Dodie (Soul Trader) Gordon has been everywhere done everything and has a
wrinkle for each of them lurking in the chaos of wispy, grey spaghetti that
engulfs what sits atop his neck.
Amazingly this is the first solo album from a musical life beginning in the
1950s as a boy soprano performing for banana sandwiches at Woman's Rural
Institute meetings and leading through Church choirs, the Scottish folk
revival in the 1960s, choral, calypso and reggae in the Caribbean, an
assortment of traditional and contemporary musical attachments in East,
Central and Southern Africa and, a few years ago in Scotland, with the late
and legendary Howling Shed (sell outs three years running at the Edinburgh
Fringe Festival).
He says that this album is just a small sample of his 'wee tunies'. He wrote
love songs when younger but these have not been included as, 'They were jist
passin fads, nae the real thing'. What we have in this album is the real
thing, what the Soul Trader wryly calls 'existential soft rock wi a bit o
this and a bit of that thrown in'.
It is difficult to label this album but there is no doubt that the lyrics
and music together overwhelmingly support the unlikely notion that this
wrinkly mass of greyness has indeed found, 'The Cure for the Blues'.
The sleeve notes which follow are extracts from an interview with Dodie
(Soul Trader) Gordon at his retreat in a small fishing village in the NE of
Scotland in January 1999.
This was written in reply to an Aberdeen poet who had penned the line
"Aristotle get out of my life". I had sussed that most of today's robust,
down-to-earth common sense is in fact the dreamy non-sense of a philosopher
from day's gone by.
In those days it was part of village life to go to Church on Sundays and I
was a tenor in the choir for about four years. I saw the fashion parade of
hypocrits in hats and spent most of the time eyeing up Ishbel on the organ
and wondering which of the other local lovelies were 'goers'.
Sometimes a line from the man in black would capture my imagination. There
was the idea that the wind blows wherever it wants to and its impossible to
tell where it comes from or where it will go. That sounded like a good way
to live - better than the brain numbing predictability of a long,
respectable life in the village.
The Church of Scotland was particularly dour and uninspiring but we had the
occasional Jehovah Witness road show with electric guitars and busty lassies
in mini skirts. They were lively and talked of being born again. That
sounded like a good idea - anything to get out of this dump and to be where
the action is.
Unless a man be born again
he will not see the kingdom
So grab the wind from whence to where, and perish not in boredom.
I was twenty two years when I wrote this song. I was a hippie and into peace
and love. There were, of course, bigots who refused to budge from their old
fashioned, boring, unhip positions - and this included most of my family and
the people from the village. Tough on them - they didn't like what I was up
to but I was going to move on anyway.
I now had an honours degree in Zoology. Life, the Universe and Everything
was sussed. The story was no longer what I had learned from anybody in the
village, or from the Church nor even from the hippies. The new thing was the
green politics of environmental sustainability.
Me and my mates could see what the biological problems were and we could see
that the answer lay in politics - but we wanted to be bird watchers. We
copped out - let somebody else reprogramme the consumerist masses.
By this time I was a teacher in the slum schools of Edinburgh. The high
minded zoological understanding of the world and its problems had been
deflated by rampant child abuse, alcoholism and broken homes. And my social
life now included more than biologists. I was singing in folk clubs and
hanging out with a pot-smoking economist who had worked in Africa. I went to
the south of France for Easter with an artist who had been the model for a
Virgin Mary statue. She taught me to be less boringly rational and
scientific. By looking through her eyes I came to see that 'trees are
sometimes otherwise than green'.
This is another song based on my time in the Camargue with the Virgin Mary.
Things were never the same after that.
I had become a rationality bigot and it was time to 'leave the why-brain
lying still'. I was reading my way into Buddhism with the idea of following
the flow. At 24 I was a bit young for the mystical experience but it was
about this time that my credo emerged:
The only certainty is doubt
The only constant thing is change
So follow the flow
It became obvious that the cure for the blues was peace of mind and that
there were folk who had figured how to achieve it. The quest began in
earnest.
Twenty one years later I had worked in Jamaica, Zambia, Sudan and Belize
and, after two years of retreat in the village, had a job lined up in
Lesotho.
Each time I came back to this country I noticed that people were getting
more and more like robots. We have the Mother of Parliaments with the womb
of democracy but the punters are completely brainwashed by advertising and
have stopped thinking for themselves.
Lesotho was my fifth overseas country. I was hardly an innocent abroad. I
had humanity sussed. OK folk speak different languages, greet each other
differently and have different attitudes, beliefs and values but, basically,
they are the same underneath with the same desires and fears and the same
ignorance about their true nature.
In Lesotho I was in a band called Inner Harmony. The main singer songwriter
was editor of a local
newspaper. He soon got my number and had me writing
Words of Faith (Eastern) every third week (in between Christian and Bahai!).
This forced me into re-reading the wisdom books.
By this time I was well sold on meditation and had developed a partiality
for Zen. The nothing or no-thing in this song refers to shunyata (Japanese
for the plenum void!)
The important thing is to have peace of mind because this is the cure for
the blues - and you can get it through
meditation.
My house in Lesotho was on a hillside overlooking a lake. Being on the hill
I could look at the lake without noticing the chain link fence, razor wire
and 24 hour security guard at the bottom of the yard. The house doubled as a
recording studio and seemed like a bus station most of the time but when
there was no one around it was a peaceful place to meditate and absorb the
ideas in the wisdom books.
Several of the band members had mystical leanings and the last two lines of
the first verse come from one of the female vocalists:
I'd really like to know
the peace in peace of mind,
The way to lose control and flow.
And by this time I had developed a more relaxed attitude myself:
As a part-time sound engineer I worked with lots of young hopefuls. There
were computer programmes to churn out backings in different styles and I
thought that it would be neat to have a mystical rock and roll number. Wu-Wei
(pronounced Ooh Eh) is Chinese for the concept of spontaneity (non-rational
action) and the outrageous St Auggie had reckoned that "If only you love God
enough you may do as you please". Thus:
The house of a Kenyan lady working for the World Food Programme went on fire
and she had to jump from a first floor window. She was stressed at the time
but soon realised that she was still alive, which was the main thing, and
she laughed about it - she changed her mind. It is never too late to change
your mind. That is the cure for the blues.
Dodie (Soul Trader) Gordon has been everywhere done everything and has a
wrinkle for each of them lurking in the chaos of wispy, grey spaghetti that
engulfs what sits atop his neck.
