Some musicians like the attention, the acclaim, the fame. Indeed, for many—watch me—that’s chief among the reasons they go there: please please me . . . see me feel me touch me heal me.
Others, they hate it. Hate it.
Van Morrison is one of those people. As he told, a couple years ago, a clueless screw from CBS "news":
Fame is absolutely . . . it’s a total negative for somebody like me. It’s a complete negative. I’m a total introvert. And that’s who I am. And there ain’t nothin’ wrong with that. That’s just what it is. I do music from an introverted space. I’m singing from an introverted space. If I’ve got my eyes closed . . . that’s why I related so much to Ray Charles. You know what I mean? Because it’s all internal. It’s all internal. For me.
Morrison is so driven to create so much music that he has forced himself to learn how to make accommodations. For a while at each concert he would turn his back on the audience, until he had consigned them to oblivion, at which time he could attain his groove; sometimes dipping into great vats of Irish whiskey has pulled him through; other times, when he needs to, he simply stops, retreats back to Ireland, there to commune with folks like Marianne Faithfull, and/or someone else resembling the muse.
Other artists, like Gerry Rafferty, never attained any such space. Rafferty, like Morrison, lived to make music. But never could he consistently cross over into making music that would at least occasionally meet the demands of other people. Rafferty died a couple of weeks ago, his liver bottomed up from thirty years of bottles. He was so forgotten at the time that he died that I had to find out he no longer drew breath by pure accident.
My late compadre John LaPado was one of the jewels of my life. Rock music became stratified and compartmentalized from the very cradle, divided into cliques and genres and in-groups and cools, and we, all of us, went along with that—except John. Who never would have any truck with that shit. He perceived the value in it all.
When I fulminated that the late-career Elvis Presley was beaching himself as a horrendous whale, breaking stages in Las Vegas, John made me feel that when Elvis first arrived on the scene "he moved with the twitch of the earth," and thereby was Forever Gold. When we all understood that we were supposed to sneer at Don Henley, John pronounced "The Boys Of Summer" as without question the best single of 1984 . . . which of course it was. And when we quivered and quailed at the overproduction of Gerry Rafferty’s "Baker Street," John decreed that it was in fact not only a perfect pop song, but a doom bell ringing a dark streak across all of our lives. And there he was right again.
Like most right art, "Baker Street" was the product of both focused attention and pure flukery. Rafferty for three years was basically prevented from producing any new music, as he waited for suits to unstring commitments to record companies that he had entered into when he was entombed in the band Stealers Wheel. During this period Rafferty oft twiddled his guitar at a friend’s flat on London’s Baker Street. That is where "Baker Street" was born. When Rafferty was free to again enter a studio, he arrived with but a feel for a sketch of the song. For instance, the eight-bar saxophone wail that more or less makes "Baker Street," was supposed to be a guitar part. But Rapheal Ravenscroft, a studio musician summoned to play a brief soprano sax bit, suggested instead that he render the guitar notes with an alto sax he had stashed in his car. Ravenscroft was subsequently paid $43 for his labors . . . with a check that bounced.
The supreme spookery of the song is that it is filled with lyrical lines in which various characters express Great Hopes, but the music lets you know that none of them are ever going to remotely reach them; all these people are going to eternally, diminishingly, recur, until they have dwindled into nothingness. And the herald of all this is the sax, which, when it first soars out of the mix, seems to offer Promise and Triumph, but it is really a death knell, sounding from the midst of a boat on the River Styx.
"Baker Street" sold more copies that year than even bump-n-grind from Saturday Night Fever, but Rafferty didn’t like to tour, so he didn’t. He just didn’t want to play for people. His Irish father was a roaring alcoholic, so, facing fame, Rafferty became one too. In later years he recorded every now and again, but mostly he drank. People like Tom Robinson and Mark Knopfler, who valued his gifts, occasionally tried to fish him out, but he just really didn’t want to come out from under. So he didn’t. On January 4 of this year he died of liver failure, and on January 21 a requiem mass was said for his soul in Paisley. After which his ashes were scattered over the island of Iona.
My friend John contracted stomach cancer a couple years ago and died for no reason, barely making 60, and just as he was righting all areas of his life and getting really happy. So it goes. We he left behind are sliding towards the same, slowly or less so. That’s just the way it is. You try to blow some good—if you’re lucky, shivering—sax in the meantime. That’s really all you can ask. Much less expect.
(If I'm reading the various FP tea leaves from Markos correctly, this diary is an example of part of what dKos 4.0 is supposed to be all about: stuff that heretofore wouldn't belong on the site. Meaning: if I'm going to have to read about Markos' dangerously advanced bicycle addiction, why shouldn't I occasionally run off the road and subject people to eulogies for obscure alcohol-controlled '80s musicians? In any event, I thought I'd give it a try.
(This piece also available, illustrated, in red.)