Tags
Joy Division, Music, Songs, the pixies, The Stooges, writing
‘Turn and face the strange’ – Changes, David Bowie
Deciding to listen to music on my walk was in its own small, personal way noteworthy. I seldom listen to music these days and haven’t for years. I find I need to feel a certain openness to hear music without it feeling almost painful and like many people I suspect I am usually wound too tightly by the near constant low level anxiety of things for that. When I train physically, lifting weights or grappling, after that I can listen to songs, after the tension has been beaten from my body for a short while but it quickly returns as if it were an essential element of my physiology, like some kind of chronic auto-immune disorder.
So this recent afternoon was a little unusual. A cold, tired afternoon near the end of the year when hibernation seems like an excellent option, the Christmas holidays cannot get here quick enough and the feeling of stasis seems both horribly terminal and dangerously attractive.
I opened one of the three music apps on my phone (why do I have so many when I use them so infrequently? It feels like an unhealthy exercise in nostalgia) and pressed ‘shuffle’. The second song that came on, as I walked through the graveyard of the small church near my house was Love will tear us apart by Joy Division and my step lighted. I love the drums in this song; which is in itself exceptional as I mostly find sixteen-time drum lines suspect, it feels like showing off and Mo Tucker of The Velvet Underground, my drumming totem, would not have given it the time of day. But I love drums in general and, sixteen-time or no, the drum line in this song has an off-beat, jagged insistence that instantly alters by breath and pushes me forward.
I sometimes think that the best career advice would be if you find something you like and find easy, do it, you’ll get good at it and have a good time. That was me and the drums. I did not need to work hard at the drums to be good at them and for that reason I practised long and diligently and became really good. I played in some bands and then stopped. I played in a Joy Division cover band before there was such a thing as cover bands. Everyone else in the band was just so obsessed with the Joy Division that we never got beyond the ‘we’ll start with Joy Division songs and work up to writing our own’ stage.
I believe this is where the origins of my distrust of sixteen-time playing squat in their murky primal soup as I initially struggled to switch from my preferred four-four, floor tom heavy, personal style to mimicking Stephan Morris who is, it must be said, a fairly complex and difficult player to copy. So maybe I resented that.
I played in other bands too, original bands that allowed more scope and more fun. If I really stretch the truth I was nearly the drummer in Primal Scream (don’t look into that one too deeply).
I had the best drumkit too. It was small and pieced together from second hand shops on Capel Street in Dublin. Everything in it was mis-matched and worn and essential. If it wasn’t essential I didn’t have it. I had a snare and a bass; hi-hats and a floor tom. That was it. I still believe that’s all you need.
But I stopped. Stopped playing in bands and stopped playing the drums. My drum kit is gone, years ago and I couldn’t even tell you where or how.
The reason I stopped playing was ultimately because I never believed, deep down, or high up for that matter, that I was allowed to me an artist or deserving of happiness. That’s a lot to say and reasonable people may feel it should have some follow-up or examination but then it doesn’t feel that way to me. It seems normal, or rather usual. My mother would remind me to emphasise that difference. Seems like all around me I see people with a similar story so many it’s not them, or us, or psychological so much as sociological. Hard to say; maybe I was just afraid; that would make sense too as I am still often afraid, still prey to the same nameless Sunday night dread of childhood.
Maybe that’s part of why I find it difficult to listen to music most of the time.
As I rounded the corner of the cemetery wall I met an old lady with two Labradors who I often meet and I quickly said ‘hello’ and guttered the dogs’ ears but I moved on more quickly than usual. Usually I would be listening to a podcast and it is altogether easier to ignore one of those for a minute or two while you fuss a couple of friendly canines. Music demands more, more attention and more engagement.
Setting off past where they are repairing the wall of the big estate I was reminded of something I have noted all the hundreds of times I have heard Love will tear us apart (I think it must be hundreds. I can remember several specific settings I would often hear it in. I remember, for instance, it being played each and every alternative night in McGonagles nightclub. I remember a friend from school who would get drunk and try to get people to stop dancing out of respect when it came on; by force if necessary). It was one of the ‘big songs’ of my teenage years.
This is what I was reminded of: at the end of Love will tear us apart there is a change, I don’t know the technical term but this change prevents the song from being perfect- and it is a song that threatens perfection from the first notes and beats. The change comes at almost exactly three minutes and you can listen to the song at the link (1) below.
This change is unnecessary. It takes the listener out of the song because it makes them ask ‘Why have they done that?’
Why did they do that? I can only think that someone thought they needed ‘more’, that what it is to that moment was/is not enough. I don’t agree; I never have.
Immediately following on from this thought I recalled I wanna be your dog by the Stooges. My favourite song, if I have such a childish thing…and I do, but it is also prevented from being perfect by an unnecessary change at the end that betrays its essential, brutal, beautiful simplicity.
The change happens at about two minutes, ten seconds and you can listen to the song at the link (2) below.
The single, repeated piano key, played by John Cale I believe, and which is undoubtably an aspect not of melody but of percussion, is the most significant and fundamental blow that I have yet heard stroke in music. It, and the droning, repeating riff are all that is/was necessary.
It seems to me that someone; and I am looking at you across the veil that separates the living from the dead Ron Ashton, simply couldn’t resisted the temptation to indulge in a guitar solo. Guitar solos, the phrase should be a slur.
The commitment to something simple, brutal and full of a magical energy that somehow intensifies through nothing but repetition is almost perfect in these two songs… almost.
Although I don’t believe in perfection that is the quality that binds the two songs to my heart and the reason why those changes break my heart every time; just a little.
Do I listen to these songs only up to the point where these troubling changes occur and then kill them? No, never. That would not be love.
I wonder if the love I feel for these songs reflects in any way the intense greyness of the Dublin I grew up in. Would I love them so much if I had sprouted in sunshine and open spaces. Are they all the more emotionally engaging because they get so close to perfection, of a sort, and then throw it away for what were probably trivial, selfish reasons?
My mind worried away at the issue, much like it is doing now, and I searched through my phone for the song I always associate with those first two. There is a record by the Pixies called Alec Eiffel. This is a perfect song precisely because of an change that occurs about one and a half minutes in. You can hear it at the link (3) below. But this change is necessary; or, at least, not unnecessary.
Perhaps this change works so well because it does not seem like an afterthought. It occurs closer to the half-way point of the song and it takes a song that starts in triumph into the realm of ecstasy, in the best, religious sense. Yet, though I love Alec Eiffel, it doesn’t quite take possession of my heart in the why the Stooges and Joy Division managed to.
Who knows when I’ll listen to music again. I’m glad I did so on my cold afternoon walk. It’s hard to do circular walks around here, too many roads; so I listened to some songs, stopped, turned around, switched off the App, and retraced my steps. In silence. Except for my thoughts. Again.
(1) https://youtu.be/zuuObGsB0No
J E Lynch Author 