DB's Song of the Day (day 59):"BIKO" (1980), Peter Gabriel

Last night I saw a play at Yale Cabaret called He Left Quietly about Dumo Kumalo, an inmate in a South African prison who was condemned to death for a killing—by a mob—where he was only tangentially present. It’s a case of how apartheid justice was no justice at all. Kumalo was eventually spared hanging—fifteen hours before it was supposed to take place. Then spent another four years incarcerated. Watching this drama, written by Yaël Farber, put me in mind of the story of Stephen Biko, subject of today’s song by Peter Gabriel.

This song, on Peter Gabriel’s third eponymous LP, released in 1980, gave great publicity to the story of Biko, a major fighter against apartheid, who was mortally wounded during lethal interrogation techniques in Port Elizabeth, South Africa in 1977 (grimly referred to as "business as usual in Police Room 619").  The case galvanized anti-apartheid sentiments and Gabriel’s song was sufficiently stirring to make people—like me—who were fairly uninformed about if not indifferent to conditions in South Africa suddenly more aware. Mind you, if you saw what white supremacists in the U.S. did to black civil rights workers in the Sixties, you weren’t really surprised or shocked by what was happening to anti-apartheid activists over there in South Africa. No matter, Peter Gabriel composed a song that was stirring and heroicizing and full of a very necessary defiance, making of a horrible death the very figure of martyrdom that most authorities go in fear of when they kill someone who has captured the hearts of a people. Biko was such a figure, and this song makes his name live on forever.

 

Gabriel became in the Eighties a figure for “world music”; having moved from his prog-rock performance style—lots of costumes and theatricality—he imported rhythms and styles from ethnic musics not typically associated with a prog-rock outfit like Genesis, Gabriel’s band from 1968 until 1974.  He also specialized in highly processed sounds—such as “gated drums”—which came to fruition on his 1980 album and helps sell the production of “Biko.”

Add to the very distinctive rhythm track Gabriel’s oddly high and strangled vocals—characteristic of him but nowhere more effective than on this track. The feel of outcry is what permeates the song, with its slow, hypnotic opening that eventually segues into a long-in-fading sing-along that feels like the voice of a people raised not so much in protest as in celebration of their fallen leader. Moments like the chorus and “only one colour dead” and “the eyes of the world are watching now” have a thrilling effect. One hears a tribute and a call-to-arms, and, now that apartheid is history, a commemorization of all the suffering—such as that of Dumo Kumalo—and the spirit of those who refused to be broken by inhuman and unconscionable laws.

Gabriel’s “Biko” is an unusual protest song, not only because it so sparely and lyrically attests to the reach of someone already dead. It makes no effort to tell the story, other than naming the place and Biko, and giving us its credo: “You can blow out a candle / But you can’t blow out a fire / Once the flame begins to catch / The wind will blow it higher.” And there you have it: the death of a firebrand like Biko can only hurt the authorities. They have begun their own downfall.

The sound in the song that reminds me of bagpipes is a synthesizer, apparently. This was the era when many interesting things were done with keyboards and drums by the likes of Gabriel. It created a dominant tendency that became rather overdone and soulless, as the decade wore on. But in 1980 this song and the album it comes from is cutting edge and Gabriel was never one to create a pro forma sound. All his albums feature distinctive soundscapes; that and the unmistakeably reedy and rapturous sound of Gabriel’s voice are mainstays.

“Biko” is a song that stirs one with a sense of the power music has to make one feel both presence and loss. And the need to attest to the human spirit. I’m rarely that stirred by songs—even ones that aim to include everyone in some cause—but “Biko” is an exemplar of how to make its listeners hear its message without having to go into details or describe its intentions. It’s a musical testimony to what it believes, and we feel its grasp of both—to borrow a phrase—the sorrow and the pity. And the strength of a people.

DB's Song of the Day (day 58):"A SONG FOR EUROPE" (1973), Roxy Music

I’ve been in a Roxy Music mood of late, not sure why. I will say that when I hear bands like Franz Ferdinand or even Echo & the Bunnymen, I find myself thinking back to Roxy and the great sounds they created from 1972-1982. No album in that span is bad, though Manifesto (1979) is the least of them (though that's the tour I saw them on); my favorite has always been—“for purely personal reasons,” as Rob in Hi Fidelity might say—Stranded (1973), from which comes today’s song.

“A Song for Europe” was my introduction to Roxy Music, that and “Mother of Pearl” (which I’ll save for another time). I first heard both on late night FM radio in 1973. And then, on The Midnight Special, I believe, saw Roxy perform “Europe”—I remember Bryan Ferry, with his expressive forelock, in a white tux.

The song, hearing it in those days when I was steeped in the likes of Hermann Hesse and Albert Camus, spoke to me immediately of Weltschmerz. It could be said that Weltschmerz was rather unfashionable in 1973, at least among fourteen-year-olds, but I drank it up. And to hear it given such an au courant presentation was remarkable. Ferry sings in English, then Latin and French to convey the different eras of Europe. All doomed to look in languishing retrospect on a previous l’age d’or.

Stranded, Roxy’s third album, was their first album sans Eno. Only much later would I come to know the LPs with Eno, and the LPs Eno himself created. Actually, my intro to Eno was via John Cale’s Fear, but that’s another story. Roxy without Eno was less aurally innovative, true, but Stranded has some of the band’s best songwriting, and it's still early enough that Ferry hasn’t yet become a contemporary lounge crooner. He started out by sending-up that kind of romanticism—as here, where it's both ironic because so flamboyant and so flamboyantly unironic—and ended up entrapped in it. It’s OK, don’t cry for him. He seems to have had a grand old time.

A few years after I first heard this song, my older brother—who was gainfully employed whereas I was just a kid in high school—went out and acquired the Roxy albums then in existence, or at least three or four of them. I immediately taped Stranded and it became a key ingredient of my soundtrack in the summer of 1976. I remember taking a walk pre-dawn to Old New Castle on my 17th birthday, to see the sun rise on the Delaware. Full of romantic longings, no doubt. I remember “A Song for Europe” was sounding through my head for most of that trek. “And here by the Seine / Notre Dame casts a long, lonely shadow.”  I would sometimes alter it to “I’m here by the Seine / Not a dime” . . . where the long, lonely shadow is my own, stretched out on the pavement before me. Could you spare a coin for a fellow American down on his luck?

Romantic vistas were hard to come by in New Castle, Delaware, I can tell you. And yet the song’s mood has a way of making its brooding sense of dark fatality overwhelm whatever might be around you. You hear this song and become dissatisfied. It’s in those big crescendos—“Now, only sorrow / No tomorrow” and “Nothing is there / For us to share / But yester-dayyyy-yayyy.”  And Andy Mackay’s sax is nowhere more expressive.

Ah, yes, the wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees is left this vault to brag of, as The Bard doth say. That’s a good feeling to know in your teens; it prepares you for so much future disappointment.  And I just love the way Ferry says “Ecce momenta / Illa mirabilia.”  But it’s the “jamais, jamais, jamais” (never, never, never) that used to always floor us. We all knew what Ferry was going for there, like some kind of glam Charles Aznavour pining for lost youth. And then he goes whistling down the Seine at the end.

This was the era of glam and Roxy Music outdid Bowie and T.Rex and whoever you want to name as the best of the time. The sonic attack of Phil Manzanera, on guitar, is a never-ending source of delight to me as I reprocess the tracks from Roxy’s prime. And even though, in 1973, the only “moments of wonder” I could reflect on was something like Rimbaud’s childhood written on pages of gold, I certainly have a better sense these days of what Ferry and company were on about: 

Tous ces moments

perdus dans l`enchantement

qui ne reviendront,

jamais.

Pas d’aujourd´hui pour nous,

pour nous il n’y a rien 
à partager

sauf le passé.

All these songs are in the past too, and their greatest is behind. Yet, thank God, they're still with us.

Manzanera, Ferry, Mackay, Jobson, Thompson

DB's Song of the Day (day 57): "FOLSOM PRISON BLUES" (1956; 1968) Johnny Cash

Today is the birthday of Johnny Cash, who died in 2003 at the age of 71.

In 1968 Johnny Cash revived his moribund career with At Folsom Prison, an LP recorded live at the CA state penitentiary, and followed it, in 1969, with At San Quentin. One day in the summer not long after the latter album was released my dad brought them home and sat in the kitchen listening to them. This was memorable because I was about 10 and there’s quite a bit of profanity on the San Quentin album and my dad, out of deference to his good Catholic wife, never used profanity around the house. But he was chuckling at Johnny’s use of it. He also rarely smoked in the kitchen after the kids were up, but he did that day.

That was the first time I heard “Folsom Prison Blues,” with which Cash opens his Folsom Prison album and ends his San Quentin album. It got released as a 45 too, from the Folsom Prison LP. Then, when Cash’s TV show debuted (with Bob Dylan on the 1st program, I might add), the song became ultra-familiar because he tended to open the show with it.

It was not until much later that I heard the original recording for Sun Studios. It’s good to hear Johnny Cash back in 1956, the way admirers like Dylan (then Robert Zimmerman) would’ve heard him. Cash, the manly entertainer at prisons, and Cash the TV showman came later.

In Walk the Line, the film based on Cash’s life, the part when Cash first plays this song for Sam Phillips of Sun Studios is one of my favorite scenes. Whether or not it’s true to life (it’s true Cash wrote the song while in the army and after seeing the film Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison), the scene indicates that the song is a significant departure from the kinds of songs one tended to hear in the Fifties. And that’s something I’ve always admired about the song: its sentiments are well thought-out.  From the mama who told the singer to “always be a good boy / don’t ever play with guns” we move immediately to “but I shot a man in Reno / just to watch him die.” This guy is a borderline psychopath, we might say. In any case, the combination of mama and cold-hearted killer (or cold-blooded killer remembering mama) is amazing.

Similarly “time keeps draggin’ on” has the real feel of serving time—we know what that’s like even if we’ve never been to prison (when I heard it first it felt like it could be about any day at school, y’know?) but we imagine it has to be worse to be serving time, to be stuck for a set length of time that runs into years, decades maybe. Likewise the convict imagining the people on the train “drinking coffee and smoking big cigars” has a bitter tinge to it, even if he allows “I know I had it comin’ / I know I can’t be free.”  That’s a big statement. Most killers, we assume, feel they should be allowed to be free like anyone else. We might accuse Cash of moralizing a bit through his convict, but I prefer to see it as the convict’s own realization—he actually is a menace to society. “But those people keep on movin’ / And that’s what tortures me.”  How many radio songs mention someone being tortured, and in this way? It’s not his conscience—about the random killing—that tortures him; it’s not due to his guilt. It’s due to the fact that those people on that train have mobility and volition. It makes him eat his heart out.

Then his dream of being more considerate to inmates: “if that railroad train was mine” he’d move it “a little further down the line” so no one else need be tortured by its proximity to the prison. And then the great line that gives us the train song over the prison song: “and I’d let that lonesome whistle blow my blues away.”

This is one of my favorite songs, bar none. It’s so easy to play, and maybe that’s part of it. It seems like something a guy killing time in prison might pick up a guitar and pick out. Its version of the state of the speaker is complex and shows a grasp of realities that no doubt struck a chord of reality with an ex-Marine like my old man.

DB's Song of the Day (day 56):"TRAIN OF LOVE" (1999) Bob Dylan

Tomorrow is the birthday of Johnny Cash, someone who I’d call one of my father’s musical heroes (I guess, more on that tomorrow).  And here’s where one of my main musical heroes meets his.  Dad never had much good to say about whiny Bobby Dylan, but John R. Cash loved him, admired him, and helped him.

Dylan, here doing a song Cash recorded for Sun Studios in 1956, as part of a gala musical tribute to Cash back when Cash was 67 and Dylan not yet 58, thanks Johnny at the outset “for standing up for me way back when”—back when Dylan’s “new direction” was alarming the folk purists and the guardians of the counter-culture.

The song, “Train of Love,” is mainly memorable in Cash's version for how nimble its rhymes are. Dylan, quite the rhymester in his own right, introduces the song by saying he “used to sing this song before I ever wrote a song.”  Indeed.  I didn’t know it at all, in Cash’s recording, until hearing Dylan do it on TV. And it was only later, after picking up a bootleg vinyl pressing of extra songs from Tell-Tale Signs era recordings, that I really got to know it.

Dylan, accompanied by some tasty slide guitar, puts his characteristic whine into this one, and with his back-up vocalist providing the high notes, each chorus of the song gets increasingly passionate, with the first line like drawing back a catapult to launch the second line: “Every so often everybody’s baby gets the urge to roam / Everybody’s baby but mine’s comin’ home.”  Dylan sings each verse like he’s staring down the barrel of a gun (he’s in fact staring into the TV camera and is being broadcast onto a big screen in front of Johnny Cash and the well-wishers gathered at the tribute in April, 1999).

“Train man, tell me, maybe / Ain’t you got my baby.”  The poor sap in the song is waiting as the train he hopes will be bringing his love back to him comes and goes without her ever disembarking. He notes all the people waiting to reunite, “here and there, and everywhere, they're gonna be embracin'," which seems more of a stab as we go on.

The part that always gets me, that I wait for, is the last verse. “Train of love’s a-leavin’ / Leavin’ my heart grievin’ / But early or late / I sit and I wait / Because I’m still believin’ / We’ll walk away together / Though I might wait forever.”  Dylan swallows the last part, seeming a bit uncertain about that walk together, but what he gives abundant force to is the part about waiting, early or late, still believing.  I consider that the take away: like anyone awaiting inspiration, we sit and we wait, early or late, still believing something will come. There's always another train.