Summer Pledge/Inevitable Girl

Since today I am going to be telling you about a couple of songs that I recorded eight years ago, I thought we should begin with a brief contemplation on the act of memory and its attendant failings. Do you remember (there we go, already) the bit in the preceding ‘chapter’ where I alluded to Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption? Come on, you can do better than that. You know, it was a nice little metaphor about my process here, with each of these installments likened to the daily deposit of his nibbled cell wall that Robbins secretes into the dust of the rec yard? No? OK, I’ll come clean. I know you don’t remember. And I know why. (And yeah, those inverted commas up there shouldn’t be around chapter, they should be around ‘preceding’). I will confess, I was having a cigarette out there in the ‘execution courtyard’ (see notes on the Borges story ‘The Secret Miracle’ later, much later) at around 4.30 yesterday afternoon, midway through my Shawshank paragraph, when I was stricken by a terrible sense that something of great importance was eluding me: a nagging Jack Torrance ‘the boiler’ moment, if we leave Kubrick’s masterpiece and return to the King novel from whence it came. (A brief note on smoking and writing: I am well aware that this is not a novel, and that there are plenty of non-smoking novelists out there - often the very ones who are still alive - but it is simply impossible to imagine Amis’s Money, or London Fields being written without frequent lashings of fire and ash and the contemplative cloud. It simply could not be done. Go on, YOU try it.) I still couldn’t remember, nor was I sure anymore why I had fallen down this Shawshank rabbit hole, but I went back inside and finished the piece, which, if you recall (you don’t), dealt with time running backwards. As so often happens, I woke up the next day, this morning, and it all came back. The prison exercise yard hadn’t been some random digression: it had been the initial impulse for the entire piece, and was going to cleverly illustrate my decision to write about the last three decades worth of my musical releases in reverse order, with the punchline, the twist, being that Andy was gradually subtracting from a pile of rubble in the yard to rebuild the wall of his cell. I think I ended up writing something like that anyway, but they were the scratchings of a headless rooster who had missed, or forgotten, the point. This image then of course reminded me of Time’s Arrow and Slaughterhouse Five, then by chance I happened to see a person walking backwards on the beach … and by the time I had finished writing about all that, I had forgotten why I started.

I am not quite sure why The Shining takes up so much room in my memory banks that could surely be deployed to more useful ends. It might have something to do with the estranged American daughter turning up as a ten year old at our place in Hamilton, with mom, and informing me that she was a ‘confirmed ghost story and horror film addict’, which was probably rubbish. Anyway, like any good dad would, I sat her down for a viewing of The Shining, no doubt doing irreparable damage (although I went back to see her in Michigan in 2013 and we saw The Conjuring at the theatre in Grand Rapids, which scared the shit out of me, but she seemed to be fine. So maybe no harm done). Second daughter, five years her junior, clearly intuited that the film was some talismanic vehicle for father/daughter relationships and to this day, in her twenty-first year, we still mutter to each other as I ferry her here and there in my trusty Iago about what should be done with Danny and whether or not I have always been the caretaker. Mount Hood and Timberline Lodge, the location for The Overlook’s exteriors, are just an hour east of Portland, where American daughter now lives. I sometimes wonder if she is the girl in the closing track of Orders from the House, ‘Dolls of the Valley’, who is having her suitcase loaded into a van to be spirited away to god knows where. Maybe she is going up to Timberline Lodge. But she wouldn’t have any money, so it is unlikely. It is likely a worse outcome. Something about the duality of the fictional hotel in Colorado and the actual, going concern in Portland also fascinates me, although of course it shouldn’t - it is hardly some rare secret I have stumbled across: the first image you see in the Gifts and Souvenirs section of the Timberline Lodge website is Jack Nicholson doing his ‘Here’s Johnny!’ bit through the splintered door. But there is something about the apprehension of a perceived split in reality, something that is but is not, and, especially, the idea that the usually dependable visual image might not be an accurate representation of how things really are that confers a certain smug pride on the beholder. It is the same when Iago lets you in on the game with his ‘I am not what I am’ disclosure. You feel a bit clever to be in the know, even though you are really not - because he has just TOLD you, and everyone else within earshot as well. It has taken me an incredibly long time to realise that I am not special, but I think I am finally beginning to make some progress.

In fact, if you throw an axe just about anywhere you are bound to hit some Shining revisionist or interpretative dancer. Even my one time favourite band, Husker Du (which in keeping with today’s entry means ‘do you remember?’ in Danish) had a go with their B side to ‘Don’t Want to Know if You Are Lonely’, ‘All Work and No Play’. Yep, you guessed it, this is a meditation on the contents of Jack’s oeuvre up there at The Overlook and, at 8 minutes and 24 seconds of ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’, is some of the hardest time you will ever do in stereo. Wendy’s discovery being a supremely rendered epiphany of insanity in the film, the song on the other hand is compelling proof that sometimes lived experience is not what you want; sometimes the indicative, the summarised, the well edited version is the way to go. If Kubrick had taken Bob’s approach, we would have had a lingering close up on each and every one of the 500 pages in the ream Shelley Duvall mercifully flicks us through. Speaking of the other hotel that I keep coming back to, did I ever tell you I saw the Huskers’ drummer, Grant Hart, play at Chicks, back when it was a venue, before it became the recording studio? You can’t remember, can you. Well I did - see him, not tell you. He was dead a year later from liver cancer, and looked a very sick and grumpy dude that night. ‘Come on hon, don’t be grouchy,’ as Wendy says. I’m not…grouchy. I’m just dying. He had picked up a backing band in Tauranga, of all places, for the New Zealand tour and he would snarl sarcastically at them between songs should they make any (imperceptible) mistakes: ‘Come on GUYS, I mean it’s not like these songs MEAN anything to me…’ Recording the last six albums in that same room, it was nice to know he had been there. Bob is coming to Christchurch in November, but I don’t think I will go - a lot has and hasn’t happened since I first handled a copy of Zen Arcade at the Dunedin Public Library as a teenager and thought, before I had even heard it, that it was the most enticing object I had ever held.

Something that has happened is the Shining, I mean the internet, that lets us send our thoughts to anyone all over the world whenever we want - hardly the ‘rare gift’ that Grady informs Jack his son is in possession of in that incredibly red bathroom. I might as well step outside and scream at the sky, Lear style, for a while as pursue this line of thought, nor do I wish to appear an ungrateful aquarium creature, bitching about the water quality of its world. The echoing halls of my bandcamp pages do occasionally register the infrequent footfall of a lost ghost, who registers their fleeting presence as a tiny ‘stat’: welcome, and thank you. From my modestly capable mid-range phone, I can send tracks to an outfit called Submithub with the promise of, at best, the glittering prize of being dropped into the penstocks of some unread blog and, at worst, some honest and immediate ‘feedback’ from a ‘reviewer’. My favourite experience in this regard was the savaging that the Orders track ‘Letter to Youth’ received for its line ‘plenty more tits and ass, going on their way without you’. The song tracks the final hours of Mad Men’s Lane Pryce, who sadly couldn’t even asphyxiate himself - ‘the jaguar wouldn’t start’. He gets there in the end. Previously, Don had paid for some girls to come around in an effort to cheer Lane up - which he clearly very much needed. To my mind, the end of the line gives a certain license to its beginning, but the learned online musicologists of Submithub did not see it that way. For a moment there, I thought I might even be the subject of a petition to cancel: but cancel WHAT? Oh, and speaking of paying for it, you do that with Submithub too.

I don’t seem to be making much progress with Summer Pledge and Inevitable Girl. To be honest, I couldn’t remember what Inevitable Girl was called, let alone how it went, before I looked it up on bandcamp. The hall was empty, so I took my time and even debated getting the floor polisher out. Summer Pledge has a cool guitar solo which was my attempt at something like Shoplifters of the World. Both tracks feature excellent vocals from a singer whose name (surprise, surprise) I cannot recall. To be fair, Brendon (the engineer) subpoenaed her fairly spontaneously, possibly because by 2015 he had already spent many a fraught evening in the sole company of my isolated vocal tracks. So thank you, stranger. At least I met her: the Acoustic Guitarist, whom YOU shall meet, was in the habit of getting people in to play on the Charcoal Burners record that I not only did not know, but to this day have never laid eyes on. When I hear someone noodling away in a faintly reminiscent fashion in the music stores of the town, I am often tempted to go and ask them if they have ever played on one of my records. At this rate, I won’t have to turn up myself, or even write any songs. It’s OK, AI can do it anyway. Oh yeah, I think Summer Pledge is a little bit about joining a cult, and also about a girl in my street when I was a child who I might have been in love with but realised it was never going to happen. She died when she was in her thirties.