I Have Forgotten How To Sing
On Great Disappearing Acts & Transcendental Times
I dreamt about it the other night. Walking into a wild dark club where a pumping band was playing and suddenly there I was, up there with them, mic in hand, launching into Tina Turner’s ‘Early One Morning’, a song I’ve sung a hundred times, a great easy warm-up-get-you-in-the-mood song… the first line came out fine and then my voice turned into a scratchy squeak and then … nothing…..I sung on for a while, opening and closing my mouth like a guppy with nothing but white noise coming from my throat, hoping the audience couldn’t tell, until I realised my silence was deafening and slunk off to wake up in a panic with the words I have forgotten how to sing beating like a warning drum in my heart. It’s been so long between drinks for all of us makers of music. We are all losing our sense of self. What is a performer who doesn’t perform? A singer who doesn’t sing?Â
You will surely sing again, I sing to myself in a hollow whisper to the tune of the beautiful Chris Wilson masterpiece ‘You Will Surely Love Again’, with its lyrics that seem to reverberate through the ages:
Goddamn your anticipation, as coquettish as a bride, goddamn your sense of isolation, your sense of hollowness inside… you will surely love again, you’re simply waiting on a friend to come and take you on a ride…
I don’t have the privacy or the ego or the nerve to keep up my artistic practise and sing loudly at home, although I should, and could, of course, even if my kids roll their eyes or stick their fingers in their ears. Use it or lose it. That tiny statement works on so many levels. I don’t have the heart, the energy or the technical prowess to live stream from home, although I am full of immense admiration for those that do. When I saw Dave Graney and Clare Moore noting their 100th live-streamed performance coming up it really brought home to me how long all this has been going on. How long we’ve been seperate from the daily joyous grind of making music as a way of life. Also that they are surely the hardest working and most innovative show-folk in showbiz. But I do practise in my head. Psychic singing practice. I keep hoping its like the proverbial riding of a bike, and try to conveniently forget I never really got much past taking the training wheels off. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine actually doing it again.
Then I started thinking about Bobbie Gentry. I think about her alot.
Her final performance was a single song, the mawkish ballad ‘Mama, A Rainbow’ (not one of hers) as part of a televised celebrity studded all star Mother’s Day special in 1981. Her mother was in the audience. Bobbie was only 40 years old, though she’d lived a lifetime since her fully formed distinctive genius first burst into the public sphere in 1967 with the sublime ‘Ode To Billie Joe’, and as far as we heathens know, she simply never sung or appeared in public again. A truly great disappearing act. She didn’t say goodbye, she never even told us why she was leaving. She’s the one that got away. I wondered if she sings in her dreams, or as she waters the roses in the gated community where she is rumoured to reside in Los Angeles or Memphis… I wondered if she’s planted clues, or left her story somewhere safe for us in a suburban storage unit with her Vegas costumes and her old parlour guitar and fan letters to find sometime down the road. Apparently she once said ‘I like being rich. If I don’t make it in music I’m gonna start a company and make really inexpensive dresses out of burlap bags’.* Apparently she invested the first $50k she made into a sports team, which made her a motza. A single photo has emerged of her at some unstated function in 2014. She looks amazing, smiling large and well dressed. Whatever she did, she looks happy.
Pioneering funk queen Betty Davis pulled off a similar magic trick. Betty started writing and singing songs at 12 years old. The old blues masters travelled through her veins, grounding her and inspiring her, compelling her forward into the psychedelic light. Fearless and peerless, she wrote what she liked and sang and moved and dressed how she wanted to and was just so far ahead of the curve that the general public hadn’t even caught up by the time she decided to disappear. I love Macy Gray’s description ‘She was the kind of girl that you want to be when you grow up’. Betty told Washington Post’s Keith L. Alexander, once a little boy who couldn’t understand why people seemed to know his neighbour Ms Betty, ‘I didn’t just fade off the planet. I just started living a quiet life back here. I just decided that period of my life had changed’ she says. It’s only in recent years that she has been tracked down and is letting down her guard, letting us in and talking a little. The still stunning wonder of her work, art and legend is really starting to flower and be truly recognised. She says she still writes songs and they’re still about sex but now they’re just for her own enjoyment, just because she has a gift and she has to use it. At the recent screening of a poetically elusive documentary, Erykah Badu read aloud a note from Betty to the audience that said ‘Hello, this is Betty. I'm sorry I could not be with everyone this evening. My life is mysterious at times, even to me, but I am with you all in vibrations and spirit.’ I think about Betty a lot too.
There are so many different paths we can take, we think we’re plodding along in one direction but its more like the paths fan out around us in every direction, connected like lifelines on a palm. We’re so much more adaptable and versatile than we think.Â
Crack another beer and pretend that you’re still here, like Lana suggests. Anything is possible. Even corralled into corners, small and purposeless and powerless, there’ll be some little way to defy expectations and dig yourself out of a hole. To imagine yourself a lion. To sing yourself into being. No one’s going anywhere. This is how to disappear.
Being any kind of arts worker living inside these endless restrictions and lockdowns is rather depressing, though of course, I am all for it for the health and safety and survival of us all. But my social media feeds are filled with cancellation notices. With friends going mad and feeling sad. Artist pals have cancelled exhibitions they’ve been working towards for years, authors have hosted long awaited online book launches from their bedrooms. We musicians have taken up writing, painting, knitting, ocean swimming, gardening and crosswords. Some of us have been working on our riffs or our moves or staring into space. We’re biding our time.
Imogen Clark, a dedicated performer who has kept up a non-stop release schedule throughout the pandemic has cancelled and rescheduled more shows than anyone else I know, and is still waiting for the chance to perform the entire Joni Mitchell album ‘Blue’, solo, to celebrate its 50th anniversary - which was way back in June. A while ago she posted a video of herself applying for the government Coronavirus/lost work payment and being rejected for not meeting the criteria. WTF?
My other friend Emma Swift flew to Australia for a series of concerts only to spend two weeks in hotel quarantine and then discover all her shows were cancelled due to pandemic complications on her exit. A couple of days later Sydney was plunged into lockdown and she spent a further two weeks locked up alone before miraculously managing to fly back to the other side of the world where music is tremulously taking its first excited steps again.
My daughter Holiday, also juggling creative life on the other side of the world, despite just having just released an incredibly beautiful collaborative album and a non stop slew of pop singles, while keeping up her brilliant Substack newsletter ‘A Hot Mess’ and multiple other projects, posted in shock the other day that a fan had asked her if she had retired.
It might seem like we’ve disappeared, but like the great Shirley MacLaine sang, we’re still here! We’re just laying low for now. And we can’t wait to get back out there and sing and play and share our art with you.
Good times and bum times,
I’ve seen ‘em all
And, my dear,
I’m still here.
I’m feeling transcendental, am I here?
*Postscript: Burlap and old flour sacks were used to fashion clothing, curtains and bedlinen during the Depression and beyond. People got creative and adapted to the circumstances. There was a saying that when the wind blew in the South you could see the names of all the potato companies on the girls homemade underwear.
Marilyn posed in this potato sack dress in a sassy response to a snippy news columnist that said she was ‘cheap and vulgar’ and would look better in a potato sack than the provocative, low cut clothing she often wore. She did. The photos went viral in 1951 terms, so much so that Idaho farmers sent her a sack of potatoes to say thanks for the publicity. Marilyn quipped ‘There was a potato shortage on then, and the boys in publicity stole them all. I never saw one. It just goes to show why I always ask, ‘Can you trust a publicity man or can’t you?’ … Good question Marilyn.
I just heard the exciting news that our Australian borders are likely to reopen very soon. Shows will be booked again and we’ll try to recall how to socialise and sing and brush our hair and regrow our broken wings. In the meantime, buy our records and t-shirts and tickets for shows booked mid next year and old rock merch and new paintings and books and subscribe to our newsletters if you can and tell your friends we’re still here so we can find ways to keep doing what we do when we’re all back on the job.
In the meantime, we’re gonna do what we can.
Enjoying your ramblings Lo!
Beautiful! Hopefully not long now until you can sing for us again. 💕🎤