Larf And Sing
It's all white on this side of the mirror. On Tuesday afternoon the first few flakes began to fall from the sheltering sky, and at last Prague was covered in the blanket of snow that I had been avidly checking the forecasts for. Snow was part of the deal when I signed up for this gig. If it didn't come soon I was going to send this life back as faulty goods. Crisp and slippery it turns every walk along the pavement into a mini-adventure. Dogs frolic in the garden square outside the flat, and no doubt return home to fill their owner's home with that comforting smell of wet mutt. Such are the strands of the tapestry. It beats the endless grim rains of London quite easily.
Not even my total bitch of a cold has ground me down yet. It appears that Czech kids carry a whole host of different bugs compared to their English counterparts, and so my steadily acquired teacher immunity to all things germy will have to find some new tactics. Like their hosts the micro-organisms seem smarter and more resilient than their Anglo counterparts. Not even regular fumigation with the cheapest menthol snouts in Praha is executing the bacterial buggers in my system. Next plan: step up to stogies and drown them in beer.
Still on my feet, but light in my head, we ambled down to a nearby bar for a night of acoustic folk with Springtime. Folk music has always given me great problems. For sure I love the timeless melodies and sensitive ponderings. Beards and free love are not all bad either, as long as only men have the former and only women offer the latter. It is just that folk clubs tend to attract Liberals, and with them come a whole stream of drippy ideas, usually involving giving away all our nukes and writing stern letters to psychopathic dictators appealing to their better natures. They also usually advocate some sort of tax increase, leading me to believe that they don't have jobs. Hands off my bombs I say… and keep your humourless pointy heads out of my wallet. I'm a grown-up and I'm busy.
To compare experiences in London and Prague is an interesting process. As a rule of thumb if you imagine the experience in London, subtract the stuff that sucks and any irritating gits who gather there, and throw in a chunk of fun and purpose then hey ho… that's what it is like in Prague. And so Springtime provided the folk experience without making me want to reintroduce conscription, hanging, or the Vietnam War. This is unusual. I once saw Joan Baez play and spent the next week fantasising about dropping Napalm on Charlies in the jungle. I later came to my senses, felt guilty for this nasty knee-jerk reaction, and merely fantasised about dropping Napalm on Joan Baez.
Springtime played very well indeed, especially considering that the "stage" was the size of a postage stamp, and not one of those big ones with a picture on either. Their set was a heart-warming mix, incorporating numbers from the Beatles, Neil Young, George Gershwin (Summertime sounds so subversive when sung in Czech), Cat Stevens, and many others. The arrangement of "Wonderful World" that they played was sumptuous and worth its weight in gold. Sam Cooke's little tune about flunking school never really did it for me until I heard this broken down and rebuilt version. I have no idea where the arrangement comes from but it wipes the floor with the well known easy-listening record that I had always heard before.
Folk music often has a simplicity of sentiment that can be its main strength or its main weakness, depending on how jaded you are feeling at the time. Context is everything for no art works in isolation of it surroundings. And so simple songs of freedom and hope take on a new meaning when sung in a land that had so recently been throttled by the yoke of Communist crazies. There is a sly glory is every chord change, every riff, and every bridge. These songs, living a new life, need to be played. Teach your children well indeed…
If only that bunch of Devil's own drunks who used to pull the strings of power in Moscow could have woken up to Western music they might have finally got a clue. Playing a guitar in a pub is more fun than dying in a jail. Understand that and the rest will fall into place.
