Tag: love

Rapture

Okay, I agree that Valentines Day tends to make me rather… cynical? Too negative, in any case. So as a day after offering, may I present to you this musical item whose lyrics have everything except “happily ever after”: agape, sex and death, ecstasy, and the dissolving of boundaries:

Rapture

Divers asleep
Dream of the deep
Closing over their heads
Lost comrades gather
By their beds
“Her voice in the drowned bells
Was tolling
In rapture we died
Waves o’er us rolling”
Pilots beware
The perilous air
Streaming under your wings
She will betray you
As she sings
Her voice in the hot sun
Is calling
In rapture you die
Flying and falling
Lovers who lie
Beneath the night sky
Neither speak nor hear
In the perfect stillness
She is near
Her voice in the heart’s blood
Comes roaring
In rapture they die
Diving and soaring.

— Lyrics by Judy Henske
— Music by Jerry Yester

from the album Farewell Aldebaran.

Farewell Aldebaran is among my favorite psychedelic albums and “Rapture” is my favorite cut off that album. The album was issued in 1969 on Frank Zappa’s “Straight” label. Musically and most especially lyrically, it is a remarkable bit of work, even if a few of the cuts only skim the top of mundane. Some of the cuts feature a Mellotron, an analog means of sampling sounds and playing them with a keyboard.

Judy Henske is originally from Wisconsin (or maybe the old Riverview amusement park in Chicago, if you wish to believe Jack Nitzsche’s liner notes elsewhere). She eventually got into folk music on the west coast, becoming known as “the Queen of the Beatniks”. Jerry Yester’s main claim to fame is as a member of  The New Christy Minstrels and later The Lovin’ Spoonful. At the time Farewell Aldebaran was issued, Henske and Yester were married but separated not long after.

I only have one other album by Henske in my collection, The Death-Defying Judy Henske. It is a live concert recording and it immediately precedes Farewell Aldebaran in her discography (liner notes by Nitzsche). It was a junk store find and seemed to be in near-unplayable condition. Then a few years later I replaced the needle on my turntable and what a remarkable difference! Apparently the new needle played a different, less eroded part of the groove.

Judy Henske is still in the music business. You can get a CD reissue of Farewell Aldebaran at her web site; possibly it’s available for download through iTunes though you’ll need to check that yourself. I’m running Linux / Ubuntu so checking iTunes is a bit hard for me to do.

Yester seems to have come to a sorry end, and I’ll say no more about it.

Courtship Politics

Well, it’s Valentines Day, a holiday that has happily evolved into yet another sentimentalized incentive for gluttony: huzzah for capitalism and corn syrup. That said, it might be fun to look backwards to the old Louis Jordan song “Beware, Brother, Beware”. It’s a male view, ladies, okay? Now, brothers, listen up:

David Bromberg’s 1970s cover of the song is also great fun, and I prefer it, though the dogmatically judgemental among us will probably mutter something about cultural appropriation (especially since Louis Jordan is sometimes counted as the inventor of rock n’ roll)…

The song belongs to a different world, I think. But keep in mind that “breach of promise to marry” is still a basis for a law suit in roughly half the States in the Union though most of them limit what money can be recovered (in Illinois, “documented wedding expenses” only according to Wikipedia). It was right before (1930s) this song was written (1946) that “breach of promise to marry” started becoming a civil matter rather than a potential criminal prosecution. I recall reading that “breach of promise to marry” was a leading sex crime in the U.S. during the 1920s. I can’t find a cite for that but, yes, men — it was usually men — could go to jail for breaking an engagement. Even after a revolution, people continue reading from the old scripts.

I’ve been out of circulation for a long time… Dating got really weird back in middle age, too weird really, and not much fun. At times the experience felt like something scripted, except the director (and who, pray tell, was that?) had neglected to provide me with my copy of the script. At other times it felt like I was on a job interview. This is not meant to be shade over any of the women; they all could have been worthwhile people to have as a friend. That “friend” was not an apparent option was the one of the strange aspects of the time.

Other things also moved me to the shelf. Often I hadn’t the money to take myself on a date never mind anyone else and, when I had money, I generally hadn’t much time. No complaints, mind you. Had I felt all that strongly about it, I would have found a way of doing something about it. After all, isn’t that an eternal trope of popular entertainment? Love, or possibly lust, will find a way.

The last date I was on, years ago, was unexpected and involuntary on my part, but I’ll save that story for another time. Maybe.

Dreamland

In the night the dead arise: lost loves, broken friendships.
You among them. Well met, old friend.
We sit and speak; of what, I do not remember.
It doesn’t matter. It never did.
It is a futile love though love remains
But in dreams alone reunion.

— Yip