'the river runs low tonight...'

(The video, unfortunately, is one of those absolutely vapid ones on the tube. It has, in my humble opinion, absolutely nothing to do with the song or its concerns. However, it is the ONLY ONE on the tube of this song; it was not a hit. If you see any other videos of this song, tell me about it.)

The cover photo on Bruce Hornsby and The Range's LP The Way It Is (1986), is captioned 'a diesel rolls in silhouette.....eastbound', on Chesapeake Bay Bridge, Virginia, looking towards the sunset. It's a powerful photo, with the horizontal motif and the single diesel inching its way on the bridge, against the backdrop of the golden colours of sunset. The photo is repeated three times in the CD sleeve - once on the cover, then again on the inside middle page (in black and white) and finally on the back cover.

The photo is absolutely pivotal because it simply personifies and amplifies the colour of the songs on the LP. There isn't a song on the LP which draws us away from the lovely colour of golden, warm evening turning to deep golden sunset, with all the hues between.There's a longing in many of the songs, especially in the tone of Bruce Hornsby's piano, a kind of deep ache of adolescence lost in the warm glow of a summer evening. I sound absolutely and over-the-top romantic about it, both deservedly and proudly too.

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For a long time, "Mandolin Rain" was the only Bruce Hornsby track I had ever heard, and that was way back in 1988. Then during the early days of MTV in India, I heard a few tracks from his second LP with The Range, Scenes From The Southside (1988), on MTV's 'Classic MTV' show, a retro show. I absolutely loved his unique country-inflected piano. Finally, sometime in 2005, a friend of mine visited Singapore and absolutely insisted she bring back something for me. I mentioned Bruce Hornsby, and she brought back The Way It Is. That's when I heard LP-length Bruce Hornsby for the first time.

No song on the LP actually puts the powerful cover photo into words and music more powerfully than "The River Runs Low". It is probably the best-written track on the LP, bringing Hornsby's lyricism to the fore.

The time-signature is a bit hard to catch, because there is no drum backbeat and the only rhythm seems to be from an accordion and from some rhythmic chord-work. The piano just drenches the entire song in a sunset glow. You could figure out chords, but they're not going to help if you try to play it, because there is lyricism even in the way Hornsby plays the piano, a lyricism absolutely essential to the song.

It's a beautiful, tough love song illuminated with sunset's golden hues, a songwriter's dream. For some reason, its sound brings back an adolescent me, back in school in 1986. Though 1986 was the exact year of its release, I never heard the song till twenty years later; and even then, I could date it back to 1986 with accuracy. It was in school I picked up this absolute goner-dewy-eyed romanticism about evening, the hour between a quarter past four till the time sunset splashes its blood-red hues across the sky, possibly half past five, lingering to when darkness covers all. And there were girls with the sunset in their hair, about whom I could say "you're always drifting through my mind..." (and never did. Was way too geeky to say things...) That's how adolescent loves are - strong, resilient, astonishingly mature, firmly prepared to go to any length it would take:

Up in the air they're heading south
The sky is light to the west of town
With a little cash I could get around
You know I'd come out there and find you

The chords on the last four bars, with the iconic seventh note runs, are the song's pinnacle for me.

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The rain held back again
Haven't felt a drop since you went away
Outside of town, the hills are brown
I guess way out there you'd call 'em golden

Lines outside the welfare store
The clock is stopped at the bank next door
They yelled like hell when the boys left home
Now just like you they're all gone

The river runs low tonight
Eyes are closed on the waterline
The river runs low tonight
And you're always drifting through my mind

The river runs low tonight
And nobody waits for the tides to rise
But I'm gonna wait till you make the river run high

The old man's gettin' on
Keeps the morning paper in his overcoat
It keeps him warm in the cold storm
And he told me today I look a little lonely

Up in the air they're heading south
The sky is light to the west of town
With a little cash I could get around
You know I'd come out there and find you

The river runs low tonight
Eyes are closed on the waterline
The river runs low tonight
And you're always drifting through my mind

The river runs low tonight
And nobody waits for the tides to rise
But I'm gonna wait till you make the river run high

Up in the air they're heading south
The sky is light to the west of town
With a little cash I could get around
You know I'd come out there and find you

The river runs low tonight
Eyes are closed on the waterline
The river runs low tonight
And you're always drifting through my mind

The river runs low tonight
And nobody waits for the tides to rise
But I'm gonna wait till you make the river run high

"Say goodbye to Hollywood...say goodbye my baby..."

In 1988, as a teenager, Songs In The Attic was one of the first live 'rock' LPs I ever heard. I learned a bit later that Billy Joel compiled it to showcase songs that sounded dramatically different when played live, from their studio recordings. It's certainly true about "Say Goodbye To Hollywood". The studio version, recorded on his LPTurnstiles (1976), generally thought to be his best LP, never gives any inkling of the anthemic, grand vulnerability of its live performances. The best of these performances of the song is the one captured on Songs In The Attic.

Songs In The Attic, released in 1981, is an excellent souvenir of live performances of songs from LPs before his first big hit LP, the No. 24 UK/No. 2 US The Stranger (1977). Consequently, familiar hits from later well-known LPs The Stranger, 52nd Street (1978), Glass Houses (1981) and An Innocent Man (1983) are not found on it. Even so, the performances on Songs In The Attic are picked well, with care, revealing a very decent songwriter putting in some very decent paces in live concerts. Most of the performances are definitive, representative of the best possible Billy Joel sound you can hope to hear, and the songs are definitely among his finest songwriting hours.

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In "Say Goodbye To Hollywood", there's a vulnerability for those who actually dig deeper into its lyrics. Strangely, this may not be evident to the casual listener or on the first listen, and if you don't actually look closer, you might never feel it at all. Billy Joel had always showed he was capable of this;  even so, it would be hard to find a song on his earlier LPs (or even later LPs) that captured it as well as this one. In later years, he would strike further out in this direction in his best ever song, "The Stranger", in 1977, but "Say Goodbye To Hollywood" remains, for me, still his finest hour. It would be accurate for me to say that except for "The Stranger" and a couple of other songs from later LPs, he would never better the quality of "Say Goodbye To Hollywood".

Somehow, somehow, the opening scenes in Billy Wilder's romantic, dark film Sunset Boulevard (1950) are evoked by the song, probably because of its anthemic feel, its hint of a deeper aura of romantic vulnerability, and also because both film and song are definitive statements about Hollywood. The anthemic feel is heightened by the drum intro, grandstanding sax solo and the strident guitar jangle, not to mention the repeated entreaties on the phrase "say goodbye to Hollywood". For me, the song is also redolent of other classic films - Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945) and Joseph L Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950; the song is especially evocative of Bette Davis in that film).

The lyrics essentially seem to hint at pleas to find 'realness' and 'soul anchors' (kindred spirits, if you like the phrase) in eventually unreal, tinsel, glittering Hollywood. Such inner loneliness (tending to delusion), we suspect, though often felt by people in showbiz, is but rarely, if ever, addressed by the rewarding successes of career and celebrity. The opening scene in Sunset Boulevard says it all; "Say Goodbye To Hollywood" only hints, dimly but firmly, at scenes like that.

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Bobby's drivin' through the city tonight
Through the lights in a hot new rent-a-car
He joins the lovers in his heavy machine
It's a scene down on Sunset Boulevard
Say goodbye to Hollywood
Say goodbye, my baby
Say goodbye to Hollywood
Say goodbye, my baby

Johnny's takin' care of things for a while
And his style is so right for troubadours
They got him sitting with his back to the door
Now he won't be my fast gun anymore
Say goodbye to Hollywood
Say goodbye, my baby
Say goodbye to Hollywood
Say goodbye, my baby

Movin' on is a chance you take
Any time you try to stay - together
Say a word out of line
And you find that the friends you had
Are gone forever
Forever

So many faces in and out of my life
Some will last
Some will just be now and then
Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes
I'm afraid it's time for goodbye again
Say goodbye to Hollywood
Say goodbye, my baby
Say goodbye to Hollywood
Say goodbye, my baby

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Other live performances of the song, though not as definitive or evocative as the one that appears on the album:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ5Nek7HFqw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOBQC0w4Mms (this one has very good amateur shots of Hollywood, I'd say essential to what I've written in this post. There is a photo of the legendary, ornate staircase in the last scene in Sunset Boulevard where Gloria Swanson speaks her famous line, "I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. De Mille!")

"....take the shadow from my eyes..."

Songwriter: Les Holroyd
Performed by: Barclay James Harvest
Album: Time Honoured Ghosts (1975)
When I heard it: Some time between 2002 and 2006, though I cannot be sure of exactly which year. Probably 2005.

There was a time when being in a rock band was associated with a certain kind of mythology (and I'm not talking about the mythological motifs that heavy metallers mine for their lyrics). It meant looking, dressing, playing, being, sounding and living a specific way, mythologised and romanticised. It was spoken of in legendary tones, and typified what rock bands looked like in the 70s. You know, the band photos that would appear on album sleeves or at the back of them.

It was also associated with a specific kind of sound. Now unless you were a heavy metaller, or a country music fan, this specific "rock" sound usually meant either heavy or grooved progressive rock (the kind that finally landed up becoming undistinguished peddled AOR with bands like Journey (later albums), Styx, Foreigner, Kansas and the like.) It had very little rock'n'roll in it, or even blues; but it did have classical sounding, pompous heaviness, a certain pretentious, derivative intellectualism which showed in expansive, literary-sounding lyrics.

At many ends of this progressive spectrum, were the primary influences (themselves influenced by more seminal early bands); Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Cream and The Yardbirds (the blues and heavy-rock influence) and to a lesser extent, bands like Ten Years After. There were also lyrical, classical and 'art' pretensions - bands like Pink Floyd (so-called 'psychedelia', though Floyd were ultimately merely peddlers of doom), Moody Blues, art-rockers Genesis, and classical rockers Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and Yes. There was some British influence, though not too appreciably, from progressive rockers there - The Beatles and The Who mainly, as well as art-rockers from the Canterbury scene - Gong in particular.

Why all this history? Because it has a lot to do with Barclay James Harvest's essential sound in the song I showcase today. The song is called "Sweet Jesus", from their 1975 album Time Honoured Ghosts. I HAVE to admit I bought this album more for the beautiful, artsy album cover and the romanticised album title rather than any great love for BJH's music. I must admit I am not a BJH fan at all, except for this one song. "Sweet Jesus" is a forgotten track, and didn't hit at all, though it appears on what is generally believed to be their best album.

The sound I'm trying to get at, is essentially distilled from Deep Purple's (and Led Zeppelin too) overdrive guitar - Hammond organ interlock, essentially lofty-sounding ballad forms with 'progressive' chords and mystic, dreamy themes. It's not exactly art-rock, or psychedelia, it is just a leftover from both, neither distinguished, nor truly 'progressive'. The origins of "Sweet Jesus" are there, but there are charming leavening touches like a smidgen of songwriting, and using a rhythm acoustic guitar rather than an electric. This was the kind of sound we were all after in the 70s.

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"Sweet Jesus", for all its sordid musical sound origins that I've just provided, has become quite dear to me. One of the factors is nostalgia for the 70s, yes, undeniably; but it is also more than that. Somehow, it manages, in my mind, to escape its derivative origins and its predictable sound, and to bring to mind the green-grey swirling mists of England. The specific instrument that does this for me, in "Sweet Jesus", is Stuart Wolstenholme's mellotron organ, and to a lesser extent, the smattering of harmony in the song. I can imagine the Cliffs of Moher, shrouded in mist and wisps of rain-laden cloud, or St. John's cliffs on Hoy, or even Slieve League; my mind stays on the heights of frosted-out Connor Pass in the Dingle peninsula.

This is why, for all its pretensions, a song like "Sweet Jesus", from a band like Barclay James Harvest, finds its way into the Cumulonimbus Archives.

Where's the lady and the time I used to know
I think that I've been on the road too long
Scenes of better days are pictured in my head
And haunting me those old familiar songs

Oh sweet Jesus hear me cry
Let me see a clearing sky
For tomorrow I may be back home again
So take the shadow from my eyes

Sunday morning comes I'm feeling kind of down
I can't see back to where it all began
And I know you'd help me if you only could
I don't know why or where or who I am

Oh sweet Jesus hear me cry
Let me see a clearing sky
For tomorrow I may be back home again
So take the shadow from my eyes
Take the shadow from my eyes

I'd not read too much into the mention of "Jesus". Honestly, I'd have to say, it seems less like a prayer than a mindless plea from a nostalgia-ridden one in the haze of a drug-induced hangover. Even so, it would be fair to say the phrases "let me see a clearing sky" and "take the shadow from my eyes" ring with as much conviction and truth as the song allows.

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Barclay James Harvest's major influences were always thought to be Pink Floyd, The Moody Blues, and to a lesser extent, The Beatles (evidenced by song "Titles" on Time Honoured Ghosts, a loose compendium of Beatles tunes and titles). The album has generally been considered their most coherent and consistent effort, their sound always typified as 'mellotron-based rock with lead guitars'. It's mostly ponderous, pretentious sounding stuff with just a little spontaneity and an experimental feel, unlike Moody Blues at their most leaden, but very like Moody Blues at their most melodic.

The absolutely beautiful cover art is by Bill Dare, working off a painting by American artist Maxfield Parish called "Harvest".