“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.

