COUNTRY OF SONG

Terry McArthur

Blog 34 | March, 2024

 Without the songwriter there is a void, without the songline the song will wither on the vine, leaving only the shadow of a song. Processed, leeched , commodified. Sold in the fodder halls of shitfuckery to a generation who have been trained to believe free music is their birthright.

i ALL GONE TO LOOK GO LOOK FOR AMERICA

The country of song lives in the soil of our history, harvested and transmitted from singer to singer. Bloodline, songline singing through our circuitry, connecting us to who we are and where we come from.

Once you enter this country, there is no turning back. Whether alone or in the company of others once you arrive the country of song is alive and present

singing in each step you take, each breath you draw.

I was travelling to America carrying the brute weight of mythology, rumour, and unadulterated hearsay I was haunted by tall tales, I was searching out the one song to sing me to my soul.

I began thinking if a person searched long enough and hard enough the country of song almost certainly had to be the kind of place you’d find a young Bob Dylan leaning out a Minnesota window, catching the strains of the new America blowing all the way from the beat bars and and folk cafes of Greenwich Village.

iii HOTELS

So when I landed in LA I told myself I was just passing through. I had yet to understand the folly of my misconception, I had yet to comprehend what lay in waiting behind the metronomic precision of Don Henley intoning: “You can check out but you can never leave."

Late that night as I lay awake in the Hotel Beverley Terrace I began hearing song after song pinging across Laurel Canyon. I swear I heard a young Joni Mitchell laughing as she walked past those two cats in her yard, arm in arm with Graeme Nash, long before she wrote Big Yellow Taxi, long before she so fiercely resisted the folly of fame trying to put up all those parking lots in her winnowing heart.

iv WE HAVE ALL BEEN HERE BEFORE

Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, 1969.

 David Crosby ( AKA Croz) was L.A’s first fully blown Hippy Rock God, King of Cool, Emperor of Endless Pleasure, sleeping with a bevy of impossibly beautiful women, smoking only the finest hand rolled weed, dropping copious amounts of Owsley's Monterey Purple, edging towards the epiphany of those celestial harmonies he would go on to sing with Texan guitar-prodigy Stephen Stills and Joni Mitchell’s man at the time,ex-UK Holly heart-throb, Graeme Nash.

Back then Mr Tambourine Man had already jingle-jangled Croz and his fellow Byrds to the top of the charts, sending out a once in a lifetime flag call to that hearse driving Winnipeg folkie Neil Young , the hands down handsome Jackson Browne, the irresistible charm of Sweet Baby James and life in the fast line silver spooners, the ultimate serial septum snorters , those cocaine cowboy Californicators, The Eagles. All presen† and unaccounted for, their songs pressed into 120 grams of coal black vinyl spinning at 33rpm on the turntable of America's young hearts.

iv   THE KING OF POP IS DEAD

And then driving down Santa Monica Boulevard on one last ride, something with the smell of prophecy and the taint of the forsaken came shooting through the tangerine sun

At 2.26pm on June 25th 2009 Michael Jackson, the polyphonic genius , the undisputed King of Pop was pronounced stone cold dead. I had to stop and take stock of this seismic shift in the plates of pop history…Los Angeles was awash with mourning. Everyone had a story about The King Of Pop. Here's mine:

No matter how many times the tip of his nose allegedly rolled around the floor of that Coca-Cola film set, no matter how many children he did or did not have sex with, no matter if he slept in a hyperbolic chamber with Bubbles his immaculately tuxedoed chimpanzee and best buddy, no matter how many plastic surgeons did or did not wield the scalpel, slicing, splicing, leeching, bleaching, biting into bone.

No matter how many keyboard warriors proclaimed Wacko Jacko a castrato, no matter how much he did or did not suffer at the brutal hand of his hard arsed daddy Joe, no matter how every one of those Jackson boys was groomed by the Master of Motown Berry Gordy for the onslaught of fame.

The King of Pop was dead. Nothing was going to change that.

v REVELATION

Maybe the answers lay waiting in the country of song. Maybe the answers are riding shotgun on the shoulder of Little Richard pounding out Tutti Frutti on an endless line of upright pianos. Maybe they are waiting in the lightning rod of James Brown live at the Apollo, pompadour glistening in the smoky

spotlight, dropping on one knee, saving the soul of America.

Maybe Curtis Mayfield and Sam Cooke were born in the country of song for the sole purpose of carrying the sacrament of truth, bearing a new proclamation for all with ears and hearts to hear as they sang People Get Ready and A Change Is Gonna Come.

Maybe Robert Johnson is still standing at the crossroads with Leadbelly, B.B King,

Jimi Hendrix and Prince singing and playing louder than all the winds of prejudice and race. Maybe Mahalia Jackson is riding in the front of the bus with Martin Luther King as Sister Rosa Parks takes the wheel, racing deep into the heart of Chuck Berry’s Promised Land.

Maybe the answers lie in a song’s bloodline, in its invisible links with the birthing chain of time. Maybe they are roaming that place where breath is first drawn and flesh first forged from the fire of unconditional love.

Maybe all songs are drawn from that first breath, maybe that first note liberates the entire symphony of existence, consciousness and bliss.

Maybe these kind of answers are something that rises from the depths of the heart, answers so powerful and so perfect no-one can fail to understand the meaning of where they come from or where they need to go. Maybe there are no answers in the country of song. Maybe this is a place where questions and answers are threads woven into the very soul of a song.

Maybe when a song touches you, maybe when a song speaks to you in a voice and with words you have never heard before, maybe when a song bursts open your heart and fills you with the meaning of its creation, cracking open the walls of separation, then you will know you have arrived at this place of revelation, this country of song.

© COUNTRY OF SONG Terry McArthur. Blue Pearl Music.