Love of the Common People.

All of us are born explorers. From the very beginning, as infants and young children, we are a curious species of animal. We observe, reach for, and question everything around us. Many of us carry throughout our lives a series of fundamental questions we seek to answer. Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? When we consider the intricate patterns of life on earth – how everything connects with everything else – our questioning becomes all inclusive. Where did the earth, and the life forms on it come from? Where are we going? 

Dr. Robert Ballard

Thirteen years ago I mailed Nick a letter that described how I’d begun to recognise symbols from ancient Greek and Roman myths in his songs. I gave it a heading: The Love Songs of Nick Cave. The mythological symbols identified even his darkest, bloodiest songs as love songs for all of humanity, grappling with love as agape, a selfless love of others. It wasn’t yet fashionable to call them love songs. At that time The Murder Ballads album was newly released and Nick was recording the spare, crystalline outlines of the songs for The Boatman’s Call album (which he sent me on cassette).

            I was beginning to delve deeply into Buddhism at the time, and the songs on the cassette – those that appeared on The Boatman’s Call and those that emerged later, on the B-Sides and Rarities set – made reference to The Gospel of Thomas, a Christian scripture discovered in 1945 that has parallels with the Buddha’s teachings of inner divinity and a sense of personal responsibility. Elaine Pagels opens her study of The Gospel of Thomas with a quote from the video artist, Bill Viola: ‘It’s an invisible world out there, and we’re living in it.’

            I carried around Nick’s songs on my Walkman and they operated as a field guide to this invisible world, through them I could recognise the spirit alive (or not) in the people of the city. When I reached for the words to describe something inexpressible, frequently those words were from Nick’s songs. For instance, young, affluent men in trendy business suits holding fistfuls of hip techno-devices who were sitting on Melbourne’s free City Circle tram, looked straight through a disabled man struggling and lurching as he tried to swing his crutches and himself onto the tram. ‘But watch the one falling in the street,’ Nick sang in ‘As I Sat Sadly By Her Side’. ‘See him gesture to his neighbours. See him trampled beneath their feet.’ 

            And I comprehended the title of the Let Love In album when I saw a blind man with his guide dog busking on Swanston Street in Melbourne. He played a voluptuous acoustic Spanish guitar and wore two hearing aids. His singing had a distant quality, as if he were remembering the music rather than hearing it as he played. His music was magnificently sad, reminiscent of Portuguese fado ballads. At the end of the Eagles song, ‘Desperado‘, after he’d sung the lines ‘you’d better let somebody love you, before it’s too late’ he reached around and stroked the muzzle of his guide dog.  It occurred to me that to ‘let love in’ is to be humble enough, to strip away one’s defences enough, to accept love.

            I gain insights from Nick’s songs in the same way that he gathers the insights to write them, by bringing them into the life of the city. He drives around, without destination, just listening, soaking in the world around him. I first heard the new Bad Seeds album Dig, Lazarus Dig!!! while Nick was in Sydney for the Grinderman tour in October of 2007, driving around Sydney’s inner city and North Shore with him, along the harbour, on a cool, clear Monday morning. The sounds of the city are in the dazzling beauty of the musical arrangements of the album: temple bells clanking like heavy machinery and a sensual groove, sunshine reflected from the surfaces of buildings and water turned into sound.

            Lazarus digs the dark, funky underworld of New York City in the 1970’s. Maybe he’s buying branded ‘blue magic’ heroin supplied by the drug lord from Ridley Scott’s new movie American Gangster, who has it shipped from Vietnam in military coffins with the bodies of soldiers returning home. Lazarus experiences the spiritual sugar-rush of San Francisco in the aftermath of the summer of love. Joan Didion chronicled this time but while readers saw the era’s treacly reaching for peace and love, baby, she was writing about the absence of a core myth to guide people. She saw the coming of an apocalypse that WB Yeats had alluded to in his poem ‘The Second Coming’ in 1919. ’Anarchy has been ‘loosed upon the world’ and ‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’ Nick’s itinerary for Lazarus includes Los Angeles, probably at the time that Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys crossed paths with Charles Manson. Lazarus may have been in Los Angeles when a musician from a band making music that sounded like sunshine itself crossed paths with a murderous figure with a messiah complex. This allusion is mystifying: are you referring to the Bad Seeds? Please clarify! Lazarus may be brought back from the dead but he isn’t reborn. He falls on hard times, becomes homeless, goes mad and becomes violent.