DB's Song of the Day (day 318): "YOU AND OBLIVION" (1996) Robyn Hitchcock

All of the colours ran out / ‘Round mid-November-o

It’s true I’ve already posted about a song from Robyn Hitchcock’s Moss Elixir. It remains one of my favorites by him, so that’s reason enough for me. But it’s mainly that today’s song is unavoidable for me, this time of year.

Hitchcock’s guitar has such a full, rich sound. Harpsichord-like, with that open strum. And the tune has a medieval or Renaissance air too. Like Hitchcock is channeling all those bards gone to ground, inditing poesy about fields of mellow fruitfulness or Goldengrove unleaving. The song, for me, hangs on a few amazing lines that Hitch pulls out of his bag of tricks—“do you remember-o?”

Let’s go for the crux: “This is the month of the dead / Leaves on your Ouija board / Carry them round in your head / They’ve got free room and board, yeah.”  Damn freeloading dead folk. All these effing ghosts are living on our dime, y’know. And they are with us, always.

Something about you / You and oblivion. Yeah, something about that. Like, let’s remind ourselves yearly that we’re oblivion bound. Unless, as Hamlet saith, a man builds churches, for then his memory might last a little longer.

Morbid? Perhaps, but the song isn’t. It’s wry, winking at inevitable loss and disaster: “Right when the death train got your ma / Right when the death train got my pa.” And get 'em it will—if it hasn’t already. “Let slip your hand on the platform / Said “I must be going,” yeah / See you, seeeeeee you.” And that’s it, y’know. More of that “people disappear everyday. Every time they leave the room.” Or get on the train. Or into the car. Or the plane. Or.

“I can remember your locks / And your virginity.” So lovely. “Locks” can be hair or something that takes a key, but, either way, it takes us back doesn’t it? For me, there’s a little girl with coruscating locks running about in the corridors of my mind. And she descends from a little girl with coruscating locks that I descend from, who I never met, in that incarnation. Yep. We were all virgins once. We’ll all be virginal again, cleansed of life. “Off to infinity.”

And what is “oblivion” anyway? It’s the dead space. Where all is forgotten. As if it never was.

But just so we don’t forget this is a Robyn Hitchcock song, there’s also, amidst the courtly joust with death, the throwaway lines both absurd and apt: “Sitting alone by the tombs / Under the obelisk / Mixing up powders with brooms / You should’ve got a whisk.” Whisk, whisk, whisk, went the broom on the obelisk. A memorial for the dead and a homely kitchen device. So that when you cannot stop for death, he'll kindly stop for you. Shoveling snow? Zap. Waxing the car? Zap. Getting that piano up to the attic if it's the last thing you do?

Seeking your personal grail / Just like your mother’s one. Now there’s a rich idea. The “you” here is in search of, y’know, something to hang onto, something solid, like a personal grail, just as her mother did. Or the “you” is seeking that harboring place, just like his mother's womb. There’s an almost off-hand fatalism to the song, as we realize that we’re forever indebted to the ghosts who got us here, while they were here. If that’s not reason enough to remember them in this month of remembrance, then what is?

We was a-scuttle about

DB's Song of the Day (day 221): "1974" (1998) Robyn Hitchcock

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.]

DB's Song of the Day (day 116): "SHE DOESN'T EXIST" (1991) Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians

Today’s song is a bit of an anomaly. Leastways, I don’t think of Robyn Hitchcock, with his irreverent, absurdist wit and odd, surreal imagery, as the kind of guy who would pen a heartfelt, even heartsick, love song. But that, sure enough, is what he did on “She Doesn’t Exist.” It’s not just a love song, it’s a “that’s all over now” love song that’s all about the reason the love has died even as it manifests just how irreplaceable the love was.

And it seems, like as not, it was unrequited love; like, they were together and it didn’t work out but only now does he realize . . . she was the one. The kind that inspires all those feelings of “it coulda been, it shoulda been, it woulda been.” If not for . . .  And there come crowding in all the reasons that love really doesn’t have its day or isn’t really the main thing or the only thing. Or, maybe even, not the only love.

When I first heard this song, from 1991’s Perspex Island, around 1998 or so, it really hit a nerve. Or at least I believe it did, in retrospect. The song has its finger on the ultimate melancholic realization: “I tell myself it would be different now / I wouldn’t treat her that way / I wouldn’t be me if she wasn’t her / And it’s far too late, anyway / She doesn’t exist anymore.”

It’s that title idea that really seals the deal. I would be different, things could be different, she’d see and we’d know and, and . . . but she doesn’t exist anymore. It’s not just saying there’s a shelf-life on one’s passions, it’s also about the window of opportunity for becoming someone’s lover. There’s that period of complete, or almost, receptivity. You can’t lose! Then there’s that period in which it’s only too clear, you did. “She”—the one you wanted or the one who was so sweet on you, either way, doesn’t exist anymore. “A fadograph of a yestern scene” as our man JJ might say.

And those “la la la la”’s that come in, thanks to Michael Stipe, carry such a burden of wise and weary sadness.  One has to remember the song begins like it's borrowing from the great tradition of put-down songs by the likes of Dylan or Costello: “These days I just couldn’t care less.” You have to start with that assertion because it’s very important that the singer be tough enough to make that declaration. A resounding fuck it to whatever he was when in the relationship: “I used to ring you and put down the phone”—makes me think of EC’s “every time I phone you I just want to put you down.”  But by the end he’s going to be a guy trying to salvage his soul by going “la la la la” to himself.  Because even the “far too late anyway” may be BS. I mean, it probably is, but that doesn’t mean this poor sap really believes it.

The only verse I don’t think much of is the one about perfume and the moon. There Robyn is maybe being a bit too ordinary. This is the guy who wrote things like “Sleeping with Your Devil Mask” and “My Wife and My Dead Wife,” but it seems like he’s trying to write a song someone else could sing, meaning not some weirdo like he is.

Anyway, the last verse makes up for it, sandwiched between the refrains with the la las. “Only inside you the ghost of a love / That is wordless and painful and old / There’s no one else in the whole outside world / That matches to her in your soul.”  If that’s true, you’re fucked, buddy. But, what’s more, if that’s true, the “her” is already ghostly, a revenant of a love from “once upon a time”—“wordless and painful and old,” like the kind that has been with you from birth, with you all the way till your dying day. We’re in the land of the anima here, the female principle you’ve got along for the ride, who resides in your soul and “no one else in the whole outside world” matches to her. Not even this chick you’re bemoaning. She’s just the latest—perhaps the most poignant—of its manifestations. Which is why the “inside/outside” dichotomy is so strong there at the end. It’s too late for that “she,” and “these days I just couldn’t care less” because there’s this ghost of a love that goes with me. And yet.

She coulda been, if only she still existed. Or ever had.