THE TAROT TAPES, Side 1: 0 THE FOOL

Near the end of Fearful Symmetry, Northrop Frye’s book on William Blake (which I finished reading in December 2020, before beginning the second group of Tarot panels), I came upon this reflection:

“Blake … seems to be striving for an ‘alphabet of forms,’ a Tarot pack of pictorial visions which box the entire compass of the imagination in an orderly sequence. The alphabet itself, if we may do some imaginative guessing, may be a fossil of some such work of art, the Zodiacal signs another, and the Tarot pack (with which [Blake’s] Job series has been associated) a third.”

I got a kick out of that, certainly, because some such intuition was the basis of me picking up a book on Blake (and not just anyone’s, but Frye’s—the master of the “anagogic method”) and beginning some readings in Blake at the start of my consideration of the Tarot panels. Indeed, the idea of an “alphabet of forms,” or a series of pictorial visions, is the driving force behind the Tarot panels and the example of Blake as a poet, artist and visionary is at least provocative. My earliest reading of any of his verses was probably around 15, and I remember time spent with the Viking Portable Blake at 19. But there was little in-depth exposure to his work, mainly because of the alien mythography at work in his writings and art. I didn’t pursue the English Romantics in college, and in graduate school improved my familiarity with Wordsworth and Keats, but that was about it. There was a semester at Yale, in the 2000s, when I sat in on a seminar that took up Blake among the other Romantics and it was there I first saw an image that I’ve recalled in the fourth Tarot panel for Ethos, XV: The Devil. So let’s say there’s some debt to Blake somewhere in the deep background, but even more so in trying to imagine “illustrations” for the Tarot figures.

But that’s the panels, as an ongoing visual art project. Accompanying each panel is a cassette tape’s worth of songs, a 45-minute playlist that assembles itself in the process of transferring the tracks from vinyl or CD onto tape, but which may be prepared for by any number of list-making sessions to see which songs most readily suggest themselves as part of the tone, mood, or theme of the Card. And I should point out that I think of the Tarot as a complex system of playing cards, and I have done readings to see what a lay-out of cards “says.” For the purposes of the panels, though, which are not cards and not meant to be used as anything more than paintings, an “alphabet of forms” is apt enough since the cards, in my decision to break them up into four different groups, do “spell out” an associative logic. And associative logic is the key to how playlists form, aural illustrations of “the spirit” the panel is aiming for.

The first group is Ethos, which is to say, based in character and upbringing, in the kind of collective rationales for behavior that mark anyone’s Bildung, but which, in terms of artistry, can also create a dichotomy between the individual person (in this case, me) and the symbolic conditions of art . . . or the artistic realization of symbols. However you put it, Ethos keeps in mind that the person who is aiming at art is forming an ethos that differs to some degree—and maybe in kind—from other practices, such as those primarily concerned with getting along with others and performing the tasks of non-artistic activities. The onus of an artist’s Ethos, simply put, is self-realization, in no matter what forms that takes. So, for me, the five Cards grouped under Ethos are the five I recognize as the most germane to my sense of what an artist is.

Tape I

A. Ethos 1 (center panel): 0 The Fool (April-May 2020)

Track A1: “The Fool”—Camper van Beethoven (Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, 1988; David Lowery, Jonathan Segel, Greg Lisher, Victor Krummenacher, Chris Pedersen)
This instrumental track from my favorite Camper van Beethoven album could be said to be the “curtain’s up” on the entire tape, maybe the entire series of tapes. I don’t know why the song is called “The Fool,” but I’d be willing to bet it has something to do with the Tarot card, though it might also be a reference to a 60s psychedelic band of that name (elsewhere on the album is a cover of “O Death,” the Dock Boggs song also covered by a 60s psychedelic band, Kaleidoscope). The late ‘80s, twenty years on from the height of psychedelia, found more than a little inspiration in the artists of that earlier period.

Camper van Beethoven, with that joke name, are suitable to start things off on our Fool’s terrain, certainly, being a fairly whimsical and comical band, heroes of the “indie” or “alternative” world of college radio rock from the 1980s. The ‘80s, in my view, have much to answer for, but the good side of it all was the number of bands who were never in any danger of becoming monster artists of the inescapable mainstream airplay variety, but would always be a bit of caviar to the general. It was a time rife with subcultures, and why not tip my hand at the start, as part of the appeal of “The Fool” is that very willingness to pursue a quixotic goal, to be an adept of an unknown practice, to prefer the cult or coterie offering. The cards themselves, no matter how popular or ubiquitous, will always be a bit esoteric by the standards of world-wide religions and symbolic systems.

The track sounds like a movie theme, almost, or at least a soundtrack for a kind of carnivalesque sequence. Sort of eastern European, ‘80s gypsies feel. Brash, with a certain Old World charm that’s seductive in its own way. No fooling.

Track A2: “The Fool on the Hill”—The Beatles (Magical Mystery Tour, 1967; John Lennon, Paul McCartney)
Most of the songs on these playlists will date from the era long since designated as “classic rock,” and this song was already a classic when I finally got around to acquiring Beatles albums in the late 1970s. And yet I do remember when it was on the radio—there were several covers of it, as I recall, not least by Sergio Mendes and Brazil ’66—and on the Beatles cartoon TV show. It may well be my first cognizance of a use of “the Fool” in a way that seems properly capitalized. Not “a fool”—as in some stooge or dunce—on the hill, but “the Fool,” as, for instance, a character you could meet (and I did by around 1974) in King Lear. Of course, the phrase could also simply be pointing out a particular fool—the one on the hill as opposed to the one in the meadow, or next door, or in the White House (the sense of a political fool suggested perhaps by “the man of a thousand voices” whom no one hears, “they can tell what he wants to do.”)

In any case, as sung with his characteristic twee-ness by Paul McCartney, the song struck me—as a child and later—as oddly ruminative. You know, the mid-late ‘60s period was when McC was apt to come up with weird little ditties of dysfunction like “Eleanor Rigby” and “Penny Lane.” This song is somewhere in between, not as dolorous as Rigby nor as jaunty as Penny but detached. The contrast is between the Fool—who sees the sun going down and the world spinning ‘round—and the people who don’t like him. He doesn’t care because “he knows that they’re the fool.”

So at the outset we get what will be a theme to this side: the Fool who knows he’s considered a fool (as in idiotic or silly), but who takes that in stride because maybe he knows something “They” don’t know. The Beatles, with their madcap, antic natures—as a collective—captured well the nature of the Fool as someone who is wise in his own way. McCartney has claimed—so Wikipedia tells me—influence from The Fool (the band mentioned above which was also a design collective) and from the Maharishi Yogi, who may or may not have had a laugh on our nirvana-seeking Brit tunesmiths.

Track A3: “Fearless”—Pink Floyd (Meddle, 1971; David Gilmour, Roger Waters)
Now that the Beatles have provided us with both a fool and a hill, we will take it to the next step. Here someone, who may be seen as something of a fool by the crowd, is challenged to climb a hill—which he’ll do “in my own time.” Like: when I’m good and ready. The notion of climbing a hill becomes a theme, and there’s also an element of tempting fate or of relying on God, or of, God knows, trying to achieve some particular facet of selfhood or even to attain . . . the ultimate Self. Which, I just want to say at the outset, may in fact be a Supreme Fiction.

You can see how well Gilmour and Waters feed into our topic (and it would not surprise me to learn that they might have had some memory of “The Fool on the Hill” floating in the background when they wrote the song’s lyrics). From “Fearlessly, the idiot faced the crowd” to “And who’s the fool who wears the crown?” we know we’re in the world of trying to judge between “the idiot” who may be a wiseman, and the earthly authority who may in fact be a fool. And with that bit about “Go down in your own way,” how could I hear this song, when I got around to this album in 1974, gripped by my earliest reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as not sharing some of the spirit of Nietzsche’s opening, where Zarathustra decides to go down from the mountain and back to the people? And the first thing he encounters is a crowd watching a tightrope walker, who falls to his death when a Fool comes onto the wire and leaps over him.

“Fearless” ends with the interpolation of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” as sung by a crowd at a football match in England. Apparently that song, which I associate with Jerry Lewis telethons, is often sung at such sites of collective outpourings of belonging. According to Wikipedia, the song, in 2020, was put at the service of tribute to the sacrifice and dedication of the frontline workers facing the COVID-19 pandemic. So, all the more appropriate for my Fool, painted in April/May 2020, while lockdowns were general. He’s walking off a cliff, though, so is, indeed, walking alone. Except that maybe, just maybe, we’re all going off the cliff with him.

Track A4: “Up the Hill Backwards”—David Bowie (Scary Monsters, 1980; David Bowie)
This song is not even one of the best tracks on this great album which I bought immediately upon its release in 1980 because of “Ashes to Ashes.” “Up the Hill” appears here because of that hill and because of its key line: “It’s got nothing to do with you, if one can grasp it.” Could be a reference to that plummeting Fool (“witnesses falling”), could be a reference to the hundreds of thousands of deaths due to COVID-19, or even to any eventual extinction that may be awaiting mankind, to say nothing of whatever shibboleths of social justice are currently on crusade. Quietism? Perhaps, but it’s more—in the context of our theme of a crowd misjudging a “fool”—about the fact that “I’m OK, you’re so-so.” All y’all.

In other words, it’s a wonderfully insouciant song, full of casual aplomb. And what we might call a survivor’s attitude. “While we sleep they go to work / We’re legally crippled, it’s the death of love.” Hard not to think of those who have to go struggle in Covidville while others get to be at home in their legally crippled privilege. Death of love—what do you call it when sacrifice goes awry? Or when love has to be proved by deaths? When you get to a certain age, the grim reaper is waiting in the wings, so why not ignore the struggle of others to stay alive and concentrate on what you might make of the time you’ve got?

Me, I’m just a painting fool for the time being, stirred by “the arrival of freedom and the possibilities it seems to offer.” For one thing, a shrug directed at all the things I’d otherwise be doing if not trapped at home. And climbing the hill “in my own way,” didn’t someone say? How about backwards? Here being a good place to pile up that detritus that Walter Benjamin imagines Klee’s Angel of History looking back at as he is blown into the future, which is bound to be an uphill course. Unless in fact it’s all downhill from here. As our plummeting Fool is no doubt about to find out, the hard way.

Track A5: “Po’ Boy”—Bob Dylan (“Love and Theft”, 2001; Bob Dylan)
I have to say that when I first thought of compiling mixtapes for the Tarot cards, I went through picking a Dylan song for each card, and I also played the same matching game with The Beatles. For probably obvious reasons, those two musical acts set much of the tone for what my record/CD collection became, and these playlists come from that collection. This “late period” Dylan track (the 21st century, for me, is “late,” as middle-age and after) continues the insouciance of “Up the Hill Backwards” but now things get positively jokey as Bob indulges in some one liners, a knock-knock joke, and conjures a Po’ Boy (not the sandwich but a kind of wise-guy rube).

That element of jokester/jester/comic gets picked up in some later songs on the side, and this is its first sounding. The Fool has to master a certain self-deprecation, playing for laughs. My list of favorite comics would include Groucho Marx, the troupe of Monty Python, Bill Murray, in many of his roles, but my sense of comic hijinks in song begins with The Smothers Brothers and Allen Sherman, both gifted with altering song lyrics for laughs, a knack I’ve indulged on occasion. Dylan here is riffing on that kind of thing, it seems to me. He could play the “poor boy” straight, as an underdog of the underclass, but instead he gives him the gift of absurdity, which is one of the great strengths to have in this world.

And that is what I’d say is the dominant sense of this side: a willingness to risk the absurd, to do things for no particular reason, to be a fool to one’s own vanity or ambition or desire or attachments, but also to laugh at one’s absurd effort to overcome such limitations, as though there is a Big Pay-Off waiting for the Fool on the hill, or the Fool climbing the hill, backwards and probably sticking his tongue out. Is the most foolish line in the song “things’ll be alright by and by”? You decide. “I already tol’ ya, won’t tell ya again.”

Track A6: “Ship of Fools”—John Cale (Fear, 1974; John Cale)
The Ship of Fools (Die Narrenschiff) by Sebastian Brant dates from the fifteenth century, in German; in an introduction to that work, in English, its translator, Edwin Zeydel, attributes to Brant the notion that “all sins are reducible to forms of folly.” But maybe it’s the sins that are expandable into acts of folly; which is to say “sin” could be a lesser idea than “folly” or greater. Zeydel, and Brant, go for sin as greater, but I wonder. It may be that the inclination to sin is, in itself, folly, making folly the force that drives the wheel, so to speak. Brant created a work in which a wide variety of follies are depicted, some of which—like avarice or gluttony—do get called ‘sins’ as well. In any case, the idea of a group of ne’er-do-wells aboard a ship bound for disaster—a ship of fools—sticks. So much so, that there are two songs on this side with that title.

In John Cale’s version, the ship of fools almost sounds like a collective of worthies—I think of Chaucer’s pilgrims on their trek to Canterbury. “The ship of fools was sent / to make sure we all got home for Christmas.” Not a bad thing, I take it. But the opening, with its weary request “take me off I’ve got to eat” and reference to “the same old story, the same old thing,” makes the ship seem not so much foolish as boring. And Cale’s tune is bright, with those tinkling sounds—a celeste?—that give the whole a stately air, full of a lighthearted dignity. And the goings-on are comic book style—“we picked up Dracula in Memphis / It was just about the break of day”; and there are ominous bits of detail: “a black book, a grappling hook, a hangman’s noose from a burnt-out tree—guess we must be getting close to Tombstone” (one of my favorite sequences in all of Cale’s oeuvre). The whole lyric feels like a fantasy of traveling through America, with a wish, for fisherman, that they “could sail from Tennessee to Arizona” (making the heartland not “flyover States” so much as “sail over”). In the end, Cale brings it all back home to his native Wales—in fact, his hometown, Garnant, gets a shout-out—and, in general, I think of this song as giving us a positive sense of the Ship of Fools.

And that’s important because the jokiness that came aboard with Dylan, and that “in my own way” theme, from Floyd, and the “they’re the fool” and “it’s got nothing to do with you” views, all come together now to give us a glimpse, maybe, of fools who are glad to be sailing away from the world where everyone else resides, whether content or contentious. And when we do get back “all the people seemed quite glad to see us.” Maybe that’s foolish on their part: to be glad to welcome a ship of fools. As the sixth song of twelve, Cale’s “Ship” ends the first half of the tape on an up note—the song’s mood, to me, feels like early spring, the season of Aries (and of All Fool’s Day), and is lively if also somewhat haunted by “something in the air that made us kind of weary.”

Track A7: “Running Up That Hill”—Kate Bush (Hounds of Love, 1985; Kate Bush)
With Kate Bush’s opening track from probably her greatest album we sound another take on “that hill.” Kate’s singer wants to be running up that hill “with no problems” and as the reward or punishment of a “deal with God.” The key idea here—since the singer is addressing a “you”—is that the deal with God would let the singer and the “you” swap places, so they could “exchange the experience.” Like, the only way to understand someone is to become that someone and vice versa. Like all those movies from the 1980s in which a parent and a child exchanged places. Presto: a pre-glimpse of maturity, and what it requires, and a reminder of immaturity, and why it works.

But in typical idiosyncratic fashion, I rarely listened to the song as a way of swapping viewpoints with some difficult personage in one’s life but rather a deal to swap places with God, thus making that climb wholly unimpeded by human foibles and concerns and failings. It would be a climbing that would be utterly transcendent, we might say. That is the aspect of the song that feeds into this tape because, while the Fool is on his way down, the eventual appearance of the Wheel of Fortune—way up ahead there in the 11th place of this schema—means he’ll also be on his way up, eventually. And the Fool, in shedding the limited perspectives of all those wise guys who think the things of the world are where it’s at, is transcendence writ small and humble and simply—as we’ll see with a few songs showing up soon—getting by by his wits.

Kate Bush’s song is propulsive and features a great rhythm track, something the 1980s were pretty good at, creating rhythm tracks which can sort of stand alone and be wedded to songs as one chooses. It’s a kind of autonomy, the rhythm that rules, and that’s important here because I feel certain that—whether as oneself or as God—the hill compels one to climb it, the propulsive rhythm of life will have it so, much as the great Wheel must spin and the earth must spin as it circles the Sun (which is coming up next). Much here lies with Kate’s repeated “if I only could / be running up that hill.” Like a Sisyphus fated to run up the hill forever and never have to come down when his big rock does. A running, climbing fool, and no mistake.

Track A8: “Fool’s Gold”—Graham Parker & the Rumour (Heat Treatment, 1976; Graham Parker)
But what’s such a fool after? Graham Parker, with his usual surly view of the mass of humanity, clues us in a bit: the search itself makes the fool a fool. He’s after “fool’s gold,” which can be read as any possibly fictive or chimerical goal, something others—more sensible—would decry. And here I have to say that I’m maybe not fool enough myself to share the vision fully. I can see the transcendent view—climbing forever—but not the notion that there is something—physical, tangible—that can answer the seeker with a definitive status of “found.” Thus my favorite part of Parker’s song is “people say heaven knows heaven knows heaven knows / see what comes I suppose.” Yeah, if it’s good enough it will be worth the search . . .  I suppose. “Well, well the event” as someone says rather testily in Lear.

As an expression both of the limit of judgment and an exasperation with explanatory comments, my mother was fond of saying “heaven knows” (and it appears in the title of one of my dad’s favorite movies, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison), so that may be one reason that line resonates for me—with its repetitions—but it also falls into line with the notion of a “deal with God.” Meaning that there might be a perspective—from heaven’s view or God’s eye—that sees the search fulfilled. Like: you gained the goal, Fool, and just didn’t know it. But heaven knows. That’s a strong fulfillment, but it’s also quite possible that the search is the goal, in some Zen-like way, Grasshopper. Like climbing that hill, backwards, in your own time, the search is your fate and your folly, one and the same for any good fool.

Parker is a blustery singer and I like the way he handles this lyric, giving it his White Soul all. It starts quiet and ruminative but with heaps of passion surging again and again, and I always listen for him getting worked up in the fade, “and in the deep blue sea,” which is a nice segue to our next track, another “ship” on the sea, helmed by fools en route to disaster.

Track A9: “Ship of Fools”—The Grateful Dead (From the Mars Hotel, 1974; Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter)
With this track—our second “Ship of Fools”—we can say that we’re entering the non-transcendent portion of the tape. The three tracks after the Dead are about jokers—not, perhaps, fools outright, but they do bring into question the interplay between fools—in the more spiritual sense we’ve been working up—and jesters, those who simply use levity to amuse or undermine or, maybe, enlighten. Lear’s Fool is a good case in point because he does want his jokes to “land” in such a way that Lear will perceive his own folly, but, because he’s a jester, he can allow that he’s just “fooling.” But before we get to our jesters, let’s give Robert Hunter’s lyrics their due.

This is one of those slow, mellow Garcia tunes, the kind that usually means he’s pondering big questions, trying to find a form for Hunter’s more searching lyrics. Here, the perspective is of a young man (thirty years upon his head . . . it’s when that Baby Boomer generation born in the early to mid ‘40s, hit their 30s, in the 1970s, a pretty dysfunctional time) who has had enough with the powers that be. The world, as conducted by these stalwarts, is a ship of fools, doomed. I’ve long aligned the song with the “non serviam” of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, particularly in those lines: “though I could not caution all, I still might warn a few / don’t lend your hand to raise no flag atop no ship of fools.” Here again we might see quietism more than activism—we’re being told what not to do, not what to do—but that caution suits the situation, perhaps. We’re not sinking yet, in 1974, so maybe it’s enough to NOT get caught up in the actions that are leading many fools to their flag-waving perdition.

And anyway the opening of the song is more aggressive: “I would slave to learn a way to sink your ship of fools.” That’s pretty emphatic, like—in “Candyman”—when usually docile Jerry muses that “if I had me a shotgun I would blow you straight to hell.” Sentiments like that are what give the lie to what is too often perceived as laid-back, hippie bliss-out as the dominant mood of the Dead. This song is not only bemused, it’s mournful and maybe ready to get serious. At any rate, the singer “cannot share your laughter.”

And that line can stand as the thin end of the wedge here. Since, in the fool/jester’s province, it’s all for laughs. Which is a way of saying, as Hamlet does, “why, what should a man do but be merry?” He asks that, of course, with all the sarcasm he can give voice to, being neither merry nor assured that there is any action—not even those a man might play—that is of any use . . . not even laughter. And if that’s so, we’re fucked.

So, before our ultimate demise, let’s have a few laughs with some jokers ready in the wings.

Track A10: “Man on the Moon”—R.E.M. (Automatic for the People, 1992; Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, Michael Stipe)
Michael Stipe’s lyrics for R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon” directly reference comedian Andy Kaufman and a few of his comic routines—from “goofing on Elvis” to playing Twister live on national television with volunteers from the audience to the “breakfast mess” with pro-wrestler Fred Blassie—and the whole song has a kind of quizzical, quixotic vibe, signaled in that “IF you believed they put a man on the moon” chorus. The questioning of the moon-landing is one of those great “conspiracy theories based on media events” that leave us uncertain about what’s real and what’s not. And it’s in that space (“is it real or is it Memorex?”) that Kaufman’s humor lives: which is to say, thanks to media, we don’t know what’s real and so we’re all fools being fooled or primed to be.

Kaufman’s fooling may have had its transcendent side—at least I feel that his persona was “holy fool” enough to lend itself to that interpretation—and in the song he’s linked to figures such as Moses, Newton, and Darwin, the kind of fools who bring on a serious change in values. Which is a way of aligning them with Hunter’s spokesman in the preceding song; these are men who won’t lend their hand to lift no flag the fools are saluting. They have a different sense of things. Egypt, aka Cleopatra, “troubled by the horrible asp” is a bit of a non sequitur in that crowd, though I think we can allow that a victorious Egypt would’ve made for a different world than the one Rome bequeathed us.

The genius of the song is that such grand figures are still reduced to sound bytes, to what “we”—in the blips of our media brain—can call up about them. And, in that company, Andy—like a “truck stop instead of St. Peter’s”—is just a little ghost for the offering. “Mister Andy Kaufman’s gone wrestling”—which was a non-put-on-put-on of a sport that’s all put-on, for the sake of comedy and satire and something else, which might be ego-as-event. Like when Andy put his continued presence on Saturday Night Live to a vote and was voted off the show. It’s reality television, that great oxymoron of our times, and maybe that begins with a televised moon-landing, way back in 1969.

“Nothing up his sleeve,” of course, makes us think of magicians, and that type of potential charlatan is coming up soon—the third panel—but for now it’s enough to register the inclusive/exclusive nature of laughter—we’ve got to be in on the joke to get it—and the fact that belief is always at risk of “the joke’s on you.”

Track A11: “Dear Madam Barnum”—XTC (Nonsuch, 1992; Andy Partridge)
And with that said, let’s recall the man who famously said “there’s a sucker born every minute.” Surely, they come along much more quickly in these accelerated times, but, even so, P. T. Barnum knew whereof he spoke. And it’s fitting that Andy Partridge, while imagining himself in the role of circus clown, addresses himself to Madam Barnum, conceived as the mistress of the spectacle—a ringleader—he’s now about to depart.

“You tread the high wire between truth and lies” certainly gets at the aspects of performance, and fooling, that we saw with that Fool in the Zarathustra scene, but Partridge is also thinking of the truth and lies of romantic involvement. His fool is a fool for love who draws the line at being a cuckold “If I’m not the sole fool who pulls his trousers down / then, dear Madam Barnum, I resign as clown.” Clowns, of course, often get their trousers pulled down in performance, for laughs, but lovers pull their trousers down for other reasons and linking the two acts is a great notion of Partridge’s.

Here the clown quits the show. Let’s say it was causing him some psychic distress, playing for laughs, sure, until he realized the joke was on him. And that no self-respecting clown can endure. We could let it stand there as the end of the tape, a resigned fool resigning from his act. Cured! Or at least a fool no longer—at least not consciously. Lear’s Fool doesn’t get to leave, really. He gets a last line—“and I go to bed at noon”—and then is heard and seen no more. I’m inclined to link that statement to Zarathustra’s great noontide, but that’s merely a figment of tangential reading, at a time when fools were brave for risking mirth where others were solemn, not least in philosophical circles. And yet the possible incentives of mirth can’t be contained, like high tides at flood walls, and soon we’re laughing at ourselves for our own foolishness.

Track A12: “Happy Jack”—The Who (Happy Jack, 1966; Pete Townshend)
So why not one more track (because it fits on the span of the tape’s 45 minutes or so)? The Who’s “Happy Jack” is possibly the most quizzical track on the tape, its subject a person known as Happy Jack who gets persecuted, seemingly, for singing off-key and for generally not fitting in. “He lived in the sand at the Isle of Man” is one of those lines that might be literally true but also highly figurative. He’s a figure for the fool, to me, because his feeling happy is linked to the waters lapping—neither of which can be affected by the kids. Here, the kids are not “alright” but rather malevolent, as kids often are, and their targeting of Jack is just one of those “us against him”—or “them against me”—situations that fools are apt to find themselves in. 

The water lapping in the harmonies and the tide in Keith Moon’s drumming make for a wonderfully pungent aural world in this song, the kind that only The Who could bring to us with such unvarnished authority. I always think of the Who as the coolest Brit Invasion band, not madcaps like the Beatles, not surly and sexual like the Stones, just not easily made fools of, and Happy Jack, as a short, simple track, gives us a little anthem for the insouciant fool who maybe knows more than others, maybe less, and who may be the kind of figure Kurt Cobain expressed when he sang “I think I’m dumb, or maybe just happy.” Is God happy? I don't know but I like the line delivered by Karen Blixen's factotum in Out of Africa: “God is happy, Msabu. He plays with us.” No fool like an eternal fool.