Random encounters with the arbitrary: #2 The Goblins, Brady and Last night's fun. Not forgetting the iced tea.

Centuries ago, in another life time, Marty Bochenek introduced me to the phrase “road stoned”. It’s that curious dislocation that occurs during travel; long night drives, twenty four hour car shuttles, plane travel, when sense as you normally understand it starts to unravel and strange connections manifest which make no sense later: travel without the t, your own surrealist text, what it must be like to exist as the first person pronoun in a Lorca poem.

“Green, I want you, Green”.

There’s always a point where it becomes obvious: I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore when, three hours into waiting for the flight home in a terminally tedious terminal, I decide there has to be a limit on how much coffee I can drink and ask for the next random thing on the board: Iced tea…the young lady serving me said: Do you want that still or sparkling and I swear I hear the Goblins laughing. I’m looking at her, watching my dad pour the contents of the tea pot down the sink in the kitchen. I’ve just returned from America where the “River of No Return” had introduced me to multi day kayaking trips and Earl Grey Tea. I had literally searched Coventry for the stuff and had made some of my prized find for my tea addicted dad.

It went down the sink. Politely, good humouredly, but down the sink, and then he washed the tea pot out. Which reminds me that tea bags used to be a barbaric novelty for campers. Sparkling iced tea is an abomination. The girl is still waiting for my reply. Things are raveling. It’s one of the reasons for traveling.

But I’ve still got Paul Brady on the sound track. His version of Arthur McBride. I love this song. I like our Sunday afternoon version. I like Planxty’s versions. If memory serves there’s a decent enough Carthy/Swarbrick version though it’s not on the ipod. I do have a version of it in Polish. Least I think it’s Arthur McBride.

But the Brady version is special. That thin slightly nasal voice, which is having its own acrobatic affair with the tune, suits the measured way he relates the brutal events “we lathered them there like a pair of wet sacks” and the sardonic “We obligingly asked if they wanted recruits”. It reminds me of People’s fiddle on the Brady/People’s “High Part of the Road”. Somewhere, I read disparaging remarks about guitar players and traditional music. Often the accompaniment is out of time, out of tune, and intrusive. Like Zoo Man’s conversation mangling Heaney’s recital on the last plane. (see previous post)

Outside the plane they are showing a film of a very beautiful north Qld coast at sunset, and soon there is only the swirling dreamscape of thick cloud cover below us and the clear sky and the sun setting over in the west. It’s a Bach landscape, the solo Partitas, or maybe Bibier and the Rosary Sonatas, but there are states of mind where Bach is too dangerous. I might fall into the spaces between the notes and never resurface. The Goblins are friendly. Some of their associates aren’t.

Somewhere I’ve read disparaging remarks about guitar players attempting to play dance music, and since I’m traveling with “Last Night’s Fun” and it sounds like something Carson might have written I’m flicking though looking for the comment. Whoever said it had to have done so pre Tony McManus, and probably, if my memory is right, allowed Brady and Dick Gaughan as exceptions.

The tenses are dissolving. Two days ago I am looking at Renbourn’s arrangement of the Blarney Pilgrim thinking “this is pretty’. Renbourn is a superb guitar player but pretty the Blarney Pilgrim should not be. So I find my favourite version of said tune: the version on the Andy Irvine Paul Brady CD, and it really is beautiful. For the life of me I can’t remember who is playing fiddle (Kevin Burke). This is what Zoo man may never understand about sex: it’s a collaborative activity. For some reason this is giving me the giggles and making the staid lady in the seat beside me nervous. She too is reading a magazine which is full of pictures of women. They are no more clothed than Zoo man’s.

Brady’s guitar on the Brady People’s ‘The High Part of the Road’, was set up so that listeners who don’t like the guitar can shift the balance and exclude it. The liner notes are defensive about the presence. The first “stereo” unit we bought was huge, but it had a balance dial and you could make the Beatles split left to right, drums and bass on one side, voice and guitars on the other. Thismade lsitenign to the Beatles interesting. Though I never owned a Beatles’ record so it must have been my sister’s tape….but the ipod won’t let me split the channels. And anyway, I don’t want to. The assumption is that the guitar should be the supporting partner in the marriage. Like a 1950s housewife knowing her place.

In Derridian terms Brady’s guitar is a scandal. It dissolves the Rhythm/Lead binary. No one seems to have explained that rhythm is provided by playing the guitar as tuned percussion and Lead is ..well..playing the tune…Brady seems to be doing both and neither. He’s not really accompanying the fiddle in the sense of supporting it. This is Kristeva’s ideal of equal but different. Celebrate the unique qualities, strengths, virtues of the part, but without establishing a hierarchy…Equal but different… ….John Doyle playing with Liz Carroll…whose guitar playing is scandalous because he does what he does and let us be thankful for this without even bothering to work out what the hell it is he is doing or how. He reminds me of some of those fiendishly difficult medieval welsh metrical forms.

I can’t find the reference but I have wandered once again through last night’s fun. I’ve read some of this so many times it has a strange sense of déjà vu(or déjà lu) but as I reread “The Smokey House” it’s not quite how I remember it. I resort to cheating and listen to Ennis tell the story himself. His delivery is perfect. And I’m right. Carson’s version is subtly different . Which is how it should be, I think. Except the print version leaves out: “This is definitely a story based on historical fact….” that knowing wink to the listener that you can leave your skepticism at the door and go along for the ride. So I do. It has to be a candidate for “The Best Intro to a Tune”.

The goblins are obviously in good form because our “flight” is twenty minutes early. The airporter is waiting to shift me on to the next set and the conversation is so weird inside I seek refuge in Rosemary Lane…

Standing on the familiar pavement, checking the goblins put the cracks the right way round, waiting to cross the road, I can hear them scurrying off to their next job gleefully singing their anthem…The World is What You Make It…

Normal service may resume later. Please do not adjust your set.

Any singer in any bar, singing traditional songs.

The songs obviously pre exist. Not just the performance but my life time. Have pre existed for a century or two in some cases. And hopefully, the good ones will continue to exist, despite the often crude treatment they receive at my hands.

We are after all merely custodians, doing our best. In this and in so much else. Hopefully, leaving something worth passing on. Beyond fashion or style or commerce.

But the singer is erased in the song. There’s obviously an art involved but it’s the art of effacing self, allowing voice to becomes vehicle and letting the story unroll.

As soon as he or she starts to sing ”I had a first cousin called Arthur MacBride” that first pronoun swallows ego; the singer is leaning across a bar, or a table, or sitting in their rocking chair, telling some button holed wedding guest the story of that memorable encounter, not as an historian or a journalist, but as eyewitness and participant.

In payment for which the magical lift, and the chance to rise on the glorious defiance of that song’s conclusion.

In the traditional love songs, the singer once again disappears, becomes reconstituted as the space between the hand reaching out to the lover, and the lover who smiles in welcome: this most human of gestures endlessly repeated across time and space.

The details of the stories encode the feeling: specifics and universals inseparable: gesture, and thought, act and emotion polished and passed along.

Anyone who says the song is irrelevant because the maid laments for her Bonnie Light Horse man killed in the Napoleonic wars has missed the point. The roguish beggarman who rises after a night of enjoyable sex with the woman he’s tricked (who may not seem so admirable once the song has finished) finds his way into today’s papers: the young girl waiting for her lover to come home from the sea or from the wars becomes the man or woman whose partner has been posted to Afghanistan.

The song suspends judgement and leaves that to the audience.

It don’t need to be rewritten or updated. It don’t need to be “modernized or glamorized”. Just treated with respect and passed on.

Which raises the interesting question: how the hell to write poems that do that.

Dream, semiotic, symbolic

The modern English “Dream” comes from the old English noun Dream: gladness delight, ecstasy, mirth, rejoicing, melody, music, singing, minstrelsy.
The verb dryman, means to sing aloud or to rejoice. Though the noun drymann means a sorcerer or magician. Music as magic.

So the obsolete meanings in English: Joy/pleasure, gladness/mirth rejoicing…the sound of musical instruments/music. Melody, minstrelsy melody noise sound.

Music as dream, as sorcery, time travel, rejoicing. Mirth. A dream of something worth while and very ancient.

Up the mountain to play on a Friday night for a change. I’ve driven that road almost every Sunday for three or four years. I’ve driven down in the dark so many times, but never up. The familiar road now totally unfamiliar; disorientating. Somehow it evokes so many night drives the car curves upwards and time starts to slip.

The pub sits on a slight rise; light streaming from windows. Smoke from the chimney. The moon’s up. Walking in from the car park; the dark wall broken by the windows which frame colour and light inside; outside dark quiet, cold. Crossing an abrupt threshold, into light and noise; music and voices. In daylight there is liminal space. Here there are borders/edges/abrupt transitions. It’s like falling asleep and entering a different space which seems to have come unmoored from its context.

We play. We dream: rejoice, celebrate, laugh. Make music. But also dream in the modern sense: caught in fluid dislocations of time. Song is Kristeva’s semiotic, but the songs and the singer co-exist in monumental time. Singing as time travel, diving into the song and finding only other songs and memories of their performance… words and melody unreeling images: Molly Malone, the tart with the cart. In the rare old times, we ride on to the red rose café where I tell the story of my cousin, Arthur Macbride and what we did to the recruiting sergeant. Leaving Liverpool via fisherman’s green we meet Captain Farrel, wishing he was back home in Derry, who is doomed yet again to get held up in some dirty old town.

If this were a dream then the narrative would slide around a corner and looking up I’ll find myself back in the Fisherman’s arms in Golant twenty years ago. But in the real world, in monumental time, I am still there, in the fisherman’s arms, twenty years ago, Mick’s coming back from the bar with the drinks and the rowing club boys are making so much noise I can’t hear my guitar, let alone tune it. Who cares. It’s a Friday night. The moon’s up. We will stagger home later, up Harry’s hill, pausing to look down at the moonlight on the boats moored in the Fowey.

If we’re lucky the Owl will be sitting on the gate.

After Ten O’clock the place empties out. The bar becomes a score after the orchestra have left the stage. Even the light seems tired and flat, unable to shine off anything. The echoes have retreated to the corners, unable to sound. It’s a comfortable space. A few late arrivals wander in and ask if there is any music.

Driving down the mountain, far too tired, what a friend used to call road stoned. drifting round the bends, drifting in and out of memories of night drives and night conversations, not really sure If I’m awake at all.

I’m convinced I’ve just been to Heorot.

Fortunately, I’m home, parked, asleep, before Grendle or his mum can put in an appearance.

The Clancy’s Sunday set list

First and last in place, everything else anywhere or not at all.

Molloy Malone
Back Home In Derry
Dirty Old Town
Follow Me Up To Carlow
As I Roved Out
Arthur McBride
The Jolly Beggar Man
Red Rose Café
The Streak Through London (martin’s up tempo version of streets)
Bright Blue Rose
The City Of Chicago
Whiskey On A Sunday
The Drunken Sailor
Mountains Of Mourne*
When You Were Sweet 16*
Spancil Hill*
The Green Fields Of France
A Pair Of Brown Eyes
Fairytale Of New York
Fields Of Athenry
Galway Shawl
The Foggy Dew
Fiddlers Green
The Good Ship Kangaroo
The Irish Rover
The Leaving Of Liverpool
The Rising Of The Moon
Galway Bay*
Ride On
The Rare Old Times
The Wild Mountain Thyme
Only Our Rivers

Rarities
The Waxies Dargle
Little Musgrave
Raglan Road
The Island
Song For Ireland*
Mary Mack#
The Batchelor’s Lament#
The Band Played Waltzing Matilda#
Now I’m Easy (Sung Only If Phil’s Around)
The Town I Loved So Well*
The Bold Fenian Men (has to be quiet)
Carrickfergus (ditto)
I Don’t Like Mondays
Seven Drunken Nights*
Paddy Works On The Railroad*
Plastic Jesus*
The German Clock Winder
The Parting Glass
Tim McGuire#
Why does it have to be me#
Whip Jamboree#
Maggie May#
Leave her Johnny#
Lawless#

Requests Only
Danny Boy
Whiskey In The Jar
Black Velvet Band

Unique one Off
Pub was empty. How many Leonard Cohen songs can we sing from memory not including Halleluiah.

The intriguing part of this is that apart from songs marked* which are Martin’s, (Songs marked # are ones sung when he’s not there) I know the words to all of these! (And more: Sundays exerts a gentle ban on English songs.) No wonder I write the way I do if that’s what’s in my head.

Ciaran Carson For all we know

Ciaran Carson wrote one of my favourite books: Last Night’s Fun. It’s a love letter to traditional music, beautifully written, idiosyncratic, and it introduced me to Joe Cooley. I feel I owe him just for that. He’s also written prose novels, at least one of which puts him up there with Flan O’Brian (about as ‘up there’ as it gets in the real sub-Joycean atmosphere.) He’s translated The Tain, another favourite book, as well as The Inferno and he’s written a body of poetry that is distinctive. Enough of the blurb.
The poetry took me a while to like. It was easy to admire. It was only when I realised that if Seamus Heaney and Liam O’flynn are a perfect paring, then the obvious Carson link (in my limited knowledge) would be to Seamus Ennis.

So Last Night’s Fun is my key. It’s a love letter, but it’s an oblique one. The same is true of the poetry. What’s not being said, what’s hinted at, suggested, alluded to is as important as what is being detailed. And because it’s not there on the page, it ghosts the reading process.
Beneath the surface dazzle and the play there’s an austere seriousness. Beneath the austerity, there’s a playful passion.
So logically, if your man decides to write a story in poems, he's choosing the form for a purpose.
For all we know…think of a musician, Ennis, showing off, but within the limits of a traditional form. The limitations are what define the player’s skills. This ain’t no dream of “free form self expression’. The framework creates the space, like a musical phrase creates a meaning for silence.
And so the narrative of For all we know is a poet’s answer to “why bother telling a story in poems”. Characters enter, reappear, slide. Events are described, then re-described, and the images fold and loop and move on. Because this is Carson, I didn't expect a straight narrative like the Monkey or Freddy Neptune.

I’m sure that if I knew anything about how a fugue works, I would understand more. But it reminds me of Herzog’s Nosferatu and the way the landscape suddenly becomes a character in the story, or the first three minutes of Suspiria where nothing happens but it happens in away that’s deeply and memorably disturbing