Rambling On with History Explored: The playlist in my head on repeat

Play it again Tom ... and Mark and Mick and Bob and the all the rest

By DAVID MYTON

Dear Subscribers - This is my weekly Rambling On history post - not the usual referenced, research-essay style. Instead, I’m just going to ramble on: what I’ve been thinking about and/or reading in recent days. This is the first and only draft. Please feel free to chip in with (preferably nice, informative) comments.

What’s been on my mind lately is: memory and music.

So, this morning I awoke to Tom Waits in my head singing his 1977 song ‘A Sight For Sore Eyes’. Here’s the first verse …

A sight for sore eyes it's a long time no see

Workin' hard hardly workin

Hey man, you know me

Water under the bridge did y'a see my new car

Well it's bought and it's paid for parked outside of the bar

And hey barkeeper what's keepin you keep pourin' drinks

For all these palookas, hey you know what I thinks

That we toast to the old days and DiMaggio too

And old Drysdale and Mantle, Whitey Ford and to you …

It’s a sad song, aching with nostalgia for another time and place. Many years ago me and a friend, Peter, did performance poetry together in arts centres and theatres in northern England. One time after he’d been away for several months we met up in a cafe to talk about an upcoming gig.

Peter was already there. When I pulled up a chair to sit down he looked at me and then sang the first three lines of Sore Eyes because we both loved Tom and, anyway, we hadn’t seen each other for a while. We had a laugh then got down to business.

A few months later he died. In his 30s, a heart attack. Whenever I hear this song it summons memories of Peter. And in my head I hear it a lot.

At any time, but mostly late at night or early in the morning, there is a veritable playlist of songs stuck on repeat in my head, some that evoke memories, others that are just there … the soundtrack of my life.

However, if I want to I can summon to memory probably any Beatles song from Love Me Do to Let It Be (plus lots of Cavern stuff, eg, Some Other Guy, Lonesome Tears In My Eyes, Shot Of Rhythm and Blues). I know the guitar chords for most of these songs too.

Jiving Sister Fanny on repeat

My subconscious playlist contains no modern songs (ie, anything after circa 2010). That wasn’t a deliberate choice, it’s just the way it is. I’ll go through some of them.

So in no particular order The Rolling Stones feature with Jiving Sister Fanny (“Jiving Sister Fanny got the brains of a dinosaur” - a crackingly awful line but it’s just stuck there) followed by, say, top songs such as Wild Horses, Miss You, Can’t Always Get What You Want, Gimme Shelter, Time Is On My Side, Love In Vain, Monkey Man, Fancy Man Blues etc etc …

Who else … well, among many others that teller of lovely stories Jim Croce (Photographs and Memories, Time In A Bottle etc), rocking Rod Stewart and The Faces (eg, Had Me A Real Good Time, You Wear It Well, Mandolin Wind) and I can’t leave out The Eagles masterpieces (eg, Take It To The Limit, Desperado, Peaceful Easy Feeling).

Bob Dylan’s there, of course - songs circling in the memory banks include One More Cup Of Coffee, When I Paint My Masterpiece, I Shall Be Released, Jokerman, You ain’t going nowhere, If Not For You and so on. It’s not just me who thinks he’s good - the guy won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. I don’t think we shall see his like again.

Leonard Cohen features prominently in my mental playlist, often with Alexandra Leaving (inspired by Constantine P Cavafy’s poem The God Abandons Anthony. Here’s an extract from Cavafy’s poem …

At midnight, when suddenly you hear

An invisible procession going by

With exquisite music, voices,

Don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now …

Say goodbye to her, to Alexandria who is leaving

Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say

It was a dream, your ears deceived you …

Leonard would always acknowledge Cavafy and his poem at concerts before he sang the song.

He also borrowed from The Bible (2 Samuel 11) for his great song ‘Hallelujah’, which includes this lyric:

Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord

That David played, and it pleased the Lord

But you don’t really care for music, do you?

It goes like this

The fourth, the fifth

The minor fall, the major lift

The baffled king composing Hallelujah.

And that’s what happens … the chords underneath the words it goes like this the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift follow that exact sequence in the tune. Of course, Leonard did that deliberately.

Outer stratosphere of musical genius

My playlist also stars Mark Knopfler and Eric Clapton. For me, these guys operate in the outer stratosphere of musical genius. Both are supremely brilliant guitarists and song writers with completely different styles, Knopfler with that impossible finger-picking technique and high-class writing skills; and Clapton, well, I’m old enough to remember those ‘Clapton is god’ posters’.

Knopfler’s solo that closes If This Is Goodbye is the epitome of talent, skill and taste. There are no pyrotechnics, just the right notes, in the right order, at the right time, complete with perfect vibrato and tone. Emmylou Harris shares vocals with him on this song … just lovely. Incidentally, he wrote that song after the terrorists’ planes flew into the Twin Towers. People who knew they would most likely die phoned their relatives to tell them … I love you, that’s all that matters.

Similarly, Clapton’s guitar work on River Of Tears (especially the live versions) is also outstanding, a masterpiece by a genius musician. Emotion, passion, heartache - it’s the full exquisite package written and performed by a man at the top of his art and craft..

I just want to go back to Tom Waits. Much like the poet Charles Bukowski his songs often feature characters from the flip side of the American dream - hobos, down-and-outs, bums, weirdos, gangsters and such like.

Many times Waits’s lyrics drip with pathos and poignancy, and I’ve heard him being criticised for this, that as a man with a middle-class background he is exploiting their condition. I don’t think that’s fair. He is highlighting the flip-side of the American dream. I don’t know what his intentions are, but I think most listeners would feel nothing but empathy, and maybe relief that it’s not them. Shakespeare was never a king, but he wrote about them.

Anyway, this ramble is getting out of hand. What I had originally intended to write about was the impact of music, if any, on the people of early medieval England. I was going to explore (or, more accurately, ramble about) their relationship with music.

I had awoken this morning wondering if, say, King Harold, William The Conqueror, Harald Hardrada, Tostig Godwinson et al had playlists inside their heads. I mean, people played instruments and sang in those days, but did it stick in listeners’ minds? … you know, some fabulous Lute solo in a madrigal, or a Gregorian chant that sent a shiver down the spine.

Maybe I’ll ramble on (see what I did, worked in a Led Zeppelin song) about that another time.

Do you have a playlist in your head? If you feel like it, let me know what’s on it.

Cheers!