As the 60s began in Canterbury, England, the being born as Robert Wyatt-Ellidge was a teenager, living in an old house full of modern music, going from his family’s Bartok and Stravinsky records, to Robert and friends jamming on themes from classical, jazz, and rock. Several such youngbloods made work tapes as the Wilde Flowers, with Robert’s unmistakable vocal approach already emerging. In the mid-60s, Robert now-just-plain-Wyatt and others from the Canterbury orbit were morphing into the Soft Machine, performing at London’s UFO club with Pink Floyd, and then, through several months of 1968, touring the United States with the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Wyatt (who tagged Miles Davis as “my favorite musician of the century,” and has always sounded like a big fan of the late 50s Brazilian ballad “Desafinado”) was the one with the floating, quavering, clarifying, sometimes skylight-pushing voice---also the scruffy little drummer who announced, “I’m nearly five foot seven tall, I like to smoke and drink and ball.” He could needle his audience about living vicariously through rock stars, but also sincerely thank them for thus enabling his success. On the other hand, he cheerfully acknowledged being a servant of sorts: “Music-making still performs the normal functions—background noises for people scheming, seducing, revolting and teaching.” That’s from “The Moon In June,” the last sung track that Wyatt was allowed to record with (no-longer-merely-the) Soft Machine, as other members became increasingly preoccupied with working out extended instrumentals, the results of their jazz-rock studies. Wyatt was a sharply responsive, resourceful drummer---and keyboard player-composer---but his most distinctive jazz-rock talents were for vocal and verbal shifts in mood and attitude, well-demonstrated in the “scheming, seducing,” among other activities, of various copious verses of “The Moon In June.” He departed, and soon assembled Matching Mole, from “Machine Molle,” French pun for one Soft Machine with a permanent place for his voice and other instruments, on a very good self-titled album (also a couple of others officially released long after the band's lifespan, along with more Soft Machine sets featuring Wyatt ). In June of 1973, he left a party by way of a third-story window, then began to climb a drainpipe. He fell, and was paralyzed from the waist down.
On 1974’s Rock Bottom, his first post-accident solo album (the rocker having said bye-bye to “the biped,” as he’s referred in an interview to his pre-fall self), dazzling ballad “Sea Song” confidently greets “…a seasonal beast, like the starfish that drifts in with the tide. So until your blood runs to meet the next full moon, your madness fits in nicely with my own…we’re not alone.” Then in “Last Straw,” he’s “buried deep in the sand.” By 1975’s Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard, he’s a little piece of pork, singing a “Soup Song”: “Now there’s no hope I’m getting out of here, I can feel I’m going soft!” But at least he can wish the soup-eater a tummy ache. On “Team Spirit,” he’s a happier pigskin, taunting the football player who’s kicking him, but also urges, “Use me to go to hell for leather and back,” because they give each other meaning.
Wyatt had recently married lyricist-graphic artist Alfreda Benge, and as he later acknowledged, “Life began to make sense.” She supported and challenged him. In the early 80s, he recorded Elvis Costello and Clive Langer’s “Shipbuilding,” about a worker whose ancient trade and town’s prosperity are finally revived by the UK government’s (shady) Falklands War, to which the shipbuilder’s son is shipped off. (“But I’ll be home by Christmas.”) Wyatt also covered Peter Gabriel’s “Biko,” an elegiac, then galvanizing account of and response to South African activist Steve Biko’s death, while being held by the Apartheid regime‘s police---and Nile Rodgers’ “At Last I Am Free,” a ballad that accounts, note by note, for every step toward and through strength and freedom.
The new album, Comicopera. begins with a couple’s questions and answers for each other, settling and shifting. They make love, while beautiful music lures other characters into making war. The beauty tries to grow out of that, as Wyatt, at the height of his powers as a multi-instrumentalist and arranger, leads other singers, jazz and rock players, all ears on deck, through Spanish and Italian words and melodies. Don Allred
more re Comicopera https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2008/02/speculationsnotes-on-three-songs-of.htm Also a lot of my comments re other RW music are on ILM thread Robert Wyatt: Classic of Dud?
https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=41&threadid=618
No comments:
Post a Comment