Ten Album Challenge # 8: The Big Huge
Did Robin Williamson and Mike Heron ever really look like they do on this cover? When we make fun of hippies, this is what we are making fun of. Were they in on the joke? Is the whole album a kind of joke?
How do I write this piece? I adore this album. It is very strange and very beautiful. If I talk about its strangeness and its beauty it will sound as if I am making fun of it.
Listen with me to the first track.
There is no introduction. There is no melody. A slightly unearthly voice half chants, half recites lines which may be very profound but may be sheer nonsense.
Dust of the rivers does murmur and weep
Hard and sharp laughter that cuts to the bone
Ah, but every face within your face does show
Going gladly now to give himself his own
The music is luxurious. There is some sitar in there, a lot of bells, possibly a bodhran. We’re in a temple. We’re on a mountain listening to a guru. Probably we’re in the Albert Hall in 1968 listening to the Incredible String Band. The voice has a wailing, howling quality to it. At one point it seems to be talking about a definite character — a long haired goddess, attended by birds. But there is no thread: just a series of visions which come and go. The droning hymn gives way to an upbeat celebration of a man who seems to be the personification of the universe…
The great man, the great man
Historians, his memory
Artists, his senses, thinkers, his brain
Labourers, his growth, explorers, his limbs
And soldiers his death each second
And mystics his rebirth each second
But this resolves into a refrain or a mantra, a thing you could sing or dance or sway along to, a political or spiritual slogan which anyone could get behind:
Maya! Maya! All the world is but a play
Be thou the joyful player!
It’s a little like a symphony. It takes us on a journey, from wailing uncertainty to joyful celebration. About what? Of what? I have no idea.
The album is an artefact of its time. It speaks to us from that strange far-away land called the 60s when everything was a symbol of everything else and whatever came into your head was probably true. The Aquarian Age was about grabbing bits and pieces from whatever myth or religion you fancied; and the Tarot is basically a deck of archetypes to shuffle and read any way you want. So why not just chuck imagery in a bag and shake it up?
Jesus and Hitler and Richard the lion heart
Three kings and Moses and Queen Cleopatra
The Cobbler, the maiden, the mender and the maker
The sickener and the twitcher and the glad undertaker
The shepherd of willows
The harper and the archer
All sat down in one boat together
Troubled voyage in calm weather
One number kicks off with a church organ and a line from a hymn. And then there is a line from a Christmas carol and a line from Winnie the Pooh, and some quotes from the Bible, and a doxology: all delivered in plainsong. It segues straight into a jaunty, cod-calypso number about caterpillar who is very relaxed about turning into a butterfly.
ah da dee do dah
dee doo dah
dee do dah
...sings everyone. How very true that is.
Meanwhile another track declares:
Many were the lifetimes of the Son of Noah's brother
See his coat the ragged riches of the soul
And that’s the whole song: it takes seven seconds. (Noah’s grandfather was the famously long-lived Methuselah: but I can find nothing canonical or apocryphal about a brother or a nephew.)
Is it nonsense? It’s probably nonsense. But nonsense is sometimes much more sensible than sense. There are different kinds of nonsense. Edward Lear uses made up words to describe some possible reality: we feel that if someone told us what a dong or a jumblie or a bong tree was everything might make sense. Lucky’s speech in Godot feels like a sensible lecture that got scrambled. I Am The Walrus is pure da-da-ism, scarcely using words at all. The Incredible String Band seems to aspire to the purest level of nonsense: like a linguist trying to create meaning-free grammatical constructs:
While a whole group of middle-aged persons with dwarfish expressions and tinned conversations in Sunday blessed blue
Standing around for a photograph, watch the cuckoo
Perhaps the rhythm is what matters: a line of 28 syllables followed by a line of 14, with a strong rhyme at the end. Sunday blessed blue is a fine, goonish bit of word play. And sometimes it coalesces into a moment of perfect poetry.
I offered my throat to the wolf but I just can’t die
all I can do is fly.
Dreams are spiritual and Lewis Carol wrote nonsense so perhaps nonsense is spiritual. But the presiding spirit is more Winnie the Pooh than Alice in Wonderland.
The album winds up with another long, rambling, freeform chant. It seems to be about a man without a head. He seems to stowaway on a trip to the underworld and back. Having no head he has no eyes; but he keeps telling us about the light:
One light
Light that is one though the lamps are many
Life is a game: all truths are the same truth. We all have some kind of enlightenment. Everything is silly. Archness and whimsy and earnestness and pretension all together. The instrumentation is sensational.
There is no-one like the Incredible String Band: but their influence is everywhere. Up and coming York folkie Joshua Burnell sounds altogether Incredible String Bandish to me, at least when he is spinning fairy tales about old men on islands. Alasdair Roberts rambling freeform mysticism is in the same space. They certainly influenced the Beatles White Album and Dylan pronounced them “quite good”. (This naturally went onto the touring poster: 'Quite good' raves Bob Dylan).
The Incredible String Band is long gone; but I have heard Robin Williamson perform live a number of times. He is Scottish and sincere and funny and exactly what you would hope and expect the man on the cover to look like in his eighth decade. He'll do an Irish folk tune and a South American Hymn and even some of the old I.S.B numbers. In between he is as likely to tell a dreadful shaggy dog story as recite a myth about Cúchulainn. (The world would end if a single day went passed without someone telling a Chuchulainn story; dreadful corny jokes are the closest the west ever came to Zen.) When I first heard him live I said that he had a quality of holiness about him. I later found that Rev Rowan Williams had said the same thing. I adore him unreservedly.
13 comments:
Coming from the pre-interweb era it was possible to hear about bands for the longest time before you actually heard them. So it was with a years-long build-up of anticipation that I finally got to listen to the legendary Incredible String Band.
And I thought, if I’m honest, it was the most interminable hippy bollocks.
Not so long ago I read Rob Young’s mighty tome ‘Electric Eden’, where he lavishes them with praise. I tried again. I’ve now read through this, and clicked hopefully on the links. Same response every time. “Well at least they’ll have to stop soon, because they’ll get the munchies”.
And I like a lot of hippie era music! I like that whole thing of figuring it’s all just inspired nonsense, and feeling in on the joke, but then never quite being sure whether it might be a double bluff and mean something after all. I love, for example, early acoustic Marc Bolan. Maybe it’s music which relies heavily on a sense of charm, teh way a child’s charm can entertain you, and the chemistry of charm is a highly subjective thing.
So the ISB are to me what Bob Dylan is to Mike.
I feel obscurely proud of having become Gavin's touchstone for Just Not Getting It.
For what it's worth, I had a similar long-run-up experience to Gavins, of having heard about the ISB for a long time before the heard the band themselves — and especially of having heard about all the other bands they'd influenced, including a lot of prog artists that I love. And I was similarly disappointed on hearing their actual music. Though perhaps that's as much the fault of the unrealistic expectations as the actual songs.
Question: regardless of the content, what do you think of the form?
Or, put another way, even if the words are silly, how does the music -- the sitar and the drums and the pan pipes work for you?
On listening now, I can't discern enough structure in the music to like it much. But that doesn't mean a whole lot — it's perfectly possible that if I listened more it would all swim into focus.
The words you quoted if anything made me think "maybe I should give this another try". But what sounds - at least to me - like the same old music, out-of-it hippies blowing into nose flutes then arbitrarily picking up some other random thing.
But then not just you but almost anyone whose opinions on music I listen to tells me I'm wrong. So quite likely it is me Just Not Getting It.
Almost anyone whose opinions on music I listen to tells me I'm wrong. So quite likely it is me Just Not Getting It.
Welcome to my world.
I don't know whether it's helpful, but I'd guess the headless man is a reference to the ideas of Douglas Harding, author of "On Having No Head" (see e.g. here). C S Lewis was terribly enthusiastic about an earlier book by Harding, also I think touting the "headless" way of looking at the world.
There is one song on this album I absolutely love, and that is "Cousin Caterpillar." ISB is often a wayward band, but sometimes they find the perfect mixture of the spacy and the snappy, and that one is it.
C S Lewis was terribly enthusiastic about an earlier book by Harding, also I think touting the "headless" way of looking at the world.
Exit blogger to write article combining two of his favourite subjects....
Based on Kalimac's suggestion I gave ISB another try, this time with Cousin Caterpillar. I found that much more approachable (although it does seem to go on for about twice as long as it needs to). Thanks for the pointer!
1: Look up the Hedgehog Song in that case.
2: I think maybe you need to listen to an album right through: Maya and Douglas Trahern are less "long songs without much structure" than "several short songs which run together" and the point of Mountain of the Lord and Noahs Cousin is that they are little flashes of tune in the 45 minute hippy symphony.
3: I didn't realise that Wee Tam and Big Huge were originally presented as a Double Album: I thought it was just the CD version giving you two for one. Which means that it's really a 90 minute hippy symphony, not a 45 minute one, which is twice as good, or twice as bad depending on your viewpoint.
4: The Archbishop of Canterbury picked the Hedgehog Song on desert island discs.
5: I am now writing about Show of Hands. What could possibly go wrong?
Ah, as it happens I am somewhat familiar with the Hedgehog Song, but I'd not really made the connection with the ISB. (That's because I first heard it at the Mitcheldean Folk Club by someone who did it as a straight guitar-and-vocal number with a very different feel from the original.)
It's an interesting example of a track that would now be thought of as a novelty song, but which I suspect has played and sung with a completely straight face at the time — or at least, with just as straight a face as the rest of the album.
oh you know all the words
and you sing the right tune
but you never really learned the song
I can tell by the sadness in your eyes that you never really learned the song
odd sort of ditty for an Anglican Archbishop to identify with....
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