The Gift - Ben Harper at Byron Bay, 1999

Reaching out for things in the dark.

It could be the definition of what an artist does when he sets out to make something.

It could be the sentiment at the 10th East Coast Blues and Roots Music Festival in Byron Bay, Australia, as a wild storm screams and expectations are desperately high for a musical force to free us from inclement misery.

It could be the American singer-guitarist Ben Harper leaving his 'demountable' dressing room and being drawn into a Ford Falcon parked nearby. A car door swings open as a journalist and a photographer decide to grab a lucky moment just one hour before he hits the stage. Harper hears us calling him, and quickly climbs on in with a bemused look on his face. I tell him, "We thought you might like something intimate."

Harper is the undisputed star of this festival, acclaimed with messiah-like fervor as a '90s mix of Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix and Marvin Gaye. The 28-year-old has the talent and the good looks to earn those comparisons, a tall lean black man with Native American bloodlines - part rock hero, part mystic with a guitar. Everybody seems to want a slice of him, but Harper holds back, bearing himself with princely self-possession, a politely intense wall that hides more than it exposes. Management repeat the mantra, "No interviews. No interviews. No."

The backseat of a big old car and a passing star glad for shelter on a stormy night are as good an interview set-up as we are ever going to get. Luck is on our side. It's surprising how receptive Harper is, remembering us from past encounters, communicating like we might almost be friends.

Two years ago at this same festival Harper seemed less focused, even a little angry. He admitted as much at the time when he said to me, " I played the worst concert of my life."

"You're definitely a different person at different stages in your life," Harper says tonight, "you really are."

We immediately start talking about growth - growth as an artist, growth as a man - and the way it all has to be in equilibrium. In these terms, Harper understands that his work "can be demanding". He also believes an artist's expression tests their personal integrity. If you can't be honest in your work, you can't be any good anywhere. At the same time, Harper says about the challenge of self-expression, "It makes me who I am. It gives me
sanity, it gives me balance."

He's uneasy about the wild weather beating down tonight and how the show will go. But I tell Harper about catching another storm-wracked open-air show of his at Glastonbury Music Festival in the U.K. back in 1998. That day I watched a group of three people with multiple sclerosis, all bogged deep up to the spokes of their wheelchairs in the thick English mud, waiting for Harper to begin. In those conditions we had all needed some inspiration. Harper kicked into a monumental cover of Hendrix's 'Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)', fully embodying the chorus line, "When I stand up next to a mountain, I chop it down with edge of my hand." The people in the wheelchairs started pulling themselves upward with excitement, rolling their tongues with joy, singing their inarticulate hearts out. It was a near-religious sight to behold: the music literally filled them up. And, as my girlfriend quietly pointed out later, imagine how much more it must have meant to them to see someone exude such power, all the while remaining seated in his chair.



On stage and in the studio, Harper favours the hunched posture of old bluesmen. He sits down to play out of necessity, having chosen as his signature instrument a1920s Weissenborn slide guitar, which was once upon a time the sounding board for jazzy Hawaiian groups of the swing era. You can still hear that faint wavelength in the sound, whether he's delivering soft ballads or supersonic slabs of contemporary r 'n' b jamming with his band The Innocent Criminals.

There's certainly a warmth in Harper's work, a faith most simply understood as something consistently uplifting. "Cool," he says, still the young skatepunk at heart as much as the new blues prince. "I'm a believer. I don't care what anybody says. It's something so far beyond my control I'm blessed to be a witness."

As for the adoration, "I don't put any pressure on myself and I don't allow that pressure." His use of the word 'allow' underlines a ferocity that is surprising in someone who usually puts a peace-loving face to the public. Harper tries to placate or cover that intensity when he goes on to say, with a rather strange mix of prophecy and modesty, "If I fall, I fall. I'll rise up like anybody else."

He's certainly been tested lately, after hitting walls in his music and within himself after three well-received, sometimes brilliant but ultimately underachieving recordings: Welcome To The Cruel World, Fight For Your Mind and The Will To Live. Harper's incandescent arrival on the music scene, and the fiery, sensual live shows that followed, have never really been caught on tape by his schoolboy buddy and regular producer J. P. Plunier. As a result, the Bob Marley revolutionary spirit in Harper's sound tends to be less well-known than the Tracey Chapman-like easy-listening studio version.

In many ways Harper has since become an artist of refinement rather than development. It's a troubling if exquisite cul-de-sac in which to dwell for a restless young man trying to shape roots music for a new millennium. He finds it difficult to speak about a new direction on the recording he is currently working on, the music that will become his latest CD, Burn To Shine. After playing lead guitar on Beth Orton's 'Stolen Car' and sampling George Michael's 'Freedom' for his own single 'Mama's Tripping', I tell him that I suspect we'll see more experimentation, more textures in his upcoming work. All Harper will say now is "it's intangible."

"What I can say is that it's not an abandonment of what we worked for as a sound today. I consider my first three records to be my first record really. And the next three will be my second. I don't think I've hit my stride yet."

Is there anything new he's written that electrifies him, that came to him like a bolt of light? He pauses for a long time as the rain beats down on the car roof close above us. Then he says, "A song called 'Alone'. It was like a gift."

Harper begins to recite the lyrics to an invisible beat. To tell me, and pull me in, as we sit in the backseat darkness of this old car. I get an odd feeling Harper is actually trying to give me something as he half speaks, half sings his new song: "This empty room, it fills my mind. Freedom - it leaves me confined. Every single bone has cracked. But in this life you can't turn back."

And with that Harper ends our interview to charge off through the rain and take center stage at Byron, where he will raise the roof and receive rapturous applause.

A few months later two things happen: his wife delivers their second child and his new CD Burn To Shine arrives on my doorstep. Harper seems to be moving on up in every way. A happy husband and father. A new CD that hungrily advances his usual mix of soul rock and folky electric blues, along with incongruous experiments like a Dixieland jazz track. But once again it's a mixed affair, part sweet wonder, part what's going on in his head? Burn To Shine is also affected by a curious unease, even rage, noticeable in songs like 'The Woman In You' ("The woman in you is the worry in me") and 'Less' ("If you're happy with nothing you'll be so very happy with me").

For me, though, it's the song 'Alone' gets the closest attention. And a lyric Harper neglected to recite that rainy night in Byron Bay, the punchline to the verse he gave me: "I don't want to live alone."


- Mark Mordue

* This story was first published in Madison magazine, New York, USA. November/December 1999.
= All photos by my good and very talented friend, the one and only Gerald Jenkins:
http://www.geraldjenkins.net/

Transmission

This story has proved harder to write than I imagined. As if there were an emerging and fading voice in my head I couldn't quite tune into, and am still searching for amid the static: an appropriate enough problem for a piece I first conceived of with the somewhat saccharine phrase, 'the magic of radio'.

It's taken me a while to realize what I am really trying to tune into is my youth. That what I am connecting with is not technology, but longing - and with it a feeling of timelessness that is both premonition and memory at once, as if the boy beheld the man and the man is keeping the boy in sight through some long and mutual telescope of sound.

If I'm honest I'd go even further and tell you radio is our most spiritual 'medium'. That there's something about radio's emanating nature, its radio-active aura, which unites it with our sense of another world, and certainly another time. Something caught up in its delivery to us, floating from place to place.

I guess it's hard, though, to tune into my feelings for radio as a line into the divine when all you are hearing is a loud-mouthed DJ laughing like a drain, followed by an old Billy Joel song and an advertisement about premature orgasms during the morning traffic report (that's an ad that takes place during those reports, by the way, not an issue of over-excitement with traffic flow - though as Billy Joel once put it, you just may be the lunatic we're looking for).

Maybe in the end I'm confusing nostalgia with spirituality, a common enough affliction today when the only church most people have is their past. Maybe I'm just another twentieth century cave man who can't put his thumbs to a Black Berry, still enraptured by radio's formerly central place as a hearth in the home - and, more importantly, in the car.

Maybe all I am talking about in the end is the way radio connects so immediately with an unconscious moment when the right song or conversation comes along. Not magic, but chance: or 'synchronicity'.

Whatever those wavelengths, radio is most certainly about voices. And while there are many radio-inspired inspired films from Oliver Stone's shock jock tale, Talk Radio (1988), to Woody Allen's recreation of the days of the 1940s serials in Radio Days (1987), and Christopher Petit's post-punk, existential English road story, Radio On (1979), I'd argue the most evocative and true depiction (if that's not a contradiction in terms) is Jean Cocteau's Orpheé (1950), a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth.

In Cocteau's version, Orpheus is a French poet with writer's block. He witnesses the death of a young poet in a road accident and becomes enmeshed in a surreal set of circumstances. They culminate in a dark-haired aristocrat revealing herself to be Death, before she pulls the dead poet through a mirror into the afterlife. Orpheus faints, then awakes in the middle of nowhere, unsure of what he has experienced and what he has dreamt. Returning home he ignores his pregnant wife and becomes obsessed with messages crackling from a radio inside a car parked in his garage. The messages - elusive and sometimes nonsensical - seem to be coming from the dead poet. Re-inspired, Orpheus jots them down, publishing them as his own. After all, he argues, "Who can say what poetry is and what isn't?"

You see something of this same energy in bio-pics like Walk the Line where the young Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) has his ear to what was then called the wireless, being seduced by similarly far-off sounds. As if the aural poetry of country music and gospel is leading him away from the flood-plagued cotton farm of his Arkansas childhood and on into a crucial place at Sun Studios and the birth of rock 'n' roll, and even further into his own mythical realm as 'The Man in Black'.

Martin Scorcese's documentary No Direction Home begins with a similar reflection on the young Bob Dylan, detailing the way "50,000 watt stations coming out through the atmosphere" would deliver the sounds of Hank Snow, Johnny Ray and Muddy Waters to a boy in the icy boondocks of Hibbing, Minnesota. Dylan also talks about finding an old 78 slab of vinyl on a record player at the house his family moved into, a discovery that had "mystical overtones" for him as a child. This moment and the influence of radio are conflated in Dylan's memories as a siren-call: "I had ambitions to set out to find like an odyssey," he says, "[to] set out to find this home that I'd left a while back and couldn't remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there and encountering what I encountered along the way... the sound of the record made me feel like I was somebody else, like I wasn't even born to the right parents maybe."

With those feelings in mind, its hardly surprising so many iconic figures have begun migrating back to the radio to work as DJs, putting together their own programs and playing the music they love: notably Bob Dylan with the 'Theme Time Radio Hour' on XM Satellite Radio and Lou Reed with his 'New York Shuffle' on Sirius Satellite Network. Figures as varied as Alice Cooper, Steve Earle, Joan Jett, Tom Petty, Steven Van Zandt and a host of others have joined them, reveling in the satellite radio broadcast revolution in the USA.

Hearing about these artists playing at being DJ seems to re-affirm radio as the ultimate machine for poetic experience and transformation to this very day. As if radio's gifts of song alongside any-time, any-place can still catch us unawares and transport us.

Which is how I came to write this story, I guess. The radio on in my car, Van Morrison's 'Astral Weeks' on the airwaves, the decades peeling away in my mind till I find myself at age 21 again, behind the wheel of my very first car, swinging through the curves of the old Pacific Highway near Swansea, this very same song streaming ecstatically along with the promise of the road as the singer calls to me through my radio: "To be born again, in another world... in another time, in another place, and another face."

- Mark Mordue

* This essay first appeared at ABC Unleashed.com on 18th December, 2008, 12.30pm.

Where Fools Rush In

In an age of sound byte opinions and digitally rapid-fire news we are wildly quick to make our judgement calls on almost any subject from Britney Spears' mental health to the Gaza Strip invasion. The culture of blogging and a look-at-me glibness that seems to reward the loudest and quickest mouths on the block only adds to this feeling of disposable and trivial involvement delivered with maximum and immediate impact.

The idea we have the time, let alone a desire to think deeply about anything seems to be an anachronism we are dispensing with. Yet the popular success of the recent film Doubt throws this into question - and seems to me to have the same ethical significance now as Arthur Miller's The Crucible (which used the Salem witch-hunts of 1692 as its metaphor) did in the aftermath of McCarthyism in early 1950s America.

It certainly must have taken quite some convincing of the powers-that-be in Hollywood to go with a drama about a priest and a nun in conflict with each other over the direction of the Catholic faith and the well-being of a young school boy in their care during a gusty and grey autumn in the Bronx of 1964. No guns blaring, no significant special affects, no comic skits or lightweight patter, not even a clear and easily digestible conclusion to send people home feeling good.

And yet Doubt has gathered such critical momentum it played a significant role at this year's Academy Awards - with nominations for Best Actress for Meryl Streep and Best Supporting Actor for Phillip Seymour Hoffman, as well as seeing Viola Davis (as a worried mother) and Amy Adams (a young nun) competing for the Best Supporting Actress honour.

Hoffman's priest is a lover of life: enjoying a glass of red wine and a cigarette, a side of raw and bloody beef, an extravagant and almost provocative three sugars in his tea. Along with these earthly pleasures he has a philosophical association with the groundswell of the Vatican II movement under Pope Paul VI in the early '60s, which sought to make the Catholic Church a more user-friendly and humane institution.

Streep's nun is a stoic recalcitrant who thinks 'Frosty the Snowman' is a pagan anthem. She detests biros as a sign of declining penmanship and runs her high school with ferocious discipline. Outwardly she represents a gloomy authoritarian hangover from the 1950s, but there's a tartly humorous side to her take on the world that slowly becomes available to us. "Everyone's afraid of you," a young sister tells her. You can almost taste Meryl Streep's smile when she replies, "Of course."

What is at heart a personal and institutional power struggle masked in the ideological currents of Catholic theology and educational practice (and with it some proto-feminist intimations as well) becomes something darker and deeper as the nun suspects the priest of inappropriate relations with the young black boy at her school. And yet despite the almost clichéd motor of a paedophile plot it's not clear if the priest is guilty - and even more ambiguously if such a 'guilty' relationship is utterly shameful, or part of a much more complex scenario involving issues of sexuality, bullying, race, class and other hidden forms of abuse.

The film's title resonates throughout every moment, turning our beliefs into presumptions. It ultimately asks us to consider the part that doubt can, or should play in how one speaks and acts. As Hoffman asks from the pulpit when Doubt opens, "What do you do when you're not sure?"

John Patrick Shanley wrote, directed and adapted the film from his stage play of the same name. These antecedents are obvious and Hoffman and Street eat up the screen in some overtly stagey if nonetheless superb bursts of plot-shaking dialogue. Shanley has meanwhile been open about the real inspiration behind the substance of the film: post 9/11 New York and the USA of this era more generally, when anyone who doubted or questioned the direction the country was headed in risked being ostracized and isolated.

And yet if events since 9/11 have taught us anything it is to be suspicious of fundamentalism, extremism and absolutism in all its forms, as well as any cheers (or hisses) that come too easily from abroad or at home. There's an old saying that fools rush in where angels fear to tread. It would pay to have it inscribed as a motto on the level of our civic debate these days.

It's this sophisticated broadening of thought - and emotions - that makes Doubt so richly involving as an experience, whether you have an interest in Catholicism or indeed an aversion to anything religious at all. The real drama it contains is its focus on our morality and how we come to determine its active nature in ourselves. How dreadful to think that our convictions can grow in the shallowest of soils and be nothing more than weeds.

Of course there comes a point where endless nuances and vacillations can immobilize us. One of the ironies of Doubt as it develops is the way in which the best possible actions are in fact committed on the basis of what is known, if for somewhat mixed and uncertain results. We do our best. What Doubt asks of us is to think about the tension between what we claim to know and how shaded the world can be in practice, and find some greater faith in its complexities - rather than annihilate ambiguity in order to reward our certainties.

- Mark Mordue

* This article was first published online at ABC Unleashed.com, 23rd February 2009, 09.30am.

May Your Hope Give Us Hope

Barack Obama stands in the torrential rains of Chester, Pennsylvania, addressing an 8000 strong crowd that has stood ankle deep in mud for hours waiting for him to appear. It is one of the great moments in the American election campaign, and a confirming symbol of the Democratic candidate's seemingly assured place in history when those elections are decided today.

If John McCain had appeared during that same storm he would have looked a sodden loser, an old man down on his luck as the election slides from his grip. The Republican candidate wisely decided to move his appearance indoors once the pelting rain settled in around Quakertown, while Obama electrified a similar scene just a city away in Chester.

That all the same circumstances were in play, yet one man could seize the day while another was overwhelmed is a case study in the way symbols work.

What those symbols say is that Senator Barack Obama is ready to lead the USA through the stormy weather that has befallen it, and that people are willing to follow him. The stormy weather is, of course, the current economic crisis and the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars that have so scarred the nation's spirit, its reputation and its confidence worldwide.

It is now clear the war machinery of George Bush's administration harnessed post-September 11 sympathy as a stalking horse for imperial ambitions which have proved fatal for the regime. Broad analysis would have it this hawkishness has also been fatal for America itself; that the nation is on its last legs as an empire, rotting from within and assaulted from without.

One could refer to all manner of indices and stats to affirm the bleak prognosis, but none have struck me more powerfully than recent information that approximately 1000 suicide attempts a month are being made in the USA by returned serviceman from Iraq. This lemming-like urge towards self-annihilation among veterans goes beyond a phenomenal case study in post-traumatic stress syndrome, and on into a mass trauma at the heart of the nation.

In truth, America has been behaving in a traumatized way ever since September 11 struck. Osama bin Laden, a man with a well developed taste for symbols, made sure the event date on the American calendar matched the numbers for phoning 'emergency' when you're in trouble - '911'. It's rare a culture gets to see such a grand blow delivered right between the eyes, an event whose script assured America it was, like all the empires before it, terribly mortal. Go ahead and call for help, you ain't gonna make it.

Yet for all the devastating power of those planes sliding into the Twin Towers and the buildings tumbling down over New York, other symbols sustained themselves by association: the couple who leapt to their deaths holding hands; the police and fireman who went up the stairwells into the smoke and fire against all the odds before them.

This is the human thrown up against the monumental, and the human is not forgotten or diminished. Indeed it's the human that grows in nobility all the more, a sentiment greatly celebrated in Bruce Springsteen's Into the Fire, which conjures up an image so religious the song becomes a prayer and the men involved ascend a staircase to heaven rather than hell on our behalf:

"May your strength give us strength
May your faith give us faith
May your hope give us hope
May your love give us love..."

It would seem to me we similarly perceive the human and heroic scale upon which Barack Obama must act today. And that this is why we admire him so much, and why we pin so much hope upon him. Satirists with a taste for the caustic agree it's exactly the right time for America to elect a black man president. And yet there remains a deeper, truer feeling that a change in government and more especially a change in leader can transform things for the USA, even in its eleventh hour.

Is it right then to say the big game is over for the United States of America? Despite pundits by the pound leaping upon phrases like "the end of the American century" I see no desire for us to witness an end to our love of rock 'n' roll or jazz or blues, or great American films, or TV shows like Entourage or The Wire, or even the apocalyptic 'frontier' novels of Cormac McCarthy. Whether it's McCarthy's book The Road or Paul Thomas Anderson's punishing film There Will be Blood, there's a thrill to American culture even as it examines its own damaged and insanely titanic spirit.

The feelings of hope that Barack Obama kindles worldwide indicates we are no great hurry for the so-called 'American century' and its influence to come to pass. Indeed Obama's looks and youthful dynamism - along with the fact he is the product of a white mother and a Kenyan father - exude a JFK meets Martin Luther King charisma that make us feel history might yet be in the making rather than the breaking.

In these symbolic convergences he personifies not just new hopes in this time of confusion and pessimism, but lost hopes from another era as well, right down to the foiled assassination plots around him. Yes, it is true: Barack Obama is the epitome of a second chance, of something reincarnated in America's vision of itself. He is a kind of living fairytale, and for all our doubts and fears about its veracity we want to believe in that story still.

- Mark Mordue

* First published at 'Unleashed', ABC.net.au, 4th November 20008
Photo by Jae Hong / Associated Press