HUH
March, 1995
The Mixed Up Files Of Robyn Hitchcock
by Dean Kuipers
There is this man standing in front of me, twitching violently and randomly in a prim, wood-furnished, university ballroom in Texas. And because of the crowd I have to look over his snap-shrugging shoulder and through his spasm-ing hair to see Robyn Hitchcock. Which is perfect. This man seems to be performing a kind of abstract interpretive dance, not to the beats or the inflections of Robyn's music -- all of his songs are so Pop-perfectly constructed, so straight, so awfully pretty -- but to the ideas of the songs. And Robyn is up there standing very tall, making the stage look very empty. A, sort of, Neil Young presence -- if Young were to be rendered by Monty Python. And he's saying things like, "This is a song about being menaced by solid objects and seeing your future in them." Or, before the terrific song "Queen Elvis": "I think
the reason people are so afraid of CDs is that they remind us of pieces of salami, which is what we get cut up into during relationships."
And I'm thinking that, if he could take a moment out from his focused, riveting performance, Robyn himself would be pleased by this spectacle -- a palsied (albeit smiling) frug inspired by the abstract boy oh-so-everyday obsessions that fill his songs.
For it seems that Hitchcock is very much amused with random events as they become casual relationships -- you know, how one man's uncontrollable shaking seems to embody another man's song called "I'm Only You", which, he says, "is just about cross-dressing," and how the lady disturbed by the dancer's palsy walks to the bar and picks up a Graham Parker fan (who was also on the bill that night in Texas) who actually turns out to be not only a woman underneath the leather jacket but also a psychotherapist who believes that L. Ron Hubbard is still alive -- and together they run off to open a home for emotionally disturbed children just across the bridge from Juarez, Mexico. That kind of thing.
He must be amused by that kind of thing, because he writes about it all the time -- and seems to be laughing at it while he does. Way back when he was one of the principals in the fab late-70's longhair Brit-Psychedelia-Pop quartet Soft Boys. These preoccupations with how god manifests itself in appliances, or the terrible Syd-Barretesque price we pay for simply thinking and eating in an absurd universe, or the unfathomable complexity of two people organizing their lives in such a way that they might think and eat together -- all that found its way onto an unbeatable album called Underwater Moonlight.
Very soon after, around 1980, The Soft Boys evanesced into such bands as Katrina And The Waves (itself something of an oddment), and Robyn put out a terrific first "solo" album (with all the same people on it) called Black Snake Diamond Role. And since then he's deposited many more albums at various labels, some of them with former Soft Boys Andy Metcalf (bass and keys) and Morris Windsor (drums and stuff) as Robyn Hitchcock and/or Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians. Now eight of these albums have been re-released on CD by Rhino records, chock-full of rare tracks and hilarious/poignant demos, along with a new CD of never-before-released tracks called You & Oblivion.
Hitchcock has perfected a vision only glimpsed by a handful of great artists (much less musicians): his work is as serious as death and funny as hell at the same time. His beautiful, resonant, acoustic guitar lines and perfect folksinger/Pop hybrid disarm the listener as he lays into something at once heavy and comic and discernible -- with lyrics such as these to "Somewhere Apart" from Element of Light:
I'm gonna burn your bongos tonight
And let Graham have a chance
'cause no one ever lets him dance
And all them see-through things are crawling from the sea
What he's trying to do, it seems, is not only describe bizarre or everyday behavior, but also to explore why it happens -- the psychological or religious or political roots -- without getting academic. Letting it still resonate in our conciousnesses as magic. I bring this up to Robyn one morning over breakfast in Texas, as we stare at the Colorado River. "Wow. Nobody's ever put it to me that way," he smiles. He's the kind of guy who digs a good intellectual challenge. "You are born into this world effectively like somebody getting into a taxi -- you don't know quite where the taxi is going. The fare is paid for the first few miles, and then you've got to find the end out of your pocket. Whether you like it or not, you're in transit. But you don't know why. The same reason they've spent ages trying to figure out exactly how trees work. You know, I mean the tree is a mirror of itself: roots are branches underground. You could turn it upside down, and after a couple of years the branches would sprout leaves. We naturally have a tendency to explore and
discover things. That's one of our gifts. We are also magical. I don't know quite what the word means, but we are. And so I'm not really surprised if I have those tendencies."
"Maybe it's a form of prayer."
Maybe it is. But to who? Where do the prayers go?
"Yeah, exactly right," Robyn jumps. "Are they held by gravity on the rim of space? You know, where all these space shuttles crash into the old prayers floating around like abandoned satellites?"
Or is some intelligence really receiving them, processing them, and storing them away -- dealing with them and sorting them out?
Robyn settles back and picks at the food on his plate. He's a big guy, and loves to eat. "I don't believe in a benign intelligence. I don't think there is a father hovering over us, like a child over a model village. Or maybe there is -- but it's literally a child. I don't think it's anything that's smarter and brighter than us controlling our destinies.
"But I believe very strongly in life as a god. I think the Earth is a form of intelligence. I think nature is a form of personality. We are of that, but we are adolescents. We have not quite figured out what to do yet -- and we may destroy the whole family while we are growing up. When we have grown up we might accomplish something fantastic. At the moment, this whole thing is god's nervous breakdown (or something) -- something has not been resolved. Of all the creatures on the Earth we've got the most potential for harm as well. And if that isn't magical, I don't know what is."
Part of the magic, I suppose, is that Robyn is a hopeless romantic. All of these 100+ songs are full of melancholy, hope, longing for love (or at least for romance), a feeling that there must be some chance of salvation. In fact, these are love songs.
"A lot of them are," he nods. "More than people think. I'm associated, at least over here, with writing songs about fish and insects and solid objects -- the preoccupations of a small boy. Which is true. But I think my stuff has got more warm-blooded recently."
In fact, Robyn Hitchcock writes three types of songs, most which are love songs:
Etc., etc. But you get it.
Why wouldn't a hopeless romantic run off at the drop of a hat and get married? Didn't he say, just the other night, that he'd never been married?
"It's the death of romance, really. Once you're completely signed, sealed, and delivered," says Robyn, shaking his head. "Romance can only exist if your love is imperiled. If you pass eight years of exams and practical tests (and things), you should be granted a marriage license. Same, I think, about having children. There should be something in your uterus or your urinary tract or gonads (or whatever) that literally cannot create fertility until you prove certain things. I think when mankind's grown its third eye and we finally turn the corner -- is that corner just going to lead out straight out from the 13th floor over the river, or are we going to grow wings? And is it going to be some health club in the sky?"
Ah, the final obsession. The afterlife. Death. A predominant theme amoung all the categories of songs listed above. Robyn seems to regard death from inside and out, slipping in and out of it like it's only a state or a possibility of being.
Robyn chuckles, "It might be a good idea not to think about death -- there are probably ways of thinking that shouldn't be encouraged -- but it's where we are all going. Even the rocks one day will shatter in eternity you, know? The water will boil or freeze. Everything will transmute.
"We spend our whole lives in this little cage of consciousness, in this bubble of consciousness. But you realize that one day this won't be there -- this whole reference point from which you've seen things that you call 'me'. It's gonna go.
"And your head is your oldest friend. Everything is just gonna vanish as if you'd just thrown an egg into the river (or something). I mean, if that is not the most outrageous thing of all about being alive, I don't know what is. It seems like an incredible waste to spend all this time building up a personality and then it's thrown away. You know, acquiring all the wisdom that you can acquire, then that vanishes. And working at it. It's not like you just sit there and drum your fingers for 80 years."
No, you spend a great deal of that time building up defenses. Acquiring tools. Machines. One of Robyn's best weapons is laughter.
"Humor is a defense mechanism," he nods, asking for more food. "And that's what worries me about The Bible: there seems to be no jokes in it. Someone once said, 'Laughter is the tool of the devil,' because laughter allows us to accept so many evils. And in the end that's what always worried me about Christianity: is that it is a way of surviving -- and coming to terms with life -- that didn't use humor. You can have humor or you can have Jesus. And I always had a terrible fear of Christianity -- a feeling that I might one day have an aneurysm (or something) and wake up as a Christian. I'd much rather change sex any day.
"Because you're also handing yourself over to Jesus, and you're saying, 'Okay, I don't want any responsibility for my life or my death. I am handing it to you, lord. You will guide me through my life and you will lead me to a better place.' In a way it's a little bit like being bought by Warner Bros. (or something). 'Robyn Hitchcock courtesy of Jesus Christ.' I don't want to be courtesy of him or the devil. I just want to be courtesy of Robyn Hitchcock. And I'm sure you feel the same."
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