Merry Go ‘Round – Kacey Musgraves
if you ain’t got two kids by 21 you’re probably gonna die alone
at least that’s what tradition told you
It don’t matter if you don’t believe come Sunday morning you best be
In the front row like you’re supposed to
Same hurt in every heart
Same trailer different park
Mother’s hooked on Mary Kay
Brother’s hooked on maryjane
Daddy’s hooked on Mary two doors down
Mary mary quite contrary
We get bored so we get married
Just like dust we settle in this town
On this broken merry go round
*
Every single time I hear this song I get moments when my eyes water and my throat starts to thicken. Very few songs that can do that to me. I’m going to try and understand why. The potency of cheap music said one unkind critic. Was it Noel Coward? But you kind of know what he meant. A simple tune, with simple lyrics. Making the commonplace poetic and heartbreaking. It was like an unkind upper class acknowledgement that the ordinary people can produce art too.
First heard on Radio 2 in England in 2012, I was immediately captivated and listened for the artist’s name, probably heard on Bob Harris Country. Dear old Bob. Met him on The Boat That Rocked when he helped me with my character Bob (see My Pop Life #205 Sure Nuff ‘n’Yes I Do. Bob Harris has had a long career at the BBC playing records on the radio, and the TV including The Old Grey Whistle Test. And here was Kacey Musgraves – a new name playing a Proper Country Record with banjo picking and everything. I bought the subsequent CD, called Same Trailer, Different Park – a line from the song – in spring 2013. It was a clue to the truths within. Those were the days. CDs. All in storage now. They will be like a moment in time that stops in 2014 when we moved to Brooklyn. Now I’m on mp3s, have a giant collection, but soon they will die too and we’ll all be streaming. I think that’s the plan, and the artists get less and less revenue per song than ever before. Guy Garvey from Elbow thinks we’re not paying enough for streaming – and he’s right. We pay $1.29 for a single song on itunes, $9.99+ for an album. But why would anyone (apart from me?) buy an album on itunes when you can just sign up to Apple Music or Spotify for $10 a month and get instant access to every song ever made in the entire history of recorded music? (except for the ones that aren’t). But I digress…
2013 was the good old days. It was our last year in Brighton, but we didn’t know it. Life was good, steady, happy – involved in the community, full of friends, football and family.
I was still working with The Carousel Singers under the compassionate guidance of Julia Calderwood and Paul Gunter – playing the piano on a Wednesday evening at the Unitarian Church for a mixed group of special needs adults, all of whom would sing. Paul played percussion, and Julia led the sessions, did the warm up, suggested musical games, then we started singing. After a while this led to us writing songs together in the group, led by the group. It was a really great and unique experience for me. They would sing a melody, it might get adapted by someone else, there would emerge a consensus on the tune as I identified a chord structure to underpin the tune. Some of the group couldn’t talk very well, let alone sing. They had a wide variety of special needs and capabilities but they all acknowledged each other and were a genuine community. I learned a lot about compassion working those Wednesday evenings, which the group had for each other, there was no judgement or competitiveness, just support, laughter, patience and joy.
By now we had three cats. Chester had passed in 2011 and was buried in the back garden. Mimi Russian blue Cornish Rex had appeared to miss him so we were gifted Roxy from Michelle in Sheffield where Mimi had come from. Roxy is a tortoiseshell (calico for american readers) Cornish Rex and Mimi took against her immediately. Michelle said that was a passing phase but it wasn’t. The dilemma was solved by not losing either cat but buying Boy, a black Oriental who immediately bonded with Roxy. Mimi had disdain for both of them, tolerated them with barely disguised impatience. It was an underlying vibe.
Merry Go Round has an amazing production which is both earthy and spiritual, voiced primarily by the banjo and the two pedal steel guitars which dominate the arrangement. It is full of pain and weariness and wisdom. It is about being stuck. Being surrounded by people who feel the same way. Small town blues. Whether or not you’re religious you are expected to be in church on Sunday. Expected to raise a family. It didn’t feel like it was about me, or us, we’ve always been gypsies, indeed we can be gypsies because we haven’t got children. And we lived in a place which didn’t conform to rigid expectations of church, sexuality, politics or whatever you’ve got. Brighton in particular and Hove too are independent melting pots of humanity.
The spring was springing rather beautifully out in the back garden and we had a rare Blackcap visitor, and some Long-tailed Tits among the usual greenfinches, robins, blackbirds and wrens. Life was good.
Amanda Ooms came back from Sweden briefly to hook up with the gang. So good to see her again. She had photos of the twins and stories of custody battles with JH in the forest. Trains from Stockholm to Göteborg, lawyers, stress. We walked along Brighton beach, we ate, we drank. We’d been to Sweden twice to see her since she’d moved back, once to Stockholm in 2004 for her birthday with the gang, once for Midsommer in Skåne where she had moved – she now lived in her old school building with her husband JH before we drove down to the 2006 World Cup in Germany. We’d be back again to Stockholm for her big birthday in 2014 but this time we’d be coming from New York.
We had no idea we had a move coming. Not a hint. After Jenny had done Ruined in Washington D.C. in 2011 we’d started thinking in a vague way about New York but it was truly vague. It would be a move for Jenny’s career in the theatre – my career would still operate wherever we lived we felt. Jenny had won the Critic’s Circle Award for Best Actress in 2010 for Ruined at the Almeida playing Mama Nadi, Congolese brothel-keeper, and she’d reprised the role in Washington D.C. It opened up the East Coast of America for us in a new way. New York was a theatre town. But all these conversations had been purely theoretical.
In 2012 Jenny had landed her best role since Ruined playing Cassius in Julius Caesar opposite Harriet Walter as Brutus, Frances Barber as Caesar and Cush Jumbo as Marc Anthony in a stunning profound all-female punk prison production of Shakespeare’s play, directed by Phyllida Lloyd. It played at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden from December 2012 – February 2013 and was a sensation with some male critics sneering and others being blown away, myself included. I’d seen the play a handful of times, including going to New York to see my brother from another Eamonn Walker playing Marc Anthony opposite Denzel Washington on Broadway in 2005. Phyllida’s production was by far the finest I had ever seen – the clearest in terms of diction and motivation of character, the strongest in terms of sheer visual imagination, using all the props from the prison to tell the story, the most emotional version of what is normally rather a dry political discourse now revealed as a very human story of ambition, cunning, mistrust and revenge, yes politics of course. A few theatrical coups included Caesar herself being played by a prison warder – revealed at the end as the prisoners took their sullen curtain call. And the breakouts – when the Shakespeare stopped and the prisoners had an emergency for meds or a panic attack or the show was interrupted because they were too boistrous and violent. A fantastic production.
For myself, I travelled to Bucharest in Romania that spring for a film job and got to see Ceaușescu‘s Palace of The Parliament in my free time, all marble and gold, the nation’s wealth sunk into one building, an astonishing legacy of a cruel self-glorifying leader who was summarily executed by soldiers with his wife outside the back door of the Court in Targoviste where they had been sentenced to death in December 1989.
At the end of March I took a train to Paris and then to Luxembourg to make a film about Marvin Gaye, discussed in My Pop Life #73 ‘Til Tomorrow. In Paris I’d done the wardrobe fitting then taken a cab to Gare De L’Est (very close to Gare Du Nord weirdly) and picked up my ticket. Seeing a platform with Luxembourg on it I proceeded to ask a liveried railway assistant “si est-ce c’est le train pour Luxembourg, s’il vous plait?” He looked down his petit-bourgeouis nose at me and rolled the single word out of his mouth : “LuxemBourrrg“. Then walked off like a cunt. Parisiens huh.
In April Jenny and I and her two sisters Mandy & Lucy flew to New York for the opening night of Motown The Musical on Broadway which Charles Randolph Wright had directed (Charles directed Ruined in D.C. and promised he would get us tickets, and HE DID.) We stayed on 8th Avenue and 46th St the very heart of touristy Times Square, visited Harlem and were guests on the night in question to see the musical which was stunning and a true celebration of an amazing record label and an amazing man : Berry Gordy. He was at the party at the Roseland Ballroom of course, where The Commodores played a set, and where all the other guests and celebrities – Sting, Bono, Spike Lee and so on – were dimmed in the burnished glow of the original Motown stars present : Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Mary Wilson, Diana Ross and Gladys Knight. I got a squeeze from Smokey which I immortalised in My Pop Life #3 I Don’t Blame You At All and close by was Stevie sitting down. I asked myself if I was going to go over and chat. I didn’t. But he is a god in my country. Biggest and eternal thanks to Charles for the Smokey squeeze though – a life highlight.
The very next day we travelled to Brooklyn on the F Train and walked down Jay St to St Anne’s Warehouse where I took this picture to mark the spot where Julius Caesar would open in New York, later that year. It was an auspicious visit to the Big Apple.
Merry Go Round was still in my ears along with the rest of the LP. Kacey Musgraves was a new face – to me – from Texas out of Nashville. The album was amazing. She’d go on to win a Grammy for best song for Merry Go Round and now I’m trying to work out why it makes my eyes prickle. First impressions – it is about the flipside of the American dream – the dispossessed, the folk who live in trailer parks. Simon and I spent a couple of nights in a trailer in the summer of 1976 with the family of Bud, an injured worker who’d given us a lift and invited us back home to Winlock, Washington state, in the far North West. The park was full of industrial accident victims on pensions and a very large Native American man with whom we did some archery into a large target. I think we lost three arrows. But it isn’t this memory that is moving me as the song plays.
I’ve had this technique that I’ve used for years now to identify why I’m feeling nervous, why I’m going all flutter, butterflies in the stomach. I have a natural disconnect from my own feelings, but they’re still there. They’re often disguised though, certainly hidden. And I get anxiety surges that seem disconnected to anything. So I devised this method – to breathe in and concentrate, as I do, on one area of my life, or one person. So breathe : school, exhale. Breathe : family, exhale. Breathe : girlfriend, exhale. When the flutters increase – that’s what’s causing the anxiety. And I can try to fix it. Sometimes life is that simple, yes. So I played the song through and found the two precise lines, and some vague stirred feelings to go with them. First line :
same hurt in every heart
It comes in the first verse when people are sitting in church, both believers and non-believers doing it for show, sitting next to each other. Same hurt in every heart. It is a wonderfully democratic poetic phrase bringing everyone together, bringing the underneath to the surface, exposing the secret pain we all carry inside. We’re all the same underneath. It is a truth – and truth pricks the eyes.
The chorus carries another truth – that we are all stuck and stuck on something. Mary Kay is a cosmetic brand popular in America, maryjane is marijuana and Mary two doors down is anyone and everyone that your dad has an eye on. Mary Mary quite contrary, we get bored so we get married
just like dust we settle in this town
That’s the line right there. Makes me choke and create eye water. Again it is a truth that we are all living dust – until the day we die, but we live as if we are eternal. Or at least we try to. It is so poignant, so understanding of people’s lives, and just when I think to myself, this song isn’t about me, it’s gone and got underneath my skin and ambushed me with details and precision – the individual and specific turned universal, like all the best art. It is rural americana populated with real people, feeling real feelings. There is a nursery rhyme element too that Kacey uses often – Jack and Jill appear, Mary Mary, others, and this sing-song element takes me back to childhood and an earlier time of dispossession. The potency of cheap childhood nursery rhyme music perhaps. The banjo and the pedal steel work both ends of the spectrum of sound and lift the song from the earth and the dust up to the wind, to heaven. It is a brilliant piece of work. But maybe it had created something else inside me which lodged in my heart. Something about dust settling. We’d lived on the south coast now for 17 years.
Back in Brighton the band were rehearsing for The 1969 Show which was the first half of our Brighton Festival Concert Abbey Road (see My Pop Life #37 A Salty Dog).
This was the second year we’d done it but still needed rehearsal – always rehearsal – and we’d added a couple of songs : The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face which Lucy was singing, and Aquarius which was a monster ararrangement, and we’d dropped a couple of others – I can’t remember which ones to be honest. We were in All Saints Church in Hove because the usual venue St George’s Church down the hill from our house in Kemp Town had decided they didn’t want any more bands on the altar area.
The summer was spent on the Downs and in the pubs and on the beach. Paul came over from China and we enjoyed The Ram in Firle village and then Colin came down and we went to Devil’s Dyke for sundown.
My sister Rebecca was married for the third time that summer. Paul was there, we were all there. It didn’t last sadly – he was a childhood sweetheart who’d reconnected on Facebook and it was all very romantic, but he turned out to be not the right fella in the end at all.
The other wedding was a complete delight as Tim finally wed his sweetheart Beth, this one had been long in the dreaming and planning. What a lovely day.
And two of my dear surrogate families lost their matriarchs. Shirley Korner, Simon’s mother was remembered with a bench on the Downs where we gathered in her memory. Jenny and I had last seen her for lunch at The Pelham Arms in Lewes, her choice for a farewell meal. She wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to waste my life, that I was going to be more of an activist, like her sons. What a special woman.
Rosemary Ryle passed away in July. Her daughter organised the funeral tribute which was held in the Bear Road cemetery in Brighton with beautiful music and poems and then we all moved to The Pelham Arms for the wake. One by one we took it in turns to stand and give homage to dear Rosemary, a beautiful gentle compassionate soul who had taken me into her heart as my own family wobbled and I was welcomed into her family. I spoke of being one of the waifs and strays that she would take in, and couldn’t stem the tears from flowing. Her sons Conrad and Cym and Martin were there, who had encircled me with their love in the 1970s. Martin & Kate’s son Jude, now living in Ireland was there, and also Martin’s daughter Madeline, with her son Caspar. And Pete Smurthwaite was there whose mum Sheila had also taken me into her family home around 1968 and 1970. He was going blind slowly and had someone to help him navigate. Simon and Joe Korner were also there.
And the 3rd wedding of the year was on TV : in work mode Him & Her returned with a final 5-part series called simply The Wedding. Directed by Richard Laxton and DP’d by Laurie Rose this was a very fine piece of television and great fun to make. Starring Russell Tovey and Sarah Solemani with my old friend (and Christopher Fulford’s wife) Camille Coduri as a friend. I was Her Dad.
Here’s a picture of the women who include my wife played by Marion Bailey – a dear lady whom I have worked with more than any other actor in England. She has played my wife before too. Now partnered with Mike Leigh, and they’ve worked together half a dozen times. We have done…Panic! at the Theatre Upstairs, Psychotherapy which shot in Köln, I’ll Be There with Charlotte Church, directed by Craig Ferguson, and now three series of Him & Her. which I’ll blog another time.
*
And then Jenny went over to Brooklyn with Julius Caesar and the women’s prison Phylidda Lloyd production. I visited for opening night which was sensational and remains one of my visceral and stunning theatre experiences. We partied in Gleason’s Gym where Angelo Dundee trained Muhammed Ali and sang Sinatra’s New York, New York in a drunken circle. I stayed with Jenny in a beautiful 2nd-floor apartment on Willow Street in Brooklyn Heights. It was a walk down to the East River to the theatre, with a stunning view of Manhattan. One morning we stepped out onto the sidewalk and voiced our simple feelings – “we could live here“. Little did we know that we were in a very expensive part of Brooklyn – but maybe that was for the best, for three months later we had actually moved to Brooklyn carrying two suitcases and a cat each. Without doing too much pesky homework on rent prices and so on. But that’s for another story. And here we are, seven years later.
And I miss my god-daughter, my band, my football team, my friends, my brothers, my sister, my surrogate Mums, my actual Mum, Beryl and Dad, the Downs, the rivers, the beaches, the trees, the pubs, the politics, the community, the commute to London, the neighbours, the pub quiz, the views, the vibes, the gigs, the parties, the people, the places, the things.
And now we live in Brooklyn, and we’re still on the merry go round. Maybe our dust will settle here?
I saw Kacey Musgraves live in McCarren Park in Brooklyn on June 11th 2016. My friend Johanna Francis – our first landlady in Brooklyn – accompanied me, trusting my recommendation. By then the second LP Pageant Material had come out and she opened with the title track. Merry Go Round was in the middle of the set, and it was glorious of course, but it was the covers that really caught my attention, as if Kacey were signalling her intention to take over the world. Country musicians do covers all the time, but always of other country songs. It’s a rule. She sang girlpower anthem No Scrubs by TLC, Bob Marley’s uber positive Three Little Birds, as well as Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made For Walking. Conor Oberst aka Bright Eyes (who was in the band) joined her on vocals for Hank Williams’ classic Hey Good Lookin’ and she finished with genuine lesbian country shout out Follow Your Arrow from the wonderful first album. I was made up. We went down the front for a while, then right to the back to smoke – I’d had some doob which produces jonesing for a cigarette among other effects. It is one of the benefits of living in New York City (was before the pandemic, will be again) – that sooner or later, everyone will come through here.
Even my friends.
I think the reason why I had some singles by her was down to Elvis Costello covering her 1965 hit Getting Mighty Crowded in 1980 as an out-take of the personal favourite Get Happy LP – which appeared on Taking Liberties, an album of out-takes and B-sides. For a musical archeologist like me there were plenty of clues there, back to the time when soul music was made out of soul. I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down (original by Sam & Dave) was one of the singles from that tremendous LP.
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