As mentioned in the marvellously leviathan comment thread to the previous entry, the señor and I will shortly be taking a long weekend in Otago, Land of Cheese, sticking to the coast road by and large and hoping to return tired but encurded.
In my absence, I invite you all to discuss in the comments to this entry a topic raised by merc. It is of the song you heard, after which you were not the same person anymore. I want to know where, when, by whom and why, and promise to chip in my own anecdote when I return.
(The entry title is a reflection of my slightly addled mental state: I am trying to write a Villanelle but find myself thinking largely of camembert.)
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Posterous
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Freedom by Richie Havens, Woodstock. OK I wasn’t at Woodstock and I saw this on the film. I have always felt homeless and homesick no matter where I am or have been (I mean even at home) and this song made me think it wasn’t such an odd thing to feel. I may have even cried. he performed at WOMAD a few years ago and I wished I could have got there. I freind who went said it was just like the Woodstock version (and she’d been to Woodstock)
David Sylvian, Orpheus.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2dgMNm64Mg&feature=related
I don’t do covers but I would play and sing this for D, because you know, it was us.
Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo.
Do call into the Blue Oyster when you are down! (Unashamed son-promotion!)
Sorry, the where when and why … Dunedin, 1971 on a rainy day listening to headphones looking out on to the Robbie Burns statue …. a rush of the exotic for a girl from Gore.
man, I want some cheese now!
The Band, the Night they Drove Old Dixie Down from the Last Waltz
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38JpAMG65Dg
It’s made me cry and I like to think opened my mind a little because there isn’t much I have in common with a poor white confederate farmer but the song even now still moves me. It probably also set me on the road to Band fandom which was one of the first online communities I was really involved with. I’m still friends with some of the people from those days. And then also for me, the Band led to Bob Dylan…
The Pogues’ “And the band played Waltzing Matilda”. (Yes, I know now that Eric Bogle wrote it, but I heard the Pogues version first). That pretty much killed my martial impulse.
There is also the slow movement of a particular Corelli trio sonata, the number of which I can no longer recall, comprising nothing but a series of long suspended dissonances slowly resolving, the effect of which I cannot properly explain; but it was the clearest exposition of tension and release in temporal art I had ever experienced to that point, and having had the revelation, I don’t think I could have it again. Every single aesthetic experience of tension and release since I have related to the memory of that music.
Also, being in Germany in 1987, aged 17, listening to the Tuatara compilation I had bought as a gift for my host-brother, and realising that there was a coherent musical thread in all the Pakeha music on that tape (mostly Flying Nun bands) and the Lilburn and Cresswell I had heard and played in the orchestra before I left, in minor harmonies and parallel seconds (old-school waiata are like that) and keening voices and oppressive ostinatos and that this was baked in to everyone who grew up here before that time. I don’t hear those things in local music any more, but it was pretty noticeable then. I had to leave the country to hear it. Anyway, I was a different person for realising that we had a musical identity that was in distinct contrast to other places’ music. I became a musical nationalist then. (I’m not any more. But that did change me then).
MTNW: Among my other aesthetic sins I used to play in a pseudo-irish band (I was paid good money) which inappropriately covered that song. I always liked it too. They should never have taken the very best. As for what I have in common with the subject, as an Anglo-Celtic-Jewbo I am descended from slaves and the owners of slaves and feel free to sympathise with whomever I like.
Cheese cheese me- The Beatles.
“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”-Elton John, made me realise that the lyrics of songs might have some more to them than just talking about kissing and dancing. That was a first for me and it was triggered by a student teacher who gave us the lyrics of “Mr Tambourine Man” in 6th form English class but that it was not hearing that song, it was reading it.
“Under the spreading chestnut tree”
August 1990, sprawled on the platform at the train station of Tralee, Ireland, waiting to escape the local festival after a night spent in the rain trying to seek refuge from the drunks. We were listening to Rain Dogs by Tom Waits – as we had had all summer – and I yelled to my friend Marco to stop and rewind the tape. All of a sudden I could make out a line: “Singing and Dancing with the Rose of Tralee”… so the mad bastard had been in the very same spot, presumably drinking himself into a state that made a little town splashed in booze and vomit somehow worthy of a romantic ballad. That was enough to put me off full-blown alcoholism – mark one point for the redemptive power of art.
The best, most beloved songs will always be the ones we used to sing the car during long trips with my family when I was a wee lad, though. Turns out they were pretty much all political songs, too, formative in a way I wasn’t conscious off as I tried to outsing my father (he of the booming voice).
Giovanni: you know there’s an annual beauty contest for the daughters of the Irish diaspora which selects the “Rose of Tralee?“, which in turn is named after an old song lyric? Waits could, like Randy Newman, always have been crazy ’bout Irish girls, or just quoting maudlin old tunes, and not actually have been there.
Yes, that’s where we were – in Tralee during the Rose of Tralee festival, which accepts diasporing Irish lasses from all over the world. We spent some time in Donegal and everyone kept telling us we just had to go: free music! spontaneous dancing in the streets! pubs open all night! When we got there, it was like taking part in the filming of a cautionary video pamphlet paid for by the temperance league, except I think even them would have gone for slightly less trite images: the music was awful, unless you wanted to pay a fortune to see the Waterboys; the happy revellers spilt out in the street engaging in spontaneous brawling and spewing on the bonnets of the parked cars; and yes, the pubs were open all night, but who wanted to drink at that point? After several failed attempts at having some sort of fun we retreated to the train station to wait for the morning express out of there and slept for a couple of hours on the ground in the drizzle. It sure was cautionary.
But I take your point, perhaps Waits hadn’t been there. Kind of spoils my story though.
fwiw I have a feeling Kathleen Brennan (Waits’s wife) won the Rose of Tralee contest one year so that might be what he was on about
harvest bird- still awaiting your anecdote!
A guy on Yahoo! answers claims that the Waits honeymooned in Tralee. Thank you, Make Tea, I feel vindicated!
(I love that part of Ireland to bits, but isn’t honeymooning in Tralee a bit like honeymooning in Foxton, except with less culture and more booze? With all due respect for Foxton, of course – it just doesn’t strike me as your obvious honeymoon destination).
I feel really touched by the diversity and detail of everyone’s stories, not to mention our mighty internet research skills where further verification may be necessary!
I have been thinking all weekend about what story I might tell in response, and humbly offer up this morsel.
When I was fifteen I took up viola at my violin teacher’s suggestion: it offered faster advancement through the orchestral ranks, making up for my late start on the smaller instrument. More or less immediately I was co-opted into the ranks of the national secondary schools’ symphony orchestra, which was more or less a twice-yearly, school holiday, week-long symphonic workshop. The symphony prepared for performance was Dvorak 9.
This was my first time playing orchestral music that hadn’t been adapted to intermediate abilities, and being in the middle strings meantt that I sat not only in the centre of the sound but also played straight out of the middle of the score. For the first time I could hear the winds, brass and percussion with clarity, simultaneous with the upper and lower strings all around me.
It was the start of my adult understanding of how classical music works, particularly the way in which not only different musical motifs but also different sound effects could be passed around the orchestra. I was not prepared for the private emotional impact of this, sustained over a week or rehearsal. I felt as if the top of my head had been flipped open and a whole new range of feeling poured in, or let out, perhaps. It was almost completely divorced from the kind of playing experiences I had in other orchestral environments, and only strengthened my ambition to progress through the ranks.
In the next few years I would become mentally ill, which in the long term undermined my ability to do systematically what I needed to do in order to succeed musically (practise constantly, focus for long periods, keep a cool head). The months subsequent to my first experience of playing a symphony were the start of a combined beginning-and-end of a professional career that went on for years. So when I look back to this memory it seems both pure and bittersweet.
Awe. The orchestra’s loss, our gain. This very morning I foolishly listened to Placebo, Song To Say Goodbye, on the way to work, held up by traffic, the World stopped, in The Black Eden, trapped between buses, realizing this World may be false.