I had a lot of thoughts about the excellent symbiosis of Cat Stevens and Harold & Maude, and just how much that was a match made in heaven. I was thinking about it so hard that I couldn’t wait until this song came up on the playlist so I went ahead and wrote than essay and posted it with a different song. Really jumped the gun on that one. No regrets or anything. It was a decent enough piece of writing and I still agree with myself. But I should have waited, because this songs is THE Harold & Maude song. Not just in the literal sense that it written specifically for the film and wasn’t culled from an album or destined to be a single. It’s that when Cat Stevens wrote it, he just nailed the whole movie down in just a few lines.
If you like poignant ballads about regret and missed chances. I could never call Cat Stevens depressing – he’s much too mellow and cuddly for that – but he does sing about broken hearts a lot. It’s heartbreak of the very laid-back and wistful variety, so much so that it almost sounds fun. And still yet profound. Deeply profound or maybe I just let Cat Stevens make me sentimental sometimes.
Times sure have changed since 1967. Cat Stevens grew a beard, became very popular, had an epiphany, became a Muslim, changed his name to Yusuf Islam, retired from music and made a comeback. Also, it’s no longer considered cute to sing about shooting people. In ’67 this was a completely harmless, rather silly little pop song. As you can see below, young Cat wore ruffled sleeve shirts, did some awkward dance moves and had to share the screen with a dog puppet on French TV. So what if his song was all about taking violent revenge on the people who wronged him. Who could possibly take those words seriously? Things are a bit different today, though. Sometime between then and now, gun massacres went from not being a thing, to being a very rare thing, to being a thing so common the news media doesn’t even cover them anymore unless it’s small children getting shot. Getting a gun so we can shoot people we don’t like; forty years ago that could be seen as just a harmless little fantasy. Unfortunately, today that is a thing people actually do. Frequently. There is no way in hell anybody in their right mind today would write a song about it, and no record company would release it as a single. Even the most violent gangsta rapper or depraved death metal band would think twice about glorifying gun violence, not after we’ve had one school shooting after another. In today’s context, what Cat Stevens thought was a goofy pop ditty becomes deeply disturbing. It’s bizarre how much the world can change like that. Stevens didn’t know that in just a few decades people would be legitimately living in fear of getting shot for no reason by a random maniac. He almost certainly didn’t stop to think that what he wrote as a lark would be someone’s literal way of thinking, and not just one someone, but many someones and more. He may be thinking about it now, though. It really was a more innocent time back then.
I wish I knew, I wish I knew, what makes me me, what makes you you…
Yes, that’s very deep and I wish all those things too. Makes me want to go off on a tangent about identity. But I keep getting distracted by that cute little dog up there. Makes me want to make ‘cat and dog’ jokes. Which would be dumb. So I was trying to say, this is a deep and thoughtful song, as could be expected from the reliably deep and thoughtful Cat Stevens. There’s not question that Stevens firmly belongs in the long and storied lineage of ‘sensitive singer-songwriter types’. You know, those guys who gently sing about love while strumming a guitar or plinkety-plinking a piano, and who may or may not have healthy growths of facial hair. That genre is, like any popular genre, wide open to parody, just because it’s so familiar and it’s been done by so many mediocre people. But everything has its laughable low points and its cream, and Cat Stevens is definitely the best of the best when it comes to being a sensitive singer-songwriter type. Absolutely, the best. Cat Stevens doesn’t just make you forget every two-bit scraggly open-nite poet you’ve ever wished you’d never heard; he makes you understand why those guys want to be that way. They’re all trying to live up to Cat Stevens, whether they know it or not. Because Stevens pretty much set the standard for writing simple, beautiful, soulful, optimistic songs about the human condition. He made being sensitive and poetic look manly and natural. And it is, of course. But only if it’s in your nature. If you’re a douchehat trying to get laid by trumpeting how ‘nice’ you are, you’re just gonna look like a drip, which is what so many SS-WTs seem to miss.
Cat Stevens didn’t write this song for Harold & Maude, but it was featured in the movie and it shares a message with it. That film and its Cat Stevens soundtrack is one of the most perfectly balanced matches of story and music, so much so it almost feels like a musical, although technically it isn’t. Another example of a movie completely suffused with the spirit of the soundtrack artist would be The Graduate with its Simon & Garfunkel songs. Those movies are honorary musicals because the music adds to our understanding of the story and even helps move the plot along. That’s a very difficult trick to pull off, which a lot of filmmakers have tried and failed to do. What usually happens when someone tries is they end up substituting emotional pop songs for emotional content, bringing in from outside feelings that should have been generated by the story and actors. Obviously, Harold & Maude doesn’t have this problem. Partly because the story is so fresh and partly because the cast is so excellent. And in no small part because the music genuinely adds depth to the story. Cat Stevens has always projected a lot of positive energy in his music; his message is always life-affirming. The message of the movie is also life-affirming, but it’s not immediately easy to grasp that, what with all the suicides and very dark humor throughout. It doesn’t have an instantly gratifying happy ending. It’s an ending that begs thinking about. It’s thanks to the songs that we come away with a feeling of fulfillment, knowing that everything turned out well in the end. It’s the songs that pull all the essentially happy themes to the surface. It’s certainly a very philosophical movie, and it uses music to subtly bring its ideas into focus. That’s a pretty rare feat when every song says something about what’s going on. This one very much does that. It was already a great song just being an album track on Mona Bone Jakon, but it benefits from a new context. What I’m talking about works both ways. Just as songs can add to a story, adding a story makes you think differently about a song you already knew. It makes you think about what it means and what you think it meant before.
A most beautiful love song for those times when you know you love someone but can’t open your mouth to say it. Because you know that to do so would irrevocably change your whole relationship, and it’s perfect the way it is and you can’t risk it. And it makes you sad that they’ll never know just what they meant to you, but you’ve accepted that you’ll never have that conversation. Because they don’t really need to know. Because if they did they might think differently of you. They might reject you most likely, or worse, they might take advantage of you once they realize that you’d do anything for them. So you never once open your mouth to tell them you love them and go on pretending you don’t care. Then you never see them again. So you go home and you cry and you want to die and you listen to some Cat Stevens until you feel better.
Wow, a beardless young Cat Stevens, trying his damnedest to fit into a sugary sixties pop star mold. If you’re only familiar with his soulful classic seventies work, Matthew & Son might come as some surprise. I can’t say it’s all good, but there are some fun moments. It’s peppy sixties pop done well, but not well enough to lift his career off the ground. There were so many artists producing lighthearted Beatlesque pop songs at the time – including no less than the Beatles themselves – that even if you got the formula down right, it was still very hard to distinguish yourself. It would take Stevens a few more years to find an identity that fit, but he wore his flouncy velvet blazers with some panache and he mastered the formula for a three-minute sub-Beatles song rather well too. This is a fine example of a shiny, happy ditty that has rather depressing lyrics underneath all the bounce. Cat Stevens loves to write sad love songs, and he won’t let an upbeat tempo stop him doing just that. The contrast of jolly melody and gloomy content is a well-worn songwriting trick, but it’s an effective one. This is one of the best of early Stevens, and it’s one of the only Cat Stevens songs you might think of dancing to.
This is something that made no sense to me when I was younger, but I understand now. ‘Hard headed’ sounds like kind of a weird thing to look for in a woman. ‘Hard headed’ sounds like stubborn and mean. Why would Cat Stevens want a hard headed woman when everyone else just wants the prettiest one? I’ve learned some things since then about Cat Stevens, and about people in general. The best people aren’t always the easiest ones to get along with, and it’s a rare thing to find someone willing to give you the kick in the ass you sometimes need. That’s the challenge of finding a good partner, not just a pretty placeholder. That’s something we all eventually have to learn, and I think Cat Stevens learned it when his model girlfriend Patti D’Arbanville dumped him to spend more time looking pretty. Or rather, she wanted to spend more time modeling and making movies, and also allegedly dating famouser rock stars like Mick Jagger. It was quite traumatic for Stevens, by all accounts, but he did get a lot of great songs from it, including Lady D’Arbanville and Wild World. I’m in no place to judge how much a youthful breakup affected the man’s later outlook on life and fame, but it’s a fair guess that it inspired this song, in which he professes his weariness of the superficial and a desire for something authentic. From writing a song about wanting a woman who won’t run off in search of more wealth and fame, to denouncing his own wealth and fame, is that a stretch? I think this may be an early sign of the singer’s lifelong quest for meaning. From one painful lesson about the flightiness of fashion models, then a more general disillusionment with the meaningless trappings of celebrity, then, perhaps inevitably, into the arms of religion. Stevens was all along too sensitive and thoughtful for rock stardom, with its hordes of cynical opportunists and false friends, with its marketing needs overshadowing artistic merit, with its ruthless measuring of a man’s worth in how well his records do. In 1970 he was already getting disgusted by the shallow interests of ‘feathered friends’ who only care about money and cachet. Rock stardom is a lifestyle so addictive that many have found it easier to die than live any other way. I think it took an amazing amount of strength and purity for Cat Stevens to so firmly turn away from it. As a fan I can’t help but resent his decision to stop recording, but at the same time I have nothing but admiration for him, for having faith that is stronger than the temptations of money or the adulation of strangers and fashion models.
What I like about this, besides being a good ditty, is how Cat Stevens presents my favorite view of the afterlife. No ash to ash or eternal oblivion. There’s a ghost party in the afterlife where you mingle with notables, and everyone appears their best self from life. Or so I like to imagine it. I realize it’s probably meant as a joke and Cat Stevens has a very different view now that he’s found Allah. But it’s a fun idea, dammit.
I’ll admit I like this song entirely on the strength of the distorted backing vocals. Otherwise I think it’s a pretty generic effort from Cat Stevens. Not exactly bad, but not as catchy as could be. On the other hand it does appear to be about an alien abduction. He wasn’t entirely off his rocker either; in the 70′s alien/supernatural/occult theories were hot stuff and about as mainstream as they’d ever be. This was when Erich von Daniken was almost taken seriously. Chariots of the Gods? made a pretty convincing case for alien influences on Earth, at least wishfully. Science and archaeology hadn’t quite caught up to debunking exactly why outer space beings didn’t build the pyramids, and imagining that they had is undeniably fun. So of course UFO landings and abductions were something lots of people thought and wrote songs about. It was a simpler time.
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