For BookExpo America: Elvis at the Wheel/Al Stewart

With the publishing industry trade show BookExpo America (BEA) poised to take over Manhattan for three days starting on Tuesday, we decided to see if we could find a song that somehow related to the book industry as well as to an individual book.  We came up with Al Stewart's Elvis At The Wheel, from his 2008 CD Sparks of Ancient Light.  The first stanza offers a sympathetic nod to a long-running issue in the publishing business, the plight of independent book stores:

There's an independent bookstore
The last one that remains
All the others you might look for
Have been eaten by the chains
They soldier on
No one cleans the window panes

Browsing in this embattled store, Stewart comes across a book that recounts a bizarre incident involving Elvis Presley: While driving through Arizona in 1965, the King sees the face of Joseph Stalin in a cloud formation, which then transforms itself into the face of Jesus Christ.  This religious episode has been recounted in many Elvis biographies, but unfortunately Stewart neglects to identify just which book he's singing about.  The source of the story appears to be Larry Geller, Presley's hair stylist-turned-spiritual advisor, who was present at the time.  His first-person account can be found in Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, the second volume of Peter Guralnick's Elvis biography, published in 1999.  (Guralnick's account of the incident draws heavily on Geller's own 1989 book If I Can Dream: Elvis' Own Story, written with Joel Spector and Patricia Romanowski, now out of print.)  Stewart's song serves as a reminder that a bookstore is a great place to browse--you never know what kind of strange tales (or musical inspiration) you'll find.

Mr. Lear/Al Stewart

Al Stewart, one of the more literate singer/songwriters working today, makes another appearance on Classics Rock! with a song called Mr. Lear, from his 2005 album A Beach Full of Shells.  The song is about Edward Lear, the Victorian illustrator, author, and poet.  Lear is perhaps best known today for his nonsense poetry, notably "The Owl and the Pussycat" (see The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear). The album's liner notes state: "'Mr. Lear' inspired in part by 'Incidents in the Life of My Uncle Arly' by Edward Lear," and some of Stewart's lyrics are closely adapted from that poem: Oh my aged Uncle Arly, sitting on a heap of barley/On his nose his faithful cricket/In his hat a railway ticket/But his shoes were far too tight.  But the song alludes to other works by the author as well.  The repeated line How pleasant to know Mr. Lear is the title of Lear's ironic verse self-portrait, and another poem, "The Pobble Who Has No Toes," is mentioned.  There's even a reference to Lear's beloved cat Foss, who turns up in several of his drawings.  The only thing missing is a runcible spoon.

Somewhere in England 1915/Al Stewart

November 11th is observed by many countries around the world--in the United States as Veterans Day, in the British Commonwealth as Remembrance Day, and in other countries as Armistice Day or the Day of Peace. Each of these holidays began as an observance of the armistice that ended the First World War, signed at 11:00 am on November 11, 1918--the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Al Stewart's song Somewhere In England 1915, from his 2005 album A Beach Full of Shells, takes us back to that conflict with a series of dream images that feature World War One British Poets. First up is Rupert Brooke, who served in the British Army during the war and died in 1915 (though not in combat). In his poem The Soldier, written at the beginning of the war, Brooke penned the familiar lines: If I should die, think only this of me:/That there's some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England. In the song, Stewart depicts a woman standing on a beach, watching a troop ship sail away. She is identified only as an English Prime Minister's daughter--a reference to Violet Asquith, daughter of British Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, who bore an unrequited love for Brooke. She's there to see him off to war, and while Stewart doesn't identify Brooke by name, the allusion is clear: And she watches the ship disappear for the length of a sigh/And the maker of rhymes on the deck who is going to die/In the corner of some foreign field that will make him so famous. In the next sequence, Stewart depicts the horror of the battlefield and mentions two other poets, this time by name: And a skull in a trench gazes up open-mouthed at the moon/And the poets are now Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. While Brooke's poetry depicted the war as patriotic and a soldier's death as noble, the poetry of both Owen and Sassoon contrasted sharply in tone, depicting the stark, horrific realities of war. Like Brooke, both of these men served in the British Army. Sassoon survived the war; Owen was killed in action one week before the armistice.

Shah of Shahs/Al Stewart

Shah Of Shahs, from Al Stewart's 2008 CD Sparks of Ancient Light, is based on Ryszard Kapuscinski's 1982 book Shah of Shahs, about the overthrow of the last Shah of Iran. In an interview on nevillejudd.com, Stewart says the song "is taken from the wonderful and eminently readable book of the same title by Ryszard Kapuscinski. . . . It's a series of snapshots of the Shah of Iran's sudden fall from grace in 1979, which happened very quickly indeed, about how he cried in the car on his way to the airport,a soldier bending down to kiss his feet before he got on the plane, his statues being pulled down almost at once. . . . a series of events that I have pieced together into a song." He cried inside the limousine and at the airport too/Where the soldier knelt before him and kissed his shoe/He flew across the desert and the open sea/While they tore down all his statues and his legacy.

Nostradamus/Al Stewart

Al Stewart's 10-minute song Nostradamus, from his 1973 album Past, Present & Future, is based on a book about the 16th century seer, but Stewart hadn't read the book, and in fact it hadn't even been published at the time he wrote the song. The album's notes read: "The book on which the song 'Nostradamus' is based is 'The Centuries of Nostradamus' by Erika Cheetham, to be published by Neville Spearman Limited, London, and Putnam, NY." In an Acoustic Storm interview, Stewart describes a meeting with Cheetham in her home, where she "had bits of this book all about her room; I mean pages were hanging everywhere. So I was walking around the room saying 'this sounds great, what does it mean?' And she’d say, 'Oh, that’s an anagram of Napoleon,' and I just sort of picked up about 11 or 12 references that came out of the book that she translated, and I put them all together into a song." The song is roughly divided into two sets of Nostradamus' prophecies, one listing predictions that seem to have been fulfilled (e.g., Hitler, Napoleon), and the other featuring things that have not yet happened (at least not as of 1973). Cheetham's book was ultimately published as The Prophecies of Nostradamus. Stewart remains neutral regarding the accuracy of Nostradamus' predictions, noting "I tend to be very skeptical about it."

Sirens of Titan/Al Stewart

Based on Kurt Vonnegut's second novel The Sirens of Titan, published in 1959, this song from Al Stewart's Modern Times album (1974) features the book's protagonist, Malachi Constant; the papery Mercurian life forms known as Harmoniums; various interplanetary locations; and a line taken directly from the text--Malachi's fatalistic conclusion that "I was the victim of a series of accidents, as are we all." Nothing to base your term paper on, but a bouncy tune that you'll appreciate more if you've read the book.