NightWriter

There are only a handful of operas that I want to listen to and actually own on CD, and two of them are by Alban Berg.  Lulu is one of them, and she is the main character in one of my short stories.  If you want to know more about what’s going on here, Lulu has moved to London just in time to meet Jack the Ripper.  But the whole opera is brilliant, well worth the time.

I was looking at some Doo-Wop compilation videos as well as solo tracks, to find something that might convey my love for the popular music when I was growing up in the late ’50s and early ’60s, before the Beatles changed the world.  So much wonderful music was written and performed then, and I remain a big fan and regular listener.  It was a different time, then — not that I miss it, but the past always informs us if we listen to it.  In the end, I selected this item because I love the song.  Paul McCartney did a decent version of it a few years ago on his album Run Devil Run, but it includes the usual Macca excesses and quite lacks the innocence of the time.  The Nelsons were an iconic American TV family — that’s Ricky’s brother Dave, looking rather disenchanted, on the end of the sofa, and his witless Dad Ozzie coming in the door.  I lived through those times, and we never sat around wearing jackets and ties, but the button-down shirts were de rigeur at the time — they even had a button on the back of the collar, to keep that tie in check.  Ricky died in 1985, in another one of those stupid flights from one gig to another that kill so many musicians. 

I’ve been a fan of The Smiths almost from their beginning in 1982.  My brother Ken mailed me cassettes of a couple of their early albums, and I was hooked.  Morrissey is a great songwriter and I love his singing.  The band broke up in the late ’80s, but in his solo career since then he has written many more brilliant songs.  The last few albums have felt flat to me — perhaps his moving to Southern California a while back has mellowed him out too much.  But his body of work is still remarkable.  I love the way he treats crime and murder in his songs — check out also the Smiths’ great song about the Moors murders, “Suffer Little Children,” and also his solo “The Last of the International Playboys.”  A Jack the Ripper song had to be written, by either Morrissey or Ray Davies, and Morrissey did it.  One last note, in my novel FOG HEART there are a couple of seance scenes that contain numerous partial and mangled Smiths/Morrissey song quotes.

This song is from the 1929 musical drama HAPPY END, music by Kurt Weill and lyrics/text by Bertolt Brecht.  The great explosion of the arts in Weimar Germany is endlessly fascinating in its painting, music, fiction, Expressionist drama and horror films.  The Weill-Brecht collaboration produced some great songs and classic musicals like THE THREEPENNY OPERA and THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CITY OF MAHAGONNY (which infuriated the Nazis).  I often revisit this period in German writing and music, and I mentioned this song at least once in a short story and again in my novel FOG HEART.  Youthful romance, passion, abandonment, profound bitterness and undying love — there’s a unique kind of power in this very unusual love song.

The history of jazz is littered with sad stories of broken lives, and Chet Baker has to be right up there among the saddest.  When he first broke through in the early ’50s, he had movie star looks, a wonderful voice, and oh could he play the trumpet.  Some thought he’d be the next Sinatra.  But Chet  had demons aplenty and got in trouble repeatedly over the years, and he spent one stretch in a French prison.  There is ample testimony that he was not exactly a splendid fellow to know and deal with personally.  But the music he left, in both his vocals and trumpet-playing, is a treasure.  I go back to him regularly, especially the 3-CD set Romance from Pacific Jazz, which includes Chet’s albums My Funny Valentine, Embraceable You and Songs for Lovers.  Youtube has a 5-part sequence of Chet at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London in 1986, and this one I think is indicative of where he was and what he could still do at that time.  It’s sad, but full of ghostly echoes of him at his best.  Two years later, he apparently fell from his hotel room window or balcony in Amsterdam and died.

It so happens I knew a couple of these guys.  The drummer, Eamon Carr, co-founded Tara Telephone with Peter Fallon, which later became Gallery Books.  My collection of poems, ABANDONED HOMES, was the 8th volume in their publishing history.  Gallery continues to this day under Peter’s leadership, and is the widely acknowledged as the #1 publisher of Irish poetry today.  I also knew keyboardist and penny whistle maestro Jim Lockhart from my college days at UCD, when I had a couple of social nights out with a young lady who became his girlfriend.  This band made history before Thin Lizzy and U2.

My friend Mark Granier, the fine Irish poet whose blog Lightbox contains many, many riches, blogtagged me in a rather dubious scheme to post 7 vids of music I’m listening to now or that I listen to regularly, with comments.  Okay, I’ll give it a try with one, at least.  I first became aware of Brazilian music back in the ’60s, when Stan Getz had his big hit single with “The Girl from Ipanema” and bossa nova was briefly hot.  Ever since then, I’ve regularly gone back to enjoy the songs of Antonio Carlos (“Tom”) Jobim and Joao Gilberto.  It’s a music full of love, and a love for life.  “Wave” is one of my old favorites, it always seems to  provide some very helpful mood-lift.  One of the songs my daughter Nicki chose for her wedding CD.  Jobim was a vast talent, a singer, songwriter and musician (guitar and piano).  He died in 1994.  There’s a nice romantic video of this song with vocals available on youtube, but I chose this one instead, because it shows Jobim on the piano, enjoying life.