Gavin Bryers: Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet

Written for Michelle Herman's Writing About Music Class, Winter 2012, The Ohio State University, about this song:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1lnSi7QWY8

Silence.  So much silence.  Then not, but so faint that you aren’t sure that what you’re hearing is sound, or rather, intentional sound.  What is there?  You doubt your hearing, check the volume.  There’s a croaking whisper, an old gramophone from beyond, replete with faint hiss.  An old man’s voice, draped in a cockney accent, fades into understandable, slowly, magnetically, singing, “Jesus’ blood never failed me yet, never failed me yet, Jesus' blood never failed me yet, there’s one thing I know for he loves me so…and repeats.  His voice grows stronger in volume, but you still hear the whistle on his inhale, the emphatic pause before “yet”, as though Jesus’ blood might still fail him, for faith and doubt exist like binary stars.  In the background, other men’s voices hover, unintelligible whispers, like static, just out of reach.  After so many repetitions, (Ten?  Twenty?  You’ve lost count, yet are mesmerized) the violin creeps in, in a leisurely, glacial pace, sneaking in alongside the other muffled voices, gently filling itself, liquid between notes, the C string pulling it’s lilt upward so slightly, dragging the other strings with it.  The verse repeats, endlessly, melancholic hopefulness.  Yet each iteration of the phrase, while identical to the one before, doesn’t feel like a repetition.  He stumbles slightly over “thing”, and slides coyly into “I know”, with the “w” on know wrapping around the end of the word like a soft blanket. 

Seven minutes in, a plucked string is a gentle shock, a pull to the forefront of the trance you’ve been lulled into.  A warm note followed by a sharper ping, a muffled twang.  The old man’s voice hasn’t stumbled, hasn’t changed, he drives his song forward with the faithfulness of each foot on a long road, one in front of the other, propelled by habit and memory.  Faintly – another voice?  No, the instruments are tricking you with their minimalism, melting together into a crest, a swell, lapping at the ragged edges of the old man’s voice.  He is as crisp and straightforward as a Walker Evans photo, as dusty as the back corner of an antique shop.  The strings are drowning him slowly, so slowly you and he faintly notice, like the proverbial frog in the pot.  But by twelve minutes, he and the instruments have traded places, the velvety surge of strings pushing to the foreground while he allows his voice to dip below the surface.  He doesn’t fight it, not when a bassoon gently, subtly honks, not when a trumpet sneaks in.  His meter never changes, his volume doesn’t fight for it’s place in the foreground but is content to repeat, again, and again, “Jesus blood never failed me yet”.  There’s one thing he knows, and we know it to, and we are comforted, whether we consider the invocation of Jesus a comfort or not.  His song is steady and reliable, and that faith does not fail us, not for a single measure. 

At fifteen minutes, a seventh chord creeps in, pulling the tone upward, lilting, hopeful.  The orchestra is full, blended into one voice that gently pushes the old man’s lament into itself, inside its belly.  The music is Jesus’ blood, and it is not failing him.  It is covering him, comforting him, enveloping him.  He is just out of reach, beyond the song, subterranean.  The chords are still filling themselves, brassier, more complex, tiny hints of dissonance suggested, then pulled away from like it’s too much to endure.  A melody plucks out, coming forward here and there as tendrils wrapping themselves around the body of the pregnant, dripping chords.  Heaving upward, the man’s voice peeking through in the silence between phrases, a tiny boat amongst the waves.  Plaintive, but never losing confidence.  Yearning.  But steady, ever steady, not lost, never losing hope.  For twenty-five minutes and fifty-seven seconds, he is with us, and we are with him.  And as quietly as the instruments crept in, they fade unhurriedly with the man’s voice, in the end, leaving him alone again, whispering, fading, disappearing, but staying in your head for hours.

Sugar Hill.

I had only recently discovered the power of music that I chose myself.  Not my parents’ John Denver and Neil Diamond records furtively slipped on the turntable when they weren’t home, and not the disco-heavy pop music and classic rock that permeated every invisible wave that could be captured with the bent antennae of my radio.  After I realized I could control what I heard and form my own tastes, I would sit in front of the radio on Sunday nights, cassette recorder in front of me and holding my breath so as not to pollute the background with excessive bodily noise, repeatedly pressing record and stop during the Top 40, trying to trim away the commercials and Dick Clark’s unnaturally upbeat and too-young voice from filling up even a precious millimeter of my 90 minute Memorex cassette tape.  This was my weekly ritual.  I would sit on my bed, recently swathed in a polyester comforter that my Mom let me pick out of the Sears catalog, with matching curtains.  It was my foray into adulthood, picking out the brown and orange graphic sunset and mountain range to replace the nauseatingly frilly pink that my Mom had tried to force on me for years, hoping to pull me back from the brink of tomboyhood.  Dick Clark’s picks only got 45 minutes on one side of the tape, for the other side was saved for Dr. Demento, who underwent the same laborious and largely inaccurate editing process.  For the rest of the week, that mix-tape was the soundtrack to my life, to be covered up by new selections in about a month, once I had cycled through my other hand-me-down tapes from my brother’s job at the Radio Shack.   

In the summer of 1979 I’d discovered two things that I felt heralded this coming adult-hood: kissing boys, and rap music.  Both had been discovered the same weekend, while staying at my friend Lynn’s house in Park Hill.  Park Hill was glamorously in the city, walking distance from City Park and the Museum, and miles away from our suburban townhouse nestled in the foothills of the Rockies.  Since the houses were older, Lynn lived in a modest bungalow next to what I considered a mansion, since it possessed three Victorian stories and a pool in the back. 

The pool came with two brothers, a short one, and a tall one.  The shorter one, whose name I don’t, but should remember, became my crush.  Which didn’t mean Lynn took the taller one – living next door to him, he lacked any appeal.  I had no clue how to act on this crush, though, so I kept it to myself, admiring his cannonballs off the roof of the garage into the pool and pretending that I didn’t care.  Later in the summer, he would miss, breaking his arm, but by that point my pretend lack of caring had become real, so his sympathetic cast gained him nothing but my signature in purple marker. 

Our Saturdays that summer consisted of roller-skating around the pool and listening to tapes – the brothers, of course, bought their tapes at the record store instead of relying on staticky homemade mix tapes.  One weekend, they played something none of us had heard before, something that made us stop our clumsy circling in tennis-shoe style skates and listen, rapt, for the full 15 minutes.  We spent the rest of the day rewinding and repeating the Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight.  It was like nothing we’d ever heard before, and we were mesmerized. 

By the end of the day, we knew most of the words and would yell-sing along, most raucously during Wonder Mike’s part, which we would try to do without giggling:

have you ever went over a friends house to eat 
and the food just ain’t no good 
I mean the macaroni's soggy the peas are mushed 
and the chicken tastes like wood 
so you try to play it off like you think you can 
by sayin’ that you’re full 
but your friend says momma he's just being polite 
he ain’t finished at all that's bull 

This, of course, was the part of the song we could relate to.  After all, our knowledge of pimps, sperm, and bootie was limited in the seventh grade, and we were a couple of thousand miles from the Bronx. 

After a full day of rapping and roller-skating, we wound up on the third floor, far from any adult activity.  Like any hormonal pre-teens with nothing to do, there were but two options: Spin the Bottle, or Seven Minutes in Heaven.  And we didn’t have a bottle.

Lynn knew all about my crush on the short boy – we’ll call him Jack.  He was round-faced and one of the few boys around shorter than even me, with a bit of baby fat and sandy blond hair.  Before anyone else had a chance to say a word, she had picked us both out and wordlessly shoved us towards the closet.  We both protested weakly, but it was disingenuous at best.  My heart racing, we went in and closed the door with a click that seemed to echo with an unnatural loudness.

Surrounded by ghosts of coats and single mittens, he smelled moist and dirty, and faintly of Wonder Bread.   I towered over him, although I was used to being shorter than everyone else.  Without saying anything, he leaned up towards me, and stuck his tongue out, and I fought the urge to pull away.  I wondered if he had ever kissed a girl before, or if he could tell I hadn’t kissed a boy.  My friend Jackie and I had once kissed to practice, although for her I think it was less practice and more thrill, since she spent most of her time trying to concoct scenarios via which her female friends would have to disrobe.  But we drew the line at tongues, just too gross. 

Now, I was presented with Jack’s tongue, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do.  In the back of my head, I could hear “goin on n n on n on on n on the beat dont stop until the break of dawn” and I tried to mentally fast forward through the song, looking for a more appropriate-sounding lyric, maybe one that would remind me of what I was meant to do.  Our lips came together, and his salty breath steamed the bottom rim of my glasses.   His tongue, slimy, like a dead fish, lay there limply, unsure of what to do.  We pulled apart quickly, and then tried again, not much more successfully than the first try.  All I could think about was the snack his Mom had fixed us, worrying that it had lodged itself in my braces and that he was tasting it for the second time. 

When we emerged from the closet, red-faced and triumphant, our friends whooped loudly enough for the parental units two floors below to holler a stern warning regarding indoor voices.  It hadn’t been anything close to seven minutes, but no one seemed to notice.

According to what we’ve been told, that first kiss should have been the most important memory of that weekend, of that summer, of that year.  But its sweaty awkwardness could never live up to the rhythm of the boogie the beat.  Wonder Mike and Master Gee had captured my heart completely.  After all, their names, I still remember.

Saved by Cibo Mato

            I didn’t cry for my grandmother’s death.  Well, either of them, really.  Nor did I cry for my grandfather’s.  I managed to work out a sniffle when my Father died, as it seemed untoward not to, and I didn’t want to give my step-monster the forever longed-for proof that I, in fact, did not love my Father, as she had always suspected and passive-aggressively intimated.  I suppose the intimations grew less passive and more aggressive as his demise neared, resulting in vicious screaming from her at his deathbed and an icy demeanor at the funeral.   

            It’s not lack of love, though even I have to admit my relationship with my Father was trussed with tension and remorse.  It’s not even that I eschew public crying, although, to be honest, there is little I find more humiliating, even at appropriate and expected times.  It’s more that, with people I don’t see daily, the evidence of their absence needs to fester for it to become real.   I need to linger over the phone number absent-mindedly, go through a Christmas shopping list, before it becomes clear to me that they aren’t just living their own life while I live mine.

            It may have become real faster with my Dad, I suppose, if I had gone to see his body when he passed on the morning of my birthday.  The step-monster was there, however, and my feelings were freshly slapped from her most recent accusations that I had not visited enough.  (What constitutes enough when someone alternates between ignoring and forgetting about your presence?)  Besides, did I mention it was my birthday?   My Father had already ruined several of those in my lifetime, and fear mixed with resentment bolstered my resolve.  My brother pleaded with me to come, but I reasoned that he must not look much different than he did on his deathbed the night before, and I preferred to remember him breathing, even raspily.  My brother could, were he churlish enough to take it, claim his “I-told-you-so” regarding my regret.  Luckily for me, he’s not that sort; though were the tables turned I can’t promise he’d be as fortunate. 

            No, I save my crying for the cats.  The tears build up in a hard rock behind my broken thyroid and wait, through all the dying, through all the tsunamis, through all the romantic hurts and physical pain, and comes out in a raw, utter wail of sub-human sorrow when a cat dies.  For you see, the absence is real immediately.  The absence is real from their staring eyes and limp jaws and sudden realization that there is no one to wake you up with wet pushy purring tomorrow morning, no one galloping to meet you at the door tomorrow night.  The absence is real and keenly felt in a way it can’t be when a relationship has been reduced to unsatisfying phone calls filled with only good news and uncomfortable holiday visits.

            This is why I drove around Santa Fe New Mexico for a week, hitting “repeat” on the CD player.  Santa Fe’s lilac dust glittered through my tears, the soaring strains of Japanese-scented English smothering my wails behind the rolled-up car window.  Fritz, my big, orange tub of a tabby, was gone forever, and I was inconsolable, save for Yuko Honda and Miho Hatori’s soft harmonies and near-incomprehensible lyrics.

            It was the verse, really.  “I wish I can take it away to three thousand light years away”, I would croon with them, repeatedly, snot dribbling down my upper lip.  “Don’t be afraid, I’ll be next to you”.  I would imagine myself flying to a faraway planet, one arm stretched out before me a la Superman and Fritz cradled in the other, no dripping bag of fluids or pain, to a planet where kitty kidneys grew on trees and nine lives were literal.  Even now, the song can make my knees week.

That breathy, tentative first note, like a low test of the trumpet’s mouthpiece, is enough to push a tear to the brink of my eyelid on even the best day.  By the time it steps up to the crescendo and the brushes hit the snare, I am invariably a snuffling wreck, even in public.  “All I can do is sing for her and myself”.  All I can do is sing for him and myself.