Got the new issue of Plan B in the mail today. There was a very sweet piece by Everett about the Death Of Tangents,
under a photo of the old Geek Lair in Herschell Road. The writing on
the wall was from a period when I was scrawling ‘place memory here’ on
pretty much everything. See, I always was obsessed with the idea of
objects and places being receptacles for memory. Some people have
suggested that it’s a symbolic notion, but I do mean it much more
literally than that. I mean it as a physical and emotional thing – the
pouring of energy into place and object. It all starts to sound very
dubious, and I’m afraid I will sound like a hippy, or some Harry Potter
fanatic thinking about Horcruxes or whatever, but meh… I’ve always seen
it as an emotional act; a way of allowing the burden of the moments out
into the world, because if they are all keep inside they just eat you
up and die.
Anyway, it was nice to feel recognised in print, like some physical proof that it all existed and that people cared.
Reading the rest of Plan B though felt strange. I didn’t recognise many of the groups being written about, and the words did not make me want to investigate further. That’s a shame, but it’s probably just my age at work. You wake up one day and the world just doesn’t seem to make the same kind of sense anymore. People are doing things differently all of a sudden. It’s almost surreal. I did like Emily Bick’s piece about why she hates Dylanology though. That was funny. It struck a chord or three.
But all this new music? It doesn’t appeal very much. All that kind of post-anti-folk or whatever the hell it is. All those beards and bad shoes. It makes me shudder.
Personally, I’ve been going back, back, further back… to a time before rock’n’roll went sour, to a Europe after the rain or something like that. I’ve become immersed in all those old El and Five Four label reissues, some of the Rev-Ola things too of course. Michel Legrand has been playing non-stop and my mind runs amok with black and white movie scenes, playing out for an audience of one. I keep fixating on his cameo in Cleo from 5 to 7 as Corinne Marchand’s accompanist and wishing I could have lived in such an age where everyone wore suits and hats and travelled on steam trains. I am desperate to hear more of Marchand’s recordings but can find almost nothing anywhere. That ‘Sans Toi’ track that Linn sent is burrowed deep into my psyche, and I have ‘La Joueuse’ but nothing else. If anyone can furnish me with more I would be forever grateful.
Oh, and have you checked out that Blue Stars set? Blossom Dearie and cohorts singing in French atop a magical swinging jazz backdrop. All this from the early ‘50s, a time when I guess Patrice Chaplin would have been heading out from Albany Park towards her adventures on the streets of Pigalle and of course in Gerona. And really, Albany Park is the perfect book to read whilst playing all these records… and there are of course the references to Johnny Ray in there, and that recent collection on El kind of reminds you of what went wrong with rock’n’roll. And of course too there are the frequent references to ‘Johnny Guitar’ coming on the radio, and who needs any more excuse than that to go out and indulge on a Peggy Lee trip?
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