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Time Passages: The Music Of Al Stewart

Posted on January 16, 2010
by Dinesh Dutt

“Two broken tigers on fire in the night
Flicker their souls to the wind”

Two of the most beautiful lines that I’ve heard in all of my musical journeys. Can you believe a song, a rock song at that, that grabs you like a thriller from the first lines and doesn’t let go till the end, almost eight minutes later. And the song has a beautiful, sad ending like a great epic. And the song is the chronicle of the Third Reich’s disastrous invasion of Russia, the beginning of its end, told from the perspective of a Russian foot soldier.

Or how about this song, “The Running Man”, that chronicles the life of a hunted man (a Nazi ?), running from the hunted, that starts with:

Before the phone hits the receiver
You’re halfway to the door
The voice said ‘get out while you can,
There’s just ten minutes, nothing more’

Or a song about the French Revolution called “Palace of Versailles” that starts with:

The wands of smoke are rising
From the walls of the Bastille
And through the streets of Paris
Runs a sense of the unreal
The kings have all departed
There servants are nowhere
We burned out all their mansions
In the name of Robespierre

Probably no other rock artist has set history to such beautiful music and woven such compelling historical tales as Al Stewart.

I was introduced to his music in Paris. When I went to meet a friend in one of the company apartments, I heard this beautiful music coming from one of the rooms. I asked what the music was and who lived in that room. I was told that the guy who lived there was a snob who had the most expensive and gorgeous sounding music system in all the company. Snob or not, I wanted to know what the music was. I knocked on the door and entered his den. A guy sat on the floor, sprouting a moustache and an attitude. I introduced myself and asked him what was playing. He said, “Al Stewart”, disdainfully. The song that I heard was “Roads to Moscow”, the song whose lines I quoted at the start of this post. The album was “The Best of Al Stewart“.

I remained in the room listening to the rest of the music and a few months later, the snob and I were good friends. We’d spend hours listening to music. I was coming to Paris from my years spent in small towns of Southern India where western music was hard to come by. And what did come by was the mainstream stuff, stuff that I had grown tired of, stuff that was unmemorable a week or a month later. I was in search of something less ephemeral, more soul grabbing. Deepak introduced me to a lot of new music, music that went under the genre of progressive rock, of groups such as Yes, ELP, Rush and King Crimson. Of all of them, the only two that remained are Al Stewart and Camel.

Al Stewart has a pleasing and distinctive voice to accompany his distinctive musical stories. Hear it once and you can recognize it again quite easily, just like Mark Knopfler’s guitaring. His musical journey began with a guitar and this voice, singing folk rock songs of intimate portraits gleaned from his life. Stories of girl friends – won, lost and love still searching – of friends and their lives, of street life and characters like history teachers. Here are some lines from one of his early songs, In Brooklyn:

‘Oh I come from Pittsburgh to study astrology,’
She said as she stepped on my instep,
‘I could show you New York with a walk between Fourth Street and Nine.’
Then out of her coat taking seven harmonicas
She sat down to play on a doorstep sayin
‘Come back to my place I will show you the stars and the signs’
So I followed her into the black lands
Where the window frames peel and flake
And the old Jewish face behind the lace
Even now trying to get to see what’s cooking
Just John the Baptist in the park getting laid thinking there’s no-one looking
And its eighty degrees and I’m down on my knees in Brooklyn

Interestingly, his first single, in 1967, included guitaring by the legendary Led Zeppelin guitarist, Jimmy Page. His albums also featured good instrumentals such as “A Small Fruit Song” from his third album, Zero She Flies. At one of his concerts, he joked that jazz is what happens when a musician continues to play even after they don’t know what they’re playing, this despite his third album containing an 18 minute track that chronicled his love life. The song reads like a rock version of Raj Kapoor’s “Jaane Kahan Gaye Woh Din”. Wikipedia credits the song as being the first mainstream record release to include the “f” word. I like how the song ends:

Of all the girls I ever knew
some loved and some denied me
And all the words I ever said
have been no use to hide me
And all the songs I ever sung
each one of them untied me
And all the girls I ever loved
have left themselves inside me

Wikipedia has this to say about this stage of his career: “Stewart was a key figure in a fertile era in British music and he appears throughout the musical folklore of the age. He played at the first ever Glastonbury Festival in 1970, knew Yoko Ono pre-Lennon, shared a London apartment with a young Paul Simon, and hosted at the legendary Les Cousins folk club in London in the 1960s.”

Things began to change with his fifth album, “Past, Present and Future“, released in 1973. Six of the eight songs from that album had historical roots from melodies about the second World War to a portrait of the American president, Warren Harding, to one about the prophecies of Nostradamus. This was the first album to be properly released in the US, though it didn’t receive much airplay on commercial radio stations due to the length of its best songs.

Two albums later came the meteoric “Year Of The Cat”. Al Stewart is mostly known to everybody for this album. He says that this was attempt to construct a chart-busting album. “If this didn’t work, I don’t know how to create one”, he said. It had fewer historical songs than say “Past, Present and Future”, but the three that it did were gems: Lord Grenville, On The Border and Flying Sorcery. The title track is among my all time favorites, along with Roads to Moscow. His description of the woman in the title track is brilliant and unique:

She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running
Like a water colour in the rain

as is the the starting of the song:

On a morning from a Bogart movie
In a country where they turn back time
You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre
Contemplating a crime

It is a song that speaks to the senses with lines of incense and patchouli, blue tiled walls, drum beats and rhythms.

The rest of his albums never quite achieved the popularity of Year of the Cat though they possessed gems such as Merlin’s Time, Running Man, Song On The Radio and Palace of Versailles. He mostly disappeared from the mainstream radio scene. But that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to put out albums. His last album “Sparks of Ancient Light” was released in 2008. The highlight of the album was the song “Shah of Shahs” about the last days of Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran. He sings:

After these processions comes the sweeping up
The rag and bone possessions, an old tin cup
The army trucks have hauled away the newly slain
The angry crowd retreats, but they’ll be back again

And the prisoner in the palace does not understand
The ingratitude around him after all he’s done and planned
But if this the way that it must be then he’ll be damned
If he will let them take away his perfect dream

….

He cried inside the limousine and at the airport too
Where the soldier knelt before him and kissed his shoe
He flew across the desert and the open sea
While they tore down all his statues and his legacy

And the victor greets the newsmen with a strange and stoic style
They take a hundred thousand pictures and in none of them a smile
But this is just the way that it must be now for a while
he’s only come to bring another perfect dream

Luckily for me, he still tours, performing at small, off beat but popular stages. He is back to being a folk artist again, singing his popular and not-so-popular tunes with a just a guitar. He’d sometimes be accompanied by his then collaborator, guitarist Laurence Juber. Almost twenty years after I first heard his song, I saw him perform live. He came to the Bay Area twice within a year and we saw him both times, driving nearly two hours each way the second time. His concert was charming despite the lack of orchestration because he also spoke well, with understated, wry British humor.

In the music shops of Paris at that time I lived there, only a handful of his albums were available, all very expensive. So Deepak and I purchased an album each, Year of The Cat, and its followup, Time Passages. I had to wait till I came to the US to buy some of his other albums. After collecting seven of his albums, I thought I had enough. For a while, he vanished from my music scene as jazz and Mark Knopfler supplanted just about everything else.

Then Maya was born. A child can begin a journey of rediscovery. One afternoon, looking for some music with an afternoon mood, I played Lord Grenville and Year of the Cat to Maya. She was hooked to both songs and for over two months now, they continue to be the songs she takes to her afternoon nap. I’ve introduced other songs such as Time Passages, Almost Lucy and Palace of Versailles, all of which she likes. Roads to Moscow is one of her favorite bedtime tracks. Last night, she evan began humming the chorus of the track. As I listened to Roads to Moscow, to her humming and watched the joy in her face as she listened to the song, my thoughts harked back to my history with Al Stewart and I drifted into those Time Passages.

It was late in December, the sky turned to snow
All round the day was going down slow
Night like a river beginning to flow
I felt the beat of my mind go
Drifting into time passages
Years go falling in the fading light
Time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

Well I’m not the kind to live in the past
The years run too short and the days too fast
The things you lean on are the things that don’t last
Well it’s just now and then my line gets cast into these
Time passages
There’s something back here that you left behind
Oh time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

Al Stewart picture from flickr, courtesy of ac4lt.

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Get Lucky: A Review

Posted on October 19, 2009
by Dinesh Dutt

September doesn’t just herald the coming change of season. For me and several others around the world, every two years, it heralds the release of a new Mark Knopfler album. Get Lucky, his seventh solo album (including his duet with Emmylou Harris) was released a few weeks back, with just about as much fanfare as his previous releases; that is, almost none. An email about pre-concert ticket sales for a concert next April was how I came to know of this album.

Though the album was to be released only on September 14th (15th in the US), I got lucky and found out that my Rhapsody music subscription service allowed me to listen to the entire album a full week before the release. That alone justified the monthly subscription that I pay for Rhapsody. Coupled with Roku Soundbridge 1001, I listened to the entire album on my hi-fi system.

Compared to his previous album, Kill To Get Crimson, Get Lucky is a more modest effort, a notch or two below his best, especially in song writing, which has become his primary focus.

Across eleven tracks and 52 minutes, Knopfler uses flute, whistle, accordion and strings to produce a sound that is a throwback to the soundtracks of Local Hero and Cal. It is a september record: a few upbeat sunny songs but mostly quiet, midtempo tracks, tracks composed with a knowledge of the coming cold, austere times.

Three tracks stood out immediately. Hard Shoulder, the second song in the album, is a heartbreaking song about an unexpected loss. In a style that he employed on Hill Farmer Blues from The Ragpicker’s Dream, he starts with a workman listing out the things he has, the tools of his trade and then quietly slips in the real subject.

I’ve got latches for windows, handles for doors,
Grinders and scrapers and sanders for floors,
Rake for the gravel, chains for the snow,
Always got the shovel – you never know
I never thought you’d go

A workman, has stopped on the shoulder of a road, trying to recover from the loss. And with beautiful wordplay, he mixes the shoulder of the road with the need for a shoulder to cry on.

A few years back, we were having some repairs done on the house. The workman called to say the morning of the repairs that he had had a family emergency and that he couldn’t make it that day. I’ll call later and reschedule, he said. I was a little miffed (I had to shuffle my schedules so that I could be home when he showed up), but didn’t think much more. He called back a few days later and we rescheduled for him to come a week later.

He was an immigrant, like me, but eking out his existence in a much harder way than I ever had to. As he was doing his work, I remembered his family emergency and asked him if everything was alright. I remember how he looked at me, his clear blue eyes shattering as he said, “My daughter died last week. She was six years old. She had a fever that led to complications she never recovered from. That morning I was to come to your house, we had to rush her to the hospital”. I held him as he cried a little. I thought about my getting a little ruffled over his rescheduling. How little we know of the lives we call upon to care for our needs. Listening to Hard Shoulder reminded me of that man.

In true Knopfler fashion, the loss is never spelled out. A first reading made me think that it was about a lover leaving. But subsequent readings made me revise that opinion: this could be about any loss.

The second stand out track was the gentle waltz, Monteleone. The song is about John Monteleone, who Knopfler calls the world’s greatest living builder of the arch top guitar. The song is about his working of the wood to produce a beautiful musical instrument. I love the line “the chisels are calling”:

The chisels are calling
Its time to make sawdust
Steely reminders of things left to do
Monteleone, a mandolin’s waiting for you

The final standout track is also, in my opinion, the finest on the record, So Far From the Clyde. The song is about a ship taken to a breaker yard, some desolate beach in some impoverished part of India. I felt my insides rip as he sings about the ship as it is first shattered by riding it hard into the ground and then hacked and sawed off “’til there’s only a stain in the sand”. The ship comes alive, becomes a living thing. In one beautiful stanza, he sings:

As if to a wave
from her bows to her rudder
bravely she rises
to meet with the land
Under their feet
they all feel her keel shudder
A shallow sea washes their hands

I love the way he mixes in the metaphor of Pilate’s washing off his hands at the judgement of Jesus to the actions of the people involved in the tearing down of the ship.

Again, the song at one level, can be treated as merely the story of a ship, or it can be treated as an elegy to the end of a way of life. The song reminded me of an article that I had just read on NYT, about the lonely, wretched existence of many elderly immigrants in this country. The lead anecdote was about a Sikh father, living in the not far-off East Bay town of Fremont. Many of these immigrants had been cast aside by their children after being brought to this country. Now far from their social network, their ways of knowing and being, a stranger in a strange land, they seek solace in the company of fellow immigrants in similar positions and return to their rented places to die lonely deaths. Not unlike a ship that sailed proud and free for many years but taken at its end to a strange place. From the article:

Mr. Singh, the widower, grew up in a boisterous Indian household with 14 family members. In Fremont, he moved in with his son’s family and devoted himself to his grandchildren, picking them up from school and ferrying them to soccer practice. Then his son and daughter-in-law decided “they wanted their privacy,” said Mr. Singh, an undertone of sadness in his voice. He reluctantly concluded he should move out.

So when he leaves the Hub, dead leaves swirling around its fake cobblestones, Mr. Singh drives to the rented room in a house he found on Craigslist. His could be a dorm room, except for the arthritis heat wraps packed neatly in plastic bins.

The album is unusual in that it comes with some liner notes by Knopfler, a man known for his understated, taciturn persona. Knopfler writes that this album was a personal one more than usual. His uncle, dead at the age of 20 in WWII, is the piper in “Piper to the End”, his father makes an cameo on “Before Gas and TV” and his own childhood and adolescent life is the fabric from which songs such as Border Reiver and Get Lucky are sown. But I found his songwriting on most of the songs not upto his usual exemplary standard.

Maya likes the three songs that I mentioned as well as the title track and Border Reiver. Especially, Monteleone which is one of her staple goodnight songs now.

There’s so little new music that soothes me. Don’t get me wrong. I continue to find new music that I enjoy, new styles and new artists. But novelty isn’t all that it’s cut out to be. Homecoming is not about novelty, but it is among the most emotionally complex and satisfying experiences. Listening to Knopfler is like a homecoming to me. Not all homecomings are as good and satisfying. But we go home anyways. And so, I’ll listen to this album.

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Kill to Get Crimson: A Review

Posted on October 7, 2007
by Dinesh Dutt

Kill to Get Crimson is Mark Knopfler’s sixth solo album, his first after 2004′s Shangri-La. I was not sure if I’d like it. His duet with Emmylou Harris was a disaster to me as a studio album. It is the only Knopfler album that didn’t stay on the CD player continuously for weeks after it’s release. This album is a fine return to form.

It is a mostly bleak album, with almost no uplifting songs, with the possible exceptions of True Love Will Never Fade and Punish the Monkey. Clocking in at a little less than an hour with twelve songs, the average length of a song is about four minutes. This implies that there are no searing guitar solos like Speedway at Nazareth. Knopfler was always a songwriter par excellence, whose writing skills were masked by his fluid and lyrical guitar play, especially during his Dire Straits days. From the very first self-titled album that gave “Sultans of Swing”, a song as amazing for its guitar work as its lyrics to his latest release, his song writing has constantly impressed me. Reducing massive tomes such as Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon to a six minute song, “Sailing to Philadelphia”, chronicling the rise of McDonalds in Shangri-La’s “Boom Like That” or capturing the nuances of the lives of black gospel singers in a racially divided south in “Baloney Again” or penning a crime cum social commentary about the lives of coal workers in “5.15 am”, his song writing skills have continued to evolve brilliantly. He writes multi-layered songs that tell an intimate personal story while capturing a social milieu and talk of matters eternal such as the price of success, the results of the choices of a lifetime and of the desire for connection.

The first song off the album, “True Love Will Never Fade” can be read as a straight forward narrative about a tatoo artist and his unrequited love for one of the women who has him tatoo her shoulder. At another level, it’s about hope, of everlasting love. A tatoo is usually considered a permanent mark of a temporary insanity. Knopfler in this song turns that cynicism into hope, hope that it will be a permanent mark of an everlasting insanity. But the way he repeats the line “True Love Will Never Fade” can also be construed as a sign of his lack of belief in that very notion, repeated to reinforce the idea, an attempt to hold cognitive dissonance at bay. At yet another level, it’s about our making a mark in the world (tatoo is making a mark on a body) and the hope that whatever we do with true love, will remain a sign of us. I like the way he phrases “Any which way we’re all shuffling, forward in the queue” to say that every day, we all take a step towards death.

Many fans and critics complain that there are no guitar epics in his later albums. A guitar epic would seem a little out of place in this album. It’s about ordinary people coming to terms with their life, about people whose life never got on the success track, was shunted to a bleak sideyard. A long guitar solo such as in the one in Speedway at Nazareth or Telegraph Road would seem out of place. This is no “Fanfare for the Common Man”. What we get instead are vignettes into people’s lives, words perfectly crafted by this word pecker. These are little gems, wonderfully crafted offbeat short stories instead of an 800 page novel.

I have never liked his folkish songs such as “Donkeytown” in “All The Road Running” or “Stand Up Guy” in Shangri-La. They seemed boring to me. Starting with chords that sound similar to “Stand Up Guy”, Knopfler crafts a brilliant song about the life of a pawn store owner in “Heart Full of Holes”. Knopfler constantly evolves sounds in each album, until he hits the perfect pitch. Similar sounding songs from previous albums seem a preparation for “Heart Full of Holes”. Written like a simple folk song, it is much more. When the narrator talks of his shops filled with belongings of people long dead and gone, the simple ditty turns into a macabre funeral music, reminding me of the third movement of Mahler’s First Symphony. I liked his reasoning about going to heaven in this song:

Well, if we go to heaven
And some say we don’t
but if there’s a reckoning day
please God, I’ll see you
and maybe I won’t
I’ve a bag packed to go either way

Secondary Waltz is another strange offbeat song, about a boxer reminiscing of his school days where he was taught the waltz by a strict discplinarian, taught on the gymanasium floor, typically also where one learns to box. The boxer sings:

When you come to my fights
and I’m under the lights
and you see that my footwork is false
don’t count me out
at the start of the bout
I’m just doing the Secondary Waltz

Another example of multi-layered writing, this can be read as a song about ingrained habits, especially those learnt very early.

He writes about the life of mismatched people who fall in love in “The fish and the bird”:

The fish and the bird
Who fall in love
will find no place to build a home in
The fish and the bird who fall in love
are bound forever to go roam

This is among the most evocative songs he’s penned.

Some critics complain that Knopfler has settled into a comfortable groove, never changing his style or pacing, penning nothing new. Others complain that he’s turned into someone who writes boring music. I see him as a musician who’s digging deep and is peeling the layers of onion away to reveal the hidden core, like the boatman in Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha who sees in the unchanging river the lessons of a lifetime. The songs are different enough to be interesting while also remaining unchanged in their unique guitaring and singing style. For example, the music in this album have strange time signatures such as being in 6/8 or 3/4 time. While the album is somewhat reminiscent of The Ragpicker’s Dream, the comparison is justified only in the mood of the songs and the pacing. There are no country music tunes like Quality Shoes or blues tunes such as Marbletown. There is more British music in here and very little American influence. If that album was about the consequences of choosing to wander, this album is about the consequences of choosing to stay.

“We Can Get Wild”, “Punish The Monkey” and “Behind With The Rent” are about as fast as songs get in this album, all mid-tempo at best. Punish The Monkey is the weakest song w.r.t lyrics, but quite catchy and quirky musically. This is the first album since the eponymous debut album of Dire Straits where there is no title track, though the line “Kill to Get Crimson” is in the song “Let It All Go”, about the life of a painter in a foreign land during World War II. The song is slightly reminiscent of “In The Gallery” from the debut album of Dire Straits in its theme. The only song that didn’t work it’s magic on me is the second song, “The Scaffolder’s Wife”, though I don’t always skip it when playing the album.

In an interview a long time ago, Knopfler said that he likes to write blues that wouldn’t be played on a blues station, country that would similarly not be played on a country station. He’s looking for that no man’s land, where boundaries are blurred, musical genres blend, reflecting off each other’s influence instead of the compartmentalized music that we get from most artists. He delivers on that promise again in this album.

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Mark’s Concert

Posted on July 10, 2006
by Dinesh Dutt

This is the first of trifle delayed updates to the happenings on the long weekend of July 4th. The weekend kicked off with the Mark Knopfler/Emmylou Harris concert at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley. Their album was mildly disappointing and it hasn’t been finding much time on my CD player except for “Beachcombing” and “Love and Happiness”. Shanthala arrived with a lot of reservations. The Greek Theatre is a beautiful outdoor venue, set in the hills of the UC Berkeley campus. Our seating was good and center though a little farther than I’d have preferred, but that was expected. The show was sold out and they didn’t permit photography.

I did not know that the venue was outdoor and was suitably unprepared for a possibly chilly evening. It started right away with Shanthala getting chilly with me for not having found this out. Luckily, she had got a shawl with her and that kept her warm. A lady sitting beside us saw my plight and kindly lent me her full-arm shirt with the words: “This is my favorite shirt. Don’t forget to return it before you leave”. It didn’t turn out to be that cold after all and with all the shaking during the concert, I stayed warm.

The concert started a little past 8:15. It was a surprise right from the start. I was curious to see the order of songs in the concert and which ones from each of their solo repertoire they’d play. The mailing list has been quiet on this front as well and so I was left guessing. While I’ve enjoyed the somewhat well-known and unsurprising setlists of his solo tours, I guess I’ve secretly yearned for a little surprise. That was in plenty at this concert.

The evening started off with “Right Now” which caught me completely by surprise. I had been expecting “This Is Us” since it is similar to “Why Aye Man” and “Calling Elvis”. He followed it up with a very catchy version of “Red Staggerwing”. The live versions were way superior to the studio versions. Emmylou said “Touring with Mark so makes up for high school” :) . She sang two of my favorites from her “Red Dirt Girl” album which are among the few songs of hers that I know. “Michaelangelo” fit in very well with the concert’s setlist. Richard Bennett also had more prominent guitar work in this concert than I recall the previous times, especially on her solo songs.

The highlight of the evening for me was a version of “Song for Sonny Liston”. There was an extended solo in the middle that was pure magic. The drumming of Danny Cummings, the drummer from “On Every Street”, was just brilliant throughout the evening, but on this song it was magic. This song is a classic live. The studio version practically sounds flat! “Romeo and Juliet” had a beautiful piano introduction and the song is always poignant. It is a masterpiece ! “Done with Bonaparte” continues to impress and the fiddle player was brilliant on this song as well. After about an hour and half of playing came a really rocking “Speedway at Nazareth” which was not very different from the Shangri-La tour version, but really put the house on fire and set the stage for the first encore which was “So Far Away” and “Shangri-La”. I had missed listening to “Shangri-La” live last year and it was a treat to hear it this time. I guess it’ll replace “Brothers in Arms” now. It has a similar start with the organs. The second encore was “If This Is Goodbye” followed by a really cool acoustic version of “Why Worry” with just Mark, Emmylou and Guy Fletcher.

Mark was his usual understated self letting his music speak for him. “If This Is Goodbye” was apparently written as a reference to 9/11, but like most of his songs, it can be applied to many situations, personal and public. Songs like “This Is Us”, “Red Staggerwing” and “Right Now” which were very low on my list of good songs from the album sounded rocking and very catchy live. The only disappointing song of the evening was “Belle Star” for me even though the guitaring was good.

My famous last words
Are laying around in tatters
Sounding absurd
Whatever I try
But I love you
And that’s all that really matters
If this is goodbye
If this is goodbye

Emmylou said “This is Us, This Is It, Goodbye” as they played in this, the last concert of the tour. She could’ve been referring to us fans as well enjoying every moment of the concert.

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