Dar Williams is about 6 years younger than me, and grew up about 12 miles as the crow flies from me (or about 25 miles driving, on a route that takes you virtually past where I am writing this). Which is a long way of saying that we both lived in the New York area, at roughly the same time. Meaning that we had pretty much the same choices of radio stations to listen to, growing up.
I’ve written ad nauseam about how I became a music fan, and how important for me it was to listen to the radio as a teenager—mostly WNEW-FM—until I headed off to college and WPRB. That was how you learned about music then, for the most part, and where the DJs were people like you who really cared about the minutiae, about the trivia, about the connections, about good segues, about the music. And also, in those days, the DJs, and musicians, were not reticent about talking about politics and other issues, because the radio stations weren’t run and programmed by some conglomerate devoted to creating a uniform, sellable product that sounded the same wherever you happened to be.
So, when I heard this Dar Williams song, about the importance that listening to the radio had to her, it clearly resonated with me. In preparing to write this piece, I found a bunch of live videos of Dar performing this song, often with her introductions included. She sometimes talks generally about the power of radio to introduce listeners to music, and always mentions that the song was inspired by her listening, in her teenage years, to WBAI, a radical, left wing station probably best known for having played George Carlin’s Filthy Words routine in 1973, which resulted in an iconic Supreme Court case that defined the government’s ability to regulate obscene and indecent material on the airwaves. Williams talks about how the station’s discussion of all sorts of conspiracy theories made her think, and the music opened her mind. In addition, there are references in the song to WRSI, 93.9 “The River,” a station in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she was living when she wrote the song (and which is also, I must add, the home of Smith College, the alma mater of my wife and daughter, where I was last week to attend the groundbreaking for the school’s library renovation).
For me, WBAI was something that I respected, but never listened to—too much talking, not enough music for me, but the song is really universal, at least for those of us who grew up obsessed with radio (and are still obsessed). I’ve long been a fan of Williams as both a songwriter and singer—she was probably one of the first artists that WFUV got me hooked on, her appearance at the Clearwater Festival in the 90s was the main lure for my family to attend our first one, and her song, “When I Was A Boy,” was a family favorite, reminding us of our daughter as a child, around the time the song was released.
Dar, and Lucy Kaplansky and Richard Shindell, joined together in Cry, Cry, Cry a few years back, but after one album and some touring, they went their separate ways, for the most part, reuniting last summer at Clearwater for a fun, if sloppy and under rehearsed set. They are back now on the road for a mini-tour, which will be stopping in Tarrytown this weekend, and my wife and I will be there, despite having to fight our way through the Halloween parade and block party right by the Music Hall.
Last week, I stretched our Hard theme as a way to discuss the founding of a new jazz club in my hometown. Today, I’m going to stretch it again to write about what I did last weekend—listening to great music outdoors at Clearwater’s Great Hudson Revival, or, as I think most people call it, the Clearwater Festival. Because not only is it hard to put on a two day, multi-stage outdoor music, environmental and progressive festival, it is actually pretty hard to attend—but well worth the effort.
I’ve written about Clearwaterexperiencesbefore, but I’ve never really focused on the whole experience. The event started in the mid-sixties, as Pete Seeger held fundraising concerts to raise money to build a boat, to highlight the need to clean up the Hudson River. The sloop Clearwater was launched in 1969, and began its educational mission, as part of a larger charitable organization.
In 1978, the first large-scale event was held at Croton Point Park, right on the river, and the “Great Hudson River Revival” name was coined.
Unfortunately, ten years later, pollution from the park’s landfill forced a move to a nearby, inland college campus. My wife and I went to the festival one year during this period, with our young children, and my two strongest memories are that the one musical act we wanted to see was Dar Williams, and that while we were at a playground with the kids, Pete Seeger appeared with his banjo and just started playing.
The festival returned to Croton Point in 1998, but soccer obligations and the fact that the festival is usually on Father’s Day, kept us from returning. In 2010 Steve Lurie began booking the festival, and started to bring in bigger names to perform. When the 2011 lineup was announced, including many favorites including the Drive-By Truckers, Martin Sexton, Indigo Girls, Josh Ritter, Suzanne Vega, Jorma Kaukonen, Billy Bragg, and Dar Williams, among many other great acts, we got the courage to tell my mother that we were not coming for the traditional Father’s Day family event, and instead went to the festival. We’ve gone every year since, except for last year, when they cancelled it to focus the organization's efforts on rebuilding the sloop.
I can only imagine how hard it is to get this event off the ground. Acts need to be booked to fill as many as eight stages, in genres ranging from the traditional folk that is at the root of the festival, to rock, dance and folk music from cultures around the world, story tellers, and other performers. There are lots of jugglers. The site needs to be set up, vendors engaged, employees and volunteers trained, and the various activist booths and environmental education booths that are a hallmark of the festival have to be set up and staffed. The organizers need to make sure that the attendees can get to and from the site, there’s a campsite that has to be organized, the performers need to be taken care of, and the sound systems have to deal with the vagaries of outside shows, including heat, rain and dust. There’s a huge group of “access” volunteers to make sure that people with mobility issues are able to enjoy the weekend, and, I think, an even larger group of “Peacekeepers” to make sure that the thousands of people all get along. Then, there is breakdown and clean up. And I’m sure I’m leaving something important out.
But, as I noted, it is also sort of hard to attend this, or I suspect, any outdoor festival (my experience in the torrential rain at the Newport Folk Festival is discussed here). First, you have to get there. Our first year, we drove the 10 miles from our house to the site, only to sit in horrible traffic. We started taking the train after that. You need to bring in chairs, a cooler with food and beer, blankets and other items. Then you have to load all of this onto a school bus not designed for large adults, unload it at the end, then schlep everything to the stages.
As I mentioned above, the festival now has eight stages, but we usually spend most of our time at two-the largest Rainbow Stage, and the second largest, Hudson Stage, which literally abuts the river. The Sloop Stage also often has good music. I’ve rarely, if ever, ventured to the Dance Stage, Story Grove or Family Stage, and skipped the new Workshop Stage this year (despite the fact that there was some good stuff there). Last year, I visited the Circle of Song to support my wife’s decision to join in the singing, but not this year. So, you are often forced to make hard choices as to which of the many simultaneously performing acts you will see. Sometimes we run between the stages catching partial sets.
Then, there is the weather. Usually, it is hot, and there isn’t much shade at the Rainbow Stage. That’s what we got on Sunday. Often it rains, sometimes torrentially, like two years ago, or steadily, like this year’s Saturday in the early afternoon. By Sunday evening, I’m usually beat, and my wife sometimes leaves earlier than me.
But it was well worth it. Here’s what I saw this year: On Saturday, we arrived early, got ourselves a nice spot at the Hudson Stage, then wandered around checking out the activist and vendor booths. At 11, we were back in our seats for a tribute to Pete and Toshi Seeger by mostly older folk and blues musicians, including David Amram, Tom Chapin, Guy Davis, Holly Near and Tom Paxton.
The great Nick Lowe was next, in the rain. (Note—all videos were taken from YouTube, and not by me)
Next up on the Hudson Stage was Joan Osborne, performing Bob Dylan songs, in advance of her soon to be released album of Dylan covers. During her version of “Tangled Up In Blue,” when she sang the line “Some are mathematician,” someone up the hill to my left, presumably a mathematician, gleefully cheered. No carpenter’s wives did the same.
After Osborne was done, we walked over to the Sloop Stage to catch a little of Guy Davis’s excellent folk/blues set.
But then it was time to see Toshi Reagon and Big Lovely, one of the true highlights of the weekend. Reagon, who is Seeger’s goddaughter, and named after Toshi Seeger, has performed at most, maybe all, of the festivals. She is the daughter of civil rights activists and former Freedom Singers Bernice Johnson Reagon (also a founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock) and Cordell Hull Reagon, and comes by her musical chops and political activism naturally. I can’t find a video of her from this year, but here’s one from 2012, also on the Hudson Stage, that gives an idea of how powerful a performer she is.
I got a nice picture of Joan Osborne watching the performance from backstage
Then came Los Lobos, who I have seen great, and I have seen not so great, and when they took the stage without singer/guitarist Cesar Rosas, I was worried. But they did a fun, rocking set.
The cool night ended with the hot sounds of Lake Street Dive, who are just an incredibly talented band. Great songwriting, strong musicianship and powerful, charismatic singing. It was an exhilarating way to end the long, wet day.
Then, back on the school bus, to the train, to Tarrytown and a well-deserved hot shower.
We were up again early on Sunday, packed our cooler, and decided to drive up, hoping that we wouldn’t get caught in traffic on the way up. We didn’t, and again schlepped our stuff onto the school bus which took us to the site. It looked to be a nice, hot day, but the forecast was calling for a chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. We set up at the Rainbow Stage, walked around some more, until the music started at 11. Although I enjoy going to Clearwater to see musicians that I am familiar with, some of the fun is discovering someone new. Sunday, we started at the Hudson Stage to hear Jerrod “Blind Boy” Paxton, who is part African American, part Native American, of Cajun descent, and who is a practicing Jew (he has one Jewish grandmother, who he discussed during his set). Performing on piano, fiddle, banjo, guitar and harmonica (and the spoons), Paxton focuses on blues and jazz from the 1920s and 30s. I don’t have a video from his set, but here’s a video of part of a Black Banjo Music workshop he gave later in the day.
I stuck around for a 50th Anniversary tribute performance of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by Brother Joscephus and The Love Revolution, a New Orleans style band. It was great fun, all the songs were well-played, but they didn’t try to sound like The Beatles. My wife ran over to the Circle of Song to sing a little, but came back to see most of the set.
By this time, it was very hot, and the occasional clouds only briefly gave some respite, so we killed time in the shade until it was time for Tommy Emmanuel, who I only knew was supposed to be a great guitarist. Wow! His fingerpicking was unbelievably fast and it often sounded like two or three guitarists were playing. Here he is doing “Classical Gas:”
Then it was back to the Hudson Stage for one of my favorites, Alejandro Escovedo, who started out rocking hard, before doing a bunch of acoustic numbers, including “Five Hearts Breaking,” his tribute to late Austin musician Billy Smith:
As he was trying to decide what to end with, someone in the audience yelled out “Castanets,” which he decided to play, and then joked that they were becoming a request band, “and you can catch us at the Holiday Inn.” During his set, the crew began to cover the speakers and other equipment, as the skies darkened. But, mercifully, it didn’t rain.
We moved back to the Rainbow Stage, for the end of Valerie June’s performance—she was wearing a skin-tight gold dress that must have been very uncomfortable. It was time to get out of the sun for a bit, so I got a banana-strawberry ice pop to cool down, and sat in the shade watching little kids play on the swings. But then it was time to go back and see another favorite, Richard Thompson, who, as always, was amazing:
We beat a retreat to the shade to listen to a few minutes of The Kennedys at the intimate Sloop Stage—They are so good, and I would have liked to see their set at the Hudson Stage on Saturday, but they were up against Los Lobos. Here’s something from that performance:
Finally, we returned to the Hudson Stage for the much-anticipated reunion of Cry, Cry, Cry, the trio of Dar Williams, Lucy Kaplansky and Richard Shindell, who had not performed together in 18 years. Which kind of blew me away—it didn’t seem like that long ago. They were clearly having fun on stage together, and while they definitely could have used a bit more rehearsal, and they weren’t in the best voice, it was special:
They’ve announced a mini-tour (and I have tickets for the Tarrytown Music Hall show in October!), and indicated that there might be a new album in the offing. During the show, the clouds rolled in and it looked like we were going to get, as Dar Williams noted, “the apocalypse.” But, again, we dodged the bullet.
After the long weekend, and knowing that Monday was a work day, we reluctantly skipped out on Arlo Guthrie’s closing set (as well as Brother Joscephus’ performance at the Dance Stage) to load back on the bus, to our car. About halfway home, we noticed that the road was soaking wet, so it looks like the apocalypse passed just south of Clearwater.
So, was it hard? It was. Was it worth it? Undoubtedly. Do I expect to be there next year? Yup.
This tale of Jesus' girlfriend's inner life after the ascension is one of my favorite songs from Richard Shindells' canon, and it's not hard to see why: the song offers a perfect set of all the things the ex-seminarian does best, from the fully humanized religious setting to the heartbreaking first-person portrayal of broken dreams framed in wistful imagery.
Shindell clearly likes it, too, as he has recorded this song three times: once on his sophomore release Sparrow's Point, again with folk supergroup Cry Cry Cry, with fellow coffeehouse circuit artist Dar Williams singing lead, and finally on his live album Courier in 2001. I actually posted the live version back in June for our Gender Benders theme, but since it's so apropos, here's his other two takes as a continued study in song evolution.
I had originally been saving this song until the end of the week. But the diversity of posts so far - and the way in which each of us has come to the table using this week's theme to wrestle so well with a difficult issue - makes me feel the time is ripe sooner rather than later.
So here is folk supergroup Cry Cry Cry with a potent, poignant interpretation of a song originally by The Nields. The lyrics are so focused on the inner life of the young female narrator, they never name the ages of the people involved - it's never been clear to me if the experienced male perpetrator here is older, or even a teacher, or just a cool kid disdainfully deflowering a younger student because she feels like it will put an end to "a lifetime of wallflower shade" - but the song certainly speaks to the self-loathing which follows those who allow sex to happen to them too early because they think it's what they're supposed to do. In my mind, this is the swan song of the "jailbait" - originally willing, because sex seems to offer power; ultimately full of regret, with the important lesson learned too late.
I hope someday my daughters will hear this song, and recognize it for what it is, and learn from it that self-worth is never about what other people say is right. I hope they will learn to only say yes when it is in their hearts, and not in their supposed-to social minds. I hope they never, ever feel like the narrator of this song. And if it were not for this song, AND for the ability to point at songs which seem to celebrate jailbait lust, and say "is this really what you want?", I might not be able to say so as well.
*****
More generally, I want to take personal responsibility for picking this week's theme, and apologize for offending anyone in doing so. My intent was not to celebrate, but to provoke exactly the kind of unique and varied perspectives and voices which Anne points to so effectively in her recent post. I'm glad to see this has been the case - that no one seems to have come salivating, and that everyone, in their own way, has use the opportunity to expose the various cultural evils of the complex of juvenile fetishism that is so prevalent in our society. But this is no excuse for potentially alienating anyone, or creating discomfort, and I commit to working to try not to do that again.
That said: I accept that some people feel that the act of perpetuating the songs themselves celebrates an aspect of our culture - the media images which fetishize preteen sexuality, and the myriad of other princess and barbie and sexpot images which encourage us all to make unhealthy choices which hurt ourselves and others - which would be better destroyed, and as soon as possible at that. But as a teacher and parent, I happen to feel otherwise. I believe that pointing TO such things and speaking of them in critical ways is better and more effective in reaching the heart and mind of a culture than merely preaching. I believe that confronting such cultural problems, especially those perpetuated through the media, is difficult, but necessary, for pretending that such things don't exist is a way to let them fester.
And I think that our responses this week have only reinforced my belief that it is, in the end, our recognition that such songs are there which makes it possible at all for us to take up the mantle of saying "no" to such things. Without the exemplar, our lessons are that much more hollow. It is, as we've seen this week, the words we share here, not just the songs we choose or the themes we take on, which truly allow this space to be a sounding board, a space for discomfort to be shared as much as song, even a force for good.
But regardless of what you believe, readers and fellow contributors alike, I am proud of all of us - to Susan for coming forward with an anti-jailbait song perfectly on theme, and for bringing the conversation around to change; to Muruch for giving us a chance to out ourselves through confronting the songs and songwriters we love for perpetuating a malicious mindset; to everyone else for refusing to celebrate the sentiment even from our very first post, regardless of how we have each chosen to frame our own individual approaches. Being a part of this community has never felt so much like world-changing as it does this week. And though changing the world one discussion at a time can be a difficult path for all of us, it feels damn good, at that.
I batted around a few different ideas for my contribution this week, but kept coming back to the phrasing of the theme... and couldn't resist my need to tie together the two incarnations of Cry Cry Cry of which I'm aware:
~ the title of Johnny Cash's song (released in June 1955, it reached number 14 on the Billboard country charts)...
Cash wasn't used to writing on demand, but back at the house on Tutweiler with Vivian's due date approaching, Cash labored at the kitchen table. He chugged his coffee and burned down cigarette after cigarette as if he were back at the radio intercept controls. Inspired by Memphis disc jockey Eddie Hill's trademark "we're gonna squall and ball and climb the walls", recalled Cash, he came up with Cry Cry Cry in two weeks... Cash enhanced the recording with a chucka-chucka percussive effect that he produced by threading a folded sheet of paper between the strings up around the neck frets...
~ the name of the 1999 folk supergroup (comprised of Dar Williams, Richard Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky)...
"The name comes from "three things," Shindell says, speaking softly by phone from his "quiet house in the woods" of Valhalla, N.Y.
"It's the threeness of it all, obviously, but it's also the sound of the voice, the way a singing voice can often sound like it's crying at the simplest of times. And there's a melancholy to the whole thing, in that most of the songs on the album are pretty damned depressing."
There's also the matter of his newborn son. "The sessions were interrupted by his birth, and a few of the arrangements were inspired by him. And he was around a lot . . . crying."
As a synchronistic sidenote, I actually did witness the trio performing the Cash tune... in February 1999 at the Centro Astureano in Tampa, Florida - sigh sigh sigh...
Though it's somewhat blasphemous to say so, I'm a much bigger fan of Ryan Adams the sensitive folkpop artist than Ryan Adams the alt-country rocker. It's not that I don't understand the appeal, really -- the man can write a hook in any form, and his heavier side makes for some danm good listening. I just think there's few other artists recording today who can hit the emotional nail on the head with such heartfelt quietude. And the tangled web of confused loss and longing which frames Cry On Demand makes it one of the best pensive, brooding acoustic ballads in his catalog.
but love is something the whole round world wanna know about..."
Granted, not exactly lyrics to win a poetry prize with. But just do yourself a favour and check out the dynamite vocals on this ´65 gem. If southern soul giant Overton Vertis sang the Memphis telephone book from cover to cover I´d buy the box set.
I love Alvin Youngblood Hart because he's a great guitar player, singer songwriter, and of course, because like me, he's a old-time blues lover and a fan of the great Leadbelly.
"Dancing with tears in my eyes",is not a cover of the new wave hit by Ultravox, but a much more ancient Tin Pan Alley song in 3/4 time, that Alvin took from Lead who, in turn had learnt it in the thirties. It's a good song about sadness and life that must go on.
My first impression of her had nothing to do with music. It was the enormous breasts. Parton was the one who made sure everyone knew about them. So, she was the trashy blond who had something to do with country. Then, I heard that she had opened an amusement park named after herself. And there was the movie, 9 To 5.
I actually saw it in the theater. I don’t remember why. It was a slight comedy. The songs were my first introduction to Parton’s music, and it wasn’t even country. It was bad pop.
At the time, I was in my “cool” phase. I wasn’t about to like country music. New wave was the thing. Jazz gave me an edge. So did blues. Folk was a secret only my closest friends knew about.
But, I got older, and left the peer pressure of high school behind. A girlfriend liked going to bars to dance to local country bands, and I began to realize that, yes, it was corny, but country music had something honest to say. Still, even the idea of liking Dolly Parton was embarrassing.
Cut to 2001. Now I am married to a woman who doesn’t care for most country music. The sound of country music has changed. Line dancing is big, and the classic sound of country is becoming a distant memory. And word reaches me that Dolly Parton has made a bluegrass album! A good one, even! The idea is so weird that I have to check it out. And it really is true.
The album was Little Sparrow, and the song My Blue Tears is right there in the middle of it. Here, it is a slow ballad about the sorrow of having a lover leave. The lyrics are a plea by the wounded protagonist to a bluebird whose sad song reminds her of her loss. The song has a naive simplicity to the concept, and the listener cannot help but sympathize.
It turns out that My Blue Tears is a Parton original that has been with her for a while. She first recorded it on her album Coat of Many Colors, in a more upbeat early seventies country arrangement. There is also a beautiful duet version on Linda Ronstadt’s album Get Closer. So, maybe Parton will record the song again in the future. I’ll be keeping an ear out, to see what she does with it next.
If you are only going to listen to one of my tearful posts this week, this should be the one.
Arthur Alexander was an extremely gifted artist but many music fans don't know his name. You should. Check out his interesting story here, here, and here.
(If you like what you hear, please consider leaving a comment so that I know a connection is being made.)
This Tori Amos song is from her 1999 double-disc album "To Venus and Back", which featured a disc of new songs and a disc of live songs recorded during her previous tour. "1000 Oceans" was the last song on the disc, and as is typical for many artists, and almost always the case for Tori, the album ends with a melancholy ballad.
This particular song was inspired by the passing of her father-in-law and was written to help her husband deal with the grief. She sings about how she has cried "a thousand oceans" but would cry a thousand more if it meant bringing him back. It's a touching and beautiful song, that, though sad, feels more like a sympathetic hand squeeze or a shoulder to cry on.
Patsy Cline. Brenda Lee. Loretta Lynn. Female country singers who had (or have) big voices. You think of them singing in front of a small band augmented with real strings. And, I at least think, this is what country music sounds like.
But were it not for producer Owen Bradley, country music might not sound like that at all. Bradley was the producer of all of these ladies’ biggest songs. And he was one of the chief architects of the “Nashville sound”.
By 1987, kd lang had made one album that had anything to do with country music. Absolute Torch and Twang had more to do with Texas country, including western swing. At this point, lang decided to do her next project in Nashville.
Mary Martin had been a friend of lang’s in Canada. Martin relocated to Nashville, and went to work for RCA’s country operation there. It was she who introduced lang to Owen Bradley. In Bradley, lang found a legend who was willing to take chance on a young singer. In lang, Bradley found a singer who blossomed, and proved able to more than hold her own as a classic country singer. The result was an album that sounded like it could have been made 35 years earlier. The album was Shadowland.
Most of the songs on Shadowland are covers that match up well to the originals. I have been unable to determine who may have done an earlier version of Tears Don’t Care Who Cries Them. But the song fits write in with the vintage material here.
These pop hits from 1963 (sung by 16-year-old Lesley Gore and produced by 30-year-old Quincy Jones) constitute history's most famous two-part, tear-dropped, teen-pop melodrama.
Some musical pairings seem obvious in retrospect, but make no apparent sense at the time. In 1988, executive producer Hal Willner was working on Stay Awake, his album of unusual takes on songs from Disney movies. Here were Sun Ra doing Pink Elephants on Parade, Tom Waits voicing the seven dwarves, and Sinead O’Connor on the title track. And Willner had the crazy idea of pairing Bonnie Raitt, known at the time mainly as a blues artist, with Don Was, from one of the strangest groups of the 80s, Was (Not Was). And remember that, to be one of the strangest groups of the 80s, you had to be really strange.
The song was Baby Mine, (heard here during the week of the same name), and the pairing worked amazingly well. So well, in fact, that Raitt tagged Was as her producer for her next album. This was Nick of Time, and the album proved to be Raitt’s commercial breakthrough, after almost twenty years in the music business.
Of course, Cry on My Shoulder comes from Nick of Time. The song was written by Michael Ruff. Ruff is one of those people who is regarded as a “songwriter’s songwriter”. You’ve probably heard his songs without knowing they were his. Besides Raitt, artists who have recorded his songs include Natalie Cole, India Arie, Kenny Loggins, Huey Lewis and the News, and The Doobie Brothers. Ruff doesn’t really tour, never venturing much beyond his native Hawaii. And he is primarily a Christian artist, doubly insuring his distance from the mainstream.
It's no secret I'm a coverhound, and this one's been done plenty raw and emotional, both by Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris, not to mention an oddly endearing christian rock take from Jars of Clay. But though most covers take both Julie's original intonation and Buddy Miller's ringing electric atmospheric undercurrent as gospel, I prefer the sparse mountain banjo and breathy vocals of Julie Miller's own solo effort, revisited as an appalachian tune for the 2001 film Songcatcher years after the song first debuted as a countryrock duet with Emmylou on Julie's 1993 album Orphans and Angels.
Emmylou's Wrecking Ball demo recording isn't bad, either. The piano is a nice touch.
O Mary Don't You Weep is a pre-Civil War era spiritual that calls to mind themes of liberation from bondage and the salvation that can come from faith. The narrative covers the raising of Lazarus from the dead, the parting of the Red Sea, and the promise of the rainbow. Each verse ends with Mary, don't you weep no more. Pharaoh's armies got drowned-ed. O Mary, don't you weep.
This song has been recorded countless times, by the likes of Pete Seeger, The Caravans, Burle Ives, and Bone Thugs 'n Harmony. I've heard several versions, but I only own one which is by Bruce Springsteen from his Pete Seeger Sessions album. I like this version a lot, and the video is also cool if you ever get a chance to see it.
"Voir un ami pleurer" ("To See A Friend Cry"), was on Jacques Brel's swan song album that he recorded in 1977, 3 years after being diagnosed with lung cancer. He had stopped touring since 1966, hadn't recorded a real album since 1968, and was living in French Polynesia, but he came back to France to record. He passed away in 1978.
Here's an attempt at an English translation
Of course, there are the wars in Ireland /And tribes without music Of course, all this lack of tender / And there is no more America Of course, money has no smell/ but lack of smell gets up our nose Of course, we walk on flowers/ But....to see a friend cry
Of course, there are our defeats/ And death at the very end Our bodies already incline their heads/ Amazed to be still standing Of course, there are unfaithful women / And assassinated birds Of course, our hearts lose their wings / But....to see a friend cry
Of course, our exhausted cities / By these 50 year old children Our impotence to help them / And our loves which have a tooth ache Of course, time that goes too fast/ These subway trains full of drowned people Truth avoiding us/ But....to see a friend cry.....
Of course, our mirrors are honest / Nor the courage of being jew Nor the elegance of being negro /We think we are wicker, we're only tallow And all these men who are our brothers/ So much so that we're no longer amazed When out of love they lacerate us / But....to see a friend weep......
The guitar wail. The vocal moan. The heartstring masculinity of the core metaphor. The poignancy of the posthumous album, the best of a bluesman lost in his prime to foggy weather and a helicopter pilot's inexperience.
I maintain that The Sky Is Crying is Stevie Ray Vaughan's greatest album, bar none -- if for no other reason than that the sheer raw emotion of the songs it contains, coupled with the bittersweet hope of its very existence, has helped me get through so many periods of great sadness and loss. Its title song is just one gem among many recorded in life, and released first in death. Talk about the blues incarnate.
This is a theme I can really work with. I love depressing music. Let's start with a great cover of one of the all-time great sad sack songs. Al Green sings Hank Williams.
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