Six teas

I don’t know about the people of my parents’ generation, now in their eighties, but I can’t sympathetically go back earlier than as a child mis-singing “Hey Buffalo Bill, what did you kill”. I doubt I’d have heard of bungalows at that stage but news of Mister Cody had traveled far.

In discussion on communication of any kind, we should never forget there was a time when radio, television and newspapers were mediated and parents and their circle of friends and associates were of a mind to impart some things more than others. Yet still we had this treasure trove of lore.

This applies as much to the song lyric as any other mode of communication; whether you subscribe to the opinion that the true intent or feeling doesn’t become apparent until you hear it sung or you think that songpoetry will be apparent on the page. If the latter, there is still the more easily parodied second stringers who tried their hardest with a seemingly cosmic sweep but end saying little.

This is common to every era, just as there is fine music being created and performed. It’s useful to those interested in the craft, as another string in their bow. I remember reading this in a totally unrelated paper on writing (as opposed to writing on paper),

Now I say this as a person who has had a man crush on The Stranglers and adored The Fall and worshipped Elvis Costello. Someone who enjoys the heck out of Ray Davies without writing like him. And of course likes and appreciates the differences in all the great and successful songwriters such as Paul Simon (I know, it’s slim picking for Aryans) and so on and so on and doobie doobie doobie

My Olympus is populated by such legendary writers and performers as Willie Dixon. Both Captain Beefheart and Tom Waits. I like The Doors so much more than I should. And regardless of all this, the passing of one true master of the song lyric as art, as poetry, is monumental to me as someone working in that field (or even if I’d only ever listened while writing assignments or during my break). And twilight recognition to a writer who, at his best, was both universal and transmuted. Even if he couldn’t sing. A couple of people have come out and said that it should have been Cohen, not Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Was Dylan the sympathetic favourite because he’d had the bigger impact, or because of Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited? For me, I saw them both live in thoroughly enjoyable concerts and my record collection is bristling, even our bookshelves have the stray work.

Despite all this, I don’t take my main cues from either, other than to give service to the power of the words to project or convey meaning once they are assembled (and this applies to knights in white satin and climbing the stairway to heaven as it does to more or less esoteric work).

Start to Rock

First: a disclaimer. I tried to figure out how to migrate From the Sound of It to my other website, Wellwrought, but can’t do it so I’m back here.

Why I ever thought it would be good to have a Belay Bob hosting a lyricist blog is anyone’s guess. Now that that’s out of the way..

The antecedents of rock are principally in the fifties: rock’n’roll, rockabilly, rhythm’n’blues but generic rock begins in the fabled 1960’s

Sure, you can point out all the pop and country and big bands with crooners but the foment of the sixties encapsulates much of what we take from the music. This is not to pretend that there is a sixties rock that can represent all the subgenres that began then: heavy metal, hard rock, acid rock

More tally 

This year death has barely drawn a breath
Hardly idle with our idols 
Quakes and shakes soon am I tidal
 measured end and mass incendiary

This time of engaging in gauging crime
from somewhere subhuman to somehow sublime
The devil his due
divulge and you die

Plan it and see if it's spinning through space
the grounds may confound but you still found the place
with pursed lips and pursestrings
groundbreaking discovery

You might think this a trifling peculiar considering how much I have let go through the net in terms of ‘authenticity’ but I’m going to say the above does not meet our criterion; it’s not sixties rock, it’s a poem. There were plenty of poems being written then, some even being performed on stage to muted background music, but we are attempting to encapsulate everything from the bikers to the mods, a stray Ted. We want to keep the hippies happy, prop and prepare protester fare, drag haut cauture and drug culture into the innocent mix

So if we can’t write our song that is secretly about two thousand and sixteen and pass it off as sixties, what next? Besides actually grabbing icons and images from the era and bunging them in and then, when questioned, claim that this represents the chaos and confusion, brother.

The solution is to not indulge in caged metaphor and describe some real incident or place or person, no small irony in doing that considering how much the sixties was hellbent on breaking tradition.

You Could Have Told Me 

You're the consequence of all my recompense
You're patchouli flavoured and Heaven sense
The way I had things planned
 I'd only take your hand
For one more whirl of boy meets girl
You could have told me
How I'd fall for you How I'd call to you
You could have told me
Now I see it's true I need to be with you

You're the destiny and distilled desire
Mirrored in the mire pirrhouetting to the pyre
The things I cherished then
I declared perish them
Since this better plan a woman and a man

(C)
You're the circumstance of when I circled chance
I'll never leave for love or roam for romance
I was sure of something else
Why, while I keep this to myself