Nick Ward and The Power of Being Human

18 Monday Aug 2025

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A confession: I’ve been going through a bit of a dark time recently, weighed down by all that’s going on in the world. I’m hardly alone in that, or in thinking that the remedy for our ills―and I hope there is one―lies in ordinary people like us rediscovering our shared humanity, uniting around it and fighting back against the inhumane forces that seem hell-bent on enslaving or destroying us.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one…

Normally I wouldn’t bother you with my innermost thoughts, but they seem relevant for once because I’ve been listening to the latest album by Welsh singer-songwriter Nick Ward.

Nick Ward, Cowboyo

It’s a tonic―not because it’s a rousing call to arms; far from it. It’s an unassuming collection of beautifully crafted, deeply human songs delivered simply and authentically. In our present emergency, there’s a lot of power in being simply and authentically human and, for me at least, Ward’s album has been a welcome source of warmth and light amid the gloom.

The title, “Everybody Knows the Dice Are Loaded,” inevitably invokes Leonard Cohen, intentionally or otherwise, but Ward wears his influences lightly. He’s an established artist, having signed with Audiofile Records in 2009 and, since then, released 22 singles, 2 EPs and, with “Everybody Knows,” his seventh album. He looks country and often sounds country, but there’s more to him than that.

A Marketing Nightmare

“As a songwriter I listen to many genres of music,” he says via email from his home/home studio in the seaside town of Porthcawl, South Wales. “However, I have my favourite songwriters and they all go through various stages in their careers where they try their hands at genres not associated with them.  A couple of examples are Neil Young, who has dabbled in country, folk, metal, punk, and Elvis Costello, who has performed pop, rock’n’roll, country, easy listening. Even The Beatles dabbled. 

“I’ve listened to artists like this all my life so it’s bound to rub off on me. But about 10 years ago I found myself listening to country, especially old country, more than anything else. When I delve into a genre/artist I kind of assimilate myself into the whole thing. Hence the image. Stetson, denim, cowboy or biker boots, belts with appropriate buckles. Heck, my home studio has wood effect wallpaper, hat hooks, light up cactuses, a totem pole, Hank Williams poster and a huge bison head-shaped mirror. I may have overdone it!

“However, I don’t see myself as a country artist. I see myself as a maverick who dabbles in country, americana, folk. But I’m just a singer-songwriter who writes whatever takes my fancy. I enjoy the freedom of that. I guess I’m a marketing nightmare!”

From Bright and Breezy to Melancholy and Paranoia

The opening track, “Saddle Up, Settle Down,” is country to its bones, easing you in gently with harmonies reminiscent of The Eagles and a vision of “Here I am, lost on the highway/Ain’t no better way to be alive.” It opens a vista of wide roads and far horizons that sets up expectations nicely for all that is to follow. And there’s a lovely chord change from verse to chorus.

Except that what follows isn’t what you expect. “Stellar Stella,” a paean to a beautiful woman, changes the mood entirely from laidback horse ride through the desert to flight into space, complete with synth effects, ethereal guitars and dreamy lyrics (“Eyes are perfect like a diamond in the afterglow”) held together by a bass line which is both solid and playfully rhythmic.

The direction changes again with the third track, “It’s an Easy Life.” Featuring just Ward on vocals, piano and harmonica, it’s a lyrical evocation of a peaceful moment on a beach with children playing, starfish in rockpools, sand beneath feet. But the simplicity feels deceptive. Beneath Ward’s pleasant voice and attractive melody, there’s an almost tidal rip of melancholy. An easy life, but for how long?

Deceptive simplicity

From melancholy to introspection. “Outside Looking In” is a haunting reflection on age (“Tell me why I feel so old/I’m just trying to fit in”) and the creatively necessary but personally burdensome detachment of the artist (“Never had a dream come true, never had a dream at all/I was close to breaking through, but trying to walk before I could crawl”). But there’s no defeatism here. The moody and menacing rhythm section drives things along, only for sunlight to break through in the chorus with a shift from minor to major and the refrain, “I’m doing all right.” It’s a gem.

“With Just a Spark” and “Elysia” are both love songs but in very different styles, with “Spark” revisiting the country genre (complete with twangy lead guitar and pedal steel) while “Elysia” ventures into fresh territory―a sophisticated late-night feel based on beautiful vocal harmonies around (I think) raised sevenths (the backing vocals are one of the album’s many strengths).

“Here’s A Song I Wrote” links back to the preoccupations of “Outside Looking In”―ageing, the sense of time passing and the potential for art to slow the process. But, here, the introspection runs deeper: lines like “Well here’s a song I wrote, I find it good for my soul; I get to lose myself for a while,” and “When I pull my guitar on, start playing my own song, to stop time from moving on,” are among the rawest and most personally revealing on the album. It doesn’t hurt that the track has a faint Beatles flavour, reminiscent (to these ears) of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Ward’s voice even sounds uncannily like George Harrison’s.

From bright and breezy country to melancholy and introspection, the songs’ moods and themes move from light to dark. The second-last track, “’Neath Open Skies”, takes the trajectory a stage further by skirting the edge of paranoia. The opening lines (“I live in a tree on open ground/Ain’t got no phone or TV/The powers that be want to cut me down/Big Brother’s got his eye on me”) set the tone, which is heightened dramatically by a combination of odd time signature (sounds like 6/8 to me), a stark, pizzicato bass line and tense strings. If I close my eyes, I can’t help seeing the shadow of Nosferatu creeping up the stairs. It really is that spooky.

After that, the final track, “Written In The Stars,” is not only a welcome relief, but a boost to the spirit. Ostensibly a song of loss (“Everybody knows the dice are loaded/It was written in the stars when time unfolded/Now there’s nothing left to do but to keep the memories of you/Safe from harm”) it has a warm, positive ambience, helped by a very catchy horn section and a relaxed but steady groove. It leaves you feeling that, whatever the ups and downs of life, you can eventually reach a point of acceptance. For that alone, it’s the perfect way to finish.

A Timely Reminder: Music Can Save You

This is a very well-produced album. Musically and stylistically, it’s open and accessible but has all the depth, light and shade that any intelligent listener could want. As I said at the outset, it’s a tonic. Before I listened to it, I hadn’t played guitar for nearly a year, such was the funk induced in me by the state of the world. Then I picked up an acoustic to try to work out one of Ward’s chord changes, and remembered again how much I enjoyed playing.

It’s true: music can save you. I owe Ward for reminding me, so the least I can do in return is urge you to give this excellent album a listen.

Antisemitism: it’s an attack on all of us

28 Tuesday May 2024

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I’m not a Jew, but I take antisemitism personally. I don’t see how anyone like me, born and raised in the West, can do otherwise (unless, of course, they’ve developed an ideological hatred of their own civilisation—not unusual, these days). The simple fact is, an attack on Jews is an attack on the West, and on those who subscribe to its values and enjoy its freedoms.

Note that I wrote “Jews,” not Israel or Zionism. Antisemitism represents an ancient hatred that predates the establishment of Zionism, the Holocaust and the foundation of Israel. Its animus, today, is not simply racist (Jews are ethnically diverse) or religious (at least, not in the post-Christian West).

It is, for want of a better word, cultural. And to understand antisemitism’s moral depravity and (from a Western perspective) its intellectual absurdity, you need only look at it in a cultural context, and measure it against the contribution that Jews have made to Western civilisation.

Recently I suggested to a Jewish friend that Western civilisation rests on three pillars—Greek spirit, Roman character and Jewish suffering (he quickly corrected me: “Not suffering,” he said. “Hope.”) But I’m writing a personal testimony, not a cultural treatise. I take antisemitism to heart because I, and millions of non-Jews like me, have been shaped by Jewish history and heritage.

To explain this, I need to give you some backstory.

I was born in (old) South Wales in the 1950s, when the region was firmly locked into post-war economic decline. My father was of Irish descent and my mother of mixed English and Welsh ancestry. We didn’t know much about our family history prior to the 1890s but understood it to be similar to that of most families who lived next to us on what was left of the South Wales coalfields.

Many family trees had grown from nineteenth-century Irish migrants who, fleeing hunger and persecution, had arrived in Wales as the industrial revolution was hitting its stride and the coal mines were booming. English and Welsh migrants, in many cases, were descended from agricultural labourers who, generations earlier, had been driven from their lands by the enclosure movement.

These waves of rootless people poured into a small corner of Wales which was itself being uprooted—literally, as woodland was felled to provide timber for mine construction. Their arrival came on the heels of broad social, economic and cultural changes across Britain, including the rise of nonconformism, a brand of Christianity tailored to the new industrial working class.

Nonconformism differed from the Church of England and Roman Catholicism by emphasising scripture over ritual, and a personal, rather than collective, relationship with God. The impact on the huddled, oppressed masses of the mining valleys was deep and liberating. Among other things, it gave them a single, powerful metaphor to help them make sense of their experience.

This was the journey of the Hebrews (the Jews’ ancestors) from slavery in Egypt to the promised land—an epic undertaking which, as told in the Jewish Torah and the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, took 40 years through wilderness. For the migrants to Wales making uncertain headway against economic exploitation and environmental devastation, the story resonated.

They named many of their chapels after places or incidents which had featured in the Hebrews’ wanderings, such as Horeb (aka Sinai), Elim, Tabernacle and Canaan. The mysterious bread that appeared in the wilderness, saving the Hebrews from starvation, inspired the most famous of Welsh hymns, written by William Williams Pantycelyn (translated into English by Peter Williams):

Guide me, O thou great Redeemer,
Pilgrim through this barren land;
I am weak, but thou art mighty;
Hold me with thy powerful hand:
Bread of heaven, bread of heaven
Feed me till I want no more.

After these words were set to the tune Cwm Rhondda, composed by John Hughes in 1907, the hymn became a rousing anthem of Welsh working-class life, sung in chapels, pubs and at rugby internationals. To this day, it fuses the experiences of two peoples separated by more than 3,000 years of history into a unified, profound and transformative understanding of the human condition.

I was brought up as a Methodist (the largest nonconformist denomination in Wales) and absorbed these influences. They sustained me when I made my own economic migration (from Wales to England, then Australia) and sustain me now, through the broader vicissitudes of life—the “barren land” of worldly existence. And not just me, of course.

The alienation and doubt that the Hebrews experienced in the wilderness, and the hope that sustained them, has affected and inspired countless others, including the early American settlers who fled religious persecution in Europe, African Americans in their struggle for civil rights in the US, and Rastafarians in their quest for their own promised land.

Jewish history and heritage are part of the West’s cultural DNA. Antisemitism is more than an attack on a particular people. It’s an attack on all of us.

Stretching My Legs: a Dog, the Dead, and a Mad-Looking Librarian

27 Sunday Nov 2022

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Yesterday, I went for a 6km walk. Instead of visiting the usual bush lookouts, I kept to the streets. My destination: the war memorial next to the community centre at the head of Galley Road. It’s a nice, quiet spot. The monument squats in the corner of a tennis-court-size lawn, one point in a triangle in which each of the other two corners is marked by a park bench, both in need of paint.

One in every suburb…

The car park was dominated by a large red truck, an Australian Red Cross mobile blood transfusion centre, left there for a few days so that the locals can do their bit. Donors came and went. They included a youngish Asian couple with an old collie. The man ducked into the truck while the dog, slipped from its lead, sniffed around. The woman called him a few times but, deaf or indifferent, he ignored her.

“He likes to take his time,” she said.

“Showing his independence,” I replied. She smiled, barely.

When she put him back on the lead, I reflected that, in human terms, he was probably about my age. For a moment I wondered how it would feel to be totally dependent on her.

Communing with the dead isn’t really my thing, but they are unobtrusive and therefore congenial company. Some of the names were familiar—Windybank, for example; and strange: one surname was “Sustenance”. I sat there for nearly an hour. What would I say if someone I knew saw me? “What are you doing here?” they would probably ask, to which I would reply: “Dwelling on the past is melancholy; I prefer to contemplate my future.” Not everyone appreciates droll gallows humour.

The centre houses a branch library. I called in to browse. As I was leaving, I noticed a young female librarian who hadn’t been at the front desk when I arrived. She stood with her back to me, absorbed in her work. She had long blonde hair and her black top and jeans showed a pleasing figure.

As I walked past her, I turned to thank her with what I like to think is my charming-and-totally-unleering old-man smile. It must have faded quickly. The lower half of her face was obscured by a blue surgical mask. Above it, her eyes were wide and bright, probably because she was smiling back at me and acknowledging my old-fashioned courtesy. The eyes were lovely but, deprived of their proper facial context, looked slightly deranged.

On the way back, before turning into Cockatoo Road, I paused to peer into the bush. Close up, it’s a confusion of fine green brush strokes (she-oaks, etc) and bold brown lines (tree trunks—thin and, below their canopies, mostly branchless). A bit like Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles.

Along Cockatoo Road, two of my female neighbours—one walking her dog, the other returning from the shops—were deep in conversation. Continuing the old-fashioned courtesy theme, I raised my hat as I approached and intoned “Ladies”, just as one of them said “…and then I had diarrhoea.” Spoiled the effect somewhat, I thought.

The Queen, the Prime Minister and the Rise of Woke

09 Friday Sep 2022

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As the world remembers Queen Elizabeth II and ponders the symbolism of her life and the monarchy, a fact likely to go largely unnoticed is that the month of her passing coincides with the thirty-fifth anniversary of a very different, but also highly symbolic, event in British history.

It was in September 1987 that then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in an interview with Woman’s Own magazine, uttered the immortal—and, for many, notorious—words: “There is no such thing as society”.

The contrast between the monarch who selflessly served her country, her faith and the traditions she inherited, and the neoconservative politician who saw life and the world in terms of market forces could not be starker.

Margaret Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth II. Credit: Anwar Hussein/Getty Images

It helps to illuminate the economic, social and cultural changes that have taken place in the last three and a half decades, and goes some way toward explaining many of the crises that we face—crises that can be traced back, with relatively little difficulty, to Thatcher’s ill-chosen words.

Naïve and Idealistic

To be fair, Thatcher was not advocating a devil-take-the-hindmost philosophy. She was elaborating a view of life that rejected the notion of society as a theoretical construct in favour of a vision of men and women as flesh-and-blood individuals seeing to their own needs first, then the needs of others.

It was a world in which no individual had an a priori claim on social welfare. She did not dispute that the unfortunate may need help, but she insisted that such provision should be made within a framework of rights and obligations that fell equally upon all individuals, rich and poor.

Her ideas are often dismissed as social Darwinism; they might equally be seen as naïve and idealistic, because they are so impractical. Essentially, they delegate social welfare, charity and altruism to market forces—dynamics that are impersonal in aggregate and self-interested at the individual level.

The destructive import of her words, however, is not confined to the narrow concerns of social welfare. It extends well into the macroeconomic sphere, and even into geopolitics.

Economic Expediency vs. Social Cohesion

Few who lived through Britain’s strikebound Winter of Discontent from November 1978 to February 1979 would deny that it paved the way for Thatcher to become Prime Minister the following May. There is little doubt that her economic policies, though stringent, were necessary.

But they came at an enormous social cost. Cuts in public spending led to record unemployment (11.9% in April 1984), while privatisation and attacks on the trade-union movement helped to dismantle important sources of cohesion in working-class life.

Scene from UK miners’ strike 1985. Source: Daily Record (UK)

“Thatcherism”, of course, was not confined to the UK. It was a local manifestation of a Western trend inspired by classical liberal economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek and supported by Thatcher’s political contemporary and ally, US President Ronald Reagan.

At a macro level, the trend resulted in financial deregulation, the increased mobility of capital, and globalization, in which manufacturing jobs migrated from Western nations to the low-cost workforces of developing countries, further undermining social cohesion in the West.

Many lines of historical cause and effect can be drawn between the economic expediency pursued by Thatcher and her peers and the social and cultural deprivation that we experience today. They all culminate with the rise of populism and Donald Trump becoming US President in 2016.

And with the rise of woke.

Self-Identity vs. Social Identity

Social theorists commonly distinguish between an individual’s social identity and self-identity. The former is a sense of self and belonging that derives from being part of a group; the latter is the sense of personal identity that one perceives as being intrinsic to oneself, independent of social influences.

Thatcher’s elevation of economic concerns above social ones, the effect of her policies in helping to erode social cohesion, and her emphasis on the primacy of individual initiative and enterprise, have created a milieu in which self-identity has taken precedence over social identity.

A consequence evident in her own time was the emergence of the yuppie, or young upward professional. The epitome of self-interest and social mobility (or rootlessness), the yuppie was a forerunner of today’s privileged meritocrats and technocrats, often referred to as “the élites”.

Meanwhile the less privileged—the outliers and minorities of society—have invested their sense of self-identity in aspects of themselves that put them (or are perceived to put them) at odds with the mainstream: race, sexuality, gender and so on. Hence the rise of identity politics and woke.

Woke is widely seen as the province of the left, but it has its roots in Thatcherism, as both result and reaction. Within the left, it works against the centrist tradition created by Tony Blair and New Labour in response to Thatcher (who once described Blair and New Labour as her “greatest achievement”).

And the fact that Western companies and cultural institutions are eagerly embracing woke values in the form of diversity and inclusion, corporate citizenship and responsible investment should surprise no-one. Woke is, after all, a product of the market forces that drive them.

There are two lessons to be drawn from this, both highlighted by the Queen’s passing.

A Time for Reflection, Risk and Opportunity

The first is that the conservatives who mourn her passing as the loss of a strand of continuity in an uncertain world should reflect—and reflect deeply—on the extent to which neoconservative values and policies have helped to create that uncertainty.

And while they’re about it, they should consider how to rebalance today’s prevailing right-wing economic orthodoxy with the more traditional social and cultural values that conservatism is meant to represent.

The second lesson is that the new King represents an opportunity and a risk. The risk is that his well-meaning but unworldly progressivism may tilt the monarchy further from social identity to the tendency for self-identity which has already captured too many members of the royal family.

But he may also provide an opportunity to re-align the progressive values he represents with the traditional values so well exemplified by the late Queen, to the benefit not just of the monarchy but society as a whole. One can only hope.

Triumph of the spirit: Jeff Cotton’s 52 years of healing

10 Wednesday Aug 2022

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Jeff Cotton via Zoom on August 3, 2022 (Australian time)

Smiling, tanned, relaxed, sitting in a studio on his island home of Maui in the Hawaiian archipelago, Jeff Cotton is a very different man from the one who, 52 years ago and physically and mentally close to breaking point, finally quit what had been his dream job.

Jeff, then known as Antennae Jimmy Semens, had been one of the two guitarists with Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, a legendary US ensemble that made an equally legendary album, Trout Mask Replica. Released in 1969, the album continues to be both controversial and influential.

Artists are supposed to suffer for their art, but not the way Jeff had done.

“Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band was my Vietnam,” he says.

The Trout Mask Replica era: Jeff Cotton/Antennae Jimmy Semens is second from right (Photo by Ed Caraeff/Getty Images)

Shortly after joining the band in 1967, Jeff received his call-up papers to serve in the Vietnam War.

“Obviously, I didn’t want to go to another country and take out my brothers and sisters, of any age, whether the children or elderly. The band wanted me and I wanted to be in the band, so, we did everything we could to get me out [of the draft], and we did get me out.”

Before long, however, Jeff found himself in the midst of another conflict. Beefheart, real name Don Van Vliet, was a creative visionary but, to put it mildly, a hard task master.

The band shared a house. While they typically rehearsed 18 hours a day for the Trout Mask Replica recording session, Beefheart usually slept. When he appeared, it was often to subject Jeff and the others to verbal and mental abuse, apparently to bend them more easily to his creative will.

Beefheart even encouraged violence. When Jeff was physically attacked by a stand-in drummer, he decided enough was enough.

“I thought I could escape war in Vietnam, but if that [war] is what’s laid out in front of you, you’re going to have it anyway. So, I had my Vietnam in the Magic Band. It was probably, for me, as intense and emotionally wrenching as going to war.”

His acceptance that war of one kind or another was to be his lot says much about Jeff’s philosophical take on life. It’s an attitude deeply embedded in his first solo album, The Fantasy of Reality, which he is about to release (August 12, 2022) to mark his return to the music scene after a 47-year absence.

The new album is a long way from Trout Mask Replica.

SMALL SIMILARITIES, BIG DIFFERENCE

Except, that is, in a couple of minor respects.

I suggest that his vocal on Elvirus is reminiscent of Beefheart. It’s a stretch, I know: Jeff’s light quavering tenor is nothing like the Captain’s booming baritone, but the falsetto flick-ups that punctuate much of his intonation echo a hallmark of Beefheart’s style.

Jeff disavows any mimicry.

“Every song I write tells me what it needs in voice or whatever.  I’m 74, and I think I sound more like 97.  But I like humour.  On Heavy, another song on the album, I use a very old man’s voice.  I won’t tell you who he was but I used his voice.”

But Jeff does see a link between Trout Mask Replica and one of his instrumental tracks, On the Thread.

“That’s one of my favourites because I do like avant-garde-type music.  And Beefheart fans may not see it exactly as I do.  They may say, ‘Well, that doesn’t seem too Beefheart to me,’ but that’s my concept.  Had I been more influential back then in the Trout Mask days, the songs would have probably been a little more conservative, like On the Thread.”

Of the three instrumentals on Trout Mask Replica, the one likeliest to offer a line of descent to On the Thread (to my ears, at least) is Hair Pie: Bake 2. Both tracks have a full band arrangement (Jeff played all the instruments on The Fantasy of Reality, and programmed the drums) and foreground intricate interplay between guitar parts.

But there the similarity ends. While Hair Pie: Bake 2, like the rest of Trout Mask Replica, is harsh and discordant, On the Thread is light and airy—indeed, almost airborne.

The difference provides clues not only to where Jeff stands, musically and personally, in relation to Trout Mask Replica, but also to his innermost character, and to the distance he has travelled, emotionally and philosophically, since, as a 21-year-old, he helped make that iconic album.

FROM FRAGMENTATION TO WHOLENESS

This article is not meant to be about Trout Mask Replica. The album casts a long shadow, however, and it seems necessary to enter the darkness to draw Jeff and his own album into the light.

Sleeve of the Trout Mask Replica double album, released June 16, 1969

While Trout Mask Replica has grown in critical esteem over the years, it continues to divide ordinary music fans into lovers and haters. Prior to its release, Beefheart and the various incarnations of the Magic Band had been a respected blues-rock outfit with increasingly psychedelic leanings.

With Trout Mask Replica, they shredded that legacy. Steady beats were abandoned in favour of arhythmicality and clashing time signatures, while melody and harmony gave way to atonality and a sonic grind based on random horn-blowing, strangulated guitars and Beefheart’s wild vocals.

Even fans would concede that it sounds like a bear roaring drunkenly to the accompaniment of metal scraping against metal. But they hear something else, too: an underlying order and beauty.

Beneath the chaos, many elements and influences are at work, from the band’s roots in the delta blues to the free jazz of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, and even (according to those who know about these things) the serialism of Stockhausen and fragmentariness of Stravinsky.

At the risk of sounding pretentious (oh, go on, then), it reminds me of T. S. Eliot’s classic modernist poem, The Waste Land. Both break down accepted artistic forms. In the poem, Eliot uses the phrase, “a heap of broken images”. It could easily describe both the poem and the album.

The Fantasy of Reality couldn’t be more different. Instead of fragments it offers an aesthetic wholeness based on Jeff’s rich blues sensibility and deep spirituality—both of which are evident on the album’s opening track, Does It Work for You?

Jeff Cotton’s debut solo album, The Fantasy of Reality, released August 12, 2022

What, in Jeff’s view, does the album say about how he has developed, musically and personally, in the last 50 or so years?

“40, 50 years ago, I believed in art for art’s sake and, today, I’m not interested in that at all.  I’m interested in communication and connection with another being, another human being.  So, all the music has evolved.  The lyrics have evolved, and the music has evolved, in that direction.”

He cites as example another instrumental from the new album, a classically-flavoured solo-guitar piece called Ivy. Like On the Thread, it’s warm and lyrical, but takes its strength from a deliberate sparseness.

“I’m looking for the least notes, the simplest construct possible. You’ve heard it many times: It’s not what you play; it’s what you don’t play. It’s the silence between. That’s why I love music even more than film, in some ways, because music allows the listener to cocreate. 

“And if there’s more space in the song, there’s more time and space for people to cocreate.”

For Jeff, the ideas of communication and cocreation have a philosophical as well as a musical dimension, because they are ways of drawing people closer to each other.

“We’re at a unique time in history. There’s never been anything like it before, and we’re all in it together.”

THE DROUGHT BREAKS

It was when he co-founded MU in 1971 with two old friends and musical collaborators, guitarist Merell Frankhauser and drummer Randy Wimer, that Jeff fully began to step out of Beefheart’s shadow.

MU—short for Lemuria, the mythical lost Pacific Ocean continent that preceded Atlantis—recaptured some of the idealism and optimism of the pre-Manson 1960s. The band’s fascination with the legend behind its name led to its relocation from California to Hawaii, now Jeff’s main home base.

Jeff Cotton with MU, early 1970s

It was around this time that Jeff began the healing process he alluded to in his YouTube interview a few years ago with Canadian musicologist Samuel Andreyev. It wasn’t just his time with Beefheart that he was healing from, however.

“By the time we’re teenagers, we have had a lot of reprogramming done on us. Unconscious reprogramming is a nice way to put it—or the dark side—where we don’t even question things until a certain time in our life.  Maybe something will happen that’s really heavy and we begin to question our lives.  Or some people say they hit a bottom before they started coming up.

“So, I had everything everybody else did to deal with as a kid, the emotional stuff.”

His time with Beefheart provided an extra difficulty, but he bears no grudges.

“I can look back at it and really enjoy it because, yes, I did a lot of healing work. I mean, right from the get-go—every kind of cutting-edge modality I could find.  Rapid eye technology is outrageous.  There are so many other different things that [I] did.  And so, I cleared it, as much as I could.  

“To me, it was important to clear the emotional garbage, because I don’t care how spiritual one may be, if one’s emotional body is polluted, all you’re going to do is shine that beautiful light through a maze of yucky colours. So that, to me, was a responsibility.”

In 1974 he converted to Christianity (but did not, contrary to some online bios, study for the Christian ministry). MU disbanded in 1975 after which Jeff devoted himself to family (he has three adult children) and medical missionary work. His wife Len-Erna—“a great musician and a wonderful writer”, with whom he co-wrote and performed at small, private gigs—died in 2017.

Since then, Jeff has been musically silent. But that’s all about to change. Not only is he releasing his first solo album, work on a second and third album is “70 to 80 per cent complete”.

It’s been a long drought. Why is it breaking now?

LET’S GET THIS FIRE LIT

There are two explanations for the timing. Technology is one.

“I didn’t get into recording music until about 2005, because I was always a little queasy about digital recording back in those days. To me, it was like a hospital—very clean and no character. When a console that was warm came on the market, I started recording.”

Raising three kids is another.

“A lot of the basic tracks on this first album were done in very little increments. If I had 15 minutes, I’d go down in the studio and lay down a part.  Maybe a couple of hours later, I could come down for a half hour.  After everybody went to sleep at night, I might be able to do two hours.  So it was literally put together in that fashion.

And what about the motivation for making the album? Was Jeff driven by a desire to meet specific creative goals, or was the impetus deeper and more personal?

Jeff Cotton recorded The Fantasy of Reality for “deep and personal” reasons (Image credit: Press)

“It was deeper and more personal.  I have wanted, all my life, to do something that counted for others.  Not so I would just have a notch on my gun, but to do something for others that was positive.  And that’s been my whole motivation.  Now obviously, that’s a thought of a young kid, but as you get older, it takes on a deeper meaning.

“And we need love in this world.  We need to love one another, is what we need now.  We know that.  And we need to do it because every human being on this planet is a genius.  Many just don’t know it yet and they don’t know what their genius is.

“And so, my heart is to, hopefully—because I’m trying to live that life—inspire others to be motivated and then to begin their path and journey, if they haven’t already, to know who they really are, because everybody has a great magic within them. 

“And if people get their fire lit, we can clear this world up.”

Better late than never: the Stranger ‘clarifies’ his thinking

10 Friday Jun 2022

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Lizard – where has the time gone? It’s a year since we last corresponded—and, indeed, since anyone wrote anything here. I mentioned this to Simon and he replied with two T. S. Eliot quotes:

“The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible”;

“And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence, seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.”

In other words, if you have nothing to say, say nothing. Now, for no particular reason other than the moment seems to have arrived, I find myself wanting to revisit our last communication (the three posts prior to this).

You were right to point out my muddy thinking. I should have made a clearer distinction between “history” as the version of events accepted by mainstream society to be its own story, and the “Alienation Theory of History”, which posits a broken relationship between that story and certain individuals who feel out of place in mainstream society. Such people look at the past and see no account of themselves there, but may instead see a reflection of their anxiety and sense of displacement. Without the convenience of history to give them an identity, they must try to invent themselves in the moment, and in each succeeding moment. This requires the creative capability I referred to, which can “cut across linear thinking in its search for truth”. “Truth”, here, can stand as an approximation of reality with which such people can feel comfortable.

So, the Alienation History of theory of history is not a version of history; it belongs instead in the broad field of creative thinking. I hope this clears up the confusion I inadvertently caused.

Cheers,

Stranger

The Stranger cops it sweet

07 Monday Jun 2021

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Lizard – you’re right. There’s no logical segue between the two statements, and I’m as puzzled as you are as to why I appeared to think there was. Perhaps I was carried away by the idea that the Alienation Theory is, in its own way, a creative response to the human condition. Either that or some other, similar, subjective lapse. Anyway, I’m duly corrected (and chastened). As I hope to demonstrate in the not too distant future, the Alienation Theory and the creative act of faith are indeed quite distinct elements in the Esse conceptual framework. Before opening my mouth on this or any other topic, however, I will endeavour to ensure that my brain is in gear.

Cheers.

Stranger.

Lizard, somewhat bemused, replies to The Stranger…

01 Tuesday Jun 2021

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Stranger – you’ve completely lost me. You interpret the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection as telling us that we have to think creatively – “That is, look for the truth outside history, or the external pattern of events”. And then you immediately say, “This, to me, seems to be consistent with the Alienation Theory of History, in which we are invited to look back over time to arrive at an understanding…” etc. These are completely contradictory statements. How can one possibly follow the other?

Awaiting your reply with interest.

Sincerely,

Lizard.

The Resurrection and the Alienation Theory of History

11 Sunday Apr 2021

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Dear Lizard – I’ve just read your post, in which you describe the resurrection of Christ as an anti-climax. I understand that you meant this as being in comparison to the resurrection, through Christ, of the human spirit in life. Even so, your comment prompted me to think about the Resurrection’s symbolic (as distinct from theological) importance and power. It could be said to represent a disruption of space and time. I am intrigued by the possibility that, in literature, the confusion, compression, inversion or any other form of distortion of space and time may stand as a proxy, conscious or otherwise, for the ability of the creative consciousness to cut across linear thinking in its search for truth. On this reading, it’s as though the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection are telling us, “If you want to understand this, you have to think creatively”. That is, look for the truth outside history, or the external pattern of events. This, to me, seems to be consistent with the Alienation Theory of History[1], in which we are invited to look back over time to arrive at an understanding of (or a version of) the human condition in which the inherent instability of the human personality is attributed to the asymmetry between humanity’s sense of primal connection to the land (or natural environment) and its actual, modern relationship to it—an interpretation which, I believe, can be supported by reference to the Eden myth and the Epic of Gilgamesh. According to this line of thinking, our primal connection to the land lives on in our DNA and—either as a result of this, or analogous to it—God is present in our consciousness in a real, evolutionary, sense, rather than as just a ghostly celestial spirit. To my way of thinking, this idea has a redemptive power of its own.

Caveat: Nobody owns the truth, but each of us can lay claim to some version of the truth as we see it, providing we see it to the best of our honesty and ability.

Best,

Stranger

[1] A component of the Esse “world view”.

Handel’s Messiah, a bird and the anti-climax of the Resurrection

01 Thursday Apr 2021

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On Sunday (28.3.21) went to see an amateur (local church) choir perform Messiah. Let’s just say the music shone through. When I was a child, it left me cold: all those twiddly bits. As I’ve matured, I’ve come to enjoy baroque music, if not fully to understand or appreciate it. Even so, it took an effort of historical imagination, while listening to the choir, to reconcile (to my satisfaction, at least) the exuberance of the music to the weight of the subject matter.

Handel: twiddly bits

I am, as usual, speculating from a position of ignorance, but it seems plausible to me that most 18th century listeners would not have noticed any incongruity. Handel and Jennens were men of faith writing in an age of faith: their composition was not an exploration of the human condition but a celebration of it, as redeemed through Christ. There’s no psychological dimension to the music, no exploration of human existential anxiety, because, in terms of the composer’s and librettist’s own cultural assumptions, such issues had already been resolved. This leaves the music free to explore its own possibilities, its autonomy lending no direct support to the weight or meaning of the words—which, in any case, are carried by a power of their own.

Jennens: weighty subject matter

And yet there is a sense in which the words and music do complement each other, if you can accept the (fanciful, or perhaps baroque?) idea that the music’s autonomy symbolizes the freedom that Christ’s sacrifice bought for humanity. It’s an idea that begs to be synthesized by an image: I think of a bird flying into a temple, darting hither and thither in the incense-infused half-light, singing freely over the sombre ritual below.

No, I don’t take the Bible literally, but I do try to relate to it in human terms. One consequence is that the Resurrection always strikes me as something of an anti-climax: Christ is never more fully alive in the Gospels than when he’s at the point of death. Yes, I understand the theological importance of the Resurrection and the idea that it gives us hope for eternal life. After Christ’s terrible suffering, however, it’s a gift I’m almost embarrassed to accept. More importantly, it eclipses what, for me, is Christ’s true gift: the possibility of resurrection in life. More than once the idea of an infinitely renewable relationship—God’s unconditional love, and our ability to receive it through repentance as a result of Christ’s sacrifice—has pulled me back from the edge.