prehistory
what i rememeber most was the cassetes my dad would play in the car. he only had a small collection and the car would regularly get broken into and whatever tapes were there would get taken. he always replaced his best of sam cooke. sam cooke the man and his music. it had a picture on the front of sam smiling and looking so impossibly handsome.
https://lastfm-img2.akamaized.net/i/u/300x300/b5b4ac4b3d424fdaf592a2bc6c31eef7.jpg
so relaxed and at ease in his own skin. as close to a god as a man can get. and his voice used to thrill me like none other, as a very young boy, and probably feeling more romantic and more in love with the idea of love than i ever would again. it was really this cassete tht unlocked the gate of those feelings and incohate yearnings. on the backseat and swooning with the window a screen and the world scrolling by. the grey crash barriers. the sickly trees. the soot stained brick and the graffiti in white block letters, applied with a paintbrush. the political struggles of the '70s and '80s. G. Davis is innocent. Free Nelson Mandela. that London, as a set of tones and textures and a scale that is now being superceded never to return. how empty it still was.
the song titles are still so overwhelmingly evocative for me. i hear the song start just by reading those titles and the whole complex of sweet sad emotion that is attatched to them. the christian mystery of hem of his garment, the first song, which is, the account of a miracle, he makes christ present, the scene, the time, the beleif and the wanting to beleive of the petitioner, you're there, right there in the bible
She stood there cryin' "Oh Lord" (Oh Lord)
"Oh Lord" and "Oh Lord" (Oh Lord)
"Oh Lord" (Oh Lord)
And "Oh Lord" (Oh Lord)
Said "if I could just touch the hem of your garment
I know I'll be made whole right now"
nothing else has ever made christianity seem so pure, so untainted, it's that tapping into the root of yearning-
the very centre of need- of being incomplete- torn from the mother and wailing, breathless with fearful sobbing, seperated from womb dark or the circuit of mouth and breast broken and all alone, the need which is the primal need and underpins all wanting, if i could be made whole right now....
but there's something that renders that very incompleteness erotic, voluptuous, we wallow in that lack, enjoying its presence, and enjoying the imagination of its cessation, fulfilment, and his whole body of work is suffused with that, and that's why he's a truly great artist and saint, one of the great geniuses of music. it goes like this
1 Touch The Hem Of His Garment
2 That's Heaven To Me
3 I'll Come Running Back To You
4 You Send Me
5 Win Your Love For Me
6 Just For You
7 Chain Gang
8 When A Boy Falls In Love
9 Only Sixteen
10 Wonderful World
11 Cupid
12 Nothing Can Change This Love
13 Rome Wasn't Built In A Day
14 Love Will Find A Way
15 Everybody Loves To Cha Cha Cha
16 Another Saturday Night
17 Meet Me At Mary's Place
18 Having A Party
19 Good Times
20 Twistin' The Night Away
21 Shake
22 Somebody Have Mercy
23 Sad Mood
24 Ain't That Good News
25 Bring It On Home To Me
26 Soothe Me
27 That's Where It's At
28 A Change Is Gonna Come
even a song called 'having a party' can make me cry. "I'm having such a good time
dancing with my baby" the sadness at the core of that. "here they have a lot of fun/putting trouble on the run" to quote from 'twistin' the night away' to tear a space for pleasure from brutal time, to wrench it from history, and doubly, to have faith, the faith of hem of his garment, the faith of a change is gonna come, that history will be redeemed.to beleive in the goodness of love and music and dancing, to affirm and preach the goodness of those things, and the emotions, the direct primary colours of living. anything less is not quite enough, is not saintly, is a fall. so this is really the beginning and the benchmark and everything i aspire to in life, its the gospel for me. this is what it means to be an ascended master.
astral weeks
this is the other cassette that made a huge impression on me. i don't like any of his other albums. they aren't magical. this is magical. it occupies a completely diferent place to sam cooke. this is the mystic. this is other pole of my spiritual life, the other tent pole, and the canvas stretched between the two. sam cooke is in the world van morrison is in the mystic, just for the duration of this one album, somehow he gets there. water everywhere, the river and the mists, and the water reeds, and the wind in those. the swirls and eddies, the rising and the ebbing and the flowing of water, to aspire to the ineffable. these are the things which teach you to live. to say, this exists- you can go here. "to be born again, in another world, in another time... i'm nothing but a stranger in this world" it sends shivers up my spine. and to know, really know, that this is true- that there is a part of us that is not of this world, and that music can sketch the contours of those other places, so that we remember.
I don't listen to either of these albums much. i don't want them to lose the connection to my childhood and i don't want them to lose the connection to my dad, who died 5 years ago. they're like sacred artifacts kept under wraps except for special ceremonies when the veil is lifted and theyre brought out in the light of the tabernacle.
i didn't understand his voice, i mean, i didnt know where it came from. it's not embodied. "wrapped up in your magic shroud as ecstacy surrounds you/this time i'ts found you" i knew sam cooke was a black american, from a particular time and place, warmly, urbanely human. this voice, i could barely even gender, but i knew what it aspired to and what it was invoking.