Big city Europa—July of ’64—It’s 5 A.M.
Weather blowing bitter off the Baltic.
Car slows beside him as he walks
Hubcaps slow revolution
Jaundiced-looking pockmarked face, round in window
Short greasy black beard
Couple of language stabs settle on English
“It’s cold—I give you ride.
Don’t you want to kiss me?”
This goes on halfway across the cobbled bridge
Driver pulls ahead—gets out by the construction fence
Ambles toward him rubbing the bulge in his pants
In his jacket is the revolver
The hand is already in the pocket for warmth and fingers
slide easily
around wood grips
Slow as that predator’s footsteps the gun comes out
Arm straightens, sight blade bisecting yellow forehead
Wind—
blue metal streetlight—
Faint twilight shining
on the corners of stones
Wave on wave of life
Like the great wide ocean’s roll
Haunting hands of memory
Pluck silver strands of soul
The damage and the dying done
The clarity of light
Gentle bows and glasses raised
To the charity of night
“THE CHARITY OF NIGHT,” 1994
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/1.
It was time to get out of Stockholm. Per and I hit the road southward, thumbing our way through Copenhagen to Bremen, then to Amsterdam and Brussels, thence to Paris, where danger also lurked. You wouldn’t have known just by walking around that the city had recently been a war zone, and although I’d heard stories of bombings and other disorder, I hadn’t given it much thought before arriving. The Algerian revolution against colonial France had ended two years before, but attacks from both sides remained commonplace. The French, who had occupied Algeria since 1830, were still on edge.
All wars are brutal, and the French fight to quell the Algerian revolution—which, perhaps not coincidentally, began the same year (1954) that Vietnamese forces pulverized the French Far East Expeditionary Corps at Dien Bien Phu—was particularly vicious. The war lasted eight years, and both sides, but especially the French, tortured and terrorized thousands of people. Nearly one million lives were lost in all, most of them Algerian, and almost all of the fighting occurred in that huge desert nation. (Algeria is the largest country in Africa.) But the Algerian National Liberation Front also routinely carried out attacks in France, and the French killed Algerians in France as well.
In 1961, just three years before I made the city’s acquaintance, the head of the Paris police, Maurice Papon, ordered his officers to attack a protest march of thirty thousand Algerians. Large numbers of demonstrators were herded into the River Seine. Some were thrown from bridges. Many drowned. Many more were simply shot after being transported to police headquarters. Some two hundred Algerians died in the police massacre. (Before becoming the Paris police chief, Papon was a prefect in northern Algeria, where he acquired a reputation for torturing prisoners. And before that, during World War II, he deported at least sixteen hundred Jews from France to Nazi concentration camps, for which a French court, in 1998, convicted him of crimes against humanity.)
In 1962 French President Charles de Gaulle signed an agreement granting Algeria independence and ostensibly ending the war. But the Organization of the Secret Army, or OAS—a violent paramilitary group dedicated to keeping Algeria in French hands—responded to the agreement by trying to kill de Gaulle. In August 1962 de Gaulle, a military hero of World War I and World War II, survived a machine-gun attack in a Paris suburb. The OAS kept at it, gunning for de Gaulle three times in 1963, five times in 1964, and three more times in 1965. They never got him.
Tensions still rippled just below the city’s surface when Per and I descended on Paris. Locals warned us never to run from the police or we’d be shot. An Irish guy we met on the Left Bank had just come from visiting his travelling companion in the hospital. A gendarme had asked the man for his papers, and when he reached into his jacket for his wallet, the cop thought he was going for a gun and shot him in the stomach.
You’d be walking down some street and suddenly all around you would be a rustle of something like apprehension—a gust of unseen energy. You could feel it coming. All at once an entire block would be lined with steel crowd-control fences, placed and manned by a line of blue uniforms blocking the view of the road. This would happen in minutes. The roofs of a caravan of black sedans would hurtle past: de Gaulle or someone else of grave importance moving through the city. As soon as the vehicles were gone, the steel barricades disappeared and the atmosphere would slip back to its normal hum.
We weren’t there to cause trouble. Like the many transient young people, from a variety of countries, hanging out along the quays beside the Seine, we wanted to see the sights, play some music on the streets, have some adventures. Our concept of adventure was not quite in sync. Per was more energetic, interested in something like sightseeing, while I preferred to lie around by the river, socializing and drinking and shouting insults at the passing tourist boats. Per and I drifted apart. Or I drifted away from him. We had spent weeks on the road together, but when it came time for him to leave I was reclining on the stone quay by the Seine, too full of cheap wine to even get to my feet and say a proper good-bye.
I met up with an American named Brian who played clarinet and was on summer leave from the Peace Corps in Ethiopia. Brian had been busking with a French guy who played trumpet. They played trad jazz as a duo, but someone rounded up a six-string banjo for me to borrow (because it was loud enough to compete with the clarinet and the trumpet), and suddenly we were a trio. There we were in beautiful, romantic Paris, playing a mixture of jazz and ragtime and bluesy rock and roll. I couldn’t have felt more cool. The problem was that at that time a permit was required to perform on the street. The permits were reserved for the clochards, Parisian street people. Of course we had no permit, and the police had already chased my compatriots out of every arrondissement except Montmartre. So that’s where we went.
Montmartre was a famous red-light district and artists’ colony in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though it had been gentrified by the time we got there. It was a tourist’s delight, and tourists love buskers (or so we liked to believe). We planted ourselves on the wide white stone staircase near the top of Paris’s highest hill, below the Sacré Coeur Basilica. It was a beautiful summer night and the place was packed with people, foreigners as well as locals. We played a couple of Jelly Roll Morton songs, then switched to something more up-tempo as a lithe young gay guy in a sailor suit danced the Charleston. I reveled in the romance and freedom of the moment. But it was only a moment. Out of nowhere, three grim-faced men in casual clothes materialized in front of us, and one of them demanded, “Let me see your papers.”
“Who the fuck are you?” It was just these three guys standing there, no uniforms. They could have been from Amway or the Elks Club. Of course, they weren’t. The short one turned away, and I noticed that he had what looked like a Smith & Wesson .38 sticking out of the hip pocket of his jeans. The trumpet player elbowed me hard in the ribs. “Ils sont des flics,” he said. “They’re cops.”
The cops demanded we haul our permitless butts with them to the Montmartre police station. They acted as if we’d committed a serious infraction and there would be a price to pay. The nervousness I felt at that moment was compounded by the presence in my pocket of a switchblade, picked up somewhere along the way, that I became very conscious of. It wasn’t very big, but at that moment it felt like a plantain bulging in my corduroys. Brian had a small quantity of marijuana in his clarinet case. The police station was right out of Dodge City, a large room painted a time-darkened institutional green, with a reception counter on the st
reet side. On the wall behind it hung the cops’ gun belts, a nice touch. The opposite wall was made up of bars, demarking a holding cell where four battered-looking old hookers occupied themselves exchanging shrill jokes and insults with the police. They reminded me of the witches from Macbeth. I had visions of being thrown into the cage with them, but it was not to be. After maybe an hour of standing in front of the counter, being questioned intermittently, we were told by the desk sergeant, “Okay, you can go. Get out of here, and don’t let me catch you at this again.”
There were other episodes: a dawn flight from the construction site in which we were sleeping, to avoid discovery by the foreman arriving early for work; narrowly escaping being mugged by an organized gang of North Africans preying on travelling youth; being rescued by a Dutchman from a beating at the hands of a Nigerian boxer who fancied Marie from Manchester, whose company I was keeping. But it was the end of our busking that signaled the end of my first European adventure. Much later there would be many more, with appearances by cops, machine guns, rioters, nuclear radiation, and some really great audiences.
I had mixed feelings about going back to Canada. I wanted to stay in Europe, but I couldn’t do it without money from home, and the folks were adamant about the higher education thing. And I was hungry. A Scandinavian menu consisting primarily of fish (I didn’t like fish), and a European diet diminished by simple lack of funds, conspired to relieve me of about forty pounds of body weight. That felt pretty good. It contributed to the shock value, though, when my parents met me at the plane in Ottawa. The clean-cut boy they had last seen in Montreal had been replaced by a rumpled, unshaven, shaggy-haired monster. The dismay on their faces was palpable. I landed back home in September 1964, but I didn’t stay there long, just enough to revel in the roast beef dinners with pie and do a bit of quiet boasting to the Le Hibou gang about what I’d gotten up to. Then Dad drove me to Boston with a carload of clothes, bedding, the portable record player he’d given me, and a guitar.
Oh I have been a beggar
And shall be one again
And few the ones with help to lend
Within the world of men
One day I walk in flowers
One day I walk on stones
Today I walk in hours
One day I shall be home
I have sat on the street corner
And watched the boot heels shine
And cried out glad and cried out sad
With every voice but mine
One day I walk in flowers
One day I walk on stones
Today I walk in hours
One day I shall be home
One day I shall be home
“ONE DAY I WALK,” 1970
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/4.
4
When I got to Berklee the school was nineteen years old, and so was I. I went there expecting to become a composer of jazz music. I wanted to write for big ensembles. I never got the chops together to be much of a jazz player, especially at that nascent stage. Today if I had to describe my playing technique, I would say it’s a combination of country blues fingerpicking and poorly absorbed jazz training. Basically, the right hand is playing country blues and the left hand is using techniques and harmonic notions acquired at Berklee. But that’s a generality, as I was and remain easily sidetracked into other directions. One of the reasons the jazz was poorly absorbed is that I got absorbed in Boston’s thriving folk scene, in addition to putting as much time into reading and trying to write poetry as into practicing scales. Another reason is that I was a lazy and undisciplined student.
My time at Berklee was short but wide. I did study jazz there, primarily in the form of learning to play scales and, to a limited extent, to improvise. To this day I’m still not much good at the kinds of chord changes that jazz people are expected to be able to play over, though I can improvise convincingly enough when I don’t have complex harmonic structures to deal with.
Among the riches I encountered were Indian and Arabic music, which the jazz world was beginning to explore, and which didn’t employ harmony in the way the music I had grown up with did. This was music that was more about rhythm and linear motion than vertical structure, an approach that resonated with me, as did the modal music of medieval Europe.
During these early explorations of sound I began to feel a kind of geometry, a sort of architecture, in the music itself. This sensation remains with me today. It jumps out of the playing of Keith Jarrett or Thelonius Monk, or Erik Satie’s piano pieces, but the geometry exists in other music as well. When I first became aware of this physical, structural manifestation of the music, it appeared like a mountain range rising from a prairie, or a building in an urban skyline: angles and movement and sonic shapes formed against a flat plane.
On my second album, High Winds White Sky, is a song called “Let Us Go Laughing” that might be a good example of the mixing of styles that I was pursuing. The right hand is my picking hand, the blues hand, and I’m playing in a style that would be recognizable by Mississippi John Hurt or the Reverend Robert Wilkins. They would look at my right hand and see the thumb playing an alternating bass with the fingers playing melodic notes overtop and know what I was doing. But the left hand, the fretting hand, is doing something that owes more to jazz or to early European music, the stuff I was absorbing in the sixties.
My canoe lies on the water
Evening holds the bones of day
The sun like gold dust slips away
One by one antique stars
Herald the arrival of
Their pale protectress moon
Ragged branches vibrate
Strummed by winds from o’er the hill
Singing tales of ancient days
Far and silent lightning
Stirs the cauldron of the sky
I turn my bow toward the shore
As we grow out of stones
On and on and on
So we’ll all go to bones
On and on for many a year
But let us go laughing—O
Let us go
And may the holy hermit’s staff
On and on and on
Guide you to the shortest path
On and on for many a year
“LET US GO LAUGHING,” 1969
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/5.
Boston itself left at least as sharp, and long lasting, an imprint as Berklee did. The region’s live music scene was robust and inviting, a ground zero for folk music. We frequented a place off Harvard Square in Cambridge called Club 47. In 1959 a teenage Joan Baez had played there and made it clear that a young and insistent form of folk music was about to take hold in this old eastern city and spread to the four directions. Bob Dylan cut his chops there in 1961, and Bonnie Raitt is said to have attended Radcliffe College in Cambridge so she could live near Club 47 in 1966.
When I think about sitting in a place that had an association with Dylan, I’m reminded of the impact he had. I tend to be influenced creatively by everything I hear that I like, but Dylan remains the songwriter who has had the greatest effect on my music. When The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan hit Ottawa in the summer of 1963, our little group of folkies all had to learn “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Hard Rain,” and “Masters of War”: these are brilliantly written songs that were shaking not just our world, but the world. When Dylan went electric, he did it again. At the time a few folk purists moaned about how they’d been let down by Dylan plugging in, but the rest of the world got it. This was an electric moment! And I don’t mean the guitar. By this time Dylan’s songwriting had evolved to its most masterful level. “Desolation Row,” from Highway 61 Revisited, came out in 1965, and in my mind it remains one of the best songs ever written. The following year Dylan released Blonde on Blonde, with “Visions of Johanna” and “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” No one has ever written songs better than these. The influence I g
ot from Dylan was less stylistic than it was motivational: Look at what you can do. Look at how broad the field is; you can do any damn thing. You can be as wordy as you want. I’ve always liked words.
At Club 47 (now called Passim) I heard Tom Rush, a pioneer among the young, educated whites interpreting traditional, often rural music and applying it to their writing. In early 2012 Rush told The Boston Globe, “The thing that strikes me about that whole time period is just how much ferment and cross-pollination there was between the different artists. Really good art very seldom arrives in a vacuum. It’s almost always a bunch of people in communication with each other and basically stealing each other’s ideas and then expressing them in a different way.” I also frequently attended shows by the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, and Taj Mahal would sit in. Taj dressed like an R&B dude in those days, decked out in a sharply pressed suit for blowing marvellous harmonica.
Bill Monroe, Eric Anderson, the Chambers Brothers, Jesse Colin Young, Sleepy John Estes, and Mississippi John Hurt all played at Club 47 or the Unicorn, the other major folk venue in town, which was only a block from where I lived in Back Bay. In the clubs on Charles Street you could hear Spider John Koerner and a range of lesser but interesting lights. I appreciated the music and manner of Buffy Sainte-Marie, a Cree Indian and fellow Canadian. She was a knockout visually. She had not yet had the hits that would later be hers, but still she swept away listeners with the power in her music. Buffy accompanied herself on guitar or sang a cappella. She also played the mouth bow, which is possibly the oldest human instrument, as seen in fifteen-thousand-year-old cave paintings. Buffy once said in describing the instrument: “[It] is basically a hunting bow and I guess somebody one day figured out that you can make music on a weapon. Maybe someday there will be virtuoso concertos to be played on M-1s and tanks.”
Rumours of Glory Page 6