THE FACT OF THE MATTER
BY PAUL HOPKINS
Twelve years ago, I found myself dancing with a young woman in Durban by the Indian Ocean. It was a typical balmy African night as I endeavoured to keep pace with her beguiling Zulu rhythms, moving to the music of Mafikizolo, when the deejay stopped himself in his tracks and announced that Donna Summer had left the building.
After a moment’s reflection by the 500 plus in the venue, some of whom would not have known of Summer, we returned to a more fevered trance with the disco diva’s I Feel Love.
Back home came the news that Bee Gee Robin Gibb had danced his last dance after a long battle with cancer. The world was an emptier place that week with the death of Robin, brother in one of the great popular songwriting teams, up there with the Beatles, the Beach Boys and Abba, as the creators of some of the most enduring melodies (and lyrics) that our ears have been privileged to tune in to.
I am reminded of that week as the summer gigs and music festivals continue to roll out and I watch the younger generation heading off to this gig or the other at 3Arena or Croke Park or a love-fest weekend up to their knees in mud as they play out an inevitable component of what it is to be be young. Music.
Music has forever been a component of my life. All of my life an audience to music, of all genres. I have a eclectic appetite and each period in my life has been soundtracked by it — rock when I rolled with the punches as a young man, solid country when in the good years of a wife and children, jazz when those years came unstuck and the melancholia of middle age kicked in. And always Classical.
As a young man I could boogie with the best ’til breakfast. These days the party’s pretty much over but I still find the night and the small hours bewitching – and the finest time to listen to music.
In his story The Crack-Up, F Scot Fitzgerald wrote that line “In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning”, but I like to think that at three o’clock in the morning the party, or whatever has replaced it in my life these days, is just getting started.
Talking with best-selling novelist Douglas Kennedy — we knew each other when he studied at Trinity, Dublin, in the Eighties — he asked why is it that cities are at their best at night? And why do cities become so infinitely more secretive and shadowy when neon defines the horizon? Maybe the analogy was one which could be made with jazz, said Kennedy. I agree. Jazz truly works best in a basement room or shadowy dive in the small small hours of the morning.
“I still have a splendid memory of being in a below-ground club in Bucharest some years ago,’’ said the man from Maine, “hearing this amazing tenor saxophonist blazing away with a trio… And smoking was still allowed, so a thick nicotine fog hung over the proceedings. And I remember sharing a bottle of vodka with the people at my table and thinking: this is the sort of scene that can only happen ’round about midnight.’’
Maybe, I no longer hang out much around midnight. But I do remember when living for five years in Belfast finding my way to Bert’s at The Merchant when I could not sleep and found jazz at midnight bewitching. Once again, propping up the bar, a whiskey to hand, whiling away the wee hours to some nebulous nocturnal notes.
Back in 1973 I was a rookie in the Irish Press when a story came over the wires that the burnt body of a rock star had been found in the California desert. The weird circumstances surrounding his cremation are to this day still uncertain, but that night in September Gram Parsons was dead at 26, from drugs and alcohol. Despite his youth, his influence, as part of the seminal Byrds, The Flying Burritos and one-time lover and side-kick to Emmylou Harris, cannot be underestimated, given the role of the Byrds and Gram in making country cool for rock aficionados. (Any worthy Wilco or Eagles fan knows his Sweethearts Of The Rodeo).
As Ryan Adams put it: “If someone tells you they have a cool record collection and they don’t have a Gram Parsons album in it, shoot ‘em.’’
