My Mother's Records

Three

Guess which one is Mum.

This might be my favourite photo of my mother. She looks very "contemporary" although this photo must be from the early 1960s. Of course it was the early 1960s in the far south of New Zealand so we should subtract at least a decade in terms of fashion. Looking at family photos from this period you get the strong feeling that living in Otago in the 1960s was not quite the same as living in America in the 1960s.

Early in my mother's marriage she started going to classes in creative dance held in a room in Otago University in the Physical Education Department. They were taken by someone called Lorna Brown. There were about a dozen people in the class, and they danced to a variety of records including Spanish stuff requiring castanets, shawls and a shuffling mastery of footwork.
When I was a kid one of my toys was a pair of black plastic castanets held together with a piece of red string. Of course I didn't know what they were or how to operate them. They seemed a very cryptic children's toy. Funny how your parents' lives before you were born don't exist when you are a child or a teenager. When you are a teenager you are utterly impervious to the idea that your parents were once young, and felt the things you felt and hated the things you hated.

Then you get older of course. Age does bring perspective. Strangely this reminds me of a piece I read in a book at the beginning of the year. The person writing is a very old Jesuit priest, and he says:

"I am sometimes very conscious that I am following a leader who died when He was less than half as old as I am now. I see and feel things He never saw or felt. I know things He seems never to have known. Evedrybody wants a Christ for himself and those who think like him. Very well, am I at fault for wanting a Christ who will show me how to be an old man? All Christ's teaching is put forward with the dogmatism, the certainty, and the strength of youth: I need something that takes account of the accretion of experience, the sense of paradox and ambiguity that comes with years."

Although my father lived to a reasonable age he died when I was five. It struck me this year that I really knew nothing about him. Am I taller than him? What did his voice sound like? All those photos of my mother and me... he was there, in the room, holding the camera and pushing the button. I really think he must have loved the woman he married. He supported her in the barbarian culture of 1960s Otago to take fashion courses, to do a Masters, to dance.

While my mother was at Lorna Brown's dance classes she worked up an original dance piece set to Mars, Bringer of War from Holst's The Planets. Aside from Mars, Bringer of War and the bit that someone set to Blake and turned into Jerusalem most of this album reminds me of the theme for Star Trek. The last piece even has a female choir. If only von Holst had thought to have someone say "Stardate blah-blah-blah" over the top of it.

It was written in 1914. That means that you have to think about World War One. The liner notes say (about Mars), "It has been called a prophecy of the mechanised warfare that was to come." No. Just because there's a snare drum in there doesn't mean it has anything to do with World War One. I would say most people listening to it now would think of Darth Vader.

Holst composed 200 pieces of music. He's remembered for this. Ravel is remembered for Bolero. Rodrigo for Concierto Andaluz.

My mother bought this after going to see the movie starring Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte. My mother said that seeing this movie in the late 1950s blew her mind. She thought Dandridge was a fantastic Carmen, and the music and dancing were wonderful. On the back of the LP Hammerstein says when he was a kid he went to the opera, liked the music but thought it was silly they were all singing in Italian. Listening to his version I think it's silly they're all singing in English. Frankly the toreador's song is not quite the same when it's about boxing and he says things like "punch him smack on the nose." Nevertheless, my mother passed on the Carmen gene to me. I was brought up on Carlos Sauras' version of Carmen. The Carmen Jones version starred Dandridge and Belafonte but they were both dubbed. So the record has neither of them on it. Dandridge's career didn't pan out very well.

"On the evening of the Pilgramage, the Gypsies gather together in their camp. On the second side of the record you will hear Manitas and his family. His brother plays the guitar with him. His sons, his cousin and his nephew sing, and during this Provencal night they are all present for you, singing, dancing, playing for your pleasure which, today, thanks to this record, is also yours."

This album. This is the jewel in the crown of the collection for me. Manitas' playing is so rough, raw and percussive. Side Two, the live side, is fantastic. Somehow I have never been bothered by not understanding what people are saying when they sing (sorry to the guys who wrote Carmen Jones), it has always been about conveying emotion for me. The wonderful thing about listening to these guys sing is that they are like the brass section in a jazz band, doing their long bluesy runs, and filling in each others gaps, while underneath are the clapping off-beat hands, and pulsing heavy guitar rhthyms. Strong stuff when I was a kid.

About as far away from this as you can get is the "New Flamenco" of Ottmar Liebert. I have two of this man's CDs and have been to one of his concerts. All because my friends knew that I loved flamenco and were being kind. I think enough time has passed for me to say (1) thank you for your generousity, and (2) German flamenco! Oh dear. It sounds like it is being performed by robots. The back of Liebert's CD says (please read it with a fake German accent): "we are dedicated to a process of continuous refinement both artistically and commercially. As in music, so in life." Dreadful. Reminds me of another slogan: "Work Makes One Free." Yeah, right.

My Mother's Records

Two

When I was a teenager in Paraparaumu it was all the rage to fill up old 1.5 litre soft drink bottles with water and leave them all over your front lawn. It was supposed to stop dogs doing their business on your property. It got to the point where every single lawn in Paraparaumu had these plastic bottle droppings on them (usually with dog droppings in between). There were various theories as to why this was supposed to work. The only one I remember was that the dogs were supposed to be frightened of their reflection in the water bottle. Of course it didn't work. In fact it was utterly ridiculous. Nevertheless, thousands of adults across New Zealand covered their lawns with old Coke bottles in the belief that it did work.

The past is a strange place. Even the past of twenty years ago can seem very odd indeed. The movement of time eradicates context and leaves you with objects. It’s hard to say why people in the 80’s thought neon coloured sweat bands were cool, but they were. The reasons things were done tend to be forgotten leaving only the objects behind like, well like a hundred soft drinks bottles filled with water on someone’s lawn, or a book dropping suddenly out of the sky.

*

My mother first met my father at a wedding, and afterwards they went to a Joe Brown dance at Dunedin's town hall. My father was at the wedding because he worked on the family of the groom's farm shearing sheep. He sheared sheep to pay to go to university. My father didn't have a really great upbringing, he was brought up by a prickly Aunt, but he was decent at school, good at sport and a great ballroom dancer.When my mother first met my father he owned three records: two by a fellow called Mantovani (Immortal Classics and Tangos) and Belafonte’s debut record. They are still in the collection, and still treasured although Mantovani’s star has dipped so far below the horizon that it is hard to believe he was once so popular.

Mantovani Plays the Immortal Classics, Decca (1953). Mantovani released four other albums in 1953 including I suspect the less than immortal An Album of Christmas Music. It's hard not to make fun of Mantovani. Even the fan website is defensive: Quality Light Orchestra Music is sometimes confused, with "background” music, or "easy listening" music, it surely is not.... Have you ever heard of a category of music called "Quality Light Orchestra Music"? A reviewer of the latest Mantovani biography cryptically comments: As years pass, we realize that art glows at different angles when and where it is examined and experienced. And generally the world is looked at differently afterwards.

Sure.

The thing is I rather like this record. I like it for two reasons:

Firstly, I love things that were once enormously popular and have now vanished off the radar. Mantovani fits the bill. He was the first person to sell a million stereo records, phenomenally popular in Britain and America, one of the recording stars of his era. Now he would be unknown to everyone under fifty.

Secondly, the little sticker my mother put on the album cover says: "Please keep this record. It is very old, but it takes me back to when I first met M. and contains two of my most loved pieces of music: Handel's Largo and Schubert's Ave Maria." When I was a kid my mother had a tape of something like the London Pops Orchestra playing classical tunes. It had, predictably, a version of Pachelbel's Canon on it. It was an "interpretation" of that piece and it ended with a French horn. The thing is I never knew until I was a lot older that it was an interpretation and I got rather attached to that French horn. Even now when I hear versions of Canon I am always listening for the surging horn at the end, and always disappointed when it doesn't happen. My point is, with some songs it doesn't matter if the first version you hear of something is a supposedly "inferior" - it will become the version that matters most for you.

*

For years I had this memory of a book I had been made to read at school. It was about a boy living on an island and he was obsessed with Harry Belafonte. For a long time I had no idea who Harry Belafonte was (even though he was sitting in my mother's record collection). One day I dragged his record out, dusted it off and gave it a spin. Brilliant.


Belafonte’s debut album is wonderful. It was released in 1956 and it was the first LP to sell a million copies in the USA. It is very hard to be depressed and listen to this album. What a great cover.


Many years after I read that book I was talking about, still at school but now a teacher, I was leaving my classroom after the day was over. It was a windy, high-cloud day, rubbish blowing through the halls and across the field, and out of the sky dropped a book. Some student had thrown it on the classroom roof and it now flapped its way to my feet. It was called The Cay and I realised as I picked it up that this was the book I had read twenty years ago at school.

My Mother's Records

One

There are some places that live on in your mind. Long after you have walked out of them for the last time you find yourself back inside them in your dreams. It has been many years since I walked though the rooms of my grandmother’s house, but it remains an important place to me; not as it is now, in other people’s hands, but as it was when I was a child.

While each room of my grandmother’s house has a set of details that I can vividly recall, the centre of that house, its heart, was at the back, off the kitchen. It was the room we came to for breakfast, lunch and dinner, the room we sat in to watch Coronation Street or play card games like Happy Families. Every meal had a ritual. At lunchtime part of the ritual was Gran turning on the radiogram. It was a large piece of oblong furniture made of wood that sat in the corner of the room. To turn it on Gran lifted the lid and propped it up like the bonnet of a car and then turned one of the chunky dials inside until it clicked. After the radio had been turned on you had to wait awhile in silence for it to warm up. Gran would be in the kitchen preparing sandwiches while I sat at the table and slowly the sombre voice of the National Radio news announcer would fade into the room calmly stating the catastrophes of the day.

When I stayed with Gran in the holidays I sat in Grandpa’s chair at the dining table for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Behind me there was a large cabinet. The cabinet had cupboards at the bottom, a bench in the middle, and cupboards above. On the bench space were piles of papers and books: Grandpa’s papers and books. It was a jumble of things all crammed in a row, and a huge edition of Webster’s dictionary sitting un-consulted amid the jumble. It was Grandpa’s side of the table. Gran’s side had the toaster and a chair for the cat. It was on Grandpa’s side of the table that I can remember being swung and dropped through his hands, and given horsey rides on his knee, and the giggling fear of it.

I hear from my mother that her father was a man of dark clouds and bursts of light. In the days of light he was a man of great charm. In the days of bruised clouds and thunder he could be mean. He died when I was five; the same year as my Dad. I never really knew him. A heart attack. It came in a massive bolt at the table one lunchtime and he was gone.

There are only three things I remember about him: the horsey ride; a curiously lonely looking figure out in the middle of a field at the back of his house; and a bike ride on the Taieri Plain.

On this bike ride Grandpa sat me on the handlebars of his heavy, black bicycle between his arms, and pedalled out into the long, deserted back roads behind Mosgiel. Here you can find the fields, and ditches overrun by weeds, the high holly hedges and the hills off in the distance lying like a woman on her side. Here is the old landing strip and hangers used for the reserves in World War Two. Everything silent and shrunk against the largeness of the sky, filled with the heat and the rasping of crickets. I have no memory of Grandpa talking on this bike ride. What would he have said if he had known this was our last time together? What parts of him are parts of me?

Quite sometime after that trip my mother gave away a pile of 78s. She gave them to a kid I knew that had a wind up gramophone and collected 78s to play on it. I didn't know what 78s were at that time, or why she had them or what they meant.

They were her father's records.

Grandpa liked opera arias and he bought 78s of Bjoerling, Caruso and crooners such as Lanza. He was a decent tenor himself and liked to sing at church or embarrass my Gran by serenading her while she scrubbed potatoes or shelled peas at the kitchen sink. My mother has some tapes that have Grandpa singing on them. He sings a lot of hymns. There is a kind of plodding melancholy to many hymns which can be comforting or depressing depending on how well they are sung. On these tapes he sometimes sings them well, and sometimes without much enthusiasm. He was quite old then, although he was never really old, and his voice wavers a bit, especially as the recording goes on. I think he was attracted to the emotional weight of certain hymns and sang them well. A hymn with a decent melody, and a reasonable lyric or two gets a better treatment than a dirge with noble protestations of faith. He also sang the odd Italian tune: O Sole Mio, that kind of thing.

Buffalo 66 is one of my favourite movies. In it the anti-hero’s father sings a song. He sings it in the spare room of the suburban family home. It has been clear from the scenes before that he is not a good father. That he is a bitter and angry man. The son remains at the kitchen table, upset, while the father takes the girls he believes is his son’s wife down to the spare room to hear him sing. He’s made tapes. He finds a Nelson Riddle record. It’s a record of orchestral arrangements that you can sing a long to. He sings Fools Rush In (Where Angels Fear to Tread). As he sings it the lighting changes in the room: it goes dark, there is a soft spot light on the father, he is standing in front of red drapes, and he spreads out his arms. It is magic. All anger and bitterness is gone, the accumulated muddle of the room has disappeared, he is alone with himself, made better by song.

I think that The Great Caruso must have been a very influential movie. It certainly made the reputation of its star, Mario Lanza. While Lanza was often criticised for being an amateur without the stamina to learn an operatic role, in truth this was probably part of his appeal to all the men around the world who could sing a nice song at parties, or in churches and dream of other things. Lanza, like Caruso, was also a bit of a ham. Technicians tend to forget, when they criticise tenors and sopranos who are hams, that opera is also about drama. It is not sufficient simply to hit all the notes, you have to sell the song as well. Caruso could sell a song. Even though it is going too far to take a big sobbing intake of breath in an opera aria as Caruso does in Pagliacci I still love it because he seems to be swept away by the drama itself.

I have never much liked art that is realistic. Art for me has always been about escape. Realistic art is false. If you want realism just open your eyes: it's a toddler reaching for food at the table; it's a mother with rollers in her hair; it's breakfast tables and net curtains. Do you think Grandpa sang Italian arias in Mosgiel in the 1960s because he wanted realism?

If you read closely between the lines of this story I think you can see what I am saying: that music comes to me from my Grandpa through my mother; that I inherit opera from him and perhaps the urge to perform; perhaps also some of my dark clouds and my desire for escape. But then what do I really know of him?

It's a nice story.