Greg Brown – Hallelujah anyway
“I had those Caedmon recordings when I was a boy,” says Brown. “I had e.e. cummings and Dylan Thomas records, and I listened to those like I listened to my Rolling Stones records.” He leans forward and declaims grandly, “‘Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs…’ Yeah, Dylan Thomas. A real singer.
“Poets I like, people like Gary Snyder or Ferlinghetti, Pablo Neruda, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams…if you get a chance to hear these people read, they’re singing. I love that old style of singing a poem, which went up strongly through people like Yeats and Pound.”
He leans forward again, chanting Yeats: “‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made…'” Brown is grinning, delighted. “Y’know, he’s singin’ the thing! That makes my little hairs go up. Pablo Neruda, whether you speak Spanish or not, it’ll make you weep to hear him sing his poems. These academic poets now, I’ve gone to several readings, and I get the giggles sometimes, because the verse is so flat, and they read it in this flat, uncomfortable way. A little stilted. Where’s the music, man?”
I was raised a fundamentalist Christian boy in a sect so ascetically badass, we were taking the Christ out of Christmas long before the term “secular humanist” even existed. We had no name, we did not believe in church buildings or preachers in vestments, and we did not decorate trees.
We gathered in regular houses and sat in straight-back chairs, constructed our own homilies and offered our own prayers. We practiced full-immersion baptism, televisions and radios were forbidden, and our sacraments were bread and grape juice, because alcohol was the devil’s gargle.
We sang unadorned hymns, a cappella. You’d hear the men grinding away at the harmonies down below and the younger women rounding out the middle range. And high above it all (I am thinking especially of the times we held meetings in a barn, and the sound had room to rise) the melody, carried by old women in plain dresses singing in guileless falsetto. They took it right to the rafters.
You ease away. Years pass. You read Being And Nothingness. Then one day several years after its release, you get a copy of Iris DeMent’s Infamous Angel. And when Flora Mae DeMent’s voice comes soaring out those speakers, you are right back in the barn, ready to rise and profess again: Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.
And yet you crave the wisdom of sinners.
Greg Brown, too, was raised up in the church. He can speak the King James, give you a little shalt and wilt. His beloved grandmother was a southern Baptist. His father was a preacher, Pentecostal. “My dad was very unusual in that he was not tryin’ to scare anybody into heaven,” says Brown. “He always approached the Bible as beautiful stories we could learn a lot from. At the end of his life he had gone from southern Baptist to open Bible, to Methodist, to Baha’i. And the Baha’i religion is open arms to everybody. That was his path, and I grew up under his guidance. But I also saw a lot of these like the guy I spoof in ‘Inabell’, a lot of these Elmer Gantry type of people.”
By the age of 20, Greg left church life behind. For good, he thought. Did not intend to return, he says. But during last night’s show at the Englert Theatre — just a block from this bench — he was tuning his guitar when he mentioned that he has joined a church in Kansas City. A church where the preacher sometimes prays that the bombs falling in Iraq might rather take the form of buses and groceries. This is a prayer requiring great faith.
Having once been born again, I have little interest in the testimony of someone freshly so. One still blinded by the light. But the testimony of someone who has been born again, unborn, then re-born…
Brown also said from the stage that he didn’t believe in heaven per se. And then he hung his suit jacket over a chair and proceeded to deliver an arm-waving spoken-word interpretation of “Inabell Sale” in the character of an exasperated psychobilly Bible-thumper, and he flat-out inhabited the role, skipping and raving and clapping his hands to his head, and by the time he wrapped it up, you figured had he not strayed into a life of playing music for us transgressors, that Reverend Brown’s boy, he coulda brought some folks to Jesus.
And then, right on cue, a breaker blew, and all the lights went out.
“It was just a joke, Lord,” said Brown from the dark.
The veracity of Brown’s music has always been bolstered by a sense of literacy. You will find it in The Evening Call when he pins human nature in “Whippoorwill” (“If you ever leave/And I imagine you will”), makes the smart rhyme in “Pound It On Down” (“Cut the rope/Kick the boat”), or nails the details (the gunpowder tea in “Eugene”, the tube top in “Kokomo”). When choosing his words, Brown rarely exercises the standard options. You get the sense he hones those lines, again and again.