I commuted my first year of college, generally with a guy I’ll call A. A. looked a bit like Art Garfunkel, which was already a strike against him, but what made commuting with him almost unbearable was that he insisted upon constantly playing Cat Stevens. I hated Cat Stevens because he wrote songs as delicate as the bones of hummingbirds that were beloved by wimps but caused me inestimable mental anguish, and if tenderhearted A. hadn’t thrown Neil Young’s Zuma into the mix once every blue moon, I might well have murdered him.
Why, just the titles of Cat’s albums were fey. Tea for the Tillerman? Buddha and the Chocolate Box? Whatever. All I knew was back in the seventies the girls of my acquaintance loved him, because he was as fragile as a butterfly wing and wrote songs that made them cry. They made me cry too, but for different reasons. And he would have gone on, wrenching tears from the eyes of young girls, had he not pulled a wild one by embracing a particularly rabid strain of Islam, changing his name to Yusuf Islam, and retiring from music shortly thereafter. Which was cool with me; I certainly wasn’t going to miss him, and while I think religion is the cause of many of the world’s problems, people have (or so we’re told) free will.
What wasn’t cool was his fundamentalism (hate the stuff), which landed him in one humdinger of a controversy when he agreed with the fatwa to kill Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses. Stevens/Islam told a roomful of university students, “He must be killed. The Qur’an makes it clear—if someone defames the prophet, then he must die.” He dug his hole a bit deeper during a subsequent appearance on British television, where he said Rushdie deserved to die and, upon being asked whether he would join in a protest to burn Rushdie in effigy, replied, “I would have hoped that it’d be the real thing.” He later attempted to write off his comments as “part of a well-known British trait… dry humor on my part.” Yeah, right, Yusuf; you’re a regular P.G. Wodehouse.
And just like that the sensitive poet who gave us “Peace Train” outed himself as an advocate of cold-blooded assassination, which just goes to show you that you never know anybody, not really. What was next, Neil Peart calling for the deaths of everyone who disliked Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead? But an ironic thing happened during the firestorm of criticism of Yusuf Islam; I heard the Harold and Maude soundtrack, and much to my horror discovered that I liked it. At long last, A. had had his revenge. And I found that I had to make the same accommodation with Yusuf Islam as I had with the virulently anti-Semitic French writer Louis Ferdinand Celine; namely, separate the idiot from his work. It’s a weak-ass moral position, I know, but I love Celine’s novels just as many people find beauty and solace in the songs of Cat Stevens.
The Best of Cat Stevens opens with “The Wind,” a lovely and meditative song that has Stevens listening to “the wind of his soul” to the accompaniment of an acoustic guitar. The melody is beautiful, and the tune is over before you know it; Stevens may be guilty of a lot of things, but song stretching isn’t one of them. “Wild World” features a full band, and everybody knows it, so why describe it? Suffice it to say that it’s a lullaby and a cautionary tale at the same time, and that to Stevens “wild” isn’t a good thing. It’s a subtle clue to his later change of identity and embrace of fundamentalism; in the song he paints the world as an evil place, and it’s a small step from that to rejecting the material world altogether. “Oh Very Young,” which like “Wild World” is a song of farewell, is lovely but a bit too precious for my tastes. That said, its deeper meaning is clear enough; life will strip you of your dreams, “denim blue fading up to the sky,” and once again Stevens is giving us a clue to the disillusionment with the worldly life that would lead to his jarring reinvention of himself.
“Where Do the Children Play” is the song I heard that made me revise my opinion on Stevens; it boasts a melody that is lovely beyond belief, thanks to some wonderful acoustic guitar, and it never fails to make me swoon. The lyrics are a protest against the devastations of progress, and as the song proceeds Stevens’ voice grows more strident; “I know we’ve come a long way,” he sings, “But tell me where do the children play?” Then some drums come in and Stevens cries out the chorus, and he sounds like a man in pain. And once again the future fundamentalist casts his shadow over Stevens, because what is one to do when confronted with a world based on Mammon, a world that has left its children no place to frolic, except abandon it? “Hard-Headed Woman” never struck me as a Stevens’ song, because it boasts both a tougher sound and a very unsentimental sentiment, despite the strings. Towards the song’s end Stevens really ratchets up his vocals a notch, and the band kicks in, and by God this is almost a rock song. And it leaves one wondering, “Just how hard headed are we talking about, Yusuf? Hard enough to hit with a hammer?”
“Moonshadow” is another song I’ve always found too touchy-feely for its own good. The melody is serviceable, but Stevens sings it in a near whisper until the cranked-up ending, which almost saves the song but doesn’t. As for “Peace Train,” it’s a tough song to hate, despite its latter day Aquarianism. The hand claps and backing vocalists (which sound like they came straight from a Peter Gabriel song) are cool, but the irony factor of the lyrics can’t be ignored. “Why must we go on hating/Why can’t we live in bliss?” sings the guy who would later sanction murder, and whose idea of a peace train would exclude all Koran bashers and infidels. Yet it still possesses an iconic power, and warms the hearts of hippies both young and old everywhere, and that’s that. Meanwhile, “Father and Son” borders on schlock despite its nice melody. A conversation between two generations, I would write it off if it weren’t for said melody and a beautiful instrumental interlude, to say nothing of Stevens’ vocals. He invests enough authentic passion into the song to save it, which brings me to a point I’ve been wanting to make, namely that I much prefer the impassioned Stevens to the wispy, wimpy Stevens.
And there’s no better proof of this than the great “Sitting,” which has a lovely melody and a great piano figure, and slowly builds and builds until it boils over and Stevens cries, “You’re going to wind up where you started from/You’re going to wind up where you started from!!” “Sitting” is most definitely the work of a dissatisfied seeker, of a soul on the prowl for deliverance—in short a spiritual from a man with an uneasy spirit, and that’s what lends it its emotional power. “How Can I Tell You” does nothing for me; it features Stevens at his most delicate, and is undoubtedly the Stevens a female friend of mine was thinking of when I told her I was going to write a piece on Stevens. “No,” she wrote, “not Cat Stevens! You are going to rip the weeds out of the hippie-dippy dreamy flower garden happy place I’ve got growing in my head!” Sorry, babe, but it’s a wild world, and filled with horrible types, music critics being a prime example.
But come to think of it, her Stevens is most likely the Stevens who bequeathed us the intolerably precious “Morning Has Broken,” which opens with some Elton John-school piano—it’s actually Rick Wakeman playing the keys—which is all I like about it—and Stevens singing breathlessly about the coming of the dawn, which I happen to hate almost as much as I hate Dick Cheney or straightedge. It’s an unapologetic song of praise to God and the many gifts he has bequeathed us, although I can’t help but notice he fails to mention either the Holocaust or rickets. Every morning, he sings, is “God’s re-creation of the new day,” and I for one wish God would give it a break already. The LP’s final cut, “The First Cut Is the Deepest,” is great, and beats hell out of all the versions recorded by other artists over the years. The guitar is delicately lovely, and Stevens sings with a subtle echo, but the best thing about it is its psychedelia-meets-Tom Jones vibe. I love the tambourine and the freak-out guitar and the big orchestral overlay, and the choruses are to die for. This song screams 1967 just as much as the fancy Edwardian garb Stevens is wearing on the cover of the album it came from, New Masters. And talking of his very early material, why “Here Comes My Baby” from Matthew & Son isn’t on this greatest hits compilation is a mystery; it beats the tar out of “How Can I Tell You,” and now that I think of it, where is Stevens’ uncharacteristically playful cover of Sam Cooke’s “Another Saturday Night”?
Ultimately, Stevens found the modern world too much for his basically moral view of life, which I understand, but unfortunately he turned to a cure—namely fundamentalist religion—that is worse than the disease. He went from riding the peace train to advocating murder in cold blood, and while that doesn’t change the fact that he wrote a handful of great songs, it does tarnish those songs, unfair or not. He may well be a kind man but he is also batshit crazy, yet another victim of God’s terrible hold over the imagination of Man.
One can only hope that the encroaching years moderate his views, but I have my doubts. Unlike Bob Dylan, another artist who embraced a puritanical strain of Christianity but gradually stopped shouting about fire and brimstone in his songs, Stevens appears to be a lifer, and that’s too bad. The world is a bad place, and the temptation to flee it is understandable, but in my humble opinion religion is the opiate of the people, and when things go south you’re better off turning to booze. It has never started a war, soothes the soul, and comes with no stone tablet of commandments to be followed. So I guess what I’m saying is, Yusuf Islam, have a fucking Bud.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B-
