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Stone Blown From The Sky... The John Lyle Lost Guitar Interview By Rick McGrath Sunday night and the rain is just pissing down outside my room, my sloppy full room and even as I write this line my mind is stretching out in front of me paradoxically to the past of last week when I sat in an old living room on the top floor of an old apartment on Broadway and listened, really listened, to a poet who puts his lines to music, himself to melody, and a bassist called Derek who plays the sweetest mellow lines to the ones I’ve already mentioned and even thought I’ve only heard them once and likely won’t hear them again for awhile, I left that old apartment different from when I entered and I guess that’s probably because of what John the poet told me and what Derek the bassist felt and nothing to do with songs like Blasted In Hope which I think is as good a set of lyrics as Sweet Baby James can come up with now and again and it’s all about, for me, at least, that: Sweet low down and all around The lone star whistle blows, I’ve been trying to make connection With my fast and lonesome Dixie flyer Stream-lined and winding-fire, stone-blown from the sky To what’s behind our lost tomorrows, baby and if our tomorrows are lost then what’s behind them are our todays and if you feel like train has passed you by you got the blues and if you’re trying to sing and write and eat you’ve also got the blues but they may be different because, John Lyle was born in Flin Flon and that’s in Manitoba and it all happened in 1946 along with, the rest of us and “the next day,” John told me: “that I remember having any fun is the first day I picked up my Flamenco banjo and began banging out the Bent City Blues” and I lit a smoke and John said: “If you bang out the Bent City Blues, you’re gonna want to bang out the Bent City Blues to the multitudes, and already you’re in a lot of trouble. And when representatives of a cross-section of a corner of the multitudes become your friends, and they tell you they like your Bent City Blues, you’re primed for a True Blue drowning” and if you caught that word “primed” you’re ready to understand a bit of the basis behind John’s version of the blues, his blues, country-western inspired blues that picks you up in homespun, wraps you in images and sets your mind on the back of a horse, or as a horse, as in:  I wish that l was one of Katharine Rosses hosses We’d ride the range to the silver strains of me; She’d ride astride and I’d feel obliged to wander Wherever she might want the range to be. Can’t you see me now? I ain’t no plow horse; I’m a saucy tossy Ross horse with my mistress Mounting me so bold and free And if my libido’s showin’, bet your spurs That I will be a growin’ Palomino, pal of mine, you’re gonna do me proud. and the song goes on and the images flicker into life as you read them or hear them and they pile up, in a cumulative fashion, partly because of the space/time restrictions of an aural medium and partly because of their connotative progressions and suddenly you’re left looking at yourself the same way John looks at himself: “A limited company of lost souls isn’t the way to describe the crowd I run with, but it comes to mind — it’s difficult not to manipulate, and it’s even more difficult to manipulate positively. Writing and singing songs for people is my way out, but without acceptance and recognition my way out becomes another blockade and I really believe I don’t get anything I don’t deserve” and somehow back in that old faded living room the drifting got to roots and bands and I guess it all started for real for John back in 1967 with a funky little folk-rock band called the Gordian Knot that featured John and another called Gary (Deadly Certain) MacPherson and Gary had this girlfriend who was in love with him and her daddy was a California businessman and he and a few of his business buddies got together $100,000 to make the Knot into the Monkees so Gary blew off the girl and then it was 1969 with the Country Western Band (“Music that’s kind to your mind”) and they gigged at Aldergrove and the Big Mother and the Bistro and just when the band started cooking Deadly Certain won a scholarship to study at Cambridge and he left but he knew “We could always write and sing, but it’s taken so goddamn long to learn to play and arrange” and then after that there was a recording and writing contract with John Christian, Neil J. Godin and their outfit called Ocelot Records and John says, “I shoulda known from the name, but I get pretty hungry. They sat on me like I was a whoopee cushion, so I got out just before they fell apart” and then John picked up with Derek Stephanson (“mellowest bass player in Vancouver”) and practiced and wrote until this year when he met Robert Altman’s daughter Christine Johnson and she led him “inside the golden circle to get a look at what I had considered to be the brass ring” and Altman heard him and had him sing three Leonard Cohen songs for his picture, The Presbyterian Church Wager, and then decided to use Cohen instead of John but offered to try and obtain a Warner recording contract which now boils down to Van Dyke Parks apparently trying to do something with one of John’s tapes and even Lou Adler wants one and Keep the Banners Flying is a bit of a response: My heart’s been sent to Heaven and the same old used to be Still lingers on beside the riverside that holds a line on me The dream is an illusion and it never comes again Until the ocean tries to take you back to where you’ve always been And when the cave on Sugar Mountain is the only home I count on, I’m a fool; and when the grave beneath Death Valley Is my mind inside an alley, I’ll be cool and even disregarding John’s love for Randy Newman and Jesse Colin Young and the Beatles and Neil Young and of course Bobby Dylan there is an influence, perhaps unknown to him, that stretches back to the sodbustin, goodtime music of Flin Flon which is in Manitoba and moving forward takes it all in, from the funk of early Van Morrison through Procol Harum and the Beach Boys until it reaches the present and even if you disregard all this you know that he’s made up of everything that he’s experienced and when you talk about rock and roll you know you’ve experienced it, too, even if we find it difficult to talk about, and the images he uses we can recognize way back in our heads and sometimes he gets it right “to feed the great mistake of intellect, the saving grace of soul” without hardly any effort at all: If the steel insane insistent rain From my old lost guitar Can be a groove for me, a tune for you Help me raise the bar and when John picks up that lost guitar and plays a bit you want to help him along, you listen to his guitar talking, you hear his soft, high voice, his crazy words and you feel his desire to communicate spreading out and filling the room, your mind, and he runs a hand through his blonde hair and grins and sings: Fair haired boys don’t make no noise, No waves, no sudden moves. Fair-haired boys got Ice-cold ploys, They use for mavin’ smooth. And when circumstance combines with chance To make me on the move, I kill my schemes with gentle dreams that disprove what I prove. and it all comes together with the melody line that I can’t express on paper and even if I could it would be a small substitute for the real thing and if there’s nothing else I can say about John Lyle is he was real and is real because he’s putting it all together right now and biding his time but soon, Vancouver, soon he’ll be telling us our secrets: When our trust is in the gambler and the odds are on the wall And all the whores can beg for rain-checks while their johns lose all recall, And when our minds are always busy mailing letters to the sea, It’s the show-off age and the show-off stage And the showdown might be tragedy and that’s the first verse of “The Showdown Might Be Tragedy” which John wrote as the title song of Presbyterian Church Wager and even so, even so, you can dig it. . . and if you get the chance, dig him. June 8, 1972
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