Quay Note

Currachs, like upturned whales beached

as musical notation on the quay.

Those sleek, mussel shelled torpedoes

ready to cleave though

wavewalls, green  and white-tipped,

chasing schools of quick-silver with

hand-strung nets tuned to their scales.

Rhythmic fingers conduct these vessels

in ancient songs that harmonise

with an underwater chorus,

carrying the music booming deep through the years,

where the call and response of the tides

meets the Blasket sound of memory.

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Pieces of a Man – Gil Scott-Heron (1949 – 2011)

Dublin in the mid-1970′s wasn’t exactly a hotbed (or even a hot water bottle) for music. Punk had yet to make much of an impact and, while the likes of Thin Lizzy had a blazed a trail, the city seemed to be in the grip of  generic, wide-flared soft-rock – Stepaside, Bagatelle, Freebooze (anyone remember them?) – or trad, from the Fureys in the Wexford Inn to the tourist trap diddly of O’Donoghues.

The music we swapped in school (on vinyl, with the cassette tape being the napster of the day) ranged from Led Zeppelin to the cult of Jim Morrison. The guy with the most eclectic musical taste was Larry Comerford, or rather Larry and his two older brothers. From the MC5 to The Band, Dylan to Springsteen (especially The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle and Darkness on the Edge of Town) the Comerfords had good music bleeding out of their ears. But the one artist that I heard in their house that pulled me up short and made me think about the words was Gil Scott-Heron and the album Pieces of a Man.

Scott-Heron was like no-one I had heard before – genuinely angry, words spitting out of him with venom, a ghetto poet with a jazz back-beat (courtesy of Brian Jackson) trying to find justice in a cruel, uncaring world. Tracks like Home is Where the Hatred Is and Winter in America told of his alienation, his pain and his addiction. Scott-Heron made music for the oppressed, the ignored, the scared and the scarred – his people. But his music also crossed boundaries and generations, his words spoke a universal truth. This was poetry in action, long before John Cooper Clarke, Billy Bragg, the manufactured anger of The Sex Pistols or the political fury of The Clash. Scott-Heron’s poetry wasn’t lyrical, it didn’t really capture beauty in any classical sense, rather it encapsulated the banality of living in desolate urban landscapes, the casual swinging of a cop’s nightstick, fathers and mothers abandoning their children, living in shooting alleys, crawling in the gutter. The genius of his words was that no matter how bleak they were they made you empathise, and made you angry even while sitting in a comfortable middle-class suburban armchair. He made you care and for any writer that has to be the highest accolade.

While the albums had a power, it was as a live performer that Scott-Heron really came into his own. He annexed the stage, towering over the audience yet he had such a low speaking voice for all his harsh words that people hushed (mostly) to hear him as he interwove his songs with anecdotes about his life, his day or just riffed on the months of the year being in the wrong place. I first saw him live in Band on The Wall in Manchester sometime in the mid-1980s, a mainly reggae club on the edgier side of town in those days (alas now part of the gentrified Northern Quarter, whatever the fuck that is). Walking in the door there was no mistaking the kind of smoking going on. Beer was served strictly in large bottles and coke only came with Jack Daniels or a rolled up pound note. Through the smoke, Gil Scott-Heron strode, totally self-contained and played a set blistering in its political integrity. Even the most blissed out stoner stood up and shook the fog out of their brains that night, it was one of the most energising performances I’ve had the pleasure of seeing.

I’ve seen Scott-Heron live a few times since then, some good and some not so good. His battles with addiction have been well documented and affected him for a long time in the 1990s and into the new millenium. But he was back to his biting, scathing best with his latest release I’m New Here with an added mellowness befitting his maturity and his gig in the Pod in May was possibly the best I’ve seen him play since that first time in Manchester. Its just a shame he didn’t get a chance to enjoy his renaissance. Go softly Gil, and know that you’ve left behind a righteous anger.

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Richmond Fontaine – The Workman’s Club

Songs about speed-freaks burying bodies under the concrete, teenage girls getting knocked up, a remote bar in the middle of nowhere that people are afraid to visit, women who disappear presumed murdered, a clandestine, doomed love affair and with opening lines like, “I just fucked up, Arlene…”, its not exactly Michael Bublé material but for Portland, Oregan’s Richmond Fontaine this is just a starting point into some dark, disturbing songs taken from their most recent album The High Country.

On Friday 4th November at The Workman’s Club, in front of a small group of obvious aficionados,  the band, along with Amy Boone from The Damnations, played the entire song-novel concept album – dealing with said teenage girl and her desperate attempts to leave both her husband and the remote rural logging community that she lives in. From the get-go this was a spellbinding, engrossing show where the proverbial pin excused itself for being so noisy as it hit the floor. Normally the idea of listening to a concept album live would have me running screaming for the exits with the memories of painful prog-rock abominations from Yes and ELP hot on my heels but The High Country album and this live show told a captivating, heartbreaking story backed by musicians of the highest quality.

The opening song/track/chapter ‘Inventory‘, is an achingly beautiful piece sung by Boon and backed by Willy Vlautin and Dan Eccles on a guitar that he somehow makes sound like a cello playing in a minor-key. The story is about a young woman trapped in a loveless marriage to a logger who gets his legs crushed by a tree. She goes to work in an autoparts store where all the men hit on her. She is stalked by Claude Murray the owner of The Chainsaw Sea bar where ‘under the concrete the fat man from Mississippi’ is buried. Murray is a speed-freak, out of his head most days, and is in league with Angus King an even more disturbed individual who lives deep in the woods, cooking up meth. The girl falls for a mechanic and they make plans to escape the stultifying, fucked-up small town but even as they meet on the logging road Murray and King arrive and from this encounter two people end up dead and a third would probably be better off dead than enduring what might come next.

The High Country has seventeen sparse, high-quality songs with a couple of instrumentals. The songs range from the melancholic ‘Inventory’ to the equally melancholic but proper rock-out of ‘The Chainsaw Sea’. But the one song that stands out for me is ‘Let Me Dream of The High Country‘, in just over two minutes it contains a whole life-time of regret, missed opportunity and desire to escape the trappings of everyday life. Vlautin manages to distill the themes of his three novels to date – The Motel Life, Northline and Lean on Pete – into this one album and the gig in The Workman’s Club was in thrall to his story-telling mastery.Vlautin has rightly been compared to John Steinbeck and Raymond Carver for his stories of the American underclass, the dispossessed and disenfranchised. Vlautin is rooted in the environment of which he writes and his particular sense of place is prevalent in The High Country, as the remote Oregan logging town where the action takes place is called Clatskenie, which also happens to Carver’s birthplace.

But The High Country is only half the story of the night. Richmond Fontaine have been on the road for many years with an impressive back catalogue and they brought out some crackers to supplement The High Country. From the sublime ‘A Ghost I Became‘ from Thirteen Cities (“I began taking vacation days and driving out as far as I could/The people around me said I drew away that a ghost I became”) to ‘Western Skyline‘ to the superbly named ‘We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River’, the band kept tossing out gems. The only regret? They didn’t play ‘Lost in This World’ but that just gives me an excuse to post it again here:

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Let The Man Speak

The Pod, Sunday night wasn’t so much a concert as an intimate conversation. Gil Scott Heron wandered on stage, picked up the mike and began telling jokes and stories and playing songs. He has a theory on the months of the year being in the wrong place – September, October, November and December should, linguistically speaking, occur two months before they actually do. And there is no way February should be Black History Month. Not because its a tokenistic sop from white America but because no fucker can pronounce it, no brother can spell it and, according to Heron’s theory, it’s last month of the year.

What followed was a virtuoso performance from a man, comfortable in his ability to lead a band – The Amnesia Express – and the audience on a journey through some of his most poetic and meaningful songs while not taking himself too seriously. ‘Winter in America’ followed a discourse on how the seasons were structured and what happened when one of them got too uppity. There were some beautiful medleys, ‘Peace go with you Brothers’ beautifully surrounded ‘The Bottle’. There was also a wonderfully poignant version of ‘Home is Where the Hatred is’. And if the Greens want an anthem to bring them into the next election they could do worse than ‘We Almost Lost Detroit’.

Above all else, a Heron gig is a performance. Words and music come together in a way that seems effortless and seamless but is all about craft, knowledge and experience. If you didn’t catch him and the band here be sure to see him at the Electric Picnic in September.

The one downside to the gig? The idiots at the bar who talked non-stop through the show. Why bother to go if you’re not going to listen? This is something the Pod management need to address – the least a performer needs is a bit of quiet to do his thing.

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Search Me

I’ve just seen the latest search query for this blog – “Jewish mother-in-law”. I don’t know what sort of strange person would be searching for Jewish mother-in-laws on blogsites but they won’t find any here.

And here’s another query – “Willie O’Dea gun shot”. If only that were true in any sense…

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May The Road Rise With You

As a glimpse of a post-apocalypic future, The Road, directed by John Hillcoat with a script by Joe Penhall, could yet be regarded as a cinematic cousin of Waiting for Godot. While Vladimir and Estragon wait fruitlessly for a Godot that never arrives, the Man and the Boy set out on a journey “south” that seems to have no end. In both cases the days seem full of endless repetition with only the occasional encounter to enliven proceedings.

The landscape in The Road is beyond bleak, ash falls from the sky thanks to fires that never seem to go out and earthquakes are frequent. There is no vegetation, no animal life and, seemingly, no hope. Yet, through this desolation the Man and the Boy plod, day after depressing day. They pick up what food they can, mostly mouldy, water is heated and sieved through socks. The Man (superb performance by Viggo Mortensen) seems to shrink visibly day-by-day as he tries to steer his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee)  from childhood to adult – a retrieved comic gives way to a gun with one bullet and the unmistakable inference that, if he has to, he must use on himself.

While most of the population appears to have died, the father and son manage to meet up with various pieces of detritus, most of whom are hostile, such as the gangs of maraudering cannibals with a taste for young flesh. The Father and Son break into a house that could be the one owned by the family from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where rounded up survivors are now being farmed for food.

They encounter Ely (Robert Duvall), a typically cantankerous old man of the west who denounces God and clings to life and hope. A thief (Michael K. Williams) steals their pitiful possessions but has the tables turned. In both cases the Boy reminds the Man that just because society has broken down it doesn’t mean that basic humanity can be forgotten. The Son lives up to the ideal that the Father has instilled in him – to carry the fire of hope inside – even as the Father falls into despair.

The film is not quite relentlessly depressing. The Man has flashbacks to a happier time with his pregnant Wife (Charlize Theron) just before the world turns bad. But as the Father and Son travel down the road the flashbacks get darker until the fateful day that sets them out on their epic journey. The real uplift comes from the relationship between the Man and the Boy as they struggle to survive in an uncompromising world. Their love for each other is truly unconditional and mutually dependent. The film explores how this relationship is created, strengthened and ultimately tested. The scene in the house of cannibals, with the Father prepared to shoot the Son rather than let him become a victim, is both deeply moving and deeply disturbing.

Smit-McPhee has real ability, he is able to portray some strong emotional bonds without sliding into saccharine cliché. Mortensen is the strong, watchful and practical leader it is around the Boy that the film revolves. While the outdoor fires rage and ash falls it is the fire of hope that the Boy carries within that is the ultimate theme of The Road.There is a compelling scene where he asks a father (Guy Pearce) if he, too, has the fire inside.

The film is by no means perfect. Smit-McPhee is a little too clean and his teeth a little too perfect for someone who has grown up knowing nothing but a lack of food and clean water. The music, by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, is appropriately melancholic but it is overused, a complaint that applies to most modern film compositions. Equally, the episodic nature of the narrative may not be to everyone’s taste. But these are minor quibbles. This is a film to witness on the big screen but there will be rewards from repeated viewing when the DVD is released.

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Cover Versions

Caught this last night on BBC2, brilliant version from Richie Havens.

Do you think Robert Smith was copying Richie’s playing style, if not the intensity?

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Hello world!

Want some more information about this blog? Try this…

You can email me at dalysmith [at] iol [dot] ie

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