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Time Passages: The Music Of Al Stewart

Posted on January 16, 2010
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“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
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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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Call Of The Valley

Posted on August 25, 2008
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Maya wakes up by 7 am usually, sometimes by 7:30. She has a bottle of milk before I bring her down from our bedroom where Shanthala is still asleep. I put Maya in a little chair that we have for her and make myself some coffee. Two cups of coffee later, I’m a little more awake and Maya is a little closer to sleep. Having waited patiently for me to finish my coffee, she starts fussing now, flailing her arms and legs, throwing off whatever it was that she had in her hand, making small noises like a whimpering puppy. I pick her up and turn on the music system. She watches eagerly as I proceed to pick a CD, signaling her happiness by beating her little legs against my body when it’s a CD that she recognizes.

For the past month or so, that CD has been the Indian classical music CD, “Call of the Valley”, an instrumental CD featuring the famous flutist, Hariprasad Chaurasia, the santoor player, Shiv Kumar Sharma and a guitarist, Brij Bhushan Kabra. As the music starts up, I gently sway my body to it, trying to follow the unfamiliar rhythms with my body. Maya nestles her head on my shoulder, starts to coo and in a little while, falls asleep. I find that swaying to music that wasn’t really meant for dancing is easier when I close my eyes and focus more intensely on the rhythm. As a result, I’ve been able to listen to this CD more closely than I have in my entire life. In the morning, this music is the equivalent of a soothing massage over my aching body, freeing the tension, my body relaxing, and I’m aware of little else but the sensation between my ears and my feet trying to move in tandem to the music.

Today morning, I suddenly remembered, in a Proust-like fashion, that this was the music my father played in the mornings when we were in Gulbarga, where he worked as a production manager in a textile mill. They were his most creative days. During the day, he worked in the mills, having been elevated to his position in a very short time, over the heads of many seniors. In the nights, he’d put me to bed, regaling me with fantastical stories that he made up. I think we have a few tape recordings of these narrations; I must remember to preserve them the next time I’m in Bangalore. It was at this time that he also painted a lot. He’d paint originals and duplicates of paintings from some painting books that he had acquired. Completely self-taught, he played with both watercolors and oil paintings, with traditional paintings and with paintings that included other objects such as a coin, pieces of cloth and stones. Two of these paintings now hang in our house.



He also took up learning Hindustani vocal. A balding old man would come home every day, wearing a silken white shirt and a lungi, his lips and tongue red from chewing tobacco, with a harmonium. In the summer, when I had the luxury of sleeping as late as I wanted to, my father would wake me up some mornings with a song that he had learned in his music class, “Tum Jago, Mohana Pyaare” (Wake up, Lovely Krishna), a song that appealed to me because Krishna was my favorite god.

My father loved music. His stories and his love of music are what spring to mind when I think of him fondly. We had a turntable and a bunch of LPs, all Western music, ABBA, James Last’s Non-Stop Dancing, the soundtrack of Shaft, Engelbert Humperdinck and Jim Reeves. The only Indian music LP we had was Call of the Valley. The cover had two shepherds, a man and a woman, tending their sheep in front of a lake, surrounded by lush green meadows, coniferous trees were visible a little ways away, and towering over all this were the white mountains, the Himalayas. My mother was enamored by Kashmir. If there was anything I remember her fervently wishing, it was to see Kashmir. Over and over again, every time the idea of a holiday came up, my mother would pitch Kashmir. How are we going to go there, my father would ask, it’s too expensive to go there and it takes so much time, I can’t take that much time off. We weren’t rich enough to afford flying and getting to Kashmir by train from that little town we lived in would take two or three days, one way. But my mother never gave up. I was five and she wanted to go to Kashmir, I was ten and she wanted to go to Kashmir, I was twenty and she still yearned to see the Himalayas. She’d sit enthralled in the movies when the hero and heroine cavorted in the lush landscape of the Himalayas.

Call of the Valley symbolised the yearning of my mother, set to the music of my father.

Call of the Valley is an unusual CD for the Hindustani classic music genre. Most instrumental music in that genre consists of a single instrument with the accompaniment of a tabla and maybe a tanpura. But this CD, released in 1967, featured three musical instruments playing together. It was also what is today called a concept album. The entire CD was devoted to the narration of a day in the life of a Himalayan shepherd, set to traditional, Hindustani music ragas. Santoor and guitar were relatively new and still not completely accepted as a Indian classical instrument. Indian music is mostly composed for the human voice, considered the most exceptional of all musical instruments. The only instruments accepted as lead instruments were those that could mimic the human voice, that could change pitch, tone and frequency smoothly, without breaks. So instruments like santoor and guitar had trouble being accepted as a classical music instrument. All three artists were relatively young and had not achieved the fame associated with them today. It was a revolutionary work in a mostly conservative and tradition bound world. It has since gone on to become the single largest selling CD of Indian classical music.

Attuned to listening to Western dance music, the gentle, nuanced melodies and unfamiliar rhythms of Call of the Valley were too slow for my impatient mind then, good only for the morning time when I was waking up. But something about them lingered. Maybe it was because it was the one standout LP in my father’s collection of mostly dance music, the one Indian LP in a collection of thirty or so Western music LPs.

Over the years, the turntable was replaced by a tape recorder and the LPs all eventually ended up, packed and crated, never to be removed. A few years ago, when I was shopping for some music, I caught sight of the cover of Call of the Valley and wanted to own it immediately. I didn’t fully understand my connection to this CD then. I mostly play Hindustani classical music for the mood it evokes rather than paying close attention to it, like I do with most other music. Except now, more than three decades later, my daughter is teaching me to listen deeply to the music of my childhood.

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