November
20
Set List Interview: Roy Harper
Passion and intelligence define Roy Harper, whose ambitiously skewed takes on folk music in the 1960s and ‘70s have gained in stature as more and more young musicians look to the period for inspiration. Many of his earlier titles, never before available in the U.S., were reissued throughout 2008, most recently “The Green Man,” “The Dream Society,” “The Unknown Soldier” and “Death or Glory.”
His first album, “The Sophisticated Beggar,” was recorded in 1966 after Harper was spotted at the Les Cousins folk club and signed to Peter Richard's Strike Records. He was among the first to record lengthy songs: the 11 minute track "Circle," the 15 minute "McGooghan's Blues." His collaborators stuck with him as they became world famous, chiefly Jimmy Page David Gilmour, until about 21 years ago, decided to walk away from the music business.
The first batch included “Stormcock,” a four-song epic from 1971 that is widely considered his best album.
In September he wrote about the album in his online diary:
“I thought, when I was writing 'Stormcock', that all we would have to do would be to address our own generation with regard to the historical cynicism and general dishonesty that surrounds the politics of organized religion. We wouldn’t have to do any more than that, I thought. Just point things out. Ask people to be honest about what they were thinking. Following generations would then pick up from where we’d left off. To expose that dishonesty, I thought, would progress a lot of younger people's thinking to a point where religion would automatically and rightly be understood to be some kind of archaic mental reflex that wasn't necessarily that pertinent any longer. Particularly in its historical context, where clearly, ‘the church’ is, and always has been, a political instrument. I thought that all we had to do was to state the obvious, whereupon belief mechanisms like this would become out-moded as society became more able to put religion under a much more rigorous public scrutiny. That people would decide, by a huge consensus, that the past should be properly left in the past and that humanity should move on. I was wrong.”
That’s how Harper addresses the world. Not by remembrances of who played on what session or through anecdotes about a tour, but through philosophies, their roots and the effects of particular ways of thinking. It makes for a fascinating interview, one that required considerable editing in the transcription. In a conversation that last more than an hour, he talked about his old pals Jimmy Page and David Gilmour, the effect of British poets and how music does not have the hold on young creative people the way it once did.
Q: Earlier this year it was a thrill to be shopping and stumble across “Folkjokeopus” and realize it was neither an import nor a dubious pirated CD. What made this the right time to get your catalog (about 16 titles) reissued in the U.S.?
A: Eventually most of the records reverted to me, but I was unable to export due to the (exchange rate). I could barely break even. Then Koch figured out it would be able to get a couple of bucks back. The credit crunch is affecting even a guy like me. I think people are working through it and there are new bases for international trade and once all of this has blown over we’ll have a new base for trade to resume the way it was 10 years ago.
Q: Your music actually seemed to disappear from the U.S., some of it almost as quickly as it got here. Is there a marketplace here?
A: The whole ethos in music has changed. There have been a lot of revolutions over the last 50 years and the last one really has said, more or less to young people, that music is free. The digital world has cheapened what music is, particularly among the young. Music that has slightly more quality is breaking through, but music does not have the same caliber of participants that it once did. The person who would have gone into a music career is now in software or something just as full of artistic input.
As science and art have expanded , they have offered space in other occupations. We grew up in a golden age. Lots of young people, lots of over qualified people without a broad canvas to express themselves (chose music). They spoke the truth. We occurred at a point in time in which music and art had never been use to express so much.
Q: In looking at your diary I noticed that you were reflecting considerably on the younger generation and its relationship with music but then you stopped posting entries.
A: The diary did not stop. Years of illness, prostrate cancer, drained my physical capabilities. It was not a productive time. I thought for a minute I was in the last throes of being on the planet but it was a matter of getting over things physically. There’s a limit as to how long you can make excuses.
Q: Getting back to the point you were making about following your muse and going into music – what was your starting point?
A: I know for a fact that as an 11 year old boy I was attracted to John Keats, Percy Shelley - the English romantic poets. It was real. I was influenced by the word – (that poetry) was among the stepping stones I used (as a musician). I was also heavily influence by the Beat poets. All of that works together with a tenuous knowledge of the blues. It’s slightly different from John Lennon’s experience, slightly different from Jimmy Page, from Robert Plant’s, those of us who came through that time and shared (that education). I paid attention to Percy Shelly. I didn’t like Byron, but you have to appreciate what he did. Oscar Wilde and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” written in Victorian times and 100 years later, it feels like its opening old wounds.
Q: Yet was there a relationship between the music that inspired you and the poets?
A: We were not entirely dependent on the political or the emotional. We didn’t need to rail against some external force, you could rail against the internal. Those are enormous lands in your own mind and a lot us, who recorded in the ‘60s and ‘70s, are still able to express that apart from banal political observations. The political stage is divided into many landscapes and you address them accordingly. There are a lot of different stimuli and a lot depends on how widespread your influences are. The whole of the musical landscape – classical, jazz, blues, rock, Africa, India – we’ve all been through that in folk music. All of those things can be used as reference points. Some of it depends on how young you were when you heard it. It’s very different when you pick it up later in life.
Q: It’s clear in your music and certainly in Led Zeppelin that an awful lot of influences were put in the filter. But there had to be a starting point for you, no?
A: Woody Guthrie was a big influence over a lot of us. And we asked what was his influence? We took him apart and (learned) he is a product of Dust Bowl poverty living in very hard times. An unashamed communist, in effect, who wants to change a society that does not favor the poor. He was very simple - no wonder he could go off and write 24 songs in a month. A friend suggested that I write songs on a journey through the USA. Those days are past. In my case, Woody was a very big influence and nobody can dispute the influence he had on our generation, obviously on Dylan. Then you think of Billy Bragg. Very educated and articulate, but over the lat 10 years he hasn’t had a Margaret Thatcher to rail against. Billy is one of those people who might have gotten out of music in a different time. He’d make a good TV commentator. But a lot of his music has become imponderable. Listen to me, the more I speak, the more I get out the magnifying glass.
Q: The reissue series started with the two-CD compilation “Counter Culture.” It’s amazing how well the first disc really flows when you consider how wildly different each of your albums were at the time. Did that drive your decisions or was there an effort to make the album reflect you philosophies?
A: I messed around with it for six months. It wasn’t right. It had to do two things: It had to flow and it had to make sense philosophically. There was a time when I though I got it right and then realized (some segues) could be a jarring experience. I found that the best I could do was use the best known (tunes). It was a happy medium I could strike, but bringing in underrated songs was the real reason I did it. The third requirement was chronology. I found I couldn’t put one of the early songs at the end, I couldn’t mix them up. I could have done it as a philosophical treatise or made a political record, but I enjoyed it when it had a more meditative tone. It some ways it’s not a best of, but a point of access.
Q: Inevitably, I’m sure Jimmy Page and Pink Floyd come up in every interview and it seems like even all these years later there are still plenty of people who know your name either from the Led Zeppelin song title or your voice on Floyd’s “Have a Cigar.” What was your relationship with them like?
A: I influenced their writing, they influenced me musically. That was the give and take. Generally we had good times together, particularly with Zeppelin. The steamroller was something to observe as they rolled into town with a police escort. Pink Floyd was never like that - they were much more argumentative. It was the same in 1975 as it is now. That’s the quick answer.
Q: You performed with Joanna Newsom late last year. Any thoughts on touring or recording?
A: Record yes; tour, not sure. If somebody comes up with a solution for the U.S., parity with (venues) and the money. I’m worth about half in the U.S. what I can get in the U.K. and I just can’t do that. I’m open to offers all the same. I’m half way through the record. Five songs. The illness slowed me down and I’ve just been getting started again. When I finish the record I’ll see what happens.
Q: Anything from the past influencing the new work?
A: Only in approach. I’ve never had to answer to anyone, which includes the public. I never obeyed what I should obey to court attention or publicity. I always sought to keep my integrity in one piece. That’s the most important thing. If that goes, you don’t have anything. I was never bothered by what the public thought - it’s a nightmare to fall into that thinking.
Q: Actually I was referring to stylistic influences.
A: I’m open to all kinds of influences. I’m not at my most facile, but to be anything less than wide open is kind of vulgar. I can’t close the door. The door is ajar.
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