MUSIC, MUSIC, MUSIC...
From time to time I am made suddenly & acutely aware of not playing live music any more. Receiving news of musicians with whom I used to play still actively gigging generally delivers the sharpest nudge in the ribs. I own four bass guitars – a Fender Jazz, a Yamaha fretless, a Washburn semi-acoustic & a dead cheap Korean Bass Collection model that cost me £200.00 & is one of the finest basses I have ever played. But all four are gathering dust in various corners, along with my two bodhrans, my Fylde flatback bouzouki & Emma’s fiddle & viola.
What passed for the tail end of my musical career – irregular engagements with Emma’s & my ceilidh-and-beyond band, Fishing for Eels – guttered to a halt the moment Reuben was born. And then, just as it looked as though we might be able to start putting an hour a week into breathing over the embers of Fishing for Eels, along came Rosie!
Well, fair exchange is no robbery, as the old Scottish proverb has it, & for as long as our time must be invested in both to the exclusion of the old indulgences, anguish is not an issue. The time will come – sooner rather than later – when I shall polish the fretboard, dig out the dust from the pickups & clamber up in front of a handful of people somewhere to play for fun & profit. In the meantime, I keep my fingers on the move by trying to out manoeuvre whoever’s playing the bass on a careful selection of blues, jazz & folk/roots CDs.
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In an article on the art of songwriting published in the altogether indispensable mag Word, someone – can’t recall who – committed the ultimate heresy in stepping outside the Lennon/McCartney/Dylan camps & nominated Days by the Kinks as their all-time favourite rock lyric. I had a listen to it this afternoon & wouldn’t put up a spirited argument against the claim. An absolutely beguiling set of melodies carries a lyric of extraordinary sophistication: although he loved her body & soul, he knew that she would leave him, but there’s no rancour because of the days he’ll remember all his life. Ray Davies – rock iconoclast but largely unacknowledged by those who can’t see (or hear) beyond the Trinity.
And on a similar note (yuk-yuk)… I bought a Roy Orbison documentary on video for £3.00 off the ‘pre-owned’ shelf (second hand, you prissy twats!) in Blockbuster. What an unlikely, even implausible, rock divinity Orbison was. A man dressed from top to toe in melodramatic b-movie Western bad guy black, peering myopically through impenetrable shades, doing nothing more exciting than stroking the strings of a Gretsch Countryman guitar whilst singing songs in a warbling falsetto about bursting into tears when crossed in love. There’s sexual predator Elvis dislocating his hips & boondocks maniac Jerry Lee busting his fingers. And there’s Roy, pale & porky, crying, crying, cry-y-ing. But within 8 bars of Running Scared I was, as ever, bewitched. As I was for Only the Lonely, In Dreams & that late flowering masterpiece Mystery Girl, each one delivered as if the slightest movement might initiate the timer on the hidden bomb.
It was the Gibb brothers – the Bee Gees – who, in talking head mode, unravelled the mystery. Roy Orbison not only admitted freely & without shame that boys cry, he celebrated the fact. Sure, Elvis had touched on that possibility in the odd ballad, but you knew that after blowing his nose once or twice he’d call up that ‘fuck you’ sneer, snap the cap off a Bud & fall asleep in front of the late night movie. And Jerry Lee had slowed the tempo down once or twice & sniffed a bit as she headed for the station. But you knew that he’d narrow those crazy eyes, suck on a bourbon & go out & fire bomb her parents’ trailer. However, as the Gibbs brothers knew from workaday adolescent experience, the nights were long & in the privacy of your room you sobbed your tender little heart out.
Elvis & Jerry Lee wrote the working script for us. When we slipped the black shirt on & turned up the collar, we looked like our heroes. The mirror fed back the fantasy as hair was teased into shape & by the time we hit the dance floor we were invulnerable. But teenage girls being the heartless jades they are, by the end of the evening they were back in the swarm heading for the bus stop & we were making a brave face of it until alone in our suburban bedrooms. And then there he was staring back from the mirror – pasty, squinty, porky, skinny or spotty, the ultimately implausible stud. It was Roy, of course, who wrote the final draft…
9:31:59 PM 
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