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"Essays"
All three songs reflect Davies’ positive concern for the man-next-store and his longing for community and themadays. “Neighbor” muses about the mixed fortunes of Misters Jones, Brown and Smith. Smith’s fate is the most discouraging, since rage gets the best of him. “Workingman’s Café “is nostalgic for the village green, which in Davies-speak is the ideal social arrangement for human beings, and in his imagination, existed once upon a time in England only to be lost to modernity. What is material here are the melodies, the voice and the poetry, which never fail to set my heart aflutter.
And while we’re on the subject of vampires…. while driving this morning, the T. Rex song “Jeepster,” came on the radio. Like most of Marc Bolan’s repertoire, the song is infectious, it’s sexy, or as one YouTube commentator puts it, “ If it’s possible for a song to have testicles (is that word allowed here?), this song has ‘em!”
I am retired grunge girl who now dabbles in housewifery. The angst coveting girl in flannel and cut-off grey sweats who listened to Nirvana, The Cure and Violent Femmes was left in the mid-nineties. Since then I had been looking for something. Music that excited me the way Smells like Teen Spirit had when I first heard it. The way The Pixies Bone Machine made me crave Japanese fast food. And though my torment had morphed from wild and dramatic teen agony to a quieter rebellion, I still needed a voice for it. I needed angst with
Morgan City, Mississippi–The Delta isn’t pretty by picture postcard standards. Desolation and despair lick every stick and brick of human habitation. Creeping vines choke abandoned shacks, the tendrils of nature reclaiming the detritus of culture. The suffocating flatness stretches as far as the eye can see. It’s a lonesome lick of land that looks like it was lifted whole out of a parched African plain and dropped in Mississippi by mistake.
But the swamps wear a haunting iridescent coat of green, and even in late November, unpicked cotton balls dangle in the fields like orphaned slow flakes. Churned up by the foaming mouths of the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers, this soggy triangle effused the Blues, that bittersweet blend of half-remembered griot chants and plantation field hollers filtered through the parched throats and plucked on the broken heartstrings of the sons of slaves. A moaned anthem of survival, whetted with whiskey, lust, anger, anguish and longing, the Blues are the half brother of Jazz and granddaddy of rock n’ roll, and, arguably, America’s greatest homegrown musical gift to the world.
Driving through Morgan City—an abbreviated urban sprawl of bare cinder block dwellings and immobilized mobile homes that never quite got started—I pulled into a combination gas station-convenience store. Two bone-thin, old black men sat out front gently rocking on straw settees not originally meant for motion. They suddenly stopped rocking and turned their heads as one as I climbed out of the car, wary of my white face like an invading chess piece from the far side of the board.
I was six years old the first time my dad warned me right before he put a record on. “This will probably be the best album you will ever hear,” he said. The sounds that followed were the most cacophonous and dissonant arrangements I ever heard. The saxophone squeals were not only sharp and piercing, they were abrasive and percussive. On the recording you could actually hear the organic passing of loose air over a saturated reed. The snare hits were impossible to follow. It was inconceivable that one man could strike so many drums in such condensed periods of time utilizing only two arms and two legs. The bass lay low in the recording and seemed to be the foundation to which the other musicians adhered. The bass was a smooth walk and rarely had any swing or double-time, but there was still something regal and stoic about the way its rhythm held fast through such decadence.
The main feature, however, was the piano. Staccato punctuations defined the heads and the solos were so riddled with spaces that the listener was forced to reflect on what they had just heard before the next sequence began. The notes hardly constituted a melody and theme was so absent from compositions that it seemed the music operated completely independent, or at least in defiance of any established key. There wasn’t a live audience on the record, so no applauses interrupted the spaces between solos.
Last week I sold my guitar; my rosewood Alvarez guitar; my beloved, resonant, androgynous instrument. Its woman-shape touched me like a man. Arthritis had finally ended my ability to embrace or stroke it properly.
When I was 21 years old I heard a Julian Bream recording of Rodrigo’s “Concerto d’Aranjuez.” I had studied piano as a teenager but had not been in love. This music smoked of passion. Even the composer’s names were transporting: Albinoni, Carulli, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and my favorite, Villa-Lobos (vee-yah low-bus, pronounced with a long caress on the first syllable).
The Alvarez was not my first. I learned on a Martinez student guitar. Like the piano, it created melody from strings pulled taut and pressed with precision. But the Martinez vibrated with more emotion, begged for greater sensitivity. Held properly against my chest there was no distance between hand and chord. No keys, no hammer, only the immediate and sensuous rapport between fingers, strings, heart. I was an avid lover.
It was during an infamous midnight record sale at the Beacon Shop on North Main St in Providence, Rhode Island, that I put my hard-earned teenage dough down and bought the Velvet’s Loaded and their first (Warhol Banana Cover) album and both Stooges records. All of it knocked me out, and turned me around, both the Velvet’s heady mix of avant sophistication and spooky irony and the Stooges assaulting, virtually infantile propulsion were like nothing I ‘d ever heard before.
