On Swedish Music

When you think of Swedish music, something else that people rarely do, you probably think of ABBA. We saw little to make us think anything has changed since then. In a park in Orëbro we came across a group of young people rehearsing for a performance they were about to give. They were clearly trying to sing some form of jazz, but it was jazz as imagined by someone who has had jazz explained to him at some point but has never actually heard any. They were also tone deaf. Another group in the same park (it was a large and lively park), were entertaining children with the theme from Pippi Långstrump and similar works. They had a big crowd and the children were enjoying it, so I assume there was something I was missing.

There is a relaxed feel to the music you hear around you. The feel of it suggests they are unused to strong melodies and dynamic, characterful rhythms. Even the Hare Krishna we saw in Stockholm were not chanting as they do in other places, but were producing a slow, mellifluent, almost tuneless sound like a group of hippies expressing the sound of water flowing over stones on a summer’s day. You could almost see long, light, printed dresses moving in the breeze.

Surely it's not Christmas again?

I like Christmas. I always have. Wherever I have been and whoever I have celebrated it with I have always found an atmosphere of genuine goodwill, happiness and the desire for peace. My good fortune, no doubt. Others will have less happy experiences to tell of, but for me Christmas brings the expectation of human warmth in the depth of winter, and as such I look forward to it and enjoy it like a child.

So whether you will be celebrating the birth of Christ, just having a day off with your family around you, or quaffing Scotch and muttering 'bah, humbug' to yourself and random passer-by, I wish you the very best, and I hope you will enjoy these days as I intend to.

To help the enjoyment along I offer a selection of songs about Him who will be born this night. First a confused attempt to reconcile faith with alcoholism, resulting in a sore head and increased existential angst.



Then, on a happier note, we have Bobby Bare with the definitive Christian football waltz (a limited genre, but a fine one nonetheless) requesting that Jesus 'drop kick him through the goalposts of life



And finally, Terry Allen picks up a divine hitchhiker late one night. As they say in Hollywood, it doesn't turn out as planned... The line at 3:18 is a classic that still makes me laugh out loud.




Hope you enjoyed that. Once again to all who have taken time to read any of my ramblings, and especially to those who have commented on them, all the best for a very Happy Christmas.

Niche Narratives

Rereading some short stories by O Henry, I was struck, as I often am, by the desire to have written some of them myself. If I could excise him from history, hide the tales from the world for long enough for them to be forgotten, then produce them as my own, I think I would do it. Or possibly not. His style is not mine, his life was not mine, his characters can never be mine, but many of the ideas behind the stories are universal, at least, they are once they’ve been thought of.

Last night I read ‘The Last Leaf’. I am certain I remember the story from another setting, involving a couple of Frenchmen. I don’t know which is the original, or perhaps it comes from some folk tale, or a source older than writing itself, and O Henry and others have taken it and given it a new world and new flesh to live in. His story may be overdramatised, and I would have given it a different title, but the composition is perfectly balanced, and the whole thing is gathered together by its own coherence.

It made me think about other unusual idea which have been repeated (or copied) in writing and in song. I have a little list (now that line rings a bell, too, for some reason) of particularly striking cases:

I’ve always thought that Thomas Hardy pinched the entire plot of The Mayor of Casterbridge from Les Miserables. The story of a man reacting against his own weakness and stupidity, trying to make up for them, rising to achieve great things, and finally losing the daughter who was his main inspiration is common enough, but there are too many similar details for it to be purely chance. I would have to read them both again to explain it more fully, but I am sure there is some influence.

Lope de Vega once wrote a sonnet which is a description of the process of writing itself. (It’s called Soneto de Repente, if anyone wants to look it up). And Leonard Cohen wrote a song called Hallelujah, a rather splendid song if you like that sort of thing, the first verse of which describes its own musical theme (It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift) very cleverly.

Another O Henry story is ‘The Tainted Tenner’, narrated by a ten-dollar bill. The Guy Clarke song, ‘Indian-Head Penny’, is not narrated by the coin, but it tells a similar story of its birth and adventures, and all the places it ends up and the jobs it has to do.

Country music has many niche narratives. Although every second country song ever written is about some guy getting drunk over some girl, among the songs which find other aspects of life there are some unusual themes. Girl who turns to prostitution out of despair is common enough (Townes van Zandt’s ‘Tecumseh Valley’ is one of the best). But there are a couple of songs which refine it further, as ‘mama was a whore because she had to be but she was always good to me.’ ‘Hickory Hollow Tramp’ and ‘Lily of the Alley’ aren’t great songs, but they take a very specific and unusual theme and do something with it.

There is even room for a, very small, ‘Jesus Christ on the highway’ genre. I forget the name of the song in which a truck driver meets Jesus out jogging on the road. He explains that Heaven isn’t a good place for running so He comes down to Earth to do His jogging. And there is the brilliant, and very funny, Terry Allen song ‘Gimme a Ride to Heaven,’ which is worth 5 minutes of anyone’s time.

This has been a series of random thoughts. Indulge me. In a couple of days I must return to the city, where I shall have to think, get up in the morning, organize my mind and my life, and pretend that what I do has a serious purpose. The riffing on odd things seen in the mountains will have to end. But today I can still think random thoughts.

*The photos are of the salt works I wrote about last week. I couldn't upload them then.

Lucia di Lammermoor

Your blogging hedgehog likes the Opera.  I'm not a buff, not having had the opportunity to watch much over the years, but I go when I have the chance and I always  enjoy it. I listen to the live performances from the Met and watch on the TV on the rare occasions there is any. Recordings almost invariably lack something, and compilations of arias are like watching highlights of old cricket matches. Not the same thing. The Three Tenors are not for me. Opera is a spectacle, a show, and admiring the technical ability of Plácido Domingo as he sings a nice song out of context is a cold, abstract pleasure, lightyears away from watching him perform Siegmund at Covent Garden.

We don't even have a proper theatre here, so the cultural offerings are minimal. There is an old cinema which is often used as a theatre, a stage was added years ago, but it's small, the sound quality is poor and there is no orchestra pit. A reduced orchestra sits literally under the stage. There is an outdoor space which is good for performers with powerful voices or microphones, music and opera, say, though not theatre as such, and in any case it's rarely used. And a new theatre is allegedly being built, but I'll believe it when I see it.

This is just my reaction to a performance I experienced. It's 'what I did last night', not a review for the New York Times. And it's as I wrote it, not adapted for consumption by the reader.

Lucia di Lammermoor. The whole thing is coloured for tragedy, except the chorus which a couple of times thinks it has something to celebrate. The production was cheap but with some imagination. The directing was poor, lots of walking very slowly across the stage for no apparent reason, people standing in the wrong place and moving in the wrong ways. And some of the acting was terrible.

Dolores Lahuerta was Lucia and she was very good indeed. She seemed a bit shrill in the first act and I wondered how she would handle Il Dolce Suono, but, although she cheated a bit on the highest, most difficult part, (and I'm not going to blame her for not being Joan Sutherland) she gave a brilliant performance in which she took control of the stage, the cast and the entire theatre and sang lke a woman mad with love. It's not easy to do that. Not easy at all. It was wondeful to listen to and to watch. I didn't want it to end. For nearly 15 minutes (I think) she had the entire theatre scared to breathe in case it provoked her. Terrific stuff it was.

The brother Enrico had a poor voice and was a terrible actor, almost embarassed about being on the stage. Not a tyrannical figure at all. The lover Edgardo had a nice voice but was a wimpy type, not one to dedicate his life and death to a woman, and not someone a woman like Lucia would die for.

The first scene of act three between Enrico and Edgardo should be dripping with tension and menace. They are two brave and powerful men who hate each other and don't kill each other only because they each have an idea of honour that stops them short for different reasons. Instead they looked like a couple of nerds playing at being hard. The whole show failed because of that.

And Edgardo's final death scene, coming after Lucia's, is likely to be anti-climactic and struck me as too long, but with this chap playing the role it almost became ridiculous. A pity, really. Presumably Donizetti knew what he was doing and placed it here for a reason.

The orchestra, a local one,  was good, and I liked the conductor. The choir was also local, experienced and competent. The flautist, a young blonde woman, who was on the rostrum for the mad scene also did a good job. So a varied evening, cuarte's eggish, but when it's all you've got you learn to enjoy it.

On The Motivations of the Guilds of Craftsmen

When people in the same business are apart they are plotting against each other. When they get together they are plotting against the rest of us. There are plenty of professions where entry needs to be controlled to some extent. You wouldn’t want just anyone putting a sign on his door and calling himself a doctor. The business of finding out whether he had actually learned anything other than a flick through Gray’s online and what he remembered from ‘playing’ with his cousin in the airing cupboard years ago is likely to be quite exhilarating, but possibly rather short. No, we really want to know that when we go to a medical practitioner he has been weighed in the balance by an expert group of his peers who would have liked nothing better than to keep him out of their club, but couldn’t find a reason to do so.

We can add a number of other professions in which it is essential that a certain expertise be demonstrated before one is allowed to practice. Some where it might be considered useful or helpful to the customer. These might include many of the artisans’ guilds. After all, the mechanical quality of a mediaeval clock cannot easily be judged by a layman. But then there are many professions and trades in which the customer requires no such protection, and the only reason practitioners have for restricting entry is to protect themselves.

The first group that comes to mind are journalists. They have created for themselves a complex mythology, the illusion that they are special, a cut above the rest of us, and so entitled to cheat and lie and act abominably in circumstances where mere mortals would be criticised and punished. At times we seem to take them at their own evaluation. A bad idea, as well as a wrong one.

They have always been attempts to decide who could and could not be employed as a journalist, to limit the numbers who were called journalists as opposed to commentators or whatever, and the powerful groups were keen to keep certain people out, but in Britain at least it doesn’t seem to have been particularly successful, perhaps because it wasn’t easy to define criteria which weren’t transparently interpretable as ‘so-and-so’s son’, and ‘his uncle handles the free tickets for Wimbledon’. But it has never stopped them trying. In Spain you can do a degree in journalism. There doesn’t seem to be any real point, not in terms of what you learn, but it’s still the best way to get into the club.

The Internet will soon kill print journalism and the legal and practical limits on the number of news outlets have ceased to exist. Anyone can do news reporting now, all that is needed is something to report on, something to say about it, and some idea of how to communicate. We will see a huge number of major news gathering organizations come to prominence in the next few years, some of them with familiar names, and many will disappear again quickly. There will be turnover as there is in music and fashion, but it won’t just be yesterday’s edition wrapping the chips, it’ll be yesterday’s journalists.

There is clearly no need for the law, or the union, to establish criteria for whom a news outlet may choose to employ. Someone looking to hire a writer will have available all the information they require to make that choice. Insisting that they can’t employ someone who doesn’t have the right degree, or the right experience, or the approval of the Head Boy and Girl, serves no one but those who already have power within the trade. It doesn’t help the paper or the reader in any way. It’s not only the unions who like the idea of deciding who is and who is not a journalist. Governments would love to licence journalists, privileging the tame ones and making life difficult for the outsiders.

The same is true of acting and music. I have an actress friend who often complains about ‘intrusismo’, which I don’t know the English word for, but what she means is that, despite having gone to drama school, she loses out on TV roles to people who have little formal training, but are younger and better looking than she is (I should say, even though she is unlikely to read this, that she is in fact young and attractive, but so are a lot of other aspiring actresses). What she fails to appreciate is that the laws and customs which prevent just anyone from calling himself a doctor or an architect or whatever, are there to protect the customer, not the worker. In stage and TV the customer is the producer/director, and ultimately the viewer, all of whom are interested only in the actual performance the performer is capable of giving, don’t need to be told how by a piece of paper, because they can see for themselves.

There is a movement among musicians here for some kind of licence. You can’t charge for a performance unless you’ve got a diploma from an official music school or some such nutty idea. That one will never see the light of day, but it’s difficult to explain to them that you earn the right to be paid by playing something that someone actually wants to hear, and playing it well.

Another angle on this is offered by my physiotherapist, properly trained and competent to do all kinds of things, including treating muscle and bone injuries, some of it with machines, that you wouldn’t want an incompetent playing around with. He complains about ‘intrusismo’, and in this case he’s right to do so, as there are loads of people who’ve learnt to do a basic massage and then call themselves physiotherapists, wasting people’s money and sometimes doing them harm. But my physio also complains about all the rules, on equipment, training of staff, inspections etc, that the association makes him follow. He doesn’t quite grasp that it’s all part of the same thing. You keep out the incompetent (in this case legitimately, I feel) by demanding high standards of the competent.

It’s all rent-seeking of one kind or another, and it’s part of being human. But it pays to be aware of it, and of what’s behind it.

The Hickory Wind

I am slightly disappointed, though not surprised, that no one has ever asked what the title of the blog refers to. The cognoscenti of Cosmic American Music will know, and why would anyone else be interested?

It may be right, it may be wrong, but it's Rock'n'Roll

Hickory Wind was arguably the most emblematic song of Gram Parsons, and is a painful expression of longing for a lost past. Parsons was born Cecil Ingram Connor and revolutionised both country and rock in the early 70’s by writing songs and performing them in ways that no one else dared to do. He was a tortured musical genius (or a self-absorbed trustafarian junkie, depending on your point of view), who discovered Emmylou Harris, taught the Byrds how to make real music, taught the Stones how to do country, and died at 26 of a heroin overdose (of course) leaving a small but influential legacy, and a musical landscape transformed.

For years I planned to get a tattoo in his honour, but I couldn’t come with a way of conceptualising the hickory wind in a unobtrusive doodle. When I finally had an idea I was happy with, Mrs Hickory vetoed it because it involved a tombstone and it gave her the creeps. In any case there is a time and an age for that sort of thing, and I left it behind some time ago.

I have always been a fan of North American music, from cowboy songs to western swing and Appalachian folk, from Tex-Mex to Cajun and zaideco, from Green Grow the Rushes to George Gershwin, including southern jazz and blues played by old black men on the steps of their house, which is about as authentic as music can get. My favourite is the rough, tough Texan stuff, like Steve Earle, Guy Clark, Townes van Zant, Kevin Welch, Terry Allen, and we can add Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Ed Bruce and George Jones when they allowed to make music instead of money. Gram Parsons doesn’t fit in there, but he was a one-off, like Tom Waits. It’s a million miles from Nashville, and all that commercial syrup that has given country music such a bad name.

Gratuitous Texan Song of the Day

Tanya Tucker, at 13, sounding like a middle-aged junkie who's almost given up on the world, with a song that won't die (not in my head, anyway). And it comes complete with a full-tone* modulation at 1:15, in case Mr Wadsworth drops by. I don't call it a gear-change because it seems to work, almost to be required*.

*I think. I'm open to correction.

And as an extra, this one, a simple but powerful story that only that young, raddled voice could tell.

Southern Rhythm and Idle Thoughts

In the end, no waterfowl, I fear. The weather was looking a bit dodgy, though in fact it turned out rather pleasant. But a decision had to be made on the available evidence and it was not to go too far. So we went running instead, which means we can't be 20 miles from home when the rain starts. I say running but, Mrs Hickory having short legs and your blogging hedgehog long ones, in practice she runs and I walk, and we both do satisfactory exercise and see the world a bit. The old railway line is our usual route for this, because it's flat, the ground is even and you meet a lot of people.

But, as I say, no waterfowl. Instead I offer you an observation on the limitations of political debate, and a feel-good song from the deep south; Alabama this time:

"Those who are strictly of the right tend not to recognise that some are genuinely fearful of not being able to provide for themselves and their families. Those of the left frequently forget that someone else has to pay for all their plans. When commentators of the right talk of rights (not a word they use very much, but the idea is often present) they mean freedoms, the absence of interference by government in private life. When the left speak of rights they mean other people’s money. It isn’t easy to understand each other like that, even if it’s only for the purpose of arguing. There is no common ground.

When David Cameron is asked to be, or acclaimed for being, or accused of being, brave, or responsible, or whatever, because he has approved some measure which will benefit some section of society, what he has done is simply to make a calculation as to the distribution of lost/gained votes that will result from his promising that other people will be forced to spend their money to make it possible.

By all means characterize left-wingers as being either stupid or lazy- which some of them undoubtedly are- and right-wingers as being greedy and uncaring- again, some of them are- but they both have a point, an important point essential to their ideas, which is unrecognized by those who disagree with them. We look at the world and we see different things."

Give Me a Ride to Heaven

Working on some stuff about education and migrating birds, but life is busy and time is short, so I offer you another in our series of Texan singer/songwriters enjoying themselves. You need to listen to the words on this one. And believe it or not, its not the only song about a hitchhiking Messiah. (The other one's a trucking song, wrong genre for this blog).

A Regular Guy

I don't know if I'm one- sometimes I hope so, sometimes I hope not- but Steve Earle claims to be one, something I doubt is true, by the way. Anyhow, for those of you who were missing the upbeat Texan music, here is the man explaining how 'regular' he is.

"I Feel Fine Today"

So, you will be pleased to hear, does Kevin Welch. And so, if you click the link, will you.

In Which I Make A Surprising Confession

'Two Little Boys' is a very good song.

There, I have said it, and I feel purged and clean, a simpler, purer hedgehog. Rolf Harris has been guilty of many crimes against taste, and took particular pleasure in perpetrating them on British television, but this is a great song. Of course, it's a children's song, you wouldn't try it at karaoke night down the Blind Beggar, you wouldn't want to hear it more than about twice a year and I don't see Bruce Springsteen covering it in the near future, but it is a finely crafted song, linking a simple, homely tale with an equally simple but horribly dramatic one, in an imaginative, elegant fashion, telling a tragic, but ultimately mundane story with humanity and power.

I am moved to make this admission by Ben Goldacre over at Bad Science, who, in the course of explaining possible flaws in a study of an aspect of human behaviour, tells the story behind the song, which I was not aware of:

'When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, Rolf Harris chose to take his own song “Two Little Boys” with him. When war broke out, Rolf explained, his father and uncle had both joined up, his father lying about his younger brother’s age so they could both join the fight. But their mother found out and dobbed them in, because she couldn’t bear the thought of losing both her sons so young. Rolf’s uncle joined up 2 years later when he came of age, was injured, and died on the front. Rolf’s dad was beside himself, and for the rest of his life he believed that no matter what the risks, if he had been in the same infantry, he could have crawled out and saved his younger brother, just like in the song. Rolf played “Two Little Boys” to his grandmother just once. She sat through it quietly, took it off at the end, and said quietly: “please don’t ever play that to me again”.'

Recursive Music

It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift…

I imagine everybody knows Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah, since, apart from being played regularly on music radio in any one of a hundred versions, it seems to be the mood music of choice for the closing credits of every detective series Hollywood churns out, and it churns out a lot. So you’ll have noticed that the first verse mostly describes what the tune is doing. Quirky, but not exactly recursion, more self-reference than chicken and egg.

Not unique either. Lope de Vega wrote a sonnet that describes the process of writing a sonnet about a sonnet. As a bit of a joke, presumably.

But for real recursion look at songs like ‘The Kentucky Waltz’, ‘The Tennessee Waltz’, ‘The Last Cheater’s Waltz’ (yes, there is a theme developing here), or ‘The Lambeth Walk’ for that matter. The song (B) that the song (A) is about only exists because the song (A) exists, but it (B) didn’t exist to be written about until (A) was written. It couldn’t even exist in the mind of the composer until it had already been written.

Odd, really. But then music, the performance of music, is recursive when it’s done properly. A good musician is constantly responding to the sound that he knows he is about to make.

GP RIP

Thirty six years ago today, Gram Parsons made a prat of himself for the final time, at the Joshua Tree motel in the desert of California. The mess he made of his life is a pity, as he could was from a wealthy family and could have done anything he wanted, and his finest music was made a few months before he died. But his family was also very messy, and drugs and music were a way of trying to turn it into something better.

Death, on the other hand, froze him in early youth, and froze his music at a point that has served as a reference for many more successful singers and songwriters. He gave us Emmylou Harris, the Eagles, Wilco, The Byrds, Sheryl Crow and countless others. I'm pretty sure he also influenced the origins of punk, but maybe we aren't so grateful for that.

The stories are well known, hanging out with Keith Richards, joining, transforming and leaving the Byrds, opening for the Grateful Dead, fighting with everyone he ever sang with, walking out on record companies, taking off on the motorbike without warning, and dying with an icecube up his backside and having his body stolen and burnt in the desert. But the songs were what mattered, and they still are. Who can listen to $1000 Wedding or Brass Buttons without getting goosebumps?

Sharper readers of this blog will already have noticed I'm a bit of a fan. If you are too, let us bow our heads and put Grievous Angel on the CD. If you're not, or don't even know what I'm talking about, normal service will be resumed shortly.