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| Ethos 2: XIX The Sun (2020) upper panel |
The title of this one could be “waiting for the Sun God” in
the sense that the Sun has associations with the Big One, the God of not only
our Solar System but of the entire Universe. In other words, the primeval sense
of the Sun as lording it over our world, controlling it—which was the case even
when humans mistakenly believed that the Sun rotated around the Earth. The
relation of the Earth to the Sun, however one positions them in the heavens,
equates the Shining One with light, truth, godliness, and our planet of earth
and water with a nature that might be able to be transcended but which seems
doomed to just circle and spin for some indeterminate allotted time. Earth is
existential, we might say. The Sun is too, of course, but we allow it to symbolize
lots of things that aren’t if only because of the vast scale of its energy and the
duration of its existence.
I know enough about Solar Myths to know that there’s good
reason to write Christ into the mix, but I chose not to in my rendering for the
panel. I went for deliberately pagan or classical, pre-Christian, and with a
sense that the Sun God is a bit like Phoebus, a bit like Cupid, a brat we might
say—you know, Phoebus Apollo killed the Python while still a baby and then
became a seer. My feeling for the Sun God could be described as ambivalent, I
guess, since the Sun, while it makes life possible on this planet, could also
make life unbearable here, as it is—in my imagination anyway—in certain climes
at certain times. I’m not a sun-worshipper, much, and so I wedded my Sun Child,
rather enamored of looking at himself in a hand-mirror, with a desert
wasteland, even as he sports with corn and sunflowers in his own little bubble.
The “sun story” I got into as a kid, reading Greek myths, was of the son of
Helios, Phaeton, who insisted his old man let him drive the sun chariot through
the sky. Kid couldn’t handle the horses and the earth got badly scorched. Zeus
had to knock the little jerk out of the sky with a lightning bolt.
Choosing songs for the panel’s tape side should be pretty
simple. Search for all the songs with “sun” in the title and slap ‘em together
in some semblance of order. Yup. But then, it’s the ordering of the examples
that leap to mind that makes for our Sun saga. And two tracks don’t even have
“sun” in the title, so the process may still be a bit associative . . .
Two songs on the side I’ve known since I was ten; my
familiarity with most of the songs date from my teens, though there’s a key
pair from my twenties and another pair from my forties, which is I guess a way
of attesting that “the Sun” inspires a youthful disposition, or at least a cyclical
view of nature acquired in youth—it comes up, it goes down; it’s summer, it’s
winter, and so on. The listing is track # on the tape, title, artist, album it
appeared on, date, composer, and, for the bio, the age (sometimes approximate)
I was when I first heard the song, followed by the number of years, roughly,
I’ve known the song as of this writing.
The point of the songs, often, is to ponder our relation to
the Sun when we are most aware of its influence, whatever we may want it to
mean. Here, in Ethos, it’s the sense of abundance, not of a Sun God who can do
things to you—like Apollo often does—out of whim, but of a Good that just can’t
help but shine and radiate and warm you up when you need it. As Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra says, at the start of the Prologue, speaking to the Sun: “You great
star, what would your happiness be had you not those for whom you shine?” He
speaks to the Sun as, like him, overfull with wisdom and joy, spiritual goods
which must be shared with the world. That sense of the Sun is needful, I’d say,
for its part in the Ethos of the artist. Why make art at all if it’s not a
question of sharing what talent dictates? The Sun, then, might be the god of
that endeavor, the unchecked radiation that creates or makes vision possible.
B. Ethos 2: XIX The Sun (May 2020)
B1 Waiting for the Sun—The Doors (Morrison Hotel, 1970;
Jim Morrison) 18: 44 yrs
In the history of my listening, this song dates to the
winter/spring of my first year after graduating high school. I was eighteen and
working a dead-end, fast-food job. The spirit of this song—“at first flash of
Eden we race down to the sea”—was one of those “consummation devoutly to be
wished” situations. When it got warm, it would be possible to go to the beach.
And one thing I associate with staying surfside is the prospect of getting up
at dawn to watch the sun rise over the ocean. That, friends, is the basis of
most of my poetic associations with the Sun. As Rimbaud says so well (even in
translation): “It is recovered. What? Eternity, in the whirling light of the
sun on the sea.” And, yes, it was in high school I learned he’d said that,
thanks to Paul Schmidt’s recent translation. In my senior year, I became fascinated
by The Doors though Jim Morrison had been dead seven years. Those first two
Doors LPs seemed to promise something new in the possibility of rock poetry and
I was all about that in those days (this was the era of Patti Smith’s first
three LPs—which decidedly picked up on the myth of Morrison).
The third Doors LP is Waiting for the Sun, but with
no title track. The song with that name appears somewhat belatedly on Morrison
Hotel, their fifth studio LP and a much less stellar effort, though with
some high points, this track being one. It’s the kind of song I easily
transported myself into in those days, gripped by the idea that there should be
these great liminal spaces, such as a beach at dawn, where transformation, if
not transcendence, would be possible. I was deep into a book called The
Transformative Vision and so this song kicks off my side on the Sun with a
glimpse of . . . let’s call it situated symbolism. My situation at 18 was to
believe in the power of the imagination as wielded by visionary poets, and
there were a few such to be found, I believed, in contemporary songwriters.
Which is why I’m inclined to compile tapes of songs as inspiration for
paintings and to write about them.
And let’s not forget there’s always something dark about The
Doors. They are not a feel-good band. “Waiting for you to come along / Waiting for
you to tell me what went wrong.” That gesture towards the failed experiment of
whatever all those newly released energies of the Sixties were supposed to mean
was the take away for me in those days, all hepped up on Hunter Thompson and
the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, A Season in Hell, and still
chipping away at Gravity’s Rainbow. Suffice to say I want my Tarot side
for The Sun to recall that promise of starting out but right at the outset I
have to sound the belatedness of the entire endeavor. “Can you feel it, now
that spring has come / That it’s time to live in the scattered sun?” That
“scattered sun” said it well enough. Something not fully realized, piecemeal,
cast to the wind. Pearls before swine?
B2 A Spoonful Weighs a Ton—The Flaming Lips (The Soft
Bulletin, 1999; Wayne Coyne, Michael Ivins, Steven Drozd) 40: 22 yrs
Then we jump forward to one of the latest songs on the side,
first heard live when my daughter, then starting college, and I sought out and
heard the Flaming Lips on their tour for this LP. Actually we saw them first
when Robyn Hitchcock opened for them, then sought them out on their own right
and KDB got the record and then I heard it. The song is fit for inclusion on
this side because of that great opening: “And though they were sad / They
rescued everyone / They lifted up the sun / A spoonful weighs a ton.”
Following on The Doors’ “tell me what went wrong,” it’s not
inappropriate to hear this, coming along at the turn of the century, as a kind
of continuation of some of those energies unleashed by the bands of the
Sixties, the ones that were still with me as ‘legacy’ handed on to my kid. The
Flaming Lips, it seemed to me, had imbibed deeply of not a few of the same
kinds of things that made their mark on my musical tastes and so this album was
like the big pay-off. It had a Sixties-revisited feel but with a touch of
post-punk prog—is how I imaged it. And that had great appeal for us, Dad and
Daughter, generationally speaking. “The limits now were none,” “The doubters
all were stunned.” Sure, why not. Total free license of the imagining, a Second
Coming into consciousness (like when your kid goes off to art school because
you didn’t, when you were her age).
When I was a kid in the Sixties it seemed that all of youth
had access to a way of meaning that was lost on the elders. It was a flash of
insight or spirit that could simply be the perennial gift of Youth or Sun, but
which seemed caught up in so many things of that time, music not least. To me,
the Lips here recall that “starting out” flame and, with its all-you-need-is
Love gestures (“louder than a gun”) that have the peaceniks singing hosannahs,
it’s like the same anew. Like the sun every morning, no? “A spoonful of sugar
helps the medicine go down” we learned back there in Kiddom, but here a
spoonful of sun sure do weigh a ton . . . like, as we’ll hear later on the LP
(and in this series of tapes), it might be too heavy for even Superman to lift.
But for now, no limits, doubters to the hindmost. The Sun is riz. We high
priests & poets and musicking shamans figured out how to set it up there
like a big special effect spectacle hanging over the birth of Lord Sunshine.
B3 Here Comes Sunshine—The Grateful Dead (Wake of the
Flood, 1973; Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter) 16: 46 yrs
And here he comes! The repeating motif on this side is that
you wait for the sun, or lift it up maybe, and, it comes! It’s there! For real!
End of night, darkness driven away again. And that’s what this song by the Dead
makes me feel. It’s an early morning song, a just got up and got to make my way
somewhere song, bleary and leery of what that might entail. But unbowed,
nonchalant, as mellow about strict fate as only the Dead can be.
I remember with astounding sonic clarity putting this song
on my turntable and listening as the sun lit up the church across the street
and I watched out of the corner of my eye for the school bus I was a-waiting on
the last day ever of my state-mandated education (June 1977), so glad to see it
gone: “you just don’t have to go no more,” Jerry sings with the gleaming tingle
of baptismal benediction. Go in peace, the mess is ended.
That line and the part about “good to know you got shoes to
wear when you find the floor / why hold out for more” came to me as the mantras
I needed since I had no job prospects, no employable skills or ever-ready
credentials, and I’d had it with whatever the local suburbs unbroken of baleful
New Castle could offer in the ways of culture, work, or vistas. But I did have
shoes on my feet and I liked to walk, and so I’d saunter my way into some kind
of inspiring frame of mind, if only the sun were kind. And here it comes,
creeping up in that lyrical way this song has which always puts me in mind of
the fact that there was a mix of LSD called “Sunshine” back in those days I was
learning to recall fondly by proxy and the way that particular drug had of
creeping up with tingling antennae stretched to receive was certainly part of
the associative logic that binds together our first three oh so trippy bands.
Have some “laughing water” while you’re at it. Justa giggling with those
ticklish rays beamed on its grinning, fluid face.
B4 Silent Sunlight—Cat Stevens (Catch Bull at Four,
1972; Cat Stevens) 13: 49 yrs
This song goes further back. Cat Stevens was the
romantic songwriter of the early Seventies when I was transitioning into early
teens from adolescence. He had a great voice and a kind of spiritualized view
of the times, as if a throwback to some pre-industrial era. I always thought of
him as a medieval troubadour type, out of step with the modern world but still
somehow a “pop star.” And that’s exactly the sort of possibility that inhabits
the ethos of artistry, I’d say. You can be of it and apart, simultaneously.
The thematic tie-in of this song is that it speaks of the
day beginning, the “silent sunlight” streaming in, and “the work I must now
begin.” It’s a roll-up your sleeves and get to it song. But there’s also a
lingering recall of the children who “wait to play”—like waiting for the sun,
waiting to play is waiting for a kind of inspiration, as an artist might, but
also for the permission or simply the right moment. To work, to play—to make
them almost the same thing? Art. In any case that was my hope for art when I
first heard that Siren Song pretty steadily during those years, when I was
filling up notebooks with verse and trying to figure out how to use paints.
And this verse is as satisfying in its simplicity as a poem
should be: “Sleepy horses, heave away / Lift your back to the golden hay /
Don’t ever look behind at the work you’ve done / For your work has just begun /
There’ll be the evening in the end / But till that time arrives / You can rest
your eyes / And begin again.” Certainly I had no idea, then, that modern poetry
was rarely as lyrical as that. What stayed with me was the injunction against
the look back at the work. Keep going forward—every new day is a new beginning
for whatever you’re trying to accomplish. What’s already been done is already gone.
Even now I can hear this song with some belief in that view,
here in “the evening in the end.” True, looking back is often now a disbelief
at how little was done—by me—and how much others accomplished, and not long
after I first made this song’s acquaintance that sense of the enormous pastness
of art and lit would start to become an issue. All the more reason to want to
remember “When all things were tall / And our friends were small / And the
world was new.”
B5 Here Comes the Sun—The Beatles (Abbey Road,
1969; George Harrison) 10: 52 yrs
The next song goes even further back in my trajectory: this
song is from the the first full-length Beatles LP I heard, age 10, 1969. Abbey
Road had that weird B Side of little songlets, but the lead-off song,
Harrison’s, was the most hummable tune on the whole record, so genial and
benign. It’s more Easy Listening than Rock, true, but no one then was going to
tell The Beatles they couldn’t be mellow if they wanted to be, and this
one—with that “sun, sun, sun, here it comes” choral bit—sounds like something
for hippies to bond to. Sun Children, little darling.
The smiles returning to the faces, the ice melting—it’s not
just a new day, it’s a new season. Spring, then summer, so not a song for all
seasons but for the great anticipation of what it means when the sun comes
back, the Sun God exerting his recurrent magic over the land. The song here
takes its cue from the Cat in continuing with that feel of a long ago golden
time. Sure, it’s childhood, for me, not even a teen yet, but it’s also that
sense of a time when simple pleasures—the sun’s back, it’s warm again—were
enough to make life worthwhile. “First flash of Eden,” and all that.
It was also something to realize—when I got a copy of the
album in the later ‘70s—that there’s a synthesizer on this track, which aligned
the song with those arrangements I loved so much in the prog years featuring
acoustic and electronic instrumentation together. Like the stately piano on Cat
Stevens’ track, the tinkly fingering on the guitar here ushers us into some
kind of Sun Kingdom where all is golden and so, our next track . . .
B6 Golden Years—David Bowie (Station to Station,
1976; David Bowie) 16: 46 yrs
“Don’t let me hear you say life’s taking you nowhere,
angel.” That opening line, the song’s syncopation, Bowie singing tracked with
himself, that “run for the shadows” chorus. “Never look back, walk tall, act
fine.” This song is—to borrow a phrase from the film The Missouri Breaks
(also 1976)—“slicker than snot on a doorknob.” Hard to believe maybe that
anyone thought 1976 and the next few years “golden years” but if you were a
denizen of the discoing demimonde, you’d say Oh Yeah. Bowie’s stepping out, his
pants pleated, his hair slicked back, his moves and his moue all moussed with
liquid strains.
A relevant question here: if you were Dylan and you’d done the run of
records from 1965 to 1967 . . . then what? And Bowie had already roped us
teen-types in with Ziggy and Aladdin and “Rebel, Rebel,” now what? Coke it up
and cut a rug? Sheesh. Anyway, the song is Dave’s second bona fide U.S. radio
hit in a row (“Fame” made #1; this one #10). He’s hitting the stride of
sounding like the radio likes. But I’m with him on this one—though, at the
time, I gave the Young Americans LP a skip. I’ll accept a blues belter
going white soul, but folky hippy glam guys, no so much. But the sea change
often throws up unexpected creatures and the LP Station to Station is
like that. It’s a sound I go back to often in these days of posthumous Bowie.
So, celebrate the golden years, however you imagine them,
whenever they may be. “Act fine”—it may be all an act but that’s what makes it
golden, n’est pas? It’s your performance for the statuette. “In the back of a
dream car twenty foot long,” like every just-so starlet, “I’m begging you save
her little soul.” Well, yes, “nights are warm and the days are young” but how
long can that last? About the time you have to run for the shadows is when
maybe you suspect a deal with the devil (“opening doors and pulling some
strings”)—and he’s up there waiting in our five panels for Ethos. “Lost that’s
all.”
Halfway through the side and we’re remembering the request:
“waiting for you to tell me what went wrong.” Or, what we did wrong?
B7 Look into the Sun—Jethro Tull (Stand Up, 1969;
Ian Anderson) 18: 44 yrs
As the second half of the tape gets underway, we hit this
little trade-off quartet: song from the Sixties (first heard as a teen) then
song from the ‘80s, when I’m in my twenties. One-two, one-two. Makes for a a nice
“step forward, step back” rhythm as we move along here: like saying we’ve gone
from watching the sun rise to seeing it hit its stride, and now we know it’s
bound to be on the wane. The songs themselves play into that dynamic in
interesting ways as well, and none of them are “big songs” (in terms of radio
play) for the artists involved.
This track from Jethro Tull’s 2nd LP was already a throwback
when I got to know it, post-high school in the late ‘70s. For me, Tull as a big
influence came to its fullest fruition in 1972 with the release of Thick as
a Brick and the retrospective collection Living in the Past. Then,
brought up to speed more or less (including a purchase of Benefit, the
LP immediately preceding Aqualung), I was primed for A Passion Play
(still my favorite), summer of ’73, then the War Child tour when I saw
them live. After which their releases were less appealing and I’d moved on.
Anyway, years later I picked up Stand Up with a sense of wanting to
complete the collection (acknowledging that point when the new stuff isn’t as
good as the old stuff … or just more of that Sixties fetishism which was looming
large in my legend around then).
The song is an Ian Anderson love song (not too many of them
in my Tull), and what’s more it’s an end of love song, which Dylan is
great at (like “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”) and so the tone of this has
immediate appeal. But it’s on this side because of that “think of all the
things you should’ve done” when you “look into the sun.” Of course, we were
always told not to look directly at the sun and to do that means a certain
risk, and here a willingness to face the truth (always risky). So it’s not what
we did wrong . . . it’s what we didn’t do that we should’ve. We’re still on
that theme, but we’re also basking in a sound—back when Ian was mellow with
more of that stately troubadour vibe—and a feeling that whether she should’ve
stayed with him or not (“remember who and what you nearly had” recalls another
Beatles sun song, “I’ll Follow the Sun”—“you’ll know I was the one”), we
shoulda stayed back there pre-teen in the world of the Beatles and a certain
golden late post-war, pre-recession time.
The “golden years” are passing away from me at the ripe old
age of 18 is what I’m getting at. But then—and this was the feeling the song
gave me when I first heard it, around the same time as “Waiting for the
Sun”—“summer always comes anyway.” Seasons change then change back. Is anything
really over? So let’s set out again at dawn—as Rimbaud does at the close of his
season in hell.
B8 I Remember the Sun—XTC (The Big Express, 1984;
Colin Moulding) 25: 37 yrs
Now time for a retrospective glimpse of the sun. Fitting,
since I acquired this song when I was back to living in my hometown not far
from my parents’ house and the schools I attended, even the church, and all
that pastness hovered in the background of the present. To think back to “days
when we had enormous super powers” was easy to do, since the places where I’d
play-acted as a superhero with my kid brothers were nearby. “When I remember
days at school, most of all I remember the sun.” Whether that’s true or not,
Colin Moulding made it so. I can recall, indeed, days in the last stretch of
the schoolyear, May, early June, and walking home in the sun. And walking the
streets barefoot as a child—“tarmac on the road feels soft”—yeah, and very,
very hot.
So this is a song about the sun when we were kids, about
that period of starting out that took place even earlier than the teens. This,
from an album by these New Wave British guys pushing 30, played into where I
was then as well. My kid still in the midst of her untrammeled childhood (a
year before kindergarten) and all’s right with the world or at least it’s a
time to revisit what childhood is like through the lens furnished by my own starchild.
The song has an odd, lurching sound, and effects that make
it aurally interesting but also a bit off-putting, especially that weird climb
into what are essential lyrics, but hard to get: “Sun that worked on overtime /
Fueled our bodies, kindled fire in our minds”—yes, that “kindled” mind was
already suggested by “I thought a page like it’s written in ink.” That was part
of my childhood and early adolescence too, making things up, inventing,
composing internally, and so, what the Sun is starting to become is a way of
suggesting the Inner Light, the shining inside, the burning beacon of the
Imagination. It pays to remember that, I want to say, want to believe—but
“pays” how, exactly?
B9 Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun—Pink Floyd (A
Saucerful of Secrets, 1968; Roger Waters) 14: 48 yrs
I might say this song is the heart of this side. It’s not a
particularly “sunny” song, but it fulfills on that idea of “the Sun” as being
both a center of the personal universe, so to speak, and the celestial body
that centers our solar system. The conflation of the two spaces—interstellar
and inner—is the “trip” of this song.
Pink Floyd are one of the trippiest bands ever, having
pioneered a form of rock that can indeed rock but which is more often spacey
and eerie and introspective and even pastoral at times. Here, it’s at its
eeriest and, the first time I heard this song (which was in the summer after
the release of Dark Side of the Moon), it fascinated and hypnotized me.
It’s not that long but it seems like it could go on forever—like how long would
it take to reach (in Waters’ whisper) “the heart of the sun, the heart of the
sun, the heart of the sun”?
The drum pattern and that little melody that sounds in some
odd way primeval is what does it (like we stumbled onto a tribe of
sun-worshippers). The overlay of electronic sounds is in keeping with the Floyd
as masters of a certain kind of tech that, in those days, was often called
futuristic, as in: that time when acoustic instruments played by people would be
replaced by electronic instruments played by computers. And onstage during this
song the band would walk off leaving Nick Mason, the drummer, to be the human
playing with pre-set sound arrangements. Of course the drum pattern could be
programmed too and free up everyone. Just “set the controls” and head
backstage. There’s a nice irony to it but also a sense that we’re already in
that future where gadgetry prevails and yet, this song is very humanistic:
“love is the shadow which ripens the wine.” Well, I guess.
The point is that the song, with its man who raves and makes
a question to heaven, is one of those “alone with the universe” situations and
the last lines of the last verse sound that note I began this post with:
“Whether the sun will fall in the evening / Will he remember the lesson of
giving?” That lesson of the Sun as simply the heavenly body that can’t help but
light our world, giving us all we need in the way of a livable environment, is
the abundance I was talking about. And knowing that we have this “wheel of
fortune” thing going where we have to turn away from that light and warmth along
a definite track of time, so it “falls” in the evening and we plunge into
darkness, is one of those “awareness of mortality” things that should keep us humble
and human.
In that light, a journey to “the heart of the sun” (besides
suicidal, a real flame-out that even Phaeton didn’t attempt) is a journey to
where the sun never sets. Kennst du das Land?
B10 Invisible Sun—The Police (The Ghost in the Machine,
1981; Sting) 22: 40 yrs
And so, though we turn from the sun on our planetary
journey, the sun continues on—invisible, as in this song, which did get some
airplay (it was a single from the LP Ghost in the Machine elsewhere but
not in the U.S.). The Police were pretty much an unavoidable radio staple in
those days and so I rarely bothered to buy their records—you couldn’t help
hearing them, but this album I got and maybe it was because this song wasn’t
available otherwise. I’ve only just now seen the video for it, all centered on
Belfast and the conditions there, and the song begins with a reference—the
Armalite rifle—that is relevant to those scenes. I seem to recall the sense,
hearing the song on the radio, that it had an occasion—a place with a definitely
hostile military presence—but I don’t think I thought of it in terms of a
specific locality.
As with many songs by The Clash that I was getting to know
in the 1980-82 era, the mood of truculent endurance here was key. “They” were
the ones with the guns and the numbers, “we” were the ones trying to get by and
doing what we could to make things better for the innocent and the oppressed.
And that—not a particular political underground—was the “invisible sun,” the
local and anonymous and not widely publicized acts of kindness and collective
hope. The song makes its case with a sense of sullen survival, with a couplet
that’s one of its best: “I face the day with my head caved in / Looking like
something that the cat brought in.” That resonated with a life on the margins,
sure enough, along with the line that reached out of the radio and grabbed me:
“I don’t ever want to play the part / of a statistic on a government chart.”
The invisible sun is unfelt in its effects? In any case, it
can’t be measured by that always intrusive government that wants to know where
you live and how much you make and how much energy you use and who your friends
are and their known occupations. There’s a sense too that the sun that burns
on, invisibly, giving us “hope when the whole day’s done” is, like the sun
whose heart we want to reach in the Pink Floyd song, already within us, y’know,
like Jesus’s claim about the kingdom of God.
B11 That Lucky Old Sun—Johnny Cash (American III:
Solitary Man, 2000; Haven Gillespie, Beasley Smith) 41: 21 yrs
And that should count as a segue into this gospelly worksong
that dates from 1949. I first heard it, I think, done live by Dylan in one of
his acoustic sets in the 1990s. Johnny Cash, as with so many songs he recorded
with Rick Rubin for the American label, takes it away and makes it his own. As
far as this side goes, it just popped into my head, perhaps conjured up by the ’60s-’80s trade-off I had going: had to jump clear of the clockwork and land .
. . way up there in the dawning 21st century. It’s a song that spoke to the
times in the sense that I was just beginning my forties and so had “paid my
dues” in a sense. Now wanting to “roll around heaven all day” rather than toil
to get somewhere.
It's a view that sees the Sun as blessed, a kind of detached
and blissful body on its appointed circuit. Rather than talk about its
abundance and all it does for us down here on the ground, the singer sees it as
“lucky” because it’s got “nothin’ to do.” It’s the way you feel about the
weekend, maybe, when you’re in the middle of the week, or summer vacation when
you’re a kid stuck in the doldrums of school, or a wage-slaver looking on at
the retirees who have finally attained that “paradise” imagined as the
cessation of striving. All of which is a way of saying that the song appears
here as the notion of the Sun as above it all, out of the give-and-take and the
ups and downs, stuck only in its circuit and lucky not to have to sweat about
it.
Cash, in his late sixties when he recorded this, sings it
with a somewhat mournful sound in his fervent wish, particularly the plaintive
“lift me . . . to paradise,” which sounds like the prayer of a man who hopes,
to borrow Dylan’s line, “to get to heaven before they close the door.” In any
case, we believe in the hardship of the life and the glance upward to the Sun
as the symbol of an extraterrestrial serenity and fixity. Amen.
B12 Sunrise—Uriah Heep (The Magician’s Birthday, 1972;
Ken Hensley) 13: 49 yrs
Now, back to those teen years again, a time when “the Sun,”
to me, was the bright light shed by the literary works I was reading, mostly on
my own dime (as in: unassigned). It was so early in my setting out, I hadn’t
yet reverted to the ’60s’ greats as the beacons to embody, but was still enamored
of hard rock and, soon, prog. Uriah Heep had its place in both those scenes,
and they even took their name from the villain in my favorite Dickens novel, which
I’d already read.
The album of the Heep for me was Demons and Wizards
(which will have its day soon enough, as we’re moving toward a Magician and the
Devil), but this album, the follow-up, kicked off with this song and this song
was almost as good as anything on the predecessor. “So from now till who knows
when / My sword will be my pen.” Yeah! Just the thing for a teen poet to hear,
at a considerable decibel level.
That comes late though: in the beginning it’s a love-lost
song, where the sunrise shines on “another day without you.” So, yeah, pining
for the great love, the one who makes it all ok, little darling, angel,
remember who and what you nearly had, love to ripen the vine . . . and then the
singer addresses the sun directly: “Bless my eyes / Catch my soul / Make me
whole again.”
That puts the Sun in the guise of the Listener, the Mentor,
the Great One who must shine on this endeavor, must countenance this effort to
shine in a merely human way. So that the “and I’ll love you for all of my time”
isn’t, finally, that lost lover with which we began, but the Sun itself. From
now on out, singing its praises. The lucky orb, crown as big the circumference
of the Sun.
B13 The Sun King—The Beatles (Abbey Road, 1969;
John Lennon, Paul McCartney) 10: 52 yrs
But there’s still room left on the tape, just enough for
this little mini-ditty from John Lennon, reprising the “here comes the sun”
lyric from his bandmate George but with a twist: “here / comes / the sun … king.”
The Sun King, of course, was Louis XIV of France, but I doubt that’s a
meaningful reference, particularly. In any case, on this side, the song
features as a coda—to reference the Sun as a King—and to recall, again, my childhood
at the end of the Sixties, and the time spent with Beatles recordings as a kind
of magic synthesis of the era itself. “Everybody’s happy, everybody’s
laughing.” We’re still happy children on that Yellow Submarine, with beautiful
overlapping voices and a feeling of dolce far niente, cheerily singing what
sound like nonsense syllables but which actually bring together phrases from
various languages to create a bit of Joycean polyglot. Questo obrigado, no?
