Dylan and Ginsberg

See ‘Waiting for the End: Ginsberg, Dylan and the Poetry of Apocalypse’ on ‘The Beats’ page

‘O Thou Transcendent’: The Life of Ralph Vaughan Williams, dir. Tony Palmer (Palmer DVD)

Ringing Roger, November 2009

The piece of music which is repeatedly voted England’s favourite is The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams – or VW, as he is often referred to. It is right  that the English people have taken his music to their hearts as he, more than any other composer, stands for what the poet William Blake meant when he preached ‘mental fight’ on behalf of ‘England’s green and pleasant land’. It is no coincidence that VW set Blake to music, for they both belong to a tradition that is deeply patriotic without being narrowly nationalistic. I suspect that the affection that so many feel for The Lark Ascending arises from its evocation of the English countryside, for what’s left of it becomes all the more precious as we pollute, degrade and ‘develop’ the rest. Nor should we overlook the fact that it was written just at the start of the First World War – in which the pacifist composer participated as a stretcher bearer – and came to acquire deeper and wider significance as a lament for a vanished Eden, a lost innocence.

The occasion of these comments is the release on DVD of Tony Palmer’s long, leisurely film about VW. Not only does it document the life with a wealth of archive film and photography, but it includes interviews with people who either knew him (eg, his second wife, Ursula) or were influenced by him (eg, the composers John Rutter and John Adams), along with extracts from filmed performances of the major works.

VW’s love of the English musical tradition was initially prompted by his concern about the dominance of European influences, notably German and Austrian: he took exception to the excessive deference of his countrymen to Brahms, Mahler and others. This love took two main forms. Firstly, VW wanted to rescue from generations of condescension the rural culture which expressed itself in folk music: he was the man most responsible for the recovery of hundreds of songs that might otherwise have been lost once the singers who knew them by heart had died. It is fitting that one of the interviewees in the film is Richard Thompson, a pioneer of English ‘folk-rock’: he recalls working in Germany prior to his musical career, and having to defend VW’s music against the accusation made by his colleagues that the music was typically English in being ‘sentimental’.

Secondly, VW wanted to revive English sacred music. He was particularly keen on the Tudor period, and greatly admired the religious songs of Thomas Tallis – composing his haunting Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis in 1910. Prior to that, he accepted the role of musical editor for The English Hymnal (1906), which contains some of England’s favourite hymns, with original melodies by VW himself in many cases. One thinks, for instance, of ‘Come Down, Oh Love Divine’ and ‘He Who Would Valiant Be’.

Palmer’s film celebrates all this. In doing so, it radically revises VW’s reputation. It is often said that his love of England renders his music safe and predictable. Far from it. His great-uncle was Charles Darwin, whose work fascinated him; so he knew all about the long, withdrawing roar of what Matthew Arnold called ‘the sea of faith’. Indeed, he comes across in this film as a complex figure: simultaneously a nature mystic, a cultural Christian and an anxious agnostic. It is no coincidence that the chorus from his first symphony which gives the film its title, ‘O Thou Transcendent’, is based upon a work by the American poet Walt Whitman, whose spirituality was unorthodox, to put it mildly.

Moreover, the man who saw unspeakable horrors in the trenches went on to write some very dark music indeed – for example, the sixth symphony – which conveyed his sense that civilisation was on the verge of collapse and that the earth was heading for catastrophe. It certainly does not make comfortable listening. He deserves our respect and gratitude, and this fascinating film suggests that we are finally able to do him justice.

Laurence Coupe

The Turin Horse, dir. Bela Tarr (Artificial Eye)

Ringing Roger, January 2014

You can rely on the Hungarian director Bela Tarr to bring us back down to earth after whatever flight of fancy we’ve been pondering. I mean that literally, as The Turin Horse is a masterpiece that makes you reflect on what life is like for those forced to eek out the barest of livings on the land. Nor is that all it does: the story told is also about a growing realisation that the end of time is at hand. So forget the festive fun and prepare to have a life-changing experience.

The title of the film is a reference to an incident late in the life of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Having preached a doctrine of ‘will to power’, and having sneered at Christianity for being a ‘slave religion’ which celebrated weakness, he underwent a curious change in 1889. Residing in Turin, he one day saw a coach-driver beating his horse, and immediately intervened, throwing his arms round the neck of the horse and sobbing hysterically. He was then taken away, and ended up in the care of his mother and sister until his death in 1900. This event has always been taken to have triggered Nietzsche’s madness. I like to think of it as the moment in which he became sane: the moment when he realised that a doctrine of dog-eat-dog was soulless, and that compassion for all living creatures, human and non-human, was the only morality that mattered.

It is a horse which one sees first in the film: a tired, dust-covered, drab creature pulling a creaking cart driven by an elderly man. We see it brought home to a windswept, ramshackle farm, then put to rest in a rundown stable. It is the horse to which the film keeps returning. Though we feel sorry for it, we feel sorry also for its owner and for the patient but weary daughter who looks after both of them.

There, then, are our three main characters. Over six ‘chapters’ and two-and-a-half hours we are invited to observe their daily lives, with its humble routines. The old man rises and is helped to dress by his daughter. They eat boiled potatoes with their hands. The horse is taken out, driven out and then brought back home. They eat potatoes again. They drink the rough, cheap, local brandy. They sit quietly for what seems an eternity. All the time, the camera simply rests upon them. In an era which relishes speed and busy-ness, it is wonderfully calming simply to sit and stay with these characters and every detail of their existence.

But what happens? Well, I suppose we could say that life is what happens. Focusing on everyday actions at extraordinary length eventually has the effect of encouraging a kind of meditation in the viewer. Many scenes are like religious paintings. Even when there is movement, the actions seem like gestures towards eternity.

Eventually, though, we sense a change is coming. A neighbour calls requesting a spare bottle of brandy, staying only to warn the old man that the world is undergoing a painful transformation: the old certainties have gone, corruption is rife, and the world is going to ruins. Sure enough, the signs are there in that isolated homestead: the horse refuses to eat or drink, and is obviously too sick to pull the cart; the well on which they rely for water dries up; the daughter reads aloud from a religious text about sin and damnation; the lamps, though full of oil, refuse to light; darkness envelops the home and its surroundings.

This review is not meant as a plot spoiler. Indeed, there is no plot to The Turin Horse in the conventional sense of contemporary cinema. ‘Things get worse and worse, and the end draws near’ hardly suggests a sure-fire blockbuster attraction. But if you want a film that will stay with you for the rest of your life, this is it.

Laurence Coupe

 Listening to Van Morrison by Greil Marcus (Faber)

Ringing Roger, August 2010

Forgive me if I start by quoting some of my favourite lines of poetry. They come from T. S. Eliot’s great religious sequence, Four Quartets: ‘Words, after speech, reach / Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness, as a Chinese jar still / Moves perpetually in its stillness.’ Eliot is talking about the way art gestures towards a sacred meaning beyond itself. In the case of music, the sound makes sense only because of the silence – the healing emptiness of the divine – which surrounds and sustains it.

It may seem a far cry from one of the greatest religious poets of the last century to one of the most famous rock musicians, especially if our theme is silence. Popular music has become the inescapable soundtrack to all of our lives – leaking from headphones in railway carriages, blaring from speakers in restaurants, thumping out of passing cars, echoing from next door’s sound system. It is as if the general assumption is that life without noise is unbearable; for many of us, it’s the other way round, of course! But Van Morrison has, throughout his forty-odd year career, been obsessed with what lies on the other side of sound. In ‘Summertime in England’ he sings: ‘And you listen to the silence. Can you feel the silence?’ We know that he is talking about mystical communion, which relies on a willingness to sit quietly without being, in Eliot’s phrase, ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’. In case we don’t get the point, he even has a song called ‘Hymns to the Silence’, in which he implies that all his music is written in honour of the sacred soundlessness which lies all around us, but which we seldom hear because we’re addicted to noise.

All this may sound pretentious, but there are a lot of people who take Morrison very seriously. Greil Marcus is one of them. The author of probably the best book ever written about American popular music, Mystery Train, and of one of the most interesting on Bob Dylan, Invisible Republic, he has taken his time to get round to the world’s most famous Irish singer-songwriter. Is Listening to Van Morrison worth the wait? Yes, if you’re of the opinion that the early albums are the best. Marcus is very good at conveying the atmosphere and significance of Astral Weeks, of Tupelo Honey, of St Dominic’s Preview, and of Into the Music. His approach is to use one or two particular songs as keys to the whole albums: eg, ‘Madame George’ for Astral Weeks.  His thesis is that Morrison’s greatest gift is a voice which has what the Irish tenor John McCormack once claimed is a sure sign of genius: the ‘yarragh’. The question to ask of any singer, explained McCormack, is this: ‘is the song singing you?’ Marcus believes that with Morrison this is the case: his voice ‘strikes a note so exalted you can’t believe a mere human being is responsible for it, a note so unfinished and unsatisfied you can understand why the eternal seems to be riding on its back.’

Putting it in the terms we’ve used above, Marcus could be interpreted as saying that the sacred silence is being made manifest in the sound which Morrison makes. Why, then, does he ignore, or even dismiss, most of the explicitly religious music of the past three decades? He doesn’t really explain, but I suspect that he considers that in the later work Morrison is singing about ‘the eternal’ rather than conveying it directly through his voice; in other words, he has lost the yarragh. If so, then I think Marcus is being unfair: true, there is something self-conscious about some of those later albums. But it’s quite an achievement to incorporate into one’s music the traditional wisdom of Zen Buddhism and Christian mysticism, or the philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti, while still producing music that can inspire, console and, to use a favourite Morrison word, heal. I certainly wouldn’t want to jettison Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, or No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, or Avalon Sunset.

Nor should one forget that that last album afforded Morrison one of his very few ‘hits’, namely ‘Whenever God Shines His Light’ – for which he deserves special praise for proving himself indifferent to the whims of his trendier admirers by (a) releasing an explicitly religious, almost evangelical  ‘single’, and (b) asking Cliff Richard to sing it with him. If the task is to produce ‘hymns to the silence’, that born-again stalwart of British rock’n’roll has as much right as anyone to sing from the same hymn sheet. I think that Morrison’s manifest lack of concern about image and reputation, about who’s in or who’s out, is a good sign that he is concentrating on what really matters.

Though I’ve written about Morrison elsewhere, I’ve often found it difficult to put my finger on what is distinctive about his art. I’m grateful to the author of Listening to Van Morrison for bringing into play that word ‘yarragh’ – suitably indefinable, but having the advantage of actually sounding like the way Morrison sings. My only difference from Marcus is that I think I can hear the yarragh in more work of Morrison’s than Marcus can. Perhaps you can too?

Laurence Coupe

The Tree of Life, dir. Terence Malick (20th Century Fox) & Melancholia, dir. Lars von Trier (Artificial Eye)

Ringing Roger, May 2012

As soon as I’d seen both these films, I realised that they form a perfect pair, balancing each other almost exactly. The Tree of Life is about wondering how everything began; Melancholia is about getting ready for the end.

In Malick’s film, an apparently idyllic American childhood turns out to be a source of endless pain and regret. The family scene is as follows. The spiritually inclined mother believes that the choice in life is between the way of nature and the way of grace, and she wants her boys to follow the latter. The father, however, wants them to follow neither, but adhere rather to his rigidly orthodox code: conventional, restrictive Christianity fused with aggressive individualism. (Let me pause to say that this part is impressively acted by Brad Pitt.) The boys try and make sense of things, despite the confused messages from their parents, but these years are overshadowed by the death of one of them at the age of 19 as an army recruit – news of this tragedy being delivered by telegram at the start of the film.

Much of the narrative is about looking back to childhood and asking where everything went wrong. But it takes us back much, much further. The mother plants a tree – the tree of life of the film’s title – which invites speculation about the story of the garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis: Adam and Eve were denied access to the tree of life because of their pride. Not only that, but in a stunning sequence lasting over a quarter of an hour, we are transported to the very moment of creation, and then given a guided tour of evolution.

Malick shows us human misery in the context of grand, cosmic processes. That might explain his decision to preface the film with a quotation from another Biblical book, that of Job, which tells the story of a good man whom God allows to be tested by Satan in order to see how strong is his faith. The terrible pains inflicted upon him fail to shake his belief, but Job understandably wants to ask God why he allows so much human suffering. God’s reply is to ask a question in return: ‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?  … When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?’ In other words: once you’ve understood all the mysteries of the cosmos, you may come back to me and complain about the way you’ve been treated! The film doesn’t necessarily condone this divine rejoinder: it draws on it to help us get outside of our normally limited point of view.

So the film presents us with the way of nature, which it sees as God-given. But what of the way of grace? I won’t spoil the end, but I think I’m right in saying that we are offered a vision of salvation.

On the other hand, Lars von Trier in Melancholia seems to be telling us that what matters is to prepare yourself for the ultimate agony: the destruction of the Earth. If Malick draws on Genesis via Job, von Trier draws on the Book of Revelation. This is an apocalyptic film.

The action takes place in a country house hotel, where a wedding reception is being held. There are family disputes and resentments galore, and repressed rage is evident throughout.  The bride-to-be is riddled with doubts, and suffers from depression. Not only that, but she is obsessed by the idea that a planet, appropriately called Melancholia, is heading towards Earth. So weary is she of life that she almost welcomes the collision. Meanwhile her sister, initially calmly sceptical, is thrown into a state of increasing terror as the film progresses.

In this case, I won’t be spoiling the end by saying, yes, the planet does hit Earth, and yes, everyone is killed. This is made quite clear at the beginning – with the strains of Wagner’s prelude to Tristan and Isolde providing an appropriately doom-laden atmosphere. Let me just say that this final sequence is unforgettable as a representation of what it must be like to face destruction.

So if The Tree of Life puts our lives into perspective by reminding us of our origins, Melancholia does the same by asking us how we will conduct ourselves in the face of the conclusion of everything (which may not necessarily come by way of planetary collision, but which will come nonetheless). By sheer synchronicity, Malick and von Trier have produced at the same moment an astounding pair of visionary films.

Laurence Coupe

American VI: Ain’t No Grave

Johnny Cash (American Recordings)

Ringing Roger, April 2010

For many years Johnny Cash was dismissed as a middle-of-the-road country singer. People forgot how dangerous he had seemed when he first started recording at Sam Phillip’s Sun studio in Memphis, along with the likes of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. After all, this was the man who sang, in ‘Folsom Prison Blues’: ‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.’ That song, which is written from the point of view of a convicted murderer, hardly fits in with the kind of sentimental material which we associate with easy-listening country music, as represented by Jim Reeves and Eddy Arnold, for example. That line, which is probably one of the most striking in the history of American popular song, strikes me as country music’s equivalent of the moment in Coleridge’s famous poem, ‘The Ancient Mariner’, when the sailor shoots the beautiful and beneficent albatross for no good reason, thereby bringing catastrophe to his ship and his fellow-sailors. It forces us to ask ourselves: why do human beings gratuitously commit the most evil acts? and does the gift of free will demand too high a price?

Even if you think I’m going too far here, it has to be said that Cash’s main preoccupations as a performer have been with the darker side of life. He has always been able to make a light-hearted love song sound like a meditation on death, desolation and despair. Listen, for example, to ‘I Walk The Line’ or ‘Ring of Fire’. This tendency to despondency was, of course, always held in check (and perhaps thereby intensified ?) by his very public and defiant commitment to Christianity. Thus in his song of self-justification, ‘The Man in Black’, he explains that he dresses in dark colours ‘for the poor and the beaten down’, and can’t help but add that he does so also for ‘those who never read / Or listened to the words that Jesus said’.

At least, then, let us agree that Cash is not a talent to be dismissed lightly. It’s fascinating to chart the ups and downs of his reputation, and to ponder the miraculous  ascent of his career in the years leading up to his death. I’m referring of course to the series of recordings which he made with the producer Rick Rubin from 1993 to 2003, when he died. On these albums Cash re-recorded some of his old songs; and he also offered new material, such as ‘The Man Comes Around’, which is his version of the Book of Revelation. Moreover he offered unadorned acoustic versions of not only  traditional American ‘roots music’ but also ‘pop’ material. His version of John Lennon’s ‘In My Life’ makes it sound like the statement of a man nearing his end – thereby revealing that a strong sense of mortality was always present in that composition by a young, successful and apparently carefree Beatle. Nor did Cash exclude the more extreme forms of ‘alternative rock’. Who can forget the deeply affecting sound of Cash intoning the sombre lyrics of Trent Reznor’s lament, ‘Hurt’?

The last of the series, which consists of material recorded in the few months of 2003 between the death of his wife June and his own demise, stands up to comparison with earlier volumes. Like the host of the wedding feast at Cana, Rick Rubin might have been expected to leave the second-rate material until last, but this is far from the case. Cash renders the title track, a Negro spiritual which I seem to recall hearing the majestic Sister Rosetta Tharpe perform, so that one is simultaneously aware both of his approaching death and the strength of his faith: ‘There ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down / When you hear that trumpet sound / Gonna get up out of the ground / There ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down.’ Typically, he juxtaposes this with a contemporary song by a performer more often associated with secular entertainment, namely Sheryl Crow. In his version of ‘Redemption Day’, Cash brings out the sense of frustration at the evils and injustices of the world, while giving full force to the notion of divine judgement (of the wicked) and deliverance (of the good). Other gems include his serene rendition of the Tom Paxton classic, ‘Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound’: the image of life as a journey is given a new resonance; we come away from this performance with a sense of how strange, difficult and lonely the sheer act of survival can be; but also we realise how necessary it is to embrace rather than evade suffering.

The necessity for acceptance, and for resolution in the face of mortality, is brought out in Cash’s own song, ‘1 Corinthians 15:55’. This is an elaboration on the words of St Paul – ‘O death, where is thy sting? / O grave, where is thy victory?’ – set to a charming, old-fashioned waltz tune which seems initially incongruous but then sublimely appropriate. Cash certainly brings that particular passage to newly triumphant life.

It’s not appropriate for me to go through, track by track, ticking them off or giving marks out of five. You really have to immerse yourself in the whole experience. From Bob Nolan’s song of physical and spiritual thirst, ‘Cool Water’, to Queen Lili’uokalani’s Hawaian song of farewell, ‘Aloha Oe’, you can’t help but feel privileged to be in the company of a talent so wide and deep. And you can’t help but marvel at how he managed to affirm the power of music, and the preciousness of life, in face of his imminent death. You don’t have to share Cash’s religious faith to feel inspired and uplifted by this album; you just need to listen.

Laurence Coupe

‘Songs of the Earth: Woody Guthrie to Neil Young’

16 January 2023

https://www.popmatters.com/woody-guthrie-neil-young-eco-folk

[I have also posted it on my ‘Green Studies’ page, given its environmental theme.]

‘Songs of the Earth: Woody Guthrie to Neil Young’

PopMatters 16 January 2023

How American folk songs, from Woody Guthrie to Neil Young, tilled the soil for the rise of ‘Green Pop’.

As this is a multimedia article, it is necessary to visit the journal itself.

To read this article, along with others written for this journal, search:

Laurence Coupe PopMatters

What was so incredible about the Incredible String Band?

PopMatters   3 October 2022

In this article, I reassess the work of this extraordinary group, and I convey why they made such an impact.

As this is a multimedia article, it is necessary to read it online:

https://www.popmatters.com/the-incredible-incredible-string-band

Au Hasard Balthazar

PopMatters 30 August 2022

Laurence Coupe

This is a classic film fable about the life and death of a donkey. It has been consistently voted one of the best 20 films ever made, in surveys carried out by leading film journals. My discussion includes episodes from the film itself.

As this is a multimedia article, it is necessary to visit the journal itself.

https://www.popmatters.com/au-hasard-balthazar-robert-bresson