It turns out that what turned him into a songwriter, as he tells it, was hearing a Kurt Weill / Brecht song, "Pirate Jenny," and then taking it apart, analyzing the hell out of it to see how it worked, and then trying to write songs on that model:
Later I found myself taking the song part, trying to find out what made it tick, why it was so effective. I could see that everything in it was apparent and visible but you didn't notice it too much. [...] It was like the Picasso painting Guernica. This heavy song was a new stimulant for my senses, indeed very much like a folk song but a folk song from a different gallon jug in in a different backyard. [...] I took the song apart and unzipped it--it was the form, the free verse association, the structure and disregard for the known certainty of melodic patterns to make it seriously matter, give it its cutting edge. It also had the ideal chorus for the lyrics. I wanted to figure out how to manipulate and control this particular structure and form which I knew was the key that gave "Pirate Jenny" its resilience and outrageous power.
[...] I hadn't done anything yet, wasn't any kind of songwriter but I'd become rightly impressed by the physical and ideological possibilities within the confines of lyric and melody. I could see that the type of songs I was leaning towards singing didn't exist and I began playing with the form, trying to grasp it--trying to make a song that transcended the information in it, the character and plot.
Totally influenced by "Pirate Jenny," though staying far away from its ideological heart, I began fooling around with things ...
Then he does the same thing with Robert Johnson. "If I hadn't gone to the Theatre de Lys and heard the ballad "Pirate Jenny," it might not have dawned on me to write them [his first songs] ... If I hadn't heard the Robert Johnson record when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down, that I wouldn't have felt free enough or upraised enough to write."
1 comment:
i remember having a similar reaction to the book, with different surface symptoms. What struck me was that the choice of time periods he covers seemed arbitrary and unbalanced....a lack of narrative control. In a sense he writes much better than most people, but he didn't get on top of the material. It's not that I expected or needed him to give the same number of pages to each year, or even represent each period of his life, but a more practiced storyteller could give shape to what he chooses to reveal.
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