Musicians often write songs about literature, from novels to short stories, from Shake or Shelley.
Whether it's the pedophilic teacher Humbert Humbert in The Police's "Don't Stand So Close to Me" or one the
many Tolkien references that
saturate Led Zeppelin songs, there is an endless list of literary references in Rock.
Love isn't easy
for anyone, not even famous rock stars; that's why we have endless songs
of broken hearts. Guitar God Eric Clapton got the memo when he met—and
immediately fell for—Pattie Boyd, model and actress who appeared in A Hard Day's Night. There was a problem: she was already married to Clapton's good friend, George
Harrison. When Clapton read The Story of Layla and Majnun, he felt a connection to the ill-fated
Majnun. In Ganjavi Nizami's 1192
poem, a young man named Majnun falls in love with the beautiful Layla. "Falls in
love" is a nice way of putting it—he becomes obsessed. Layla's father,
refusing to marry her to a madman, marries her off to someone else. Denied his
love, Majnun goes to live in the wilderness, where he is sometimes seen writing
poetry and singing songs to Layla. In Clapton’s "Layla," he begs her to, "make
the best of the situation, before I finally go insane," like the poor Majnun.
Of course, unlike Majnun, Clapton did eventually marry, and later divorce, his
Layla. "Bell Bottom Blues" was also a tome to Patty Boyd. Ah, love, the great muse.
It is crazy to
think that if Frederich Nietzsche hadn't been so popular, we may never have
experienced the Beatles' psychedelic phase. Searching the bookstore for a copy
of The Portable Nietzsche, John Lennon instead picked up a copy of Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience. Inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Leary's book is an instruction manual meant to aid your psychedelic drug-taking
experience. Lennon brought the book home, took some LSD, and had a mind-altering experience. "Tomorrow Never Knows" provides the listener with some of the same instructions: "turn off your mind,
relax, and float downstream."
While the clever
title might make it obvious, "ReJoyce”" is Jefferson Airplane's paraphrasing of James Joyce's Ulysses. Loosely inspired by Homer's Odyssey, the famous novel
follows a day in the life of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, and how their
lives interact. Jefferson Airplane takes this lengthy work and boils it down to
its basics. They invoke the dark madness that permeates the novel and even
mention, "Molly’s gone to blazes, Boylan's crotch amazes," referring to Molly Bloom's affair (cf. Kate Bush: "and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes").
"Young teacher, the subject of schoolgirl
fantasies:" Right from the first line, you know what’s going down. In this tale
of an inappropriate relationship between a teacher and his student, the man
struggles against his urges but eventually gives in. Whenever a story like this
pops up, you can’t help but immediately go to the quintessential story of
pedophilic love: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Lest there be any question about their
inspiration, The Police include the lyric "just like the old man in that book
by Nabokov."
Led Zeppelin has
a well-documented love for J.R.R. Tolkien and Middle
Earth, referencing it in songs like "Ramble On" and "Misty Mountain Hop." "The
Battle of Evermore" tells the story of one of the final battles for Middle
Earth: It talks of Sauron, "the Dark Lord rides in force tonight," and "the
Ringwraiths ride in black tonight." And of course, Frodo and the One Ring get
special attention: "The magic runes are writ in gold to bring the balance back.
Bring it back." Though it’s unclear who the Prince of Peace is, the Tolkien
connection is clear.
In the 60s, it was not uncommon to look to Eastern
philosophies for guidance and inspiration; Pink Floyd was no different. In "Chapter 24," Pink Floyd take the I
Ching, an ancient Chinese text on divination, and set it to music.
Specifically, they pull from chapter 24 of the book, which describes the process of divining using hexagrams, a
process that goes through six stages. The song has a meditative sound that
carries the teachings of the I Ching through the listener and deepens the experience.
Lest we forget,
Bowie's take on 1984, Wakeman’s on Journey to the Centre of the Earth,
Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad, The Cure's "Killing an Arab" (Albert Camus' The Stranger), Morrison’s references to Huxley, William Blake and Berthold
Brecht. The question remains, how often is it the other way around? How many
examples are there of literature based on music instead? Hmm, well there is
this novel by, oh, me, Jay and the
Americans, but that’s just a shameless plug. Instead, how about Haruki
Murikama’s Norwegian Wood, Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes or Dylan as the
inspiration for a key character in Scott Spencer’s The Rich Man’s Table? Before
Dylan, rock stars and literary writers were considered contradictions in terms,
the pure division of mind and body. Even Dylan was mocked by Updike for looking
"three months on the far side of a haircut" at a concert in the early
1960s. By the late '60s, English teachers were reciting the lyrics of Dylan,
the Beatles and Paul Simon with the kind of reverence usually shown for John
Donne. Meanwhile, rock stars became more self-conscious (and pretentious) and
literary, from the "rock theater" of the Doors to the "rock
opera" of the Who's Tommy. "For people of that time, some
of the rock lyrics were more important to us and occupied us more than reading
the great poets, even those of us who went on to study those poets," said
T. Coraghessan Boyle, whose books include Water Music and World's End.
