THE TRACKS OF MY TEARS

A while back, as we drained another bottle because it would have been criminal to waste it now that we’d pulled the cork out, a very old friend & I (also very old) fell to talking about ageing.  Not the usual stuff about trying to kneel down without joints going off like rifle shots, or having to leave pairs of glasses in every room in the house and in the glove compartment of the car.  Instead we talked about emotional change; about leaving behind the whole big-boys-don’t-cry-even-if-they’re-new men thing.  As soon as the women left the room, both of us declared – tentatively at first & then with the fervour of converts – that here, in the foothills of the Third Age, tears come much more readily, much more often. 

Once the dread admission was afloat, there was no stemming the flood.  It became a contest about who could enumerate the most comprehensive list of items likely to provoke the tear ducts.  A striking sunrise – a deep crimson sky over the supermarket.  Finding a bus ticket as a page marker in an old school textbook.  John Wayne walking into medium long shot in The Searchers.  And, of course, music, music, music…  By the time the women came back we’d tugged two more corks & were struggling with the consequences, both of us snuffling like toddlers to a backing track on the stereo of The Kinks singing Days. 

All of which leads me inexorably to The List.  Compiled long after that epiphanic conversation, these are The Tracks of my Tears.

I’ll start with 2 hours & 26 minutes of multicultural soul music.  On impulse I bought a DVD of the Concert for George, the memorial gathering held by George Harrison’s family & friends at the Royal Albert Hall a year to the day after his death in November 2001.  Many of the usual suspects were there – Clapton, Ringo, Paul, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne  - the old stagers who crew those conscience-salving rock fests laid on from time to time by the entertainment glitterati.  There was an adoring audience; there were big hugs aplenty; there was confetti in abundance. 

But this time it was altogether different.  From the start it was clear that this was a labour of love, a celebration untouched by either noblesse oblige or ego.  In fact, the first 30 minutes or so are given over to a glorious composition by Ravi Shankar, Sarve Shaam, conducted by his daughter Anoushka & played by an orchestra of Indian & European musicians. 

But as Clapton peeled off that first solo in While My Guitar Gently Weeps with a passion & commitment he’s not exhibited for 30 years, I was back in the front row at The Crawdaddy Club, Richmond Athletic Grounds in 1964 worshipping The Yardbirds.  And I gently wept…

A piece of music can never truly evoke the palpable reality of a place or a time.  All it can do is recapture within its duration something of the dream elements that prevailed in that place or at that time.  The dream of elysian childhood; the dream of first love; the dream of first footing into some era that came triumphantly & passed quickly.  I think that all the pieces of music that move me – if not, infallibly, to wracking sobs, at least to a temporary misting over of the eyes – link into some dreamscape, once occupied within the real world or simply a permanent feature of the topography of the imagination.

THE TRACKS...

Sheep May Safely Graze by J.S. Bach. Punched out of an old black upright piano with mathematical precision by an elderly teacher with straight back & headphones of hair over each ear as we filed into assembly at my infants’ school. Melodic majesty that transcended medium & circumstance. Tiny & frightened at the back, I filled up & sobbed quietly.

Une Barque Sur l’Ocean by Ravel.  Initially, half heard curling up the stairs from the sitting room, played every night by my father during the summer of my eighth year.  Falling asleep to dreams of Tristram & Iseult & the ship that returned with black sails that were really white.

Words of Love by Buddy Holly*.  Incipient adolescence, aged 12 at New Sherwood School.  All of us in love with Lindy Rutter, squeezed onto one sofa with her in the middle.  No-one clambering up to change the record on the portable player set to ‘Repeat Play’. (She married Nick Mason of Pink Floyd in the end, the heartless jade.)

Lover Man by Charlie Parker.  This track introduced to me by an infinitely wise, cool & worldly friend at boarding school.  Both of us awestruck in our dormitory as Parker, close to death, blew strings of broken notes evoking only echoes of once greatness.

It’s Over by Roy Orbison. I have written of the godlike Big O before. If anyone could be said to have straddled the yawning gulf between the transcendent emotions of grand opera & the glorious histrionics of hard-core pop, it is he. For me, it’s rain dripping from the over-arching rhododendrons at the edge of Wennington School woods, my ciggy cupped into the palm of my hand as, from my portable radio, Roy’s unearthly contralto reminded me (as if I needed reminding) that “it’s over, it’s over, it’s O-O-O-O-VER!”

Au Bois De Mon Coeur by Georges Brassens. For me the first raffish, world-weary, guitar-toting, boho anti-hero was not Bob Dylan but Georges Brassens. Where French teachers up & down the British Isles were driving their reluctant students across the pages of tattered text books, ancient when God was a boy, Roger Gerhardt at Wennington used the chansonniers. Guy Beart, Yves Montand, Charles Trenet, Juliette Greco, Anne Sylvestre & Georges Brassens were our tutors. 

Boots of Spanish Leather by Bob Dylan.  Played constantly on my return home from work at the glasses factory in the year after I left school.   Looking out of my suburban bedroom window at an avenue lined with mock-Tudor houses & pollarded trees & wishing it was Highway 49.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want by The Rolling Stones.  The perfect confluence of the baroque glories of the London Bach Choir & sneering, raffish rock and roll vocals telling us that the dream is over. The ‘60s fading fast.  A sense of tougher times to come. 

The Goldberg Variations by J.S. Bach, Glenn Gould’s version.  Crystalline, fresh & pure. Played during the long car journey home from raucous blues gigs in reeking, sticky-floored pubs in Portsmouth & Southampton.  Passing from one world to another through sudden lights & back into enveloping darkness late at night.

The Day Thou Gavest followed by The Battle Of The Somme.  The hymn & the Scottish lament written for bagpipes but played by a full electric band closed the National Theatre production of Lark Rise by Keith Dewhurst. This promenade production from 1980 was an adaptation of Flora Thompson’s autobiographical account of rural life in Oxfordshire in the 1880s & it transformed utterly my notions of the boundaries of theatre. Subsequently I staged the play twice & went quietly to pieces in the wings each night with the pairing of the two pieces. The passing of the old ways.

I Am The True Vine by Arvo Part & the Credo from Edward Rubbra’s Missa Catuariensis, live in Winchester Cathedral. Sound & vision coalesce – the shape of the music inside the architecture.  A kind of glorious shock, a benign trauma.

Enough, enough. For now...

*A sincere hommage. Closest I could get...

.o0o.