CHAPTER 29
In My Eyes
PETER GABRIEL
There are surely many fans of Peter Gabriel’s music—both
before and after his breakthrough hit, “Sledgehammer”—who would be surprised to
learn that he and Phil Collins once played together in a rather famous old
band. A once-relevant group whose best days were far behind them when Phil left
to focus on his solo career in 1992. A band which many critics expected to be
unable to carry on following Peter’s departure seventeen years earlier, after
their final tour together in 1975. A prog rock band called Genesis, whose
members incorporated religious and mythological references into their songs
from their earliest days together.
The soul music-influenced Peter Gabriel met the
classically trained keyboardist Tony Banks in 1963. At the time, they were
thirteen-year-old students at the Charterhouse boys’ boarding school, located
twenty miles southeast of London.
Gabriel and Banks’ band (The Garden Wall) soon
merged with members of another local group (The Anon), including guitarist/bassist
Mike Rutherford. Their original intention was to function as a songwriting
co-operative, creating songs for others to perform.
Lack of interest in their (300+) still-amateurish
lyrical offerings, however, plus a fortuitous visit by Charterhouse alumnus and
pop wonder Jonathan King (“Everyone’s Gone to the Moon”), eventually led to
King producing the still-unnamed group’s first album.
Replete with an attempt at imitating the Bee Gees’
style of writing (“The Silent Sun”), the pretentious overall theme of the
acoustic-based album, as charged by King, was to be a history of the universe
from the beginning of creation to the end of time, in song.
The group was christened “Genesis”—after “Gabriel’s
Angels” had been rejected by all members of the band, save one. King was soon
chagrined, however, to find that there was already a group in the U.S. performing
under that name. Recovering quickly and intending to bill the group as
Revelation, in America, the completed album was given the title From Genesis
to Revelation, with the band’s name being indicated only via that label.
Packaged with Gothic gold foil lettering on a black
background—with songs including “In the Beginning” and “The Serpent”—the
“lesson in marketing” album was understandably quickly routed to the religious
bin of the few record shops that even bothered to carry it. (In its initial
1969 issue, the disc sold only around a thousand copies, mostly to friends and
acquaintances of the band.)
Soon permanently sans Mr. King and under new
management, in 1970 the group released their follow-up—Trespass. It was
highlighted by an “aggressive number about [a] revolutionary figure on a power
trip.” Ironically, that seven-minute piece (“The Knife”) was actually inspired
by “a book about the life of Gandhi,” rooted in the idea that revolutions
brought about by violence will invariably end up with dictators in charge. (The
lyrics were also partially about Peter “being a public schoolboy rebelling
against [his] background.”)
The song in turn inspired Gabriel, in concert, to
use his microphone like a sword, “attacking” the audience with it. It also led
him to take a literal flying leap off a five-foot-high stage into the audience
near the end of a June, 1971 show in Aylesbury, presaging his later solo crowd
surfing ... and breaking his ankle, to the point of needing to have two metal
screws inserted in his leg to set it.
Rehearsals for the group’s third offering, Nursery
Cryme, took place in a spooky Tudor house formerly occupied by the likes of
Leonard Cohen and the Monkees’ Michael Nesmith. As the band’s new drummer, Phil
Collins, described the place: “I’m sure the house was haunted.... There were
some weird vibes. There was a picture with eyes that followed you everywhere,
and other strange things.”
Collins, in addition to his previous drumming for
one album with Flaming Youth, had child-acted the part of the Artful Dodger in
a West End stage production of the musical Oliver! That skill was later
to serve him in good stead for a mid-’80s guest-star appearance (as “Phil the
Shill”) on the second season of television’s Miami Vice. There, he delivered
lines like “You must take me for a right wanker” with all due aplomb.
That third album also marked the addition of Steve
Hackett to the group—functioning alternately as a searing lead guitarist and as
a one-man “special effects department” within the
band’s constraining arrangements.
Cryme opened with the ten-minute-long
“Musical Box,” telling the story of a young boy (Henry) who had his head
removed at the croquet mallet of a slightly older girl, Cynthia. He later
returned, in spirit, as an aging crippled man. While a music box played, Henry
attempted a seduction of the girl, his ghostly form calling out, “Touch me,
now!” Hearing the disturbance, Cynthia’s nanny entered the room, throwing the musical
box at the bearded spirit-child, thus destroying both.
In a similarly fantastic vein, lyrics for the
album-closing “Fountain of Salmacis” were derived from the Greek mythological
explanation for the origin of hermaphroditism (i.e., the presence of both male
and female reproductive organs in flowers, animals or human beings). The myth involves
the excessive union of the boy Hermaphroditus—offspring of Hermes and
Aphrodite—with the water-nymph Salmacis, to no happy ending.
The record quickly rose to the #1 chart position ...
in Belgium.
In the autumn of 1972 Peter began developing the
visual aspect of the band’s live shows, acting out their songs’ characters via
a wide array of theatrical costumes and face masks.
The most controversial of those was a shocking red
dress (belonging to his wife, Jill) and fox’s head. That apparel had nothing to
do with the music being played while it was worn, but nevertheless garnered
some coveted media attention—quickly doubling the group’s concert fee. (The
costume was later replaced by an “old man” latex mask, allowing Gabriel to act
out the “Musical Box” story from Nursery Cryme.)
The “foxy lady” gag actually derived from the drawn
cover of the band’s next unintentionally low-fidelity album, Foxtrot—their
first album to chart in England.
The meaning of the various images on that cover was
explained by the artist, Paul Whitehead, in Armando Gallo’s Genesis: I Know
What I Like. Initially, the painting was conceived simply as a put-down on
fox-hunting as an aristocratic sport—as an extension of the satirical croquet
theme on the Nursery Cryme cover, the latter of which is itself
reproduced in part in the background of the Foxtrot jacket. As Whitehead
became familiar with the subject matter of the contained songs, however, he
soon incorporated the four horsemen of the Apocalypse in that “fox-hunt”:
“The ice floating on water is like the soul floating
in the human body. The fox [standing on the ice] is a passion, a violent aspect,
but it has used its cunning and adopted a disguise and the ice to escape its
pursuers [i.e., the four horsemen with their bloodhounds, assembled on the
shore]. The cover is adopted into half land and half sea, and it shows that
there is as much life in the sea as there is on the land. There is also death
in the sea, as signified by Cynthia’s [croquet] mallet, the shark, the Hogweed
[referring to another fantasial/botanical song on Cryme] and the nuclear
submarine.”
The cyclist on the cover was Peter
himself—apparently he once turned up for a meeting on a bike, but couldn’t ride
particularly well. The hotel in the background was intended to be symbolic of
all the road trips that the band would be taking in their coming years.
From that disc, side one’s “Watcher of the Skies”
was written by Banks and Rutherford, inspired by a lifeless landscape of
buildings and fields which presented itself to them as they gazed one day from
their hotel in Naples. The inanimate scene below struck them as approximating
what an alien being might see, in coming to the deserted planet after some
catastrophe. (Davin Seay, writing from a Christian perspective in his Stairway
to Heaven, would prefer for that “Watcher” to be God. He is, however, quite
mistaken. Interestingly, the phrase “watcher of the skies” also occurs in John
Keats’ poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” very possibly being
borrowed by Tony and Mike from that source. In the poem, the experience of
reading Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey is
compared to the feeling which the Spanish explorer Cortez must have had in
first seeing the Pacific Ocean.) Performed in concert as the set-opener, the
piece found Gabriel sporting ultraviolet-illuminated day-glo eyes, batwings,
and a floor-length cape to complement the song’s doom-laden Mellotron introduction.
Side two, however, is where the band, by their own
testimony, began “sounding really good on records.” That plane of vinyl is
given entirely over to a single, apocalyptic song: the episodic, biblically
influenced tale of good and evil, “Supper’s Ready.”
Peter Gabriel himself confirmed the song’s religious
basis: “I ended up reading Revelations in the Bible. This explains the
apocalyptic bit at the end of ‘Supper’s Ready.’ I think it was one of the first
times that I felt as if I was really singing from my soul—almost like singing
for my life.”
The song’s title refers to Revelation 19, verse 9:
“Then the angel said to me, ‘Write: “Blessed are those who are invited to the
wedding supper of the Lamb!”’”
The work itself consists of seven sections:
i Lover’s Leap
ii The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man
iii Ikhnaton and Itsacon and Their Band
of Merry Men
iv How Dare I Be So Beautiful?
v Willow Farm
vi Apocalypse in 9/8
vii As Sure as Eggs is Eggs (Aching Men’s
Feet)
The first movement, “Lover’s Leap,” where the
narrator sees his lover’s “face change,” was based on an actual paranormal experience
had by Peter and his wife Jill, one night in her parents’ apartment:
“I saw this very old face in Jill, there was this
sense that it wasn’t her there....
“I tried calming her down and holding her, but
nothing seemed to get through.... The window flew open, there was this horrible
coldness and we got the shivers.... I made a cross with candlesticks, which
helped, I don’t know why.”
At the height of that experience, Jill had been
speaking in tongues, and reacting like a “wild animal.”
Peter further recorded: “I did feel that I saw
figures outside, figures in white cloaks, and the lawn I saw them on wasn’t the
lawn that was outside.” (Thus, “six saintly shrouded men,” led by a seventh
carrying a cross, are included on the Foxtrot album cover.)
Part two, “The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man,” concerns
the head of a “highly disciplined scientific religion” who falsely claims to
possess “a secret new ingredient capable of fighting fire.”
A number of twentieth-century guru-figures,
including the Maharishi and Paramahansa Yogananda, have presented their
techniques of meditation as being “scientific,” and even as (dubiously) having
had their efficacy proved in controlled studies.
Further, the mantra “Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna,
Hare Hare, Hare Rama” is one of two chants which are especially recommended in
the Vedas for delivering one to “the realm beyond material existence”—the other
such mantra being “Om.” (The Hare Krishnas themselves use a slightly modified
version of the former chant.) Such chanting could be said to be the practice of
a “supersonic mantric science.”
Further, when directed outwardly, the so-called
kundalini energy is believed to give rise to sexual desire. (The kundalini
“fire” is a subtle energy held to reside at the base of the spine; its coiled
nature accounts for the bulk of extant scriptural references to “serpents.”)
The Hare Krishnas, however, like many yogic groups, are supposed to be strictly
celibate. That is, they and other groups with similar emphases on celibacy as a
purported means toward spiritual enlightenment are “fighting fire,” in that regard.
The kundalini reference is further supported by the
choir of schoolchildren singing softly, even against the claims of that “science”:
“We will rock you, rock you, little snake.” (For the relevance of the
views of children in the realm of spirituality, cf. Matthew 5:8—“Blessed are
the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”)
The next section, “Ikhnaton and Itsacon and Their
Band of Merry Men,” concerns an army summoned out of the ground at the
Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man’s command, attacking all those who are not members
in good standing of the religion.
Ikhnaton (1379 – 1362 BC) was an Egyptian king,
husband of the legendarily beautiful Nefertiti, who developed the monotheistic
solar cult of Aton. (Freud, interestingly, believed that Moses was a high-born
priest of the same royal sun god, Aton, whose cult had been overthrown in a palace
coup.)
Its-a-con has been read by some as referring to the
International Society for Krishna Consciousness—ISKCON—popularly called the
Hare Krishnas, and known for their bands of chanting, merry men. The organization
has its U.K. headquarters at Bhaktivedanta Manor in northwest London.
Moving right along, in Genesis’ early days Jonathan
King had been in the habit of looking into the mirror and exclaiming, “How dare
I be so beautiful!” From that, Peter conceived the same description as applying
to the egoic Narcissus, in part four here. Our narrator and his company join
the mythological figure-turned-flower in staring into a pool, and “are pulled
into their own reflections in the water.”
For the following “Willow Farm,” Gabriel donned his
infamous “Flower” costume—modeled after a character he had seen in a children’s
television show. Climbing out of the pool, then, the song’s witnesses “are once
again in a different existence. They’re right in the middle of a myriad of
bright colors, filled with all manner of objects, plants, animals and humans.
Life flows freely and everything is mindlessly busy. At random, a whistle blows
and every single thing is instantly changed into another,” losing the firm
boundaries and rigid identification of consciousness with its prior forms.
“At one whistle the lovers become seeds in the soil,
where they recognize other seeds to be people from the world in which they had
originated. While they wait for spring, they are returned to their old world to
see the Apocalypse of St. John in full progress.”
Thus, we arrive at the “Apocalypse in 9/8
(Co-Starring the Delicious Talents of Gabble Ratchet).”
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable,
under “Gabble Ratchet,” advises: “See GABRIEL’S HOUNDS.” From which:
“Wild geese. The noise of geese in flight is like that of a pack of hounds in
full cry. The legend is that they are the souls of unbaptized children
wandering through the air till the Day of JUDGMENT.”
This segment, loosely based on Revelation’s Chapter
13, includes a reference to the “guards of Magog”—in biblical terms, people who
are “recruited to be the evil army of Satan after he gets out of prison.”
Finally, we have the appropriately numbered seventh
movement, “As Sure as Eggs is Eggs (Aching Mens’ Feet).” Seven trumpets—or, in
the yogic interpretation, spinal chakras—blow the vibration of “sweet rock and
roll” into the hero’s astral and causal bodies. The river of life energy in the
spine joins the ocean of Cosmic Consciousness, freeing the soul from its mayic
or Satanic (“666”) bondage.
As Paramahansa Yogananda explained, in his Autobiography
of a Yogi: “Revelation contains the symbolic exposition of a yogic science,
taught to John and other close disciples by Lord Jesus. John mentions (Rev.
1:20) the ‘mystery of the seven stars’ and the ‘seven churches’; these symbols
refer to the seven lotuses of light, described in yoga treatises as the seven
‘trap doors’ in the cerebrospinal axis. Through these divinely planned ‘exits,’
the yogi, by scientific meditation, escapes from the bodily prison and resumes
his true identity as Spirit.”
Peter Gabriel actually had both of his daughters—Anna,
born in late July of 1974; and Melanie, born 1976—“confirmed and christened ...
in six different religions” at Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship Lake
Shrine temple in Los Angeles. He could not possibly have gotten to that point,
of bringing his family into the organization in such a significant way, without
having read Yogananda’s Autobiography. Gabriel is also on record as
having been inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, various “books on
Zen Buddhism,” and Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan—concerning the
exploits of the fictional Yaqui sorcerer, Don Juan. (Castaneda’s books were
similarly regarded by high-pitched songstress Joni Mitchell as being “a
magnificent synthesis of Eastern and Western philosophies.” Peter sang on
Joni’s 1990 Chalk Mark In a Rainstorm album, on “My Secret Place.”) He
further took both Silva Mind Control and est training—the latter of which was
alleged to make use of “brainwashing” techniques—in the 1970s.
In concert, Gabriel would remove his black cloak at this
penultimate point in the song to reveal a silver suit, symbolizing the triumph
of good over evil. Photos further show him holding a violet fluorescent tube
vertically over his head, during the closing “New Jerusalem” section. (The New
Jerusalem is the “place of peace” where “mankind is finally reunited with God
after having been redeemed from sin.”)
The reason for that is obvious from a yogic
perspective: The tube was another clear reference to the spiritualized spine,
by which the individual’s victory of good over evil in Self-realization is held
to be obtained.
Selling England by the Pound was the group’s
next studio effort, composed in the summer of 1973. It offered much in the way
of Her Majesty’s Britannia, but less than one had become accustomed to as far
as religious allusions. A small exception to that unusual dearth was PG’s “karmacanic”
(i.e., “karma mechanic,” as a sort of religious mechanism). That invented word
was to be found in “The Battle of Epping Forest”—a story about rival gangs
fighting each other for protection rights in tradition-loving East End London.
More ethereally, the beginning of the album’s epic
“Cinema Show” derived from T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland.” The same song
also offered an explicit reference to Tiresias—the narrator of Eliot’s poem,
who had “crossed between the poles” of male and female.
In Greek mythology, Tiresias had accidentally struck
a pair of mating snakes with his stick. For that error, he was transformed
“from male into female for seven years; and then back to male again, when
striking the snakes a second time. After those encounters he was made blind to
the outer world, but given the gift of prophecy, i.e., had his inner eye
opened.”
In those two mating snakes, one can easily see the
same two life currents as are said to be symbolized in the intertwining snakes
of the caduceus: one masculine or solar (pingala), and the other
feminine or lunar (ida). Those two currents are believed to criss-cross
the spine from its base to a point between the eyebrows, in the manner of a
repeated figure-eight.
On more of a grounded, terrestrial note, the tour
for Selling England resulted in Genesis being elected “Top Stage Band”
in the New Musical Express (U.K.) Readers’ Poll. They were further
hailed in certain quarters as being “The most significant rock band to happen
since the Beatles.”
Nineteen seventy-four saw the group composing their
double-album gold-selling opus, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. The
story and lyrics were written almost exclusively by Gabriel, and the music done
almost solely by the rest of the band.
Just prior to that intensive writing, however, Peter
had been contacted by William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist. (When
just out of Charterhouse, Gabriel had been accepted by the London School of Film
Technique, and had seriously considered pursuing that avenue rather than a
musical career.) The ensuing offer of a screenwriting job resulted in Peter
briefly leaving the band, before Friedkin’s own lack of commitment and his
focus on PG as a source of “weird ideas” rather than a full-time writer caused
the latter to return, if somewhat sheepishly, to the Genesis fold.
“The Lamb was intended to be like a Pilgrim’s
Progress ... an adventure through which one gets a better understanding of
self—the transformation theme,” said Gabriel. The story’s hero, Rael, was a
streetwise Puerto Rican from the Bronx ghettos; his appearance on the album predated
the actual punk movement by a full two years.
As Peter further explained in Chris Welch’s The
Secret Life of Peter Gabriel: “The story begins with a dose of reality, establishing
an earthy character which develops into more fantastic things. Rael is half
Puerto Rican and lives in New York.... He’s alienated in an aggressive
situation. The Lamb arrives on Broadway and acts like a catalyst. A very
oppressive sky descends over the city and solidifies. It becomes a screen like
a TV with the camera behind it. Real life is projected on the screen and starts
to break up.... The screen that Rael sees is sucking him in. When he regains consciousness
he is in another underworld.”
From waking to find himself wrapped safely in a
woolen cocoon, Rael is soon fearfully trapped in one of a network of cages,
then witnesses the Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging—an exhibition of human shells
without free will. He then returns, in memory, to his street life in New York
City, reliving his first sexual encounter.
Next down a carpeted corridor saturated with
esoteric mystical symbols, and then up a spiral staircase—cf. Solomon’s
temple—he finds a hemispherical chamber of thirty-two doors (or channels for
life energy), only one of which leads out to the next level of reality. Led by
the Lilywhite Lilith guru-figure through a tunnel of light, Rael confronts
Death, then passes through another corridor to find a rose-water pool inhabited
by three beautiful half-woman, half-snake creatures, the Lamia.
“The Lamia enter his body and they die. He finds a
more feminine side of his personality which is totally foreign to him, and yet
he has fallen in love with a delectable Lamia creature and becomes so engrossed
in its attractiveness and the newer side to his personality he never believed existed,
that he doesn’t notice a strange blue light which causes him to sweat. The
Lamia nibble at his buttocks [i.e., at the base of the spine] and are
killed....”
Sorrowfully leaving that scene by the same door
through which he had entered, the now-deformed Rael comes upon the Colony of
Slippermen.
“The Slippermen are grotesque and totally sensual
beings whose entire day is spent gratifying every orifice, including nose,
mouth and ear. The only way out of this situation is castration. A bird comes
down and carries off a tube containing the offending member. He can go through
a window to get back where he was in New York.”
Rael forgoes the skylight, selflessly choosing to
save his brother instead, and scrambles down the mountainside to the river below,
where John is drowning. (“Brother John” is a collective name for the American
people; as rendered in the lyrics sheet, the initial capitals taken by the two
words are highly significant.) But as he looks into John’s eyes, he sees only
his own face there.
“His brother turns out to be another illusion.
Eventually he is absorbed into a substance called IT, a purple haze.” That
absorption and the diffusion of Rael’s consciousness equally into both bodies
occurs with a “sudden rush of energy up both spinal columns.” And that
is proof, for anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of yoga, that the entire
story was meant as a spiritual allegory, given in sections corresponding to the
physical, astral, causal, and Self-realized aspects of mystical reality. (Rael
undergoes three “deaths” during his journey—the initial “wall of death” in
Times Square, his meeting with the Supernatural Anaesthetist, and his eventual
dissolution into the purple haze. He also, correspondingly, passes through
three [spinal] corridors or tunnels: in the “Carpet Crawlers” section, then on
his way to the Lamia, and finally in chasing the raven toward the river.)
All of that, at least, is the short version
of what seems to be going on in The Lamb, coming largely from Peter’s
own reliable mouth. Yet, the more one looks at the details of the images and
storyline, the more references one can find to ideas which seem to be taken
straight from Yogananda’s Autobiography and other Eastern spiritual
texts.
Interestingly, Mike Rutherford’s (outvoted) idea for
the album, in early band meetings, had been for them to do a musical version of
the children’s book The Little Prince.
If you ever need proof that you shouldn’t listen to
your bass player for song ideas....
For his own part, Phil Collins has since admitted:
“I can’t remember too much about the Lamb tour. That was my grass tour.
I sank beneath my headphones every night to play the whole of The Lamb
and thoroughly enjoyed myself!”
If you ever need proof that you shouldn’t listen to
your drummer for song ideas....
In 102 live shows across America, Canada and Europe,
from late 1974 onward, the hour-and-a-half-long Lamb was performed in
full, backed by over one thousand slides projected onto three screens. Rael was
played onstage by Gabriel with a short all-American haircut, dressed in
turned-up blue jeans, white T-shirt and a leather motorcycle jacket. He didn’t
put on his first costume until three-quarters of the way through the set, for
“The Lamia.” There, “he was covered in a cone-like object bathed in ultraviolet
light that was meant to signify the tourbillion, the wheel that catapults
beings into the mystical world.” That was followed by “The Colony of
Slippermen,” in which Peter emerged from a (transparent pink, phallic) plastic
tunnel garbed in “a monstrous, bulbous costume with outsized inflatable
genitals.” For the album’s finale, “It,” following an onstage explosion, PG was
joined by a “dummy” Rael mannequin, with strobe lights flashing alternately on
the two of them, deliberately confusing the audience as to which was the “real”
Rael.
As to the reception which the multimedia
extravaganza received, Peter relates: “The Who and Yes weren’t able to play easily
entire works like Tommy and Topographic Oceans.... Our audiences
initially tolerated The Lamb and eventually became positive towards it.”
A mere six weeks into their planned six-month world
tour, however, Gabriel announced to Genesis’ management that he would be
leaving the group at the end of that commitment, in May of 1975.
In the two-month holiday which followed Peter’s
final concert with the group, guitarist Steve Hackett recorded his first solo
album, Voyage of the Acolyte. Musically ornate but lyrically sparse—only
three of the tunes have words—the disc is noteworthy for having each of its
songs named after a specific card in the tarot deck: Ace of Wands, Hands of the
Priestess, Tower Struck Down, Hermit, Star of Sirius, Lovers, and Shadow of the
Hierophant. (Hackett’s second solo album, Please Don’t Touch, featured
“Narnia,” a song derived from C. S. Lewis’ Christian spiritual allegory The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. His later Spectral Mornings would
contain the instrumental “Clocks—The Angel of Mons.” The title referred to a
collective vision of the Virgin Mary purportedly seen by British soldiers in Normandy
during World War II.)
After auditioning numerous potential replacements
for Gabriel, it was decided that Phil Collins would take over the lead-singing
duties, in addition to his drumming. (Phil had already contributed backing
vocals to a number of Genesis songs, and lead vocals to Selling England’s
“More Fool Me.”)
The band would release two more studio albums prior
to Hackett’s departure in 1977. The first of those, A Trick of the Tail,
featured the song “Squonk”—sketching a wart-covered, rat-like creature from
American mythology, said to dissolve itself into a pool of tears when
surprised, frightened or captured.
Beyond that, religion and mythology in the lyrics of
Genesis (and their members’ solo projects) were to be essentially a thing of
the past. So, through the glorious Wind and Wuthering, And Then There
Were Three, Duke and 1981’s Abacab, we find plenty of easily
digestible pop songs, and little need to puzzle over the deep metaphysical
meaning of the words. (The singular exception is perhaps “One for the Vine,” on
Wind and Wuthering from late 1976. There, the hero claims to be “the
chosen one,” and in turn inadvertently produces other, less willing messiahs.)
Likewise for their self-titled 1983 LP, whose hit single “Mama” concerned the
relationship of an inexperienced boy with a much older, maternal prostitute.
With 1986’s top-selling, poppy Invisible Touch,
long-term Genesis fans such as myself predictably began to seriously lose interest,
in spite of the band’s record-breaking stint of four consecutive shows at
London’s Wembley Stadium. Still, anyone who stuck around for another half-dozen
years, for their next studio release—late 1991’s We Can’t Dance, the
last to feature Phil Collins—would have been rewarded with “Jesus He Knows Me.”
The song was another distant cousin, in general
subject matter at least, to the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” (whose own
four verses all “came directly from preachers”). As such, it reflected the
breaking sexual and monetary scandals of various American televanglists, amid
their claims to be on intimate terms with Jesus. The song was actually banned
in certain parts of the U.S., while the BBC itself refused to play the video.
The group finally called it quits after 1997’s Calling
All Stations, having been fronted for that one effort by ex-Stiltskin
singer Ray Wilson. A planned tour of the States in support of the album had
already been cancelled, owing to a distinct lack of public interest as manifested
in slow ticket sales, not merely for the original arena dates but even for a
humbly scaled-down, theater-venue version. (The album failed to crack the Top
50 in America, though still rising to the #2 position ... in Britain.)
Rutherford, interestingly, considered that failure
to be the product of “something of an anti-English movement” in the United
States.
In marked contrast to that “slow and painful death”
of a once-groundbreaking band, Peter Gabriel’s own post-split career has
rarely suffered from any dearth of innovation, creativity or spirituality.
Indeed, the very first song (“Moribund The Bürgermeister”) on his very first
solo album (now known as “Car”) was a lyrical rendition of St. Vitus’ Dance.
Medically, St. Vitus’ Dance is a disorder of the
nervous system, primarily afflicting young children. Its victims display rapid,
jerky, involuntary movements, typically of the face and limbs, with a resulting
inability to maintain any posture.
Historically, however, the Dance was a mass hysteria
which swept Europe at various times between the eleventh and seventeenth
centuries, in which tens of thousands of people exhibited similarly chaotic
movements. That “plague” was sympathetically passed along by “sight alone,” and
medievally taken as a demonic manifestation.
The illness was prevalent in Germany in 1374,
accounting for Peter’s choice of locale: A “bürg[h]ermeister” is a castle
master or mayor—in this case, evidently one with an overbearing mother.
(Gabriel, of course, also later released phonetically sung German versions of
his third and fourth albums.) In the song, that leader orders that the palace
grounds be sealed off to prevent the spread of the ailment.
In the fourteenth-century German outbreak, some
dancers “afterward asserted that they felt as if they had been immersed in a
stream [i.e., “torrent”] of blood.... Others, during the paroxysm, saw the
heavens open and the Savior enthroned with the Virgin Mary.”
Suffering parties sought out the chapels of St.
Vitus, hoping for a miraculous cure.
Of the afflicted, Robert Burton (1577 – 1640), in
his Anatomy of Melancholy, further records: “Music above all things they
love; and therefore magistrates in Germany will hire musicians to play to
them.” (In the Strasburg outbreak of 1418, actual bagpipers followed the
dancers around.)
Regarding “waxen dolls” as a tried-but-failed cure
for the Dance: The Middle-Aged physician Paracelsus advised the victim of the
illness to make a miniature replica of himself in wax or resin. Then, via a
supreme effort of thought, he was to concentrate all of his blasphemies and
sins into that image. The doll was then burned completely.
Other remedies advocated by Paracelsus included potions
“composed of the quintessences,” i.e., substances rich in elemental
(alchemical) ether.
PG’s solo debut album also featured “Down the Dolce
Vita” and “Here Comes the Flood.” (A more sparsely produced version of the
latter song, preferred by Gabriel himself, appears on Robert Fripp’s Exposure.)
Those tunes were part of a six-song mythological “Mozo” suite—from an intended
rock opera—which Gabriel had written following his departure from Genesis.
Other songs from that cycle have turned up on albums up to and including PG’s
worldwide hit, So, as we shall see.
The Mozo protagonist “was partly based on Moses, but
he was a fictional character who came from nowhere, disrupting people’s lives
and causing changes and then disappearing.” That is, Mozo acted as a catalyst
for spiritual transformation in those around him—a metaphor which Gabriel
borrowed from the alchemical treatise Aurora Consurgens. The book was
championed by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung as purportedly being the work of
Thomas Aquinas.
The Mozo suite is set in a quasi-Mediterranean
fishing village whose volcanic sand lends its red color to the rough sea, where
the “great macho feat is to cross the water, which no one has done.”
Disturbed by Mozo’s presence in their community, and
projecting their own fears onto him, the people who had discovered him living
in a garbage-hut on the outskirts attempt to throw him out of the city. He
evades them, and returns as a hero after having successfully crossed the
forbidding sea.
The orchestral “Down the Dolce Vita,” then, depicts
“a ship leaving harbor on an intrepid journey” across that sea. Like Mozo
himself, the Aeron (Aaron) and Gorham characters mentioned in the song have corrupted
biblical names. (Aaron was the older brother of Moses.) And, as with all
spiritual journeys, “looking behind the egoic face” of the prospective heroes
is an essential part of the transformation.
“Here Comes the Flood,” in turn, was written by
Peter “after a burst of meditation.” At the time, he was fascinated by the way
in which shortwave radio signals would increase in volume as night fell:
“I felt as if psychic energy levels would also
increase in the night. I had had an apocalyptic dream in which the psychic
barriers which normally prevent us from seeing into each others’ thoughts had
been completely eroded producing a mental flood. Those that had been used to having
their innermost thoughts exposed would handle this torrent and those inclined
to concealment would drown in it.”
Regarding the “early warnings” given by those growing
shortwave signals: Perhaps significantly, the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line
was a system of radar stations in Canada’s Arctic Circle, intended to detect
Soviet intrusions during the Cold War; and “Car” was recorded in Toronto.
The Mozo theme continued on Gabriel’s next
album—predictably untitled then, but now known as “Scratch”—with both “On the
Air” and “Exposure” being drawn from that song cycle.
In the former, Mozo, though being completely ignored
in daily life on the street, becomes a shortwave hero at night, broadcasting
invented characters such as Captain Zero from his trash-built cabin by the
river.
“Exposure” concerns “the struggle for salvation.”
Significantly, then, the version of the song recorded (with Gabriel’s vocals)
for Robert Fripp’s album of the same name begins (and continues,
intermittently) with a recording of the English “sage” John G. Bennett
repeatedly proclaiming: “It is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering.”
Bennett (1897 – 1974) co-founded the British
headquarters of the Subud movement. (Subud teaches that humans have the ability
to surrender to God or the Universe, and to thus feel a quickening of the
omnipresent cosmic life force. The increased contact with that force is
supposed to lead one to a spontaneously right way of living.) He had earlier
been a student of the Russian “crazy wisdom” spiritual teacher, Gurdjieff.
PG3 (“Melt,” from 1980) took a break from myth and
mysticism, but still managed to introduce a drum sound which was to become
ubiquitous over the next decade.
Composing in a new drum machine-led style, Gabriel
had invited Phil Collins to perform on the gestating album, with the revolutionary
(for rock) stipulation that he was to use no cymbals in accenting the music.
Collins began by playing around with a simple rhythm, as producer Steve
Lillywhite and engineer Hugh Padgham slapped a gate compressor on the
reverberating sound. With Peter recognizing and recording the ensuing riff—and
then writing the album’s opening cut, “Intruder,” on top of it—a new sound was
born.
The same “gated reverb” effect (on the snare drum,
esp.) later featured prominently on Collins’ “In the Air Tonight,” Men At
Work’s “Who Can It Be Now?” and numerous other ’80s tunes, and beyond.
Gabriel’s fourth solo venture, Security,
featured the Grammy-nominated “Shock the Monkey”—his first single to chart in
the United States. The piece was not about anything like shock therapy, but is
rather “just a love song, although it’s not really seen as that. It refers to
jealousy as a trigger for an animal nature to surface.”
The Fairlight-infused album’s first track, “The
Rhythm of the Heat,” was inspired by Carl Jung’s experiences with a group of African
tribal drummers. (The Fairlight CMI was an early digital sampler, now obsolete.)
“There was this one scene in which he joins a group
of drummers and dances, and for the first time really loses himself totally and
is taken over by what is happening. And as this sort of primordial fear which [sic]
overwhelms him, he is so terrified by the thing that he stops the dance and
orders the drums away and has to beg and pay for them to move apart. And that
seemed a very powerful example, Jung obviously being a pivotal figure of the
mind, actually confronting something in himself which he was afraid of.”
In a related vein, “San Jacinto” concerned the
initiation ceremony undergone by an Apache Indian whom Peter Gabriel had met
during an American tour. The boy had been taken up into the mountains by his
tribe’s medicine man, along with a sack containing two rattlesnakes.
“[T]he snakes were made to bite the boy’s arm and he
was left on the mountain to have his visions. And if he got back down at the
end of it, he was a brave. If not, he was dead.”
The culturally holy San Jacinto Mountains border on
Palm Springs, California; that resort town is known for its artificial “white
man’s” world of golf courses and swimming pools.
“And so in ‘San Jacinto,’ there’s the intent for
this one man to find this [spiritual relationship to the natural world] and to hold
onto this line of instinct and not be seduced into this world which
increasingly is moving around him.”
Later in the record, the crowd-surfing anthem “Lay
Your Hands On Me” was oddly misconstrued by some reviewers as an example of
Peter displaying “Christ-like tendencies.” It is rather about the concepts of
“trust, healing and sacrifice.” One is further strongly tempted to trace the
narrator’s mention of the washing of dishes, while others pursue miraculous
phenomena, to dishwashing voluntarily done by Peter one evening in California,
when the rest of the party were enjoying an after-dinner joint.
The album-closing “Kiss of Life,” with much more of
a spiritual referent but less potential for misinterpretation, was about “a
large Brazilian woman with abundant life-force raising a man from the dead.”
So, the recording which established Peter
Gabriel as an international superstar, was released in 1986. Produced by Daniel
Lanois, it yielded Gabriel’s first U.S. #1 single, the Otis Redding-influenced
“Sledgehammer.” The accompanying “Claymation” video was ranked #1 by Rolling
Stone in their 1993 “100 Top Music Videos” list.
Two songs on the first half of the CD went all the
way back to Peter’s “Mozo” period: “Red Rain” and “That Voice Again.”
“Red Rain” begins with sparse drumbeats and
twinkling hi-hats that increase in both frequency and intensity, suggesting a
mounting storm. In the video, parched ground cracks—its orange-red color
indicating the volcanic sand of Mozo’s homeland.
The song itself originated in a recurring dream
which Peter used to have:
“I was swimming in a swirling sea of red and black.
I remember a tremendous turmoil as the sea was parted by two white walls. A
series of bottles, of human shape, were carrying the red water from one wall to
another, then dropping down to smash into little pieces at the bottom of the second
wall. I used this for a scene in a story in which the red sea and red rain from
which it was formed represented thoughts and feelings that were being denied. I
do believe that if feelings of pain do not get brought out, not only do they fester
and grow stronger but they manifest themselves in the external world. For
example, if a personal storm cannot be outwardly expressed it will appear in
life in events with other people—in this case a cloudburst.”
That idea is actually an entirely yogic one, lifted
straight from Yogananda’s teachings: Every earthquake is a manifestation of
man’s violent thoughts, every mosquito an embodiment of someone’s biting
speech.
Closing the first half of the album, “That Voice
Again” was originally titled “First Stone”—as in John 8:7, “Let him who is
without sin among you cast the first stone.”
The lyric itself is about “judgmental attitudes
being a barrier between people. The voice is the voice of judgment. A haunting
internal voice [i.e., a ‘sharp tongue’] that instead of accepting experience is
always analyzing, moralizing and evaluating it”—or “seeing right and wrong so
clearly,” thus driving love away.
The immediately following gorgeous love song, “In Your
Eyes,” was written, with intentional ambiguity, for both woman and God—an idea
which Peter borrowed from Senegalese music. In it, he takes churches as being
the site of both human and divine (chakric) union, effected in experiences of
light and heat when the façade of prideful ego has been burned away, via one’s
reaching out “from the inside” in prayer or silent meditation.
The song also reflects Gabriel’s personal views on
the spiritual nature of human eye contact:
“If you really want to beam in anyone, who they are
or what they are, you can do so through their eyes.... I know I can look into
people if I want to now.... I used to do some sort of eye meditation. A
Japanese meditation which you do with a mirror, where you look at your own
image until it disappears. You try and put your consciousness into the mirror
image, rather than where you are. What happened for me was that I would get a
flash, I would lose myself, effectively.”
For his next project, Gabriel scored the soundtrack
to director Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Scorsese
“wanted to present the struggle between the humanity and divinity of Christ in
a powerful and original way,” and found PG sympathetic to his vision. The
ensuing innovative world music went on to win a Grammy award in the New Age category,
in 1990.
Several years of psychotherapy for Peter, and the
associated “digging in the dirt” of his own mind and heart, produced 1992’s
dark relationship album, Us.
Of its hymn-like “Washing of the Water,” Gabriel
suggested that “in the desire for the water to wash over me there is a spiritual
yearning as a result of emotional pain.”
“Kiss That Frog,” by contrast, is based on
psychologist Bruno Betelheim’s interpretation of the “Frog Prince” children’s
story. The idea there was that something which might initially appear to be
repulsive—one’s first sexual experiences, in this case—could later reveal
itself to be exquisitely beautiful. (The same applies, on a deeper level, to
any unpleasant truth.)
Of course, the same story which Betelheim reduces to
an adaptive children’s tale can also easily be read as incorporating the most
profound metaphysics. For, in that narrative, a frog who has been cast
spellbound by a wicked witch (i.e., maya) retrieves a golden
ball (or seventh-level sphere) which a (divine) princess has dropped into a
well (i.e., a spinal-symbol column filled with the Water of Life, or
life-energy).
“Such frogs
are beset by the incarnational curse of being confined as amphibians—equally at
home in the water of earth as in the air of heaven—to a well in a ‘great, dark
forest’ of maya. They are then freed to return to their true,
handsome-prince form, by the princess’s (Cosmic Beloved’s) kiss [on the
‘mouth of God’ or sixth chakra]. Or, freed by being thrown against the
princess’s castle bedroom (seventh chakra, cf. royal nuptial chamber)
wall, in the original Brothers Grimm version.”
Still, whatever original meaning one prefers, in
Gabriel’s expert hands it makes for a fine, danceable tune about oral sex.
Towering above all of the rest of the songs on the
album, though, is the stunningly emotional “Blood of Eden”—a powerful display
of sexual poetry, set in the context of a couple who are trying to work through
a failing relationship.
The innate darkness in a man’s heart is seen and
clearly recognized by him, but is still allowed to work further, in untying the
cords which bind him to his lover. Simultaneously, the uncertainties and failed
promises of love become a “dagger or a crucifix” in the hand of the beloved—or
else are merely imagined, Macbeth-like, in the man’s own fevered mind.
Peter: “I wanted to use the biblical image in ‘Blood
of Eden’ because it was the time when man and woman were in one body, and in a
sense in a relationship, in making love, there’s that sort of struggle to get
some form of merging of boundaries, a real powerful union.”
From that personal tension and resolution, the song
reaches outward to include the lonely fate of countless distant “unheard
souls,” each one searching for comfort with another.
The long-awaited Up, released in late 2002,
showed Peter grieving over the recent loss of a loved one, and then finding a
way to let go of the pain and carry on with life—even if “life goes on” becomes
a mere platitude when received in the midst of such sorrow. The same “I Grieve”
song further voiced Gabriel’s belief that the physical body is merely a “car”
in which we drive around for a few years, or a house in which we temporarily reside.
When the soul has been released from that flesh and bone at death, there is
indeed “no one home” in that “empty cage.”
He then asks: Is that belief in the continuation of
consciousness beyond death a naïve dream ... or have we, in taking life as the
only reality and death as an end to existence, merely been “believing in a
dream”? Either way, the sorrow at the loss of a loved one is all too real.
Later in the album, “More Than This” suggests that
there is more to life than what we see in our everyday world, without specifying
what form that “more” might take—as God, the afterlife, mere paranormal phenomena
or otherwise.
Interestingly, as early as 1975 Peter disclosed that
he had already “attempted levitation and telepathy.” (Hoped-for levitation
based on the recitation of mantras is not unique to the Maharishi: Yogananda,
too, gives a purported technique in his SRF Lessons, involving the
chanting of the “sacred syllable” of “Om.”)
Said Peter: “A lot of things which interest me are
coming to the surface like ESP, telepathy, UFOs, astrology, Tarot, the rise in
mysticism.... I believe all people have experiences which they can’t easily
relate into their own terms, whether it is seeing ghosts or having premonitions
of an accident. I have been working on various techniques which have produced
some amazing results—like picking up experiences recorded in rooms.”
Has PG, then, ever brought his psychic powers to
bear in a concert environment?
According to the man himself, yes:
“There are certain things I have felt during some
performances resulting in the old shivers down the spine, when things were
really happening. It could be the result of controllable energy flows. At times
strange things seem to happen within me.”
Around the time of 1982’s Security, Peter had
been experimenting with a theta wave-stimulating sensory-deprivation tank,
having been inspired by John C. Lilly’s claims of out-of-the-body experiences
supposedly induced by that environment, as related in his The Center of the
Cyclone. Even earlier, back in the ’70s with Genesis, Gabriel had imaginatively
hoped to attach biofeedback machines to the band members, to control the light
and sound of the Lamb shows. Shortly thereafter, he had learned the
yogic “Breath of Fire”—a form of hyperventilation—which he credited with getting
his “head floating.” (That effect, of course, requires nothing of parapsychology
to understand.)
Peter has further stated unequivocally that, since The
Lamb, “he has developed all his shows according to the I Ching and
the principles of yin and yang.” (That bent presumably accounts
for the separate square [“male”] and round [“female”] stage areas on 1993’s
“Secret World” tour.) Indeed, Gabriel claims to have “taken some of his biggest
decisions on the toss of a coin” (though less for feeling bound by that random
result than as a means to discover what he really wanted to do in the
first place).
Well, it’s obviously worked for him so far, given
that no one in popular culture has been so commercially successful and
simultaneously unrelentingly creative as PG, over the past four decades. But as
every gambler knows....
CHAPTER 30
Trip Like a
Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee
STING
As a child, one of Gordon Sumner’s favorite sweaters
featured alternating black and yellow horizontal stripes, giving him something
of the appearance of a bumblebee.
That, however, is not where his famous nickname
began. Rather, the moniker derived from his early-twenties days in the Phoenix
Jazzmen—the house rhythm section at the Wheatsheaf pub in Newcastle. There, he
one day wore a yellow-and-black striped soccer pullover to rehearsal.
That, however, is still not where the nickname
originated. For, the wearing of that knit apparently came only after
bandleader and trombonist Gordon Solomon, surveying the intense demeanor of his
new bass player, had christened the young man “Sting.”
Born to an engineer/milkman father and a hairdresser
mother, the ex-Gordon had briefly considered a vocation in the Catholic
priesthood in his early teens, after time as an altar boy. The future lead
singer later worked at various times as a ditch digger, soccer coach at a
convent school, and secondary-school English teacher.
The aforementioned religious upbringing was to have
long-lasting effects on Sting, even in his adulthood:
“I’m not a devout Catholic and I don’t go to mass,
but I’m not so sure I’ve broken away from it. I still believe in a heaven and
hell, mortal sins—all that’s inside my psyche and I don’t think will ever come
out.”
Hooking up with guitarist Andy Summers and bassist
Stewart Copeland in 1977, the trio called themselves the Police, soon defining
a new punk-reggae sound for the world. (Jamaican reggae itself is of course
strongly associated with the Rastafarian religion, as popularized in songs by
Bob Marley and others. Rastafarianism takes the late Ethiopian ruler Haile
Selassie as having been God incarnate or the Black Messiah—against Selassie’s
own protests that he was no such thing—and regards marijuana as a sacrament.)
Stewart Copeland has joked that the group took the
“Police” name because it gave them free publicity in every country in the
world. However, his father Miles (Sr.) had been a founding father and field
agent for the CIA, later writing two books about those experiences. And Stewart
had decided on the name even before forming the band.
Andy’s pre-Police career was commemorated in Jenny
Fabian’s book Groupie, where his genitals are described by those in the
know as being “perfectly formed.” In the same psychedelic era, he was
predictably experimenting with LSD:
“My first few acid trips were all deeply religious
experiences and I started to get the White Light and all that.”
In 1978, the group released the first of their five
studio albums, Outlandos d’Amour—nonsense words which loosely “translate”
as “Outlaws of Love,” referring simultaneously to the dangerous and the
romantic sides of the band. It was highlighted by the tango-esque “Roxanne”—the
story of a man in love with a prostitute. Sting wrote the song following a walk
in the red-light district of Paris after an early Police concert; the name
“Roxanne” was actually taken directly from the love-interest in Rostand’s
classic play, Cyrano de Bergerac.
Uncomfortable with the song’s controversial subject
matter, the BBC quickly banned it from their tea-time airwaves.
The 1979 gold album Regatta de Blanc topped
the charts with its two loneliness-inspired singles—“Message in a Bottle” and
“The Bed’s Too Big Without You”—and for one about not feeling the effects of
gravity so much when in love: “Walking on the Moon.” It also, however,
contained “Bring On the Night,” a song originally about Pontius Pilate, based
on the late English poet Ted Hughes’ work, “King of Carrion.” (Another Hughes
poem, “Truth Kills Everybody,” inspired Outlandos’ “Truth Hits Everybody.”)
Zenyatta Mondatta, with a cover featuring the
bandmembers’ shadowed heads within a sacred pyramidal form, landed on
record-store shelves a year later. Its U.K. #1 hit, “Don’t Stand So Close to
Me,” was based on Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Lolita, whose storyline in
turn involved the sexual relationship of a prepubescent girl with an older man.
“De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” laid bare a more mature
relationship—albeit a non-carnal one, concerning as it does the unfettered use
of catch-words and slogans by authorities to manipulate and subjugate others,
and the comparatively refreshing nature of pure, unadulterated babble. It was,
in Sting’s words, “an articulate song about being inarticulate,” pertaining to
“banality and the abuse of words.”
With at least equal sophistication, “Spirits in the
Material World,” from the 1981 album Ghost in the Machine, was based on
the writings of Arthur Koestler. Koestler’s text concerned the mind-body split,
the relation between reason and imagination, and the potential for our higher
logical functions to be overpowered by hate and anger. That is, to be swayed by
the more primitive core brain structures enfolded from our earlier periods of
“troubled evolution.” (Those primitive structures are the “ghost in the
machine,” invisibly shaping our use of reason and language.) Attempted
political, constitutional and revolutionary solutions to our world’s problems
will ever run aground on that underlying penchant for destruction.
“Secret Journey,” with its talk of holy men and
“light in the darkness,” was based on Gurdjieff’s book, Meetings with Remarkable
Men. The text narrated the exploits of a group of spiritual adventurers out
searching for hidden mysteries, emotionally unattached to phenomena which are
ultimately as fleeting as the rain, and thereby finding joy and love in life’s
play of sadness and pain. In one of the semi-autobiographical tales, Gurdjieff
himself was blindfolded (“His blindness was his wisdom”) and led to an
enigmatic monastery.
By contrast, “Rehumanize Yourself,” after resisting
the urge to break into an up-tempo version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs.
Robinson” in a variety of keys, grafted alienated-by-technology-and-violence
characters onto Koestler’s notion that “society is gradually dehumanizing itself.”
The title song of the Police’s final studio album, Synchronicity,
from 1983, was inspired by the writings of C. G. Jung. The Swiss psychiatrist
postulated an “acausal connecting principle,” whereby seemingly coincidental
events were held to have an underlying relation. That, he believed, offered an
explanation for ostensibly paranormal occurrences such as phone calls arriving
from people just as we have been thinking about them.
In “Synchronicity II,” unusually harmonious picket
lines surround the industrial workplace of the song’s emasculated
father-character, protesting the environmental contamination unleashed by that
factory. Simultaneously, a vengeful Ness-like creature emerges from a polluted
Scottish lake, many miles away ... or as close as the stressed father’s teeming
subconscious, the beast inside him being on the verge of wreaking havoc just as
the distant monster arises. (In the video for the song, the “cottage” finally
approached by the creature on the strand of the dark lake becomes Boleskine
House, on the eastern shore of Loch Ness. A century ago, the mansion was owned
by Aleister Crowley, and more recently, by Jimmy Page.)
The album’s “O My God” then asks how God can seem to
be so far away, allowing misfortunes and unfairness to exist in the world.
“Wrapped Around Your Finger” depicts an
inexperienced youth trapped between “Scylla and Charybdis,” in a dangerous
liaison with a married woman. That is, caught between two equally perilous
alternatives, where moving away from one danger takes him closer to the other.
Such perils were encountered by Odysseus (in Homer’s Odyssey) as a pair
of former nymphs turned into lethal sea-monsters.
This older, seductive woman may not be the
rebellious fallen angel, Mephistopheles, of Goethe’s Faust. It is
nevertheless clear that her extra-collegiate “teachings” are designed to
enslave the young soul to whom they are applied.
The song’s “devil and the deep blue sea” is a
sailing term. In the construction of wooden vessels, the “devil” was the
longest seam in the deck planking, running from stem to stern. The act of
caulking that seam required one to be precariously suspended in the bilges,
literally between the “devil” and the aquamarine ocean. The same position has
since come to be regarded as akin to one’s being caught between a rock (e.g.,
the one on which Scylla lived) and a hard place (or the difficult, drowning
whirlpool of Charybdis).
Closing the present song, then, the student imagines
his otherwise-betrothed conjugal teacher and her perils as being in his own
past, from a future vantage point when he will be more knowledgeable than she
is, being in a position to teach and mesmerize her with his expertise.
“Every Breath You Take,” on the other hand, though often
taken as a devoted love song, was actually about a man stalking his
ex-girlfriend.
The album’s closing jazz-rock melody, “Murder by Numbers,”
charted a course to success for the most aspiring of politicians, proposing an
easy means whereby they might eliminate their competition. That cut-throat
suggestion, however, only increased the wrath of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart,
to the point of insisting that the song had been written by Satan himself, and
performed by the sons of Beelzebub.
The London home which Sting now shared with Trudie
Styler following the divorce from his first wife was believed by them to be
haunted by the ghosts of a mother and her child. Accordingly, Sting awoke one
night to find the two spirits in his bedroom, and on a later occasion again saw
the same pair of wraiths in the corner of a room.
The ensuing cleansing of the property at the hands
of a local spiritualist, however, was apparently insufficient to allow all
souls associated with the house to rest in peace. Rather, even afterward, “on
one occasion a kitchen knife rose from a table and embedded itself in the
wall.”
Notwithstanding such concerns, during his 1984 sabbatical
Sting was reportedly “planning a private expedition in search of the abominable
snowman with a veteran yeti hunter.”
In 1985 he released his debut solo album, the
jazz-influenced Dream of the Blue Turtles.
The title came from an actual dream of Sting’s,
worthy of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” or “Octopus’s Garden.” In it, he saw
an immaculate and sheltered English garden being destroyed by a marauding group
of large blue turtles.
In a Jungian analysis of the dream the dramatic,
shocking turtles were taken as symbolic of Sting’s new (solo) band and its
chaotic but needed effect on his staid and comfortable life in the Police. This
confirmed for Sting the value of striking out on his own.
The album’s lounge-like “Moon Over Bourbon Street”
was inspired by Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire. Actually written
by Sting under a full moon, it detailed the conundrum of a blood-sucker
troubled by his own conscience over his need to kill in order to stay “alive.”
His (Sting’s) next solo work, Nothing Like the
Sun, possessed a title derived from Shakespeare’s sonnet CXXX, which opens
with “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”—a line also quoted in the album’s
“Sister Moon.”
Two other songs, “Lazarus Heart” and “Rock Steady,”
have obvious biblical references.
The former, written for his late mother, deals with
the theme of sacrifice for a greater good, via wounds given not for vengeance
or anger but rather for emotional growth and resurrection/rebirth.
The bouncy “Rock Steady” adds a couple of new passengers
to Noah’s Ark, who find use in “sailing with the Lord” when times are tough,
but forget about God as soon as the rain stops.
In late ’87, in the jungles surrounding Rio de
Janeiro, Sting had his only life-changing “genuine religious experience,” under
the influence of the ayahuasca plant. After the obligatory period of retching,
he saw himself on a fear-filled battlefield, escorted by a shadowy “companion”;
then back in his mother’s womb; then reliving his various familial relationships.
Up an elevator-like shaft, he arrived in a chamber, and was soon playing chess
with a seductive goddess—ultimately being checkmated by her.
He later shared his feelings upon leaving the
isolated church, in his autobiography, Broken Music:
“I have never felt so consciously connected
before.... I seem to be perceiving the world on a molecular level, where the
normal barriers that separate ‘me’ from everything else have been removed....
“This sensation of connectedness is overwhelming.
It’s like floating in a buoyant limitless ocean of feeling that I can’t really
begin to describe unless I evoke the word love.”
Sting was soon appropriately campaigning on behalf
of environmental concerns, including the Amazon rainforests—spearheading the
creation of a national park for the native Xingú tribe in the late ’80s.
Meetings with various heads of state finally led to an audience with the pope
for himself and the Indians’ Chief Raoni. There, Raoni informed His Holiness
that “My god is saying to your god that your missionaries should get off our
land ... Now.”
Around the same time, Sting also toured with Peter
Gabriel and Bruce Springsteen in support of Amnesty International.
Following an extended writer’s block, The Soul
Cages finally came together in 1991—its title song touting our eventual
“swimming to the light” and “sailing to the island of souls,” as birds freed
from bodily cages at death. The album was dedicated to Sting’s recently
deceased father.
“All This Time” was appropriately about a man
wishing to bury his father at sea as an individualized last show of respect.
Instead, he suffers through learned and learning priests who subject the
expired one to their canonized rituals. All of those rites, however, have their
foundation in the existence of an invisible savior who has too little effect on
the real world. For that matter, no faith in any god has ever prevented an individual’s
or worshiping culture’s ultimate demise—including the fall of the Roman empire
which founded Sting’s own childhood home of Wallsend in northeast England.
From the same album, the middle-eastern flavored
“Mad About You” was inspired by the adulterous relationship of King David and
Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba—later, mother of King Solomon. The song pictures David
restlessly longing for his illicit lover, his kingdom meaning nothing without
her. (In the biblical story, of course, David arranged for Uriah to be slewn in
battle, later being exposed in that guilt by the prophet Nathan.)
“Jeremiah Blues,” in turn, lambasted the corruption
and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church. The track included another Shakespearean
reference in “something wicked this way comes,” for an elegantly dressed,
violent, money-hungry world happily ticking down toward some form of apocalypse—a
“midnight at noon.” (“And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord
God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth
in the clear day”—Amos 8:9.)
Ironically, just a year after the release of the
song, Pope John Paul II finally publicly admitted that his Church had been
wrong in their Inquisition’s persecution of Galileo for his
contrary-to-the-Bible suggestion that the earth was not the center of the
universe.
“A pope claimed that he’d been wrong in the
past....”
Nineteen ninety-three saw Ten Summoner’s Tales—a
pun on Sting’s real surname, Sumner, and also a reference to Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales. That fifteenth-century tome includes stories told by, among other
figures, a summoner, i.e., a court figure charged with calling others to appear
before royalty or for some other important, formal function.
The included musical tale “St. Augustine in Hell”
found its protagonist caught in his own “eternal fire” of uncontrollable sexual
attraction to a woman dating his best friend. In his pique, he proposes a
corresponding rightfully earned torturous eternity for cardinals, archbishops,
accountants who misuse the investment funds entrusted to them ... and music
critics.
Augustine’s own prayer to God in the face of
temptation, as quoted in the song, was exactly “Lord, make me chaste, but not
just yet.”
Further risking his own place amid such fire and
brimstone, at least in the eyes of the priests, the former Police-man has
actually been heavily involved with yoga and meditation since the early ’90s,
following the Soul Cages album. Like Madonna, he at one time embraced
Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga, a “method of yoga [which] involves synchronizing the
breath with [a] progressive series of postures—a process producing intense
internal heat and a profuse, purifying sweat that detoxifies muscles and
organs.” Through comparable tantric practices, Sting has further claimed to be
able to make love with his wife for up to five hours at a stretch ... although
later qualifying that figure to include “dinner and a movie.”
As of 1996, he was also practicing Tai Chi and
Qigong, and reportedly believing in crop circles and UFOs. His reading has included
books on religion and philosophy by authors from Krishnamurti to Ayn Rand. With
Trudie, he currently owns a yoga center in Manhattan.
In the best tradition of the New Age “quantum
physics and consciousness” set (Fritjof Capra, Amit Goswami, etc.), he has
further averred:
“Protestantism is based on Cartesian philosophy and
Newtonian physics, which have largely been discredited.”
In India to perform for tsunami relief in early
2005, Sting explicitly declared what one should already have suspected, given
all of the above:
“In a sense I am more of a Hindu ... I like the
Hindu religion more than anything else at the moment.... I would not consider
myself a Christian any longer. My beliefs are much wider than that.... I will
spend the rest of my life discovering your wonderful country. I’ve become
addicted to it.”
Of the application of such spiritual pursuits to his
music, the composer of “Roxanne” has ventured:
“In the composing of music you have to enter
virtually a trance state to transmit songs. I don’t think you write songs. They
come through you. It’s trusting that they exist out there and you have to be
the transmitter. For that you need a certain amount of mental purity. Yoga is
just a different route to that same process. You’re taking something from our
higher selves and putting it to use in normal life, I think....
“As I get older I find that I am unwilling to accept
an existential universe without a God. It doesn’t actually make logical sense
anymore.”
After all, as every (ex-)Catholic knows: Every step
you take, every move you make, God is watching you.