David Axelrod & William Blake - Songs of Inncocence and of Experience
by Graham Johnston
David Axelrod emerged as a producer in the late 1950s working with the likes of tenor saxophonist Harold Land, and later moving on to work for Capitol Records, with Lou Rawls, Cannonball Adderley and, perhaps most famously, the Electric Prunes.
A fairly common theme of his work was something between an interest and an obsession with all things divine. David Axelrod knew how just how 'trippy' the concept of God could be - the vast incomprehensibility of the creator and the creation clearly fascinated him as he appeared to view religion as neither believer nor theologist, more as a musician who loved to stare at the clouds and wonder about nature and the Heavens. This fascination is most evident on his monastic collaboration with the Electric Prunes in 1968, Mass In F Minor which was sung entirely in Latin, cauterised with blazing psychedelic guitar, conjuring images of far-out monks hallucinating wildly in the cloisters. Following shortly after (and recently reissued on CD) came Axelrod's finest moments which look to something even bigger than Creation for inspiration: the imagination of William Blake. God may well have created the universe, but Blake had created something even more ambitious: his Illuminated texts.
While the visionary Blake saw Heaven in a wildflower, Axelrod wanted us all to hear it in his sumptuous late-1960s productions; commonly featuring august orchestral arrangements, splattered with psychedelic guitar and the tightest, grooviest drumming that you've probably never heard. Indeed, the word "phat" could have been created specifically to describe Earl Palmer's drumming for Axelrod. His ambrosial melodies and musical movements, so perfectly formed and delicately nurtured, are almost as stellar an achievement as a work such as Blake's pen and watercolour A Vision Of The Last Judgement - an obsessive and earnest piece depicting hundreds of beings, on one side of Christ all ascending into Heaven and on the other plummeting into Hell.
In 1968, Axelrod brought his interest in William Blake and his untouchable productions together with his solo album Songs of Innocence which provided a soundtrack for Blake's book of poems by the same name. The following year he released Songs of Experience which continued the theme, both of which were a tremendous artistic success. These two albums have provided samples a-plenty for the likes of DJ Shadow whose distinctive sound and rock-solid beats can be heard thirty years earlier in Axelrod's music. Following a remix for UNKLE's "Rabbit In Your Headlights", Axelrod has returned to music and will shortly be having a new full-length album released by the Mo'Wax label, which will hopefully prompt a higher profile for his simply astonishing, though largely overlooked or forgotten music.
The album Songs Of Innocence opens up with "Urizen", not the title of a poem from Blake's Songs Of Innocence, but the name of a later character who formed a key part of Blake's complex mythology. Urizen is a complicated character to get an adequate grasp of, since he symbolises and epitomises a range of traits considered by Blake to be stifling and repressive. The name is derived simply from the words "your reason" and Blake was diametrically opposed to the all-pervading reason and rationality which he believed had suffocated the imagination and lead to our creative and spiritual impulses becoming constipated and restrained.
Urizen is cast as a priest in America: A Prophecy, representing the forces of organised religion which Blake believed to be so detrimental to anything approaching his vision of spirituality. Organised religion was rooted in the need for control, to repress our sexuality, instil a doctrine of fear and loathing, and to eternally divorce the Earthly from the Heavenly. Blake's contempt is neatly summed up by a line from The Marriage of Heaven And Hell: "As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys."
Urizen was a repressive and dangerous tyrant and in many of Blake's engravings his appearance is very similar to how he also depicted God. This is most notable in the engraving God Judging Adam where we see Adam the sinner, bent almost double in remorse and shame, being cast out of Paradise by a cruel and unforgiving Creator, condemning not only Adam to a lifetime of hardship but also every one of his descendants, for all of eternity (thus creating the right-of-centre's approach to crime and punishment in the process). Blake's representations of God were often far less than favourable, believing him to have a cruel streak for having created a world so beautiful on the surface, yet so completely bound by suffering and sickness in reality (c.f. The Sick Rose which we will come to later). This is a key theme to the duality of Songs Of Innocence and Songs of Experience. As we move from our early years of innocence and wonder into a more realistic or experienced perception, we invariably suffer a great shock. The world is in fact a horrible place; its surface beauty merely deceives us into thinking otherwise, into believing that God loves us and that nature offers us glimpses of Paradise. The more rich our experience becomes so should our perception of God as the benevolent creator disperse, revealing His true despotic nature to us. Paradoxically, the older we become, and the more knocks we suffer throughout our lives, the more need many of us seem to have for a belief in a loving and forgiving God - flying in the face of the evidence. This also happened with Blake - as he was living out his final years of poverty, frustration and possible madness, he believed that God would treat him better after his death.
Axelrod's "Urizen" is therefore an inspired start to his exploration of Blake's world since the character so beautifully epitomises the negative side of Blake's world-view. However Urizen, a caricature of all that was valued by society then and now and all that was so utterly despised by Blake, is not a figure of innocence, and Axelrod's theme for Urizen is surprisingly upbeat. Gorgeous strings wrap us in clouds, a sparse yet precisely-funky bass bounces us along, psychedelic guitars free up our mind, and church organs point us towards the Heavens. I suspect that Axelrod is attempting to continue the deception of Urizen (and of God and church) in presenting him in this positive light. Through the eyes of the innocent, we may believe the fallacy that God is protecting us, either too unsophisticated or too vulnerable to dare to see through it.
Despite the intentional and poignant duplicity, the song "Urizen" is simply stunning and sets the scene for the remainder of the album. Many have commented that Axelrod's music has the feel of a soundtrack to it, and in this instance that is exactly what he has attempted to provide, except instead of the score to a film, he has provided the soundtrack to a small but highly significant part of what is potentially the most original and complex body of literature and art ever to have been created.
"Holy Thursday" follows and is possibly Axelrod's finest moment, featuring a glorious showcase of his approach to sparse, exiguous drumming which would so influence the sound of later artists such as DJ Shadow. It is hard to imagine what Shadow's classic Endtroducing would have sounded like had "Holy Thursday" not existed.
Blake's "Holy Thursday" appeared in both Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, presenting the two sides of a single coin. In Innocence, "Holy Thursday" aims to confront us with an image of triumph over adversity. A congregation of 'charity school' children from deprived backgrounds file into St Paul's Cathedral, under the watchful and repressive eyes of their guardians who impose their rigid structure of tight discipline upon the children, who Blake would inevitably have preferred to see running free and unfettered. As the service starts the voices of the impoverished, subjugated children reach up high into the heavens, far higher than those of their dour guardians.
Unlike "Urizen", Axelrod beautifully mirrors the theme of Blake's poem through his instrumental music. As the children nervously file into the cathedral, a restrained and austere introduction to the music gradually commences. As the music swells in the cathedral, so too does Axelrod's glorious soundtrack, until Howard Roberts lets rip with his psychedelic wah-guitar and the strings slice effortlessly through the air, bursting forth from the cathedral's dome and into the Heavens.
There is, however, a vague and only slight feeling of menace to the music which reminds us that there is another side to the imagery of the poor momentarily escaping their Earthly-troubles. Blake's Songs of Experience also contains a poem entitled "Holy Thursday", this time inspired by the discovery of a dead child in Blake's street. Blake lived in Lambeth, a town whose people were dogged by overcrowding and poverty, just a few doors down from the 'Asylum for Orphan Girls', the workhouse and the charity schools from which the above mentioned children came to fill St. Paul's. Blake was thus surrounded by images that could only have compounded his 'experience' rather than his 'innocence'. In February 1773 a dead homeless child was found in the Lambeth marsh, likely to have influenced the bleak hopelessness of his second "Holy Thursday":
Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land, -
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
While the poor may attain a moment of transcendence in the cathedral, no amount of heavenly voices can avert them from their cruel and inevitable fate. Thus the brief moment of spiritual relief amounts to little of any significance in the alleviation of the suffering of the poor.
Axelrod follows "Holy Thursday" with "The Smile", which is not named after a Blake poem, and it is hard to be certain to what Axelrod was referring. I suspect that it refers to a theme in Blake's "A Cradle Song":
Sweet dreams, form a shade
O'er my lovely infant's head!
Sweet dreams of pleasant streams
By happy, silent, moony beams!
Sweet Sleep, with soft down
Weave thy brows an infant crown
Sweet Sleep, angel mild,
Hover o'er my happy child!
Sweet smiles, in the night
Hover over my delight!
Sweet smiles, mother's smile,
All the livelong night beguile.
Sleep, sleep, happy child!
All creation slept and smiled.
Sleep, sleep, happy sleep,
While o'er thee doth mother weep.
Sweet babe, in thy face
Holy image I can trace;
Sweet babe, once like thee
Thy Maker lay, and wept for me:
Wept for me, for thee, for all,
When He was an infant small.
Thou His image ever see,
Heavenly face that smiles on thee!
Smiles on thee, on me, on all,
Who became an infant small;
Infant smiles are his own smiles;
Heaven and earth to peace beguiles.
The content and happy child, unburdened by experience, lies smiling and asleep in its cradle, unaware of the mother's sorrow that the child's innocence must one day come to an end after she has lulled it to sleep. The music begins with a delicate orchestral lullaby (sounding not unlike something from Tom Waits' later Blue Valentine album). Almost instantly the lullaby ends and the melancholy descends as the child drifts off to sleep, leaving a sombre mood until the orchestra swells and lets rip with an arousing, indeed beguiling, chorus.
"A Dream", "Song Of Innocence" and "Merlin's Prophesy" gently continue the introspective mood. Again not named directly after Innocence poems, they capture the mood of the entire tome, allowing us to return to the period of youth and the joy of innocence, a moment's escape from reality into a fantasy world of dreams.
The music is highly pastoral, conjuring images of spring / summer afternoons wandering through the countryside, delightfully sparkling and breezily carefree. "Merlin's Prophesy" is especially exquisite with its harpsichord refrain and dazzling guitar interplay, buoyed up by Axelrod's trademark opulent strings and delicate melodies.
The final song on Songs of Innocence, "The Mental Traveller", yet again not specifically named after a Blake poem, brings us back down to Earth (temporarily) as it opens with a foreboding, shrill tone from the violins, which gradually dies away beneath a Hammond and repeated late-sixties-guitar lines. The shrill violins return once more to signal the end of this enormously satisfying album.
Blake followed up his Innocence collection of poems and engravings with what was initially intended to be a satirical response to his own work. In order to expose the truth behind the seemingly idyllic subjects of his Innocence poems, to insist that we peel away the visage and see what festers beneath, he planned to rewrite each individual poem from the perspective of 'experience', but this intention rapidly evolved into a more general rumination upon the burdens of life. Interestingly, the copper plates that Blake used to etch out his poems and their accompanying illustrations were reused - each had a Song of Innocence on one side and a Song of Experience on the other, truly two sides of the same coin [Ackroyd, 141].
In printing these two books, Blake developed an entirely new and revolutionary method of printing - relief etching - which enabled a book to feature both text and illustrations on the same page, for a fraction of what it would have cost to do so previously. The process of producing his books was entirely based in his own home - he wrote and illustrated the books and then he and his wife would print them, without any outside involvement whatsoever. The technique that he developed was arguably as revolutionary as the Internet in giving individuals the ability and means to publish their work without being prevented by high costs as they had been previously. It also reduced the cost of illustrated books for the reader, potentially enabling poorer sections of society to own lavishly illustrated texts.
This new method of relief etching was revealed to Blake in a vision in which his dead brother demonstrated the entire process to him. Blake's method involved adding text and illustrations to a copper plate using a quill pen dipped in a glutinous liquid, which would protect the areas of the copper plate to which it was applied from being eaten away by the acid that was then poured over it. He ended up with a perfect plate to use to print and reprint his design. By using dabs of different coloured inks on the plate, or by re-pressing with new colours applied, Blake was able to produce theoretically endless runs of his colourful 'Illuminated' texts, as he used to refer to them. These prints could then be touched up with watercolours as desired. In his Book of Job Blake exclaimed "Oh that my words were graven with an ironpen and lead in the rock forever." Now they were.
While this description makes the process sound very simple, we should consider the painstaking work that went into initially getting the design onto the copper plate in the first place. Because the text and images would be 'mirrored' on printing, every single word would have to be applied to the plate backwards, in mirror writing. After flicking through the Illuminated texts for the hundred-page long epic Jerusalem, the mind literally boggles at Blake's dedication and compulsion to produce his art, which was viewed and appreciated by precious few in his life-time. Indeed, he was more often derided than praised for his work, and often driven to great frustration, believing himself to have been born at the wrong time, undoubting that his work would be more favourably judged some time after his death.
Songs of Innocence was Blake's first entirely successful print run using this method and was soon followed, in 1794, by its sequel Songs of Experience.
Axelrod's Songs of Experience opens with "The Poison Tree", again, as is the case with "Urizen", a very upbeat opening, one not entirely suitable for its subject. The poem deals with very dark themes of resentment, revenge and hatred. It is often possible to discuss our angers and resentments with friends, and consequently these resentments can be resolved. However, we do not discuss these angers with our enemies and thus the problems increase, occasionally (as is the case with Blake's poem) with dire consequences.
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright,
And my foe beheld it shine,
and he knew that it was mine,
And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning, glad, I see
My foe outstretched beneath the
tree.
In a cunning twist, Blake uses his subject's pleasure at his foe's misfortune as a warning to the rest of us of the dangers of suppressed rage. Anger was not something to be hidden or repressed for Blake, and he frequently caused offence in public by speaking his mind where others would probably bite their tongue. As he stated in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you." There is a clear moral to the poem, one which would not be fully explored for over a century until the time of Sigmund Freud, that repressed emotions are carried with us through life to re-emerge at a later date if not properly checked.
Does the music successfully evoke this imagery? Axelrod's tune is buoyant and soothing, casually optimistic in its rhythms and melodies, and contains little hint of the subject to which it alludes. This may be confusing until we consider the time in which Axelrod operates, a culture which paradoxically prizes and professes to protect innocence, yet also puts great value on the attainment of knowledge through experience. We are placed into the absurd situation whereby optimism is valued and adored in the face of the crushing blow of life's realities. Axelrod has successfully turned Blake's intentions on their head by giving his Songs of Experience a far lighter feel that one may have imagined, focussing on the positive side of experience, delighting in the ability to see things as they 'really are' without being duped by the need for a false innocence. It is only this sense of clarity and enlightenment which can give us a truly fulfilled life and, hard as life may be, this is something to delight in.
Thus, Axelrod is not so much providing a soundtrack to Blake's poems as providing a soundtrack to his delight in Blake's poems, leading to an entirely different mood.
"Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained." (Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
Next up is "A Little Girl Lost", Blake's paean to free love which would have struck a chord with readers in the late 1960s, which continues the notion that repression in all its forms is a bad thing, damaging to the individual. For Blake there was also a spiritual side to unfettered sexuality, believing "If a thing loves, it is infinite" (Annotations to Swedenborg, 1788). Blake optimistically opens his poem with the words:
Children of the future age,
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time
Love, sweet love, was thought a crime.
Clearly he believed that the repressed conservatism of his time would be defeated and replaced with a more enlightened and liberal outlook - "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," (The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell). It is hard to imagine if he would have expected to wait nearly two hundred years before free-love became a commonly espoused notion, even if only briefly and among limited sections of society. Blake's biographer Peter Ackroyd believed Blake's attitude to promiscuity was "a matter of the mind rather than of the flesh" (Ackroyd p.82) and that he was never unfaithful to his wife despite his persistent belief that sexual and spiritual freedom were cut from a similar cloth.
Axelrod provides an ideal soundtrack to the poem. Pastoral / utopian music gently washes around the young lovers, introduced by threatening, squalling strings which remind us throughout the unfolding romance that "love, sweet love" had its consequences in a disapproving society. The young or the free-thinkers will inevitably be suppressed by the weight of tradition and societal expectation.
This theme leads neatly into "London" which explored the problems and misery caused by the "mind-forg'd manacles" that the city's inhabitants had handed down from generation to generation, often voluntarily imposing upon themselves. Blake's most politicised poem, "London" catalogues the misery and squalor caused by the political oppression of the time. This poem was written (as is the case for much of his work) at a time when English authorities were watching closely and fearfully what was occurring across the Channel during the French Revolution. Blake, a strong supporter of the revolutionary ideals which were also starting to flourish in certain circles in England, observed the authorities' attempts to quell any writings, meetings, organisations or mutterings which could spark similar events in England. In 1792 a Royal Proclamation against seditious writings was published, beginning Pitt's Reign Of Terror against any individuals or organisations sympathetic to the Revolution. Blake's response was to openly display the bonnet rouge, a revolutionary symbol, as he walked the streets of London.
Individuals who spoke out against the King at this time were liable to face a year in solitary confinement or worse. Blake himself was later arrested and charged with sedition for throwing a soldier off his property while reportedly shouting "Damn the King! The soldiers are all slaves!" These words, combined with his violent attack on one of the King's soldiers, could well have got him hanged, however, since it emerged at the trial that the soldier was drunk, and there were no other witnesses to Blake's seditious outburst, he was found not guilty.
The poem "London" is a coded message of support for the Revolution and a condemnation of the authorities who sought to suppress liberty and equality. Words such as "charter'd" and "manacles" were commonly used in radical, pro-Revolution circles.
I wandered through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames
does flow,
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:
How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.
But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.
Axelrod's "London" is an exceptionally bold, brash and defiant instrumental expression of Blake's (and other refractory radicals of the time) ducking into the shadows as the authorities attempted to close in on them. It has a tinge of bitterness to it as Blake looks at the unjust society around him which holds its citizens prisoners, and the prisoners in turn seek to impose similar shackles on successive generations. Part anthem, part lament, Axelrod's "London" is a stirring tune with its tightly clipped drumming, swathes of strings, menacing undercurrents and an atmosphere which conjures up the torment of one faced with the choice of silence and safety or the danger associated with speaking out for what he or she believed in.
When one considers Blake's anti-establishment, anti-church and anti-authority stance, the regard he now holds in conservative quarters of Britain is very peculiar. Blake was an arch anti-conservative, yet his poem "Jerusalem" has been elevated to the status of a 'second national anthem' where it is sung with pride by patriots and xenophobes across the country. Billy Bragg, covering "Jerusalem" on his mini-album The Internationale, was moved to write in the sleevenotes:
"My belief that Jerusalem is a left wing anthem has got me into arguments with public schoolboys at Eton and Trotskyist newspaper sellers in Trafalgar Square. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that this song does not belong alongside "Rule Britannia" and "Land of Hope and Glory" at the last night of the Proms."
Continuing the theme of sickness and moral weakness in London, Axelrod's "The Sick Rose" follows, more subdued and pastoral than its predecessor, fitting the theme of the poem which is an eloquent lament for goodness, into which badness so often creeps to make itself at home:
O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
"The School Boy", with its theme of longing for escape which all school children feel when trapped in the classroom on a summer's day, is a gorgeous lullaby / gentle lament with a gently plucked harpsichord-like guitar leading us into a delicate melody played on piano and harp.
"The Human Abstract" will be familiar to many on first hearing as containing the sparsely precise piano phrase which was sampled to great effect in DJ Shadow's epic "Midnight In A Perfect World". Interestingly, and perhaps purely co-incidentally, the "Gab Mix" of Midnight In A Perfect World features a highly 'Blakean' rap from Gift Of Gab. Perfectly following the rhythm of the poem, the lines 'You look God in the face and say, "Forgive me!" and all he did was stare' and 'Soon to be none again / so new life can come again' could be straight out of the pages of Songs Of Experience.
It is this piano phrase, sampled by Shadow, which forms the elegant foundations of the tune until Earl Palmer's classic, solid drumming kick in, as tight a groove as you could imagine. Suddenly, in a crescendo towards the end, the song erupts in a fountain of psychedelic guitar before returning to the repeated piano phrase as the music dies away. Perfection.
"The Fly" follows, a whimsical tune, jauntily echoing the image of a seemingly carefree fly at play in the breeze in the summer:
Little Fly,
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.
Having intruded on the fly's existence, Blake then considers himself as a fly, brushed away by the thoughtless hands of those around him:
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance
And drink, and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
Blake considers the potential for free-thought to be the essence of being human and alive, and without free-thought we may as well be dead or some other creature entirely, blissfully unaware; inexperienced:
If thought is life
And strength and breath
And the want
Of thought is death;
Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.
Axelrod's "The Fly" is the penultimate song on the album, and is the last time we shall hear an example of the sumptuous melancholy which has characterised the majority of the Songs of Experience album.
Blake's short poem "The Divine Image" was never included in the publication of Experience, but is a masterful piece which elucidates Blake's disgust with the human race in general. Axelrod's astute decision to provide his score for this poem at the very end of Songs of Experience provides us with a piece of music and a poem which complement each other beautifully, each perfectly summarising the respective artist' intent and vision:
Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secresy the human dress.
This final tune cuts to the quick of the essence of Blake's Experience and is a suspenseful instrumental permeated with fear, menace and the horror of enlightenment. It also inadvertently invents trip-hop - here we have a clearer blueprint for a genre which would not emerge for another near-quarter century. The interplay between the drums and bass, particularly the insistent though minimalist use of the bass drum, firing off its nudging beats of dread is possibly the most influential moment of this pair of albums which were both utterly of their time, yet also completely ahead of it - not unlike the source for their inspiration.
I've been completely wrapped up in both Axelrod's music and William Blake's poetry and painting recently. I was fortunate enough to make it along to the biggest ever exhibition of Blake's work at the Tate Modern in London a short while ago, probably a far cry from his first ever exhibition, held in his older brother's hosiery shop with precious few visitors. Two hundred years later and even an £8 entrance fee couldn't keep them away.
While wandering around the Tate, surrounded by Blake's visions in ink, it was impossible not to hear the shrill tones of Axelrod's strings, his stringently measured drums and sumptuous arrangements chiming around the gallery, utterly entwined with the paintings and poems that inspired them.
Hopefully Axelrod won't have to wait two centuries before he becomes a household name.
By Graham Johnston
Order David Axelrod's Songs of Innocence from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
Order David Axelrod's Songs of Experience from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
View David Axelrod's catalogue at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
Order Peter Ackroyd's excellent Blake biography from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
Order William Blake's Complete Illuminated Books from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
- Clicks & Klangs Issue 5, February / March 2001
