watch while isolated.  On the first day when I watched the news, I thought I had made a mistake.  Most of the 30 minutes was taken up with extensive coverage of strange scenes at the entrance to Parliament House in Canberra.  It was 11 November, and now I know the then Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, was in the process of being dismissed.  The shouted remarks and conversations on the steps of the Parliament made little sense.  They would have made little sense for any new arrival, even those not ‘away with the fairies’ covered in spots and with a fever!  Just to add to the series of unusual events, at the end of December, when I was well into recovery, an Italian family we’d met invited us over for a ‘Christmas meal’.  For our sake, the huge lunch included roast turkey, Christmas pudding and other traditional delights, all to be eaten when the temperature was around 37ºC.

We lived in Belair, our house on Winding Way looking out over the plain, with city lights and even the airport visible at night.  A peaceful house, even if there were brown snakes in the garden (once we found one curled up in front of the car, a discouraging sight when you are about to go to work:  it slid away before I could get back with a spade!).  We had our moments there.  On one occasion my children started a fire in the garden, which could have turned into something serious, but was extinguished quickly.  On another day, two evangelists drove up our steep drive and parked their car, precariously, at the entrance to the car port.  As they left, they misjudged their journey backwards down the drive, and rolled off into the bushes.  It was an expensive attempt at a (failed) conversion!

Then there was the swimming pool.  This was the first of two times I have owned a swimming pool:  they are not recommended.  The Belair swimming pool was distinctive, as it was slowly tipping over!  One side of the pool, dipping down towards Winding Way’s road several metres below, was a few inches lower than the upper side.  I was convinced we would wake up one morning to see it down at the bottom of the block, or even resting on Winding Way itself, a somewhat disconcerting thought.  It never happened, and when I checked on Google maps in 2016, I saw the pool was still there.  I guess it had slipped as far as it was going.  The other thing I remember was that the pool was surrounded by gum trees (better known as eucalypts).  That meant a steady supply of leaves into the pool, and large amounts of debris every time there was a dust storm.  We had a ‘Kreepy Krauly’ automated pool cleaner, but I still had to go out there every few days to remove leaves and other junk.  And how many times was that pool used?  Very few, and never by me!

After the disastrous and very sudden end to the life of a Yorkshire Terrier when living in Cambridge, and the sad demise of two hamsters during time in Edinburgh, I was keen to avoid pets.  However, one daughter was determined to have a pet again, and so I agreed to her buying two guinea pigs.  A suitable cage was built, placed under the living room of the house, which stood out over the hill below, providing a safe dry location.  She trained her guinea pigs, yes, trained them, with the result ‘Squeaky’ could be released from the cage, and would run up the side of the house and wait on the front door mat.  She was very patient!  However, disaster was waiting in the wings, and one night there was a terrible sound from the vicinity of the cage, and we discovered it had been torn apart by a couple of dogs, and guinea pigs were gone.  Is this always the case with pets?

It would have been some months later when I returned home after collecting the children from school.  I went into the house from below, and then heard cries from upstairs.  I raced up, worried someone had been bitten by a snake.  No, not that.  There on the front door mat was a somewhat emaciated but clearly alive guinea pig:  Squeaky must have managed to escape the dogs and, true to its training, eventually arrived at the front door mat.  Amazing.

Bizarrely, another feature of our life in Adelaide was the decision to learn to ski.  I got a book (of course) titled We learned to ski, published by the UK Sunday Times, and read through the opening chapters.  After driving over to Porepunkah, we hired all the equipment (we had already bought snow jackets, trousers, hats, and gloves), and then we went up to the ski area at the top of Mount Buffalo.  Ski lift tickets purchased; we were ready to have fun.  Armed with the book, I was (moderately) confident.

Step one (chapter one) I showed everyone how to put on boots, skis, etc.  Step two (chapter two) I showed everyone how to walk up a slope, turn, and hold yourself steady using the stocks.  My eldest daughter now asked a question “Dad, how do you go down a slope?”  This might have been step three (in chapter three), but full of confidence, I simply lifted my stocks, moved the skis to be parallel, and started to slide down.  Unfortunately, there was a man at the bottom of the slope, and I was heading for him. “Get out of the way,” I shouted.  “I can’t, I’m a beginner …” he replied.  There was no time for further discussion, and I slammed into him, and cracked two ribs!!

The rest of the trip, I stayed on the baby slopes, while my three children were up on the most difficult slopes in two days.  A year later, they were keen to go skiing again.  We went to Falls Creek.  On the first day, I was abandoned by the children, and continued my slow progress, skiing down the simplest slopes.  By late afternoon, I could manage easy stuff – just.  Coming down towards the village area, I saw a slight bump, and, in a moment of foolish excitement, sailed over it, landed with a jolt, and cracked the same two ribs a second time!!  I’d always known sport – of any kind – was not for me.

The great delight of Adelaide was the biennial International Arts Festival – an opportunity to see and hear theatre, music, opera, and cutting-edge drama; to enjoy a real cultural feast.  For three weeks every two years, the place was alive.  For my wife and daughters there was ballet.  For me, there were great plays:  I will never forget seeing ‘The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade’, performed by the South Australian Theatre Company.  It was so compelling and moving the audience was unable to applaud for moments after the end; we could see that one actress couldn’t – or didn’t want to – get out of her role.  Gripping beyond words.  What an introduction to Adelaide,   a festival of wonderful and exciting performances from around the world.

While we lived in Adelaide, we went to two festivals, in 1976 and 1978, and then came across from Melbourne every couple of years until 2002.  Looking back, we were lucky to enjoy what was a purple period for the festival.  Adelaide offered a comprehensive arts festival, based on the parent model of the one in Edinburgh.  The city paid for the expensive and stunning festival arts complex, a drawcard for a sunny city in early March.  Arts festivals had emerged from a past where music hall vaudeville and travelling circuses were dominant, and this was a brilliant development.  For Australia, I think Adelaide led the way.

For a city down under, there was the chance to see and hear the best.  Perhaps I can offer a few examples.  In 1978 the Israel Philharmonic came, we heard Tippet’s ‘The Midsummer Marriage’, and Roger Woodward played 32 Beethoven piano sonatas.  In other years we saw such delights Britten’s ‘Death in Venice’ the extraordinary Shostakovich opera ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’, Glass’s music for ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Rostropovich and Andreas Schiff, Prokofiev’s ‘The Fiery Angel’, Peter Greenway’s opera ‘Writing to Vermeer’.  The list goes on, with Tristan and Isolde, ‘Nixon in China’, Melvyn Tan, the Kronos Quartet, and Jean Yves Thibaudet, and more.

It wasn’t just music.  Highlights over the years also included  the Nederlands Dance Theatre, as well as ‘Dido and Aeneas’ by the ACO and Mark Morris Dance Group, and the Frankfurt Ballet.  One special highlight was a version of the Magic Flute that was advertised ‘for children’:  it was for everyone, and Papageno played as a football supporter has been stuck in my mind ever since!  Dance was always on the program, especially contemporary approaches like DV8, Bang on a Can and the Bangarra Dance Theatre.  Finally in this long and boring list of credits, I have to add Kabuki and Noh theatre and a performance of Vietnamese Water Puppets.  Why give you that list?  To convey how in Adelaide, in the middle of nowhere, you had access to outstanding arts, if only briefly.  Enough?

In 2004 we skipped the Festival to go to The Ring in November.  We sat next to a Jewish couple from Sydney, who were worried they might be ‘seen’ by someone they knew; it was still not ‘kosher’ for many Jewish people to go to listen to Wagner!  We have been just once since 2004, mainly because of work and other mundane matters.  Whoa!!  Did that long and boring list of activities give you the idea – arts in Adelaide were sometimes great!!!

No more listing things I saw and heard – it’s silly.  I’ll just add that over the years, other cities in Australia have sought to compete with Adelaide and then began to surpass it.  I don’t think the Adelaide Festival can claim to be the pre-eminent arts festival in Australia any longer, now competing against high profile alternatives in Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney.  Given what was happening around it, few years ago the city decided to make the Adelaide Festival an annual affair.  It still attracts great overseas acts, but so do the others.

However, beneath the surface of a city that is often described as a ‘great place to bring up children’, there were other issues.  Adelaide was very stratified, despite all the talk of Australia as a classless society.  The aboriginal community was hidden away in back streets.  Despite the pioneering efforts of Premier Don Dunstan, it was homophobic, predominantly middle class, with ‘intellectuals’ concentrated around the universities, all rather boring.

When I lived there, I used to joke that Adelaide was truly alive for three weeks in every 104 weeks, the weeks of the festival.  It wasn’t a fair criticism then, and even less so now, as more events have continued to make Adelaide a vibrant centre for the arts.  There are other delights.  Within easy reach of the city there are wineries, both north and south.  Most Australians are aware of the Barossa Valley, which is often packed with tourists trying out wines in some of the more famous wineries.  For locals, the preferred choices were the smaller winemakers in the Clare Valley to the north, and in McLaren Vale to the south.  It is hard to beat a lazy, warm day sampling vintages in a handful of small wineries, all the while professing to having a discriminating palate, even if any such ability to be discriminating was largely eroded after the first few samples!

Adelaide is an outdoor city.  Eating out means eating outside most of the year.  Away from the metropolitan area, there were many lovely bistros, several of which allowed BYO (Bring Your Own) or only charged a small corkage fee if you came with your own wine.  Food and wine, what could be better.  Well, I guess that was a silly question, because now I need to add that for many people the other attraction was the beaches and the sea.  Not for me, as I remain firmly uninterested in getting sand in my pores, and quite convinced water is a dangerous substance.  On that latter point, there were times when sharks could be seen out at sea, but there were lifeguards keeping watch, and shark attacks were rare.  It made no difference as far as I was concerned, water was dangerous in itself, and remains so.

Looking back, Adelaide was an interlude.  When we left Adelaide for Melbourne, I was leaving the academic world, and about to spend some twenty years working for the private sector, the government and the not-for-profit sector.  I did go back to the university world eventually, but those Adelaide years were exciting.  Back then being an academic meant that you had considerable time for research, for ‘thinking’, and even for escaping!  I suppose the time in Adelaide was like an extended summer camp.  Yes, there was work to be done, but there were trips to be undertaken, new experiences to be sampled.  It was a time that revived my love of theatre (as an audience member), of music, and of literature with the Festival’s Book Week, where we listened to authors reading from their work and discussing issues.

I returned to another earlier hobby, birdwatching.  It was exciting and at times almost overwhelming to discover that any knowledge of bird varieties that remained from my childhood was almost useless.  The place was full of parrots, cockatoos, and tiny brightly coloured wrens.  There were black swans.  There were bowerbirds.  There were emus.  Have you seen an emu?  They are big (only the emu’s close relative the Ostrich is any taller), and apparently fearless.  I didn’t know much about them until we went camping up towards Wilpena Pound.  We put up our tent, noticed them off in the distance, and then spent most of our time checking for snakes.  Almost without our noticing, they advanced, and one got inside out tent, and couldn’t get out.  One slightly confused emu can make quite a mess.  The day of the emu in the tent summarises the Adelaide experience well:  exotic, unexpected, hot, chaotic, a crazy interlude and an equally crazy introduction to a new world.  Reflecting on this blog’s title, ‘Here’ had been Edinburgh, but now it is ‘There’.

Here and There – Performances

In commenting on ‘here and there’ I usually write about travel.  This is a little different.  In one sense, this is still about places, but concert halls and theatre stages rather than countries.  In another sense, it is about being transported, especially by music.  Music has been a central part of my life, and some performances have had a major impact, many in my teenage years, some a little later.  In offering a few examples, I hope these comments will serve another purpose, encouraging you to think about your own transformative musical experiences.

My parents loved classical music, especially my father.  Until I was nine years old, we didn’t have a television, nor go to the cinema, and my life was about study, board games and music.  I don’t want to give the wrong impression.  There wasn’t music blaring away all day long,   but by the time I was a teenager I had my own collection of records to play when I wanted.  My collection was classical, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky.  Other music, like Elvis, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones, let alone Pink Floyd, The Who and The Doors, were still years away!  However, when I was around eleven years old, my parents took me to hear live music.  Once they had done that, the genie was out of the bottle.

Back then, London was paradise for a young boy.  I was able to travel from Ealing on the Underground (the ‘tube’), with a free travel pass and my parents apparently unconcerned about my fate.  Paradise existed from the early 1950s through to the 1960s; what a privilege to have experienced such a world.  I could travel to various museums in Kensington, galleries in Trafalgar Square and the Embankment, and I could go to plays and concerts.  I did.  I joined the evening ‘rush’ (free seats available in the half hour before the play began) to see Brian Rix farces.  I sat in the cheap Orchestra seats at the Royal Festival Hall, listening to performances:  in those seats you were behind the orchestra, looking at the conductor!

One concert remains especially clear.  I was watching the members of the Philharmonia Orchestra taking up their seats. Did I have a program?  Perhaps, or was this when we were  given a sheet with details of the programme and players?  The players finished tuning; the hall went quiet.  The orchestra stood up for the conductor.  He entered and sat down at the podium!  He’d walked slowly, so he must have been injured in some way.  Oh, and to my teenage eyes, he was old, really old, in fact he might have been even older than my dad!

I hadn’t known Otto Klemperer had injured a leg some years earlier, nor that he sat to conduct.  He certainly demonstrated a minimalist approach, small hand movements and gestures, but the dissonance between his gestures and the power of the piece was amazing.  In almost no time at all, I forgot about Klemperer, the orchestra and even the auditorium, swept up by extraordinary music, powerful, sometimes searching, often majestic, and unceasingly driving.  It was the first time I heard Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica.  It absorbed me, swallowed me up entirely into a towering structure of sound.  More than sixty years later, I still find it inescapably embracing, especially the Klemperer recording I have at home.

Why did it have that impact?  Later I read Beethoven had originally written it for Napoleon, and then torn up the dedication, but I didn’t know it at the time.  All I knew was this was about powerful emotions, quite outside the experience of an average middle-class English boy.  It was about triumph and uncertainty, about transcending obstacles, about exhaustion and determination, about death and glory.  What was more, almost sitting inside the orchestra, it was unrelenting.  There must have been some other pieces played that night, but what remains for me of that experience was feeling that I’d been transported.  In time I would fall in love with other works by Beethoven, the second movement of the Fifth Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto, but the impact of Klemperer’s steady hand controlling the Eroica has never left me.  Sometime later I saw him conduct Handel’s Messiah, extracting the same sense of grandeur, and this time standing with the audience for the Hallelujah Chorus.

Those were my romantic years.  I am no longer exclusively addicted to major classical orchestral works, and I no longer need a fix from the Third or the Violin Concerto on a regular basis, although I still listen to both from time to time!  They have left me with a passion for the heroic.  Although my mother didn’t know it, she saved me from total obsession when she decided I should experience other kinds of music.  She couldn’t have chosen something further away from the classical greats.  She took me to Gilbert and Sullivan!  The D’Oyly Carte Company offered Gilbert and Sullivan light operas at Sadlers Wells.  I was entranced by The Mikado.  Then we went to The Yeoman of the Guard.

Boys don’t cry, but when Jack Point, a strolling jester, realised Elsie Maynard, a friend and strolling singer, loved someone else, I was distraught.  I cried, probably to my mother’s embarrassment.  Just ‘light opera’, but it was Jack Point’s song with Elsie that hit me:

POINT.                                      I have a song to sing, O!

ELSIE.                                                      Sing me your song, O!

POINT.                                      It is sung to the moon

                                                 By a love-lorn loon,

                   Who fled from the mocking throng, O!

                  It’s a song of a merryman, moping mum,

                  Whose soul was sad, and whose glance was glum,

                  Who sipped no sup, and who craved no crumb,

                   As he sighed for the love of a ladye.

                                                 Heighdy! heighdy!

                                                 Misery me – lackadaydee!

                  He sipped no sup, and he craved no crumb,

                   As he sighed for the love of a ladye!

ELSIE.                                       I have a song to sing, O!

POINT.                                                      What is your song, O!

ELSIE.                                       It is sung with the ring

                                                 Of the songs maids sing

                   Who love with a love life-long, O!

                  It’s the song of a merrymaid, peerly proud,

                  Who loved a lord, and who laughed aloud

                  At the moan of the merryman, moping mum,

                  Whose soul was sad, and whose glance was glum,

                  Who sipped no sup, and who craved no crumb,

                   As he sighed for the love of a ladye!

                                                 Heighdy! heighdy!

                                                 Misery me – lackadaydee!

                                                                He sipped no sup, etc.

I might have been 13 years old, my hormones surging, and I was wrecked.

Three years later, I was at the Royal Opera House, this time by myself.  The Covent Garden Opera Company was putting on Peter Grimes.  I had no idea what I was about to see and hear, I didn’t know who Benjamin Britten was, and I had never heard of Peter Pears.  I love many of Benjamin Britten’s works, but Peter Grimes sits at the centre.  Like most operas, the story is simple, set in a fishing village (a thinly disguised Aldeburgh, Britten’s home from 1947), and was first performed in 1945 (when he was living in nearby Snape).  Peter Grimes is a fisherman.  His young apprentice had died at sea, an accident for which the villagers believed he was responsible.  Despite resistance to his taking on another apprentice, he manages to do, helped by of a retired skipper and Ellen, the local schoolteacher, whom he was planning to marry once he’d earned enough money.  Falling from a cliff on his way to Grimes’ boat, the new apprentice dies.  The villagers form a vigilante mob.  Grimes is told he needs to disappear.  The opera ends as he sails away to die at sea.

It was first performed at the Royal Opera House in 1945, when Sadlers Wells reopened after the Second World War.  By the time I was at Sadlers Wells in the 1960s, it was a firm favourite, dramatic, dark and driven by powerful, tragic and unstoppable forces.  Peter Pears, Britten’s partner, was magnificent as Peter Grimes.  You knew, from the beginning, things were going to turn out disastrously.  Here is Peter Grimes about halfway through the opera:

In dreams I’ve built myself some kindlier home,

Warm in my heart and in a golden calm,

Where there’ll be no more fear, no more storm.

And she will soon forget her schoolhouse ways,

Forget the labour of those weary days,

Wrapped round in kindness like September haze.

The learned at their books have no more store

Of wisdom than we’d close behind our door

Compared to us the rich man would be poor.

I’ve seen in stars the life we might share:

Fruit in the garden, children by the shore,

A whitened doorstep, and a woman’s care.

But dreaming builds what dreaming can disown,

Dead fingers stretch themselves to tear it down.

I hear those voices that will not be drowned

Calling, there is no stone

In earth’s thickness to make a home

That you can build with and remain alone.

Yes, this was a tragedy.  Three hours later it was a very quiet journey back home to Ealing.

After falling in love with various kinds of music , everything changed in my twenties.  With young children, the music around me was the accompaniment to nursery rhymes and children’s television.  Beethoven’s Third lay to one side, although there were the Classical Kids recordings.  By the time I was thirty, I could repeat the whole of Vivaldi’s Ring of Mystery or Mozart’s Magic Fantasy verbatim!  They had turned The Four Seasons and The Magic Flute into exciting stories and were surprisingly sustaining.  In the meantime, friends ensured I listened to The Doors, The Rolling Stones and more.

When I arrived in Australia, it was as if the music switch had been flipped back.  Adelaide’s biennial International Arts Festival brought classical music back into my life, never to be dislodged again.  There have been so many stunning performances I’ve attended since then.  Operas became a passion, with such highlights as The Victorian State Opera’s production of Don Giovanni in 1986; Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel at the Adelaide International Festival in 1988, or the 1990 Tristan and Isolde, also at the Festival.  At the same time, I was back into  attending theatre.    I saw Carrillo Gantner’s astonishing ‘Japanese’ version of King Lear in 1993, and Amadeus at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Theatre in 1994.

Amadeus was clever, linking music and drama, but one play that had a massive impact was a production of Peter Weiss’s play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, performed by the South Australian Theatre Company, again as part of an Adelaide Festival, in 1990.  Like most people in the audience I had little idea as to what we were about to see.  The staging was simple, a semi-circle of performers, all dressed in white, the asylum inmates surrounding the performance space and acting as a chorus, creating a context for the ‘play within the play’.  The broader story takes place in  July 1808, as the Marquis de Sade directs a play.  That ‘inside’ play is set fifteen years earlier, during the French Revolution, with the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat in July 1793, using the inmates of the asylum as the actors.  As the Marat play progresses, the asylum’s nurses and supervisors occasionally step in to restore order while the patients jump in, often giving views about the Revolution.  All this was accompanied by occasional songs and music commenting on the themes of the play. It was electrifying, for the audience and for the performers.  As the cast took bows at the end, I remember one actor couldn’t get out of role.  Incidentally, Geoffrey Rush played Marat.

When I start thinking about performances that have affected me, the list keeps growing.  More and more concerts, operas and plays with music come to mind.  Among the first few that had a major impact on me Eroica introduced me to great music; unexpectedly Gilbert and Sullivan gave me my first perspective on the joys and agonies of love; Benjamin Britten spoke to the bewildering contradictions and complications of hope, hate and sorrow; and Peter Weiss addressed that minute and uncertain line between sanity and madness.

Living in Adelaide, I had started working with an older academic on a series of critiques of higher education.  Neil was a polymath, teaching philosophy, history and education, playing the double bassoon and learning Icelandic (among other languages).  He was quick to see that I was somewhat hung up on the classical romantic composers, and so began a gentle but firm education.  By the time he’d finished with me, I was listening to Shostakovich and Bach!  I added Glenn Gould’s first recording of the Goldberg Variations and Bach organ works to my collection of classical music and operas from The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni onwards

He also sowed the seeds of chamber music, and, as I have grown older, I have come to love string quartets.  Luckily my copy of the Borodin String Quarter playing Shostakovich is a on a CD and not an LP, because it wasn’t it would have worn out years ago.  The ‘sleeper’ was Neil’s gift of a set of cassettes comprising all the Beethoven String Quartets.  To begin with, I played them through once, and would occasionally listen to one or two.  Now, they are my firm favourites.  Among so many much-loved pieces, if there is one recording I return to more often than any other, especially at times when my emotions need a thorough working over, it is the Alan Berg Quartett’s recording of those string quartets, especially the last six, 12-16, and the Grosse Fugue, originally the final movement of the 13^th.

I looked them up recently.  The Quartett (their spelling) was formed in 1970, and continued to perform until 2008, with two members present for the whole time, and one for all but two years:  it was his death in 2006 that saw them decide to retire.  Their recording of the sixteen Beethoven quartets in the early 1980s is generally regarded as outstanding:  the CDs have sold more than one million copies.  Unlike my reaction to the music, plays and operas mentioned earlier, there is no simple reaction to these pieces.  They have grown on me over time, especially the 14^th and 15^th quartets.  I listen to them often, and then try to school myself to leave them alone for a while.  I fail, and the usual sequence is to listen to the Shostakovich  7^th and 8^th Quarters, then the Beethoven 12-16, ending with the 14^th and 15^th a couple more times – just in case.  Just in case of what?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that they’ll be playing again soon, offering a window to emotions way beyond any prosaic understanding and yet, for me, totally addictive.  Thank you, Neil.

1984 – Big Brothers

I can’t remember when I first read George Orwell’s 1984.  First published back in 1949, it is a horribly depressing story, set in a dystopian future, a totalitarian society characterised by mass surveillance, thought police, and the rule of Big Brother.  Orwell imagined that the effects of a yet another world war, civil war and aborted revolutions had led to a dictatorial government ruling Oceania, one of the three ‘super-states’ which now comprise the world.  Winston Smith is a low-level employee of the state, who spends his time rewriting history to suit the changing needs of Oceania.  If you’ve read it, you’ll remember Smith’s abortive attempt to be a rebel, his affair with Julia, his entrapment by the thought police, his re-education, and his return to life under Big Brother (this last at the cost of betraying his lover).

It’s the benefit of hindsight that leads me to wonder why Orwell had chosen 1984 for his novel.  Did he really believe that things would change that quickly?  The environment has certainly changed since he wrote, and surveillance, political correctness and government controls have been steadily increasing.  Despite this, we have a little further to travel before we find ourselves in a world like Oceania.  It would be reassuring if we could convince ourselves his imagined world still seems remarkably unlikely:  sadly, we can’t, and the slow drift to totalitarian regimes doesn’t seem to be waning.

Not predicted, but 1984 saw one change take place that had enormous consequences for democracy, although it wasn’t so obvious at the time.  This concerned Hong Kong.  For a long time, Hong Kong had been an unremarkable island, at the mouth of the Pearl River in southern China, with what is now modern Kowloon a short distance away on the mainland coast.  From what little we know, it was a sparsely populated base for fishing, and possibly some farming.  According to Wikipedia, that invaluable first stop for information, the island came under China’s direct control as the consolidation of the country took place under the Qin Dynasty, somewhere around 200 BC.  It was of little interest until the Mongols invaded in the 13^th Century.  Many Chinese were pushed south, and the Southern Song court was in Kowloon for a while. Then the Portuguese turned up, and in the early 16^th Century they established a trading post in Hong Kong’s waters, following this up by acquiring a permanent lease of Macau in 1557.  This was the start of Hong Kong’s role as an entrepôt, even during that strange period in the Sixteenth Century when the emperor decided to stop all trade, immediately after ending the amazing worldwide voyages of Admiral He.

In the 18^th Century, Qing authorities introduced the Canton System, focussing trade between China and other countries on the port of Guangzhou (Canton).  While Canto was the key, various other locations were used, and Hong Kong was one among many stopping off points for Russian, Portuguese and eventually many other trading nations to barter for tea, silk, and porcelain.  There was a problem, however, one we would call a ‘trade imbalance’ today:  visitors wanted Chinese goods, but the Chinese were not excited by western offerings.  That changed with opium.  Soon, it was silk, tea and porcelain one way, and silver, gold and especially opium from India the other.   Addiction quickly ensured dependency, and in the face of an emerging catastrophe Qin officials worked hard, pursuing several attempts to stamp out the opium trade, to the point that by 1839, a desperate Chinese government tried destroying all the opium stocks in the country and was about to end overseas trade altogether.

As they had shown before in India, the British were quick to bring military support to ensure the continuation of profitable business, and that year the First Opium War erupted between the England and China.  Confronted by British warships, the Qing government surrendered.  The fateful decision was made to cede Hong Kong Island to Britain, establishing it as a major trade port.  A Convention agreeing to hand Hong Kong over was signed in January 1841, but both sides failed to ratify the agreement.  Occasional hostilities continued, ended by a formal handover of Hong Kong to Britain in 1842, under the Treaty of Nanking.  Of course, even this wasn’t the end of trouble, as dissatisfaction and more armed confrontations led to a Second Opium War.  The Qing lost this war, too, and so, with British and French forces entering the Forbidden City, a second agreement, the Convention of Peking, was signed, with the Chinese adding Kowloon and Stonecutters Island to the British territory.  Trade grew rapidly, and finally, in 1898 the British signed a 99-year lease for the New Territories (Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories were now consolidated as one colony).

For a long time, Hong Kong was distinguished by rapid economic growth and major investment.  The only blip came in 1941, when the Imperial Japanese Army seized the island, continuing in control there until 1945, when the British took it back.  Although the territory’s manufacturing competitiveness declined as the costs of labour and property grew, Hong Kong shifted over to focussing on a very profitable service-based economy.  That left one problem, the colony was facing an approaching and uncertain future as the end of the New Territories lease was getting close.  The UK’s Governor in Hong Kong raised the issue of Hong Kong’s longer-term status in meetings with Deng Xiaoping in 1979, and continuing negotiations led to the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1979.  In the auspicious year of 1984, the British agreed to transfer the colony in 1997, while China agreed it would guarantee Hong Kong’s economic and political systems for the 50 years following the transfer.  The transfer of Hong Kong to China as a ‘Special Administrative Region’ took place on 1 July 1997.

It wasn’t an easy start.  Within a few weeks of the handover, the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis reverberated through the island, and the government had to draw on a substantial part of its foreign currency reserves.  As if to add insult to injury, this was followed by the first of a series of Avian Flu outbreaks (a second in 2001 was equally serious), and these were followed in 2003 by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic.  SARS was to prove particularly devastating, with the region suffering its most serious economic downturn to date.  Was fate telling the Hong Kong people that the handover was a mistake?

Somehow, Hong Kong overcame all these challenges.  Even now it has maintained its standing as a major capitalist service economy centre, characterised by low taxation and free trade, with its currency the eighth most traded in the world.  It is home to the third highest number of billionaires anywhere in the world, the second-highest number of billionaires of any city in Asia, and the largest concentration of ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs) of any city in the world.  While such a concentration of wealth is extraordinary, Hong Kong is also a city characterised by extreme poverty.  It is two worlds.  Starving citizens on the streets, hardly surviving while surrounded by the largest number of skyscrapers of any city in the world, and a public transport network carrying more than 90% of its people.  Hong Kong is ranked 4th in the Global Financial Centres Index.  A place of paradoxes.

What would George Orwell have to say about all this?  Clearly, extreme poverty alongside enormous wealth would not surprise him.  However, it would be the politics that would draw his attention.  The 1979 Declaration had included the provision that China would guarantee Hong Kong’s’ economic and political systems.  Economic system, maybe.  Political system, certainly not.  The deal with the UK was the result of the British insisting on democracy in Hong Kong, while the Chinese central government followed what it described as the ‘one country, two systems’ principle.  The political situation went downhill, quickly.  It began with the reversal of several democratic reforms enacted at the last colonial era Legislative Council meetings.  Several other provisions were soon flouted, and dozens of protesters were arrested and charged.  In particular, the central government’s decision to introduce nominee ‘pre-screening’ before the elections for the Special Administrative Region’s Chief Executive set off a series of protests in 2014, which became known as the Umbrella Revolution.  Tens of thousands took part in a 79-day occupation of the city demanding more transparent election.  An Umbrella Revolution?  It came from the use of umbrellas as a means of passive resistance to the Hong Kong Police, who were using pepper spray to disperse the crowds.

Two years later, there were complaints over discrepancies in the electoral registry and, even worse, the disqualification of elected legislators after the 2016 Legislative Council elections.  Slowly but surely, Chinese national law was used to deal with events in Hong Kong, and it was adopted as the legal framework to manage activity at the West Kowloon high-speed railway station, the first time Chinese legislation was applied inside the territory.   In June 2019 another round of mass protests erupted, triggered by a proposal to pass an extradition bill, supposedly to extradite fugitives to Taiwan.  In practice, it would allow criminals to be moved to the mainland before trial.  Those protests have been the largest in Hong Kong history so far, with claims they’ve attracted more than three million Hong Kong residents.

Will the one country, two systems model survive to 2047.  Clearly not.  It’s effectively dismantled already.  For Hong Kong ‘Big Brother’ is the PRC, and the Peoples Republic is clear about its intent.  Perhaps a more accurate – and meaningful – term is ‘older brother’.  The older brother is the person with seniority in a group, and to be named as the older brother is a tacit acceptance that this person is to be respected, even if the relative age assignation is incorrect.  This takes me to another aspect of Hong Kong’s relationship with China, which is the result of the extraordinary rise to power and party dominance by Xi Jinping.

Xi Jinping’s early life reflects the shifting character of China.  He was born in Beijing in 1953, just four years after Mao had founded the People’s Republic of China.  His father was a senior official in the Communist party, responsible for propaganda, and appointed a Vice Chairperson of the National People’s Congress,  However, a little later he was purged from the Communist Party and sent to work in a factory in Henan Province.  Xi stayed in Beijing with his mother and two sisters.  Then, in 1966 Mao announced his ‘Cultural Revolution’.  Xi’s mother was forced to denounce his father, and three years later Xi was sent to work in a small town in Shaanxi Province.  Like many others, he spent several years away from Beijing with no access to formal education.  As the Cultural Revolution began to end, he successfully applied to study chemical engineering at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, as a Worker-Peasant-Soldier student; his credentials had improved after his father had been reinstated.  He got in early:  the national higher education examination wasn’t re-established until 1977.

The rest of Xi’s story is one of steady rise through the ranks of the Communist Party.  Between 1979 and 1999 he held increasingly important positions in various provinces, culminating in his appointment as Governor of Fujian Province, where he remained until 2002.  Next, he was appointed Governor and Party Secretary of Zhejiang, one of the largest provinces in the country, one often described as the ‘backbone’ of the country’s economic development.  He remained there until 2007.  After a brief period as Party Secretary for Shanghai, Xi joined the Politburo Standing Committee in Beijing, as First Secretary of the Central Secretariat.  A year later he was designated as the intended successor to President Hu Jintao, and a Vice-President of the PRC.  On his path to the top, Xi’s position was briefly threatened by rise of Bo Xilai, who was expected to join the Politburo in 2012, possibly as a challenge to Xi.  However, Bo fell from favour that year, probably at Xi’s instigation, and the threat disappeared.  In November 2012, Xi was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party, and in early 2013 replaced Hu as President.  He became ‘leadership core’ in 2016, and abolished term limits for the Presidency two years later.

A ‘big brother’?  Since becoming President Xi has relentlessly enforced party discipline and demanded unity.   He introduced an anti-corruption campaign, one which was much needed, but which also led to the downfall of several prominent incumbent and retired Communist Party officials, including members of the Politburo Standing Committee.  Internationally, he has addressed a number of issues, especially the country’s claims over the South China Sea, and more generally an ambitious ‘belt and road’ economic, trade and foreign policy program, seeking to build influence and control across the globe.  Is he a dictator?  Xi has increased censorship, introduced many mass surveillance systems across the country (as well as in Hong Kong, of course), together with other measures limiting human rights.  Equally concerning is the cult of personality that has been promoted; his operating without  term limits as President; and the publication of his observations and thoughts, an approach reminiscent of Mao and his famous ‘Little Red Book’, (the pocket-size edition of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung).  Orwell would have had no doubts.

Not every event in 1984 demonstrated increasing intolerance.  Over in India, Indira Ghandi was assassinated and was replaced by her milder and more accessible son Rajiv.  An older brother, it was his younger sibling, Sanjay, who was expected to carry his mother’s political role forward, but he died in a plane crash in 1980.  If the milder Rajiv stemmed some of the intransigence that increasingly characterised Indian politics, it was a short-lived variation.  After five years he was voted out of office, and then blown up by a fanatic in South India two years later, leaving his foreign-born wife to hold the Congress Party together.

However, when I think about 1984, about big brothers, older brothers, and politics, I can’t help the way my mind wanders.  This was the year the film Amadeus premiered, in September.  The film was an adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s play of the same name.  It was a huge success and many regard it as one of the great films of all time:  it was nominated for no less than 53 major awards, and received 40, including eight Academy Awards (one of which was for Best Picture), four BAFTA Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, and a Directors Guild of America award.   In 1998, the American Film Institute ranked it 53rd on its ‘100 Years … 100 Movies’ list.

Perversely, I think of the film as reflecting on that Chinese role of the ‘elder brother’, the oldest member of the group, to be respected, and to advise and support others.  Mozart was the young, almost infantile genius, pouring out beautiful and eventually ground-breaking music, all brilliantly woven into Shaffer’s fiction.  Salieri was that older brother, admiring, hating, helping, and thwarting Mozart, who continued along, perverse, often obscene, and almost oblivious to whatever role Salieri was playing.  Murray Abraham is brilliant as Salieri, wanting to destroy Mozart while unable to ignore the precocious young man’s extra-ordinary talent.  Such are the complicated dynamics of brothers, older brothers, and even big brothers!

1984 proved a year George Orwell could never have imagined.  1984 was the year Jeopardy began with Alex Trebek.  1984 was the year McDonalds celebrated producing its 50 billionth hamburger.  The world George Orwell imagined has continued to develop, but we hadn’t got to his ‘1984’ just yet.  There’s increased control being exercised over our lives, alongside yet  more hamburgers and quizzes, our 20^th Century version of the ‘opiate of the masses’.

1962 – Love Me Do

Without fail, popular music provides inescapable evidence of age, even if you are one of those remarkable people who keeps up with music trends and genres.  Most of us have an irrepressible nostalgia for bands and songs from our teenage and young adult lifetimes.  Certainly it’s true for me and the Beatles who, some of the time, sang about the issues I was facing growing up.

The Beatles entered my world when I was 18 years old.  To begin with, they were in the vanguard of the new pop scene, a group who sounded fresh, non-American (!!), and fun.  The singles that I, and millions of others, heard in 1962 were Love Me Do, and then the even more attention grabbing Please Please Me.  In fact, while Love Me Do came out first, I only listened to it after Please Please Me hit the charts.  Both songs are listed as by Lennon-McCartney, but, I recently learnt Love Me Do was largely a McCartney composition, which he had first started working on some four years earlier, whereas Lennon had always made it clear that Please Please Me was his alone.  Fresh and non-American?  No, it was more than that, they were bouncy, sparkling, exciting, teenage fun.  Listening back then we had no idea that these were the modest beginnings in a sequence of compositions that would prove more and more original.

Those two singles were followed by the Beatles first LP, also titled Please Please Me, in 1963, which I rushed out to buy on the first day of its release.  There they were on the cover, John, Paul, George and Ringo.  It never occurred to me they had a past:  I just assumed they had magically appeared out from the famous ‘Cavern Club’ in Liverpool a few months earlier.  It was much later I discovered their origins were from five years earlier.  Back in 1957 a sixteen year old John Lennon had formed a skiffle group.  Skiffle was a mongrel genre, based in jazz, but quickly developing and changing into various types of music, with a loose but common character of improvisation, rebellion against existing genres, and using any kind of instrument, the range almost always including guitars, drums, but going on from there on to washboards, harmonicas, and just about anything else a group might drag in!  Skiffle was eclectic.  Paul McCartney joined Lennon’s Quarrymen, soon after its formation, and George Harrison was added in 1958.   In 1959 John Lennon began studying at the Liverpool College of Art, the other initial Quarrymen left, and Lennon, McCartney and Harrison continued – as The Moondogs!  In 1960 Stuart Sutcliffe, a friend of Lennon, joined as a fourth guitarist, and they performed as The Silver Beetles, dragging in a drummer whenever they could.  From the Silver Beetles, two quick name changes saw them end up as the Beatles, Pete Best joining them as drummer.

This was the beginning of overseas adventures, another reason why most of us knew little about them, unless, of course, you were an habitué of the Cavern Club.  As their popularity grew, we did find out they had been performing in Hamburg for two years.  On their first visit, they played in a converted strip club, but got into trouble when the club was closed over noise complaints, and George Harrison was deported, having lied about the fact he was underage and ineligible to remain in the country.  They all left, and then returned on several occasion over next two years.  While that gave them the opportunity to write and play, it was Liverpool that pushed them forward, as the ‘Merseybeat’ became famous, the throbbing, continuing beat running under local songs.  Back in the UK, they met Brian Epstein, who became their manager, and he negotiated a recording contract with George Martin at EMI’s Parlophone.  They never looked back.

Stuart Sutcliffe left, and they went to the Abbey Road Studios in June of 1962 to begin recording.  George Martin was a professional, and immediately decided Pete Best wasn’t good enough.  The Beatles recruited Ringo Starr, who had been playing for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, a group that was as popular as the Beatles in Liverpool and Hamburg, but which was never to transition into a successful recording career.  By leaving the Hurricanes, Ringo had joined a group that was on the way up, despite George Martin’s doubts about him in the early stages.  His addition had one odd consequence.  In 1963, the Beatles had decided all members of the group should be vocalists, a challenge for Ringo, given his rather limited vocal range.  If you’ve heard him narrating Thomas the Tank Engine Stories, you’ll know what I mean!

We are about to enter one of those ‘you had to be there’ segments.  To understand how the Beatles changed and the impact of each successive new phase, well, I suspect you had to have been there.  In just a few years they managed to reinvent themselves several times, and with each new version were always to be found close to the leading edge of pop music trends.  Reviewing the succession of albums from 1962 to 1970, it is hard to separate how much they influenced music culture, and how much they mirrored the changes around them.  Either way, the Beatles were at the centre of the ‘swinging sixties’, a youth-driven hedonistic explosion in music, fashion and art.  As each year saw new trends, many of us would have one of the Beatles’ songs from that year running around in our heads.  Yes, it’s true, you had to have been there!

Over that nine year time span, my life kept changing, and I would find themes in several of the successive Beatles albums that served as a counterpoint to my own experiences.  Not only that, but the music is still there, lodged somewhere in the back of my brain, and pulled to the front as soon as I hear a track or read about a song.  I said at the start this was about nostalgia, but actually I think I was wrong.  It would be better to explain the associations as a process of formation: as the Beatles were growing and maturing, so was I.  There are many, many ways in which their lives and music couldn’t have been more different from mine – drugs, Indian mysticism, and avant-garde sensibilities were way beyond me.  In other ways, the ethos of the times, the zeitgeist, of which they were a central part, was also part of the environment shaping me as I moved out from home, married, studied, and began teaching.

We can go back to that 1963 album, Please Please Me.  At that stage in their career, the Beatles were happy to record other classics, but when I look back over what stood out, there are ‘I saw her standing there’, ‘Please please me’, ‘Love me do’ and ‘Do you want to know a secret’, all listed as written by Lennon-McCartney.  These were songs for late adolescents, romantics, people like me back then, aspirational, hoping to find ‘true love’.  They were undemanding and light, all at a nice rollicking pace.  For those who could dance, eminently rhythmic.  The beat mattered almost as much as the words.  I didn’t take to it at the time, but another track was ‘Misery’.  Rather more bittersweet, and written for another singer before they recorded it on the album, it might have been the first sign that this group was going to explore more than happy dancing tunes.  The album hit the top of the UK charts, and remained there for seven months, an unprecedented success, some commentators calling the music “joyful”.  It was the music for me.

Towards the end of 1963, the second album appeared, With the Beatles.  Appearing some eight months after Please Please Me, it was another mixture of Lennon-McCartney and other tracks.  Did the cover hint at change?  Black and white, four faces, and no words:  artistic, possibly suggesting this album would be more than just good fun.  In retrospect, this didn’t turn out to be the case, and this second album was still largely light, full of dancing music:  four songs, all listed as Lennon-McCartney, are still in my head:  two were largely John’s work, ‘It won’t be long’ and ‘All I’ve got to do’, the other two, “All my loving’ and ‘I wanna be your man’ by Paul.  Perfectly timed, as I was getting married:  we played the LP to death at our wedding reception.  My, I even tried to dance to some of those tracks, an effort fortunately lost without trace!

It was at the end of my first year of university when the next album came out, in July 1964.  A Hard Day’s Night was an album that passed me by.  My first child was three month’s old:  that was more than a distraction.  I hadn’t enjoyed my first year of study, and was trying to work out what to do.  The relentless pop-rock sound, and the film, seemed like marking time, even though this was the first time all the tracks had been written by the Beatles.  The title song was energetic and the kind of tune you can’t get out of your head, and it, with ‘Can’t buy me love’, are the two most memorable for me.  Learning more about that album, I realise that most tracks were written by John Lennon.  However, I really liked McCartney’s ‘And I love her’; my kind of romantic.

My life was changing.  I was fascinated by my new university studies, a second child was on the way, and for me the Beatles had become simply entertainment.  Beatles for Sale came out in late 1964, and I think I didn’t really pick up on its slightly less bouncy character.  For certain, nothing from that album stuck, as I wasn’t feeling down and so slipped out of sync with where the group was heading.  Beatles for Sale included several songs by Lennon-McCartney, and some from others; despite the spirited numbers, there was a sense they were tired. However, when Help came out nearly a year later, there was a change.   This was less like the usual Beatles pop rock:  the sound was more complex and sophisticated.  Among them, there was one song that really grabbed me, ‘Yesterday’.  With a string quartet playing as backing to Paul McCartney, it was evocative, a sad reflection on lost love.  Can’t get that tune out of my head!

Rubber Soul changed my views dramatically, or perhaps I was changing and the music suited my mood.  Half way through my last undergraduate year, surrounded by the rebellious values of the young people around me, the Beatles were back, riding the wave of a social revolution.  Part of their success must have been through their ability to tap into the widening gap between many young people and the generation above them, those that didn’t ‘get it’.  At the same time, drugs were ever more prevalent, especially marihuana, and a craze for LSD.  While these shifts weren’t part of my life, I would hear about drugs and generational battles in the college bar.  I loved so many of the Rubber Soul songs, living vicariously through the disappointments and out-of-kilter experiences they depicted, enthralled, while simultaneously studying hard, just a few months off from my final exams.  If there’s a track that stands out the most, it’s probably ‘Nowhere man’.

A graduate, sorting out what I was going to do next, Revolver (August 1966) came at just the right time.  Any preoccupation with love, and loves lost, had gone.  Now the Beatles’ themes were psychedelics driven by drugs, Indian music, and an extraordinary melding of all sorts of musical traditions from chamber music through to R&B.  This was the music of disillusionment, countercultures, and an underlying sense that all the songs were linked together in a critique of contemporary society.  Where to begin.  ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was a ballad of existential despair, only to be reversed two tracks later by ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ which focussed on living in the moment.  Not all references to the drug culture had disappeared, some tracks clearly referencing LSD and out of the body experiences, like ‘I’m only sleeping’ and ‘Tomorrow never knows’.  The Beatles had me in their grasp again, as it was a time when I was confused, uncertain, and critical, while striving to make sense of where my future path was to be found.

A year later, I had settled into a combination of activities, a mixture of postgraduate research, college tutoring, helping newly arrived couples, and struggling to create a life in a Cambridge satellite town while getting more deeply embedded in college culture. In 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band reflected most of that.  It was a celebration, with its loosely linked structure a mirror into what I was trying to do.  From the opening track, which sounded like the prelude to an opera (an idea The Who were to take much further two years later with Tommy), to its astonishing finale, ‘A Day in the Life’, this was a whole experience, not a set of disparate tracks.  A whole experience, but not quite:  I could relate to that, as bits of my life didn’t quite fit together, either!  Every part of Sgt. Pepper, with the exception of ‘Within You, Without You’ is lodged forever in my memories;  if I listen to it today, it’s like an old friend, raucous, funny, crazy, containing yet another evocative McCartney ballad, She’s Leaving Home.

I didn’t know it then, but the central place of the Beatles in my life was coming to an end.  When The Beatles, (aka The White Album) appeared in 1968, I was already entranced by other groups.  Among those reverberating with my evolving person, two stand out.  First, The Who.  They had been around since 1965:  among many other tracks, ‘Thinking about my generation’ was the theme song for the decade as far as I was concerned.  Later, in 1969, Tommy was released, a stunning, extraordinary rock opera, a commentary on the decade.  The other was The Doors: so many evocative songs, but ‘Light my fire’ and ‘The end’ are stuck somewhere inside my brain, both on their 1967 Album.  The Rolling Stones recorded many great tracks, but I wasn’t quite as drawn to their mixture of heavy, pounding rock and blues as I was to the other two groups, and yet I have to ask myself, why it is that ‘Under the Boardwalk’ remains one of my prominent memories from the era.  Finally, Bob Dylan.  Dylan was the poet of the times, and I can’t go past ‘Don’t Think Twice’, ‘It’s Alright’, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘The Times They Are a’Changin’, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, and, at the end of the decade ,‘Lay Lady Lay’.  What a decade.

The Beatles White Album was almost overwhelming.  A profusion of great songs, from the opening ‘Back in the USSR’, through ‘Dear Prudence’ ‘Bungalow Bill’ ‘Blackbird’ ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’ (!!) to ending with ‘Revolution 9’ and ‘Goodnight’. A profusion?  It was a crazy collection, crying out for a CD version so you could pick out tracks according to mood (CDs didn’t appear until 1982).  Close to the end of the decade, Abbey Road was almost the last album to be released (and the group was falling apart during the final stage of recording).  It was a strange mixture of fun, an extraordinary mixture of styles and techniques, outstanding songs like ‘Here Comes the Sun’, and the album ending with a non-stop medley, culminating in ‘The End’, with its “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make” (and for conspiracy theorists, a bizarre final short piece, a hidden track called ‘Her Majesty’.

The Beatles had evolved past me, and when Let it Be appeared in 1970, my sense of connection was lost.  While some later singles were great, ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Let It Be’ and ‘Come Together’, I think my head was, and possibly still is partly stuck back in 1962.  An unreconstructed romantic, some words just keep running through my head: “Love, love me do, You know I love you, I’ll always be true, So please, love me do”.  Perhaps it never works out quite like that, but …

The Flames of Passion and the Fires of Temptation

In one of his Old Kingdom books, Garth Nix writes: “Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?” [i]  It’s a thought-provoking line, one that encourages reflection on choices and consequences throughout his Abhorsen trilogy.  I decided to explore his questioning reflection, although in a modified form: ‘Does the music choose the person, or the person the music?’  My incentive was I’d been thinking about musical preferences while working on the first chapter of my never-to-be-released autobiography.  Mulling over the less than thrilling moments of my life, I had been examining the music I was drawn to at different stages, noticing how my tastes had changed, or at least shifted.  I could see links between the two, but it wasn’t clear if my choices followed events, or if music was like a catalyst, a key element in precipitating new directions.  If I set out some examples, the question might be clearer.  Here’s a summary, preferences by age.

As a child, I would often lose myself in music, listening to my slowly growing collection of LPs:  classical music, symphonies and concertos; organ music, Bach especially; and choral music.  As a family, we all agreed the best of all was listening to The Messiah at Christmas.  As in so many things in my childhood, I was gently guided.  Early on, my parents would play music from the classical era, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak and Sibelius.  Then dad would put on Bach’s organ music as I got older.  At this stage, most of the time I was listening to big, heavy romantic pieces.  Was that what my mother liked, was that the kind of person she was?  I have no idea: it wasn’t obvious, and I still don’t know.  As for me, I think was entranced by intense passions!  Bach?  That was Dad: mathematical, he loved fugues and variations, and I realised I did too.

Around the age of twelve, I decided I wanted to learn the cello.  I don’t know why I ignored the clarinet, the very instrument my dad played, as well as the organ.  Certainly, dad didn’t talk much about his ability as a clarinetist; what’s more, he was never one to push me into anything.  I was in luck, and managed to borrow of the school’s cellos.  For six months I would take it home on the train, and bring it back again the next day.  No fancy back-pack cello cases in those days:  it was big, and it was a nuisance.  Ah, but the sound it could make; well, to be honest it was the sounds the teacher could make.  I tried hard, and I have no idea what it was like for mum and dad to hear the groans and shrieks that resulted.  Even worse, I could hear I kept on missing the notes, but couldn’t seem to find the way to get there.  My performing career ended quickly, when I managed to chop off the end of a finger with a circular saw (please don’t ask me how).  I think my parents were relieved – about me not playing, of course!  I was back to listening.

In the late 1950s school friends told me about rock and roll, and Elvis Presley.  I went to see some Elvis films in the local cinema.  I bought, or was loaned, some recordings.  Two stick in my mind.  First was Blue Suede Shoes:

Well, it’s one for the money
Two for the show
Three to get ready
Now go, cat, go …

Well, you can knock me down
Step in my face
Slander my name
All over the place …

You can burn my house
Steal my car
Drink my liquor
From an old fruit jar …

[and that wonderful refrain}

Do anything that you want to do
But uh-uh, honey
Lay off of my shoes
Don’t you step on my blue suede shoes [ii]

Jailhouse Rock, Treat me Nice, but, wait, what was this?  Elvis singing Treat Me Nice and he missed the beat, and that was – that was sexy!  Syncopation thrilled me.  It was new; it was daring.  This was the same decade I was attending classical concerts, quite often at the Royal Festival Hall, on the Thames south bank.  You could buy cheap orchestra or balcony seats.  The list of great musicians I heard would seem amazing now:  I heard outstanding concerts with Rostropovich, Rubenstein, Klemperer, and so many others.  Looking back, it must have been slightly dislocating:  on the one hand, I was in step with the great romantics, and on the other hand, with rock’n’roll.  Classical was to be the winner, but that Elvis, he was thrilling, too.

At some stage, just a teenager, my mother took me to a light opera, the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company performing Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, and a little later The Yeoman of the Guard.  That was it:  not so much the humour, but the pathos took me down a path that would lead me to a lifelong love of opera.  A little later I was off to Covent Garden and the Savoy Theatre, and for very little money heard everything from The Flying Dutchman to Peter Grimes.  The staging and the music of operas fascinated me.   Unworried by the rather pathetic stories that sustained them, this was romantic life on the grand scale.  Was I a romantic now, or still becoming one?

A little older, the time of the Beatles and Rolling Stones!  Both played to my clearly romantic nature.  Initially the Beatles were love all the way, with a slight tinge of regret.  Please Please Me, I Saw Her Standing There, Twist and Shout, Till There Was You, Please Mr Postman, and Money, all in 1963.  The Rolling Stones were rather grittier, but in the same vein.  Then, just as I was coping with marriage, one child and then another, the music went a little darker.  From the Beatles is was Can’t Buy Me Love, Paul McCartney the romantic balladeer was now sadder, with Yesterday and Eleanor Rigby, while John Lennon was off in space with Nowhere Man, and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.  These were the years of the Rolling Stones throbbing, driving, unrelenting songs, (I can’t get no) Satisfaction, Heart of Stone, Moving On, songs of bittersweet longing and regretful failure. And then there was Tommy, The Who’s stunning rock opera.

Longing.  Down in the disco, The Doors hit town.  Moving on from the Stones and Beatles, I listened to the strange, pulsing narratives of Light my Fire, The End, and L A Woman.  Angst, revolution and radicalism was in the air, only to be saved by Carole King a little later with wistful songs:  So Far Away, It’s Too Late, Will you Love me Tomorrow, and Tapestry:

My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue
An everlasting vision of the ever-changing view
A wondrous, woven magic in bits of blue and gold
A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold

Once amid the soft silver sadness in the sky
There came a man of fortune, a drifter passing by
He wore a torn and tattered cloth around his leathered hide
And a coat of many colors, yellow-green on either side  …

Soon within my tapestry along the rutted road
He sat down on a river rock and turned into a toad
It seemed that he had fallen into someone’s wicked spell
And I wept to see him suffer, though I didn’t know him well

As I watched in sorrow, there suddenly appeared
A figure gray and ghostly beneath a flowing beard
In times of deepest darkness, I’ve seen him dressed in black
Now my tapestry’s unraveling – he’s come to take me back
He’s come to take me back

Longing, journeys, wanting something out of reach.  I was ripe for all that.  I moved and my new workplace was a hothouse, throbbing with UST (yes, unresolved sexual tension!).   I had several staff.  One was an attractive young woman, interested in me.  My boss invited us over, and started playing some records.  All I needed was a gentle push, and it came from Roberta Flack!  I can still remember her introducing Revered Lee with a spoken verse: “This is a song about a very big, black, strong sexy southern Baptist minister who thinks that he’s got his program all together until he runs up against a lady who shows him that he ain’t got it all together.  His name is Rev. Doctor Lee”.  Then the music started:

Rev. Lee, he went to the water
And he prayed to the lord about ol’ Satan’s daughter
It seems in a dream, child
While he lay sleeping
She climbed in his bed
Starts rubbing and weeping
Oh she was twisting and turning
She was beggin’ and pleading
Loving, burning
Panting and breathing

Rev. Lee she said
“Oh, Lord knows I love you child
I will not even place God above you.”
Rev. Lee, he lifted his arms high
Said “heavenly father, take me home to the sky.”
He said “Lord, please don’t test me
Not down where she touched me, oh
My mind is so hazy, Lord, my body is hungry …

God rolled a thunder then a bolt of lighting
He seemed to be angry
Oh sure was frightening
The thunder grew louder louder
Dark and conditions just then a voice said  “God can not petitioned”…

Just then the devil emerged from the water
And he said in a dry voice
“Your God will not barter.”
Reverend Lee ran screaming from the water
He was hotly persued by old Satan’s daughter
“Reverend Lee” she said, “Reverend Lee, Reverend Lee
Oh do it to me, Reverend Lee
Do it to me, Reverend Lee, do it to me…”

Oh, yes.  Did the music choose me?  I suspect I might have already made the choice!

Moving to a different country, busy working, music disappeared from my life for the rest of the 70’s and 80s.  In the 1990s, with a new partner, a new life, it was a time for a renewed love of baroque music, chamber music, and Mozart operas.  Melbourne was, and I am sure will always be, a great city for music.  Chamber music series, orchestra series, opera series early music series, and many individual occasional concerts.  Music by trios and quartets, by chamber orchestras and major orchestras, by soloists, duos, and even crazy ensembles!  And I found jazz!

This was also a time for the invasion of the blockbuster musicals.  Some were excellent entertainment.  I liked Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables, romantic tales of love and death, which might be described as modern ‘light operas’, but where the music was clearly secondary to the story.  Light, simple, and sappy, yet some songs were designed to catch you unawares, hang on in your mind, and annoyingly, fail to go away!  For me, one of those tunes ‘stuck in my head’ was Music of the Night, from Phantom of the Opera:

Softly, deftly, music shall caress you
Hear it, feel it secretly possess you
Open up your mind, let your fantasies unwind
In this darkness which you know you cannot fight
The darkness of the music of the night

Was I making any choices?  The only thing I seemed to avoid was popular music.  It was a time when almost anything else was acceptable.  Music all the time, until my partner died, and the music stopped in the late 2000s.

One more cycle, as music has become central once again, and the pattern has shifted.  I seem to be back to some of the music from my childhood, and some I had never really given myself time to enjoy.  I am listening to Bach’s organ music again, some modern jazz, but I keep listening to Beethoven’s late string quartets, Shostakovich’s quartets, leavened with occasional bursts of opera, from Akhenaten to Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute.  Older, it seems I want music that is more reflective, more cerebral.  Or perhaps the music is pushing me that way.

Is the music choosing me, or am I choosing the music?  Perhaps it is neither, but rather there’s a constant interplay between the two.  I think that was Garth Nix’s point, too.   Opportunities reach out to us, and we seek choices:  the two-way process helps define and redefine who we are, and what we’re seeking.  The process is continual; as we change, so do our choices.  Perhaps in the past I responded to the flames of passion, the fires of temptation, the peaks and valleys of the romantic world, the ingenuity of baroque counterpoint, but now?  Now I seek those deep, quiet, complex compositions that reach deep into my soul.  That’s the music that is finding me today, shaping and satisfying a more reflective, thoughtful person.

Ah, but I did enjoy listening to Roberta Flack as I worked on this blog, for research of course!

[i] Sabriel, Harper, 1997.  The quote repeated in the other two books in the Abhorsen Trilogy

[ii] I haven’t sought permission to quote these and other lyrics:  I think it is OK

Three Men in a Bar

Three creative and thoughtful people, a philosopher, a playwright and a composer walk into a bar.  What would Shakespeare, Socrates and Shostakovich say to each other?  Would they be busy, with only a little time for conversation and a quick drink before getting back to work?  Or would they be relaxed, three enthusiastic gossips enjoying a couple of hours of drinking?  Or might they recognise they shared a common interest, one they wanted to explore further?

We can begin with Socrates, the earliest of the three.  Unfortunately, we don’t know as much about him as we might like.  The person we know is the version of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues, and there is every reason to suspect the real Socrates might have been somewhat reshaped to fit with Plato’s own thinking.  However, the material on Socrates last days, especially the Apology, Crito and Phaedo, probably offer some useful insights into the man.  What a man!  On trial accused of blasphemy, attacking the state and corrupting youth, his response was, yet again, to engage in some of his subtle question games to reveal the truth, (or was it merely sophistry?).

You know the style.  “Would you not agree …?”  “Is it not evident, then …?”  “Can there be any other conclusion?”  Whether he is questioning Glaucon, Cebes, or some other agreeable friend, Socrates comes across as a rather smart, even smug, guide, a trickster, showing us the issues that he sees as important, carefully unpicking and then reassembling the logic of his argument, all the while leading the discussion on, a gentle but firm instructor.  Push, push, until all we can see is what Socrates had determined, as he magically draws it out from a hapless friend or reader, as if all the answers were there from the start.  He never stops.  In the Apology, he avoids his accusers by seeking to show the basis of their charges are wrong.  In the Crito, he reveals why the law must be obeyed, even if it seems wrong in its application and consequences.  As you read Plato’s accounts, it is hard to avoid frustration:  why doesn’t he just address the acusations directly and prove his innocence; or, if he’d prefer not, leave on his friend’s ship for another, safer city?

The Phaedo starts off in Socrates’ usual fashion.  On this occasion he wants to persuade his listeners of the immortality of the soul, and the happy prospect of being with the gods.  That hinges around a key proposition, that it is reason that matters, while the body is some kind of annoying and inconvenient distraction.  Here he’s talking to Simmias, having received agreement that the greatest understanding comes from using mental faculties, unimpeded by the senses: [i]

” so long as we are encumbered with the body, and our soul is contaminated with such an evil, we can never fully attain to what we desire; and this, we say, is truth. For the body subjects us to innumerable hinderances on account of its necessary support; and, moreover, if any diseases befall us, they impede us in our search after that which is; and it fills us with longings, desires, fears, all kinds of fancies, and a multitude of absurdities, so that, as it is said in real truth, by reason of the body it is never possible for us to make any advances in wisdom.  For nothing else than the body and its desires occasion wars, seditions, and contests; for all wars among us arise on account of our desire to acquire wealth: and we are compelled to acquire wealth on account of the body, being enslaved to its service; and consequently on all these accounts we are hindered in the pursuit of philosophy … if we are ever to know any thing purely, we must be separated from the body, and contemplate the things themselves by the mere soul; and then, as it seems, we shall obtain that which we desire … when we are dead, as reason shows, but not while we are alive.”

That Socrates, or Plato’s version of Socrates, certainly can talk and take us to unexpected places.  In his desire to be able to reason without distractions, Socrates envisioned the soul escaping to a realm where only reason existed, which happens to be the realm of the dead!

Despite this, he’s not one to miss an opportunity among the living.  In the bar, a glass of wine in his hand, I imagine he’s already asking questions of a rather distracted Shakespeare.  I can’t think of a more powerful contrast than between these two.  In Shakespeare’s great tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, we are gripped by emotional drama, relegating any time for logic and rational thinking over to the sidelines.  We know his characters are merely actors, and yet the power of their feelings is such that what we hear is real.  Socrates can go calmly to his death; at the end section of the Phaedo and we are scarcely touched.  With Shakespeare, it is people pushed to the edge, roiled by regret and misunderstanding, who hold and engage us:  you’re unlikely forget what it was like to watch a performance of King Lear.

This fearsome and frightening play ends at a British camp, near Dover.  Warring dukes and earls are trying to make sense of Lear and his actions, while he is slowly coming to realise the horrific consequences of his treatment of his daughters.  As it has to be in a tragedy, Lear has the best – or worst – lines.  I find it hard to sit and watch this play without being drawn into the emotional turmoil.  Save him, save her, but Shakespeare is relentless:  [ii]

[Enter Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms; Lear is speaking]

“Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stone.

Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so

That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for ever!

I know when one is dead, and when one lives;

She’s dead as earth. Lend me a looking glass;

If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,

Why, then she lives.”

…

“A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!

I might have sav’d her; now she’s gone for ever!

Cordelia, Cordelia! stay a little. Ha!

What is’t thou say’st? Her voice was ever soft,

Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.

I kill’d the slave that was a-hanging thee.”

…

[And, later] “And my poor fool is hang’d! No, no, no life!

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never!

Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir.

Do you see this? Look on her: look, her lips,

Look there, look there!”  [Lear dies]

Socrates and Shakespeare.  Socrates gives reason, and reason alone, as the only issue that matters.  His injunction is to free  yourself from the body and its misleading symptoms and concerns.  Shakespeare turns the account entirely the other way around.  It is our feelings, our emotions, our senses that are central.  If Socrates prefers to be the logical computer, Shakespeare wants to get on with what he sees as the real stuff of life, crafting emotional wild rides, and in so doing reminding us we are creatures of passion, fear and love.  In a sense, both want us to reflect, but for very different reasons.  Socrates suggests we should welcome escaping from our bodily prison to enjoy a life of pure reason with the gods, to meditate through reflective dialogues.  Shakespeare asks us to confront our non-rational selves, using soliloquies, that necessary and ingenious way into a person’s inner life, to give us insight into troubled lives, slowly drawing us into a dread fascination with the violent emotions, the pain, misery and death of his characters.

Is there an alternative?  How would these two respond if a Buddhist monk, Dadul Namgyal perhaps, had wandered in to join them, to comment on the meaning of death?

“We can reflect on and contemplate the inevitability of death, and learn to accept it as a part of the gift of life. If we learn to celebrate life for its ephemeral beauty, its coming and going, appearance and disappearance, we can come to terms with and make peace with it. We will then appreciate its message of being in a constant process of renewal and regeneration without holding back, like everything and with everything, including the mountains, stars, and even the universe itself undergoing continual change and renewal. This points to the possibility of being at ease with and accepting the fact of constant change, while at the same time making the most sensible and selfless use of the present moment.” [iii]

Calm and insightful, this monk would make a good character in a dialogue or a play!

But what about Shostakovich?  He’s been rather quiet, listening.  Music without words or images is a different category of experience.  Some composers get caught up with opera.  Not Dmitri, although he did write one chilling and violent opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. [iv]  He also wrote quite a lot of film music.  However, it is his other music which speaks most clearly and directly: it isn’t so much logical or analytical, but communicates in other, often subtle ways to the listener’s emotions.  As is the case for so many composers, his works have been analysed and interpreted, searched for the meaning hidden behind the notes.  It is likely the complexity of his scores may in some ways reflect the dedications he gave.  As a frequent listener to his string quartets, two of my favourites, 7 and 8, are dedicated to his first wife and to ‘the victims of fascism and the [second world] war’.  Living in a time of never-ending disaster and death, you can feel the pain and the hope.  Yet that’s not all.  Unlike Socrates logic or Shakespeare’s emotions, the music speaks to us with a different, very complex kind of reflection and insight.

I am still thinking about the three of them in a bar.  Socrates might try to push Shakespeare into a question and answer exercise in the pursuit of truth, but Shakespeare would be far too volatile to be wasting time like this, starting to bang his beer glass on the counter, his attention distracted by the men and women around him.  He can see there are stories to be discovered here, and Socrates is, well, kind of boring.  That couple sitting quietly over in the corner, if he could slip away for a few minutes, he would love to talk with them.  Eventually, I imagine Socrates would give up on the inattentive Shakespeare.  Shaking his head, he’d turn to the man beside him, starting to ask him some questions instead.

Shostakovich just drinks quietly.  He’s seen these scenes before.  Some with dictators and demagogues talking loudly about doing what they claim needs to be done; others with people pretending to be enjoying time together while hiding their suffering, whether from the physical or psychological wounds of war, or from a bad relationship; and yet others, alone, quietly managing their private pain, a mental or physical disease eating them up.  He listens to the flow of sounds of the room, the discussions, quiet conversations, glasses and bottles on trays, and the water running in the sink.  He gets out a notebook, and writes down some phrases.  He conjures his responses through music rather than with words.

I liked the conceit of having these three meeting over a drink, but I think my imagination was awry:  these three might not have much to say to each other after all.  After politely listening, it’s possible they would turn aside.  Each communicates in his own and different way, each a performer, developing his art in order to engage and draw us along their kind of  journey.  They might find it hard to settle on common ground.

No, I’ve been too hasty. If we could be a little more patient, we’ll see them decide to sit at a table. Now, as they are concentrating on each other, the noise around them recedes.  The topic that engages them is death.  Shakespeare and Shostakovich understand Socrates passion for pure reason, if passion is the best word to use.  They concede that only with the freedom given to the soul in death, away from daily aches, pains and emotional misunderstandings, only then pure reason might grow and develop.  On the other hand, Socrates admits his admiration for Shakespeare’s ability to construct emotional dramas, bringing out the fraught nature of love, hate  and friendship.  Trading compliments, Shakespeare is equally willing to accept that the soul, after death, can see the world more clearly.  However, why would anyone want to abandon the pleasures of life, drinking in a pub, going home to a loving partner?  Those pleasures might be interrupted by other, painful episodes, but those only make occasional pleasures even more enjoyable in contrast.

Shostakovich joins in.  In his lifetime unexpected and unwarranted deaths were frequent: deaths in wartime, deaths in Stalin’s pogroms. He offers a quote from the Buddhist monk, “If we learn to celebrate life for its ephemeral beauty, its coming and going, appearance and disappearance, we can come to terms with and make peace with it. We will then appreciate its message of being in a constant process of renewal and regeneration without holding back, like everything and with everything … [t]his points to the possibility of being at ease with and accepting the fact of constant change, while at the same time making the most sensible and selfless use of the present moment.” [v]  Socrates and Shakespeare nod in agreement, a little surprised as he’d been so quiet before.  Dadul Namgyal had provided a necessary and meaningful framework for their debate.

There is little else to add.  The table has gone quiet as each contemplates life in the face of death, each striving to find a deeper truth to offer.  Three men, the authors of three quite different ways to reflect on our place in the world.  Three men in a bar.

[i] The quotes are from Clauses 29 and 30 of Phaedo.  I am using the Henry Cary translation, via Gutenberg.

[ii] Extracts from Act V, Scene II of King Lear; this is from the Project Gutenberg edition

[iii] How Does a Buddhist Monk Face Death?  George Yancy, Opinion, New York Times, 26 February 2020

[iv] I saw the film version, Lady Macbeth von Mzensk, 1992.  It’s at Amazon: beware, there’s rape and nudity

[v] Yancey, Op Cit

Indolence

I grew up at a time dominated by the Protestant work ethic.  It was simple: work hard, be frugal and be disciplined.  Work was for the benefit of your family and the broader society, waste was bad, and to be a good member of the community you lived by these precepts.  It is said the Jesuits claimed that if they could have a child to the age of seven, they had him for life (yes, I know, Protestants aren’t Jesuits).  Certainly, I was imbued with Calvinistic virtues as I grew up, especially by my mother who made sure industriousness and thrift were well established at an early age: to my surprise, they’re still there.  As for indolence, if it ever came up in conversation it was uttered with something close to embarrassment.  It was sinful and self-indulgent. For years I knew it was out there, ready to suck me into a swamp full of morally dangerous quicksand.

As I grew up, I found my mother’s list of virtues was growing.  Initially, and most important, I discovered if you worked hard, you could enjoy some (but not too much) time off, especially at the weekend.  Of course, there were tasks to be completed in the evenings or on a Sunday, but it was acceptable to slot in some non-work time, for reading comics, or, once we had one, for watching television (only for a short period of time in our household).  A little later, I learned if I laboured away as an adult, I would be rewarded with a good, comfortable retirement.  When my dad retired and I saw him digging away in the garden, I wasn’t quite clear about the comfortable part, but I reconciled what I observed with understanding working hard brought you a pension, money for your old age.  Eschewing his comfort, perhaps my dad just liked gardening?

Those values were further reinforced when I started a position at Shell.  I had an unexpected phone call from the UK (expensive back then).  It was my parents:  “You’ve got a job with Shell!  Stick at it, and in thirty years you’ll be able to retire on a good pension”.  I knew it was good advice, but I failed to heed it, and left the company after three years.  The miserable payout I got at the time was largely wasted on shopping.  With my dad’s scientific bent in my head, I decided to acquire one of those new-fangled video-recorders, and my research showed the Sony U-matic system was superior.  Yup, it was, but I’d wasted my meagre savings as VHS swept the board!

However, as a child, I had acquired a horrifying fascination with doing nothing.  I was saved by my time being filled with school, after school activities, and reading good books.  I was tempted to think the grass might be greener on the other side, but I was determined not to cross!  Young, naïve, I was truly scared:  if I didn’t work, I’d have no money, become a tramp, a parasite and an embarrassment to my family.  But there it was, doing nothing remained seductively appealing.

Part of the trouble came from books I read, especially those I loved.  There was that somewhat overweight, lovable bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, whose whole life seemed to be based on masses of indolence, lots of eating, and a little activity.  How could you not love a bear with this response to a question?  “‘Honey or condensed milk with your bread?’ He was so excited that he said, ‘Both,’ and then, so as not to seem greedy, he added, ‘but don’t bother about the bread, please.’”  His wisdom was dangerously attractive. “Don’t underestimate the value of doing nothing.”  “Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.”  “Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.”  What a profoundly wise bear.

Quintessentially, the Pooh philosophy (or Milne’s I suppose, although Pooh exemplified it in the books), was caught in this telling exchange:

“What I like doing best is Nothing.”

“How do you do Nothing,” asked Pooh after he had wondered for a long time.

“Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it, ‘What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?’ and you say, ‘Oh, Nothing,’ and then you go and do it.

It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

“Oh!” said Pooh.” [i]

There was something about that lazy, sunny day image that was enticing.  I’d grasped, intuitively, this wasn’t the same as reading or some other kind of entertainment.  This was ‘Nothing’.  When I read Wind in the Willows, I saw Rat understood:

‘Nice? It’s the ONLY thing,’ said the Water Rat solemnly, as he leant forward for his stroke. ‘Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING–absolutely nothing–half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing,’ he went on dreamily:  ‘messing–about–in–boats; messing—-’ ‘Look ahead, Rat!’ cried the Mole suddenly.  It was too late. The boat struck the bank full tilt. The dreamer, the joyous oarsman, lay on his back at the bottom of the boat, his heels in the air.

     ‘–about in boats–or WITH boats,’ the Rat went on composedly, picking himself up with a pleasant laugh. ‘In or out of ‘em, it doesn’t matter.  Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don’t; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you’ve done it there’s always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you’d much better not. Look here! If you’ve really nothing else on hand this morning, supposing we drop down the river together, and have a long day of it?’ [ii]

Not every children’s author was extolling a life of indolence.  Lewis Carroll used ‘lazing about’ as an excuse to launch an improbable (and later, we came to realise, dream-like) adventure: “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice ‘without pictures or conversations?’  So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.” [iii]  Writers like Carroll were warning us, indolence could lead to danger!

Despite my fascination, parents and school had scared me off from doing nothing, and so began a life of study and employment.  Here I am now, no longer working full-time, and, you might think, able to enjoy that ‘doing nothing’ I’d dreamt about.  I do have a considerable amount of ‘free’ time, not allocated and controlled by an employer, but it has only been in the last couple of years that I have looked around and asked, “What am I doing?”  I was still living the life of a full-time employee.  I was managing my time by routines and habits, putting in some 7-9 hours most days, writing and editing, mentoring, as well as planning various activities.  At my desk by 9 am, and apart from a break for lunch I might still be there by 6 pm or later.  I reserved entertainment for the time after dinner, when I would usually read for 2-3 hours.  Even worse:  unlike when I was employed full-time, this was for seven days a week.  What was I up to?

I had made one major change about three years ago.  In the afternoon, I would step away from my desk, make myself a brewed coffee, and settle down in a chair to listen to a CD.  For nearly a year, I listened to all of Bach’s organ music, each of the 13 CDs played several times.  Then I moved over to the Beethoven String Quartets: I must have heard each of the sixteen, twenty times at least, even more for the last four.  Now I have been caught up with Shostakovich for a few months, a couple of late String Quartets and a Piano Quintet.  The music is demanding, yet I seldom slip away from careful listening.  So, yes, there are times when I do stop working.

Listening to CDs coincided with my plan to write a blog each week.  Every so often I would find myself thinking about various topics, and would light on an idea that I might want to use.  It wasn’t deliberate, it just happened.  Now I am a little more indolent.  My planned day is semi-structured, though I’ve stuck with breakfast followed by emails at the beginning of the day, and reading in the evenings.  The stranglehold of the Protestant work ethic is slowly loosening.

At the same time, I have made a discovery.  The way I used to work was that I would think, spend time to sketch out some ideas, and then set to typing up a note or observation.  Once that initial draft was done, the remaining work was editing, which I did with reasonable enthusiasm.  Now I follow a different path.  I will have some ideas, and start on a topic, a future blog.  Then, away from the desk, no longer focussing on work, my mind wanders.  Almost unprompted, ideas pop up.  Many relate to one or two of the blogs I’ve been writing; others might be on a different task.  Instead of having a clear approach for the next article or blog, it is a more organic process, the topic emerging rather than being set out in a planned, rigorous and well-structured outline.

I had noticed this process a few years earlier when I attempted to write detective novels.  I hadn’t proved as adept at thinking through a complex plot as I’d anticipated.  As a result, I would start a story without knowing how it would end (other than an epilogue dealing with the lives of the key characters, but not the murder mystery itself).  Then, over time, the plot would emerge, elaborate and complicate itself, sometimes leading me to events and places quite different from the ones I imagined the story would embrace.  As Pooh would say, I no longer underestimated the value of doing nothing, and I also accepted, there was no need to hurry; I would get there, although, it turns out, not with novels.  I have been disappointed to have discovered that I don’t have the right kind of mind for a novelist, certainly not a good novelist.  It requires a kind of focus I lack.

What I have discovered is the real value of indolence.  As I am getting older, I know part of this is realising insights, wisdom, good ideas and further thoughts don’t come because I want them.  They appear when my mind is free, able to wander down new paths and around familiar ones, seeing connections and possibilities, rethinking and reimagining – exactly because that is not what I am trying to do!  By being indolent, by doing nothing in particular, it is as if I have given my brain a free pass:  you can think what you like, go wherever you want, and see what emerges.  What a discovery: this is what I had been teaching students in innovation classes!

I can guess what you might be thinking: not only getting older, but lazier, too.  So, let me tell you about Mark O’Connell, and a day in his life just before his 40^th birthday.  Mark is an Irish author, based in Dublin.  In addition to novels, he writes on literature, and his columns appear in such prestigious places as The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Observer, and the New York Review of Books (and others from time to time!).  A prolific, busy man, close to 40 years old, he was confronting the realisation he was entering middle age, with the older of his two sons now a six year old and about to start school.  He had begun to think about his own childhood, seeing it like a “lost civilisation”. [iv]  Walking alone in a forest in Devon, he found himself at a turning point:

“I came to a clearing in a forest by a riverbank in Dartmoor national park, far enough from any trail that it seemed unlikely I would encounter anyone while I was there. I gathered some loose branches and stones and arranged them in a circle of about 10 metres in diameter, and then I walked into the circle and did not leave it until the same time the following day.  The short version of this story is that nothing happened in that time: that I did nothing and witnessed nothing, experienced only the passage of the hours and minutes, and the languid dynamics of my own boredom. The long version isn’t exactly The Iliad, either, but in that version something could be said to have happened. Because by the time I walked out of that circle the following afternoon, I’d had an entirely unexpected and intensely cathartic encounter with the passage of time.” [v]

What did Mark experience?  His article is compelling, and I hope you read it.  What I will tell you is that he didn’t spend time thinking about being 40 years old, and how his life might unfold in the future.  He did think about his childhood, and he thought about his six-year old.  And he thought “with a pang of how I was always hurrying him – to get dressed, to get out the door for school, to finish his dinner, to get ready for bed – and of how heedlessly I was inflicting upon him my own anxious awareness of time as an oppressive force. How before he knew where he was, [his] son’s early years would have receded into the past, and he too would be out of the secret level of childhood and into the laterally scrolling world of adulthood.”

Above all, he found himself able to restore an environment of connectedness, to his own past, to the physical and natural world around him as he sat alone, without his mobile telephone, without any task he had to accomplish.  If his article resonated with me, and, as I hope you will find, with you too, it is because he experienced a freedom that is hard to grasp. [vi]  Clock time and calendar time are deep in our consciousness, as is the list of things we need to do, do now, do tomorrow.  That awareness is like a prison, constraining us, denying us the opportunity to be free, to be engaged in the moment.  As Mark wrote “The point of being here is to be here.”

We can’t all escape to the Devon woods by ourselves (Mark’s wife was wonderfully supportive, I thought).  However, there are other ways we can step out of time, and out of the demands of the world around us.  As I mentioned earlier, I escape through reading or music.  Mark O’Connell found himself intimately connected with the physical environment around him; I can find myself involved in a fantasy world or a murder mystery, or drawn into music that absorbs me without asking for any explanation or reason.  Indolence isn’t sinful, it is the only way I know to be truly free, to think, and to savour all the things we miss in busy living.

[i] All these quotes can be found in Winnie-the-Pooh, by A A Milne, Methuen.  I have the 1926 E H Shepard version.

[ii] From Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, Methuen, 1931, Chapter 1

[iii] The beginning lines of Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, Macmillan, 1865 (and republished ever since!)

[iv] What follows comes from Mark O’Connell, Splendid Isolation, The Long Read, The Guardian, 24 January 2020

[v] Some see boredom this way: https://aeon.co/ideas/boredom-is-but-a-window-to-a-sunny-day-beyond-the-gloom

[vi] Hot topic right now: https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-need-an-absence-of-noise-to-hear-anything-important?

Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll

I went to see Hair the other day.  To my surprise, most of the musical came back to me, even though I had only seen it once before, nearly 50 years ago.  The songs and the loosely articulated story had lodged somewhere in my memory, and I could remember the excitement and emotion that had captured my soul back then.  However, this time around there was one significant difference, but to explain that I need to set my experience of Hair in context.

Going right back to the middle of the 1950’s, British theatre had seen a series of plays by the ‘angry young men’, beginning with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956.  The playwrights were young, and fierce critics of contemporary society.  Their plays depicted the crushing conformity and conservatism of a class-ridden country, realistic ‘kitchen sink’ stories confronting audiences with adulterous affairs, inter-racial relationships, and liaisons that cut across class boundaries.  One of my favourites (if that is the right word) was Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, about a teenager who has an affair with an African-American sailor, becomes pregnant, and moves out from home to live with a gay friend.  The plays spun out into films, with A Taste of Honey being made into a film in 1961, just two years after Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, one of my all-time favourites, with Albert Finney as the philandering shop-floor machinist.  These were followed in 1962 by A Kind of Loving, and The L Shaped Room, both of which explored the impact of unwanted pregnancies on relationships between husbands, wives and other partners.  Today, when I read about ‘reality television’ my mind always slips back to the dramas of that time.  There was the world, depicted in the gritty and grim realities of day-to-day life and the unrelenting pressures of complicated affairs, each story slipping inexorably into one kind of uncomfortable compromise or another.

Then it all changed in the UK.  I think the signal moment was late 1962, with the release of The Beatles first hit record, Love Me Do, followed early in 1963 by their first LP, Please Please Me.  The miseries of working-class life in the Midlands were replaced by the irrepressible and infectious music and behaviour of four mop-haired Liverpudlians.  That rather trite phrase “you had to have been there” is the only way I can explain the impact of the music that followed, with The Rolling Stones, Gerry & the Pacemakers, The Moody Blues, The Dave Clark Five and The Yardbirds.  In a period of six years, youth culture took over.  It was exhilarating, even for a stodgy young middle-class nerd like me.

Part of the underpinning of the change was the drug culture.  Marijuana had been around in the UK since the 1950s, but by the middle of the 1960’s it, together with amphetamines, began to be the part of what defined the youth experience of the time, quickly followed by LSD as it made its way across the Atlantic.  For bookish people, the man of the zeitgeist, Carlos Castaneda, was off having mystical experiences under the guidance of a sorcerer.  Avidly read by students, his journey was first outlined in The Teachings of Don Juan which came out in 1968; we had to wait until later in the 1970’s to get the full story, but by then Castaneda’s moment had passed.[i]

At the same time, the so-called sexual revolution was emerging.  The origins of the changes in sexual behaviour are harder to determine.  In part they were driven by the development of the contraceptive pill (in 1960) and better drugs, especially penicillin, to treat sexually transmitted diseases.  But there was more going on.  Playboy emerged on the scene, divorce rates started to increase, and nudity became evident in mainstream magazines, films and even newspapers.  A rather one-sided revolution, too, as most changes turned out for the benefit of men.

If you were living in Britain, it was the era of ‘sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’.  Much of the same was true of youth culture in the US, but there some other issues were also pressing.  The first was war.  Slowly but surely, America had been drawn further into the conflict in Vietnam, where President Kennedy had seen the need to support the south, to “make our power credible” [ii].  An attack on the destroyer USS Maddox in 1964 proved the trigger for a massive escalation in the American effort, and, without declaring war, Congress authorised President Johnson to conduct military operations, beginning with air strikes (Operation Rolling Thunder), followed by a huge increase in the number of US military in the country, jumping from 16,000 during 1963 to more than 530,000 by 1968.[iii]   This massive deployment of troops required an equally massive increase in servicemen, through increased drafting:  US conscription had continued at a low level from the end of the Korean War, but it grew rapidly.  With more being drafted, more protested.

At the same time, two other issues were prominent.  First was the civil rights movement.  Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, (and later the Voting Rights Act in 1965), violence and marches had continued across the country, violence that was to culminate in Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination in 1968.  At the same time, there was growing resentment in universities over the restrictions on free speech for students.  For personal reasons, I’d like to highlight one critical point in this: the emergence of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1964-5 academic year, under the leadership of Mario Savio, Jack Weinberg, Brian Turner and several others, a movement that sought to support and address academic freedom, the civil rights movement, ending the conflict in Vietnam and overturning the draft.[iv]

With several others, Brian Turner was one of the leaders who was imprisoned for his role in the Free Speech Movement.  During his time in prison, he successfully applied for the Ehrman Studentship at King’s College, Cambridge and arrived there in October 1967.  Brian came to study social anthropology, and as a college tutor he was assigned as one of my students.  A year younger than me, he was, quite simply, the most able student I have ever worked with.  However, his past caught up with him, and in 1968 he received his notice of draft into the US Army.  Brian was smart, as well as clever, and after admitting himself as a psychiatric patient to the local hospital, he managed to have his status changed!

Soon after that episode, Brian married a fellow American, a brilliant woman PhD student, studying philosophy.  I was invited to the wedding, along with my wife and three very young children.  I am not sure it was a ‘legal’ wedding (I think they may have gone to a registry office to deal with that requirement), but bride, groom and guests met on a sunny afternoon in the large garden of a house owned by King’s.  Everyone was dressed in flower power garb.  Well, almost everyone:  I managed slacks and an open-necked shirt (no jeans for me, and I left my jacket with leather elbow patches at home, together with my pipe).  It was a memorable day, celebrating love, flower power, and music, with a heavy, heady atmosphere of drugs being smoked all around me.  Ah, and memorable for another reason:  unnoticed, my five-year-old daughter and her sister (a year younger) ate a small fragment of the hash brownie, cream and petal wedding cake!  Not much, but when I thought I saw them floating about the garden soon after, I guessed they had nibbled what was meant to be an adults’ delight!! [v]

Brian disappeared from sight after completing his degree at Cambridge.  I have been unable to find any papers, articles or books he has written.  When the new edition of the college Register appeared this year, his was the second name I checked (yes, mine was the first!).  It told me two things I didn’t know:  he had done research, at the University of Columbia and in Paris, on the history of anthropology; and he was described as ‘retired’ with no contact information.  A brilliant person who effectively disappeared along with those flower power years.

It was an era of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll?  As usual, I exaggerate.  That was true for a small part of the British population, mostly privileged students at university and idle young things in Chelsea!  The rest of the country went on much as usual.  In 1968, I carried out a consulting project for a training group, which saw me visiting woollen mills in Scotland.  The furthest north we went was to Brora, in Sutherland (a small hamlet above Inverness).  When we arrived there, the owner called his small number of his staff into the room.  When they had arrived, he told my wife (and I mean ‘told’) to stand on a chair, which she did.  “There’, he said. “That, that’s what’s ruining our industry.  That, that is a mini-skirt!”.  I wish I could write the way he said it, with a broad, aggressive Scottish accent.  The revolution might not have reached northern Scotland, but the consequences were already there.

By this time, the heyday of the Beatles was over, almost certainly having culminated in the 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album (I will leave it to you to decide where the best music is to be found, but for sure, that LP was the end of the ‘big’ successes).  Like so many other students, I found the mood had become darker.  After MLK’s death, we were busy joining marches, carrying protest placards against the Vietnam War outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square in London: ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’.  In meetings and discussion groups we were exploring new approaches to education and the attractions of the Free University of Berlin.  Having cut my hair short (like the Beatles), now it was time to let it grow again.  I managed to add a long, drooping moustache (which is evident in my official college photograph, I believe).

Then, in early 1969, I was down in London, at the Shaftesbury Theatre, watching Hair.  Those songs:  Aquarius, Sodomy, Manchester England, Black Boys White Boys, Good Morning Starshine.  The costumes, even more garish and exciting than those I had seen at Brian’s wedding.  Nudity, swearing, wow.  It was a joyous night, even if I couldn’t quite get myself to join the packed stage with cast and audience dancing at the end to ‘Let the Sun Shine In’.  Yup, a wimp, even that night!!  Uplifting, fun, but with a bitter sweet element as Claude succumbed to the draft, an element of the story which almost got swept aside by the vibrancy of the casts’ performance.  I think I should add one more detail:  how about Marsha Hunt, Dionne in Hair, with her halo of black hair; I was in love with her (and Diana Rigg) for the next few years!!

So, there I was last week, seeing it all again.  As I said, it wasn’t quite the same.  Now it was more bitter sweet and rather sad.  Not so much sad because of Claude, but because of the sense that Hair fifty years earlier had been the anthem of change, of a new world, of young people coming into their own.  And now I look back and see all that promise dissipated.

We saw some signs early on.  Oz, the Australian hippie magazine that started a UK version, went commercial and carried advertisements: for Playboy, for Rise (an early antecedent of Viagra), for sex partners and autoerotic magazines, and for sex manuals.  The stories were great, and the parodies of other magazines were outstanding, but a trial for ‘obscenity and trying to corrupt public morals’ was, probably, the beginning of the end.  With two outstanding defence lawyers, John Mortimer (of ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’ fame) and Geoffrey Robinson (of ‘Hypotheticals’ fame) the three editors were sentenced on only two minor charges, taken to prison where their long hair was cut, an act which caused even greater protests on top of the already considerable outcry surrounding the trial and verdict.  However, the trio managed to get further publicity by arriving at the committal hearing wearing schoolgirl uniforms.   At the time, it was the longest obscenity trial in the UK.  On appeal, their sentences were struck down.  However, from then on Oz’s circulation dropped, and in 1973 publication ceased, leaving £20,000 in debts.[vi]

Another change was coming:  no sooner had I seen Hair than I was watching a cool Neil Armstrong piloting Eagle, the lunar module, on July 20, 1969, seeking a safe landing spot for the first moon landing.  Technology took over from youth musicals, and just around the corner were computers which you could access from a terminal (the IBM 370 range in particular).  No more dancing in the streets, and no more youth sit-ins and marches, not for a long time.

As I walked out from the theatre last week, I wondered how Hair was seen by the audience that night.  There were a few from my age group, for whom this must have been a ‘remembrance of times past’.  There were a lot of younger people.  One, in the row in front of me, was texting at one point.  As I was leaving two young women were talking, and, as usual, I didn’t want to hear but did: “Time to wear beads again; I’ve got some at home”.  For almost everyone, I think it was a fun, joyous evening.  The issues about the draft were already distant; at long last the sexual revolution is being rethought through #MeToo; and, as for drugs, I really don’t know what a millennial has to say about them.  Cannabis OK; heroin and cocaine, not OK; fun drugs are fun?

Is Hair a ‘musical’?  More like a loose assembly of songs and bits of songs, given meaning by the performers who are allowed and encouraged to improvise.  Music theatre, a rock musical?  It inspired (or was followed by) Jesus Christ Superstar, but defined an approach that ended almost as soon as it appeared.  Ken Russell’s film of Tommy was released in 1974, but that was one of a kind, although it included some outstanding rock music by The Who. Improvisational, loosely articulated musicals are not a staple, too risky for most promoters, I would guess.

The writers of Hair rejected the theatre of Look Back in Anger and offered the promise of looking forward in hope.  But last week I found I was look backing in sadness.

 

[i] Well, that’s what I think, but I discovered today he has a business and a website: <https://castaneda.com/>

[ii] In an interview with James Reston in 1961 in the New York Times: see <https://www.thenation.com/article/kennedy-week-jfks-uncertain-path-vietnam/>

[iii] <https://www.americanwarlibrary.com/vietnam/vwatl.htm.

[iv] It was only when reading about the Free Speech Movement did I come to appreciate Brian’s role:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement>

[v] Not enough to do any damage, fortunately.

[vi] Wikipedia has a good summary of the OZ story:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OZ_(magazine).  The University of Wollongong has online copies of both the Australia and UK copies of OZ, https://ro.uow.edu.au/ozsydney/, and https://ro.uow.edu.au/ozlondon/

The Hissing of Summer Lawns – Remembering

After a long, cold and gray winter in North Carolina, we are well into spring, with warm days and plenty of rain ensuring plants and trees are growing quickly.  It’s around this time of the year a line from one of Joni Mitchell’s songs often pops into my mind: “the hissing of summer lawns”.  However, there’s no hissing here.  In part that is because it rains enough to keep the gardens green without watering, (quite a different story over on the west coast).  But the other reason Joni Mitchell’s line doesn’t work in our area is because the sound of spring and summer on this side of the US is the roar of the lawn mowers:  with larger blocks, it often takes 1-2 hours for the mowing team to chop down the grass, and then turn on the leaf blowers to blast every clipping off roadways, paths and steps.  If the work is done by the house owner, it can take even longer.  On a bad day, I have the stereo up loud, so I can ignore the unrelenting insistent droning.

What was that song about?  I found the other words hard to recall, so I decided to go back to look at the lyrics.[i]  That was a shock.  I could vaguely remember the first part:

He bought her a diamond for her throat
He put her in a ranch house on a hill
She could see the valley barbecues
From her window sill
See the blue pools in the squinting sun
Hear the hissing of summer lawns

However, what I recalled as an evocative song about suburbia in the summer was a lot more than that.  This was about being imprisoned, a woman kept behind a (barbed wire) fence.  In a way, Joni Mitchell was anticipating #MeToo, by 40 odd years.  And it ends with the disquieting sense the woman accepts her situation:

He gave her his darkness to regret
And good reason to quit him
He gave her a roomful of Chippendale
That nobody sits in
Still she stays with a love of some kind
It’s the lady’s choice
The hissing of summer lawns

There is a strong theme of alienation in this, a self-imposed subjugation even, without really telling us why.  Was it for the ranch house and the Chippendale furniture, or something more?  We are left to wonder.

Once you start down the track of recalling popular songs from the past, it is hard to stop, so I hope you are ready for Peter Sheldrake’s trip down memory lane!  After Joni Mitchell, I next thought of Carole King and another great song of the 1970’s, Tapestry, recorded two years earlier.[ii]  I have used the lyrics of that song many times, in discussion groups and in my teaching.  The first verse is wonderful, a hymn to complexity, to the various strands of life we experience, and to the ineffable sense of who we are, always just outside our consciousness:

My life has been a tapestry
Of rich and royal hue;
An everlasting vision
Of the ever-changing view;
A wond’rous woven magic
In bits of blue and gold;
A tapestry to feel and see;
Impossible to hold.

Did I say great songs of the 1970s?  Let’s get real:  the 1960s were the best.  For me, it started with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.  Then suddenly, out of the blue, it was 1964, The Leader of the Pack, and The Shangri-Las.[iii]  It took me years to get this one out of my head – narrative, drama, a bad boy and the girl who loved him:

My folks were always putting him down
They said he came from the wrong side of town
They told me he was bad but I knew he was sad
That’s why I fell for the leader of the pack

Do you remember the song, the sound of the motor bike, the crash?  I’m not now clear why that particular song grabbed me in the way it did.  Was it the story-telling element?  Not just that:  after all, if you wanted a story what about The Beatles and their sad tale of Eleanor Rigby?  The sound effects?  Maybe.  Whatever the reason, I see it like a little gem, standing out in the midst of one song after another taking the Mersey sound and tweaking it this way and that.

I guess there will always be people and songs I can never forget: from Procul Harum to Dave Clark Five, Donovan to Arlo Guthrie.  The list goes on, but even more firmly stuck in my head than these are the songs of The Who, and especially My Generation.[iv]

People try to put us d-down (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Just because we g-g-get around (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Yeah, I hope I die before I get old (talkin’ ’bout my generation)

Later in the decade The Who released a ‘pop opera’, Tommy, all about the pinball wizard’s life.  Pink Floyd released weird albums reflecting the troubles of the group.  Social commentary was everything.  In the same year as My Generation, Bob Dylan lashed out at the pretentious rich, contemplated their downfall, in Like a Rolling Stone.[v]

I’ve got to stop quoting so many lines, but the beginning says it all:

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People call say ‘beware doll, you’re bound to fall’
You thought they were all kidding you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hanging out
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal

How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone

1965 must have been a remarkable year.  It was around then The Rolling Stones really hit their mark, with Under the Boardwalk and, best of all for hormone driven young men,  (I can’t get no) Satisfaction.  The raw sexual tensions of that song were only to be relieved in 1967, when The Doors brought us Light My Fire.[vi]

Well, Jim Morrison and the rest of the gang weren’t really into deep lyrics, but you got the point:

You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
Girl, we couldn’t get much higher

Come on baby, light my fire
Come on baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire

1967 was also the year we saw the culmination of The Beatles evolving style with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, packed with extraordinary songs, and ending with A Day in the Life.[vii] Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote alternating parts of this amazing track:

[Paul McCartney]

Woke up, fell out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up I noticed I was late
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Made my way upstairs and had a smoke
And everybody spoke and I went into a dream

[John Lennon]

I read the news today, oh boy
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall
I’d love to turn you on

1965-1967 was an extraordinary time in my memories of the past.  There were lots of hedonistic songs, sex, drugs and rock and roll.  Bu there were also moments of real insight, delineating the era’s troubles through personal and social analysis.

Back in the 1960s and into the 1970s I would listen to popular music all the time, and tried to watch Top of the Pops every Saturday night.  I think that stopped when I moved to Australia in 1975. To my chagrin, there’s scarcely a song I know, or even many performers I think about from the rest of that decade.  Madonna, REM, Duran Duran, The Cure, AC/DC, Pet Shop Boys, Joy Division, New Order:  yes, I know those names, heard many of the songs, but they haven’t stuck.  Past then, I scarcely even know the names of the groups or solo artists.  Is that what happens to us all?  Popular music is for the young?  Or did I just get busy with work, and stop having or spending the time to listen to the radio?

It’s the music from 1965 to 1975 which is stuck in my head. But of all songs from the past, I always keep coming back to Tapestry.  I must have suffered from a short attention span when I was younger because it is the first verse that always comes to my mind, not the rest.  Now, older and wiser, I know better!  In fact, Tapestry concludes on a much darker theme than the first verse might suggest, moving on to death, the death of self, the death of consciousness:

As I watched in sorrow,
There suddenly appeared
A figure gray and ghostly
Beneath a flowing beard.
In times of deepest darkness
I’ve seen him dressed in black.
Now my tapestry’s unraveling;
He’s come to take me back.
He’s come to take me back.

Hard to beat.  Carol King was just twenty-nine when she wrote that: what a poet.

Great memories.  Do my neighbours think about the hissing of summer lawns when they are mowing?  Of pop songs from their younger days?  Have their lives been a magical shifting tapestry of many colours?  Yours, too?  I hope so.

 

 

[i] Joni Mitchell, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, © 1975; Crazy Crow Music

[ii] 1971: Tapestry: Copyright with Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC.  Written by Carole King.

[iii] Songwriters: Jeff Barry / Ellie Greenwich / George Morton; Leader of the Pack lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group, Carlin America Inc

[iv] The Who, My Generation 1965; Songwriter: Peter Townshend; My Generation lyrics © T.R.O. Inc.

[v] Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone , 1965; Songwriter: Bob Dylan; Like a Rolling Stone lyrics © Audiam, Inc

[vi] The Doors, Light my Fire, 1967:Songwriters: John Densmore, Jim Morrison, Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek

Light My Fire lyrics © Doors Music Company

[vii] A day in the Life, Beatles, 1967, Songwriters: John Lennon / Paul McCartney; A Day in the Life lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC