Over a period of a few years, though a while ago, I wrote and compiled a sequence of my Top Fifty albums of all time, posted elsewhere, and as these reflect my thoughts and feelings beyond the music itself I am re-posting here to share, but also as a means of my revisiting the memories and expression of this at the time. They are then inevitably dated, but that in itself can resonate, as with this first one written soon after the death of Havens, and the words echoing what is the impact of so many more since that time. This Top Fifty was never written as a rank order and is posted now in no particular order:

[Originally posted April 2013]

Deserved Ripples

I was saddened to hear of the death of Richie Havens, who passed, aged 72, on the 22^nd April. This is a sentiment and line becoming all too frequent of late, but not surprising as musicians with whom I grew up as a teenager – so themselves already or just being established musically as young adults – are of an age where this will be more common.

Having been away in the Lakes last week I have only just found out. So the sadness is deepened a little by the fact that Haven’s death did not register more widely. If at home I would have ‘heard’ as I touch base daily with music sites for reviews and information, but even though I was able to go to a local cafe to use their WiFi for quickly checking emails, and I got a daily newspaper and watched the TV news, his death hadn’t registered enough to be reported. Lesser ‘popular’ stars would, I’m sure, have created larger if less distinguished ripples.

Quite by coincidence, I had during the week been thinking about my musical Top Fifty [see – even when away from home and not writing on the blog I am somewhat consumed by the insular world it provides for me] and wondering if Richie Havens should have a place there. He is without doubt a favourite artist of mine. It is his distinctive vocal – at times quite a growl, but at others a soft and resonating folk vocal – and of course the guitar playing, open-tuned with a famously, aggressively strummed style. This style was brought to my attention and so many others with his opening performance at Woodstock – obviously through the film version – and his mesmerising and commanding stage presence with, as we now know, impromptu jamming as he was asked by the organisers to extend his performance as other acts were held up in traffic [if you are from another planet and haven’t seen/heard, check out the stunning Freedom].

It isn’t his death that sways me to include Alarm Clock in my Top Fifty, but it does provide me the opportunity to honour him by its inclusion. This is one of the first few albums with which I grew up musically and in many other respects, so it was played a considerable amount. It is beautiful – the song I am listening to as I write is the self-penned [with Roth and Margoleff] End of the Season, with its unusual, for this album, orchestral accompaniment, acknowledged on the album as a string arrangement by Bill Shepherd, but surely it is a Moog Synthesiser dominating the background. It is a lovely song with Havens’ deep vocal and the heightened drama of that arrangement.

The title track is quite a bluesy number, Havens’ signature rhythm driving the beat and Paul Williams providing some funky lead guitar. It has a jamming/live element that appealed particularly then, reminiscent of the Woodstock performance [the cd version runs at 7.17 to accentuate this feel, compared with the vinyl at 5.17].

Havens was a great interpreter of others’ songs, especially the Beatles, and Alarm Clock opens with a beautiful cover of the beautiful George Harrison number Here Comes The Sun. Third track Younger Men Grow Older is another Havens/Roth song and its apparent gentle lyricism about age and wisdom and hopes for the future encapsulates perfectly the ideals of the Woodstock generation, that initial sweet focus tempered ruefully by reflections on the destruction of war and assault on the environment. Fourth track Girls Don’t Run Away, written by Havens, is gorgeous, if plaintive, and lyrically also reflects well on preoccupations of this generation, here the ‘generation gap’ and a mother who does not understand/appreciate her daughter, and an urge that the daughter should stand up for herself and seek independence. Such musical folk excellence was heightened by a storytelling which so deeply tapped into the contemporary listeners’ thoughts and feelings.

Most appreciative of Your One Phone Call for publishing more of my poetry, especially these spam poems which I have been writing for some time.

We leave the Thunderbird
to salt-rust some more,
take the 350 out
under the full sun and
zig-zag up the middle of the
white-lined highway
heading for Canada.

It’s a long journey to take
and for that reason alone.
It is beyond where we are
and in this bright light
shines like the right way to
disturb and excite our
blood on a hot day.

We pass cars that retain the heat
and roll up country into our
channel of cooling air where the bike
and white broken stripes become a line
racing the road to an end
or wherever it takes us on a long
curve of an invisible bend

until T-junctions become targets
for our heart-beats. But each stretch
soon turns into the flat grey
of open space within the greater
emptiness of the countryside.
The Honda roars on and our
sun closes down at the horizon.

The Lakes are somewhere
in the night we reach
before turning home,
and, never nearing the border,
we look for more than small
lights in the distance to signal
this new destination, some
sign unknown along the road
but speaking to us alone on the
reason for thundering on.

Deep-searching and cleaning on the computer this morning and all I do is find things I have forgotten are saved and won’t delete anyway.

Like this from the Observer Magazine – 13 years ago!

Very pleased to have a poem published at this relatively new magazine and who are a literary magazine focusing on emerging fiction and poetry with a preference for the weird…

Read here and other poetry and fiction on the whole site.

This excellent book-length ‘minimalist’ poem reveals what it has to reveal gradually, somewhat like the ‘broken bit of skirting’ and ‘stair-rod’ of the first page become less disparate in the disparate observational continuum of the whole, especially when bits of building are mentioned within a lineage of ‘a hedgehog’, ‘a grapefruit’ and ‘pigtails and mushrooms’ that take us up to page 27, a page that ends with the line

‘i’m at home wearing new trousers and making intuitive drawings’

The poetic and other philosophies within all of this are as simple as the simple items described and the direct observation of

‘2 buddhas make some soup’

‘one makes it differently’

What engages and amuses and surprises [so I’ll only mention one so as not to ruin for your own reading] are the ways in which observations are repeated but altered, as is the unfixed nature of any observation as well as interpretation and the fact of difference – so, for example, references to lemons can be

‘a pile of lemon and lime skins’

and

‘a witness to a lemon on a slag heap’

As we read we are experiencing the world in all of its mundane to complex existences, and occasionally there is the deeper contemplation of this

‘meditation on sulphur, calcite and stibnite’

to the variation on a theme

‘i saw her eat a lime’

Did she eat the lime

‘behind the wall’

because this is the chronology of the observation, or have we moved on and beyond?

Perhaps the questioning within the text becomes more taxing than our own, but in the end only we can decide

‘examine the difference between a blue plastic put next to me and
placing myself next to a blue plastic’

There are no new narratives but this is one of them. It is a sequence that genuinely surprises and delights, but you must have the perseverance to match the writer’s stamina for discovery, for example

‘the first 1000 google images of yellow paper cups 28/4/13’

More details and to purchase here.

Delighted to have my poem Rainbow Aphorisms at Stride .

This is a poem from my sequence American Finds, found poems from the Great American novel, and I appreciate the support in publishing these – I hope to one day get a collection out where they can be read in the whole.

The poems in this collection seem cut-ups/found and convey a sense of loss or change – though not as maudlin observations and rather moments of candour – as with first poem Downriver where

In the title poem, similar reports of diminution continue

The titles too [though not all] present decline, for example Skint City and Derailment, though in this latter there is hope/humour/’lite’ litotes perhaps

The A Circle of Mirrors section continues the patterning in lay-out. In Cantilever there is within this the playing with further patterns of repetitions, the brevity of the whole – as with each short poem [perfect for this Red Ceiling chapbook]  – providing succinct moments of aural clarity even when the ‘meanings’ shift with re-reading.

These ‘shifts’, by the way, are when we see beyond the perceived mood and simply enjoy the language and imagery that flashes before us, somewhat like

An evocative chapbook to have and read. Check here to order.