[Originally posted February 2014]

Purple

I’m listening today to a superb live recording of Donovan, the 1967 The Complete Anaheim Show, and when he sings songs from the 1968 UK release A Gift From A Flower To A Garden I am reminded of how much I loved this album at its time, and more recently – for me that means in the last 10 years – when I bought it on cd. It is both beautiful and twee [e.g. a song sung to a pebble, everybody is a part of everything anyway], encapsulating all that is classic Donovan as well as late 60s, right down to the purple and mauve and pink psychedelia of the cover and all similar posters/pictures of this album and the time. Prettily purple, psychedelically purple, poetically purple. For me, Donovan’s purple patch too, though many may prefer the folk of his earliest recordings, and these are fine as well. The live recording has some excellent light blues and jazzy performance, the latter demonstrated on the track I am listening to as I write, Preachin’ Love, Harold McNair terrific on sax solo.

It isn’t that my Top Fifty or albums for that category have now become an afterthought – well, I guess that’s precisely what they have become. The defence I want to make is that favourites still resonate and for some reason I have simply left this blog focus behind a little. Perhaps that is what makes today’s ‘discovery’ so pleasing and surprising, surprising that I hadn’t written about the album before.

Songs that meant the most to me at the time from the album are Isle of Islay, The Lullaby of Spring [oh the consonants and enunciation], Widow With a Shawl [A Portrait], Epistle to Derroll, Wear Your Love Like Heaven [a single too] and The Tinker And The Crab [*]. And others, but those just mentioned are songs I played on the guitar [I have the songbook somewhere] and sang, and played with a good friend who had a flat in Putney, and as a teenager I used to go there from Ipswich to visit and grew up in all kinds of interesting ways for my age and at that time and in London. We even had a very occasional band called Proleptic Kinecy – oh yes, as pretentious as that – and played one gig as a band at a residential centre for disabled teenagers where we helped out [my friend then a social worker]. It was earnest and correct and worthy and all those things that you can’t knock and yet seems formulaic.

But those songs are so, as I’ve said, pretty. I don’t know if Donovan is an acquired taste: he wasn’t the British Dylan because he was so different, but it is easy to understand that tag. The ‘poetry’ of the lyrics was quintessentially British [I think ‘English’ but Donovan is Scottish so I am being embracive] yet it is that enunciation, again already mentioned, and the precision of the language sung in the sweetest tones that may not have appealed to all. Not the case for me, then or now.

[*] Have just returned from car trip when I played the cd: was reminded quite sharply that apart from Wear Your Love... I don’t really like what was the first of the two lps, and it is only the second one that truly appeals, so on the cd it’s track 11 onwards. Also reminded of the campfire cowboy harmonica on The Mandolin Man and his Secret as well as the dancing flute breaks, especially on The Tinker and the Crab. What a sucker I am for this sunshine pop ‘For Little Ones’].

I whistle; why not?
Have I not seen the first strips of green winding up the sloughs?
Have I not heard the meadow-lark?
I have looked into soft blue skies and have been uplifted!

Where are the doubts and the dark ideas I entertained?
What have I caught from the maple-buds that changes me?
Or was it the meadow-lark— or the blue sky— or the strips of green,
The green that winds up the sloughs?

I sought the dark and found much of it.
Is there in truth much darkness?
Have the meadow-larks lied to me?
Have the green grass and blue sky testified falsely?

I want to trust the sky and the grass!
I want to believe the songs I hear from the fenceposts!
Why should a maple-bud mislead me?

Reproduced from Lyric and Dramatic Poems by John G. Neihardt. Copyright 1926 Macmillan Company. Copyright renewed 1954 by John G. Neihardt.

I forget my precise – if it ever was – rubric for posting ‘Nebraska’ poems. Initially, they referenced the state directly or places therein, and then it seems relevance was the poet’s link to Nebraska. All will suffice. Neihardt was a one-time resident in Nebraska as well as Professor of Poetry at the University of Nebraska.

I like the challenge of the questions here and the defiance within that.

I haven’t of late written anything specifically for posting here on the blog, so I will now.

But it won’t be about education or politics. No creative writing ideas either. Not another poem.

It is about showing a heifer.

In the late ‘70s I worked on a very large farm in Suffolk for three years. In this time I became a highly skilled tractor driver and fork-lift aficionado as well as a professional irrigater from laying basic moveable sprinkler system pipes to using the latest [at that time] equipment like a self-propelled ‘Dolphin’ system and a ‘whirligig’ – not a brand name – huge helicopter-arm irrigation machine driven onto the fields to spray great gushing circles of water. I also did so many more rustic jobs from winter potato riddling – including bagging, threading and stacking 112lb hessian sacks of spuds – to winter man-harvesting of sugar beet with a special handheld puller and knife.

Then there was feeding the animals, especially early morning tractor-filling troughs for the cows with maize silage [the glorious sweet-rot of it]; mucking out the animals – tractor with front loader in the large sheds and by hand in the smaller; chainsaw felling of trees for making into fencing posts; farm fencing, including putting in our own posts [no concrete used] and bracing corners with natural, hand-axed wood wedging; making a horse lunging ring by hand and sight…

…and there I am lyrically waxing, which isn’t genuinely what I meant to do, but it is fun to recall and I am proud of the range of experiences and skills I acquired, but rather than continue with accounts of more, I should mention a few jobs I didn’t do, like

milking cows; showing heifers.

That is until The Suffolk County Show one summer of seventy something. I have no recall how I was persuaded to or why, but I was asked if I would show one of the farm’s Frisians at the Suffolk County Show and I agreed, probably because it was a day off from the routine. Something new. Something simple.

I also have no other memory of events leading up to the showing or anything else to do with the Show other than that showing, which I will recount in a minute as I remember this very well, but I do have these pictures of me at the tent and then with my heifer, number 979, right at the beginning of my showing her in the Show ring in front of quite a few people, maybe in the hundreds around the entire four sides of the arena:

Not in either of these two pictures, but I think at the same time, a young boy between I would guess and remember 10-12 years old, was leading and showing a bull. A full-grown massive bull, being led by the boy holding on to the bull’s nose ring with a rope, a rope similar to the one I am using to lead my heifer.

Events like these have their traditions and protocols and one of these is for those doing the leading/showing to wear a clean white coat, and I am wearing mine. You can see the judges in their smart suits and bowler hats in the background. All very prim and precise.

The rest is history and that is all I remember. Nothing between the second picture and the only subsequent event I vividly recall and which, thankfully, was not photographed – or perhaps it was and I just don’t have a copy. My heifer decided to go independent. Remember – in all the time I had worked on the farm and of all the highly skilled and often quite complex, demanding jobs I had perfected, showing a heifer was not one of them. I had never walked a heifer. I didn’t this time either, not very far.

The heifer took off. My one and only mistake – I don’t believe I made any error whatsoever to prompt the heifer to run – was to hold on to the rope. Hold on with the strength the many demanding jobs on the farm had nurtured me physically to do. So I was running with the heifer. Do you know how fast a heifer can run? It was certainly much faster than me. But I held on. I even held on when I tripped and fell and was dragged to the ground.

Can you imagine how much shit is lying on a showground where animals are being paraded all day? That khaki, liquid green primarily of cows? And do you remember the white show coat I was wearing?

Pleased to have this poem in Eunoia today. Found in words shared between a dear friend Andy and me shortly before he passed just over a year ago.

Very pleased to have a poem here this morning – a site new to me, showcasing ‘experimental’ writing [a shorthand expression, really]. You can read my poem and visit the rest of the work on the site here.

I have two poems posted here and here today. With a big thanks to Reuben who is a big supporter of others’ poetry.

[Originally posted April 2013]

If I was only allowed one album out of all that I have and even all that are available from forever, it would be John Martyn’s Bless The Weather. And if similarly I was only allowed one song out of all those available in the infinite musical universe, it would be Head and Heart from this album.

This third solo album presents John at his sweetest – the sweetest songwriting, the sweetest vocal and the sweetest guitar playing, all as on opener Go Easy with its honeyed guitar chords and the youthful vocal register so different to the gruff slur and growl of John’s eventual vocal instrument. Second and title track Bless the Weather is of course a classic in the broadest sense but also in Martyn’s oeuvre, the distinctive slap guitar playing of John himself and then the accompaniment of great pal and genius double bass player Danny Thompson, a match made in whatever sonic heaven oversees such musical gifts bestowed on this aural world and where John now roars and jokes in a Scottish accent utterly incomprehensible and yet innately and cosmically endearing. The expressions of emotion in both these opening tracks reflect all of the happy hope and positive romanticism for life and love we all then had a right to wish for and now embrace  wherever it was achieved and still endures – whatever loss being tempered by the beautiful expression of that initial idealism. [Photo: John with Danny]

Third track Sugar Lump reminds us that John was also a rocker and a rogue – the boogie rhythms, the punchy harmonica and the guitar licks presenting his other great musicality; the lyrics reflecting his naughtiness, his wicked charm [of course there’s a long blues tradition of lyrical innuendo aped here, but John was also hilariously obscene when performing, especially in his expletive-laden banter with Danny on stage]: Get down mama to my sugar cube/Get down mama, won’t you try to make it move, my sugar cube.

Tracks four and five, respectively Walk To The Water and Just Now, are further examples of the felicity Martyn had with prettiness in melody and sentiment at this time, the former graced with the surprise of steel drums, the latter the simplest and yet sweetest strummed guitar with piano accompaniment presenting a gorgeous song, reminiscent of a folk sound honed on his two previous albums with then wife Beverley. [Photo: John with Beverley]

And then there is sixth Head and Heart, a song gently but profoundly honest in its expression of love where fear is so much a part of its declaration. The guitar work is again classic Martyn with the slap and pluck of the rhythm and then quick lead licks, Danny Thompson bending his notes and running them up and down in that magical partnership, and the lyrical poetry of lines like

Only got my fate
A bird above you
You know we all get scared from time to time

Love me with your head and heart
Love me from the very start
Love me with your head and heart
Love me like a child

Seventh is the plaintive beauty of Let The Good Things Come with Beverley echoing lines in the background, and eighth is another in the treasure chest of these sweetly crafted gems, the tender Back Down The River – guitar and vocal in the sweet symbiosis of this folk quintessence and time in Martyn’s career.

The penultimate instrumental Glistening Glyndebourne introduces the jazz aura that would become an increasingly strong influence in Martyn’s writing and performance, but more importantly, it introduces the electro-acoustic cosmos of Martyn’s guitar world, here presented through the echoplex prism which electronically echoed and repeated and swirled the beautiful melodies and skills of John’s playing. As I have written elsewhere, it was at Essex University in Colchester where I first heard John playing with his echoplex, having gone to see and hear this acoustic folk god which Bless the Weather had introduced, when at some stage in the set and suddenly without warning John flicked a switch somewhere on a machine and in my and most other unsuspecting heads, and this psychedelic tsunami of echoing sound surged through the PA which, as they say, blew me away. If there was one musical experience that I could relive, it would be this special and extraordinary one which to this day amazes in its recalled surprise and joy.

The album closes on another surprise, John’s simple version of Singin’ In The Rain with all its folk jollity and skill in the guitar playing.

It must be obvious that even though I am not going to produce a chronology for my whole Top Fifty – whenever eventually finished – this album will definitely be at the top. It is there first and foremost for the music, but also for the memories of a time in my life where such perfection in that music and honest joy in its lyrical expressions encapsulated genuine content. The encapsulation also of full awe – no diminishing qualifier for this album!

a tent
a clam

agape
a gawp

in awe
its shell

like echo
of our

two there
we too

were then
and now

still the
pearls in

where it
was when

a clam
a tent

Very pleased to have my poem at Erase-Transform and be a part of its Poetry Project. You can read it here.