Miscellaneous - October 2009

  by Lisa Torem

published: 24 / 9 / 2009

intro

In 'Rock Salt Row', Lisa Torem debates each month with another writer about a different issue in rock. In the latest installment, she chats with John Clarkson about the effect of dreams as an inspiration on songwriters and musicians

Two Writers Season One Historic Rock Moment LISA 'All We Have To Do is Dream, Dream, Dream’ Many Roy Orbison songs address dreaming or are presented in a dreamlike, ethereal fashion. Orbison claimed that 'In Dreams' presented itself to him in an actual dream as did many of his other songs. He was half asleep when he imagined it, and upon awakening the next morning he completed the song in less than thirty minutes. The song, itself, echoes the sleep process. It starts out simply, like a lullaby, with simple acoustic guitar. Orbison half-speaks and half-sings the lyric, "a candy-colored clown they call the sandman." He then sings about dreams of his lover as drums begin to add richer components such as rhythm. Piano and backup vocals follow and build-up the texture and intensity. Orbison’s voice rises – he wakes to find his lover gone. He sings, "it’s too bad that all these things/can only happen in my dreams" then concludes with, "only in dreams, in beautiful dreams." This 2 minute, 48 second song ascends though seven movements – never repeating a section twice. Rolling Stone listed ‘In Dreams’ in their ‘500 Greatest Songs of All Time’ in 2004 in which it came in at # 312. In 1963 it was released as a single on Monument Records. Here Orbison flaunts a two-octave range – unprecedented in the field of rock ‘n’roll. Moving ahead, David Lynch used ’In Dreams’ in his dark thriller,‘Blue Velvet’ The usage was, however, never authorized by Orbison and it was used in an overtly unorthodox manner. In the film, a psychopath demands that the song be played over and over again. In addition, it is also lip-synched by another character who is then beaten up by the protagonist. Ironically, although Orbison probably never would have approved the song being showcased in this manner, it eventually achieved cult status which helped boost Orbison’s career. Author Ellis Amburn said that what he gleaned from the song was, “dreaming is preferable to waking and power and control are the real themes of the song instead of love, longing and loss.” Carl Jung believed dreams were an important portal to the undiscovered parts of self and to that end he analyzed dream symbols in detail. This analysis involved a stage called, “active imagination” in which a dreamer evokes a character from the dream and engages in a conversation. In rock, too, dreaming is a recurring theme. Sometimes the dream is in response to a seemingly perfect geographical location. The group, the Mamas and The Papas’ sang these lyrics from ‘California Dreamin’ "All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey/I went for a walk on a winter’s day/I’d be safe and warm if I was in L.A./California dreamin’ on such a winter’s day." Other times a dream is simply something to aspire to: Aerosmith sings, "Sing for me, sing for the year/sing for the laughter, sing for the fear/sing with me, if it’s just for today/dream on, dream on, dream until your dream comes true." Sometimes the lyrics are less important than the impact of the music. The Lennon-McCartney tune, ‘A Day In The Life’ begins as a cacaphony of orchestral sounds and distortions after the line, “Somebody spoke and I went into a dream” which set a precedent for rock music in terms of fuelling the imagination with dream state imagery. And in Lennon’s ballad, ‘Julia’ in which he immortalizes and dreams about an unfinished relationship with his mother - sadly cut short by a car accident when he was an adolescent - he poignantly states, "Half of what I say is meaningless/but I say it just to reach you, Julia…" Given the wide breadth of these circumstances in which dreams play a pivotal role, how have these crack-dreams and rock-dreams impacted our lives? Does a dream allow you to revisit an episode of unrequited love and repair the wound? Does it enable you to fully imagine a romance that could exist? Is there a song that has shattered your dreams? Is a dream – as presented in a rock format - a healthy phenomenon or does it keep us from fostering further emotional development? Is there a song which contains one of Jung’s universal archetypes? Would any of these archetypes help you analyze your sub-conscious thoughts? Is the stuff that dreams are made of worth the hype? JOHN In an attempt to try and answer your questions, Lisa, I thought that I would start by asking one of my own. What do you think is the defining or ultimate aim of the song writer? You’re a songwriter and are probably better equipped to answer this than I am, but for me the role of the songwriter (having listened to a lot of records, some would say too many records), seems to be to take something that is highly personal and then attempt to open it out enough for other people to put their own interpretation and slant on it, in other words to attempt to make it more universal. If you look at most of the classic pop and rock songs in history, they have nearly all done this. Take three radically different examples, the first three that come into my head, Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ and the Sex Pistols' ‘God Save The Queen.’ They were all, of course, written out of deeply heartfelt and personal feeling. Elvis, with one of the first really great rock songs and the only song that he ever had a songwriting credit on, was singing about being dumped. In his depiction, however, of all the loneliness and alienation and bruised hurt and resentment that comes with it, he captured that feeling of agony of being jilted with far more pinpoint accuracy and universal truth than most songwriters and musicians have been able to muster in the fifty odd years since its release. Marvin Gaye was singing in particular about the appalling situation of many of his friends in the black ghettoes in Washington in the late sixties and early seventies, but again his song went beyond that and became an anthem for the disposed everywhere, as did 77's ‘God Save The Queen.’ In part inspired by John Lydon’s upbringing in the then impoverished Irish community of Finsbury Park around the old Arsenal stadium in North London, his rant about Britain’s peculiar social order became a rant not just against the monarchy but about injustice everywhere. It is why perhaps so many Americans as well as Brits once they had heard it were as inspired by it and the Pistols into forming punk bands in the late 70s. The problem with dreams is that because they are so personal they remain just that, personal and so surreal that they are of relevance and importance to the dreamer alone. From that, how do you write a pop song about a dream? And one that is not only going to be of interest to Yes and Emerson Lake and Palmer fans, fourteen year olds hooked on ‘Dungeon and Dragons’ or that small minority of people who really did live through the sixties and can’t remember it? Robert Fisher from the Willard Grant Conspiracy, who comes from a Baptist upbringing, has been introducing one of his songs, ‘Lady of the Snowline’ some nights on his latest European tour, by explaining that its initial inspiration came from a dream about his death. In the dream he imagined that he found himself at the Gates of Heaven, where St. Peter explained to Robert that he was going to start to become invisible, and if he was going to get through to the other side he had to apologise to everyone that he had ever wronged on Earth before he disappeared entirely. As Robert started to run around saying sorry to all the people that he had sinned against, he found himself part of a bizaare game show. It makes for a great and very funny on-stage story, but for a less good song and Robert, whom a lot of the power of his songs comes from their universality, seems to know that. As he is quick also to point out when introducing ‘Lady of the Snowline’, the first line of the song is about that. The rest is about “something else”, the memory of a lost lover sparked by the narrator’s return to a place where once they were together. LADY OF THE SNOWLINE by Robert Fisher Before I fade thin And cast a shadow no more Before the dark hour I’ll pass here once more Take a walk in the sun With the breeze in your hair And remember the time I walked with you there… That seems to me to capture the paradox of the situation perfectly. The only way I think you can really capture dreams and their strangeness in song is by having one foot at least in reality, and it is interesting to me that two of the songs that you mention do exactly that. Despite the surreality that you describe above, ‘A Day in the Life’ (incidentally probably my favourite song on my favorite Beatles album), in the verse before the line in which Lennon sings, “Somebody spoke and I went into a dream”, is as much about mundanity, the mundanity of getting up and nearly missing the bus for work ("Woke up, got out of bed/Dragged a comb across my head/Found my way downstairs and drank a cup/And looking up,I noticed I was late/Found my coat and grabbed my hat/Made the bus in seconds flat"). The whole point of ‘In Dreams’ as well is that Roy Orbison doesn’t get the girl at the end. For all it’s strangeness, its several movements and changes, and of course David Lynch and 'Blue Velvet', my interpretation of this song is that the Big O wakes up at the end and finds that the girl hasn’t just got away. She’s never been there in the first place. It’s just a fantasy (“In dreams I walk with you/in dreams I talk to you/In dreams you’re mine/all of the time we’re together/in dreams, in dreams/But just before the dawn/I awake and find you gone.”) Things don’t get any more real than that. No wonder it was such a hit when it came out in ’63. It wouldn’t have just been girls, who preferred sensitive boys to jocks, who bought that record. It was and is an anthem to the geeks and unsure guys, the ones too shy to ask out the girl of their dreams, everywhere. LISA Songwriting is deeply personal and very gratifying when lyrics or a melody is acknowledged universally. For me, I don’t have the patience to sit down and write the sequel to ‘War and Peace,’ or even a trashy romance novel. But the constraints of. a three- minute song allows freedom of expression and a built-in time line. That said, however, I do not wish to minimize the craft of songwriting. Achieving that amazing blend of communicative lyrics, a contagious hook, a memorable, fresh melody – that’s immense. Some writers will say, “I wrote it and I really don’t care what anyone thinks.” While it’s true, we may write something that’s esoteric, creating a song from a finite group of notes (non-Western music offering up a more generous palate than that, of course) and finding that this songs moves another person is the ultimate joy. Otherwise, why not bury your feelings in your journal? ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ is a fantastic song – one which should be buried underground in an American time capsule - to unveil to our great-grandchildren someday - quick-fire lyrics and a universal theme coupled with simple, but raw guitar. I stood on that iconic X at Sun Studios in Memphis where Presley recorded many of his early hits fulfilling one of my own dreams. ‘What’s Going On’ should also be buried in that same plot of land as it definitively defined that era’s angst. ‘God Save The Queen?’ Sorry, John, I’ll allow that gem to pickle in your personal kettle of fish. I‘ll be a good Yank and take three hefty Giant steps back on that one… But, let’s get back to that image of having one foot grounded in reality. As much as I’m salivating - awaiting a meaty row - I like that image. True, dreaming’s superfluous if we have nothing hodge-podge with which to compare it. Also, as I do more research, I find more and more musicians robbing their nocturnal sub-consciousness – Robin Hood-winking in the dead of night, gleaning songs from their dream states, sharing them with the conscious. It’s almost eerie – the robbing of one’s self at its most vulnerable state and then surveying the remains in the glaring light of day. A New York vocalist I interviewed months ago had a song come to her in a dream – in strict Haiku form. A harmonica player I know revealed that he woke up remembering a catchy harp riff. I dreamed once of this exquisite European piano museum which contained mother-of-pearl engraved harpsichords. So, yes, dreams are personal. I don’t play the saxophone and have never awakened recalling a great Coltrane solo. Jim Peterik (Survivor, Ides of March, Pride of Lions) wrote a song ‘The Roaring of Dreams’ which examines a couple drenched in their daily doldrums who only find solace in their dreams. Peterik had an eye to the future when writing this album – a dream-filled future. Peterik also wrote ‘Heaven on Earth’ which came to him from a dream about his brother-in-law Andy who had died of cancer. The words in this dream were, “Jimmy you don’t have to wait until you’re six feet under/you can have Heaven on Earth.” In this dream, Peterik heard the melody in his head, and saw Andy’s face. The chorus, ‘rise up to the thunder/I’m not gonna wait until I’m six feet under” came to mean, to Peterik,’ live each day.” Along with Joe Thomas and Post Beach Boy Brian Wilson, Peterik wrote this song for Wilson’s young daughter called ‘Dream Angel’ which appeared in the album, ‘Imagination.’ Peterik has stated that working with Wilson was also a realization of one of his own dreams. DREAM ANGEL (Brian Wilson/Joe Thomas/Jim Peterik) Holding you as you sleep, I get this feeling of peace I know that you’re going to be allright ‘cause heaven is in my arms tonight. And I know that someday girl you’ll be the one to change the world Believing and seeing all your wishes come true. So dream angel through the night, you can fly forever, never wondering why Dream angel in my arms, with just one smile you can take my heart away. And someday when I am gone you’ll have the strength to carry on… This dream of imparting wisdom, serenity and best wishes to posterity is a universal theme. So, I believe some of these themes and lyrics exemplify your formula, John, that of having one body part grounded in reality and one off in REM state. Oh, and in response to your “geek” reference - those shy guys often do get the dream girls – they all grow up and see what really matters – ‘God Save The Queen’ on that one. JOHN It seems that we are both subscribing to the ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ school of songwriting here. I don’t know if you have ever seen that film by the Spanish director Guillermo del Toro, Lisa, but it did good business over here in Britain, ending up playing for weeks on end in the multiplexes which normally don’t show foreign languages film. It deserved to. It is a really good film and it was great to see something which would normally be confined to art houses have such a wide appeal. It is set at the time of the Spanish Civil War and is about a girl who moves from the city to the country when her mother remarries. In order to escape her pretty grim reality – her abusive stepfather and the general unpleasantness of the time – she keeps disappearing into an imaginary world of outlandish creatures and demons. The fantasy/dream sequences in the film probably last barely twenty minutes in a two hour film, but it was what you remember the most afterwards. They only work though because they are such a contrast to the girl’s reality. It is something that del Toro has got right, but so many film directors have forgotten, who rely increasingly on special effect after effect with very little to contrast it. While different and not an action director, David Lynch, not really with ‘Blue Velvet’ which is about the darkness beneath the surface, but in his more recent films could be thrown into that category, which are surreal and odd with nothing to counterbalance it. You need both black and white, lows ever to feel highs, and in song writing humdrum and often bleak reality in order to be able to really dream. LISA I’ve seen ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ and feel it’s more of a nightmare visually. Nevertheless, I see your point. Perhaps that’s why ‘MacArthur Park’, more than seven minutes long and performed by Richard Harris, more a classical actor than popular singer, was such a hit in the 70s. It precisely combined those aforementioned characteristics. Dreamy imagery - "MacArthur Park is melting in the dark/all the sweet green icing flowing down/someone left the cake out in the rain/I don’t think that I could take it/cause it took so long to bake it and I’ll never have that recipe again"- confronts a tedious task. Yesterday I left some fresh produce outside of the refrigerator after a tiring day. Yes, I had to dispose of these perishables the next morning. I didn’t, however, dream about the grocery money or the produce, nor did I awaken suddenly, race to the piano and sing a rousing cathartic chorus. Instead, I remained steadfastly transfixed in dull reality. But, there’s still tonight…