55. The Cold Blooded Moon

...being some thoughts on Bob Dylan, pop star poets, the moon, and the men who have been there.

It was 2016 when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” It was quite a shock to many, me included. It was the first time that a musician and songwriter had won the award since its inception in 1901. It was worth a lot of cash to him, well over half a million pounds in todays money. Irvine Welsh summed up a lot of people’s feelings with his characteristic swagger… -

"I'm a Dylan fan, but this is an ill conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies."

There were plenty of others who thought it was a brilliant Idea though, feeling that Bob could comfortably take his place on a list which includes figures such as T.S Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, Albert Camus and Ernest Hemmingway - as well as Winston Churchill.¹

Perhaps Irvine Welsh was just jealous that he wasn’t considered, a bit like me. Not that I would expect to receive the Nobel prize in Literature - not just yet anyway - but I do feel that if they had decided to make a statement by giving it to a pop star, then they would have been better to choose that funny looking fellow out of Sparks (the one with the moustache) or at least David Bowie.

Dylan, like Hendrix, was slightly too early for my tastes, I never quite got him, but I understand that plenty of people did. Maybe one day, I will grow up sufficiently to appreciate his stuff, but then again - maybe not. I still get a bit excited when Showaddywaddy come on the radio.

I do recall Ian Parkes being enthused by Dylan’s award, and there being quite a discussion in the Read to Write group about pop star poets. Leonard Cohen was mentioned and I think that I mumbled something about Marc Bolan and maybe Lou Reed too, before we took a look at a 1978 Bob Dylan piece - “Changing of the Guards”. Here’s a verse

The cold-blooded moon, 
the captain waits above the celebration
sending his thoughts to a beloved maid
whose ebony face is beyond communication
the captain is down 
but still believing that his love will be repaid

Even after searching online for explanations of what it is about, I still don’t really get it.

At the end of the session, Ian suggested that, as homework, we each try to write a piece of poetry based on the line “The cold-blooded moon.” I quite liked that line despite the fact that I had no idea how it related to the song as a whole. Was the cold blooded moon the captain? Or was the captain waiting above a moonlit celebration? Was the moonlight not bright enough for him to see the beloved maid’s ebony face properly and therefore it was impossible to guess at her feelings? No - I really couldn’t make head nor tail of it. I decided to concentrate just on the single image of “the cold-blooded moon” and forget about the rest of the lyrics and the problem of trying to get to grips with what Dylan might have been rattling on about.

There are plenty of great songs that contain lyrics about the moon. Not just the ones who want to rhyme it with June and Spoon either. In my humble opinion, Mike Scott out of the Waterboys should have been awarded some sort of laureateship for the lyrics to his 1985 song “The Whole of the Moon”

I pictured a rainbow
You held it in your hands
I had flashes
But you saw the plan
I wandered out in the world for years
While you just stayed in your room
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon

My favourite Moon lyric would be Gill Scott Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon”² which was released in 1970. Admittedly it is not actually a song, but poetry. However, he regularly performed his work alongside a band of accomplished Jazz musicians and was perhaps better known as a musical performer than a traditional poet. Whitey on the Moon contrasts the lunar landings of the late sixties with the poverty suffered by many black people in America at the time.

A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arm began to swell
And whitey's on the moon
Was all that money I made last year
For whitey on the moon?
How come I ain't got no money here?
Hmm! Whitey's on the moon
Y'know I just 'bout had my fill
Of whitey on the moon
I think I'll send these doctor bills
Airmail special
To whitey on the moon

In 2012, one year after his death, Scott Heron received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award for his work. Bob Dylan had already received the accolade, some fifteen years earlier.

I was still eight years old when whitey first stepped on the moon. At least I thought that it was a white man. The television images were inconclusive - you couldn’t really tell on the fuzzy pictures that we received on our ancient cathode ray set, particularly as his face was hidden behind the giant helmet that he wore whilst bouncing around on the surface. Some of my mates at school were convinced that it was Louis Armstrong. I had seen Louis Armstrong’s photograph on the cover of one of my Dad’s budget prices LP records, so I was certain that he wasn’t white.

It was thrilling to me as a small boy to know that people had actually travelled to the moon, whatever colour they might have been. I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. I remember my grandmother telling me that, when I was a man, space travel would be commonplace and I would be able to choose which planet I wanted to go to on holiday every year. At the time it seemed so possible and so exciting. The future was going to be brilliant, with Captain Kirk and Mister Spock boldly going where no man had gone before, accompanied by people of all races and nations, including the glamorous Lieutenant Uhura, who was like Diana Ross, but an expert in science who had an impressive command of intergalactic languages thanks to the device that she kept in her ear. Think about that, Bob Dylan - Her ebony face certainly wasn’t beyond communication, and if her captain was ever down, he was soon up again and righting wrongs throughout the entirety of the galaxy.

Sadly, the future I was promised as an eight year old still hasn’t materialised. So far, we haven’t got any further than the Moon, and all that we found when we went there was an inhospitable chunk of grey rock. A cold-blooded Moon. A place which, like the rest of space, and vast areas of the Earth is almost impossible to survive in. Even exploring somewhere as simple as a Scottish hillside can be fatal for the reckless or ill prepared. We may love and admire the beauty of environments like the Moon or the Cairngorms but they don’t have emotional attachment to us. They have been around for millennia before us, and will be around for millennia after us too. They are cold-hearted, cold-blooded, uncaring, unfeeling places. Timeless and majestic. We pale into insignificance compared to them.

The Cold Blooded Moon

The cold-blooded moon gazes down with an indifferent eye
through blue skies of day and black skies of night
Serene and unblinking, 
Unfeeling, unthinking
Undisturbed even when, more than half a century ago
through great effort 
a handful of hot-blooded men paid it a few brief visits

The cold-blooded moon remains unchanged and impassive
whist, here below change comes so quickly 
that the past seems unrecognisable,
so slowly that it hardly seems like change at all
Here, hot-blooded men posture and pontificate
Taking credit for the change they like
Apportioning blame for the change they don’t.

Joy and suffering
Profit and loss
Life and death
all come and go
stirring pride or indignation in the hearts of hot-blooded men 
whilst there’s only indifference in the eye of the cold-blooded moon

1. Churchill got it “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values”

2. I added a link to a modern remix of Whitey on the Moon, with footage of Gill Scott Heron mixed with images from the current day. It is well worth a look, even if you don’t normally click on the links that I put in these articles.