Song Snatcher

 Love Minus Zero/No Limit

Performing for Amnesty International - Yes, that is Adrian Mitchell on the left.....

Last night I had a dream.  Somehow, I was to sing a song.  I think it was at an event at my wife, Amanda’s, Care Home, so there would be a small audience – maybe some twenty or thirty.  My son-in-law has recently loaned me his Martin acoustic guitar, though I have not practised for years.  

Thanks, Cam - I'll look after it

 

In the dream I had the guitar, and I had several books of words and chords.  These were the books that I had written out when a teenager (I had my first, cheap, guitar, when I was about twelve).  I can see them now, flimsy exercise books with my handwriting in royal blue ink underlined on the cover, then songs written out with the chords over the words in red biro.

 

Some of the first songs I learned were simple American songs, cowboy songs, copied from Alan Lomax’s American Songbook, and probably heard on Two-Way Family Favourites on the radio on Sundays.  

 

Then there was Peter, Paul and Mary and Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan with some more modern material – Blowin’ in the Wind, etc.  

 

My guitar playing was simplicity itself – three chords if I was lucky, and none of them with a barré (so B minor was a problem) and my sense of rhythm less than strict. I was no singer, either, though perhaps later on my voice pleased some.

 

Anyway, I was there with the guitar and my song books, but then, as I seemed to be on a stage now, with a gathering audience, I panicked a bit.  I couldn’t find the books, I had put them somewhere but I was now lost.  I was never good at remembering all the words, and, I had had a crib stuck on the shoulder of my guitar with the first words of lines or verses to help me.

 

But I get ahead of myself.

 

For many years I just played a bit with friends.  I was a very minor part of a group led by school mate ‘Niggles,’ with Nick on Bass, Ben as vocalist, and Roy Dodds (yes, THE Roy Dodds) on drums.  I remember we played at parties, but my contribution was minimal.  I don’t think anyone noticed.

 

Picture taken on Dunrobin Beach, Sutherland, for the local press

I made some progress however when another friend, Charlie Snoxall, gave me a better guitar, and it was with this that I went to Scotland before my eighteenth birthday.  There I met Paul and Derek and we formed The Dunrobiners (for more about this period you can see an earlier Blog, entitled “Highlands,” https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2014/06/highlands.html) quickly becoming sought after for Ceilidhs and pubs, and even making a record (long since disappeared, don’t even try to find it....)  I remember one evening when we drove up to Wick in Paul’s Rover 90 to perform at a folk club.  The headline act was Hamish Imlach (I think!) and we played with him – but that’s about all I recall..... 

Paul, Derek and me at The Stag's Head, Golspie in 1969
I loved that silk shirt (until I dropped hot cigarette ash on it!)

 

Later that summer we did a week in the front room of The Stag’s Head, Golspie, and I still smell the tables of Tennent’s Heavy that accumulated before us as we worked through our repertoire of traditional Scottish and Irish songs, including The Irish Rover (She had twenty-three masts and she stood several blasts....), Leaving of Liverpool (So fare thee well my own true love....), and my speciality, The Black Velvet Band (Her eyes they shone like diamonds/You’d think her the queen of the land/And her hair it hung over her shoulder/Tied up with a black velvet band), the whole room joining in for the chorus. Apart from that I spent time trying to impress the Assistant Matron (the gorgeous Marty Dearlove) by plucking my way through The Last Thing on my Mind, my eyes sticking to her like snails on a window pane, while she darned the boarders’ socks (Are you going away with no word of farewell/Will there be not a trace left behind?) 

 

Not a trace.....

 

Around the same time, I also spent holidays in Ireland and met Luke Kelly, in Dublin (for more on this see my Dublin 3 Blog https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2012/10/dublin-3_28.html).  I learned a little from singers and guitarists, but, to be honest, I wasn’t a very good musician.  I had a few party pieces – Season of the Witch (When I look out my window), being one, Mr Tambourine Man (Let me forget about today until tomorrow.....) another.

 

Several years later, in Rome, friends formed Roisin Dubh, the Celtic connection being strong at the time, and I bought a new (Echo) guitar, which stayed in tune a little better than my old one.  With a friend and colleague, Gerry, I set up a folk group at our school, and we practised and sang loud and happily for some years.  It was, interestingly, a very cosmopolitan group, including Palestinians and Israelis as well as British and Italians, and we performed at concerts that I set up for Amnesty International, headlined by the likes of Adrian Mitchell and Roger McGough, with songs like I shall be released (They say ev’rything can be replaced....)

One iteration of our folk group in Rome

 

On my return to the UK I tried to keep going, but family life and then, eventually, my wife’s illness withered the vine.

 

And so, to my dream.  I am now searching furiously for my word books, sweating and frightened, the enormous audience restless (we are in something like the Ryman Auditorium now), but I am lost, and my soft fingers are not practised.

 

I stand and there is a hush.  I decide to talk about memory, and memory loss, and try to illustrate this with snatches from some of the songs I used to sing, plucking hopefully at the guitar.  At my door the leaves are falling/The cold wild wind will come/Sweethearts walk by together/And I still miss someone..... (Johnny Cash).  I struggle to complete the song, and then talk some more about my personal history as I have told you, dressing up my encounters with musicians and singers, grasping at memories of lines.  Things begin to fall into place, I see my light come shining/from the west unto the east/Any day now, any day now/I shall be released....

Danny, Andrew and Clive

 

My confidence grows, my fingertips harden, I use a pick, Must be the season of the witch!  I talk a bit about dementia, about the way my wife has lost all language, I strum a chord, and begin Love minus zero: (My love, she speaks like silence....) I falter.....  I begin Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right, but muddle the verses:  Well it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why babe, If’n you don’t know by now.....

 

The audience is standing, No wait!  I say.  I just remembered.  One more.....

 

May God bless and keep you always, May your wishes all come true,

May you always do for others and let others do for you,

May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung,

May you stay for ever young

For ever young, for ever young, May you stay forever young.....

 

The auditorium is dark and empty.  The audience has gone.  The auditorium has gone.  I am in my wife’s Care Home, in the Dining Room; Amanda is asleep, head down on the table.  The cook brings me a cup of tea.  Very nice, she says.  You should go on Britain’s got talent......

 

Love Minus Zero/No Limit

 

My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful
Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire
People carry roses
Make promises by the hours
My love she laughs like the flowers
Valentines can’t buy her

 

Bob Dylan

 

Highlands

Pretty much a long way from most places!

My Heart's in the Highlands

by Robert Burns

(1759-1796)

Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North,

The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth;

Wherever I wander, wherever I rove, 

The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;

My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;

A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,

My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go.

Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow;

Farewell to the straths and green valleys below;

Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods;

Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.

The Falls of Shin

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;

My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;

A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,

My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go.

 

Daniel Defoe, in his A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain observes that this frightful country of Scotland, can be divided into four quarters: The South Land (which is south of the River Tay); The Midland (from the Tay up to Lake Ness and the Aber, including Isla and Jura); The Northland, and The Islands. He goes on to say, as he enters the third division, that the mountains are so full of deer, harts, roebucks, etc.... also a great number of eagles which breed in the woods.... the rivers and lakes also in all this country are prodigiously full of salmon.....

Red Grouse

OK. So there's deer. So there's salmon. But there are also birds. Don't forget the birds. Wonderfully varied, impermanent, characterful, elusive, frustrating, but ultimately so worth the watch......

Lapwing

And not just the powerful, elemental, grand birds that dominate.  There are birds to suit all tastes (?) - and I am not including young Gannets here - and interests. I wrote something about Ospreys in another entry, and alluded to some visitors in writing about Islay, but on the shores here, of loch and coast; in the heather and on the rocks; in the air and on the water, the Highlands abound in wildlife, much of it in avian form.....

A Redshank skims the waters

And the ubiquitous red-eyed oystercatcher seems different here, purer, perhaps more at home. The last ones I saw were busy on the lawn of my hotel in the Isle of Wight, but here they seem to have time to linger, basking in the cool light of their own reflections.....

Some are more difficult to see close up, and without the advantage of the high-tech, extremely high cost, equipment of the SpringWatch team, it is still possible to appreciate the colours and temperaments of rarer species, such as Slavonian Grebes bobbing on Loch Ruthven....

And flitting, resting, watching, feeding, there are so many beautiful species, just being, like this upright Wheatear among the heathers......

But then it is not only birds, either. Off the shingle of Chanonry Point, we watch dolphins tumbling in the tidal rip. Defoe reported the fishing of porpoises here, but our sport is in watching these creatures doing what they do, without obligation....

I love Scotland, and I shall personally grieve if it detaches from me in any way.  Like Robert Burns I am not a Highlander, nor am I a frequent visitor, nor can I offer this frightful country anything in the way of appeasement, but something of my heart is in the Highlands, for personal reasons...

As recounted in an earlier piece, entitled The Battle of Blenheim, and of a very different nature, I lived for a while in Dunrobin Castle, on the shore just north of Golspie.  In early 1969 I took this picture:

And in 2014 I took this one:

Better camera, perhaps; better weather, certainly.....

Inside there is still the same questionable opulence:

And from the rooftops I imagine the dusty vistas are as they were when Garibaldi docked at the quay:

It was weird to roam that Gormenghast-like castle freely. The thirteenth century core had been consumed by additions aeons ago, and the servants' quarters were crawling with nothings to remind even the dust of shames long past.  For an impressionable youth it was very impressionable.  From the haunted chamber, where perhaps a young woman had had a fatal accident with a sash window, to the Duke's bathroom, where a wicker seated commode communed with a claw footed bath, the world was eerie, detached and strange. Fulmars launched themselves from my window-sill; the raven himself was hoarse....

Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
(My brother had thanes on his mind)

By th' clock ’tis day,

And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.

It was extraordinary to be so far north. When I arrived, not yet eighteen, it was deep winter, and the days were so dark you needed a torch to read at midday. The sea was spectacular, hurling spray at my window fifty feet or more above the gardens. When I left, in late summer, you could read without a torch at midnight.

That July the world seemed to be whirling out of control through space.  On Tuesday 1st John Lennon crashed his Austin Maxi into a nearby ditch and spend five days in the local hospital, with Yoko Ono and her daughter Kyoko.  John had 17 facial stitches and Yoko 14 (Julian had been with them too, but he was unharmed).  

That same weekend, my group, The Dunrobiners, which had become something of a phenomenon in the area (well, we cut a disc in a recording studio in Wick!) was heading a Ceilidh at the Stags Head Hotel. 

There was talk that John might come down from the hospital to see what was going on, but the delightful Alice Sutherland leaned across to me and smiled, We don't need no John Lennon.  Whisht, you're our Beatles!   Perhaps he heard her.....

Later that month Brian Jones died and Mick Jagger threw butterflies at heaven; and then men seemingly stepped on the moon, while we attended dances at the Drill Hall, an extraordinary example of corrugated architecture, into which the entire village and many more from far and wide would crush, jigging and bopping to the scottish equivalent of a Show Band.....

And we would nightly carouse in the wonderful Sutherland Arms Hotel, fuelling our dreams with Tennants Heavy and ten year old Glenmorangie.....

I loved it there, and on returning recently it was sad to hear that Mrs Hexley, the landlady, had long since passed away, but one of her sons still lives in the village, and most wonderfully I learned that Murdo, the perfect barman, was still around, working now as a guide in the Castle.  

A piece of my heart is certainly there.  As curiously is Bob Dylan's....  apparently, or so he said, in Highlands on Time out of Mind:

Well my heart’s in the Highlands gentle and fair

Honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air

Bluebelles blazing where the Aberdeen waters flow

Well my heart’s in the Highland

I’m gonna go there when I feel good enough to go

Well my heart’s in the Highlands wherever I roam

That’s where I’ll be when I get called home

The wind, it whispers to the buckeyed trees in rhyme

Well my heart’s in the Highland

I can only get there one step at a time

My heart’s in the Highlands at the break of dawn

By the beautiful lake of the Black Swan

Big white clouds like chariots that swing down low

Well my heart’s in the Highlands

Only place left to go

Curious how Burns and Zimmerman share this sentiment, perhaps.  Maybe it's because Bob and his brother David share a home at Nethy Bridge, in the Cairngorms National Park? But it's good enough for me.....

Well, my heart’s in the Highlands at the break of day

Over the hills and far away

There’s a way to get there and I’ll figure it out somehow

But I’m already there in my mind

And that’s good enough for now

Copyright © 1997 by Special Rider Music

With many thanks to Dr E for all the driving

http://www.richardpgibbs.org/2012/11/the-battle-of-blenheim.html

Inside the Stags Head, 1969
(is that a metaphor?)