There is a lot of wonderful music out there, you hear it on the radio every day. If your my age, you've been hearing it on the radio for about fifty years now. What I've learned over the years, though, is that the music you hear on the radio is not always the best music there is out there, even by the the same artist. I find this very frustrating to talk to people who have an opinion on an artist only based on what they've heard on the radio. To help relieve my frustration a little in this regard, I'm going to post some of my favourite songs you probably haven't heard on the radio.
The first one is Leonard Cohen's "The Sisters of Mercy". I was kind of torn between this and "Dress Rehearsal Rag" but I was after a slightly lighter tone so chose the former. I saw Cohen perform this song live here in London many years ago and he told a little story about how it came to be. Apparently he was wandering frigid Edmonton after a concert one wintery evening and somehow got invited in out of the cold by a couple of young women. He ended up spending an "unfortunately chaste" night at the girls' place and ended up writing this song as a result, if my faltering memory serves. Melanie Safka has always been one of my favourite artists, ever since "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain). It always bothered me that one of her most popular songs of all time was "Brand New Key". It certainly is a catchy little song but in her overall body of work there is some achingly beautiful music. Once again I had a hard time choosing. I finally opted for "Leftover Wine", probably one of her best. Briefly, it describes her relationship with her fans and audience. It was hard not to pick "Momma Momma", "Bobo's Party" or perhaps even "Birthday of the Sun", plus many others. This particular song, perhaps more than any other, showcases her amazing voice.
I was watching a Harry Chapin PBS special many years ago and saw him perform a song called "Sniper". It was an amazing nine minute opus and I immediately went and bought the album it was on. Out of many Chapin songs I love, this is personally my favourite. It is a fascinating character study, touching on human nature and the effects of alienation. It was inspired by the story of Charles Whitman, who, in 1966, went to the top of the University of Texas tower and started shooting, killing thirteen people and an unborn child. Not typical Chapin stuff but he goes back and forth, almost documentary style, getting the story both from the sniper's viewpoint and the people who knew him. This is a powerful song.
I was only mildly familiar with Joni Mitchell before I saw an appearance of hers on the Johnny Cash show way back when. She sang a song called "For Free",from her "Ladies of the Canyon" album. At that point I was hooked, bought the album and many more. Nothing of hers I'd heard on the radio at that point really would have prompted me to become a fan so I'm very thankful for Johnny Cash having her on.
Okay, I think I might stop there although I could go on and on. As you've probably figured out by now, I am an old "folkie" and I make no apologies. If you've hung in there and actually listened to all of these then you've heard almost half an hour of "Brian Baker music" and you should be congratulated for making it through! There has always been so much music out there that the radio and T.V. stations couldn't possibly do all the artists the justice they so readily deserve. The end result is that we, as an audience, lose out. We never get the opportunity to hear all the other music that's out there. Occasionally, Doralyn and I will be watching a movie and somewhere in the soundtrack we'll hear a song we fancy, that we've never heard before. So we look up the artist and discover all sorts of new great music! That's the wonderful thing, it's all at your fingertips!
In a recent blog, I mentioned that one of my all-time favourite movies is "Four Weddings and a Funeral". I then went on to list some of the qualities about it I liked best. One of the reasons I like it is that it contains poetry. In his eulogy to his partner, Gareth (Simon Callow), Matthew (John Hannah) reads a poem to the mourners who are gathered. It was W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues". I had never heard this poem before and, up to that point in the movie, it was nothing I'd been expecting. It seemed I'd even forgotten the actual title of the movie and was not prepared for either one of its larger-than-life characters to pass away or this poem's recitation to move me the way it did. It took the general tone of the movie and turned it a full one hundred and eighty degrees. The following is a clip of the movie wherein John Hannah recites the poem:
This is what I love about poetry. It does have the power to at least momentarily grab hold of you and re-arrange the way you view or think about something. In "Funeral Blues", Auden manages to take the demise of one single person and and stop the world with it. It's not one of those "death" poems that's trying to be uplifting either, the last line clearly shows a depth and length of despair which appears to be almost interminable. My love of poetry began back in the sixties. As I became interested in popular music, I found myself drifting towards artists such as Simon and Garfunkel and Leonard Cohen. Cohen, in particular, bridged the gap between poet and musical artist demonstratively. We studied Cohen in high school, both his music and his written work. For me, it was the perfect blend of words and music I'd never heard the like of before. I imagine it also appealed to the introspective and analytical part of whoever I thought I was at the time. It is tempting to include one of his pieces of music here but I'm saving that for another post somewhere down the road. I would like to include, though, one of his poems that has resonated with me the last forty years or so. It is from a book of poetry entitled "The Spice Box of Earth".
I wonder how many people in this city
I wonder how many people in this city live in furnished rooms. Late at night when I look out at the buildings I swear I see a face in every window looking back at me and when I turn away I wonder how many go back to their desks and write this down.
When I went to retrieve the words to this poem, I was amazed at how many other bloggers had taken the time to write about it. It clearly had struck a chord with many other people, not just myself. I think if you are a writer of any kind then you tend to look a little more closely at the things unfolding all around you. Writing is also a bit of a lonely thing to do and nowhere is this demonstrated better than in this poem by Cohen. How much more alone can you be than to be in an apartment by yourself where the furniture is not even your own, looking out over a world of anonymous strangers? But the poet in Cohen has seen through to the universality of this and wondered if maybe we are all in the same boat together. When you realize this, the potential of us all being together in our loneliness arises. This will not stop you from being isolated but once you realize you are not alone in your isolation it's not quite as terrifying. When I read this poem the first time the imagery hit me like a tiny little thunderbolt. This, then, is one of the things I love about poetry.
Bronwen Wallace
Speaking about thunderbolts, I once read a book called "The Stubborn Particulars of Grace", by Bronwen Wallace. I had attended a reading she did here in London, admired her poetry greatly, and bought this book afterwards. Just a few short months later she was dead of cancer, sadly. My signed copy of her book is now one of my prized possessions. Wallace, more than any other poet I'd read up to that time, pointed out the potential for poetry in everyday life. She essentially looked at the everyday goings-on in her life and saw the significance beyond their surfaces. Occasionally, I will read a poem and go holy crap at the end of it. Just about every single poem in "The Stubborn Particulars of Grace" evoked that response and I read the book over and over. It greatly affected the type of poetry I was writing at the time simply because it made me realize that almost anything can be a poem. It was then I really started looking at the world in a new light. In a "Fifty Shades of Grey" kind of world, you don't see a lot of people sitting there, reading poetry, anymore. As I remember, back in high school we were more or less forced to read the little bit of poetry we did. I took a little less forcing than most of the rest of us and I'm kind of happy for this. I get back to the books of poetry I still have every now and then. Besides Cohen and Wallace, I could also recommend Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Bill Bissett, Lorna Crozier, Colleen Thibaudeau, James Reaney, Anne Michaels and Michael Ondaatje. Canadians, all of them, and a pretty small selection out of all the great Canadian poets there are. In my life, I have gravitated to the Canadian poets but the world is full of marvelous writers of poetry, Auden included.
So give poetry a try. Go to a reading the next time there is one. Join a poetry group. Download a song but maybe read the lyrics at the same time. Sit with a kid and do rhymes. Take a song you enjoy and give it your own words. Look at the world around you and try to figure out what one thing means to the next. None of this will be nearly as painful as it may seem to you now. Poetry is worth it, in whatever dose you choose!
I imagine that when most of you think of "steamboats" you are taken back to the glory days of side wheelers plowing down the Mississippi or perhaps even the Great Lakes waters, maybe even the coastal and inland waters of B.C. To me, however, "steamboat" is a unit of time. It is a unit of time closely approximating one second once you have taken the time to say the word "steamboat" out loud, in normal cadence. As a proviso, you must also add a number to this, as in "one steamboat" or "two steamboats". "Steamboats" is the classic method for denoting how long the defence in a game of touch football must wait, after the ball has been snapped, before it is allowed to rush the opposing quarterback. The reason this is used is primarily to allow the offence time to complete some kind of play. In normal football, the offensive players would be able to block the defensive ones, thereby giving the quarterback a little time to run a play. In touch football, though, there is no blocking allowed. This, then, is why "steamboats" are employed. It works like this. Before the start of the game, the two teams decide how many "steamboats" will be counted off after the snap of the ball. It will be the job of one of the defensive players to stand there and count the "steamboats" out loud. When he has reached the allotted number of "steamboats", he or anyone else on his team is allowed the rush the quarterback. So what you end up with is one guy standing there, going "one steamboat, two steamboats, three steamboats...etc", while all around him all hell is breaking loose, guys are criss-crossing all over the place, yelling for the ball, cursing and the like. I have no idea why the word "steamboat" was chosen. As a spoken unit of time, the number "one thousand" is also used, along with its ascending number ie. one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand and so on. Ironically, so is the word "Mississippi" (one mississippi, two mississippi,...) so maybe this is where steamboats came from? Generally in a game of touch football you don't go much higher than about eight steamboats. This is probably good, as my experience using steamboats as units of time in other endeavours eg. run/walk intervals, is that "steamboats" becomes a bit of a tongue-twister the higher up you go. I actually did a comparison the other evening as Doralyn, my wife, and I were out doing a training run. I compared "steamboats" with the"one-one thousand" method and found the latter to actually be more precise. Of course, at the same time my heart was beating outside my chest so it was a very subjective kind of test! So that's the story on steamboats. It's probably been about 45 years since I've played touch football of the schoolyard variety so have had little opportunity to be on a field counting out steamboats. I'm not even a hundred percent sure that anyone even uses "steamboats" any more. It could very well be they have gone the way of......well.....steamboats...now that I think about it!
