Mary Gauthier: Mercy Now.

I won’t be going anywhere today. Sitting in the kitchen on a grey rainy Sunday morning I gaze out of the window at the gloomy sky. In the garden I can see the birds ripping the linings out of my hanging baskets to use as nesting material. They are quite welcome. It would be nice if a pair of them set up house in the bird box on my wall. That hasn’t happened for about three years now. Inside my kitchen window I’m pleased to see that some sunflowers are already poking their little heads up. I only potted the seeds a few days ago.

I am listening to Mary Gauthier. I had never heard anything by her until last week when I was listening to a folk sampler album and was quite taken with a song called Our Lady Of The Shooting Stars so I looked her up on Wikipedia. What a life she has led. Born in 1962 to a mother she never knew, she was placed in an orphanage and adopted. Mary ran away from home at 15 and spent her 18^th birthday in jail, struggled with drug and alcohol dependence until 1990 and never wrote a song till the age of 35. She opened a restaurant which she ran for eleven years until selling it to finance her recording career.

I thought I ought to buy an album, but I wasn’t sure which one was the best. In the end I opted for Mercy Now which was released in 2005 and I’m glad I did because I’m on my second listen on this rainy Sunday morning and I really like it. The opening track is Falling Out Of Love, It reminded me a little bit at first of Robbie Robertson’s Somewhere Down That Crazy River. She has a very southern kind of drawl in her voice which I like. I’m not very good at thinking of adjectives but the words Southern Gothic come to mind, or maybe not. The second track is the eponymous Mercy Now which is a very poignant heartfelt song and features the likes of a cello and pedal steel guitar. Wheel Inside The Wheel is more upbeat with banjo to the fore and is quite catchy. I Drink is very introspective. I thought of John Prine or Steve Earle during this song, Lucinda Williams sprang to mind on some tracks as well. I’m pleased to see that the late great Ian McLagan of Small Faces fame plays Hammond organ on some tracks on this album. Just Say She’s A Rhymer is a very nice song written by the late Harlan Howard. I really like the fiddle playing on this song. Prayer Without Words is driven along by the drums of Rick Richards. The viola of Eamon McLoughlin is also to the fore, as is Mac’s organ playing. Your Sister Cried has some fabulous doom-laden guitar playing by Gurf Morlix. After two listens I think this is my favourite song on the album. It is written by Fred Eaglesmith and is great. Empty Spaces features Patty Griffin on backing vocals and is a very sad study of desolation and loneliness. The cello of Brian Standerer adds to the pathos of this song. Drop In A Bucket is another sad story of lost love and the loneliness of life on the road. I think it must be quasi-autobiographical because I don’t think you can write songs like this if you haven’t experienced it yourself.  It Ain’t The Wind, It’s The Rain sums up the weather today. A great song to bring this album to a close.

I have really enjoyed listening to this album today. I think you would enjoy it as well. The wind is getting up now, I think there is going to be some heavy rain soon, I might go back to bed for the afternoon. See you later. If you would like to hear Mary sing Mercy Now live you can find it below.

Mary Gauthier "Mercy Now"

Music For Zen Meditation

I asked the boy beneath the pines

He said "The Master's gone alone

Herb-picking somewhere on the mount

cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown".

It is Thursday morning, the last day of February and the weather has returned to what you would expect at this time of year. I am listening to an album called Music For Zen Meditation And Other Joys by Tony Scott. It was recorded in Tokyo in 1964. It is amazing that it is 55 years old because it sounds so modern, yet at the same time so timeless. Tony Scott plays clarinet accompanied by Japanese table harp and bamboo flute. I have put one track called The Murmuring Of The Mountain Stream below if you would like to hear it. I love this music because it instills a feeling of calm in the listener. Don't think though that it is just one of those new-age relaxation albums.  This is music of pure class. Krishnamurti liked music and said that what is important is the silence between the notes. I think this is what Van Morrison meant in Hymns To The Silence. Music like this is so pure it makes some other music sound just like a trivial noise to distract people from thinking for themselves. I highly recommend this album.

Tony Scott - The murmuring sound of mountain stream 1964

Morrissey - Everyday Is Like Sunday (Official Music Video)

The Radiant Radish.

eden ahbez & Brian Wilson.

Hello, it’s Sunday morning and the sun is shining again. I’m going to do some seed planting and garden tidying later. At the moment I am having a cup of tea and listening to the Beach Boys album from 1967 called Smiley Smile. It is an album that was salvaged from the recording of the abandoned Smile project of Brian Wilson. Smiley Smile was a flop by Beach Boy standards when it was first released but it is now regarded by many including me as a minor masterpiece. I’ll tell you why I was reminded of it today.

Last week at the fabulous Robert Plant concert that we went to in Bath, Robert sang a song called Nature Boy. It was one of the highlights of the evening for me. Robert said that there was an interesting story about the writer of the song. 

eden Ahbez & Nat King Cole.

I had heard the song before, it was a big hit in 1948 for Nat King Cole and has been recorded by many other great singers as well, including Frank Sinatra & Ella Fitzgerald. I have been reading about the writer of the song who called himself eden ahbez. (He didn’t use capital letters because he thought only the words God and Infinity should be capitalised). He was born in 1908 and died in 1995 and his lifestyle in California was influential in the hippie movement. He was known to friends simply as ahbe. Living a bucolic life from at least the 1940s, he wore sandals and shoulder-length hair and beard, and white robes. He camped out below the first L in the Hollywood Sign above Los Angeles and studied Oriental mysticism. He slept outdoors with his family and ate vegetables, fruits, and nuts. He claimed to live on three dollars per week. He could be described as a proto-hippy and was decades ahead of his time. 

eden ahbez & his family.

I always thought that the hippies grew out of the Beatniks and were a 60’s phenomenon, but in fact they can be traced back to Germany in the 19^th century. eden ahbez was influenced by the Lebensreform ("life reform”) movement of the late 19th-century and early 20th-century Germany and Switzerland that propagated a back-to-nature lifestyle, emphasizing among others health food/raw food/organic food, nudism, sexual liberation, alternative medicine, and religious reform and at the same time abstention from alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and vaccines. The subject of Nature Boy was one of his best friends who was known as Gypsy Boots. Gypsy Boots (August 19, 1915 – August 8, 2004), born Robert Bootzin, who was an American fitness pioneer, actor and writer. He is credited with laying the foundation for the acceptance by mainstream America of "alternative" lifestyles such as yoga and health food. His books Barefeet and Good Things to Eat and the memoir The Gypsy in Me gained him a cult following.

So, what has this got to do with Brian Wilson and Smiley Smile? Well, when I was looking up eden ahbez I came across a photo of him with Brian Wilson. As a fan of Brian’s since 1964 I was delighted to see this photo. It was taken when eden ahbez attended the sessions for Smile. “What was he doing there?”, I asked myself. I wondered if he might have influenced Brian in some way. There is a song on Smiley Smile called Vegetables. You can hear it below if you want. It is a very simple, charming and unpretentious song. When eden ahbez first arrived in California in 1941 he began playing piano in the Eutropheon, a small health food store and raw food restaurant on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Brian Wilson became obsessed with health foods himself around the time of the Smile recordings (coincidence?) and opened a health food shop in West Hollywood. called The Radiant Radish. It closed after about two years because Brian had no business sense. While it was open though he could often be seen in there dressed in his bath-robe looking at all the various products.

Anyway, I don’t know if eden ahbez influenced Brian or not, but I have enjoyed reading about him and his lifestyle and especially enjoyed listening to Smiley Smile on this sunny Sunday morning. Now for the garden! See you later.

Vegetables.