From whiskey river:
For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid
There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot — air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That’s the world, and we all live there.
(William Stafford [source])
…and:
So strange, life is. Why people do not go around in a continual state of surprise is beyond me.
(William Maxwell)
…and:
Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
KINDNESS in another’s trouble,
COURAGE in your own.
(Adam Lindsay Gordon [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Graham Chapman: Trouble at mill.
Carol Cleveland: Oh no — what kind of trouble?
Chapman: One on’t cross beams gone owt askew on treddle.
Cleveland: Pardon?
Chapman: One on’t cross beams gone owt askew on treddle.
Cleveland: I don’t understand what you’re saying.
Chapman: (slightly irritatedly and with exaggeratedly clear accent) One of the cross beams has gone out askew on the treddle.
Cleveland: Well what on earth does that mean?
Chapman: I don’t know — Mr Wentworth just told me to come in here and say that there was trouble at the mill, that’s all — I didn’t expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.
(JARRING CHORD)
(The door flies open and Cardinal Ximinez of Spain (Palin) enters, flanked by two junior cardinals. Cardinal Biggles (Jones) has goggles pushed over his forehead. Cardinal Fang (Gilliam) is just Cardinal Fang)
Ximinez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise…surprise and fear…fear and surprise… Our two weapons are fear and surprise… and ruthless efficiency… Our three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency… and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope… Our four… no… Amongst our weapons… Amongst our weaponry… are such elements as fear, surprise… I’ll come in again.
(Exit and exeunt)
Chapman: I didn’t expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.
(JARRING CHORD)
(The cardinals burst in)
Ximinez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms — Oh damn! (To Cardinal Biggles) I can’t say it — you’ll have to say it.
Biggles: What?
Ximinez: You’ll have to say the bit about ‘Our chief weapons are…’
Biggles (rather horrified): I couldn’t do that…
(Ximinez bundles the cardinals outside again)
Chapman: I didn’t expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.
(JARRING CHORD)
(The cardinals enter)
Biggles: Er… Nobody… um…
Ximinez: Expects…
Biggles: Expects… Nobody expects the… um… the Spanish… um…
Ximinez: Inquisition.
Biggles: I know, I know! Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. In fact, those who do expect —
Ximinez: Our chief weapons are…
Biggles: Our chief weapons are… um… er…
Ximinez: Surprise…
Biggles: Surprise and…
Ximinez: Okay, stop. Stop. Stop there — stop there. Stop. Phew! Ah!… our chief weapons are surprise… blah blah blah. Cardinal, read the charges.
Fang: You are hereby charged that you did on diverse dates commit heresy against the Holy Church. “My old man said follow the…”
Biggles: That’s enough. (To Cleveland) Now, how do you plead?
Cleveland: We’re innocent.
Ximinez: Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Superimposed caption: DIABOLICAL LAUGHTER
Biggles: We’ll soon change your mind about that!
Superimposed caption: DIABOLICAL ACTING
(Monty Python, “The Spanish Inquisition” [source])
Now, one of those fairy-tale stories which weave through pop-music history:
The year was 1991. On the streets of Detroit, a forty-one-year-old blind black man played the guitar and sang his songs. Born and having grown up in Alabama, in a family of ten, his name was Robert Bradley; and at age 16, with his family, he’d made his way to Detroit. At some point in the 1960s, he moved to California with a cousin, knocked around from city to city there, and performed in a number of bands. “I sang in different rock groups and on the weekends. Teenage parties, proms, stuff like that. Then I played a lot in church. Saturday night at the bar, Sunday morning in church,” he told one newspaper.
Eventually, Bradley returned to Detroit. Already pretty wizened by then, he was playing and singing one day on the sidewalk, as usual. He didn’t know (we assume) that somewhere above him, through an open window, guitarist Michael Nehra, bassist Andrew Nehra, and drummer Jeff Fowlkes of a Detroit band called Second Self were listening to him. They listened to him for an hour, in fact.
“There are no words to explain what happened to my brother and I as we heard him down on the street,” Michael Nehra once told groovengine (apparently at one time a “music guide and streaming radio destination,” although the site’s no longer active). “I’ve never had a feeling like that. I know it is a cliché, but it was truly a spiritual experience.”
After trying for a few years to convince Bradley that they were serious about forming a band with him, the Nehras and Fowlkes finally succeeded. The result: the 1994 album — its title the name of the new group — Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise.
Writing of that debut album, Amazon’s official reviewer Geoffrey Himes says:
Like the late street-singer-turned-major-label artist Ted Hawkins, Bradley is not a blues traditionalist. He loves the soul music of the ’60s and ’70s, but the experience of playing that material on an acoustic guitar on sidewalks created a hybrid sound that’s neither old folk nor new pop. And when he started writing his own songs in this weird genre, he came up with arrestingly personal testimony, like his plea to the “Governor” to turn his electricity back on before the singer’s woman walks out on him. Or his memories of his youth “Once Upon a Time” when Marvin Gaye sang and the world was full of dreams that slipped through our hands. Because Bradley’s bandmates come out of a different tradition, they avoid the usual R&B clichés. They also provide surprisingly sympathetic, admirably restrained backing to his peculiar vision.
The Nehras departed in 2002, after their third album, but Bradley has continued with Fowlkes and others. (Their most recent album came out a few months ago. One reviewer called it “one of the finest Soul albums in many years.”) Using Amazon’s “customers also bought” feature, I see a range of musicians which might give you an idea where his music falls, or to whom it appeals anyway: Derek Trucks Band, Sonny Landreth, John Fogerty, Eric Clapton, Back Door Slam, Ryan Bingham, Mudcrutch, Tab Benoit, Van Morrison, Steve Winwood, JJ Grey, Mofro, My Morning Jacket, Susan Tedeschi, Jeff Healey, and Kings of Leon.
Here’s the video of one of the cuts, “Once Upon a Time,” on the Blackwater Surprise debut album; lyrics appear below.
Lyrics:
Once Upon a Time
(by Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise)Once upon a time, when I was in high school
I was in love with you, lady and you treated me so cool.
I was drivin’ a Chevy ’72 had 4 on the floor, girl,
one hundred 20 it would doI remember Marvin Gaye, singin’,
Let’s Get It On…There was a war, baby, somewhere across the sea
I didn’t wanna go and fight, girl, but you were really lovin’ me.
I remember Martin Luther King,
Lord he was the man, baby, that gave us all a dream.I remember Marvin Gaye, singin’,
Let’s Get It On…
Don’t play with my love no,
I remember Marvin Gaye, singin’, Let’s Get It On.We used to have sweet music in the park
Lord up at Monterey they sang throughout the dark
You used to wear girl, those hot pants
When you strolled down the hall,
all the boys wanted a chance…I remember Marvin Gaye, singin’,
Let’s Get It On…
Don’t play with my love, no…
I remember Otis Redding, Sittin’ at the Dock of the Bay —
ahh, he went away..
I remember Sam Cooke ya’ll, Bring It On Home To Me,
from your love I can’t be free…
I remember Elvis Presley, and the Blue Suede Shoes
ahh it gave me the blues.
I remember Marvin Gaye, singin’…let’s get it on
Information about Bradley and Blackwater Surprise is scattered across the Web. The Wikipedia article was clearly written by a fan, a publicist, or a member of the group; it’s somewhat painful to read. The MTV site includes a capsule bio from the AllMusic Guide. For the background story — although links to its own online sources are no longer functional, and it seems to include no information more recent than 2001 — a good source is the Encyclopedia.com article. And of course, there’s always the MySpace page if visiting MySpace doesn’t make you as nuts as it does me. :)
DarcKnyt says
Very interesting story. I’ll check out that video. Always lookin’ for a new musical interest. Thanks for the well-written informative post!
Jules says
Your Poetry Friday entries are like little works of well-researched, perfectly put-together art.
“There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye.” I run the risk of sounding really flighty when I share this, but last night I woke up (thanks to a wee child) at something like 3 a.m. As I was trying to get back to sleep, I remembered something like a dream—sorta a dream, sorta not, hard to describe—a place I suddenly realized I visit often in my head at night. And I was wondering at the wonder of it all — that I was *just* remembering it, this place I ALWAYS visited, something not unlike Afterlife Central (good news is that it was pretty and very green), yet I never seem to be able to recall it. As in, “oh yeah, THAT place. Of course. I go there all the time.” Like the window cracked for a second, and I got a glimpse inside, I dunno, a parallel life.
See? Flaky-sounding, I know.
John says
Darc: Okay, foiled again… I just logged in with the idea of deleting all that back story about Bradley and leaving the last paragraph in place for those curious enough to hunt it down. Never imagined that someone (other than Google) would have actually scanned the thing yet!
(I’m still in the grip of Web-research fever, from the two-part Begin the Beguine posts — Part 2 will be up tomorrow — and I need to shake that before my average post length starts to bump up again 2K words. :)
Thanks for stopping by, and glad you enjoyed my weekly whiskey river-fueled post!
John says
Jules: We must have just missed each other in the comment antechamber just then.
One of the regular features of my dreams is that I’m driving somewhere (sometimes these dreams include actual maps). And one of the regular features of my driving-somewhere dreams is that I come to an intersection which I recognize: that house on the corner, that tavern over here, this little rise in the road as you approach. Even on waking, I sometimes “recognize” the intersection, although I can almost never remember from where.
And then — rarely, but it’s happened — comes the real-life moment when I actually am in a car, on a road trip somewhere I’ve never been. The road before me goes up a little… and then there’s a corner… a house… and a tavern…
“Flaky,” you say your story sounds? Ha!
John says
Jules, P.S.: “Afterlife Central” — oooh, I love that phrase, and especially the idea –accommodating departures as well as arrivals!
(reCaptcha: Episcopal prevost. It turns out that Prevost is a manufacturer of buses, so maybe Afterlife Central is like a Trailways depot instead of Grand Central Station.)
Jules says
Okay, whew. Glad you understand, John. Isn’t it all fascinating?
Jules says
p.s. I also keep having those dreams/moments at night in which I have some brilliant idea, and then I wake — and it’s gone. I did that at some point last night with a poem. For someone who’s limited in her creativity, as I am, this is particularly frustrating.
John says
Jules: You probably know of the suggestion which some creativity gurus make — that you keep a notebook or journal and pen by the bed, so you can train yourself to wake up at those moments of inspiration and hurry to jot it all down.
I’ve tried this a few times. Maybe I gave up too soon, but the only results I ever remember getting were illegible scrawls. If I were a bit more mystically inclined, I might think these were spirit writings in the alphabet of the sleep dimension. But, umm, no.
marta says
The line though that I’m taking with me from this is the one about being continually surprised. My students are rarely amazed (interested) in anything, and this disappoints me all the time.
Froog says
There’s a point quite early on in Douglas Adams’ The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (at least, it was one of my favourite gags from the original BBC radio series, but I can’t recall whether it made the transition into the novels) where the protagonists believe themselves to have been killed in an explosion but have in fact been fortuitously transported to the Universe’s most exclusive bar/restaurant, which intially causes them some confusion. Our bemused everyman hero, Arthur Dent, observes: Not so much of an afterlife, more of an aprés vie.”
John says
marta: I wonder what their conversations (spoken, IMed, texted, whatever) among themselves must be about. If they’re going through life 100% unsurprised — especially uninterested — that’s pretty sad. (Or scary.) (Or both.)
Froog: Laughing here about the afterlife line… Adams was truly one of those authors who wrote a lot, but didn’t seem to have written quite enough!