Steps Toward a New Kind of Music Writing

Still hashing through my Irish memories. Listening to Mr. Lonnie Donegan, a true English gentleman.

I have been conversing with people on how music writing often sucks to read. You get the feeling the writer is having a good time writing it, maybe he's even analyzing it...But I've come to the conclusion that I'm in desperate search for a new kind I guess. Here's one try from Corked:

Betwixt, between the Twisted Stars, the faulty map that brought Lou Reed to Ireland

This will be short because I’ve already written a concert review that was so removed from reality that I don’t have it in me to include it here. One moment seems to cast a brighter light on the music I once consumed myself.

One day after seeing a TV news brief that Lou Reed, Antony, Nick Cave and Beth Orton would be singing the songs of Leonard Cohen I told Meike I’d skip the Anglo-Irish Fiction class and take a trip to Dublin. It was my first real time in Dublin. When the bus let me off I spent 10 minutes on one of the bridges leading to the fancy concert hall The Point. I stood watching boats drift away and photography societies next to me snap shots of the creamy Dublin sunset which looked like none other. I had my Kodak and tried to match their efforts.

The concert was fine. Leonard Cohen wasn’t there, and neither was Rufus Wainwright who appeared in the film version of the concert I was seeing. Lou Reed looked a bit like death, but he also looked like the street poet I had always imagined when I listened to his grungy songs about Heroin. A man who also, sweetly, knew a damn good pair of Pale Blue Eyes when he saw them. He had lived life and now here he was dragging this husk of his former self onto the stage to lend his presence to others who were hungry to live for him now that he couldn‘t, dammit.

But God if I wasn’t sitting next to the drabbest, most dull black suited men and smooth red silk, scarlet lipped ladies in all of Ireland. And they were all around me. I was at the top balcony, sitting. The rows and rows below me, sitting. And here was the black angel of death before us all, the man who in his underrated solo career wrote these words:

"Ill take Manhattan in a garbage bag/With Latin written on it that
says It’s hard to give a shit these days/ Manhattans sinking like a rock/ Into the
filthy Hudson what a shock/ They wrote a book about it. / They said it was like
ancient Rome"

And we were all dressed up. Who in this dapper mot was really listening when during his song Whitmanesque song about naked bodies, which featured his dirty Sister Ray style guitar skronk, the real flesh we came to see instead of his own (the beauty of music).

Did we really hear Antony (and this is on You Tube now) in his agony, writhing and face making with a cover of Cohen’s If it Be Your Will, with the consoling black ladies behind him:

From this broken hill/ your praises shall ring/ if it be your will to let me
sing/ If it be your will/ If there is a choice/ Let the rivers fill/ Let the
hills rejoice/ Let your mercy spill/ on all these burning hearts in hell/ if it
be your will to make us well.

God if we weren’t all listening, I know these guys next to me weren’t. Another cosmo black tie night. I needed a Guinness.

During intermission I stood in the beer line upstairs. The line shortened and the cluttered mass thinned. I asked for a 6 Euro Guiness and the 40 something woman poured it to me in a plastic cup. She handed me the drink, sized me up and looked around a bit lost.

“Who’s playing down there?”
“Oh, Lou Reed, Nick Cave and some others.”
“Oh, I’ve never heard them”
“Yeah. It’s pretty good.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, how much did you pay to get in?
“60 Euros.”
“Oh! No thank you … is it that good?”
“Yeah it is! I‘ve always wanted to see these guys.”
“Well, that’s good for you then.”

I seem to remember this exchange clearer than half of the concert, this glimpse of the Corkians who work these service jobs and serve beers to dry elites who like their Lou Reed, their street poetry with an aperitif. The woman had such a straight forward manner. She kind of made me feel like a teenager. She no doubt liked music like the rest of us blood pumpers, but she didn’t feel the need to spend a weeks, or half, pay on seeing it in the flesh.

The older I get the more I can enjoy music privately, forfeit the show. The stuff I saw that night was very good, the Antony was the best. But what better times I had had with the burned CD Lou Reed that a White Water lifeguard had burned for me so affectionately years ago. I Came So Far for Beauty was the name of the concert, and Meike appropriately noticed this was the theme of my trip with all my music chasing. But a lot of that stuff came from the past as I remembered it, or the streets (in the form of The Conservatory in Oklahoma City … or Oklahomans like Samantha Crain trying out brand new songs at the small Galileos for a 5$ cover).

It wasn’t there in Dublin where I had hopped the bus and tramped through the spacious Dublin streets past the cold Green statues. It wasn’t in such places where Lou Reed found the subjects to his songs, the pious and sexual Hispanic Romeos and Juliettes with diamond crucifixes in their ears. Man, if confronted with a 6 Euro/$8 stout the old Lou would probably take it and pour it on his crotch just to make the people around him feel uncomfortable and restore his own weird comfort level. People out there had mouths to feed and couldn‘t go anywhere for beauty or spend so much money looking, as this lady made clear to me. For the rest of the concert somehow I felt silly for putting her to work pouring my drought.