Rock - what are you listening to?

[fergus]

Not Rock, but an old favourite revisited this evening....

[tweber]

[fergus]

Another old favourite: Rick Wakeman's Six Wives of Henry Viii...

[markof]

Lovely album of late fifties and early sixties guitar tunes filtered through the great Frisell machine.
Has all the optimism of the period coloured by nostalgia for the lost time.
Includes wonderful versions of Messin' with the Kid, Telstar and So Tired.

Mark.

[mcq]

Listening once more to the music of Judee Sill.  It was this day 35 years ago that she took her own life.  Six years after the release of her last album, six years of creative silence, six years of the dark peace of heroin addiction which she clung to as a shelter from the world  before finally coming to the end of herself.  Six years of degradation as she sought to blank out physical pain and mental trauma and becoming increasingly closeted within the vacuum of her mind.

Ten years have elapsed since the restoration of Judee's music to the catalogue and one wonders will she remain forever a marginal figure waiting to be discovered.  The sheer concentrated emotion that is embedded beneath many, many layers of listening emerges in the mind as the clearest picture we can ever have of this remarkably talented yet desperately enigmatic young woman.  The deceptive simplicity - the "art that conceals art" - which is the hallmark of this musc belies its craftmanship but also indicates a creative imagination that expected (and wished for) her audience to listen closely and sympathetically.  This is music of great depth that demands patience from its listeners to unravel its dark power.  The periods of time spent listening to and absorbing this music are rewarded by a resonating depth of wounding emotion that time cannot dissipate.  Ultimately music this powerful begs the question:  where do these emotions go.  Undoubtedly something this concentrated progressively seeps into the mind of the listener but something must always have remained with Judee.  The writing of this music would have had enormous cathartic value, a way to exorcise her demons.  It must have been incredibly draining to write these songs, based as they were on a self-examination of her past and present life, about sorrow for a lost childhood, anger and regret for her imagined transgressions, and above all a hope for redemption and love.  But she needed this creative outlet because, without it, she could no longer face her sinful past, her wasteful present and a future without hope of redemption.  Denied this creative outlet, she returned gradually at first and then wholeheartedly to what she called the "dark peace" of heroin initially to relieve the physical pain that she suffered after a serious road accident but eventually to isolate herself from her mental suffering.  

Almost ten years after first encountering Judee Sill's music, the overriding impression I have of it is just how uncomfortable it makes me feel..  This is not comforting, reassuring music but retains its lasting power from its incessantly personal nature.  Time and again, I get the impression - despite its immaculate sense of craftsmanship - that this is music that is afraid to look you directly in the eye, so patently unfit for public consumption as it is.  Sill wrote her songs out of a burning need for redemption for past imagined wrongs and fervently wished that the expression of this anxiety would cathartically expunge it from her mind but it proved not to be.  In her personal life, Sill was incredibly self-destructive and the ways in which she sabotaged - subconsciously or otherwise - her relationships with men (not to mention her professional relationship with David Geffen) indicated that she perhaps felt that she was undeserving of a redemptive love in this life and that all she could hope and pray for was the forgiveness of a benevolent God in the next life. Aside from redemption, the other underlying theme in Sill's music is that of time and the passage of time which, in her periods of self-reflection, is something that she dwelt on at length.  This was a woman who, in her work, constantly revised and refined, and spent a great deal of time honing and perfecting her songs.  Yet she would have been acutely aware of the time she had wasted in her life prior to her full-time pursuit of a musical career.  The aimless drifting of these years which saw her plummet to an oblivion of heroin addiction and prostitution must have seemed an eternity to her, a time where she must have raged at the creeping passage of time.  As she remarked to a Rolling Stone reporter during an interview in 1972, "As a hooker, my heart wasn't in it ... all I really cared about was getting that needle in my arm, squeezing off".  And during the four years of her period of creativity (circa 1969 to 1973), time must have just flown by and what she would have done to regain those lost years.  Perhaps she felt frustrated that she would never be able to truly articulate her innermost thoughts in the time that was given to her.  To recall the poet Conrad Aiken:  

"These poor words, these squeaks of ours, in which
We strive to mimic, with strained throats and tongues,
The spawning and outrageous elements -
Alas, how paltry are they!"

Perhaps any hope of final redemption would ultimately depend on a sense of penitential responsibility and making herself accountable through her music.  She had to make these words count in order to make peace with herself.  And then, within the black cocoon where she enshrouded herself for her final six years, time would once more slow down to a snail's pace as she would once more lose herself in an ever-spiralling descent into drug addiction.  What she must have done to isolate herself from any kind of conscious perception of the passage of time does not bear thinking about.  What does come to mind is a passage from Thomas Mann's classic novella, Death In Venice, where the protagonist's eye falls upon an hourglass and he muses aloud:  "I remember we had one of these in my father's house. The aperture through which the sand runs is so tiny that... at first it seems as if the level in the upper glass never changes. To our eyes it appears that the sand runs out only... only at the end... and until it does, it's not worth thinking about... 'til the last moment... when there's no more time left to think about it." I think, that, for Judee, that last moment must have been agonisingly protracted, a moment where all of her past failures and transgressions must have haunted her and no quantity of heroin could have anaesthetised her against her torment.  Perhaps the terrifying image enshrined in The Donor, that of there being no hope of redemption and that the next life would be a neverending purgatory hopelessly crying out "Kyrie eleison", proved too much to bear.  

Listen to her music.

"And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And I pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
...
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death"

from T.S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday

[Derek]

Picked up from HiFi Joe last Friday all original and played loud.



Many thanks Frank

[Diapason]

Original cover too!

[Ivor]

more mellow last night...



Bright Eyes - I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning

[Derek]

Original cover too!

Yes Si, the cover that was subsequently banned.

I also got this beauty, again all original.

This has a special place in my heart as I was there. I'm one of the Olé, Olé, Olé quire at the very start, recorded at The Point gig.

The mandatory play loud goes without saying.

[fergus]