Patrick Lundborg experiences transcendence in Donovan’s psychedelic folk music for children

Sometimes it doesn’t take more than a few inspired phrases to create an otherworldly mood. Sometimes all it takes is eight words:

How sad
The farm lad
Deep in play

The image of the little farm boy is stark, evasive; its meaning refuses to stay fixed but keeps changing, like a psychedelic pattern. It is an image that appears internally, in the mind’s eye, rather than the external hallucination of a living carpet or dancing tree canopy.

With a sparseness that some might call Japanese, Donovan places a vision inside your head, then makes it psychedelic. With those eight words, at least three different emotions are evoked, pulling in different directions. As a listener I am made ready for sadness, then nostalgia, but what I finally receive is a contradictory picture of meditation and joy. The surreal ambivalence of the stanza rests upon the final word play, which becomes a pivot, a point of gravity. Replace play with grief, and the delicate balancing act collapses into sentimentality. Instead the lyric forms an endless riddle, a Moebius strip of questions involving the simple words sad, play, deep. Each word alters the emotional charge of the vision so profoundly that it adopts a state of perpetual change, ambiguously flowing back and forth between the shifting moods.

“Isle Of Islay” first appeared on the second disc of the 1967 double album A Gift From A Flower To A Garden. Released as a standalone LP under the title For Little Ones in the USA, the record was intended as a concept album for children. In spite of such humble origins, it turned out to be not only a near masterpiece (surpassed only by Sunshine Superman), but the birth of a new genre. Donovan had experimented with the marriage between acoustic folk music and psychedelic modalities on album tracks like the delightful “Legend Of A Girl Child Linda” and the visually evocative “Sand And Foam”, but with

For Little Ones he temporarily surrendered all rock ambitions to concentrate entirely on this wistful, surreal folk with an occasional Eastern touch.

During a 1967 meditation retreat in India, “Isle Of Islay” became an anthemic number among Donovan’s fellow hippies. His Indian guru recognised it as a “transcendental song”, while Donovan more modestly suggested that it might bring the listener “to the edge of transcendence”. Indeed it does. Each time I hear it, I feel as though time has ceased to exist.

“Isle Of Islay” contains only 60 words, and it is a wonder of concentrated craftsmanship. It opens with the island as seen from a seagull’s point of view, high in the sky, then shifts into the perception of a single grain of sand on the beach. The radical change of perspective is mirrored in the musical arrangement, accenting the tonal drop from the opening chords to the last ones, and enforcing this effect even more in the dramatic guitar figure between the verses. The seagulls are part of the ocean, but they are also part of Islay’s beach, where William Blake’s famous line “to see a world in a grain of sand” may invoke a view of Islay as its own world.

Further up the shore we see the farm lad in his complex, psychedelic-childlike state of mind – but Donovan does not linger here. In a manner reminiscent of the later Rilke, he sees no qualitative difference between the people on Islay, or the birds and the sheep, or the landscape itself. The isle is not a human metaphor, but something both more real and harder to grasp. We humans and our existential brooding are merely one stroke on a much wider canvas of experience. It seems almost impossible that Donovan, at the age of 21, could attain such a mature, holistic understanding.

With Zenlike economy, the second verse’s “sheepbell music” introduces animal life, a pastoral lifestyle, and a sound to augment the ocean surf and crying gulls. Donovan’s eyes (and mine and yours) fall upon a single sheep who strays towards the edge of the pasture to look out over the sea, and the singer expresses, in the most gentle way, the sense of not being free and not belonging: “The tide left me here.”

But in the third and final verse, the longing for the ocean is replaced by the comfort of the island. The shore and the pasture are left behind as we enter the forest where songbirds succeed the seagulls, while the sky’s freedom of space gives way for the joy of aesthetic creation. This music is not the ringing bells of the domesticated sheep, but spontaneous song affirming the habitat of an untouched woodland, along with words that imply a homestead: “blessed” and “neat”. Donovan’s lyrics reflect a central theme of the psychedelic experience: the enjoyment of everyday life (on Islay) while awaiting a return to higher transcendence (the ocean).

The song closes with an observation that puts the listener firmly on Islay rather than in some symbolic abstraction, and this is the peat that has been cut up into thousands of bricks to dry and later be collected. This is a late phase in the pastoral biosphere; dead moss found useful by humans after nature has discarded it. When Donovan sings of the cut peat, he recalls the seeds at the beginning of the growth cycle, seeds which in turn recall the grains and pebbles on Islay’s beach.

But the mystery of the farm boy and his inscrutable brooding – “sad… deep in play” – still remains. Donovan’s vocal performance, precise in its otherworldly melancholy, presents an ambiguity much like the image of the boy, highlighting the stroke of sadness. Is the farm lad Donovan himself, deep in play with his attempt to capture the richness of Islay, yet sad because he can never fully succeed? Or is the sadness always there, before the beginning and after the end, and the deep play out of which Donovan’s music arises his way to escape it? If Donovan did not fully mirror the transcendence of Islay, then my attempt to understand the epiphany his timeless song brings will also fail.

 Patrick Lundborg is a Swedish writer whose books include The Age Of Madness and The Acid Archives. His latest book, Psychedelia – An Ancient Culture, A Modern Way Of Life, is published by Lysergia

98 | The Wire (April 2013) | Epiphanies

Glenn Jones on music of John Fahey that really expanded his mind

As a teenager, US guitarist Glenn Jones saw Hendrix, Beefheart and The Stooges live, and was spat on by Janis Joplin, but it was the music of John Fahey that really expanded his mind

Glenn Jones with John Fahey on the former’s key fob from the Kowlon tiki bar, 1989

After discovering Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love in 1967 (described as “a guided tour of Hieronymous Bosch’s Hell” in the weekly supermarket supplement that came in our local newspaper), I began hounding my father for a guitar. I was 14.

Consider that just a few weeks earlier I’d brought home Herman’s Hermits – Their Greatest Hits, and you have some idea how quickly things were changing for me, how many doors were opening and how big the world suddenly seemed. A year later I was taking in Big Brother & The Holding Company from a front row seat at a movie theatre in Jersey City, New Jersey on a rainy Tuesday night, and gloried in Janis Joplin’s spittle spattering my face.

I saw Hendrix play for nearly three hours at what is reckoned to be one of the best concerts he ever gave: the second show with Band Of Gypsys on New Year’s Day 1970 at the Fillmore East. Just a few weeks later at Ungano’s in New York City, Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band blew my little mind – the group was more aggressive, more blindingly intense than any I’ve ever heard, before or since. By the early 70s I was writing letters to Sun Ra and Harry Partch. In 1973 I saw The Stooges at Max’s Kansas City on the second date of the Raw Power tour, and a few months later attended the reopening of the Kitchen at its new location at Broome and Wooster Streets in New York, which was celebrated with two nights of the music of John Cage, with both the composer and Merce Cunningham in attendance. Musical epiphanies were not only possible then, they were practically unavoidable.

I first heard the music of John Fahey in my Life Drawing class at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond in 1971, where I was a first year Fine Arts student. I made a mental note of the name, and on spring break went nosing through the John Fahey bin at Sam Goody’s in Paramus, New Jersey, one of the record stores that had sustained me through my high school years. After poring over the five or six Fahey albums they had in stock, I bought The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party And Other Excursions. I suspect my choice had something to do with the cover. It gave off that whiff of obscure inscrutability that had so drawn me to ESP records by The Godz, James Zitro and The Holy Modal Rounders, records that looked as otherworldly as they sounded.

I didn’t know it at the time, but The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party was Fahey’s most experimental album to date. The recordings, made between 1962 and 65, find John toying with knotty dissonance (“Guitar Excursion Into The Unknown”), backwards tapes (“Knotts Berry Farm Molly”) and open tunings (the title track is in open G minor). Also included were recordings of Fahey’s guitar accompanied by flute (“900 Miles”), veena (“Sail Away Ladies”) and church organ (“Will The Circle Be Unbroken”). But it is the 19 minute title track that is the album’s outstanding feature. A kind of musical stream of consciousness made up of 11 discrete parts separately recorded and then cobbled together (with all the seams still showing), it unfolds very slowly, as so many of Fahey’s works do, its heavily reverbed opening chords giving way to syncopated picking. The ascending/descending pattern that begins after 38 seconds still gives me goosebumps, as does the section played with a slide beginning at 10'25".

What was Fahey trying to convey with this piece? Resignation? Triumph? Fear? At the time, Fahey said (tongue in cheek?) that it that expressed “...futility, a hopelessness and general existential despair complicated by ontological absurdity.” In the 90s, when Fahey was routinely trashing his earlier works, he called it “a histrionic, disorganised outpouring of blather”. Whatever; here commenced my mania for the music of John Fahey.

What didn’t I get from John? From him, I discovered open tunings. I began playing with my thumb and two fingers instead of with a pick. I began trying to syncopate the way he did. I fell in love with the prewar blues, gospel and hillbilly recordings that had so influenced him. More importantly, my preconceptions about what was required to play music were shattered. After hearing Fahey, I understood that all you needed was the will to play: you didn’t have to be in a group; you didn’t need lots of expensive equipment; you didn’t need to write lyrics or sing; and you didn’t need formal musical training. One person with an instrument could tell stories.

I finally met John in 1978. We became friends, writing to each other and talking over the phone. He played Boston once or twice a year and stayed with me whenever he was in town.

In 1989, I formed Cul De Sac. We covered John’s “The Portland Cement Factory At Monolith, California” on ECIM, our debut album. I vividly recall playing our version of the song for John (with much trepidation) in my car, in the middle of a rain storm in the parking lot of the Kowloon, a tiki bar-cum-restaurant-cum-comedy club in Saugus, Massachusetts. As the windows grew foggier, Fahey made me play the track again and again.

And, in the way things happen, this led to Cul De Sac’s 1996 collaboration with John, The Epiphany Of Glenn Jones, an album Fahey titled and which I’ve written about at length elsewhere.

Today, more than four decades after that trip to Sam Goody’s, I am one person with an instrument trying to tell stories. John’s music still makes me feel like no one else’s. There are things about it I still don’t understand. I still puzzle at some of what he came up with, and at some of the choices he made. But after The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party nothing was ever the same.  Glenn Jones’s My Garden State is released this month on Thrill Jockey

98 | The Wire (May 2013) | Epiphanies

Nancy Elizabeth - Simon Says Dance

Nancy Elizabeth - Simon Says Dance (single version)
Original version can be found on Dancing (2013)

http://nancyelizabeth.co.uk
http://theleaflabel.com/nancyelizabeth
http://twitter.com/nancynancybeep
http://facebook.com/nancybeep

Produced by BLOC+BLUR Creative Studio
http//blocandblur.com
http://BLOCandBLUR

Kimya Dawson - Simple Folk Radio Session

Kimya Dawson - Simple Folk Radio Session

Kimya Dawson In session for http://www.simplefolkradio.com/ and http://www.galapagospresents.com/

The Tallest Man on Earth - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

The Tallest Man on Earth performs live in the KEXP studio. Recorded on September 9, 2012.

Songs:
Wind and Walls
Lost My Shape (David Bazan cover)
1904
Leading Me Now

Host: Stevie Zoom
Audio Engineer: Julian Martlew
Cameras: Jim Beckmann, Scott Holpainen & Jenna Pool
Editing: Jim Beckmann

thumbnail photo by Dave Lichterman

http://www.kexp.org/
http://www.thetallestmanonearth.com/

The Lumineers - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

The Lumineers perform live in the KEXP studio. Recorded April 2, 2012.

Songs:
Flowers in Your Hair
Ho Hey
Dead Sea
Stubborn Love

http://www.kexp.org/
http://thelumineers.com/

The Shins - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

James Mercer of The Shins performs live in the KEXP studio. Recorded 2/10/2012.

Songs:
Australia
September
Simple Song
It's Only Life

http://www.kexp.org/
http://www.theshins.com/