And you say that's
where it ended / But I say, “No no no,
it just faded away / August was grey” / It feels like 1974 / Ghastly mellow
saxophones all over the floor / Feels like 1974 / You could vote for
Labour, but you can't anymore / Feels like 1974 / Digging Led Zeppelin
in Grimsby / Oh Christ
Thus Robyn Hitchcock in a song performed solo acoustic in
the film Storefront Hitchcock (1998),
directed by Jonathan Demme. I first heard the song somewhere around that time,
as the Nineties came to an end and my daughter graduated high school, so,
sure, it took me back to my own high school years—in 1974 I finished 9th grade
and began 10th, and 10th was the most godawful year of my high school
existence. I wasn’t digging Led Zeppelin in Grimsby (I was digging Jethro Tull
in New Castle, but more on that tomorrow), nor was I “half twenty-two” like the
person in the song whose favorite song was Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel.” Still, one
thing we all had in common, then, was the fact that on this date, forty years
ago, Richard Nixon resigned as President of the United States of America.
Hitchcock commemorates that momentous event with the lines,
firmly tongue-in-cheek: And as Nixon left
the White House you could hear people say / “They’ll never rehabilitate that
mother, no way” / “Whirry-whirry,” goes the helicopter, “Out of my way / I’ve
got a president to dump in the void” / Ooh.
The idea of rehabilitating a crook (which Nixon famously
denied being) was one of those buzz terms back then, so that’s a nice parting
shot. The helicopter, which was how Nixon left, comes tainted too with Vietnam associations. The void, of
course, is always with us.
Other topical moments in the song refer to “[Monty] Python’s
last series,” for, yes, that was the end of the beloved Python, in Britain,
though here in the States we didn’t get them until then. In the summer of 1974,
two skits appeared on Dean Martin’s World
of Comedy, causing my sister and I to pick up, on chance, a record album of
skits from the TV show, so that when PBS started airing the series, I believe
in the 1974-75 season, we were ready. We also got the albums the Pythons
released and pretty much memorized the skits, which I often preferred, old time
radio-like, to hear and imagine rather than see portrayed. There is some great
physical comedy on the shows, and of course costumes and Gilliam’s animations,
but the Pythons were always great voice comics to me, and that was easier to
appreciate on the record albums, though they weren’t masterful uses of the
format such as the Firesign Theater albums.
Hitchcock also mentions the Guardian’s put-down of the Pythons: “the stench of rotting minds”
which made me recall that such things as were the few spots of delight—like Python
on PBS—were not necessarily embraced and appreciated by the mainstream.
The song references Syd Barrett’s last session as well. Barrett showed up during the recording of Wish You Were Here by his former band,
Pink Floyd. The Floyd was huge at that time—to namecheck them and Zep and Bowie
is a given for that year—and Barrett gave up being “Syd” (his recording name)
and would “have to be Roger [his given name] for the rest of his life.” This is
sung with a bit more mournfulness than most of the rest by Hitchcock because
you know he feels the loss of Barrett, still, in 1998.
Other spot-on references are “you didn’t have to inhale too
hard / You could smell the heads festering in the backyard.” Personally, I wasn’t
anything approaching “a head” in 1974, but the heads were everywhere and you
didn’t have to inhale too hard to pick up a buzz around them. Grass was in the
air, often enough, wherever the young congregated. The phrase a “X-head” where
X is some thing one is enthusiastic about, was common enough too. I guess I
could say I was a “Lit head” at the time. In any case, the couture was certainly “funky
denim wonderland.”
The song opens with Hitchcock cautioning himself—45 while
singing the song—about how to live “a middle-aged life.” Well, we’re past that
now, Robyn, and we’re still here, for now.
The part of the song that has always affected me most has
little to do with all those topical references and simply registers the
distance between, say, being 45 in 1998 and 21 in 1974 (for Robyn), and being 39 in 1998 and 15 in 1974: All those molecules
of time / That you thought you'd shed forever / All those inches of time / That
you thought you could just say bye-bye. In other words, this is a statement
about what remains rather than what gets shed. It says that the past remains with
you because it’s part of you, you can’t just say “bye-bye” to “those molecules
of time.” This was a worthwhile reflection to me, at the time, as I soon
embarked on a major writing project that required me to recall “all those
inches of time” that connected me to the Seventies. This song may have had
something to do with directing my compass in those days—the early Aughts.
Wait ‘til you get
older than this
[Other milestones today: Jerry Garcia died in 1995, and Dylan's Another Side of Bob Dylan was released 50 years ago, 1964.]
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