I liked the young drop-outs I was with in Torremolinos, and when the last of Paxton Fell’s older group had quietly fallen asleep or had retired to unaccustomed partners in unaccustomed beds, I looked for my companions. I found them clustered together in a far corner of the garage. They were with the rustic musicians, and Gretchen was singing softly her ballad of the silkie, that overwhelming song of a man trapped in inescapable contradictions. Britta stood with the villagers, interpreting roughly the words Gretchen was singing, and I thought how appropriate that was, for the song must have originated with the ancient Norse invaders who had stormed the coasts of Scotland.
I was surprised at how easily they understood this rather difficult song, for when Britta explained to them that the seal had taken back his son and predicted that the boy’s mother would marry a huntsman who would one day shoot both the seal and her son, the villagers nodded. To them such outcomes seemed logical.
It was Britta who suggested that Gretchen bring her guitar to the Alamo and offer regular programs as respite from the incessant records. ‘I know the customers would appreciate the music. Remember those Spaniards the other night. And they couldn’t even understand the words.’ Since Jean-Victor was still absent in Morocco buying marijuana, the only one who had to be consulted was Joe and when he heard of the proposal he said, ‘Why not?’
I was present at Gretchen’s first appearance. Some of the soldiers grumbled at this type of interruption to the usual records, but after the first strong chords on her Spanish guitar they paid attention, and before many days had passed they were making their requests by yelling out the Child numbers.
This was made easier when one of the soldiers stole the paperback reprints of Professor Child’s volumes and donated them to the bar. On each inside cover was stamped: This book is the property of Morón Air Base, but in my opinion the books were doing more good in Torremolinos that they would have at the air base; at any rate, whatever I know about the Child ballads I learned thumbing these volumes while Gretchen sang in the Alamo.
Which ballads did the soldiers prefer? They never tired of ‘Barbara Allen’ and would yell ‘Child 84’ four or five times a day. ‘She just sang it,’ one of the men would tell a newcomer, who would yell, ‘Well, let her sing it again.’ I think the young, men relished the idea of a faithless girl dying of a broken heart, for when Gretchen sang this perennial favorite, I would see the soldiers nodding complacently.
‘Mary Hamilton’ had no charm for them; apparently her tragedy was one that older people related to. But they loved ‘The Twa Sisters,’ with its haunting refrain ‘Binnorie, o binnorie!’ This ballad related events that developed when a young man courted an older sister but ran away with a younger; again the soldiers could identify with such an impasse, for all of them, apparently, had at one time or other wooed one girl while keeping an eye on another.
They also liked Child 12 very much, the account of a gallant knight who was poisoned by the girl he was proposing to marry. To watch the nods of approval when Gretchen sang this ballad, one would have concluded that such poisonings were commonplace and that the soldiers had been lucky to escape. But the song that seemed to strike the most responsive chord was ‘The Prickly Bush,’ for its moist sentiment reflected their own sense of morality:
‘ “Oh, the prickly bush, the prickly bush,
It pricked my heart full sore;
If ever I get out of the prickly bush,
I’ll never get in any more.” ’
The singing of the ballads had one consequence that I should have anticipated but didn’t. When Gretchen placed herself on the high chair, twisted her left foot around a rung and crossed her right knee over, she formed a most appealing picture, and with her braided hair about her shoulders and her bright eyes flashing, it was not surprising that many of the casuals who drifted into the bar should have been attracted to her. In fact, barely a day passed without some man asking her to dinner, or to a drive down to Marbella, or a swim; but she rebuffed all invitations with an iciness that frightened or perplexed them. Habitués, having repeatedly tried to lure Gretchen to their flats, passed the word that she was frigid, or a lesbian, or weirdo. Interesting speculations circulated, with the men occasionally bringing Joe and Cato into their seminars.
‘What’s with Miss Boston?’ they asked.
‘She’s okay,’ Cato reported.
‘What goes on in the yellow pop-top?’
‘She sleeps there,’ Joe said.
‘I know that. But with who?’
‘With herself. And you lay off. When she sends out the message that she needs a companion, you’ll be the last to get an invitation.’
‘What bugs me,’ one of the Americans said, ‘is that in a place like Torremolinos, where girls go nuts looking for dates, this one is no-no.’
‘Maybe she feels no-no,’ Cato suggested.
‘There you’re wrong. Because I look at her when she sings, and those songs come from the heart. She lives them.’
‘All you look at is her legs,’ Cato said.
‘How else would you know what a girl’s thinking?’ the soldier asked.
And then Clive flew in from London, and the music changed, and for two weeks the Alamo was bewitched, for Clive brought with him such a compelling sense of this day, this generation, that everyone had to listen.
I was sitting in the bar one afternoon, waiting for instructions from Geneva as to what I must do next with the fractious Greeks, when a soldier who was gazing aimlessly into the alley suddenly leaped from his chair and shouted, ‘It’s Clive!’
I looked into the alley and saw standing there, with sunlight on his face, a most unusual-looking young man. He was in his early twenties, tall and slim in a soft, effeminate way. He wore his hair long, and had a beard much like Christ’s, above which peered the biggest, most limpid eyes I had ever seen in a man. He was dressed London style, in a velvet jacket that was obviously expensive; and around his neck he wore a heavy Renaissance chain from which dangled a large flat metal disk on which had been engraved the copy of a Verrocchio head. He created an impression of a young faun, lacking only horns and a wreath of olive.
The American soldiers jumped toward the door, shouting, ‘It’s our boy!’ They reached out, grabbed him by the arms, and hauled him into the bar. He responded by kissing each one on the cheek and saying to those he remembered from previous visits, ‘Dear boy, it’s ripping to have you back.’
‘You’re the one who was away,’ one soldier said.
‘Darling boy,’ Clive protested, ‘I am never far from here. Sink of Torremolinos, Mecca of the world, I bow three times,’ and carefully handing me an article he was holding, he threw himself prone upon the floor, knocking his head thrice against the boards. ‘I am overjoyed to be here,’ he said from his reclining position, blowing kisses to everyone, ‘and the good things I’ve brought you! Oh, oh!’
I now had time to notice that he had handed me a large flat carpetbag, purple in color, with two leather handles. It was about twenty-six inches long, thirteen high and not more than six inches thick, but it was heavy. Before he recovered it from me he moved about the bar, embracing all his old friends and pausing to inspect the three girls. ‘You are a glorious addition,’ he told Britta. Kissing Monica on the cheek, he said, ‘Ah, that English complexion! Tend it with Pond’s cream or it’ll go to hell.’ He tried to kiss Gretchen too, but she drew back in such a way as to indicate that she did not intend to participate in such nonsense. To her surprise, he grabbed her left hand, pressed it passionately to his lips, and cried, ‘You can always tell a lady. She keeps her knees together.’ Before Gretchen could protest, he was standing before me, saying, ‘And now, my good man, you can hand back the jewels, s’il vous plaît.’
As the Americans gathered around him, he cleared a place on the bar for his carpetbag and carefully unzipped the edges. Throwing back the top, he revealed two stacks of gramophone records with jackets in the current mode: weird montages, an extremely austere ph
otograph of an eggplant titled in copperplate Aubergine, an 1877 grainy photograph of a public execution in Belgrade, and a series of vignettes of the American west, including the scalping of a white woman in voluminous petticoats. Records by two English rock-and-roll groups predominated: Octopus, Homing Pigeons. The records looked as if they had never been played.
‘What shall I start with?’ he asked his audience. ‘Yesterday these gems were in London, untouched by human hands. Today we offer them to the swine.’ He nodded to the soldiers. ‘I think the biggest news … the really shattering thing that has set music back on its ear … this.’
He dug among his records and came up with one enclosed in a jacket that showed a gangster accompanied by three screwball types standing under a bare tree in a western clearing. Looking at the forbidding photograph, I could not guess what the music inside contained, but Clive explained: ‘It’s a surprising departure for Dylan. A savage attack upon the church … a blistering rejection of Catholicism.’
‘What!’ one of the soldiers cried. ‘Must be terrific,’ and it was through his response, plus that of his friends, that I became aware of how vitally interested this group was in what was happening in their music. What Bob Dylan was doing in his latest record was more important to them than new army regulations or editorials in the New York Times. Music counted; other aspects of culture were in the hands of the Establishment or were controlled by old people like me, but this music belonged to them, and the fact that it outraged the stabler regiments of society made it doubly precious.
‘God, I’d like to hear what Dylan has to say,’ a soldier said as he watched Clive take the record from its jacket; the young Englishman behaved like a priest conducting a religious ritual. Only the tips of his fingers touched the edge of the record so as not to mar it. Gently he placed the record on the turntable, adjusted the dials to high volume, and leaned back to hear the revolutionary music which he and his friends found so rewarding.
It was a strange record, in which every phrase had a recondite meaning. When Dylan, in his nasal tones, addressed himself to his landlord, who apparently was about to evict him, Clive said, ‘Of course he means God,’ and when Dylan challenged God not to underestimate him, in return for which he would not underestimate God, the soldiers understood. The lonesome hobo in the next song was mankind defrauded by the religion it had accepted. The wicked messenger, Clive explained, was the body of priests in all religions who misguide and thieve from the faithful; I found this a particularly savage thing, filled with youthful contempt. Tom Paine, bitterly disappointed with organized religion, was the hero of one song; a disillusioned St. Augustine, of another.
I found most of the songs jejune, the type of thinking one should have completed in college bull sessions—freshman year, not senior—but there was one that seemed better than the rest; it dealt with a ‘poor immigrant who eats but is not satisfied,’ and it displayed a deep and timeless religious spirit. When the record ended and the Americans had had an opportunity to digest its radical message, I judged from the remarks they made that Dylan’s interpretation of modern religion was more significant to them than any encyclical of the Pope’s. In succeeding days they asked Clive to play the record repeatedly, for it seemed to speak directly to them.
The actual music of the Dylan record was not impressive—mostly guitar and drum—but Clive’s next two finds got down to the hard core of modern statement. A London group called Octopus offered a driving number called ‘I Get All Hung Up,’ in which a singer shouted that phrase forty-seven times, with only a few alternating clauses, illiterate and frantic, which did nothing to explain why he was hung up. The song exerted a powerful effect upon its advocates, who told me, ‘That’s the best side Octopus has ever done.’ When I asked why the endless repetition of a single idea was commendable, they told me, ‘You miss the whole point. It’s that combination in the background.’ When the record played again, which it did no less than once every fifteen minutes, I listened to the supporting music and heard an electric organ that produced a mournful wail appropriate to the words of the song and two electric guitars that sounded like musical machine guns. The third instrument I could not identify, so one of the soldiers enlightened me: ‘It’s a mouth organ … played very close to the mike.’ I listened more closely but was not able to confirm that intelligence.
But the combination of these instruments, plus the nasal, wailing voice singing in the accents of a South Carolina Negro—even though the singer had never been outside London—was so different and so commanding that I began to understand why the young people appreciated it so much. Did I? It had been recorded at such tremendous volume that all I heard, really, was a vast blur of noise.
When I said this to Monica, she clapped her hand over her mouth and said, ‘You idiot! You haven’t caught that wonderful twisting of the sound—like the arms of an Octopus? Where do you think the group got its name?’ So I listened again as she explained how the two guitars and the organ constantly intertwined while the shrill, staccato mouth organ carried the tune forward. It was a thin musical contribution, but at last I understood it.
‘You’ll like Homing Pigeons,’ she assured me. ‘They’re for squares.’ And when Clive put on their new record I agreed, for I could hear the words and they made sense.
Who was Clive? I never heard his last name, but he came from London and apparently belonged to a good family, for Monica had known him previously. ‘His father and Sir Charles did things together,’ she told me, ‘although whether it was in school or university I’ve never understood.’
At sixteen Clive had been a brief sensation in a musical group that had offered a series of new sounds; what they were I did not learn, but I did see a photograph of him at that period dressed in Edwardian clothes and seated at a harpsichord with twin keyboards, which must have been an innovation for rock-and-roll. When he was eighteen his group had lost its popularity and at twenty he was a used-up elder statesman. Now at twenty-three he was writing songs for others—very good songs, I was to discover—and to keep his imagination fresh he toured the centers of inspiration: Mallorca, Torremolinos, Antibes, Marrakech. On such trips he carried only a small handbag plus his purple carpetbag containing the latest records from London and New York.
Arriving at one of his stops, he would seek out some bar or café with a record player, and there he would ensconce himself, at no pay, and report upon what was happening in the music world, playing his disks at their maximum noise-level and infusing the area with reverberating echoes of whatever new sound had come along within the past six months. The highlight of any such visit came when he placed on the turntable one of his own compositions, and now in the Alamo the time had come for him to uncover what he had been up to since his last visit.
‘I’ve done two songs,’ he explained. ‘One for Procol Harum.’ This turned out to be a London group with a fine reputation. ‘And the other for Homing Pigeons.’ He played the latter first, and I was unprepared for either its content or style, for musically it derived straight from Mozart and poetically from Homer and Sappho.
Ancient days, ancient days!
I sailed among the Isles of Greece
Peddling handsome slaves to rich wine merchants,
Peddling slaves and seeking peace.
Ancient days, ancient days!
I traveled to the mainland city
Selling little girls to fat bankers and trustees,
Selling girls and seeking pity.
Ancient days, ancient days!
How terrible the setting of the sun,
For with tumult gone I had to lie alone,
Peddling slaves
Selling girls
Smuggling pearls
Robbing graves
And in my sleeplessness, face up to what I’d done.
The Homing Pigeons had given Clive’s composition the right touch; basically they played with an eighteenth-century lyricism, but in unrhythmic lines like ‘Selling little girls to fat bankers and trustees,?
?? they gave it an awkward, hammering quality that made it quite modern. I was surprised at how attentively the soldiers listended to Clive’s song; without saying so, he had launched an attack upon the Establishment, and this they approved.
At about two in the morning Clive said, ‘It’s been a long day. I’m getting tired. Is the sleeping bag still there?’
‘Yigal’s using it.’
‘So be it. What’s available?’
Britta answered. ‘You could sleep in the pop-top.’
‘Wait a minute!’ Gretchen protested. ‘I do my own inviting.’
‘What I meant was,’ Britta explained, her cheeks flushed, ‘was that Yigal and Clive could sleep in the pop-top and you could take over the sleeping bag.’
‘Now that’s a sensible idea,’ Gretchen said, and with no more planning than that, off they went to bed.
On one point I was mistaken about Clive. His effeminate mannerisms had led me to think he might be homosexual; certainly the soldiers who were meeting him for the first time thought so, because I heard comments of a fairly purplish hue, but one of the Americans who had been at the army base for three years offered a correction.