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Joseph Azize: on Elton John and Leon Russell’s ‘I Should Have Sent Roses’

John Lennon: Essence and Reality Part 15: “Mother”

JOSEPH AZIZE PAGE

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com
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John Lennnon c 1948

Part 15: “Mother”

Mother. “Mother” is the most harrowing song Lennon ever recorded, and
is the most harrowing piece of rock’n’roll I have heard or could
imagine being put down. There is even something confronting about its
stark title: it isn’t “Mother, You Had Me”, or “Goodbye, Mother” or
“My Mother”. It’s just plain “Mother”. It bears a mute challenge: what
does “mother” mean to you? The word utters a primal reality. Four
other songs on 1970’s classic John Lennon-Plastic Ono Band album also
had one word titles fired point-blank: “Isolation”, “Remember”, “Love”
and “God”. With nothing but single words, Lennon evokes divinity, a
parent, a terrifying state of existence, a poignant faculty of the
psyche, and the most powerful feeling-impulse we know. This is a
record of essential experiences. All artifice, all glossy surfaces,
are sanded back, and the heart, the raw matter of life is presented
through the vehicle of an art so perfectly mastered as to appear
artless. On this album, Lennon means and does business. Yet, it is
also the moment of his greatest apparent hypocrisy, his most signal
failure to live up to his own standards.

Mother. Our relationships with our parents are always in flux, even
after they have died. Nothing seems to remain static for very long:
not how we feel towards them, not what we think of them, not our
dominant memories, and not our overall assessments of them. And it
must be so, because our relationship with our parents is essential,
and as long we change, so will that relationship. This is neither good
nor bad; it is simply a fact. Good and bad become meaningful only when
we have an aim, and so a set of principles. If we are aiming for
conscious growth, then we must aim to become more loving, and this
will mean – at an absolutely fundamental level – to love our parents,
whatever issues we may have had. Until we can find love there, in that
relationship, we can only know passion and obsession mixed with
appreciation and esteem in varying degrees (and passion, I think, is
what passes for love with us).

When we speak about Lennon’s life a little further below, his mother
Julia and his father Fred, I shall mention the distortion which seems
to inevitably affect our memories of our parents. But just to briefly
make the point here, one cannot love while we are subject to these
distortions, irrespective of whether they are “favourable” or
“unfavourable” distortions. Love is impartial, or more accurately, it
includes impartiality, as George Adie said.

Of course, we cannot love anyone, not even mothers, on demand, and
anyone who thinks so doesn’t know. But we can do something in that
direction, and the need to do so becomes more urgent each day we have
not reached that state, because the longer it’s left, the harder it
gets. What we can do is prepare the soil for love by forming attitudes
which might foster or welcome love, by cultivating understanding, and
by striving to make negative emotions passive. Perhaps most
importantly of all, we can strive to acquire being, and with that,
individual will. As Gurdjieff is reported to have said: “Sometimes ‘it
loves’ and sometimes ‘it does not love’. … In order to be a good
Christian (and so to love) one must be. To be means to be master of
oneself. If a man is not his own master he has nothing and can have
nothing.” (In Search of the Miraculous, 102)

Being stands above emotion, and individual will is not just a power of
decision-making, but a manifestation of the real self which is based
on and understands my own unique makeup (so this will is not
experienced as tyrannical or even as an imposition, but more as a
return to home, to where I should be). Making effort, any effort for
being and individual will, allows more emotional control, so that we
can play a conscious role in forming the attitudes we want and need.
There are no guarantees, but we can make honest attempts. The road is
one of self-education, or self-agriculture. We know that if we want
anything to grow in a particular field we need to prepare the earth by
working it, adding substances to it, and removing impediments. And so
it is with loving our parents.

At some point in life, everyone will have issues in their
relationships with their parents, or so I see it. I am not speaking
about resentments, but about issues: ongoing attempts to reconcile
difference of opinion on important matters. I do not believe that it
is possible not to have some sort of serious issue, provided only that
you know your parents long enough and are sufficiently honest with
yourself. The more anyone argues otherwise, the more they convince me
that they’re in denial. So it is not just you, and it isn’t just me:
we’re all in the same position.

One can, of course, form theories about this: for example, that in
growing up in a world different from that which our parents knew they
must inevitably, to some extent, misunderstand us. Or one can theorise
and say that in acquiring our own individuality there must be a
reaction against our parents’ individualities. That is, there is an
inevitable tension between the infant’s natural impulse to imitate the
parents and the adolescent’s urge to become independent individual. We
could say that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and
there’s a lot of truth in all that. However my assertion is not based
on either theory: it’s just an observation. But the observation is
good enough for me. It is based partly on introspective observation,
and also, wherever I’ve been close enough to someone to tell, there
have been issues.

I am not speaking about dislike. I am not saying that we are bound to
dislike let alone hate our parents. On the contrary, I think that what
is real in the relationship is the love. An essence relationship is
always and can only be one of love. My position is that the
differences and issues arise in personality, and can be handled
without rancour. It is an indictment of us that they too infrequently
are. One does sometimes see cases where beneath even the disagreements
and misunderstandings there is a current of certainty in love. True
affection is not given on condition or subject to recall.

The issues are more or less serious, and are more or less harmonised
or aggravated by the passing years, but they’re always there. To take
an example which struck me quite forcibly, one of my friends had the
not a-typical match of the “perfect mother” and the “perfectly awful
father”. In this case, I always found the beauty more puzzling than
the straight-forward beast. One day, when he was already in his 40s
and his mother had been dead for several months, my friend suddenly
said to me, in what was a mildly depressed explosion, that his mother
had silently consented to his father’s rages. She had effectively
collaborated with him. As stated, I think everyone has issues with
their parents.

More importantly for this article, John Lennon thought so too. When he
performed “Mother” at Madison Square Garden, he introduced it like
this: “… a lot of people thought it was just about my parents, but
it’s about 99% of the parents, alive or half-dead.” I only wonder why
he made an exception for one per cent. Was it just optimism? Yet, the
song itself is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Lyrically, it is
almost clinical in its concise, naked statements of fact:

Mother!
You had me,
But I never had you.
I wanted you.
You didn’t want me.
So I,
I just got to tell you:
Goodbye.
Goodbye.

Father!
You left me.
I never left you.
I needed you so bad.
You didn’t need me.
So I,
I just got to tell you:
Goodbye.
Goodbye.

Children!
Don’t do what I have done.
I couldn’t walk,
And I tried to run.
So I,
I just got to tell you:
Goodbye.
Goodbye.

Mamma don’t go!
Daddy come home!
Mamma don’t go! Daddy come home!

I have allowed a separate line for each line of the song as it’s sung.
The lyric sheet doesn’t do justice to the measured barrage of short
addresses. The entire sound of the piece is funereal. It sounded like
that to me the first time I heard it, and it has never sounded any
other way. But the lyrics, when I set out then like this, read to me
like an indictment. Except for the emotion in Lennon’s verse, one
could imagine a clerk of the court reading them, methodically
ploughing on (so too, in “God”, the list of people and things Lennon
does not believe in sounds like a list of convicts read in a
Dickensian criminal court). And who does it indict? Lennon’s parents,
of course, but equally, also himself. Lennon does not preach at his
family from some easily assumed superiority. Even his singing of the
opening word of each verse – Mother! Father! Children! – sounds more
like a calling from island to island.

Another feature of the song is its extreme economy with words. Even
when Lennon sings: “I just got to tell you, goodbye”, he’s being
minimalist. He means that he has to say it, and that’s all there is to
say. He’s driven to impose finality. Even the word “just”, which I
recall Lennon and McCartney once said was a “filler”, to be avoided
where possible, is exactly the right word for the poetry.

Yet, there is no finality. After the prose of the verses bidding
farewell to mother, father and children, Lennon yells: “Don’t go! Come
back!” Which is it, goodbye or come back? It’s both. His mind and his
heart sing that he has to take his leave, and move on. But his
feelings scream that he wants more of them, not less. The song is
made by this tension between the two poles of departure and return,
burying and retrieving the past. The tension cannot be maintained in
life, but only in the song.

The third verse is the key to the whole piece: he accepts that he is a
failure as a parent, and can do nothing more constructive than to warn
his “children” (although he only had Julian, at that point) not to
follow his example. The children are not part of the banshee grief.
Yet, we feel that this verse is related to the rest of the song. There
is a hope that the children may succeed where Lennon and his parents
have not. Lennon tells the children to learn from the pitiful examples
before them, and to this end, he’s prepared to let us see that he had
never recovered from his painful childhood. Was Lennon perhaps saying
that he tried to run too soon because he was running after his
parents? Maybe. Parents spend a bit of time encouraging their children
to take a few steps towards them, and anyone who has ever done this
knows how deep and purely joyous are the feelings evoked in both the
adult and the toddler by this simple play. No parent would dream of
coercing the child to run towards them, and yet, perhaps, they make
the demand that with their emotions the children race the wind. So
Lennon warned the children, and showed them where the dangers are. Of
course, we are the children, and so too, I think was Lennon. After
all, he did try again with Julian and later with Sean.

But here we come to the apparent hypocrisy I referred to above. At the
time Lennon wrote “Mother” he had a child, and had run out on him.
Lennon could have done more for and with his son, but it appears that
he was too selfish to do so. My own view is that he knew he could rely
on Cynthia, his first wife, and this made it easier for him to leave.
I am not seeking either to excuse or to condemn Lennon, but just to
state that whatever Lennon’s subjective culpability, there is an
“apparent hypocrisy”, and Cynthia’s book, with Julian’s forward
effectively says as much. This being so, no wonder he was so cool to
her on the few times they met in the 70s: she reminded him of his bad
conscience. You can even say that Cynthia carried the burden of his
self-centeredness.

Lennon did not use the word “selfish” on “Mother”, even though, if one
thinks it through, it’s tolerably obvious that selfishness is the
danger Lennon was pointing to. There are almost no bounds to our
selfishness, and yet, once we have risen above it, selfishness has no
strength at all. People will gladly sacrifice their health, their
money, and their own lives, once they have put selfishness beneath
them. Once again, I think of Dickens, and in particular, of Sidney
Carlton from A Tale of Two Cities. But it is not a case of “once
overcome, forever vanquished”. One of the real dangers in parenting,
as in life in general, but especially in parenting, is that while the
real me, the essential I, will make a sacrifice, personality will come
in later on and claim credit. Personality claims its “due reward”, it
speaks the language of entitlement. Obviously, an act of love can
never come with a demand for gratitude let alone recognition. Such a
demand proves that it is not and never was “love”. This requirement of
reciprocation – love me as I loved you – ruins many relationships.
It’s a commerce in the expression of affection, and it excludes love
because it swallows up everything real with selfishness.

Then love becomes mixed – not in itself, because in itself love cannot
be sullied. But love can become mixed in our psyches by an emotional
entanglement. The mother’s love is forever being offered, and then
withdrawn if her prior unstated conditions are not met. The child
becomes confused and hurt: “I thought you loved me for myself, but now
you’ll reject me if I cannot force myself to some display which to me
feels unnatural?”

And yet, I must admit that people who spend all their lives in
personality seem to be content with this state of affairs, or at least
not to question it. How can such situations persist? Surely one part
of the answer is that we do not confront these questions sufficiently,
and with sufficient being. We do not place ourselves before the
issues: we think about things, and our emotions pass over the fields
of our lives in a more or less intense shadow play. And then, with
time, the ordinary tempo of our existence reasserts itself, and the
tender pink membranes of scar tissue are buried deep. But the
“pondering” (or “being-logical-confrontation”, as Gurdjieff put it),
which could lead to a real change – to maturity – is rare.

If we could ponder, we would see the lies we tell ourselves. By
“lies”, I don’t just mean outright untruths, saying that I was there
at 5 o’clock when in fact I wasn’t. I chiefly mean self-deception and
distortion. These deceits always support a particular judgment: “My
mother was the greatest”, or the opposite, or something different. In
their turn, these moral judgments seem to always be that things were
or were not as they should have been.

It is hard not to judge our parents, after all, they teach us to
judge. The irony is that this lesson which we learn only too well,
then works against them. I knew a woman who effectively taught her
children to criticise and be embarrassed of their father. She did not
do it consciously of course, but that was the effect of her incessant
and vicious attacks. It was as if she thought that her children would
rely upon and esteem her all the more if she could alienate them from
their father. With one child, she succeeded, with another she failed,
and with the third the results were mixed. But what she never
appreciated was that if she taught them to criticise and to be
embarrassed of one parent, they could do the same with the other, and
would become suspicious of and hostile to most of the world.

These judgments support what Adie called “justified by God
grievances”, and as he saw so deeply, the more justification there is
for a grievance, the more dangerous it is. Gurdjieff showed that
negative emotions can never be justified. Further, as he said, many of
our grievances are based upon a false belief that matters could have
been different, when in fact, as he said, “If one thing could been
different everything could been different.” (In Search of the
Miraculous, 21-2).

Clearly, “Mother” is entirely founded on Lennon’s belief that his
parents should not have left him. The recent publication of Philip
Norman’s book on Lennon was important not least because it refocussed
the picture we had of Lennon’s parents. This piece is already long
enough, so I encourage anyone interested to read Norman. But the
bottom line is this: the fact of the matter was not so much that Fred
Lennon ran out on Lennon (although there is some truth in that, he
could have made greater efforts to speak to his son). It’s more that
Fred was weak: “just a pawn outplayed by a dominating queen”, as
Bernie Taupin said of Elton. Here the queen was probably Lennon’s Aunt
Mimi more than his mother Julia. Further, Norman also reveals that
Lennon knew that there were two sides to the story: one of Fred’s
brothers, John’s uncle, had written to him, setting out their side of
the story.

So Lennon’s view of the past had become garbled, and he seemed to be
wedded to the distortion. When we are subject to this distortion, we
can remember mostly those incidents which fit the twisted
world-picture. So, if for example, I have a grudge against someone,
then whatever unpleasant things they did come to mind quickly and
forcibly, and when they do, I feel at once the impact of my
accumulated dislike. Hatred is a feast for a glutton, and it is never
satisfied without revenge, which is why revenge seems so sweet. On the
other hand, if while I’m in the grip of this distortion I do manage to
remember the good things my parents did, they tend to come with less
power. In fact, they often call up with them an accuser, who will
explain them away. This is part of the spell of negative emotions:
they have this defensive quality that they attract similar negative
emotions and supporting memories, and subject reality to a selective
canon of interpretation. Being able to curse is a form of revenge, and
the gladness of cursing then seems to justify the resentment. And so
the fatal cycle unfolds.

There are two vitally important things here. First, we feel we must
judge, and in the rush to judgment, we introduce distortions.
Incidentally, U2 capture this very nicely in one of my favourite U2
songs, “Dirty Day” from Zooropa. Second, we are bound to these painful
untruths by the strongest bonds – our sufferings. As Gurdjieff said:
“Man is made in such a way that he is never so much attached to
anything as he is to his suffering.” (In Search of the Miraculous,
274)

I feel as if I could finish there, but one cannot leave “Mother”
without mention of Janov and the “Primal Scream” therapy he gave
Lennon and Ono. At the opening of this piece, I described the one-word
title “Mother” as a “primal reality”. In the Rolling Stone interview,
the question was raised as to whether John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band
might be the first “primal” album. As I recall, Lennon quite properly
deflected the question as a sterile curiosity about labels. “Was
George’s the first Gita album? It’s that relevant”, he said as I
remember, meaning that what you called it was irrelevant. But while
Lennon may not have been keen about such tags, the album is a record
of a man’s encounter with the first human things.

When I read Janov’s The Primal Scream, I was impressed by certain key
insights, but that was it. It struck me like having a black-tie supper
to celebrate painting the house. I’m not qualified to speak about
Janov’s therapy on Lennon, although I am suspicious. Lennon was quite
enthusiastic about it for a while. He had Janov come to England to
treat him, and when Janov had to return to the USA, he followed him
there. Although he soon left Janov rather abruptly, he retained a
sense of the importance of Janov’s ideas, at least for a while. Thus
in “Aisumasen” from Mind Games, he says “It’s hard enough, I know, to
feel your own pain”. Gurdjieff spoke of “intentional suffering”, but
also of “conscious labours”. There is a lot more to do than relieve
one’s past tortures. From what I can see, Lennon tried to move on. But
primal therapy did not seem to help him tremendously in the middle
term, if Lennon’s experiences in Los Angeles are any guide.
Shouldering the responsibility of raising a child, however, did: it
brought him to the clear-eyed sanity of “Beautiful Boy”, “Clean Up
Time”, “Living On Borrowed Time” and “Grow Old With Me”.

Also, the theory that all traumas go back to childhood, or even to
birth, leases a spurious credibility from a trick of the eye. When we
try to account for anything, we consider its history. An earlier cause
always seems to be a truer cause. So if a problem in an adult can be
attributed to something which occurred in childhood, we seem – by this
trick of the eye – to be really probing the depths. Janov’s idea that
childbirth was causative of later disorders may then seem persuasive
beyond what any evidence would warrant, simply any later conditions or
factors can be explained as derived from, or being potent because of,
the earlier problem – and it is difficult to prove the hypothesis
wrong.

To try and sum it up, I feel that there is a real danger of
identifying with the pain, and of manufacturing it in accordance with
expectations. Perhaps it’s something like the way that if you think
about headaches long enough, you’ll get one. I have a sense that there
is a good idea somewhere in the slick presentation which was Primal
Therapy, but that it was taken to an extreme, and that other good
ideas were blocked out by the seduction of the “primal scream” theory.
I am not saying that Dr Janov never helped anyone. I would be quite
certain that he did. But I cannot help but wonder if this had more to
do with his considerable personal powers than with the theoretical
value of his Primal Therapy.

As one learns to feel one’s own pain, one needs to learn be able to
bear it. One can proceed only by careful degrees. Perhaps this is part
of the reason why a teacher is necessary on the spiritual path, at
least in the beginning. My own view of people such as Van Gogh is that
they could not bear the force of their own impressions. To be able to
bear any influence, especially perhaps pain and suffering, being and
understanding are needed. There is no such thing as emotional
strength: the emotions do not have muscles of any description. If we
have being, then our emotions will not knock us over. But I cannot
believe that it is helpful to relive the pain and lie on the ground
screaming. The idea of being able to feel your pain is good, but the
idea of being able to feel your own presence is even better. As
Gurdjieff said in his last years, “by so much as one is conscious,
there is no more suffering.”

Lennon returned to some of these ideas later on in a song which was
never publicly released, and which I know as “Memory”. We come to that song next time, and continue this train of thought.

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com
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Joseph Azize has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book The Phoenician Solar Theology treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The second book, “Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria”, was jointly edited with Noel Weeks. It includes his article arguing that the Carthaginians did not practice child sacrifice.

The third book, George Mountford Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.The fourth book, edited and written with Peter El Khouri and Ed Finnane, is a new edition of Britts Civil Precedents. He recommends it to anyone planning to bring proceedings in an Australian court of law.

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Written by SOPHIA WELLBELOVED

December 3, 2009 at 11:44 am

ELTON JOHN: The Songs of Self-Knowledge (Part 1)

JOSEPH AZIZE PAGE

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

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Bernie Taupin and Elton John

“It is on your own self-knowledge and experience that the knowledge and experience of everything else depend.”So spoke the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing more than 600 years ago, in what is the greatest work of mysticism in the English tongue known to me (see ch 43 of Clifton Wolters’ translation). As I said in the first Elton John blog, it is through knowledge of this life and our selves that we come to knowledge of a higher life and, once more, our selves. But, of course, our experience of our selves on that other level is quite different.

And so it is that I return to Elton John, because I sense that sometimes something sublime comes from beyond and can be felt through the songs Of all their work, perhaps John and Taupin touch the sublime most often on these songs of self-knowledge, such as “Someone Saved my Life Tonight”, “We All Fall in Love Sometimes” and “The Sweetest Addiction”.

Other than John Lennon, I can think of no other artistes of their era like Elton John and Bernie Taupin for excelling in what I might call “songs of self-knowledge” or perhaps “songs of reflective biography “. Certainly, I do not know of anyone else in popular music who has developed such a sustained corpus of work over a period of 30 years. I think that Taupin’s work is marked by an impartiality and even fearlessness as much as Lennon’s was. After all, Taupin is writing lyrics for another person to set to music and perform, and not just anyone, but Elton John.

Meditating on the Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy album led me to a discovery which really should have been apparent before, but had somehow escaped me. And that is that although we exclusively think of Taupin as someone who writes the words, he is in a very real way, a musician. His instrument just happens to be his words, an instrument few can master, and his great achievement is that he developed his art to the lofty degree where his words sing on the page with an unheard melody. Incidentally, much as I respect Dylan’s achievements, I don’t hear that much self-knowledge in his songs, although there is certainly tremendous insight and his lyrics often have the musicality I find in Taupin’s. But in the end, Dylan seems to me to hide behind his presentation, while John and Taupin reveal, and so whatever self-understanding he has remains in obscurity. Only outside of popular music, for example with Gerard Hopkins, do I find even more self-knowledge and musicality combined than I do in Taupin.

However, we must come back to this fundamentally important question of the search for self-knowledge. If one has been touched by the search, then the questions “Who am I?” and “What am I?” always demand a response, although – and perhaps even because – they can never be answered once and for all. If we speak of self-knowledge, then because it is self-knowledge, we can take no one else’s word for it. Self-discovery is only possible because a higher part of us is impartial. When I see myself, the lower self becomes transparent to a higher part in myself, and that higher part operates under entirely different rules, and has different powers.

Even if I am alone in my room, yet all of my learning takes place within a socially-constructed world, and I am forever learning from and with others. It is not just that we can compare ourselves to others, find similarities and draw distinctions. Neither is it just that we can get good ideas, or follow other people’s methods. We can also, to an extent, recognize ourselves in others. This doesn’t mean seeing that the details of our loves are identical, although this can occur. More deeply, it means seeing the human condition beneath the accidental facts and biographical details; seeing that we all share in this common humanity, and that we make it what it is in all its inexhaustible variety.

The essential self may be approximately described in words, and we can even figure out some things about ourselves with our intellects, but it’s only discovered through feeling, and, of course, there are levels of feeling and hence of self-knowledge. But affirmation of the goodness of life is a feeling impulse which will bring impartiality. This entails seeing myself without undue self-appreciation or self-hatred. Full and complete impartiality, however, is a function of the essential self, the soul. The soul brings something trans-personal in self-knowledge, an awareness of a call, a memory of something always just forgotten.

When I speak of songs of self-knowledge I am not speaking of narcissism. “My Way” is narcissistic and self-congratulatory, but as we shall see, the music I’m discussing is not. It is not spiritual, either, and yet it isn’t divorced from the spirit. Perhaps the first striking feature of these “songs of self-knowledge” is their quantity: John and Taupin entered the field in a convincing way with 1975’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, and updated this tour de force on 2006’s The Captain and the Kid. These were albums completely devoted to reflection on their own history as artistes. In addition, there are many songs of this genre on The Fox, Made in England, Songs from the West Coast, and Peachtree Road. The theme clearly means a great deal to them, and has meant more as they grow older, having both more material and more leisure for reflection. To really understand what I am writing about, you will need to hear the music, beginning with Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, which for my money (and I’m not alone in this) is their greatest achievement, surpassing even the magnificent Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. In the discussion, I’ll be referring to the tracks as they were on the record, five tracks on each of its two sides. We shall see why a little later.

The first track, the title track, is a good example of Elton John’s originality: it sounds like no song you’ve ever heard before. Until the chorus, it has no almost melody, although it has a sound and a rhythm, and the effect of the song seems perhaps even stronger for all that. You know that this song was not produced in a hit factory, because small clusters of words are broken into islands of sense by a jagged phrasing and oddly placed emphasis: “Captain Fan-tastic … raised and regimented … hardly a hero … Just someone his mother might know.” This works, partly, I think, because he’s telling a story, and an achingly beautiful tune like that of “Your Song” might distract from the narrative, while the strength of the lyrics is quite sufficient to hold our attention and interest. “Raised and regimented”: it is hard to imagine that any three less assuming words could be found to say so much about what in a later song they would describe as a “repressed” youth.

Elton, of course, is Captain Fantastic, while Taupin is the Brown Dirt Cowboy, turning brown in his ‘saddle’ even as the precocious Captain inhabits the stimulating but artificial city. They are painted not quite as opposites, but as contrasts united by a common aspiration for the “honey the hive could be holding”. In a wonderful expression, their pursuit of their art takes them “from the end of the world to your town”. After all, wherever they are seems to them to be the end of the world, while wherever you are, and no matter how small a target, they are infallibly delivered to you through the electronic media. And yet, for them, their careers have been a ‘long and lonely climb’, which they also describe as walking on a wire and as ‘stepping in the ring’.

In an artistic touch of considerable finesse, these two characters, our hosts in this autobiography-for-two, are distinguished by their food. The Captain has cornflakes and tea with sugar: the Cowboy eats “sweet chocolate biscuits, and red rosy apples in summer”. Later in the song, when they are struggling to establish themselves in their chosen careers, they share the same food, “cheap easy meals”, which as Taupin wryly notes, “are hardly a home on the range”. I am fairly certain that readers will be able to point me to many examples of autobiography rock, hitherto unknown to me. And I’m quite sure that some of these will prove to be considerable achievements. But I’ll be very surprised if any of these use simple references to differences in diet with anything like the symbolic force that Taupin does.

There is a lot of history in these lines: one couplet juxtaposes the ‘City Slick Captain’ with the ‘still green and growing’ Cowboy. Then we’re told of “weak winged young sparrows that starve in the winter” and “broken young children on the wheels of the winners”. The Captain and the Kid must have seen a lot of callousness and even bastardry. The lyrics for a song called “Dogs in the Kitchen” were printed with the lyrics, although the song is not on the album, if it was ever recorded. The sentiments seem so raw that if Elton did them justice, the product may not have been a palatable release for the average record company. The very first line is: “All our innocence gave way to lust”. And that was the sweetener:

Poor boys fight to stay alive …
Uncage us, we’re restless, snarled the dogs in the kitchen.
Howling in the heatwave, riding all the bitchin’ ladies.
Who got the first bite in on the greasy bone?
… the vultures belch in their swivel chairs,
And the vampires all wear ties.

It is unnerving to think of writers being likened to greasy bones and quarrelled over by cannibalistic entrepreneurs. This gives us a gritty perspective on the title track, where Elton sings: “We’ve thrown in the towel too many times, our for the count when we’re down”. This is why I say that this is fundamentally a universe apart, and two dimensions deeper than Sinatra’s “regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again …”.

However, even the most powerful missiles need to be launched and guided, and it’s the music which delivers these words. The real magic, for me, is in the combination. To start with, the simplicity of the title track is like innocence made audible. Then, at about 1’ 46” when Elton begins to sing about the Brown Dirt Cowboy, the music picks up. Steady country and western strumming effortlessly evokes an air of ‘childhood at home’ feel, but becomes ‘rockier’ as the song proceeds. This musical development naturally bridges the twin worlds of town and country, the passage from youth to adolescence, the fall from fruit to fat, and the journey from the idyllic woods to wherever we are. The important connection, of course, is between John and Taupin: “hand in hand went music and the rhyme”. One of the odd things is that while Elton is the city-slicker and is significantly called ‘the Captain’, he was, in some ways more vulnerable and innocent than Taupin: one has the feeling that the Cowboy was canny enough for the two of them. This masterly track nicely sets the stage, and introduces its heroes to the challenging world at the same time as it introduces them to us.

The very next track is the knowing “Tower of Babel”. Its first sounds are as ominous and resonant as two tolls on an undertaker’s bell: “Snow – cement – “ and we are immediately submerged in a world of barely speakable cynicism:

Were the darlings on the sideline
Dreaming up such cherished lies
To whisper in your ears before you die?

As with the title track, Taupin is not saying that their early years were tough. He is saying that they were facing starvation, and even the prospect of death. There is not much here about knowing yourself, but knowledge is demonstrated. Too often, we lie to ourselves about the past: we paint it in pictures either too black or too white. In each case we’re really trying to project an image of ourselves (“I understand and forgive all”, or the opposite). But there is no honesty without fearlessness. If someone was a bastard, why not say so? Here, someone has learned a lesson and tells the truth, let the chips fall where they may. Had he said it in those words, it would have sounded indulgent. But Taupin just tells it as it was, so we can take it or leave it. Then we’re into the chorus:

It’s party time for the guys in the Tower of Babel
Sodom meet Gomorrah, Cain meet Abel. …
Watch them dig their graves,
‘Cos Jesus don’t save the guys in the Tower of Babel.

The Biblical terms add a surprising solemnity, and universalise the experience of these two young men. Taupin will open his bible again, for example, on “Just like Noah’s Ark”, from The Captain and the Kid. It’s funny how often non-believers quote the Bible and appeal to Jesus and salvation. It’s also an odd image because the point of the Tower is that it was never completed. The ‘Babel’ here is both the ‘Babylon’ of John’s Apocalypse, the city of the harlot and unspeakable sin, and the Tower which is cast down and has became a symbol of false pride and arrogance. And it also fits the skyscrapers where the captains of industry lurk as if it were designed for them. So, even if it’s a rather anomalous metaphor, it’s nonetheless evocative and multi-dimensional. The crudity of their money-chase is underscored by the fact that, as even more than with the title track, there is no tuneful melodic line : it is as if the omen-like intensity of the words breaks their symphonic chains. But that changes at the chorus “It’s party time for the guys in the Tower of Babel. Sodom meet Gomorrah! Cain, meet Abel!”

So “Babel” is one raw and fiery song. The significance of its first black statement, the stark single word ‘Snow’, is obvious. The second verse opens with the knell of two words ‘Junk – Angel’, and takes us down beneath the floorboards into the company of cockroaches, where the dealers in the basement are “filling your prescription for a brand new heart attack”.

On track three, the tone softens with the beguilingly musical: “Bitter Fingers”. It opens in the voice of an entertainer addressing the songwriters:

I’m going on the circuit, doing all the pubs,
And I really need a song, boys, to stir those workers up,
And get their wives to sing it with me …

It isn’t that the entertainer is insincere, he’s just selfish, insensitive and second-rate. He’s been deeply dyed in the industry. After two bouncing verses of this blarney, the gears crunch, and Elton snarls:

It’s hard to write a song with bitter fingers,
So much to prove, so few to tell you why.
Those old die-hards in Denmark Street start laughing
At the keyboard player’s hollow haunted eyes …
No more long days hocking hunks of garbage.
Bitter fingers never swung on swinging stars.

I had to cite those last two lines if not just for the alliteration. Although it is the first track on side two, I shall deal here with “Meal Ticket”. It covers something of the same ground as “Tower of Babel” and “Bitter Fingers”, but this time, it directly reveals what “Fingers” had only implied: that the songwriters could themselves be mercenary. I take it that, in the very first line, Elton is aggressively addressing music industry power brokers:

I can hound you if I need to,
Sip your brandy from a crystal shoe …
While the others climb reaching dizzy heights,
The world’s in front of me in black and white:
I’m on the bottom line, I’m on the bottom line.

… While the Diamond Jims
And the Kings Road pimps
Breathe heavy in their brand new clothes.

So here are both sides: the boys’ desperation, and the cynical, selfish parasitism which has driven them where they never thought to go. We’re now removed from the innocence of the title track by a margin that can be crossed but not measured:

And I gotta get a meal ticket.
To survive you need a meal ticket,
To stay alive you need a meal ticket.
Feel no pain, no pain; no regret, no regret.
When the line’s been signed you’re someone else.

I took this song out of turn because these last three songs, like “Dogs in the Kitchen”, deal directly with an important issue: how we relate to being abused. Here the abuse is bloodsucking by professionals in suits and ties, but in life we find countless other examples. The starting point is to see it for what it is. Of course we have been taught to love our enemies, but this does not mean to pretend that they are not your enemies or have not harmed you. One can aspire to say “Forgive them for they know not what they do”, although to be candid, one can know that but yet be incapable of feeling anything which corresponds to it. As the late George Adie said, that sentiment is the ultimate in impartiality. We are still learning to be impartial for short moments. The ultimate is not yet within grasp, though we must not give up on that account.

What I like about these three songs, indeed, what I respect, is that Taupin states his disgust in all its bare ugliness without excuse, apology or evasion. He does not indulge in hatred, he just paints what he saw and felt. It isn’t pretty, but it is arresting. It has, to my mind, something of the quality of some of Tennessee Williams’ work, which is noteworthy, because Taupin mentions him at least twice, on “Lies” from Made in England, and on “Old Sixty Seven” from The Captain and the Kid. Of course, Taupin was attracted to Williams’ work because of a pre-existing similarity of disposition, just as Lennon was. You could, perhaps, call it a thirst for the truth, accepting that someone may be hurt. And I have to add here that I just don’t believe people who urge ‘love’ as if it were as accessible to the heart as money to the hand. This is one area where Taupin has never, from what I can presently recall, slipped in syrup. Even on an early piece like “Border Song” on the Elton John album, he is aware that the love which ends enmities must be sweated and prayed for. Perhaps I shall come to that in a future article. For now, we have the powerful and almost transcendent close of side one: “Tell me when the Whistle Blows” and “Someone Saved my Life Tonight”.

“Whistle Blows” is a story of the country boy going back home for a visit: “And I still feel the need of your apron strings once in a while”. The London railway is seedy, and he himself feels like “a black sheep going home”. Yet, he’s drawn back, and wonders whether the “street kids (will) remember”, whether he can still play pool like he used to, and whether “this country kid (has) still got his soul”. I hear something big in the music, rather as if Elton John also related to it, although it’s really Bernie’s story. What I hear in it, and in its inspired string arrangement, is “moving on to the moment of truth”, if I can put it that way. Has he changed? Who is he now? How will others, his family and his peers receive him? What it comes down to, perhaps, is this: has he been true to himself?

Perhaps questioning yourself is always the first step to seeing yourself, and thus to self-knowledge. This song is Taupin’s record of questioning himself. Great as this song is, it’s greatest value perhaps, is to set the stage and open the curtain for what may be the strongest song this duo ever produced: “Someone Saved my Life Tonight”. On the record, this track closes side 1 with the closure of a red curtain at intermission; and these two tracks are balanced by the last two tracks on side 2, which reprise them in a different emotional key. If “Whistle Blows” is a story of going back home, “Someone” is the same story, but in tragic-triumphant tones, of returning home, to light from darkness. Just quickly, the loss of the two-side album has not only spelled the effective end of the art of record covers, but has robbed the artiste and their audience of the dramatic opportunity to close one side and open another. This is why the record is different from, and superior to the CD.

The piano and cymbals of “Someone Saved my Life Tonight” take us to a world far from that the black sheep waiting at the station, however near it may be in miles: “When I think of those East End lights, muggy nights, curtains drawn in the little room downstairs.”It is not innocent, and its stolid respectability is barely skin deep. The woman Elton almost married is hardly painted in flattering terms: “Prima donna, lord, you really should have been there; sitting like a princess perched in her electric chair”. He gets drunk so that he can’t hear her, and his friends are as legless as he is. We know that this is all true, and that to escape a marriage he felt he could not disavow, he tried to gas himself, but was saved by Long John Baldry. This is the song of the man who came through:

And someone saved my life tonight, sugar bear.
… You nearly had me roped and tied,
Altar bound, hypnotised.
Sweet freedom whispered in my ear,
You’re a butterfly, and butterflies are free to fly,
Fly away, high away … bye, bye!

The lyrics are almost stunning in places: “A slip noose hanging in my darkest dreams. … Just a pawn outplayed by a dominating queen. … Saved in time, thank God my music’s still alive.”

This last line is the key to the album, that music equals life. Yet, as we shall see, there’s more. There is an odd kind of contemplative interlude, where he says “I would have walked head on into the deep end of the river”, almost as if he is somewhere above his body, watching it move. The same disembodied calm possesses the line “They’re coming in the morning with a truck to take me home”, the line which formally links this to “Whistle Blows”. Then the music swells until it is would be too intense to bear but for the band’s masterly restraint: “Someone saved my life tonight, so save your strength and run the field you play alone”.

Bear in mind that this is the man whom Bernie Taupin calls ‘The Captain’. And after Taupin wrote him these lyrics, he set them to music of singular potency and sang them. Somewhere or other, I came across that when it was being recorded, Gus Dudgeon asked Elton to put more emotion into his voice, until Davey Johnstone told him to let up: “he’s singing about an attempted suicide”, or words to that effect. That the Captain should submit himself to the ordeal is significant. It had a life purpose, it was written and recorded for a purpose, for fulfilment, not for money.

This is one of those songs where I feel that although the spirit is never mentioned, yet the music bears within itself something of the sublime. In the first blog, I wrote: “I call the ‘sublime’ that precious, subtle feeling of myself as if on the cusp of touching the mystery of eternity. It is the life of what Gurdjieff called the “higher emotional centre”, and its music is, as it were, music delivered through the flesh, but heard by the ears of the soul. … For example, when I listen, with quiet attention, to Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” or “Funeral for a Friend”, I feel that there is something majestic swelling in and above the music, which calls me on and upwards.” And I’m not alone in that.

Now, as mentioned, side two opens with the visceral “Meal Ticket”, but from there, the mood of the record changes. Track two is the startlingly original “Better Off Dead”. Driven by the piano, Elton sounds almost derring-do. If a song were to be written for the Scarlet Pimpernel, this could be it. It’s early morning in the grimy city, people are being arrested as the fag end of the night plays itself out: there’s vandalism, and there’s trouble. And yet, here is life! As in “Someone Saved”, music and life are linked:

‘Cause the steam’s in the boiler, the coal’s in the fire!
If you ask how I am, then I’ll just say ‘inspired’!
If the thorn of the rose is the fire in your side,
Then you’re better off dead and you haven’t yet died.

Life is acknowledged, accepted and affirmed with its thorns and all. The means to affirmation is the music, or to be more precise, the feeling of self which comes through their music. This feeling comes through clearly and warmly on the next track: “Writing”:

Inspiration for navigation of our new found craft.
… Will the things we wrote today sound as good tomorrow?
Will we still be writing in approaching years?
… Don’t disturb us if you hear us trying
To instigate the structure of another line or two,
‘Cause writing’s lightin’ up,
And I like life enough to see it through.

I don’t think the music of this song is particularly wonderful, but it’s pleasant, and it allows one a nice breathing space between the precocity of “Better Off Dead” and the symphonic triumph of “We All Fall in Love Sometimes” and “Curtains”, which really form one sustained statement. Here, the love we all happen to fall for is their music. Now not everyone writes music, but music here is a symbol of realising one’s potential, and love for what we have made of ourselves.

This is, I think, the manifesto of the album, if it has one. If the music is alive (not prostituted to the highest bidder), if it is your music, and you are true to yourself, everything life sends you can be accepted. We have seen how the preceding songs have provided the material of this ‘manifesto’, and it all comes together now on “We All Fall in Love Sometimes” and “Curtains”

The song opens with some simple descending piano lines. It’s as if someone has walked into the room. Then Elton starts singing, describing the two of them, late at night on a subway station, tired and aching, but believing that “it’s all worth it, we all fall in love sometimes”. Accidentally or not, Elton’s accent falls equally on the three words “all – worth – it”. Exactly what it conveys, beyond the intuition that ‘it’ is something special, is hard to say; yet I feel meaning in it. Now comes the romance:

Full moon’s bright, starlight filled the evening,
We wrote it, and I played it,
Something’s happened,
It’s so strange this feeling.
Naive notions that were childish,
Simple tunes that tried to hide it.
When it comes, we all fall in love sometime.

The melody is simple, and has a subtle sway which comes more to the fore in the chorus: “Did we, didn’t we, should we, could we …”. The evocation of close-of-day fatigue married with the discovery of the wonders of their “newfound craft”, is as accomplished as it is – to my best knowledge – unique. In a funny way, such is the achievement of this song that there I have very little to say about it. To my ear, at least, these songs of self-knowledge are amongst the greatest songs of the last hundred years, and “We All Fall” is perhaps the jewel in the crown. It segues straight into “Curtains”, once more, a strikingly original song in melody, lyrics and format. Like the total track, it practically has no tunefulness, and yet, as chimes softly toll, its slowly paced incantation gives the lyrics an almost oracular status:

I used to know this old scarecrow,
He was my song, my joy and sorrow.
Cast alone between the furrows
Of a field no longer sown by anyone.

As with the previous song, there are no illusions that everything they wrote was brilliant. Yet, the old scarecrow is not disowned, and in one concise phrase we have a generous spectrum of feeling: “He was my song, my joy and sorrow”. The next words are given poignancy by the bells which have been unobtrusively sounding:

I held a dandelion that said the time had come,
To leave upon the wind, never to return,
When summer burned the earth again.
Cultivate the freshest flower
This garden ever grew.
In between these branches
I once wrote such childish words for you.

We have seen these motifs above, the country imagery, and the naivety of some of their earliest songs. But the themes are now drawn together and bring a coherent, almost convincing power, as Taupin refigures them. We have come now from summers in the saddle to summers which will never be repeated, from aspiration to achieving. Yes, the lyrics were naive:

But that’s okay, there’s treasure children always seek to find,
And just like us, you must have had A Once Upon A Time.

This is an important insight: we can punish ourselves for the mistakes of childhood and adolescence, but we were learning and, we can punish ourselves beyond any sane reason for our ignorance. This understanding is allowed its full weight by the evenly chanted spell which Elton John casts. Finally, there is a lengthy “outro” in which Elton and the vocalists compete in bursts of “o-o-o-o-o” and “lum-de-dum-de-day-do” while the drums rumble and the bells ring. No wonder Elton John’s output went into a slump after this. Where else could he go? If it is a law that every force has an equal and opposite reaction, then the law applies to output (which makes me think of how the Beatle’s greatest triumphs, Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt Pepper were followed by the mediocre Magical Mystery Tour, and the splendid John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine by the barely listenable Some Time in New York City).

Captains Fantastic is the most perfectly executed concept album I have ever heard, forming a satisfying thematically unified whole. I mean that it makes a better album because, being integrated, it leaves one with a sense of the whole which rounds out any uneven spots along the way. It’s as if the weak points are effaced by the strengths, because after the title track, no song is beginning from zero point. There is a building, an accumulation, and it’s all gathered and harvested in the almost spectacularly brilliant “We All Fall in Love Sometimes” and “Curtains”, two limbs of one musical statement.

More than I can recall in popular music, John and Taupin demonstrate the continuity between childhood and adulthood, acknowledge it, and understand that with the development there come also lawful changes. It is an album of metamorphosis. Although it’s never stated, there is something of the story of the Ugly Duckling here about Elton John: the nerd who grows up to reveal a soul of heroic steel.

The album is a statement of metamorphosis: the album cover, the work of Alan Aldridge and Harry Willcock, but conceived by Taupin, I believe, evokes a world of chimeras, unearthly combinations and familiar monstrosities. Once again, I have reason to mourn the passing of the album cover. Perhaps if CDs could be released within record sleeves? It is a manifesto of metamorphosis, because the message is that only if you are true to yourself and do not compromise on the music inside you (whatever form that music takes) can you realise your potential. This message is rather more explicitly developed on The Captain and the Kid, so I’m fortunate to have the advantage of hearing that music in my head as I consider this one.

While Captain Fantastic is about the lives of John and Taupin, it is also of almost universal relevance: it deals with ambition, love of life, sacrifice, great sadness, triumph, realism, creation, manipulation, excess, generosity of spirit, perseverance, and human existence. Ultimately, everyone can relate to its forceful artistic statement that life is worth living, despite the pain. And the statement is put all the more powerfully for not being put directly. If you let the music in, the enlightenment rises upon you, in all its splendour, and lives inside your feeling. Considering Captain Fantastic from that perspective, it’s clear why it is, at least in conception, superior to Yellow Brick Road.

But that’s not all. When I said that the message is that life is worth living, despite the pain, I think that there’s something else implied. And that is that you have to make it worth living. I would say that an aim is needed, and in Gurdjieff’s terms, this would be an aim to discover and develop your essential individuality. In Taupin’s terms, speaking about Elton and himself, it was the development of their musicianship. When he said “thank God my music’s still alive”, what was his highest gratitude for: himself or his muse? And yet, perhaps the two come down to the same thing.

Elton John and Bernie Taupin

====================================
Joseph Azize has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book The Phoenician Solar Theology treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The second book, “Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria”, was jointly edited with Noel Weeks. It includes his article arguing that the Carthaginians did not practice child sacrifice.

Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com

Written by SOPHIA WELLBELOVED

November 11, 2009 at 2:56 pm

Gurdjieff's teaching: for scholars and practitioners

Posts Tagged ‘Bernie Taupin’

Joseph Azize: on Elton John and Leon Russell’s ‘I Should Have Sent Roses’

John Lennon: Essence and Reality Part 15: “Mother”

ELTON JOHN: The Songs of Self-Knowledge (Part 1)

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Posts Tagged ‘Bernie Taupin’

Joseph Azize: on Elton John and Leon Russell’s ‘I Should Have Sent Roses’

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John Lennon: Essence and Reality Part 15: “Mother”

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ELTON JOHN: The Songs of Self-Knowledge (Part 1)

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