“The Songs Are My Lexicon”

Looking for Answers in the Fragment of Song

I don’t have religion, I don’t have dogmatic ideology, but I do have the songs.   “The songs are my lexicon,” said Bob Dylan.  “I believe in the songs.”  This was Dylan in 1997, after Christianity, after going back to Judaism, then into mystery.  What remained was Hank Williams singing “I Saw the Light,” and even though the song was about getting saved, specifically by Jesus, Dylan could hear beyond the liturgy and bow to the song’s uncanny power.  Anyone who loves Charles Mingus’s “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting” or Aretha Franklin testifying “Mary, Don’t You Weep,” or Stevie Wonder intoning “They Won’t Go When I Go” can be transported by the song without necessarily converting to the religion.  The song itself is itself a ritual, sometimes a purgation.  George Harrison noted that, just after the breakup of The Beatles, he and John Lennon were recording their solo debuts at opposite ends of EMI Studios; Lennon was singing “I don’t believe in Jesus” while he was singing “My Sweet Lord,” and Harrison felt that they were both really doing the same thing.  They were both, under intense scrutiny, singing their way into themselves.

You don’t need Scientology for Chick Corea or Beck, you don’t need heroin for Charlie Parker or Billie Holiday, you don’t need mental illness to get Bud Powell or Thelonious Monk or Nick Drake, and you don’t need suicide to feel the pain of Kurt Cobain or Elliott Smith.  Anyone who cares about these artists and what goes into their songs is aware of their surrender, yet the songs themselves offer what Northrop Frye called a secular scripture.  Frye was an ordained minister and an eminent literary scholar, who said, “I marry and bury my students.”  The secular scripture was a way of separating his credentials.   The songs can change your life.  The rituals are up to you.

The further I got from childhood, the more I could separate fantasy and reality, and yet the songs I loved the most were the ones that could still put me in transport.  Sometimes the songs in my arsenal make me feel, as Joni Mitchell sang, “I really don’t know life at all.”  And yet the songs are a map to my brain and heart and soul, an aural disclosure.  The song—discretely from any other belief system—can define the soul and develop the self, specifically mine, specifically yours.  We have been cursed to be living in interesting times, and we need the solace of song more than ever.  I know I do.  Music was crucial to every crisis point of my life.  It helped me endure, but it was also something all too real.  I remember walking around Williamsburg, Brooklyn with a cumbersome Sony Discman, breathing in the fumes of 9/11 wafting from the East River, listening to Billie Holiday sublimely bellowing, like it was her last breath (it nearly was), “You’ve Changed,” or Dylan, rasping “The emptiness is endless / Cold as the clay / You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.”  The wheezing, croaking voices sounded like they were taking in reality and answering back.   Music accompanied serious medical diagnoses, falling in and out of love and back in it again.  They were with me at 6 or 12 or 18, and then later, reliving those ages.  We keep changing.  The recorded music stays the same.  The mystery is never solved. 

“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls.”  Young Paul Simon wrote this in his parents’ bathroom.  He had the idea that there might be something going on, but that the people attuned to it were the most likely to be the lowliest among us.  We’re all looking for a place called America.  “Kathy, I’m lost I said, though I knew she was sleeping.”  We admit we are lost when we know we are not heard.  We’re slip sliding away.  Homeless, we are homeless.  Life presents itself as a series of riddles, even starting with, “A man walks down the street...”   His most recent album has a character, the Street Angel, “sort of a visionary and then gets hospitalized as a schizophrenic.”  Simon still thinks these are the prophets, fools and pilgrims all over the world.

By the time I talked to him, when he was nearing 70, the word “God” was coming up a lot, but in the song “Love and Hard Times,” The Almighty and his only son, made “a courtesy call on earth one Sunday morning,” only to determine, “Well, we’d better get going.”  The song is a chromatic miracle, with a sweeping orchestral arrangement by Gil Goldstein.  Simon told me that Goldstein’s perfect pitch was so perfect, he could hear the overtones of chords.  Somehow, Simon’s adrift characters were attuned, too. They could never get the whole thing, just a helm of the garment.  But they were hearing something, too.  “The Afterlife,” another song Simon and I talked about, seemed like a joke until it wasn’t.  First a guy, standing in line in a posthumous bureaucracy, was trying to pick up a girl, with the line, “By the way, how long you been dead?”  But then it was time to confront the deity.

Face to face in the vastness of space
Your words disappear

And you feel like swimming in an ocean of love
And the current is strong
But all that remains when you try to explain
Is a fragment of song

Lord is it, Be-Bop-A-Lula or Ooh Poo Pah Do?

If we could, like Paul Simon’s arranger, hear the overtones of overtones, would we get an answer there?  Or could we find it in the unlikeliest places, from the schizophrenics and drifters, knowing our destination when we’re slip sliding away? What is divinity if it can only come in these fragments, these songs we danced to in youth, the place where we went when we didn’t want to think too much?  Enter Wallace Stevens.

What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Teenagers were blowing off their homework listening to these records.  Jessie Hill’s “Ooh Poo Pah Do” was covered by Wilson Picket, by Ike and Tina Turner, among many others.    'Cause I won't stop tryin' 'til I create a disturbance in your mind.  “Ooh Poo Pah Do” was created to be a feeling, a groove, a hit.  It wasn’t supposed to mean anything, until it meant everything, a disturbance in your mind.  Do I dare disturb the universe?  Ooh Poo Pah Do.

There goes Rhymin’ Simon, asking the Supreme Being to choose between Gene Vincent and Jessie Hill, as if the decision would reveal an answer. 

No one really knows anything, but is there something going on?  Are we always slip-sliding away from it?  Could the songs be our lexicon? There was a time when you felt it. You had no words, but the feeling was undeniable. You would spend the rest of your life running from it or trying to find your way back. You want that feeling again. That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. Neitzsche wrote that, but in the 19th century, when if you didn’t see it or play it, music was a memory. Now you can press play and the experience is available. Are you still the same person you were when the songs reached you? Are the songs dead in your heart? If you have read this far, I think I know the answer.