Reminded Me

My older daughter and I had a micro music swap while I was waiting for the lasagna to cook in the oven.   I don’t know quite why but I reached for a rather forceful female punk expression: “Systematic Death” as sung by Eve Libertine on the Crass Album, ‘Penis Envy.’  As I’ve done certainly too many times now, I explained that this was not only what I was listening to, but somehow fervently believing in at her age.   Like her I was a vegetarian in my teens, and this band was the reason why.

I could tell she was intrigued by the vocal onslaught.  She noted how paired down, simple, forceful the music was.  Her turn next and she threw on something by a British band called “1975.”  Good year.  It was a simple, catchy finger picking on guitar with a gravely and reasonably genuine vocal accompaniment.  I told her it sounded like it was recorded in a hotel room, which meant I liked it.

The opening chords reminded me so much of a Beatles outtake I’ve had for years of “She Said” where John is presumably sitting in a hotel room, finger picking one chord and singing “He said, I know what it’s like to be dead.”  As the story goes this spawned from an exasperating conversation he’d had with Peter Fonda that yielded this simple rhyme and later was cast on Revolver in the feminine as the thundering, “She Said.”  I played her this later version as well, which she recognized, though it was technically cheating. 

Her turn and she played me another cut by 1975.  This time it brought to mind Nick Drake whom I hadn’t heard in years.  I couldn’t remember the title of the song “Parasite,” which I located finally after a bit of searching and head scratching.  I tried to draw attention to how unpretentious and plausible the vocal was.  She immediately wrote his name down, which I took as a rather good sign. 

And in my mind Nick Drake was a pale, wispy, half shaven, middle-aged guy busking somewhere in the Tube.  And while I knew he died young, before achieving much of any fame, he always sounded “older.”  The web quickly revealed that his visage remains as haunting as his voice. Tall, withdrawn, nubile, he somewhat reminded me of me-self on very good day, when I had hair to match his.  The son of parents who met in Rangoon, I hadn’t realized he was a student at Cambridge before he’d left and devoted himself to his music.   A mere twenty-six, when he overdosed on the anti depressant amitriptyline at his parents home, in Warwickshire.