Book Five Essays Musical and Literary

Book Five

Essays Musical and Literary

One  Classically English - A Brief Homage to Nick Drake

The much-loved singer-songwriter Nick Drake was not so much handsome as beautiful in what could be called a classically English, soft, wistful, romantic, Shelleyan fashion, with seemingly perfect skin, full lips and a head of cascading curls.

And in some of his many photos, he bears an uncanny resemblance to the former Doors front man Jim Morrison; and like Morrison, he was a poet as much as a musician. But the likeness ends there, for while Morrison was able to conquer his natural shyness and become a wildly charismatic showman, Drake never mastered the art of Rock performance.
However, blessed with a precocious musical genius, he secured a recording contract with the Island label while still

only twenty years old and at Cambridge University.

On the surface of things, he was destined for a long and happy life, but unlike his near-double, was unable to translate his enormous gifts into commercial success. And he became very seriously depressed as a result, dying mysteriously at

the age of just 26, after having released only three albums in his lifetime.

Looking back from the vantage point of the early 2010s, one can't help thinking that in any era other than that ushered in by the Rock revolution, Drake would have pursued a career more suited to his background and temperament. As opposed to one which, while ensuring his immortality, clearly caused him an inestimable amount of pain.
And he came to maturity in a Britain whose young were in active rebellion against the Judeo-Christian value system on which the nation had been founded. So was perforce affected by the spiritual chaos of the times, which propelled him towards the endless night of worldly philosophy, deadly for a mind as litmus-paper sensitive as his.
For despite the fact that the vast majority of those who pass through the British public school system go on to lead full and successful lives entirely free from melancholy, social advantage can clearly be a heavy burden to bear for some. Such as Nick Drake who sang so devastatingly of “falling so far on a silver spoon” in the dark pastorale, Parasite.

Two  The British Blues Explosion

What was it that transformed an interest among young men of largely middle class origin in the bleak brooding music of the Blues into a musical movement that took the world by storm all throughout the '60s and beyond? That's not an easy question to answer, but I'm going to give it some sort of a go.

The Blues themselves may provide something of a solution to the puzzle, for in the shape of the British Blues boom they constituted one of the dominant tendencies within the Pop explosion of the 1960s.

Yet, far from proceeding from the Pop revolution inspired by the Beatles, the British Blues came long before it. In fact, they emerged from the Traditional Jazz revival of the late 1940s, although most Trad devotees decried the Blues as simplistic in comparison to Jazz.

The most beloved and fearful form of the Blues was the Delta Blues, whose spiritual homeland was the Mississippi Delta, a region lying between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, and stretching all the way from Memphis in the north to Vicksburg in the south.

With lyrics reflecting the sensuality, isolation and anguish of lost souls victimised by life and alienated from God, she found fertile soil in the still repressed United Kingdom of the late 1950s and early sixties. And especially in the affluent south among such passionate young men as Brian Jones from the spa town of Cheltenham in Gloucester; Eric Clapton from Ripley in suburban Surrey; and Jimmy Page from nearby Epsom, also in Surrey.

However, it's none of these legends, so much as a certain guitarist of Greek and Austrian ancestry by the name of Alexis Korner who's been called the Founding Father of the British Blues. And justifiably so, for more than anyone, he was the incubator of the British Blues Boom which was one of the great cornerstones of the entire Rock movement.

Korner began his musical career in 1949 as a member of Chris Barber's Jazz Band, but his love of the kindred but then lesser known music of the Blues led him to form Blues Incorporated in 1961. And he did so with several future Rock superstars, including Jack Bruce, most famous for his tenure with Blues-Rock legends Cream, and Charlie Watts, future sticks man for the Stones, both from a Jazz background. As was Brian Jones; for this was not unusual for the first generation of British Rock artists.

And in addition to those already mentioned, the list of future Rock and Roll stars who were drawn to Korner's regular Rhythm and Blues night at the Ealing Jazz Club in the early '60s included Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Ginger Baker, Jimmy Page, Rod Stewart, and Paul Pond.

Pond, a tall, elegant Oxford undergraduate with the chiselled good looks of a Greek god, had been Brian Jones' first choice as lead vocalist for a projected Blues band, but apparently convinced the Blues had no future, he turned the young Cheltenham Welshman down.

He later resurfaced as Paul Jones, front man for former Jazz outfit Manfred Mann, one of the first generation of British Blues bands to achieve mainstream Pop success. And alongside Jones and Mann were Mikes Vickers and Hugg, and bass man Dave Richmond...soon to be replaced by Tom McGuiness, who'd begun his career in the Roosters with Eric Clapton.

While Clapton himself found fame with the Yardbirds which, like the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who and the Spencer Davis Group surfed the first wave of British Blues and R&B all the way into the Pop charts.

But British Rock was fuelled not just by the Blues, but an effervescent fusion of Rock and Roll, Skiffle, R&B, Doo-Wop, Motown and Tin Pan Alley known as Beat. And Beat emerged principally from the tough industrial North and Midlands of England to form part of the great Pop revolution of '63 to '64, although it's doubtful the great record buying public had any notion of the difference between Beat and the Blues.

Yet there were those Pop musicians who clung doggedly to the Blues ethos, despite spectacular chart success. Such as Brian Jones of the Stones; and Eric Clapton, who forsook Pop stardom to seek refuge in Blues purist band Bluesbreakers...whose leader John Mayall played host to a veritable plethora of future Rock superstars at various stages of his career.

The term Rock was somehow perfect in describing the powerful primal sound of such Blues-based outfits as the Stones, the Kinks, the Yardbirds, the Pretty Things and the Who, although when this moved in to supplant Pop as the critic's term of choice, it's impossible to say.

One thing is certain is that as soon as it did, Rock became far more than a mere music form. In fact I'd go so far as to say it was a way of life from the outset; a philosophy; even a religion, and as such, one of its prime tenets was rebellion against the traditional Judeo-Christian values of the West. So it's not surprising its spiritual homelands were Britain and the USA, given these are the nations most associated historically with the rise of Evangelical Christianity.

For despite having been inextricably linked to Pop since its inception, Rock is clearly more than just another form of popular music. And while it possesses very little ability left to shock, its rebel spirit, and the sexual and social upheavals it once spearheaded have altered the fabric of Western society, possibly beyond all hope of recovery.

Three  The Blues, Chicago, and the Genesis of Rock

7 million black people emigrated from the South to the North, Midwest and West during the period 1910 to 1970 known as the Great Migration. In terms of their music, their most famous port of call was surely the great Midwestern city of Chicago, where the Chicago Blues was born in the 1940s, this being a version of the original Country Blues enhanced by new developments in amplification. It went on to significantly inform the development of Rock and Roll, which was equally influenced by Country music, and most especially the variant known as Rockabilly.

The most influential Rock phenomenon of all time, the Beatles, were not overly influenced by the Chicago Blues, unlike their closest rivals the Rolling Stones.

They looked to Rock and Roll, and other more recent and commercial trends in Popular music, such as the music which eventually became known as Soul - and which was plausibly a fusion of Rhythm and Blues and Traditional Pop with elements of Gospel - for inspiration. As such they were the chief architects of Pop Music which went on to form the basis of Pop Culture and the entire Swinging Sixties scene. In this respect they differed from the prime movers of the British Blues Boom, who largely ignored Rock and Roll in favour of the Blues, and specifically the Delta and Chicago Blues. Out of this British Blues Boom, Rock was born although it would not be called this until well into the sixties.

Many of these Blues groups jumped onto the Pop bandwagon created by the Beatles to form part of the British Invasion of the US Pop charts. They included the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Who. In time, they all became known as Rock groups, whether British or American, although Pop survived as an alternative generic description. Today, however, Pop is viewed rather as a strain within Rock or a sub-genre, or as a different form of music altogether.

From the grafting of anti-establishment values onto a music that seemed like little more than noise to many members of the older generation, a massively successful commercial phenomenon with millions of followers worldwide came into being. Its effect on the fabric of the Christian West cannot be underestimated.

Four  Linton (The Weaker Heathcliff)

The Gothic tendency within literature pre-existed the great Romantic movement in the arts and literature, pre-eminently in the shape of the Gothic Novel. And the latter introduced a type of brooding anti-hero, such as Montoni from Ann Radcliff's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which would go on to be identified as Byronic after the great English poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824).

But the Byronic hero could be said to have attained its literary apogee in the shape of a brace of anti-heroes featuring in the works of two literary sisters born to an Anglican minister in the county of Yorkshire towards the beginning of the 19th Century, Emily and Charlotte Brontë.

These being Rochester, from Charlotte's Jane Eyre, and Heathcliff, from Emily's Wuthering Heights, both novels being first published in 1847. The latter, perhaps the most celebrated Gothic Romantic novel in literary history, has as one of its central features the introduction of the aforesaid Heathcliff into the prosperous Earnshaw family of Wuthering Heights, a farmhouse situated on the Moors of Yorkshire.

This occurs in consequence of a trip made by the master of the house to the city of Liverpool, where he encounters a homeless Romany boy to whom he decides to adopt as his own son, despite the fact that he already has a son, Hindley, as well as a daughter Catherine.

And while Hindley goes on to experience deep resentment of his adoptive brother, his sister comes to care for him, and it's this powerful attachment that ultimately blossoms into the all-consuming love between Cathy and Heathcliff that is the novel's central theme.

In young adulthood, Heathcliff is the quintessential Romantic hero, in so far as he is fatally dark and handsome, and motivated by a nature so passionate that it threatens to destroy everything it comes into contact with including its possessor. And one rendered especially dangerous by virtue of Cathy's status-seeking marriage to his love rival, Edgar Linton, and his own new-found prosperity.

Following Cathy's death, the remainder of the novel depicts his ruinous effect on all forced to co-exist with him, including his sickly and ineffectual son, Linton. And one can't help thinking that the latter's short life in some way incarnates the tragedy of sons born to strong and successful men, and how they so often spend their lives in restless and troubled pursuit of not just their fathers approval, but their power.

Linton is the unfortunate offspring of the marriage between Heathcliff and Isabella, sister of Edgar Linton, whom Heathcliff wed merely as a means of taking his revenge on his detested brother in law.

And Linton inherits none of his father's swarthiness and manifest manliness, being very much a Linton in appearance, blond and blue-eyed, but unlike his uncle he is something of a milksop, with a spoiled and peevish nature. But contrary to what might be expected for one so fragile, he enjoys the sufferings of the weak and powerless.

One might be tempted to see in this cruelty the revenge of one excluded from societal power by virtue of lack of manly character.

Indeed, Wuthering Heights as a whole has been described as a meditation on the nature of power, with certain characters representing its purest form by dint of advantages of birth and gender fused with lofty character; while others enjoy only relative power. And among these might be included Cathy and Heathcliff, who, despite being strong alpha figures, are excluded from true power by dint of gender and lowly origins respectively, a fact which ultimately secures their shared ruination through Cathy marriage to Edgar Linton, a man for whom she feels only limited passion.

Linton, on the other hand, is very much an omega male, petrified of his powerful father, who ultimately forces him into marrying Cathy's daughter with Edgar Linton, also called Cathy, soon after which he dies, never having truly lived in effect. Yet Linton Heathcliff is an intriguing character despite his pathetic failure to make his mark in the world, and one can't help thinking that had he been born into an environment more suited to his fragile and sensitive nature, he might have amounted to something in the end. Perhaps the coming century's end would have been more congenial, and he'd have thrived as a poet in the aesthetic tradition.