Our March '88 Wedding Song Hit Parade

Chess 1906. The year John Huston was born. Also Mary Astor, who would star in the first film he directed, The Maltese Falcon (1941). We'll encounter that film and his last, The Dead (1987)—the events of which take place on the night of Epiphany in 1906—later in our Story.  

Our first wedding song, in that it was the first I encountered, is of course Chuck Berry's "You Never Can Tell." When August rolls around this year (2024), it will mark the 60th anniversary of the song's release. And this fall will mark the 30th anniversary of the release of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, with its unforgettable twist contest scene that rocketed the song back to life again in the popular imagination. Yes, this little number has staying power. As recently as 2019, the author blurb in veteran British music journalist and publisher David Hepworth's A Fabulous Creation: How the LP Saved Our Lives, ends with the following:

He [Hepworth] says Chuck Berry's "You Never Can Tell" is the best record ever made. "This is not an opinion," he says. "It's a matter of fact."

We've already seen the wedding day itself in the portentous first verse. Like so much of Berry's work, the song then brings the ensuing marriage to life in the charismatic, almost surreal packaging of quotidian detail:

They furnished off an apartment with a two room Roebuck sale
The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale....

They had a hi-fi phono, boy, did they let it blast
Seven hundred little records, all rock, rhythm and jazz.... 

They bought a souped-up jitney, 'twas a cherry red '53
They drove it down to Orleans to celebrate the anniversary....

As usual, Chuck's peculiar alchemy transforms this cornucopia into more than the sum of its parts, but for our purposes let's say this wedding song exists in the material dimension.

 *****

 "It was done very quickly," [Robert] Plant said of "Stairway." "It was a very fluid, unnaturally easy track. There was something pushing it, saying,' You guys are okay, but if you want to do something timeless, here's a wedding song for you.'"

—Barney Hoskyns, Led Zeppelin IV, 95–96 

For our second entry, it's interesting to note that immediately following the text quoted above, the author Hoskyns hastens to declare, "A wedding song 'Stairway to Heaven' is not, but a song about real versus fake spirituality it does appear to be." He may be right, but in the popular mind, Plant's take has persisted. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a 1991 Esquire article on the song, 20 years after its release:

But Hoskyns has a point, and as our own view positions the song as a call to embrace the spiritual and leave inert materialism behind, I think we can position this one in the spiritual dimension.

*****

Oops, this wasn't quite the look we were going for,
but let's leave it here anyway, since this is a neat little book...

Now we come to number three, the "Song of Songs, which is Solomon's." In keeping with the book cover image above, according to famed Ancient Near Eastern scholar Samuel Noah Kramer, this book seems, on its face, "to be nothing more than a loosely organized collection of sensuous love songs devoid of any religious, theological, moralistic, or didactic motivation." But once it was included in the canon (perhaps because of its ostensible authorship by King Solomon), "it came to be looked upon as one of the most inspiring books in the Old Testament, since it was interpreted allegorically with Jahweh in the role of the lover, and the Hebrew people in the role of His bride." But then Kramer goes on to rain on that parade:

Modern scholarship, however, cannot accept this whimsical and fanciful allegorical interpretation, attractive as it may be. To judge from what we now know of the history and culture of the Ancient Near East, there is good reason to conclude that at least some of the passionate and rhapsodic love songs of which the book is composed are cultic in origin, and were sung in the course of the hieros gamos, or “sacred marriage,” between a king and a votary of Astarte, the Canaanite goddess of love and procreation whom even so wise a Hebrew king as the great Solomon worshipped and adored, according to 1 Kings 11:5. But as more than one scholar has surmised, this Canaanite rite itself has Mesopotamian roots; it goes back to the Tammuz-Ishtar cult, which in turn is a Semitic Akkadian counterpart of the Sumerian Dumuzi-Inanna cult. 

Mind you, that was written in 1962, so both interpretations may be considered bosh by scholars by now. But this one suits our purposes, so we'll happily stick with it, because that's how we roll here in Stanza-land. And why wouldn't we want to take ourselves back to Sumeria and the very beginnings of what we recognize as writing? 

It's no crazier than thinking the Psalms were really written by King David, or the Song of Songs by King Solomon. In any case, this is truly a wedding song for the ages. 

FUN FACT: Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man," as we've mentioned, is Checker 814. It so happens that the final verse of the Song of Songs is chapter 8, verse 14, or 8:14, which reads, "Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices." In the Christian allegorical tradition, this is interpreted, in the words of the textual gloss on the verse in the venerable "red letter" King James family Bible I've inherited, as "Prayer for the coming of Christ." 

Make of that what you will, but there's no doubt that we've entered the realm of ritual and religion here, and can safely place this wedding song within the sacred dimension.

*****

Finally, we come to the briefest and most enigmatic of our wedding songs—my poem "Genesis," which mysteriously appeared to me in a dream exactly a week after my March 4 experience in the Black Lounge. Since it is so brief, let's reproduce it in full here:

 I met someone from the corners of time

 and folded her into the centre.

I knew someone from the inside out

 and she unfolded me for the world to see.

 

Laughing and crying, singing and dancing,

we shared our pasts with the world

While grateful Time showered us with presents.

It hadn't struck me immediately as a wedding song, but when John M tagged it as such, I realized it was pretty obvious.

Where shall we position this one? It's literally the progeny of a dream, so definitely not materialistic; it's too ephemeral, perhaps, to even be considered coherently spiritual. And it's not sacred, being the independent speech of the composer's (or composers'?) mind(s). At the very least, we can see it as the attempt of a person who has been thoroughly dazzled to come to terms with what, or who, has dazzled him—and to do so in a symbolic, almost archetypal, fashion.. So let's place it in the psychic dimension, in the hope that someday it will lead us on to the others.