B -- Bridge Over Troubled Water, Blowin' in the Wind, But You Love me, Daddy

Bridge over Troubled Water was my introduction to the astounding repertoire of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, known popularly as Simon and Garfunkel. With just this one song I realized what a phenomenon they were.

At its heart, the song was a touching promise and a proof of rock solid commitment. Growing up, I learned to value the strength it contained within itself, the reassurance it offered.

Can there be a greater love than laying down your life for those you love?

But this one ranked a close second.

Being there for those you loved. Holding their hands and comforting them. Wiping the tears from their eyes and offering to stand between them and the hardships that each day flung at them. That was the comfort that was implicit in these words.

A safe way out of the most difficult situations. When the world turns its back on you, how comforting to have that one person who never deserts you, but stands in your corner to the very end.

In essence, the song expressed the strength of the most durable relationships. The promise in the song was the glue that holds and binds all ties together.

As a kid, I wondered if a special someone would ever sing this song for me.

As a teenager, two of my closest friends and I sang it for the fourth friend in our quartet when she had her first heartbreak. Later, we all had need of that song. It was a part of growing up, and it was refreshing to hear that song, whether it was sung soulfully by Simon or Garfunkel, or “murdered” by tone-deaf friends, the comfort it offered, remained undiminished.

Bridge Over Troubled Water can still do that to me.

Another B that has the ability to blow me away was sung by none other than a B. It was Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind, a song that helped me appreciate how compelling a well written song could be. 

Sheer poetry.

The poetry of protest and revolution and insurrection.

The poetry of questions.

The kind that asks questions that no one has answers to.

But even when the answers are blowing in the wind, it helps to know that they are there. Like the wind, invisible and hard to grasp, but certainly there.

Blowin’ in the wind helped me understand that music didn’t always have to soothe.

Rap, the sound track of the anti-Establishment, had not yet emerged as a voice then. And Blowin’ in the Wind succeeded in making a political statement that was couched in stylized vocals. It seemed so easy.

There was no grilling or rattling of our consciences.

Without holding anyone of us responsible for the abysmal state of affairs, it still managed to evoke in us a sense of political responsibility.

What kind of a song was it?

Just a series of rhetorical questions thrown up into the air, into the wind, left to fall as they may, by the wayside where they might be trampled upon or in the minds of its listeners who might be persuaded to understand its deep meaning.

What kind of a man did it speak of?

How many roads must a man walk down,
Before you call him a man? 

Whether you were a woman, a dark-skinned person, a slave or a prisoner, whatever you were, it enveloped you and the oppression you suffered in the embrace of “man,” signifying the human experience, and how we are all alike, or ought to be.

But even within the confines of melodiousness, I could see that it was possible to prick the conscience of your listeners, to make them see that some things weren’t right, to feel for those others, even in the midst of your comfort.

The writing was beautiful, and as the song flowed on, sonorous, seemingly lulling you to sleep, it was actually shaking your sensibilities awake.

Whether Dylan was speaking against war or about human rights and freedom, I believe he was asking us, as humans, to give others their due, to give them the same rights we demand for ourselves.

Pay attention to the lyrics of that song, and you’ll see what I mean. If you don’t already, and you’re not already nodding in agreement.

The answer is blowin’ in the wind. Will that wind move us to tears or leave us scrambling for cover?

The answer to that question is as relevant as ever.

The third B song that mattered much in my growing up years was Jim Reeves' But you love me, Daddy.

Dad used to sing it to me, and because I was 5 then, I believed he'd made it up for me. Of course, a lot of the other lyrics didn't strictly apply to me. You can read more about it here.

That song can still make me feel all warm and fuzzy and gooey inside. 

I learned that it wasn't Dad's original composition only when it played on the radio, on Saturday Date. For a brief while, I felt crushed. Dad had not written that song for me.

But the feeling passed.

And I realised that it didn't matter if Dad wasn't the original singer. 

When Dad sang it, it was mine.

That was all that mattered.

A -- Annie's Song

I was entranced. 

Mesmerised. The very first time I heard it.

It was called Annie’s Song and it was composed and sung by John Denver for his wife, Annie Martell Denver. But I listened to it with as much feeling as if it were my own song. 

A love song sung for me.

Apparently Denver wrote the song in July 1973, in just ten-and-a-half minutes on a ski lift to the top of Ajax Mountain, in Aspen Colorado. The physical exhilaration of the ski lift, there on top of the world, coupled with the beauty spread before him inspired him to think about his wife.

Wow!

Faced with such awe inspiring beauty, most people would have pulled out their Kodaks and their Polaroids, intent on capturing the moment for posterity.

Not Denver.

He lived in the moment, steeped himself in it, leaving posterity and our musical legacy the richer for it.

He just sat and soaked in the sensations that the moment inspired in him, letting those sensations guide his thoughts, letting himself get carried away, drift away gently.

And so the song came to him.

A song that spoke of a love so pure, so pristine, that it had to be likened to nights in the forest, and mountains in spring time, and walks in the rain, and storms in the desert, and sleepy blue oceans.

Things that were here long before we were.

Things that will continue to be long after we are gone.

Things so monumental and awe inspiring, they could only have been made by God. The most state-of-the-art factory couldn’t produce beauty like that, nor replicate the sensations that such beauty could inspire.

The most heart-stopping metaphors all lined up to re-create the grandeur of love, which in its purest form is magic itself.

And yet, all too often, we ignore that magic, and take the love for granted. Instead of soaking it in, and soaking ourselves in it, we fiddle with our cameras, adjusting the frame on the viewfinders, or click inane selfies that we can display for the joy of getting thumbed up.

As I listened to the song, I would shut my eyes, and imagine that Annie’s Song was an ode not just to Annie, but to me.

And to every man and woman who aspired, dreamed, prayed for such love.

It was so perfect.

I wished for it, imagining it to be some sort of a prayer.

“You fill up my senses,” he said, and that is just what Annie’s song did to me. My ears would burn with the intensity it inspired, the whoosh of the oceans dancing in my ears.

That, I imagined, was how love should be.

When it hit you, it would fill up your senses, and leave room for nothing else.

It would fill you up, and then overflow all around you, drenching you in its sweeping power.

Denver’s voice itself seemed to soar high above the mundane world.

Annie's Song seemed to elevate love -- that much-abused feeling that so often ends up shriveled and abused, having lost its beauty, reduced to a four-letter word.

It stirred my senses like few other songs have done for me, either before or since. When it played on Saturday Date, I used to wish the anchor reserved it for the last song. It was a finale, and I could go to bed with its echoes still throbbing within me. Any other song played after that, I used to think, would have undone the effect.

There were no pulsating rhythms in the song. The melody itself was easy to sing.

It started soft and easy and then gradually built up to a crescendo, before gently bringing you down to earth again.

After all these years, Annie's Song can still leave me feeling slightly breathless and uplifted.

Arthur Hailey's Hotel: Lessons Learned

Arthur Hailey's Hotel gives you a behind-the-scenes backstage peek into what keeps a five-star hotel in ship-shape condition. As guests and visitors, we see the glamour and the glitz, the ornate pillars and the marble balustrades, and it is easy to forget the army of worker ants, the housekeepers, room service attendants, cooks, chefs, telephone operators and others that work in spite of relentless pressure, their movements perfect, offering service with a smile. Because even one disgruntled customer is bad news for the whole business.


Since the book cover had the legend, A Master Storyteller, emblazoned upon it, I took it upon myself to study the novel in great depth and learn something of the art and craft of writing from it.


Here is what I learned:


In spite of having a plethora of characters, a necessity when the setting is a luxury hotel, Hailey successfully manages the tricky task of creating back stories for a number of them. The back stories themselves have to strike a fine balance. Too little and we don't know enough about the character, preventing us from investing in them. Too much and we've got needlessly caught up in the past. 


The moment a character is named, he becomes real to the reader. We must know more about him. If you, as the author, don't mean us to get too close to a particular character, don't introduce us to him/her. If you tell us a character's name, make sure that character plays a significant role in the story, even if the role is brief. 


Hailey succeeds in keeping all the sub-plots afloat at the same time. Not an easy task.


There is Warner Trent, owner of the St Gregory Hotel in New Orleans, whose hotel is under mortgage, and who is desperate to avoid both a foreclosure and an acquisition.

There is Curtis O'Keefe, who owns a chain of assembly-line style hotels and who, knowing that Trent is in dire straits, is eager to add to his bouquet of hotels.

There is Peter McDermott, assistant manager of the hotel, eager and efficient, but tied down by the lack of power.

There are the Duke and the Duchess of Croydon, who are desperate to cover up their guilt. 

There is Albert Wells, who is hiding a secret of his own.

There is Keycase Milne, an inveterate thief.


These are just a few of the many sub-plots that Hailey twists around his fingertips all at the same time. To do this successfully, he ensures that the development of the story is arrested at a crucial place, one at which much has taken place, and much that is important is going to take place. Even though, we, as readers, would have liked to hang around that scene to find out more about that character, the author wants us to know that there is something that more urgently needs our attention.


None of the characters are perfectly good or perfectly evil. They are all real, with flaws in their make-up and personalities. For example, McDermott suffers errors of judgement, and has a tendency to get carried away by the good life. Trent is charitable towards his employees, but only because it serves him well to receive their gratitude.


Reading Hotel gives one an idea of the kind of research that must be done in order to write a story fully. Hailey becomes the consummate hotelier, one that knows his hotel inside out, upside down, and can see through the beams and the rafters, the walls and the floor, the electrical wiring and the plumbing.


I was also impressed with the manner in which Hailey expressed the race issue, through Warren's patronising of Aloysius Royce and the matter of the dentists' conference and the issue of accommodation for Dr Nicholas, the black dentist.


The entire action takes place over five days. So you can imagine the skill and the dexterity involved in juggling multiple characters and their actions over the space of such a brief period to ensure that the various events did not clash with each other in terms of the order in which they take place and the bearing they have on subsequent events.

I can't even begin to imagine how Hailey must have set about writing this novel. But I presume that there must have been a lot of research and a lot of writing of back stories, long before the first word was typed.


There are many ways to become a published novelist. But they all involve tons of hard work and effort, with a little bit of daydreaming about being a bestselling author. 


Am I up for the challenge?




(This post has been written for the Ultimate Blog Challenge, October 2013.)


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