Brick Wall Sentiments Prevail

Another one from the St. Cuthbert's Burials archive. This one can also be found in Tell It To A Hound Dog, Pedro. It's pretty well a doublerehash. And to coin a phrase, it's probably good advice if you've got shit for brains;

Brick by brick and trickle of mortar, come who may, the progress is never slow, for imperceptible. It’s not that you’re connected, but the scratching with nails at dusty but solid joinings of wall shows that that at least is not disconnected. Railway dreams are sleepers, the rail is the real goal but is iron not mist. Liner? There’s a thought on board, that’s why it’s swift; no real weight. Say mass. Say a lot of things. Steam speeds you through but what matters is not the journey, but the destination. Drink rum. That’s a journey and a destination in the one happy passage. I may be right, I may be wrong, I’m scared to discover, so I proffer nothing but the odd pithy pith. Learn something from that, dusty child with wrinkles. There are means of protection. If you want to ride, just pretend you have, and wherever you wind up, well, that was your destination all along. Don’t fret about it. Spin a wheel. Roulette/Steering. It matters not, babe. Eat shit, eat chocolate. It fucks your teeth either way, and what do you remember? Delicious sweetness? Bitter filth? No. You remember that you have no viable teeth in their sockets in the skull. Spend everything on a cocaine bath, dissolved in a woman’s utterances and seep. Thrift through baked bean bonanza of your mind’s easiest dream, the ordinary sense of the survival instinct. What do you regret? You spent it all, fucked up? You didn’t take enough time for your pleasure and now it’s too late? No. What you regret is that you wasted your time. Never your money. Money rolls and flows. If you’ve got it, you don’t give a shit. If you don’t got it, you’re resigned to that come reckoning time. In the end, you regret the things you haven’t done. I was a platinum selling hip-hop phenomenon, but I never climbed K2. Fuck it. Like I say… Drink Rum, The Rest Will Come… and then drink rum. You may as well. Thanks.

Empire Burlesque

Writ drunk.

I’ve long admired at least some of the songs on Empire Burlesque in the same manner as I’ve admired anything else by Bob; “I’ll Remember You” and “Dark Eyes” have always struck me in particular. My trouble with the album as a whole was always the production; “Never Be the Same Again” was a major offender, having once driven me, while listening on headphones, into the very depths of The Fear, necessitating a two hour walk into The Field.

Time, and my switching of principal mind-altering substance to wine, have conspired to take the edge off my unwillingness to so much as countenance what my demons still call ‘80s production. Truth, though, as I see it, is that an awful lot of it’s awful shite, but that tends to be when coupled with poor musicianship and/or a lack of imagination, roots and, for want of a better word for there is no better word, soul.

Soul is the key word here; soul in the broad sense of the realness of intent and performance, and soul in the sense of the musical idiom that goes by that name. This is nothing wholly new to Dylan, his two albums with Jerry Wexler being cases in point, but it was Empire Burlesque where he immersed himself fully in secular soul waters, writing songs with the vocabulary of Smokey Robinson and Holland-Dozier-Holland. “Emotionally Yours”, covered memorably by The O’Jays is perhaps the best example of this, along with “I’ll Remember You”, but I urge you to listen to “Trust Yourself” and The Staple Singers’ “Respect Yourself” in the same sitting; the production on the former is perhaps not wholly sympathetic to the intended feel, but there can be no doubting the nod to the latter, albeit in a concoction that is one part empowerment to twenty-seven parts bitter cynicism.

There is on the album a bona fide stab at stadium rock in the form of “When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky” (a fine song a rendition of which with the E. Street Band I would more often than not prefer to hear), and a handful more fairly straight rockers (the best of which is “Seeing the Real You At Last”, a song that it didn’t take me too long to appreciate, and that I’ve dug fully since the Fleadh Festival of 2004), and then of course there’s the acoustic “Dark Eyes”. The overall feel, though, and not only in the overtly soul-inflected numbers, is of Soul Music, that finest of pop forms. A return to Muscle Shoals with Jerry Wexler and his people, and a shade or two of the glorious, dirty, dense, frantic sound of Street Legal (pop’s most underrated album if I’m the judge) might very well have improved Empire Burlesque; that said, it’s a solid album devoid of bad songs and with plenty of truly grand ones.

Further Notes writ immediately afterwards:

N.B. Revise to make reference to “Seeing the Real You At Last” [I did that]

Also the abhorrent album cover… It’s Ian McLagan’s shirt, but that doesn’t explain the jacket or the graphic design; God couldn’t explain the jacket or the graphic design.

Five minutes after completing this mini-essay, I feel compelled to refute the suggestion that Empire Burlesque was Bob’s first full immersion in soul, even secular soul – Street Legal surely trumps that – Changing of the Guards, Baby Stop Crying, True Love… I think the argument still carries water, but needs refining – clarification regarding song (specifically lyric) structure… E.Y. and I.R.Y less ‘wordy’, though still very much Bob… though even that’s spurious… I’m talking shite, frankly, though I stand by most of it – it’s a fine album, sure, but probably the main reason I wrote about Empire Burlesque rather than Street Legal is the complexity of my feelings regarding the latter, a truly great album the importance of which to myself I can’t currently express…

But listen to Empire… it’s tasty…

Please, fellow Bobcats, I know what I wanted to say here but tied myself up in knots – mercy! If you can fill in any gaps in my thoughts, don’t hesitate to do so – you may know my mind better than I do. In fact, I’m sure that you do.

Old Fool at the Egg

Inspired by Moxther to do so, I trawled through old notebooks, seeking The Jonathan. I found a fair bit, some of it good. The following dates from May 2002, though it required a little fine-tuning tonight, a little sanding of the edges. I gave that a quick whirl, and here it is:

I have a chance meeting with the sorrowful old fool who passed out at the egg last night on my way to see that gentleman I heard mentioned over foul cocktails, before Mr Samuel Thompson’s hideous public humiliation. I’m very surprised to see the Old Fool, who looked quite frankly dead last night. He still looks rather dead, and yet I hear him mutter words that suggest his continuing and pitiful existence, words like ‘pain’ and ‘alcohol poisoning’. I’m catching the drift, more or less, I’m really not sure, of what he’s trying to communicate. I won’t even attempt a verbatim transcription here of the poor bastard’s monologue. But it goes something like this;

“When I was your age, young sir, I had the deepest desire to donate a kidney. After all, my boy, I did have the two. It seems frightfully selfish for a young gentleman to have so many kidneys when there are people out there with really frightful kidneys, or none at all, even. I trust, my boy, that you have donated one of your own,” the Old Fool looks very stern. He frightens me. Of course I haven’t, nor will I ever donate a kidney, or anything else for that matter. But I must humour the old coot.

“Yes, sir, I donated the larger of the two, and a lung.”

“Splendid!” (This is an extremely guttural sound), “My dear boy, I myself was not able to donate a kidney. I was healthy young man, in my prime, barely thirty-seven years of age, my boy, and they told me they wouldn’t take the kidney. I was positively crestfallen, my dear. I believe that they said something along the lines of, ‘Sir, your stronger kidney resembles a dog turd, and the other is unspeakable,’ I mean, they just cut me open, took one look at my darling kidneys, and then turned away, truthfully, young sir, they were retching. They sewed me up and threw me out. My dearly beloved, that is what drove me to the drink, and I vowed that from that day on, if I ever saw a young man, like I was those many years ago, declining to do his duty, and keeping all of his kidneys selfishly to himself, I would cut open his gut and positively feed them to him, young sir. Just look at me now,” and he screams, “Just look at me now! I have barely two kidneys to rub together…”

“If you’ll excuse me, sir, I have an appointment to donate a portion of my brain to friendly helpful people. If I’m late, I will be a murderer, and be held responsible in law.”

“Oh, marvellous, young marvellous man! May you never become as I am, a pathetic, drunken old rabbit.”

I would sooner die, “Farewell!” I say.

“Farewell, young sir my dear.”

Concerning Brother Surf

For connoisseurs, the following is a piece roughly contemporary to the fabled Baiting of the Marshfish, and appears to occur jointly in the world of that and of The Jonathan. Curious. Precise provenance cannot be determined.

Brother Surf walked into the Egg, with his beach-time anecdotes and propaganda, all his shit, every last morsel of that shit we’ll never, ever countenance. Well, he came to the bar, I was sitting on a stool, Stephen was slouched on the bar, and Apricot was looking at him askance, wiping a glass.

“Hello, Brother Surf,” I said, he had not yet reached his podium there by the bar, the place he would stand righteous and harass the bar staff, leaving us in the middle, or rather me in the middle, Stephen would never involve himself, crossfire or not.

“Yeah… Apricot, cider please.”

“Yes,” Apricot was blunt as ever.

“You know what?” Brother Surf preached his usual opening question.

“No.” Stephen spoke up unexpectedly.

“No? Ha! Well, I bumped into the bishop, the cunt, may he die, and you know what he said?”

“No,” this was turning into a real conversation for Stephen.

“I wouldn’t expect better from you – yeah, you – the silent one. Cunt. Well, yeah, so the bishop, yeah? The bishop – Bastard! – he told me that there had been complaints, you see, complaints,” seethe, “about my mosque. I mean, Jesus Aloud, what about Me? Fucking bishop, whole fucking diocese, it’s rotten. You hear me, Apricot?”

“Yes.”

“Slut. Yeah. Tell you what, Apricot. I’ve got a friend needs servicing. Think you could help? Ha! Well, what do you reckon I should do with the bishop?”

“Does he have a daughter?” Stephen offered.

“Oh! No,” Brother Surf was often sarcastic, “What do you think, Jack?”

“Petrol-bomb the fucker.”

“No. I’ll invite him to the beach. We’ll fight it out like men. Not worms, you fucking worm. Well, thanks for nothing, I’m leaving now, keep the change, ha! You’ll see, you’ll see,” and he left, swiftly, spitting.

Packet of Twenty

Between the chains of opportunity, somewhere, and the pitfalls of potential, in the midst of plimsolls and satchels, Mary bought a packet of twenty. She’d smoked the odd one at parties from acquaintances, her first on the building site, surreptitious, she’d liked it, liked them all, she never coughed, well, maybe spluttered, but she liked them so she bought a twenty packet from the racket on the platform that would sell to girls in plaid. She liked to smoke so Mary smoked, and in the pub with weekend feathers, Mary drank with older girls and passed and rose to any challenge that she was a schoolgirl.

Time has passed now; Mary has passed too, out of her school and into the dream lethargic as life. From phony potential to the jealousy of words, Mary’s mind can skip objective, drinking wine and smiling cigarettes and stretching limbs on waking, impassive as dawn.

I married Mary, not because she coughs now and she doesn’t like it, nor because she drinks like breathing and it’s ordinary, but because she eats a second breakfast or she doesn’t eat at all if she doesn’t fancy lunch, and she has a fine laugh, and she smokes the same cigarettes as me.