JOHN HARRIS VENTURES OUT FOR THE FINAL TIME (PART 3)

(CONTINUED FROM PART 2)

 

 

     ONE fateful day- well, actually New Year’s Eve- John Harris and his female companion decided to herald the beginning of a new year by drinking and dancing at one of Wangaratta’s nicest pubs called ‘The Vine’,  situated a little out of town, and down a dusty lane. It was here, mulling over the events of the year just lapsed, the good times, and the plenty of mistakes made, that John Harris met Jenny and Bob, both from nearby Whitfield, seemingly kindred spirits of his (well that’s how it seemed after two or three hours of celebration and dancing). Jenny was short and thin, wearing those tight, stretchy jeans that make your legs seem even skinnier. She was trotting around like a wild goat, pumping those skinny legs with occasional little hops and bounces. Bob was a bit more refined and a much better dancer. He was also thin but better proportioned, faintly good looking in a dark-haired Irish kind of way. Even Bob’s dancing was faintly reminiscent of Irish dancing, with his long but nimble feet. It was all so light-hearted and easy, basking in the glow of warm minds.

About a month later John and his friend Sharon were walking down Faithful Street. As they passed a real estate agent- in fact just at that exact moment- Jenny and Bob tumbled out onto the street in front of them, exiting the rental shop. There were smiles and good wishes all ‘round, happy memories of the event before. Jenny and Bob had decided they wanted to live in Wangaratta. John blurted out that, because of Alan No.2’s defection, there was a spare room at 39 Templeton Street. Bang. It was sealed.

Just three days later, on a Saturday morning, John Harris woke to noise down the formerly quiet section of the house. Jenny and Bob were unpacking. There were things everywhere. There was a corpulent dog running around the back yard (‘corpulent’ was a word that Bob himself used about his dog, the first time John had ever heard the word). Jenny had just put a bucket of water on the kitchen floor to help stave off the Wangaratta summer heat for the dog. Pretty soon it would be wandering over, slurping water out of the bucket and onto the linoleum, its furry cheeks dripping and glistening. Suddenly a poster supposedly of a UFO was plastered onto the kitchen door. Fine sheets of material were draped over doorways. Packages of food were thrown into cupboards. And then there was that little corpulent dog running around the house. John rubbed the back of his head with his hand. He couldn’t remember seeing the little dog outside the real estate agent the month before.

The next weeks and months went by in a blur. Jenny and Bob certainly had a huge impact on the house, and they were a fascinating couple to live with. There were cold drinks every night and fabulous stories told. Bob seemed to know quite a lot about everything. He was studying psychology by correspondence, and his essays were fantastically written. He knew everything about the Arabian Nights and was quite enlightened about politics, the Royal Family and world events in general. Talk would drift into the early hours and it was a miracle that John wound up fresh for his job at Benalla High each morning. When John would go home to Reservoir the occasional weekend- and it must be said that it was only occasional now- he would have fabulous stories about Jenny and Bob to tell his friends. There was the time that Jenny stole a big sack of clothes from outside St Vincent de Paul one Saturday night, and tipped the contents all over the floor. The sack contained about twenty pairs of jeans, all in various states of usefulness. Bob tried them all on and discovered to his delight that about six pairs fitted his thin body. When asked, by John,  about the ethics of such an event,  Jenny stated with viciousness, “well the money only goes to the Pope, and he’s got enough anyway.”

Another, somewhat more disturbing event, occurred in the unusual couple’s bedroom. John needed some sort of assistance and knocked on their door. Bob had been away for the weekend, and John soon discovered why. He had had a vasectomy. After a rap on the door, Jenny sang out casually, “Come in!” As he entered the vision that greeted John was of Bob lying naked on the floor, and Jenny applying ointment to a particularly sore part of his body. Moreover, this wasn’t the only thing that he found startling. A used potty, apparently kept each night under the bed, was sitting on the floor near the fire grate. Stories like these amused John’s friends no end.

Then things suddenly turned not only sour, but nasty as well. John forgot to put the money in the kitty for food a couple of times. The arrangement was that Jenny and Bob would buy the unorthodox vegetarian food- mostly nuts and grains, John noticed, to his chagrin- and would then go ahead and cook whilst John did the dishes. One night, in the cooler winter months, John could hear wine glasses clinking and the sounds of food being served on plates. He came out of his room nonchalantly to say “oh, is dinner ready?” Jenny’s response was abrupt and forceful (expletives deleted). “We haven’t made any food for you. We’re sick of the way you keep forgetting to put money in the kitty…” So that particularly warm arrangement was terminated, and the winter evenings became colder as a result.

A few days later John went to work having left the iron on. Jenny and Bob were your archetypal greenies. They loathed wasted power, and they both hated irons, especially because of the conservatism they associated with them. When John got home he stared at the lounge room wall in disbelief. “TURN IT OFF!!!” was written above the ironing board and thick blue crayon letters.

Then the issue of untidiness and grotty living came to the fore. It was always an issue for John, especially when the corpulent dog was nosing around. One day a friend from Benalla High came around. He and John were sitting in the kitchen. It was incredibly embarrassing. Large, unsightly flies were hovering around the room. Some were clinging to sticky cups and spoons. These days, the dishes were often left not done. When John opened a cupboard to extract coffee for his guest, they both noticed lots of little weevils flying around cups and saucers and unsealed food containers. John’s heart sank. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind he thought fondly back to his mother’s kitchen in Reservoir. Spick and span, with Tupperware containers filled with rice and pasta and other foodstuffs, tightly sealed.

Animosity grew between the once happy residents. Little things took on greater annoyance, like the woodchips all over the carpet in the lounge, and the Safeway trolley incongruously situated in the corner. The end of the year could not come soon enough. John was going home, back to Melbourne, to say goodbye to Jenny and Rob, and Wangaratta, forever. As a kind of parting gesture, John naively lent Jenny a hundred dollars during his final days. She said she would place the money in his bank account. She did place half of it in. The other fifty dollars, she insisted, was left on the table for him before he left. It wasn’t her fault he apparently, when cleaning, must have thrown it out.

Much later John was able to look back on his two year experience with a reasonable level of satisfaction. Yes he made plenty of errors, much of it to do with naivety and misplaced goodwill. However he survived, and learnt a lot, and felt that the next time he chose to enter a shared arrangement with other boarders, he would make fewer mistakes.

                

END PART 3

 

 

Young John Harris, Still Venturing Out... (PART 2)

  

Continued from part 1…

SO, sometime towards July, after six inglorious months at 81 Rowan Street, Wangaratta, a second opportunity confronted John Harris.  An advertisement appeared in the local paper reading approximately thus: ‘A single man requires a boarder, male or female, non-smoker, professional,  in lovely old house in tree-lined street.’ Ha! That word ‘professional’ again. John Harris smirked as he perused the invitation, then steeled himself for the possible change. Leaving Lindsay, Peter and the fabulous thin grey spectre, Alan, would be no easy task, but one wintry day he made the journey around the corner to meet a new, older and wiser Alan, and the deal was struck virtually on the spot.

The house, in Templeton Street, was a lovely old house- with the emphasis on ‘old’, and Templeton Street certainly was tree-lined. The local Ovens River ran alongside it, and in the past, and probably into the future, it would be subject to floods. Alan was firmly ensconced into the nicer, front room, and John would have the back. There was also a nice sized kitchen, an ugly third bedroom, and a serviceable bathroom and lounge. Alan himself was a builder and part-time musician, quite a handyman who would soon make John look silly- he was always slightly uncomfortable around ‘handy men’- but this was a gentle, older soul, who was probably looking for mateship and colour and solidarity in his choice of John as boarder. It was true that John was becoming firm friends with some of the women in the town; nevertheless a father figure in the form of Alan was never going to go astray. And John immediately sensed that this was a much nicer Alan.

A few weeks into the adventure, John decided he’d like to paint the walls of his bedroom a baby blue. Alan was impressed. John was one to hang around for a while. So John bought the brush and paint somewhere and began splashing on thick layers of the lovely pastel paint. Alan wandered in to see how the preparation was going- the sanding, the preparing of floor covering, the different sheens of paint required, the sandpaper, the taping of the walls… the list goes on, especially for builder aficionados like Alan. Well, one can only imagine the mirth spread across Alan’s face as he became doubled over in pleasure at seeing John with paintbrush in hand, the baby blue paint looking streaky and unhealthy on the walls, and little globules all over the wooden floorboards. John’s parents visited Templeton Street a few days later, and what a wonderful story Alan was able to tell Mr and Mrs Harris after their long drive up from Reservoir.

 

Time went on and Alan and John became reasonably strong friends. John found himself a nice girlfriend and Alan had a short American woman called Bobby with him most of the time, and the four of them would sometimes go out as an unlikely foursome, to cheap restaurants, and one time to Beechworth to hear Alan play in his jazz band.

John’s coterie of friends had widened further towards the end of the year. Suddenly there was a party at Templeton Street. Alan was away for the weekend at Bobby’s pad in Yarrawonga. When he came back home at about midday on the Sunday he couldn’t believe his eyes. John was still in bed. The coterie of friends had left about six hours earlier. There was mess everywhere. Broken half empty packets of chips, cola and wine stains on cheap rugs, a couple of overflowing ash trays, a sink full of sauce-stained plates, a small piece of cold fried fish near the kitchen door, drinking glasses in almost every room in the house, clothes strewn on the floor. Alan waltzed into John’s bedroom, despair filtered all over his sad face. ‘I don’t feel as though this is my place anymore’, he blurted out. John was still a bit sleepy, and not his usual tactful self. ‘Well Alan, it’s not as if there’s a leaking car engine rotting on the lounge room floor.’

Things never did seem quite the same after all of this. Alan left one day, presumably with Bobby, with not exactly rancour in the air, but a certain formalness and coldness nevertheless. John had a bit of time to reflect. In two households he had independently inhabited in his short adult life, things had either turned sour or failed to ignite. There was another experience around the corner, which would become the third and final incarnation that would put these two experiences to shame, in terms of both dysfunction and unhappiness.

                           

 END PART 2

 

JOHN VENTURES OUT FOR THE FIRST TIME (PART 1)

       

 

 

JOHN Harris’ parents drove him up to Benalla, a three journey from Melbourne, to get some sort of insight to the new life he would shortly be leading. He was a mummy’s boy- a sort of daddy’s boy as well- living a very uncomplicated first twenty three years or so. He’d never mowed a lawn, never planted a tomato, never painted a fence. John Harris led a charmed life in luxurious Reservoir, and knew absolutely nothing about the real world. The day his parents drove him to Benalla, he sat in the back seat, contemplating the next chapter in his uneventful life with a degree of naïve confidence. ‘How could it be so difficult?’ he thought to himself. There was the teaching caper that was just around the corner, and the living in a rented house with others caper, and the new town of which he knew next to nothing caper. It all sounded fairly easy. He was always natural and good humoured, and knew he would always be able to fit in. Benalla High was about to be the location for his first teaching position.

Weeks later, John Harris arrived, solo, to the main street of Wangaratta, just thirty kilometres north of Benalla. Someone told him it was better not to live in the same town as your students, so he prudently chose Wangaratta as the town of choice, for the multitude of virgin experiences that lay excitingly ahead. His car was loaded with bags and books and very little else. He travelled lightly and knew that he would have to buy things, but there was no hurry overall. There was an advertisement that he had answered from Melbourne, just to make sure that first day went smoothly. ‘WANTED: A SINGLE PERSON TO SHARE A COMFORTABLE THREE BEDROOM HOME WITH A COUPLE AND ANOTHER SINGLE PERSON. PROFESSIONAL PEOPLE NEED ONLY APPLY.’

The ‘professional’ part appealed to him. ‘You must make sure the people are sensible and professional’, more experienced adults advised him. The prospect of living at 51 Rowan Street was good. He saw right away what a lovely home it was. Potentially a bit noisy, being right underneath the overpass, but John Harris was given a comfortable, reasonable sized bedroom at the front of the house. The other occupants proved to be very difficult to get to know. Alan had just broken off an engagement- or, rather, it seemed that he was the one on the losing side. He was the other single person in the room next door. Overly serious, morose you might say, seemingly depressed and totally non- communicative. Oh, dear. John felt that Alan was impenetrable, and John wasn’t used to that. Later he would call Alan the ‘thin, grey spectre’, but never to his face, only to his amused friends in Melbourne.

The biggest bedroom was inhabited by an older, mature couple called Peter and Lyndsay. They owned a photocopying company in the town. They were a little more friendly, but wrapped up in their own lives and not particularly interested in poor John Harris. Where John was expecting friendship, John was receiving acquaintance. You pay your money, you get a room. That was the kind of alien thinking that unnerved John. Even after weeks, and months, went by, John still didn’t feel comfortable in this modern, breezy house. He would usually go to Melbourne on weekends. One Sunday night, after a particularly enjoyable time in Melbourne with dear family and friends, John reluctantly returned to Wangaratta, but was nevertheless in a good mood as he entered the household and wandered into the lounge area. Alan, Lyndsay and Peter were all watching ’60 Minutes.’ ‘Hi’ said John with a confident, optimistic tone, ‘how are things here?’ ‘OK’ was the reply. ‘How was Melbourne?’ There was a distinct lack of tenderness in the voice. In fact, none of the three occupants of the house even looked at John. Their gaze remained on the television. John spent a couple more minutes in the lounge, utterly deflated, and crawled back to his room, to his desk, and to his diary. His diary got a good workout this particular month.

                       

Things improved a bit after this. There were still lonely times ahead, though.  John would wander the streets of Wangaratta with his ‘Walkman’ listening to Van Morrison songs for comfort, delaying his return to the house as long as possible: ‘Oh, won’t you stay? Stay a while with your own ones. This old world is so cold. Don’t care nothing for your soul, that you share, with your own ones.’

And then there was the awkwardness in the kitchen. Alan didn’t go out much, and as much as John tried to avoid a clash of cooking times with Alan, invariably they would become hungry at the same time. One memorable day, Alan was in the kitchen cooking eggs and baked beans for lunch. There were your usual four elements to choose from. John found one that was free. He planted his skillet pan on this and scooped the hamburgers inside. The air was thick with tension. John and Alan had not spoken for weeks. Perhaps a grunt here, and a grunt there. It had been like a monastery of two silent monks. With a tiny bit of space enveloping them, Alan and John managed to cook each other’s sad and sorry meals, almost elbow to elbow, and should to shoulder, without speaking a solitary word. It was almost impossible, yet they pulled it off.

School and teaching motored on reasonably comfortably. John took himself off sometimes to the local nightclub called ‘The Pinsent’ and met some local women. Things got easier rather than tougher. But he never felt happy in the tight confines of 81 Rowan Street. What a miserable household. Something comparable to a house in an Edgar Allan Poe short story.  John stayed six months. Eventually, and miraculously, he answered another advertisement.

 

END PART ONE

 

 

ON THE DEATH OF RAY MANZAREK

                                           

SO RAY is dead all of a sudden. I saw it in The Age last week, and I didn’t even know it was coming. It hasn’t a big effect on me like the death of John Lennon, occurring whilst I was having fun on a sunny day in a back yard pool. Dying in your 70’s after a life of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll isn’t so sudden, or shocking or surprising. Not like murder is. Still, The Doors were my favourite band for a long time, and I was barely cognizant of music when Jim Morrison died.

I never really thought a lot about Ray as I became obsessed with The Doors in the late 70’s and 80’s and even into the 90’s, but I think I have underestimated him. I’ve heard the story about when the Doors first got together- there are photos of it- staying somewhere near Venice Beach, trying to write songs. They set themselves a target to write songs this particular weekend- I’m guessing around mid-1966- and only Robbie Krieger really came back with anything substantial- just a little rock ‘n’ roll number he called ‘Light My Fire.’ Yes it was Robby’s tune, and Robby’s words, but I bet Ray had a big say in the way it was fully constructed, beyond the drafting phase. Think about the swirling organ at the start, and I wouldn’t mind betting he created that sound, just like John Densmore might have thought up the idea of the bang on the snare as the song’s first noise. The Doors, like The Beatles, I gather, all joined together to create their songs, like all good bands do.

I’m sure there is any number of key Ray influences in lots of Doors’ songs. ‘The End’ may shine in particular because of Jim’s words and Robby’s guitar, likewise Robby’s palpable influence on ‘Spanish Caravan’ or ‘Been Down So Long.’ But think about ‘Riders on the Storm’ and Ray’s pretty (for want of a better word) piano/organ comes to mind, likewise ‘Love Street’, the piano beautifully jaunting, the swirling mad organ in ‘Strange Days’, and especially in an underrated song like ‘Not To Touch The Earth’ with its exhilaratingly mad organ swirls.

           

Beyond the studio, I can see that Ray was an integral part of The Doors line-up. I remember Jim Morrison once saying that whenever he was getting ahead of himself, he would take one look at Ray and realise that he wasn’t Superman (it may not sound like it, but probably a nice compliment). It seems that Ray and Jim were pretty close, more than the others, and certainly more so than Jim and John. It was probably Ray that in some ways held The Doors together, talking Jim out of leaving the group, being a band spokesperson when something went wrong, like in Miami. And Ray was a crazy guy. You only have to read his memoirs about life in The Doors to realise that. Pages and pages about sex, and shamanism, and rituals, and what not. Ray used the (possibly LA) expression ‘man’ all the time, and he was, it seems, excessive in the way he spoke and the things that he said. He went on to create music and manage bands when the Doors ‘died’ but always associated himself proudly with The Doors legacy.

When I saw the obituary of Ray Manzarek in The Age the other day, I thought back to my days of being obsessed with The Doors and driving my friends crazy. It was a lonely time because I remember being, it seemed, not only the only fan in my school in Melbourne, but seemingly the only person who even knew The Doors existed. I would play the first album and ‘LA Woman’ over and over again, and it seemed back then that every album and every song they wrote was genius. It was not until later, from a less involved perspective, that I came to a personal view that albums like ‘Waiting for the Sun’ and ‘Morrison Hotel’ were not quite as good as I thought, and that even songs like ‘Queen of the Highway’ were downright average.

Ray was like a father figure to the group I am imagining. Not just in terms of age- he was the oldest, but not by a great deal, and barely older than Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger- but also in the sense that he may have been the wisest, the most experienced and most level headed, and probably the most settled or secure. This is only an inkling, because I cannot be really sure.

One day, I know, Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell will die- and then I will really feel it.

                                            

 

'THE ENGAGEMENT'- CHLOE HOOPER FICTION

 

            

I HAVE no doubt that Chloe Hooper is a very good writer. Her account of the Palm Island ‘murder’ from a few years ago in which Cameron Doomadgee died in a police cell was chilling and absolutely captivating. Her new, second novel of fiction, is called ‘The Engagement.’ Again one couldn’t deny that there is an intelligent writer at work here, capable of some impressively taut and thrilling writing. However, ‘The Engagement’ left me cold and I found it a bit of a chore to get to the end.

Liese Campbell, a 35 year old architect, is the unreliable narrator who has fled London and now works in her uncle’s Melbourne real estate business. Enter Alexander Colquhoun, a wealthy client who becomes more than just a little obsessed with Liese. After having sex in a number of potential rental apartments, Colquhoun pays her an enormous amount of money and takes her to his enormous grazier’s property named Warrowill,  in rural Victoria. Both people- and there is barely anyone else in the novel- continually play intimate mind games which ultimately leave me cold and disinterested. Eventually the games become too tense and serious for Liese, to the point where she feels a strong compulsion to run away, and even fears for her life. Earlier she enjoyed this game of pretending to be a prostitute, until the game became out of her control and Alexander became more of a disturbing prospect than she anticipated. I suppose both Alexander and Liese are unusual and interesting in a way. However, for me the book dragged on, each time making me think something of note or import was going to happen, only to feel let down.

Neither character is warm or attractive in any way. They are both selfish, scheming types and I didn’t at any stage care what happened to either of them. Alexander is by far the most repulsive, not helped by the fact that there is a carcass of a swan he has butchered in the kitchen, and a series of infantile and disturbing letters about Liese he has invented.

The melodrama is contained in the idea that Liese feels more and more desperate to escape, as a claustrophobic metaphorical net is placed over here. Alexander never really seems to lock any doors. Hooper is at her skilful best in that at times it seems that imprisonment is partly of Liese’s own making.  Ultimately, however, the whole ambiguous game is something that I never really at any stage felt I was wanting to buy into.

“It lay on the ground, a black spineless thing with arms and legs outstretched. It seemed to have no eyes. It seemed to have no mouth. It swam in shiny black oil, twitching and wriggling inside a translucent sheath.”

At her best Chloe Hooper is powerful, and one day perhaps, consistently powerful, like an M J Hyland who really knows how to write thrilling prose.

 

 

 

PARANOID PARK, 1997

                    



THE DIRECTOR, Gus Van Sant, made Paranoid Park in 1997. It is a real skateboarder’s picture. Having said that, I find skateboarding boring, but I enjoyed the film. It is a skateboarder’s film in the sense that it shows skateboarders in a good light- basically a big bunch of young, harmless people, performing impressive feats. No real sense of delinquency or pre-meditated violence, or use of drugs. Plenty of ennui, however, and some misguidedness, or reckless action- a film about adolescents/ adolescence.

                 

It is also an advertisement for Portland, Oregon, where Van Sant apparently hails from. Not a glamorous depiction of the city, but an honest one showing a reasonably tight knit community without glamour. There are unhappy people in the film, and family dislocation, but that happens everywhere, from North Carolina to Texas.

The ‘star’ is a young actor called Alex in the film, known as Gabe Nevins in real life. He is handsome and photogenic and the cinematographer studies his face and body and walk just as intently as Kieslowski does the beautiful Irene Jacobs in ‘The Double Life of Veronique’ and ‘Three Colours Red.’ You can see it when, early in the film, Alex is interviewed by a policeman at school about the death of a security guard. The camera probes Alex’s mind as it focuses squarely on Alex, even there is dialogue with the policeman. The camera slowly pans towards him until it comes very close to his face. He proves to be a good liar. In real life, scant research tells me, he has spent a little bit of time in the slammer. There has been post-film homelessness and drug taking, maybe echoes of River Phoenix. Van Sant evidently auditioned a non-acting skateboarding bunch using something like myspace. Nevins never expected to be in front of the camera much, but here he is in the vast majority of shots. A win for him, and a win for Van Sant. Maybe the day he found Nevins was a casting red letter day, a mild version of the euphoria John Duigan apparently felt finding Noah Taylor and Ben Mendelsohn on the same day for the lovely ‘The Year My Voice Broke.’

 

There are many tricks of the camera, some clever and others simple but effective. We watch Alex walk along the school corridor, in slow motion, about to be interviewed at school by a policeman interested in the discovery of the body of a security guard, cleaved in two by a train, down at the rail yards. Van Sant’s film contains many scenes at the skateboard park. The camera lovingly showcases the skills of various skaters. One shot particularly interesting has the camera inside a tunnel watching skaters negotiate the steep sides. There is a hint of claustrophobia here, and a hint that something isn’t quite right amongst the skating fraternity.

Alex plays the teenager heavily burdened by guilt or a secret very effectively. It is a role that was similarly played by James Dean in ‘Rebel Without A Cause’, but the difference here is that Alex has less existential angst associated with him. He doesn’t shout out, or get angry, just suffers his problems quietly and numbly, more like the way that the impressionable young lead handles his more significant problems in the intelligent horror flick, ‘Snowtown.’ Alex/ Nevins is probably just playing himself. But it was clear why he was chosen. Every time the camera is on him he is in some way fascinating, not the least because of his nice, youthful looks.

                 

At the centre of the film is that story about the security guard. His death is horrible. We get to see the body cleaved in two. What’s more, the upper half of the body lurches forward across the tracks, the facial expression pleading and helpless. Alex is understandably haunted by what he has witnessed. However he is reluctant to come forward, a typical teenage reaction. It dislocates himself from his family and his friends, as well as himself. There is a telling scene in the bedroom when his girlfriend is eager and all over him. But Alex is just numb. He barely participates in their communion, almost totally disengaged. When they break up she is incensed, and yet the filmmakers have her shouting with her voice muted. It’s like it is from Alex’s point of view. He is not really able to hear what she is saying, his depression and exhaustion being so bad.

The other way the film emphasises dislocation is by noises on the soundtrack. Sometimes there’s music and sometimes just muffled sounds. This occurs, for instance, when Alex is trying to cleanse his body and mind in the shower after the trauma of seeing the security guard dying on the railroad tracks. There is a kind of buzzing with bird squawks at the same time which is distracting and discordant. Interestingly, the music played in the scene of the accidental murder is classical- from the soundtrack to the Fellini film, ‘Juliet of the Spirits’, which gives it an elegiac feel. whenAlex is looking at the newspaper for reports of the accidental ‘murder’, he sees two female friends. His perspective of them becomes blurred as their mouths open to speak even though we can’t hear them, and the gentle movement of the scene is played in a vague, hazy kind of slow motion.

youtube and listening to america and bread

 

THESE days of warm autumn weather during holidays should be a relaxing time of reading, dreaming, seeing films on DVD you have always wanted to see, and the occasional crossword puzzle. Instead, with all the family responsibilities and living in a dislocated environment nothing very much like relaxation often takes place. So last night, numb and tired and in a state of stasis, and feeling unable to read my new Chloe Hooper novel, www.youtube.com is a welcome relief. It’s one of the greatest discoveries, the Internet at its most useful for dreamers, romantics  and lovers of music. Of course when you drift into a random state of searching, anything might appear on your music screen.

The songs I played last night were songs that hard- nosed Metallica fans would call mawkish and overly sentimental. They wouldn’t spit on songs like this. None of their transformative power would ever reach them. And that is the beauty of music- like films, it elicits different reactions because we all have different tastes and experiences.

My clumsy pointers typed in the name of the band ‘America’.  I haven’t heard their music for a long time- not since I played my brothers’ vinyl copies. I love the simplicity of ‘Daisy Jane’ from the album 'Hearts' from 1975: 

‘Flying me back to Memphis

Honey, keep the oven warm

All the clouds are clearin

And I think we're over the storm.’

A metaphoric oven? A metaphoric storm? No, we shouldn’t read too much into the simplicity of these words. Surely it is simply because ‘warm’ needs a rhyming word for ‘storm’ or vice versa. It’s a lovely song I hadn’t heard for years. In big open expanses like the country America, you might have to fly a plane to see the person you love.

I just had to play ‘I Need You’ next, another song by America on their first, self-titled record in 1971. Simplicity perfected again. But this time love gone wrong. 

‘We used to laugh, we used to cry,

We used to bow our heads and wonder why

But now you’re gone, I guess I’ll carry on

And make the best of what you left to me….'

Favourites from years ago, on battered old TDK cassette tapes. ‘If You Leave Me Now’ by Chicago- from the album Chicago X -the only song of theirs that I ever really played- and ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ from the massive Elton John album of the same name, that I always thought had a lot of padding and should have been much shorter, just like The Beatles ‘White Album’ and especially George Harrison’s ‘All Things Must Pass.’ And who could pass up the dreamy romanticism of Bread? ‘Everything I Own’ is lovely and full of foolish commitment. But the song ‘Diary’ always struck the biggest chord with me:

‘I found her diary underneath a tree

And started reading about me

The words she’s written took me by surprise

You’d never read them in her eyes

They said that she had found the love she waited for

Wouldn't you know it, she wouldn't show it..'

The speaker of the song gets the shock of his life when a sudden tragic revelation occurs later on:

‘Her meaning now was clear to see,

The love she waited for was someone else not me

Wouldn’t you know it, she wouldn’t show it….’

I had a conversation with my seven year old daughter about the lyrics to this song tonight whilst she was cleaning her teeth. She understood what happened perfectly, and really felt the pain of the jilted lover. I explained that the same thing happens in the Jimmy Webb song ‘Someone Else’ from Art Garfunkel’s Watermark album. These are songs that reach across all age groups with their simple but telling lyrics and perfect melodies.

My fun hour of wading into the magnificent pool of www.youtube.com  concluded after this when darkness fully invaded the avenue.  But not before I heard Gerry Buckley’s warm and comforting voice in my ear plugs again… telling me of an amusing story in ‘Sister Golden Hair’ of a kind of innocent eroticism:

'Well I tried to make it Sunday

But I got so damn depressed

So I set my sights on Monday

And I got myself undressed

I ain’t ready for the altar but I do agree there's times

When a woman sure can be a friend of mine.'