Music of the '80s That Matters: "Fortress Around Your Heart"

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Fortress Around Your Heart: Sting & Co.

Fortress Around Your Heart is from Sting's first solo effort after The Police disbanded -- the trio has never officially broken up. That album, Dream of the Blue Turtles (1985),
is Sting's attempt to form a serious jazz band fused with, well, Sting.

In the film Bring on the Night, director Michael Apted documents the promotional tour preparation process. The live album Bring on the Night covers the tour itself; the clip above is from this tour.

And when I say all-star jazz band, I mean all-star jazz band -- just check out the lineup here. The Branford Marsalis saxophone mojo is just the start.

With such a timeless allegorical love poem as this, you deserve nothing less than access to the lyrics. They are reprinted below. Be prepared to totally dig this tune.

"Fortress Around Your Heart"
(-- Sting, album version lyrics)

Under the ruins of a walled city
Crumbling towers and beams of yellow light
No flags of truce, no cries of pity
The siege guns had been pounding all through the night
It took a day to build the city
We walked through its streets in the afternoon
As I returned across the fields I'd known
I recognized the walls that I once made
I had to stop in my tracks for fear
Of walking on the mines I'd laid

And if I built this fortress
Around your heart
Encircled you in trenches and barbed wire
Then let me build a bridge
For I cannot fill the chasm
And let me set the battlements on fire

Then I went off to fight some battle
That I'd invented inside my head
Away so long for years and years
You probably thought or even wished that I was dead
While the armies are all sleeping
Beneath the tattered flag we'd made
I had to stop in my tracks for fear
Of walking on the mines I'd laid

And if I built this fortress around your heart
Encircled you in trenches and barbed wire
Then let me build a bridge
For I cannot fill the chasm
And let me set the battlements on fire
....

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Bo Diddley (1928-2008)

Bo Diddley in 1997

I saw blues-to-rock pioneer Bo Diddley once, at Tipitina's in 1978. Tip's is New Orleans' premiere music venue (though The Warehouse had more industrial gothic charm, and was a larger venue.) The night I saw Bo, he was on fire in a way I'd never seen. With his trademark custom rectangular electric guitar, he put out the same you-gotta-move-to-this riff the whole night. Bo Diddley, for seventy of his years, could rock the house.

Bo, rest in peace.

References (found by "Salt Lick"):

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Music of the 80s That Matters: Elvis Costello - "Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head"

From 1986s Blood and Chocolate:

Elvis Costello and The Attractions: Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head (studio version)

A deep album cut from the ever-growing, ever-evolving Elvis Costello, the singer/songwriter who helped a lot of us get through the 1980s.

'Everyday, [He] Writes the Book' -- who else helps the ladies handle it ...

... "When you find strange hands in your sweater
When your dreamboat
Turns out to be a footnote"

Thanks Declan, thanks.

".... Climbin' Up the Topsails, I Lost My Leg ...."

The Dropkick Murphys performing I'm Shipping Up to Boston (lyrics by Woody Guthrie; performance included in The Departed soundtrack)

Celtic punk age-of-sail seaman's folk ballad -- well, punk ballad (?) -- that brings to life the violence of a winter storm at sea. This song, as used in the video above, and, as slammed brilliantly into The Departed soundtrack, is a searingly truthful illustration that urban life in America today can be as violent as any storm you'll encounter. Rock with a vengeance.

Epigram: For hints as to why Woody Guthrie wrote an age-of-sail poem, a great place to start is the section in Joe Klein's Woody Guthrie: A Life on Guthrie's "military service" on troop ship convoys crossing the Atlantic to the European theater of World War II -- a hero with a guitar instead of a gun। Honestly though, the fact that Woody wrote these lyrics is a mystery I'm still trying to unravel.

Billie Dawn contributed to the preparation of this post.

"All the Roadrunning"

A million miles our vagabond heels

Clocked up beneath the clouds.
They're counting down to show time
When we do it for real with the crowds.
(-- Mark Knopfler, from This is Us)

All the Roadrunning, Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris (2006)

The following is from Amazon.com's Production Description of the album All the Roadrunning:

For several years, the iconic Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris have been quietly recording a remarkable collection of duets whenever the Grammy winning artists could steal away from their own illustrious careers. The extraordinary result is All the Roadrunning. The songs from their Nashville sessions, all originals, while undeniably modern, have the appeal of classics, whether country, Celtic flavored or gently soulful. All the Roadrunning is Knopfler & Harris making music and, as the lyric for "This is Us" puts it, making history.

I can't find a hole in that logic. Further, anyone who has heard Emmylou do Paul Kennerly's Born to Run will eat up the track This is Us.

Sold. Send me a copy down the Telegraph Road, addressed to all of us Living in Babylon. Reverse the charges.

Chris Isaak: "Wicked Game"

No matter how near or far,
You'll always be my star.

(- Me)

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Chris Isaak, Wicked Game, from Heart Shaped World (1989)

Second only to Raul Malo (formerly of The Mavericks) -- who I saw flawlessly perform Roy Orbison's Blue Bayou a cappella in Chicago in the late 1990's -- Chris Isaak, as a performer, has contributed the most to keeping the flame of Roy Orbison's style alive. And that's a very good thing.

J. D. Salinger: Then and Tomorrow

Franny and Zooey, J. D. Salinger (1961)

Nine Stories, J. D. Salinger (1953)

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction, J.D. Salinger (1963)

J. D. Salinger's released body of work covers a time when the U.S. was at a cultural watershed moment. Old social systems were crumbling, and alternative culture (the Beat Generation, the Dharma Bums, The Merry Pranksters, Timothy Leary) was growing with ferocity. Salinger was and remains a harbor of serenity from the surrounding chaotic storm. I like storms, but I also like safe harbors.

The Catcher in the Rye gets all the attention it needs. Here I want to make sure you've been properly introduced to the Glass Family, in three of Salinger's finest released (in book form) works: Frannie and Zooey, Nine Stories, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction.

These short stories and novellas are unparalleled, timeless, visionary. I agree with contemporary critic Janet Malcolm who argues the novella Zooey is Salinger's masterpiece. Malcolm also addresses eloquently the way Salinger was short-sightedly brutalized by some critics regarding the works listed above.

Regarding Zooey, Ms. Malcolm sets the stage for us as such:

.... In "Zooey" we find the two youngest Glass children, Franny and Zooey, in their parents' large apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Salinger's use of recognizable places in New York and his ear for colloquial speech give the work a deceptive surface realism that obscures its fundamental fantastic character. The Glass family apartment is at once a faithfully, almost tenderly, rendered, cluttered, shabby, middle-class New York apartment and a kind of lair, a mountain fastness, to which Salinger's strange creations retreat, to be with their own kind. Twenty-year-old Franny, who is brilliant and kind, as well as exceptionally pretty, has come home from college after suffering a nervous collapse during a football weekend. ....

The other place to begin your acquaintance with the Glass family is Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters has it all: Zen wisdom, a picture-perfect view of Manhattan in the 1940's, brutal yet tender satire, belly-laugh humor, and intolerance for intolerant people. As I write this, I'm taking my 4th or 5th crack at rereading Seymour: An Introduction and trying to break through to its core meaning. I've been trying for 30 years, and this time, I think I've climbed to level one comprehension. (Point being: don't start with Seymour: An Introduction.)

Nine Stories is highly recommended here most importantly for a non-Glass-family story: For Esme' with Love and Squalor. This short story is one of the finest I've ever read. Salinger biographer Paul Alexander documents both the enduring popularity and critical acclaim this tale receives. Don't get me wrong, Nine Stories has a great deal to offer, but I'm just crazy for Esme'. A friend of mine loves A Perfect Day for Bananafish best. Teddy is also masterful. The total collection is pure joy, if viewed through a Buddhist lens.

Salinger quit publishing his work in 1965, but has apparently continued writing. I for one can't wait to find out what he's got tucked away in his vault. Once you've read Frannie and Zooey, Nine Stories, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, chances are you will also be impatiently awaiting the release of more Salinger.

Now, to close, a little self indulgence on my part. Even if you never read a word of Salinger's work, I'll be quite content if you read the long quote (actually an uncredited long quote from another time and culture), used by Salinger in the first several pages of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. Seymour Glass, oldest and most revered of the Glass children, reads the following story to comfort his 10 month old baby sister, Franny, who is up crying during the night with the mumps:

Duke Mu of Chin said to Po Lo: "You are now advanced in years. Is there any member of your family whom I could employ to look for horses in your stead?" Po Lo replied: "A good horse can be picked out by its general build and appearance. But a superlative horse -- one that raises no dust and leaves no tracks -- is something evanescent and fleeting, elusive as thin air. The talents of my sons lie on a lower plane altogether; they can tell a good horse when they see one, but they cannot tell a superlative horse. I have a friend, however, one Chiu-fang Kao, a hawker of fuel and vegetables, who in things appertaining to horses is nowise my inferior. Pray see him."

Du Mu did so, and subsequently dispatched him on the quest for a steed. Three months later, he returned with the news that he had found one. "It is now in Sach'iu ," he added. "What kind of horse is it?" asked the Duke. "Oh, it is a dung-colored mare," was the reply. However, someone being sent to fetch it, the animal turned out to be a coal black stallion! Much displeased, the Duke sent for Po Lo. "That friend of yours," he said, "whom I commissioned to look for a horse, has made a fine mess of it. Why, he cannot even distinguish a beast's color or sex! What can he possibly know about horses?" Po Lo heaved a sigh of satisfaction. "Has he really got as far as that?" he cried. "Ah, then he is worth ten thousand of me put together. There is no comparison between us. What Kao keeps in view is the spiritual mechanism. In making sure of the essential, he forgets the homely details; intent on the inward qualities, he loses sight of the external. He sees what he wants to see, and not what he does not want to see. He looks at the things he ought to look at, and neglects those that need not be looked at. So clever a judge of horses is Kao, that he has it in him to judge something better than horses."

When the horse arrived, it turned out indeed to be a superlative animal.

Less is more.