Three months on from the previous posting I hereby declare my "wee phrase" of buying up old cassettes from a well-known auction website exhausted. Not that this means I'm any nearer a conclusion about the wisdom of re-embracing this ancient medium. If I could be said to have embraced it: an air-peck-on-the-cheek, if anything. Even though I must have bought around a dozen I've only listened to a few.
Why the reluctance? Two reasons, one more fanciful than the other.
The first is fear of contamination (there's a lot of it about these days). When the first package arrived from that well-known auction et cetera and I pressed the cassette into the player of my lately acquired microsystem and lightly touched the tape button (none of those keys you had to press hard for me, thank you very much) the speed didn't seem quite right - not off enough to be, y'know, "off-off", but still not ... didn't sound like I remembered. Then the next tape I tried added a kind of corrugated effect to Django Reinhardt's guitar ...
These small shocks then set me wondering about the age and condition of those rehomed tapes I'd been gathering in. And ever since then I've been wary of risking any more in case even one dodgy, oxide-shedding rogue musicassette could pollute the whole batch. And with these kind of saucy doubts'n'fears at the forefront of your mind how on earth do you settle back to enjoy an evening of what young men in greatcoats used to term "sounds"?
But there is another reason for holding back. Not sure whether I really believe it myself, but essentially it's the fear that I might have been chasing a dream in this recent flurry of acquisition and maybe that's the real reason why I don't want to rush headlong towards the confirmation of such a possibility: it'd be Pinkie's girlfriend all over again (in the novel, anyway).
If that is indeed the truth, or part of it, at least my money hasn't been entirely wasted. There's still some pleasure to be derived from having these objects in view, imagining their contents. There is, for example, a Julie Felix cassette, bought solely because it reminded me of evenings spent in Hamilton Library. I can only remember one song from it, and judging from the cassette case, it's not in prime condition, but it conjures up the memory of so much happy browsing, both in the large and airy room allocated to LPs and tapes and among the many showbiz biographies in the library proper, light relief from the more formal studying I was doing the rest of the time.
And maybe, in the end, that's the wiser course with regard to all these recent acquisitions: unheard - or at least, unrevisited - melodies and all that. Earlier I wrote a piece about buying a CD with The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore on it then coming to regret doing so. I had never owned a copy of the single, or any album which included it, because I hadn't wanted to ruin a perfect memory: the song is forever associated with the experience of hearing it, around the time of its first release, in warm, fuzzy medium-wave mono issuing from a radio in another room in another house, the backdrop to a friendship which didn't last beyond early childhood. Since which time I'd only ever heard The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine ... by happy chance - on the radio, usually a nostalgic AM station - and those unexpected opportunities had kept it a treat: it remained strange, different, special. Suddenly to be in possession of it, accessible up close any time I wanted, took some of its mystique away - not helped by the CD in question having a stereo, and rather tinny-sounding, mix.
That said, maybe hearing treasured songs after the long passage of years via a different sound carrier could be accounted a kind of mercy, taking away the pressure of expectation. If the same feelings you experienced as a six year old (or whatever) aren't instantly evoked when you revisit a song there's a handy explanation: it's a new mix, or stereo when you first heard it in mono, or maybe it's got added - or reduced - reverb, or someone went back to the original tapes and it's been all freshly chopped into its component parts as opposed to that sonic soup you slurped in some happy yesteryear. And provided you can get just a tiny little kick out of what you're hearing now, it's enough: your memories remain unassailable.
In Gordon Burn's novel Alma Cogan - not a biography of the singer but an imagining of how her life might have turned out had she not died so young - he has Alma speculating about why more people don't choose to retire in the town in which they grew up. She concludes that it would be too painful to be confronted every day with the stark evidence of time passing: this landmark demolished, this newsagent now a cafe etc. Spending your final days in a strange town is less painful because you're less aware of the only end of age creeping nearer.
So could it be that the invention of newer and more convenient ways to hear music has had the unintended consequence of serving to lessen our disappointment and disillusion when today's experience of a much-loved track falls short of what we have hugged to ourselves in memory for so long?
Actually, I have learnt a little from my recent purchases. One of the cassettes is a Flanagan and Allen compilation which I'd never actually owned before, borrowing it from Motherwell or Hamilton library. It includes On the Other Side of Town, one of the songs I associate most strongly with those walkman years of the early eighties, lugging around a chunky Sony machine to provide the novelty (as it was then) of a soundtrack for night time constitutionals. In recent years I have sought out the song online, and once found a much cleaner-sounding transfer on a streaming service. But something was missing.
Then I had a closer look at the details on the sleeve of the cassette I'd just bought and saw that what I'd been listening to a few decades earlier was actually "reprocessed stereo". And it struck me that maybe this was why the original experience had stayed with me and had become so associated with the outdoors, like that pre-CD Pet Sounds tape mentioned in the previous post: the sonic equivalent, you could say, of spraying some perfume into the air and then walking through it. Instead of the sound staying narrowly between my ears it felt all around me, part of my surroundings, the woodland I was walking through ... alright, I was reading Wordsworth's The Prelude around that time, which probably helped.
That brief cassetofrenzy (copyright) did not make me so crazed as to lay out forty-odd quid for a budget Pet Sounds cassette in fake stereo but I have found an online source if you would like to hear the difference for yourself. (There's a link at the end.)
At least, I presume that what's online - an upload of a prerecorded reel to reel tape of the "duophonic" Pet Sounds - is more or less the same as that overpriced cassette. I've listened to it and am glad I didn't part with my cash. Even if it is the same mix, the experience can't be the same: without the setting of a lake to walk around, imagining the sound carrying from some distant vessel - and without my being in that particular set of personal circumstances again - there can only be the echo of an echo. Yet when I first listened to that tape, confessional numbers such as That's Not Me had a profound effect, with lines like:
I once had a dream
So I packed up and split for the city
I soon found out that my lonely life wasn't so pretty
I know Mike Love did most of the singing but it felt like I was Walking With Wilson, confiding in him or vice-versa. Not that the precise meaning of the lyrics (by Tony Asher) really mattered that much; it was the mood, the sense of emotional openness which tied in with the literal openness on those solitary walks, allied to my sense of undergoing a slow reawakening. One of the most interesting chapters in Craig Brown's book on the Beatles is about the lyrics of Hey Jude, and how we absorb them:
Rock works most powerfully when it is like a native chant, or a Latin hymn, its scattered meanings transformed into abstract sound, floating free of specificity.
As for Flanagan and Allen, On the Other Side of Town stays in my head really for a brief moment rather than the whole recording. The story is told from the point of view of a former suitor, or would-be suitor, who cannot compete with the attractions of the wealthier area, and relinquishes his claim on his former love, telling a friend simply to "give her every wish from me" for her future happiness. The situation is outlined in Bud Flanagan's warm growl, and there are rather jolly, uptempo sections in the performance, as though none of this means a light, just an excuse for a sedate knees-up, but there is one poignant moment which occurs during Chesney Allen's customary recitatif-type reiteration:
I always knew that she was meant for palaces and kingsHalfway through the above Allen shifts from his normal register into something approaching singing, signalling a moment of heightened emotion, of pain clearly audible, even though the mood is still light: a necessary glimpse of subtext.
No wonder she was discontent with all those shabby things
This reminds me of another song I associat with night: Crying My Heart Out for You by Neil Sedaka. I've actually written a fuller piece about this, providing a bit of context, but it's Sedaka's keening, bookending the record, which really stays with me. I can't remember whether the version issuing from my walkman was real, or reprocessed, stereo, and despite a lot of online searching can't even identify with certainty which edition of which cassette might have been whirring around in my machine - Sedaka was well represented in the two local libraries I alternated between - but there was a lot of reverb on the recording anyway, so maybe it matters less in this case. That anguished wail ushering in, and waving away, the narrative felt like it was coming from somewhere far away, not up close, much as I identified with it.
My final cassettomemory (copyright) is of Louis Armstrong. The tape was bought from a small company called Neovox, specialising in early jazz; it may have been a one-man operation, as only one person seemed to be writing the sleevenotes and occasionally facetious publicity material. A point was made of stating that there had been minimal interference with the original sound and the listener was therefore advised to adjust things at his end if so desired. I bought several tapes from this small company, though at times I think I was forcing myself to like what I heard, or telling myself that I did so: it was part of this great history of jazz so it had to be good.
Not so, however, with a tape of the early big band work of Louis Armstrong, which accompanied me time and again at night, often while taking a walk to clear my head after a bout of studying. Hearing these numbers back to back, I quickly realised that the sequence of events on these sides was predictable: you pretty much knew when Armstrong was about to come in with his vocal or trumpet solo, but who cared? There are several recording on that compilation which I still love, but it was Just a Gigolo which really stayed, I think because of the contrast between that mournful, self-pitying vocal and the sudden entry of that sprightly trumpet, unexpectedly turning the whole thing around. I did scan that well-known etc etc for a copy of that particular tape, but no joy; the image at the top of this piece is from an earlier volume.
Although I bought LPs of the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens - I'd read so much about their being the foundation of jazz that it seemed a necessity - it was really that later work which gave me unalloyed pleasure. A friend once described Chekhov as "nasty medicine": you didn't like it but you could feel it doing you good. I've never felt like that about Chekhov, but apart from the obvious highlights like Potato Head Blues, West End Blues and a few others, those early Armstrong sides did feel a bit of a chore ... then again, I didn't have them on tape, so listening to them on my new Dual 505 turntable was perhaps more of a formal occasion with all its attendant pressure.
But those later Armstrong sides meant as much to me as anything on the other tapes. I imagined the recording sessions always taking place in a brightly lit studio, invariably late at night, after the band had returned from whatever gig they'd been playing that evening, and it was as though I was carrying that brightness in my head, a protection against whatever unseen dangers might be out there as I walked along.
I say "in my head" because with the Neovox tape there was less of a sense of sound coming to me from outside. It had no fake stereo or added reverb: Robert Parker, who famously doctored some jazz classics, hadn't had a look in. And I think at the end of one of those Okeh sides - though I may be confusing this with a later recording - the first smattering of what may have turned into a mountain of applause is just about heard before the recording ends, an indication that their leader is in the business of giving joy to all, band members and future listeners alike. The audio on this youtube clip is perhaps a little muddier than the Neovox version but you can still hear the joy build when the dismal tale is over and he picks up his trumpet:
Here's that Flanagan and Allen song, which sounds similar to the cassette:
The "duophonic" Pet Sounds can be found here.
The earlier post discussing Neil Sedaka's Crying My Heart Out For You is here.
The Scott Walker piece, written immediately after learning of his death, is here.
The first part of this meditation upon the cassette is here.
No comments:
Post a Comment