Songs With Which to View the Solar Eclipse

"Moondance" / Van Morrison

When I left Indianapolis to go to college in New England in 1971, I'd never heard of Van Morrison. Sure, there was that song "Brown-Eyed Girl" by the Irish band Them, but I had no idea who their lead singer was. But in the early 70s Van Morrrison, now a solo act, was huge in the Boston area, and everybody from the Northeast seemed to know the title cut from his 1970 LP Moondance.  It was played endlessly in the dorms, almost as much as Carole King's Tapestry (and if you were around back then, you'll know that's saying something).

In that album-oriented age, it didn't matter that it had never been released as a single -- that wouldn't happen until November 1977, when the record company, stymied by Van's three-year writer's block, finally packaged "Moondance" as a single.

I had just moved back to the States after two years in England, and hearing this song on the radio was welcome indeed, especially since the airwaves were otherwise infested with Fleetwood Mac and Billy Joel, not to mention the Bee Gees, Barry Manilow, and (shudder!) the Eagles. In that context, no wonder Van's eight-year-old record sounded timelessly great, its Celtic soul sound distilled with laidback cool jazz.

Listen to that saxophone part -- it's like honey (Van, a saxophonist himself, composed the melody first, working it out on a sax). Even better is that nimble Jeff Labes piano solo in the middle eight. And best of all is the sinuous prowl of Van's singing -- leaping for the high notes, snuggling with the lows, flirting outrageously with the syncopated beat. Towards the end, Van just gives up and becomes a saxophone.

Okay, so it's not about a solar eclipse -- this is definitely a nighttime song.  "A fantabulous night to make romance," indeed. Still, that dance of the moon is cataclysmic in its own way. "And every tiiime I touch you, you just / Tremble inside / And I know how much you want me,  / That you can't hide  . . . " Unh-HUNH.       

"Moonshadow" / Cat Stevens

Sure, the titles are similar -- but this 1971 track from Teaser and the Firecat is something very different from "Moondance." Forget the sexy soul and jazz; Cat Stevens' stock in trade was folky charm, all wrapped up in faux hippie wisdom. It's very much a song of its era, but a splendid one nonetheless.

Stevens has said in interviews that this song was inspired by a visit to Spain, where one night he stood by the sea under moonshine so strong that he could see his own shadow. All right, not technically an eclipse, but since the whole thing about the solar eclipse is the moon's shadow blotting out the sun . . .

Like a nursery rhyme, it begins with its chorus: "I'm being followed by a moonshadow, / Moonshadow, moonshadow, / Leaping and hopping on a moonshadow, / Moonshadow, moonshadow." All that repetition is almost like an incantation. Then come the verses, which follow a neat pattern -- "If I ever lose my hands [eyes /legs /mouth] . . . I won't have to work [cry /walk /talk] no more." It's an old folk song device; the fun lies in predicting how the singer will complete the pattern each time.

Sure, there's an undertone of melancholy -- all those physical losses, teetering on the edge of tragedy (it's just a whisper away from the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, taunting his adversary while his limbs are hacked off one by one. ["Come back here and I'll bite your legs off!"]). But verse after verse, he somehow finds a way to blithely sidestep despair. The song is suffused with a glorious optimism -- the lighthearted skipping rhythm, the dancing melody, that nimble, delicate acoustic guitar.

Ever since Cat Stevens turned into Yusuf Islam, listeners have been looking for coded religious messages in his songs. There is something cryptic about that bridge: "Did it take long to find me? I asked the faithful light. / Did it take long to find me? and are you gonna stay the night?" But get over it, folks -- this is the sort of anthropomorphic stuff you'll find in hundreds of children's picture books, and Stevens didn't convert to Islam until 1977, long after he wrote "Moonshadow."

 Nearly 50 years later, this song's fey charm survives intact. And if this is the song that pops into my head while watching the sun disappear on Monday, I'll be cool with that.  

Another Shuffle for Holt

Because that playlist just has too many great tunes not to go for another round.

1. "American Tune" / Paul Simon (1973)
"I don't know a soul who's not been battered / I don't have a friend who feels at ease / Don't know a dream that's not been shattered / Or driven to its knees" -- yep, that's life, and Paul Simon's never been afraid of facing that down. My brother the minister got that, too. Best part of this song -- where he dreams that he's dying, and he flies, freed from his mortal bonds, over the Statue of Liberty. The song breaks free of its gentle melodic patterns (stolen from Bach, I feel compelled to note) and soars into another realm of consciousness.

2. "The Weight" / The Band (1968)
Surely I'm not the only one who finds something Christlike about the singer of this song, wandering into town to "take a load off Fanny / And put the load right on me." And after meeting all the characters in town, he takes his wistful fare-thee-well -- "My bag is sinking low and I do believe it's time." Holt had this album, Music From Big Pink, though it took me years to figure out why these guys were worth listening to. They may have been a Canadian band, but they took their cue from Appalachian folk music, and from thence all the great Scots-Irish folk songs, in which the spectre of death is ever-present.

3. "Drive South" / John Hiatt (1988)
I've bragged here about how I knew Johnny Hiatt, growing up in Indianapolis, but my brother knew him better than I did, and was just as astonished as I was when we discovered he'd become not just a rock star but a genuine artist. I took Holt to see JH for his birthday a few years go, and he saw him a few more times after that. So you know there had to be at least one Hiatt tune on the playlist. I love this one for three reasons: 1) It's about driving, and Holt loved driving (Indy, natch); 2) It's a sexy seduction song ("Don't bother to pack your nylons / Just keep those pretty legs showing / It gets hot down where we're going")  and my brother, he loved the ladies; and 3) "drive south" may be a metaphor for going to hell. My brother worked a powerful lot of good in his life, but he was no saint, and who knows how tough the grading system is at the pearly gates?  But if he's headed to hell, then hell's a reasonable option for us all.

4. "The Cape" / Guy Clark (1995)
The first time I heard Guy Clark sing this song, all I could think of was my brother, and how much he loved to dress up in costumes as a kid. And yes, like the hero of this song, even when he was old and grey, people still thought he acted like a kid. But as Guy puts it, "he's one of those who knows / That life is just a leap of faith / Spread your arms and hold your breath / And always trust your cape." Brilliant song that never fails to bring a lump to my throat.

5. "Don't Forget Me" / Marshall Crenshaw (1995)
Here's a two-fer: Marshall Crenshaw AND Harry Nilsson, who wrote this tender wry song. I don't know if Holt shared my Nilsson obsession, but I know he loved Nilsson's oddball animated movie The Point when it first came out; in hospice, Holt smiled when I played him my Nilsson playlist. Although this is basically a song to an ex-wife, we can extrapolate the sentiments to any loves from the past. Even the spookily apposite verse three: "And when we're older / Full of cancer / It doesn't matter now / Come on, get happy / Cause nothing lasts forever / But I will always love you." Amen.

6. "Miles From Nowhere" / Cat Stevens (1970)
Tea for the Tillerman was an inescapable album that year, full of folky riffs and mordant black humor. Perfect soundtrack for Harold and Maude, a movie Holt loved for its warped fascination with death. Many songs on this album are about fathers and sons (I watched that battle from a front row seat) and taking journeys. But the line that really resonates here? "Lord my body has been a good friend / I won't need it when I reach the end." And so we told Holt in the hospice -- time to turn in the loaner car, it's reached the end of its usefulness.

7. "Losing My Religion" / R.E.M. (1991)
For a Methodist minister, having "Losing My Religion" as your ringtone was a pretty gutsy move, doncha think?

8. "Don't Forget About Me" / John Mellencamp (2010)
Our other homegrown Indiana talent, Johnny Cougar nee Mellencamp always held a special place in our hearts. From his stellar back-to-basics album No Better Than This, another ex-wife song that can, if you squinch your eyes just so, be re-interpreted to apply to an old beloved friend who's moved to another plane of being.  

9. "Over the Rainbow / Wonderful World" / Israel Kamakawiwo Ole (1993)
One song we all agreed had to be played at Holt's memorial. Because, no matter how often it's played, this lilting ukelele rendition of the old standards transforms them into something new and hopeful and uplifting.

10. "Warmth of the Sun" / The Beach Boys (1964)
It was Holt, not me, who owned all our Beach Boys albums. (Note that possessive "our," because I listened to them just as avidly as he did.) In the face of the British Invasion, he never gave up on their American counterparts. In 1966, our family took a cross-country train trip to California that gave us our one taste of golden SoCal surf summer, before the Monkees and the Summer of Love happened. In my mind, this glorious Beach Boys ballad sums it all up -- how we keep the warmth of the sun inside us, to survive grief and loss. Interesting to note that Brian Wilson and Mike Love began to write this song on November 22, 1963, but didn't finish it until the tragic events of that day -- the Kennedy assassination, for those of you too young to have been permanently scarred by this event -- had happened. So the elegiac tone of this song was no accident. Those exquisite chord changes, the vocal counterpoints, and above all Brian's heart-melting falsetto -- they make me weep, make me smile, make my heart swell in my chest. Magic.

Cleaning out my brother's apartment, I found his iPod and put it in the dock to play on shuffle while I folded clothes and emptied drawers. How lovely it was to hear his own curated inventory of music! It was as if he were in the room with me. Expect to hear more from that source....

52 GIRLS

"Sad Lisa" / Cat Stevens

In my Indianapolis high school in 1971, Tea for the Tillerman was the album you had to own to even pretend to be cool. (We weren't hip enough to know the term "hip.") Cat Stevens' folky tracks were a little snide, a little fey, full of longing for the open road and brooding about the generation gap -- perfect for college-bound suburban kids. Many people first fell for these songs in the classic black comedy Harold and Maude, but not me -- I liked Harold and Maude BECAUSE it featured Tea for the Tillerman songs.

I was precisely the right age, and precisely the right target demographic, to think that this was the wisest and most beautiful album ever (at least for a few months, until Carole King's Tapestry came out). It seemed to be playing everywhere I went -- maybe not on Top 40 radio or on the musak at the mall, but at every party and at every friend's house. That folkie acoustic guitar, Stevens' quavery voice, the flower child conceits, the romantic loner alienation -- how better to appeal to us hippie wannabes?

And along with Tea for the Tillerman's many "road map" songs -- "Father and Son," "Miles From Nowhere," "On the Road to Find Out," "Wild World" -- I was always particularly haunted by the melancholy riddle of "Sad Lisa."

That opening image, sung with tender solicitude over a contrapuntal piano motif, tugs on your heart from the get-go: "She hangs her head and cries on my shirt / She must be hurt very badly / Tell me what's making you sad, Li?" 

So who or what is making Sad Lisa so sad? Back in the day -- programmed as I was by years of pop songs about young love -- I guessed that she'd had her heart broken by another guy, and the singer is lending her a comforting shoulder to cry upon, in hopes of eventually winning her himself.

But further listens made it clear that this was something else, something deeper and infinitely sadder. Could be depression, could be autism -- she certainly isn't communicating with the singer, who seems to be visiting her in an institution: "She walks alone from wall to wall / Lost in her hall, she can't hear me" and "She sits in a corner by the door." (Remember, ours was the era that romanticized life in the loony bin with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.)  She won't answer his questions, she's "lost in the dark", she can't hear him, she needs to be freed.

Verse two's poetical imagery of her weeping adds a delicate sort of glamor: "Her eyes like windows, trickle in rain / Upon the pain [pane] getting deeper." (Dig how he adds arpeggios to the piano to imitate the trickling rain.) And in verse three, white knight that he is, he vows to take action: "I'll do what I can to show her the way / And maybe one day I will free her." But now -- wait! -- he throws us a curve ball: "Though I know no one can see her." Is Lisa just a ghost, or a figment of his own disturbed imagination? The mind boggles.

What ultimately made us feel most sad was that minor key melody, rising urgently, then falling in despair. Instead of the default folk-rock instrument, a guitar, Stevens went back to his own original instrument, the piano, adding a mournful cello halfway through. Nothing like musically wringing the heartstrings.

Was this based on a real girl?  Stevens did spend several months in a tuberculosis hospital in 1969 and 1970 -- if James Taylor could write "Fire and Rain" about a girl he met in a mental hospital, surely Steven Georgiou could write about a fellow TB patient.

But I kind of like not knowing the details. Because all that matters, really, is the sadness of Sad Lisa -- and that is clear as a bell.

21 DOWN, 31 TO GO

The 100 Best Singles In My Head
Nos. 31-35

After the British Invasion petered out, I had to find my own way musically -- what a drag! As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, I was just the right age for brooding poetry, packed with social meaning. All right, all right, everybody in my college freshman dorm listened to exactly these same songs. That doesn't mean they weren't good songs, before they turned into cliches . . .

31. "The Sounds of Silence" / Simon & Garfunkel (1965)
"Sounds of Silence" was the Song That Would Not Die. I heard it first as a gentle acoustic number on Simon and Garfunkel's 1964 album Wednesday Morning 3 a.m.; as a wannabe folkie, I had all those early S&G records -- I even learned to play the guitar so I could fumble through various tunes. "Sounds of Silence" was clearly one of the stronger songs on the album, a melancholy meditation on the lack of communication in modern society. (Paul Simon says it was inspired by the Kennedy assassination, though that never registered with me -- was that what he meant by "the vision that was planted in my brain / Still remains / Within the sound of silence"?). Then a few months later, in September 1965, it emerged as a radio hit, with electric guitars and drums added, to make sure you wouldn't miss the swell of emotion on "'Fools said I 'you do not know / Silence like a cancer grows." I've read that it was remixed without Simon's permission while he was off in London, pondering what to do now that his folk duo had failed. He may have been surprised by the amped-up version, but he didn't refuse to cash the checks when it climbed to #1 on the charts in early 1966. The political preaching of the song found a ready audience: "And the sign said the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls / And tenement halls / And echoed in the sounds of silence." Pretentious? We didn't know the word in 1965. Simon and Garfunkel quickly reunited, and in January 1966 they rushed out a new album, titled -- what else? -- The Sounds of Silence. Now jump forward to late 1967, when I began to see the trailer for a new movie: a young man in chinos, sitting aimlessly on the edge of a fountain on a college campus, accompanied by Simon and Garfunkel's hushed echoey vocals: "Hello darkness my old friend . . . " Man, I knew I had to see that movie. The Graduate laid down the template for my adolescent view of life; how apt that "Sounds of Silence" would be part of it.

32. "Wild World" / Cat Stevens (1971)
In my Indianapolis high school in 1971, Tea for the Tillerman was the album you had to own to even pretend to be cool. (We weren't hip enough to know the term "hip.") Cat Stevens' folky tracks were just a little snide, a little fey, full of longing for the open road and brooding about the generation gap -- perfect for college-bound suburban kids. I loved so many tracks from this album: "Miles From Nowhere," "Sad Lisa," 'On the Road To Find Out," "Father and Son" (the titles alone give you a good idea of this album's themes). Many people first fell for these songs in the classic black comedy Harold and Maude, but not me -- I liked Harold and Maude BECAUSE it featured Tea for the Tillerman songs. As the album's single, "Wild World" was a shade bouncier than the other tracks, but not much. I suppose you could call this a break-up song -- in verse one the singer wistfully says to his girlfriend, "Now that I've lost everything to you / You say you wanna start something new / And it's breakin' my heart you're leavin' / Baby, I'm grievin'" -- but it's a peculiarly bloodless break-up song. He's not angry, he's not even fighting to get her back. He's more like an older brother, gently advising her about the perils of life, because he doesn't want to see her hurt. (Most guys I know DO want their exes to get hurt.) Cat Stevens was the original Sensitive Male, inventing it as he went along. The arrangement is delicate, mostly piano and acoustic guitar (the chorus adds drums), with the slightest suggestion of reggae in the beat -- no wonder Jimmy Cliff scored a UK hit with his cover. Although Cat seemed to be warning us about the bigger world's dangers, for the half-dozen of us who actually left Indiana for college, it was like catnip. "Ooo baby, baby it's a wild world / It's hard to get by just upon a smile" -- the subtext to me was always, BRING IT ON!

33. "Fire and Rain" / James Taylor (1970)
I saw James Taylor in the spring of 1971 at the Coliseum in Indianapolis; I'd been mainlining his albums for almost a year, I couldn't wait to see him live. Tall, skinny, with long brown hair and a droopy mustache, dressed in faded blue denim -- he was a folksinger, yeah, but so much younger and more with-it than the Peter Paul and Mary types. His acoustic guitar playing was nimble indeed, but he wasn't above throwing drums and electric guitars on his tracks. I knew by then, of course, that James had briefly been in a mental hospital as a teenager; like most kids my age, I thought that was cool, proof of his sensitive soul. So as I pored over "Fire and Rain" -- and indeed I pored over it for months -- I was looking for the inside story. Verse one was clearly about a friend's death ("Just yesterday morning / They let me know you were gone / Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you"). Verse two is set in the depths of melancholy; naturally drugs were part of the equation ("My body's aching and my time is at hand"). In verse three, he's trying to get his head straight, taking long walks and making phone calls; the last line, "Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground" we all thought referred to a plane crash (not knowing about Taylor's failed earlier band, The Flying Machine). And then there was that apocalyptic chorus -- "I've seen fire and I've seen rain," a reference to electroshock therapy and the cold showers that follow it. From these fragments, I made up my own movie -- that Taylor had been in love with a fellow mental patient who had committed suicide, and the evil doctors had schemed to erase his memory of her with anti-depressants and incessant psychotherapy. (I must have just finished reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.) Yet that night, as I watched James Taylor sit on a stool performing this song -- flinching at the spotlight, gazing warily at the crowd -- I realized that this song was really just one long stream of navel-gazing self-pity. I should have turned off James Taylor completely at that moment, but of course I didn't. Something about his voice, that remarkable mix of cragginess and sweetness, had its hooks too deep in me by then; it still dives right past all my defenses. And I'm always struck by that moment of genuine sorrow and tenderness at the end of the chorus: "I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend / But I always thought that I'd see you again." That's put so exquisitely, so simply -- well, it still makes me cry.

34."It's Too Late" / Carole King (1971)
The opening act for James Taylor that night at the Coliseum was Carole King, a pairing inspired by the fact that James Taylor had just released a cover of Carole's song "You've Got A Friend." We were all so primed to see James Taylor; we had no idea who Carole King was. But I have to say, James set himself up with a hard act to follow. With a cloud of frizzy ringlets, wearing some sort of embroidered hippie blouse and a huge flowing skirt, Carole King took the stage by storm, pounding that piano commandingly, rocking out to tune after tune that we realized we knew. So THIS was the woman who'd written all those early 60s hits like "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" and "Up On the Roof"? She won us over immediately, then launched into a string of newer songs that were instantly lovable. The very next day I ran out to buy Tapestry, her second solo album after years of being "just" a songwriter. Of course it went to college with me, and I swear, it was the one record that every woman in my freshman dorm owned. All those years of being a music fan, and I realized how few of the songs I'd taken to my heart were written by women. Carole King stepped in just in time, like a big sister laying down her lessons in life. "It's Too Late" offered so much more nuance than your usual break-up song. "Stayed in bed all morning just to pass the time / There's something wrong here, there can be no denying / One of us is changing, or maybe we've just stopped trying." For psychological acuteness, that can't be beat; I still think of it every time I lie in bed, fretting over a recent fight. And the resignation at the end of a flawed relationship (probably her split from ex-husband and creative partner Gerry Goffin): "It's too late, baby, now / It's too late / Though we really did try to make it / Something inside has died, and I can't / Hide and I just can't fake it." (A triple internal rhyme!) Here my friends and I stood, on the verge of "real" life; Carole King had been there and done that. On my list of Important Life Albums, Tapestry remains a constant.

35. "American Pie" / Don McLean (1972)
Is this a good song? I have no idea, and I'll bet if you were of a certain age in 1972, you don't know either. The thing was, it was being played everywhere -- at least on college campuses -- and we were all abuzz, trying to decode the cryptic references in the song. I don't suppose Don McLean had any idea how irresistible this would be to a generation who'd been weaned on rock and roll the way we Beatle Babies were. Rock music mattered to us in a way it hadn't to previous generations. For starters, we all knew that "the day the music died" was the day that Buddy Holly and Richie Valens died in a plane crash -- the fact that some of us had never heard of Buddy Holly until that moment didn't mitigate the haunting impact of that line. But then we had to puzzle out the rest. Who were the jester, the king, and the queen? (Bob Dylan, Elvis, and -- what girl singer?) Who were the father, the son, and the holy ghost? (Wikipedia tells me it was Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, and Allan Ginsburg -- again, people I had never heard of in 1972). Good that he mentioned John Lennon ("while Lennon read a book by Marx") as well as "Helter Skelter" (thereby referencing both the Beatles and Charles Manson in one fell swoop). And there were the Stones, appearing as Jack Flash and Satan. But there was so much else, and we ate it up, singing lustily along to the chorus, "And we were singing / Bye bye Miss American Pie / Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry / Those good ole boys were drinking whiskey and rye, and singing / This'll be the day that I die / This'll be the day that I die..." We ALL knew those lyrics, and we fell into them with relief, having gotten lost as hell in those interminable word-crammed verses. McLean even snuck in tricks like slowing down the tempo and hushing the volume for later repetitions of the verse. Yes, he had a lovely folkie voice; yes, he played the guitar just fine. None of that matters. Like the Paul Is Dead hoax, "American Pie" knit our generation together in an underground movement, information passed from one kid to another, often at night over guttering candles with a joint smouldering in the ashtray. I still can't hear this song without getting a shiver up my spine.

"Moonshadow" / Cat Stevens

This is the way it works. For days I had "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out" stuck in my head, thanks to that obnoxiously ubiquitous iPhone commercial. (I tell myself it's just a fond flashback of Bud Cort dancing around a cemetery in Harold and Maude, but I know better.) So I surrender to the inevitable and go onto iTunes to download that song. While I'm looking for it, though, I run across this other Cat Stevens song and I'm instantly hooked.

I remember "Moonshadow" very well - it was the standout song from Teaser and the Firecat , Stevens' valiant 1971 follow-up to his phenomenal Tea For The Tillerman. Like every other girl in my class, I owned both in vinyl, but years later when it came down to replacing the LPs with CDs, Tillerman made the cut, not Teaser. "Moonshadow" vanished into the twilight zone of forgotten tracks -- until today.

Now I'm seduced once more by its fey charm. Yesterday I was pondering the childlike quality of late-1960s Donovan; moving on to Cat Stevens is a totally logical transition. Like a nursery rhyme, it begins with its chorus, a frothy bit of fairy-tale imagery: "I'm being followed by a moonshadow, / Moonshadow, moonshadow, / Leaping and hopping on a moonshadow, / Moonshadow, moonshadow." All that repetition is almost like an incantation. Then come the verses, which follow a consistent pattern -- "If I ever lose my hands [eyes /legs /mouth] . . . I won't have to work [cry /walk /talk] no more." It's an old folk song device; the fun lies in predicting how the singer will complete the pattern each time.

None of which adequately explains why this is such a splendid little song. You just can't resist its glorious sense of optimism -- the lighthearted skipping rhythm, the dancing melody, are so joyful, especially sung in Stevens' warm timbre, over that nimble, delicate acoustic guitar. Stevens has said in interviews that it was inspired by a visit to Spain, where one night he stood by the sea under moonshine so strong that he could see his own shadow. I love the idea of that transfiguring nature experience.

Of course, in true Cat Stevens fashion, it's edged with darkness -- all those physical losses in the verses. I've read that when Stevens was young, he nearly died of tuberculosis; melancholy always shadows his songs. This song could so easily misfire, with its relentless verse-by-verse translation of tragedy into triumph. It's just a whisper away from the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who continues to taunt his attacker while his limbs are hacked off one by one. ("Come back here and I'll bite your legs off!") But that perky formula saves it -- all those disasters remain imaginary, held at bay by his buoyant positive spirit.

Ever since Cat Stevens turned into Yusuf Islam, listeners have been suspicious of anything that sounds like a coded religious message in his songs. There is something provocative about that bridge: "Did it take long to find me? I asked the faithful light. / Did it take long to find me? and are you gonna stay the night?" But get over it folks -- this is the sort of anthropomorphic stuff you'll find in hundreds of children's picture books, and Stevens didn't convert to Islam until 1977, long after he wrote "Moonshadow." Stevens' sense of childlike wonder seems totally sincere to me, and nearly 40 years later, it still seems fresh and lighthearted and uplifting.

Let's just hope no one decides to spoil this one with a tacky commercial, ok?

Moonshadow video

"On the Road to Find Out" /
Cat Stevens

Apropos of nothing -- or maybe apropos of everything -- I've been stuck on this song ever since it popped up on my shuffle today. There are days when I can't remember what the Sixties felt felt like, but boy, yesterday sure wiped all the rust and dust off those Sixties ideals.

Suppose you were making a movie and you wanted to slap something on the soundtrack that says 1970; you couldn't go wrong with any song from Tea for the Tillerman. Okay, I know Hal Ashby already pulled that trick with Harold and Maude, but Tea for the Tillerman is so much more than just Harold and Maude for me. I was precisely the right age, and precisely the right target demographic, to think that this was the wisest and most beautiful album ever (at least for a few months, until Carole King's Tapestry came out). It seemed to be playing everywhere I went -- maybe not on Top 40 radio or on the musak at the mall, but at every party and at every friend's house. That folkie acoustic guitar, Stevens' quavery voice, the flower child conceits, the romantic loner alienation -- how better to appeal to us hippie wannabes?

"On the Road To Find Out" is your classic spiritual quest song, and we -- the generation that made Siddhartha a cult classic -- liked our spiritual quests, and the vaguer the better. The singer starts out by leaving his happy home "to see what I could find out," "with the aim to clear my mind out," et cetera et cetera et cetera, all very soft-focus and high-minded. It isn't all easy going -- he mentions snow, frost, thunder, howling winds -- and worst of all, human loneliness hits: "Then I found myself alone, hoping someone would miss me / Thinking about my home, and the last woman to kiss me (kiss me)." Still, he perseveres, as the chorus tells us over and over: "So on and on I go, the seconds tick the time out / There's so much left to know, and I'm on the road to find out." This is more Easy Rider than The Searchers, that's for sure.

Cat lays this down with swelling and climbing melodies, a distant chorus cheering him on, drums and a touch of bass and organ building up that folky guitar ever so subtly until it almost feels EPIC. We are totally with him -- or are we? Because I'll bet that ninety percent of the kids who wore the grooves off this LP still think it's about running away from home -- whereas, I now realize, it's about the folly of running away. Like he says in the last verse, "Then I found my head one day when I wasn't even trying / And here I have to say, 'cause there is no use in lying / Yes, the answer lies within, so why not take a look now? /Kick out the devil's sin, pick up, pick up a good book now." (Or is it "the Good Book" he's talking about? Knowing that Cat eventually became a serious Muslim, changing his name to Yusuf Islam, you've got to wonder.)

PICK UP A BOOK? That wasn't the message we wanted to hear -- that's like something the school librarian would tell you. And what we wanted was to go out of state to college and smoke dope and drop acid and live in communes until we found The Answer. It almost didn't matter what Cat Stevens was trying to tell us, we heard what we wanted to.

And you know what? It still doesn't matter. I still get that yearning to hit the road when I hear this song. And even if the answer lies within, I still want to believe there is an Answer. Yesterday gave me hope again that there is.

On the Road To Find Out sample