I'm watching Coldplay on Austin City Limits from 2011 on late night PBS--they come out of the box rocking, singing "Hurts Like Heaven."--after enjoying a bit of "Song of the Mountains," a bluegrass show out of the Lincoln Theater in Marion, Virginia.  At night, alone, the ability to perceive is freed up;  one is left with the deep memory of all the things that have washed over the sub-conscious as the higher mind has led his interests, tastes, curiosities.  In the deep of the night, connections are made.  And if you're feeling too much like crap from what the trees are doing, well, the same thing is going on in your mind.

In the old days, before the great economic encroachment of the self-interested, before real modernity as we know it, people, like the Irish people who still were able to live in the countryside, would gather on Saturday nights with their musical instruments and play music.  "You name it, they played it," Shane MacGowan's mother says with a lilt in a documentary explaining the great background, speaking of her family, uncles, aunts, her parent's generation, her grandparent's.  They would gather at the Tipperary farm house, and play, and drink, and sing, and talk about life.  And this is what Shane MacGowan experienced as a child, in bare farmhouse in the countryside.  It was here, he learned, being placed on tabletops, about music and how to sing.  And why does that stick with me?  Why should it resound in you, you being not as obsessed with the roots of music as I?

But in my middle age, it dawns on me.  MacGowan describes Irish music (which is folk, if we had to place it here in the US) as one of the roots of music, a parent of blues and rock'n'roll and all such things.  And watching Coldplay go through all their hits here, I see that all this anthem rock of theirs is Irish music played by people on a Saturday night.  And maybe the political point is to give people back the musical instrument and a place to play.  The main point, though, this is all familiar.  And that to think there is much distant from what Chris Martin is singing, "up in flames," for example, and, say, the Clancy Brothers, is a complete fallacy.  What works about this music is its truth, its roots, its tradition, its lyrical loyalty.  It's Irish music.  It's music normal human beings play to express themselves, to express the deep beautiful stuff in their hearts.  There is an element of conservation, preservation, to it.  And I'm not surprised by the instrumentation of it.  Congratulations to Coldplay for translating, for being creative with the form.  More ambitious than the Pogues perhaps.  They aren't singing, directly, Greenland Whale Fisheries, or The Auld Triangle, of A Freeborn Man of the Traveling People, and the instrumentation, thanks to what an electric guitar can do these days, has preserved the quality of fiddle reel and bass, tin whistle and guitar.

Oh sure, the tempo changes drastically sometimes.  But the thump is the same.  Coldplay, then, a direct descendent of The Pogues, and that, in some ways, is fairly unique.  Simple melodies, or clips of them, that would be home in any Celtic setting or bar.

In the night, one remembers that musicians are heroes, heroes of that difficult thing called honesty (the honesty of Larkin when he says, in Aubade, "I work all day and get half drunk at night.")

"I used to roll the dice...  "

And this is all something lost, I think anyway, in our habits.  Maybe that's why it would now seem utterly ridiculous to adopt being a musician in the face of economic reality.




No one ever said it would be easy when you started a blog.  No one ever would know, myself included, what the point would be, how it might be anything, how it would 'amount.'   The great thing about a democracy, in the end:  we all can speak our minds.  And somehow through that process, we can iron it all out, find some wisdom, appreciate leaving things as they are.

And that's the way the Irish (i.e., all humanity) are, loving staying up too late and indulging in the freedom of music and lyrical drink, by singing a simple song, even alone, able to share with all the world all around the world.  Musicians are, like Louis Armstrong, the great ambassadors of the world, the ones who express our pain, and to put it away in a box, to forbid it (like Islamist reactionaries in Mali), well, that's never a good idea.

Maybe that's why my old dad, a botanist was always tolerant about taking me to midnight movies where musicians like Hendrix played.


A Saturday Night, without the playing of music, as Milan Kundera knows, is anomaly, useless, strange.