On Going Retro

My friend Thomm Jutz used to chide me for not keeping up with the new sounds coming out. He said it was okay to listen to roots music, but not to the exclusion of the new. I said I listened to new music on the radio all the time but it wasn’t pushing many buttons, not the pleasurable ones. I listened to early Tex-Mex and conjunto music, to Flaco Jiminez and Los Lobos; to Lightning Hopkins and Muddy Waters, to Ponti Bone, the R&B accordionist. On trips back to Texas I searched in vain for the old music on the Spanish stations; like modern country, the new stuff sounded like a kind of pop music.

Leaning against the CD shelf in the living room a small LP stack attests to my own leanings. Two-record sets of Muddy Waters, the Dubliners, and Bob Dylan Live at Budokan; Kris Kristofferson’s, Silver Tongued Devil and I; Gordon Lightfoot’s Summertime Dream; Leonard Cohen Greatest Hits; and one of my favourite chance discoveries, a French group called Le Clou, on a German label called Stockfisch titled Cajun Music Von Frankreich nach Amerika. Complimenting these are some of my father’s classical CDs I brought back from Houston: Beethoven piano sonatas and concertos, Van Cliburn playing Chopin and Liszt; Sibelius. But the LPs are special; I’ve rediscovered something inherently pleasing about taking one out of the sleeve, cleaning it, placing the disc on the turntable, listening to the whisper as the needle settles in the grooves. Accompanying Edith on her rounds of the second-hand stores I find myself gravitating to the LP bins to see what might await me. I’ve found Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez; guitar quintets by Boccherini, Manuel de Falla’s El Sombrero de Tres Picos; Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic performing Ravel’s Bolero, with more pieces by de Falla. I picked these up for a Franc or two each, less than the price of a newspaper or a beer, all in excellent condition.

I turned sixty-five the other day. It didn’t mean much in the tumult, overlapping confusion and looming shadows; the endless spectacle of war, brutality, sleaze, arrogance, mendacity. The lines written on your face—and elsewhere—tell you where you’ve been. As if in trade you might point to a few accomplishments. Another friend, the West Texas writer Roxy Gordon, wrote a book called Some Things I Did; an interesting title for a first book, but fitting for someone moving through life faster than people realized. Like Townes Van Zandt—with whom he shared the same birthday—Roxy didn’t live to see the much ballyhooed new millennium. Neither of them lived to see sixty. Sixty-five is an age where you might expect to be looking back. But to tell the truth, it seems like I’ve always been looking back: back to sailing ships, pirates, explorers, mountain men, Indians. What was it like to sail on a square-rigger? What did the country look like before the settlers came? I wondered and tried to picture things as they once were. I wanted to see and feel the country as it was when only the Indians lived there. Now I live in Europe. (Old Europe as the late, unlamented Donald Rumsfield would have it). I still want to know. My friend and neighbour Hans-Ruedi Brandenburger has a Celtic mill wheel that came from a truckload of stone taken from the shores of Lake Constance. It gives me chill bumps to touch it. There’s your old Europe; long before the Romans came people were milling grain here. Now in my exile I think back to the Celts instead of Indians.

The more I reflect on these things, on people and events gone before, the more I’ve come to believe it is not so much an act of looking back; it is more like seeing yourself in a wider, ongoing continuum. A hundred meters away the Rhine has been running in its present course since the glaciers retreated, around ten-thousand years ago. I think I understand what is meant by the saying that you cannot put your foot in the same river twice. Yet it is the same river, flowing continuously as people come and go; as civilizations, languages and religions advance and retreat. I find it useful and somehow comforting to see myself as part of the larger picture, the long way we’ve come. We should look ahead too, but it is more difficult with many unforeseen variables.

It is not that I want to go back and relive those lost days. But I strain to hear the echoes. I hear the cadence of horses in the old music; of marching men, cannon, pageantry. And moments of serenity, reflecting a quieter age. Perched atop the old city walls our house dates from 1834, our windows facing the south, away from the Rhine. We’re up in the loft, under the eaves among hand-cut posts and roof timbers from trees that were growing in Beethoven’s time. First mentioned in a document dating from the year 757, our little town of Diessenhofen is 1250 years old this month.

I think it was the advent of trains that gave us country and early rock & roll music, the metronomic clicking of the wheels, the sway and jerking momentum, the hair-raising steam whistle. The noise of trains has been obliterated by the onrush of newer technology: the roar of diesel and jet engines, amplifiers, an endless array of digital sound effects; of beeps and squeaks, loops, howling feedback. I find little love or comfort in it, but nobody is asking what I think. I will venture to say though, that this is one of the reasons country music doesn’t sound right anymore—the trains are gone. Western themes and the enduring fascination with cowboy life remain. The music has moved on. These days I listen to modern country music about as often as I read the bible, and usually in the same place—on the road, in a motel room somewhere in America.