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Thursday, June 04, 2009
PEACE, AT LAST
Chas Jankel
Chas Jankel
Angel Air : 1980
[Buy It]
EVERYBODY WANTS TO FEEL LIKE YOU
John Prine
The Missing Years
Oh Boy : 1991
[Buy It]
GOOD TIMES
Sam Cooke
1964
Available on : The Man and His Music
RCA : 1986
[Buy It]
CRUEL STAGE
Graham Parker
12 Haunted Episodes
Razor & Tie : 1995
[Buy It]
Some weeks are filled with peace: peace in the weather, peace in the work, peace in the world. This wasn't one of them. It started with an illness that passed quickly but was severe enough to unsettle.
That was the first domino, and it fell over.
Then there were professional developments that, while essentially positive, were still destabilizing. I don't want to be vague, but I don't want to revisit them either. Suffice it to say that the same mechanisms that brings my work--the books, the essays, the journalism--to a broader audience brings that broader audience back to me, and while I like to know that readers are out there, sometimes I'm disturbed by how out there they are. Then I spent some time with a friend who is going through a hard time that seem to be half-psychological, half-somatic, if not all psycho-somatic. He will get better, I hope. Then I spent some time with another friend who is going through a hard time that seems to be half her own doing and half her undoing. She will get better, I hope. Then another friend got some disappointing news about a project she has been working on for years, and I spent too many hours on the telephone fighting the mortgage department of my bank over a dishonest escrow policy, and I encountered various forms of humorless mid-level bureaucratic stupefaction. Today I was at the end of the rope, and not the bottom end, either--I had climbed to the top with thoughts of leaping. Energy gone, patience gone with it, I then proceeded to have the worst day of the entire week, a dull afternoon growing frustrated with nonresponse from adults who should know better followed by an exhausting evening in which my younger son was impossible in all the ways that five year-olds are impossible. My older son tried to broker a peace, but I wasn't having any, and my wife, who is now in the grips of the illness that unsettled me at the beginning of the week, alternated between not reacting to any of it and overreacting to all of it. This is trivia, mostly, of course. It's the cost of doing business when the business is life. But this week, too, Dr. George Tiller was gunned down, in church of all places, and though I wrote a piece about that, my writing didn't make me feel any better about the cost of doing business when the business is death.
So I ended up here, now, looking for songs that produce peace. It took a while. The Chambers Brothers' "Love, Peace, and Happiness" makes promises, but it is too effortful to deliver fully on its title. Bob and Marcia's "Peace of Mind," a bit of Motown reggae with a little filip of a string arrangement, is closer, but Bob Andy's vocal is pushed too far forward in the mix to allow any listener to settle back comfortably. Cat Stevens' "Peace Train" and the Eagles' "Peaceful Easy Feeling" begin to create the desired effects, but they are cliches, and cliches turn themselves inside out.
I knew the songs were out there. I have Van Morrison on my iPod, and Caetano Veloso and Miles Davis and Mississippi John Hurt. Some people would try to find peace in the space between the songs, but some people are wrong. Still, the search itself was starting to become disruptive to my day, so I just put the thing on shuffle and gave up. Slowly, they started to come to me. First, was Chas Jankel's "Peace, At Last." Jankel, who played keyboards with Ian Dury and the Blockheads and was responsible for much of the songwriting, particularly the work that leaned out of pub-rock into funk and disco, released his first solo album in 1980; it included a few piano instrumentals, including this one.
After songs by the Beastie Boys, the Fall, and Bongwater--a triple shot of chaos--John Prine showed up. Prine has plenty of peace. I was thinking of him while I was searching actively, particularly "All the Best," from The Missing Years, which is a beautiful, simple song. What I got was even better: "Everybody Wants to Feel Like You," from the same record. While the lyric isn't the most generous he's ever written--it's a song to a woman who won't show him affection in the way he wants--the melody and the vocal are simple and magnetic, like a compass, and Prine's lyrics are always at once childlike and wise: Next time tell me that you want me
Put your little foot inside of my shoe
Next time tell me that you need me
Everybody wants to feel like you
They are also lovingly lickerish, which carries its own kind of peace:I used to love you so hard in the morning
I'd make you stutter and roll your eyes
I put your mind on a brief vacation
To the land of the lost surprise After Prine came the MC5, Iggy Pop, XTC, Grandmaster Flash, the Gun Club: not bad but not peaceful, and not welcome. Skip, skip, skip, skip, skip. Then I got Sam Cooke's "Good Times," which I was about to skip. I didn't. I hung in there. And I was rewarded, I think. "Good Times" is among the most misleading of soul songs. It's a song about pleasure, certainly, because it's a song that's built of pleasure: the swaying melody, Cooke's subtly soaring vocal. But the undercurrent of sadness is at least an undertow, and it threatens to take you back out with it. He's singing about a party, and it's ongoing, but he Cooke doesn't know for how long, or what pain will return when it dissipates. This is especially clear in the final stanza:It might be one o'clock and it might be three
Time don't mean that much to me
I haven't felt this good since I don't know when
And I might not feel this good again This felt hopeless, almost, so I was relieved when after another stretch of chaos (Stooges, Steinski, Sonny Boy Williamson's "Little Village"), the random hand of music landed on Graham Parker's "Cruel Stage." There are songs about coming out of the dark into the light, but few of them take responsibility to this degree, or do it with such a lovely, spiraling guitar part. It's almost a secular gospel:Take me for what I'm worth though it may not amount to much
Take me from this abyss and put me back in touch
Though I have strayed from you though I have fallen from grace
I am back on higher ground up from that lonely place
And I have found the going tough
But I will find the strength enough
And I am undoing this cruel stage
That I've been going through The people who should call won't. The friends who should pass through their difficulties might not. The occlusions may not dissolve, certainly won't dissolve all at once. The frustrations will keep on coming. But so will the songs.Labels: ben, folk, soul
posted by Ben
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