The title to this post is a quote from Mayhem's
great Pagan Fears. It's also a fact, in a way; the past is alive in each of us
in a philosophical as well as literal way; and in the things people leave
behind them and our reponses to those things. Which is
essentially a long-winded way of linking things that have nothing much in
common except that I got them for Christmas; but in fact looking at it more
closely, there is a link of sorts, albeit a tenuous one.
Taking a few things almost at random, the link that came to mind was not
only that they were all the products of human beings, but that they all
represent ways of life that no longer exist, or that have changed almost beyond
recognition. As a non-misanthrope (at least 94% of the time), the things people
leave behind elicit an emotional response of one kind or another; an empty
landscape is beautiful, but there is something special about stumbling
unexpectedly upon a standing stone or war memorials, or cairn or even old
initials carved in a tree, or indeed this statue, in the middle of
nowhere;
These objects represent the lives and worlds
of people you will never know, times that will never return and that can
probably never be fully understood in the casual way we understand our own
time.
ANYWAY, this will be chronological as it seems
simplest, even though Switzerland in 1983 (later) is now as gone as Mississippi
in 1929. Unless that is, you subscribe to a non-linear understanding of time.
As good a place to start as any, Charley Patton's
music documents not just one vanished world, but several, so:
Complete
Recordings 1929-1934 by Charley Patton (5CD box set, JSP Records)
The recordings the great Charley Patton made
fall on either side of the (to us) dividing line of the Wall Street Crash of 1929
which heralded the Great Depression; but they also demonstrate that, although
it no doubt had serious repercussions for the rural south, there was little the
Depression could do to immediately worsen the situation of the African American
population living in and around the cotton plantations and poor farms of
Mississippi.
Even in his earliest recordings, Patton’s songs
are full of references to local events and people (there’s a nice article here:
www.earlyblues.com/essay_pea%20vine.htm)
and his concerns are – as his listeners mostly would have been - local too.
Many of his songs are full of enigmatic references to people, places and
things, sometimes (as in Tom Rushen Blues, documenting the singer’s tempestuous
relationship with Tom Rushing, then sheriff of Mergold, Mississippi) fairly
easy to decipher, but sometimes impenetrable but hugely evocative.
The Wall Street Crash was probably news on the
Dockery Farms plantation (outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi) where Patton had
been raised, but it was almost certainly not as immediately pressing as had
been the great Boll Weevil infestation that devastated cotton plantations
across the southern states of the USA through the early years of the 20th
century, commemorated in (among many other places) Patton’s Mississippi Boll
Weevil Blues (recorded in June 1929) which mythologises the spread of the
weevils in a rueful, semi-humorous way:
Well,
I saw the bo weevil, Lord, a-circle, Lord, in the air, Lordie/The next time I
seed him, Lord, he had his family there/Bo weevil left Texas, Lord, he bid me
"fare ye well", Lordie/(Where you goin' now?)I'm goin' down the
Mississippi, gonna give Louisiana hell
In the month of the great Wall Street Crash (which
took place in late October 1929), Patton was recording a two-part song which
had more immediate local and personal significance; ‘High Water Everywhere’
parts 1 & 2, commemorating the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which
Patton – an eye-witness to the flood - gives an almost biblical apocalyptic
quality:
lord,
the whole round country, man, is overflowed /You know I can't stay here, I'll
go where it's high, boy/I would go to the hilly country, but, they got me
barred /Now, look-a here now at Leland river was risin' high/Look-a here boys
around Leland tell me, river was raisin' high/Boy, it's risin' over there
The consequences of disasters like the great
flood and the weevil epidemic were inseparable from those of the Depression
itself; a vast, poverty-stricken population for whom escape was only possible
through the exactly the kinds of things Patton was singing about; alcohol
(still illegal in this period, hence the sheriffs like Rushing who pop up
throughout Patton’s work) or becoming part of the large itinerant population
then wandering the country looking for work.
Despite his much-documented loathing for work,
Patton identified closely with these roaming figures and his most evocative
(and to modern ears almost sepia-toned) songs such as Jim Lee Blues pt 1 (also recorded the same month as the Crash) and Some Summer Day (from his first
post-Crash recording session in June 1930) have lyrics which reflect the
instability of a life on the road and are sharply relevant to the events then
happening (or about to happen) to thousands of displaced people across America;
but they are also full of the railroads, riverboats and mysterious
individuals that had probably been a part of his work since long before they
were put down on wax.
World War Two, the civil rights movement, advances
in technology, music and just the passing of time itself have made Patton’s
recorded work (and indeed the one photograph of the man himself, above) seem
incredibly distant; but the recordings bring that lost world vividly back; its
bitterness made bittersweet by the art which preserves it.
Far less distant chronologically, but even
remote in other ways is the way of life and death preserved in Soviet
Ghosts by Rebecca Litchfield
Soviet Ghosts is a collection of photographs by
Rebecca Litchfield of the decaying remains of neglected buildings and monuments
of the Soviet empire that accumulated across Eastern Europe and Russia for a
large part of the twentieth century.
The photographer travelled through fourteen
countries, including Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Russia itself,
capturing powerful images of the schools, youth camps, hospitals, sports
centres, conference halls and prisons that were once central to the
daily lives of thousands of people but are now rotting, empty and often open to
the elements.
As the title suggests, there’s something extremely
haunting about these images; the remains of heroic, ideological murals give the
same impression as the more familiar and older tumuli, standing stones, cairns
and war memorials that are found across the world, but there is often an added
sense of poignancy here because it so often feels like the people who used
these places have just left; the youth camps are strewn with books, posters,
banners, sports equipment or even shoes. In hospitals, laboratories or theatres
equipment has been left as it was, seats are stacked neatly or scattered across
rooms as if in the aftermath of a hurricane. In the case of the abandoned
Ukrainian city of Pripyat, lying within the danger zone surrounding Chernobyl
power station, all of this is even more intense; homes were abandoned
hurriedly, with all but the bare minimum of belongings being left behind. And
for the most part nobody, even thieves, has returned. TV sets sit in front of mouldy
couches, toys lie abandoned in living rooms. As with the state buildings in
Russia, schools in Bulgaria, military bases in Latvia and monuments all over
the former Soviet Union, the feel is partly haunting because unlike Stonehenge
or the pyramids, nothing is really very old; children were being schooled in
the Young Pioneer Camps when I was born; the Chernobyl disaster happened in
1986. Bizarre.
picture
© Rebecca Litchfield
In the same period that millions of people were
living the lives prescribed for them by the government of the USSR, the late
Robert Fuest was attempting, with mixed results, to film Michael Moorcock’s
stylised, very 1960s sci-fi (ish) novel The Final Programme, resulting in The
Final Programme (dir Robert Fuest, 1973)
Although Fuest’s film was released in the early 70s, it’s infused with the
spirit of the mid 60s pop art/swinging London scene that was the background to
Moorcock’s novel. Although the film is confused and not exactly focussed or
dynamic, it has a charismatic central performance by the sadly underrated Jon
Finch as dandified millionaire genius scientist playboy Jerry Cornelius, who
casually buys tanks, missiles and napalm for undisclosed purposes and generally
fails to get excited by anything.
Finch exudes a kind of blasé charm best captured
in the immortal exchange when a minor character discovers that Cornelius’
refrigerator is full of chocolate biscuits:
man: you
like chocolate biscuits then?
Jerry: (with feeling, for once) ‘oh yeah’
Not a masterpiece, but stylish, humorous,
apocalyptic, philosophical, semi-psychedelic, camp sci-fi action movies don’t
come along very often, so it has a certain rarity value as well as a great
period atmosphere.
Of a similar vintage are the amazing records that
make up Saigon Rock & Soul (Sublime Frequencies Records 2012)
This 17 songs on this compilation were recorded
between 1968 and 1974; that is, while the Vietnam War was taking place. The
assimilation of western pop music in Vietnam followed much the same pattern as
in Japan and elsewhere in Asia; in the early 60s the sound of the electric
guitar in the twangy form of The Ventures and The Shadows had captured the
youth of the country, to be superceded thereafter by the influence of the
Beatles, Rolling Stones, soul music etc.
During the war, the occupation of troops from the
US meant that local musicians were more than ever influenced by western music
and the songs here include funk, soul and heavy acid rock. The musicians
favoured (or at least ended up with, due to limited recording facilities)
heavily fuzzed guitars (sometimes with excellent watery wah-wah effects), funky
bass and reverb-laden vocals.
The songs are very much products of their time,
and were made with little thought of posterity, but what sets them apart from
superficially similar-sounding records from elsewhere are the very
specific-to-their-time-and-place subjects; Carol Kim’s James Brown
influenced Cái Trâm Em Cài (Your
Hair Clip), about a hairclip made from shrapnel by her soldier boyfriend in
the trenches, Lệ Thu singing about
lovers separated by war, and the almost folk-ballad like treatments subjects
like jealousy, which invariably feature young soldiers their protagonists and
patriotism as a (sometimes negative) theme.
It’s amazing that such seemingly ephemeral music
should not only have survived the extreme situation that gave rise to it, but
that it should be so good; moments like the saxophone solo being played over
the squelching, gritty wah guitar on Phương Tâm’s Đêm Huyền Diệu
(Magical Night) or the sinister, almost Goblin-like
intro to Lệ Thu’s Starfish have a unique atmosphere and feel.
Less alien (to me) in its milieu but barely less
of a vanished way of life is documented in the superb Only Death is Real by Thomas
Gabriel Fischer and Martin Eric Ain.
Although the story of Fischer’s chaotic and
deprived childhood more than adequately explains the intense morbidity of his
vision and the anguished quality of the music he produced as the songwriter and
driving force behind Hellhammer, it’s the less personal aspect that earns the
book its place here.
Forming
a metal band (or any kind of band) in rural Switzerland (or rural anywhere) in
the early 80s was a vastly different undertaking from doing the same thing in
the internet age, and there’s something moving about the long-haired teenagers
trying to forge their own identity amidst the mundane streets of Switzerland,
their hand-made banners and hand-drawn logos. It may seem a stretch, but
Hellhammer’s Triumph of Death; a
feral cry of desolation and anguish, calling from the middle of nowhere to
anyone who would listen, with its trappings; black & white photos of
alienated youths posing with the makeup, spikes, studs and bullet belts isn’t
really so different from Pony Blues,
recorded in 1929, the discontented bellowing of a man with little to lose and
not much to his name except for the guitar he poses with, in the only known
image he has left behind him.
