Robertson - Lives of poets (with guitars)

Copyright Ray Robertson, 2016

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first edition

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Robertson, Ray, 1966-, author

Lives of the poets (with guitars) / Ray Robertson.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77196-072-4 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-77196-073-1 (ebook)

1. Musicians--Biography. I. Title.

ML385.R652 2016 780.92 C2015-907386-3

C2015-907387-1

Edited by Dan Wells

Copy-edited by Emily Donaldson

Typeset by Chris Andrechek

Illustrations and Cover Illustration by Chloe Cushman

Cover design by Gordon Robertson

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

The author acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council.

A.F. Moritz

Poet, Teacher, Friend

And to everyone who listenedand listens

Just one more...

Is everything just sex and music?

No.

Youre awfully down.

I need more sex and music.

Barry Hannah, Ray

Brings me words that are not the strength of strings.

Gene Clark, Strength of Strings

Introduction

The last sentence of Barry Hannahs delightfully riotous first novel, Geronimo Rex : That was it. Good, good heavens. Were in the wrong field. Music! Like many writers, I dont play an instrument, I cant sing, and Ive never attempted to write a song, but none of thats ever stopped me from occasionally feeling as if what I dothe stringing together of words in the hope of delighting and incitingis a middling impersonation of what musicians, real artists, are capable of. Musician envy: easy to acquire, even easier to understand.

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life declared the novelist Berthold Auerbach, and who hasnt experienced the rejuvenating uplift of music at the end of the day, at the end of a relationship, when one feels quite simply at the end of the line? More than a convenient coping device, howevera pragmatic panacea for a too-stressful lifemusic can remind us that existence is about more than merely surviving; at its best, it offers us the chance for the sort of transcendence of the suffocatingly mundane that poets and theologians like to go on and on about but that musicians actually deliver. From Philip Larkins poem For Sidney Bechet, an ode to the American jazz musician of the title: On me your voice falls as they say love should/Like an enormous yes. Offering humanity its necessary dosage of Enormous Yesness: who wouldnt want that job?

Except that its not minejust as it isnt most peoplesso one does the next best thing: listens, listens, and sometimes, if one is lucky, falls in love with a particular musicians entire body of work, coming to know their soul as expressed through the singular personality of their music as well asor perhaps even better thanones own. And like any love thats more than ephemeral infatuation, this love changes, deepens, becomes more complex over time. My youthful idolatry of Gram Parsons has ripened into middle-aged awe at his musical accomplishments mixed with occasional exasperation at his personal behaviour. When we become deeply immersed in an artists work, we inevitably want to know as much as possible about his or her life. T.S. Eliot and a load of other over-orderly intellects would disagree, but an artist is inseparable from his or her life. More than that: because our favourite musicians are as close to real-life magicians as most of us will ever know (now you see your humdrum little world; hum along to my song and abracadabra! now you dont), its understandable that we would want to know more about the source of that uncommon magic. In the process, we often become as fascinated by the life story as we are by the art that sprang from it. Occasionally were as inspired by the life as much as by the art itself. Platos dialogues are intellectually stimulating; his account of Socrates last days in The Apology is wholly stirring.

Ive certainly been inspired by both. It was the dazzling babble of Little Richards lyrics and not Mallarmes poetry that provided me with an early lesson in the wonderfully malleable nature of words and what they can be pushed and prodded into communicating. It was Gram Parsons voice, not Shakespeares plays, that convinced me life is essentially tragic. But I also learned from Ronnie Lane that making the art you want to makethat you need to makemore than compensates for the alternating opposition and indifference youll likely encounter for living life on your own terms. I learned from Townes Van Zandt and Gene Clark that what can fire your imagination can also extinguish it. And like any other itchy writer, its not enough to simply experience these truthsone wants to convey in words what it is that makes for a musically-transformed, more-alive human being, to sing a hymn in praise of a particular existence transformed by a lucky lifetime blessed with enormous Yeses.

In one form or another, this desire has always been there in my novelswhat nature is to Jim Harrisons books, I remember one day realizing, music is to minebut theres also always been a desire to one day drop the fictional veil and directly espouse and explore, at length, the lives of some of the musicians who have so deeply enriched my own life. Which is what Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) is about. I decided when I was twenty-six years old that I wanted to write novels instead of pursuing philosophy because it seemed to me as if literature was the more subtle tool for examining the maddening, miraculous ambiguity of existence. In the following twelve essays I employ much the same narrative approach as I do in my day job, telling a life story while also investigating the works of art that often gave that life its guiding purpose.

As my slightly tweaked title suggests, the biographical/critical prefaces to the selected works of what were then viewed as the greatest English poets that Dr. Johnson agreed to undertake in 1777 at the urging of three British booksellerswhat we know today as his Lives of the Poets has been my loose model. (Johnson himself wasnt exactly a musical aficionado: Of all noises, he said, I think music is the least disagreeable. To a friend who praised a violinist because of the complexity of his performance, Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.) One of Johnsons biographers, the novelist John Wain, remarked that Lives of the Poets is a work of memory, judgment and love, not a work of research. So is Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) . Ive listened to everything each of my subjects has created (oftentimes incessantly) and read everything of interest thats been written about them (and when there hasnt been sufficiently illuminating material available, Ive sought out and interviewed some of the people important to his or her story), but, as Johnson said, If it rained knowledge I would hold out my hand. But I would not give myself the trouble to go in quest for it. Some truths are too important to embalm in facts.