ARRIVAL OF A GROUNDED DREAMER

“This is an author you need to see. ‘Backup culture’ … like he came out of your book. He’s got Scottish and Russian blood. He’s a modest and good man. In Spain and Portugal, he’s pretty big. He performed there with Cohen in the 80s. You’re the only one here who could write something about him.  Who could feel and recognize him”, says an old friend of mine, calling from Germany, as dedicated and excited as a scout sending smoke signals before Nick Garrie’s arrival to Belgrade and Novi Sad. He reveals a name I have never heard before. And that is always a welcome situation for music aficionados. The same evening, he sends me selected tracks and casually, in digressions between the songs, writes out the destiny of Garrie’s witched album from 1968, a conceptual musical narrative about J. B. Stanislas which had potential to open all accessible gates of universal recognition and global fame for this nineteen-year-old Brit temporarily living in Paris. The doors never opened in the end. The failure of this ambitiously performed creation made Nick Garrie a legend in the years to come. If the planned success had happened, Garrie would have become what the Earth dwellers, using the common linguistic expression and very often with too much ease, call a star. Blaze Foley, the cursed Texan troubadour, would have liked such an outcome: he used to say he did not want to be a star because he wanted to be a legend. Certainly, Nick Garrie has not intentionally chosen the latter. But defeats always carry a completely unsuspected or just barely suspected value of possible victory. Just like an inseparable shadow that faithfully follows many a triumph as a foreboding of its opposite outcome, which could have unfolded or may yet do so in the future. That is why every defeat has some charm, because it preserves yet unfulfilled possibilities. On the other hand, victories bring consequential vanity and emptiness. And hunger for more. That is the origin of logic to Neil Young’s decision to get down from the top as soon as possible after he reached it with the song Heart of Gold. Not to deal with marketing policies because the market’s requests are endless, to be interested only in his own creativity heights. Success comes with a price, defeats with a value. To be a quiet and steady legend means to receive compensation from Life for that breaking moment when you play with the strongest cards and, eventually, lose it all. That night I started listening to Garrie’s songs strongly feeling it was a good thing that a soul destined to become a planetary loser, as yet unknown to me, was coming to Novi Sad. It is a well-known but always exciting plot in the spirit of urban rock-and-roll mythology. What I did not expect, and what had me jumping for joy, even caught me off-guard, were Garrie’s songs themselves. In them, there was something … extraordinary. And for too long I had been a man who could not be caught off-guard by music.

“Daddy, who’s singing,” my older daughter asked me while we were listening to Deeper Tones of Blue. At our home, for months now, you could hear Guy Clark or Townes van Zandt. Both had become household voices in my house. My children were accustomed to hearing heavenly loners with weighty wings and wretches with guitars. Nevertheless, this voice was different, distinctive. It came from another world, not just geographically. And the child reacted instantly. Of course, when stripped of its flamboyant but beautiful baroque arrangement, the song evoked another loner with a guitar. I told my daughter Nick’s name, pronouncing it carefully as if repeating it to myself, and again we listened to the song which simply enthralled us with its beauty. It crossed my mind that the final lyric of that chorus from the end of the 60s could have been sung by Morten Harket from the beginning of the 00s, when his band went back to creating undisputedly good pop albums. And just on the basis of that one initiating song which belonged to the body of the unlucky debut The Nightmare of J. B. Stanislas, I realized this was the case of genuine pop brilliance. That what I heard belonged to the cream of music from that era. That it was as good as The Beatles and The Beach Boys. And that this Nick Garrie was an unknown gem, undiscovered treasure of the world’s pop music. Fatefully, a little like the old enigmatic raven Rodriguez, except for the fact that in Garrie’s case there was no inexplicable success in South Africa, nor an Oscar-awarded movie which would open the eyes of the world. Garrie’s musical brilliance has remained the privilege of few, those familiar with the secret of a true songwriter miracle from the times well behind us. Had things turned out differently and had the planet discovered Nick Garrie the way it got to know Rodriguez’s talent, Garrie certainly would not have traveled to Serbia to play a concert. And he was coming right to Novi Sad.

“Nick Garrie? I know about him,” I was surprised by Milan Korać, who was preparing with me for a live presentation of our joint second album. Milan did not know Garrie’s songs, but somewhere along the way, on his personal musical journey, he caught the story of the lost gemstone of British pop music. We went to the concert together, free from assumptions, without any expectations, with an occasional feeling that could not be wrong. “Will we be the only two people in the audience?” he asked me, in his jesting goodhearted manner, hinting at the interest of Novi Sad audience in performances of certain solitaries with acoustic guitars, especially those who come an illogically long way to play here. “Maybe we will. And maybe there’ll be ten of us,” I guessed. That is more or less how many of us there were. With the two people from the venue staff, as many as the biblical apostles. And as is the case when an author of considerable greatness is packed into a small format and presented unconventionally, primarily in his human modesty and sincerity, a genuine sense of conspiracy developed among the privileged chance visitors who were part of Garrie’s show, as if all of them were bound by the awareness of immeasurable value of the forthcoming shared experience. There was also a beautiful girl with a velvety voice who led a musical quartet and very stylishly interpreted tastefully chosen pop, folk, and soul standards. I was not surprised to hear later that she added a Garrie’s song to her set list. She did not have to go to the source for that one, because the very source came to her.

Nick Garrie got on stage, sat on a chair and started to sing and narrate, accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar. At times his playing was shivery and tentative, at times confident, but his voice was an unmistakable resonator of the unique essence which this seventy-year-old man carried in him. His hair was silvery, of course, his appearance autumnal, and his voice way too colored by experience, but at the same time, this hearty calm gentleman shared the stage with the same nineteen-old-year dreamer who had put all his cards on an absolute genre classic from the musically expansive 1968, which nobody heard of when they were supposed to. And this leitmotif in his life, this commercial sinking of his debut record, had given Garrie reasons and material for delicate British-toned irony which permeated his announcements between the songs. More than once he said that nobody in the world listened to him. He made a remark about the number of people present at his concert in Novi Sad, but his comment was rounded with sincere gratitude to those present. It was obvious that he used his personal defeat in the world of music industry for his musical mono drama, but also that he had not submitted to negative self-branding and to emphasizing this single fateful event from his youth which determined his life and career. He had simply accepted this striking and breaking moment in his life and naturally begun to develop his story further, to work on it and lead it to everything that happened after that moment. And a whole worldly life happened, ennobled with parenthood, inspired by loves and burdened with goodbyes, pervaded by an assortment of different jobs which provided the necessary family sustenance, with some years fully spent in the Swiss Alps, giving up music and returning to it because man cannot suppress creational torrents in himself forever even though the development of every human essence almost invariably calls for a period when it works against itself. Nick Garrie did put effort into divorcing himself from music forever, but music did not want to separate from him. It would wake up and break through to pour out again from Garrie’s inner world, and the crucial touch of the angel of inspiration belonged to the man Garrie mentioned during his performance: Francis Lai, the French maestro of film and pop music, who played a significant role in inspiring our hero to resume creating and performing. Nick Garrie came to Novi Sad as a music veteran who, without much objection to his life, had accepted that his youthful music had been denied major recognition, and that it was quite alright to serve this music loyally in his old age, regardless of its media reach and commercial success. Because this music was exceptionally good. And when you dug beneath his protective self-ironic remarks, it was clear that Nick Garrie, luckily or simply because his character lacked a narcissistic component, was well aware that it was that good, in spite of his insecurities. After all, self-irony always serves to defensively mask expressed awareness of your own value.

With completely open hearts, Milan Korać and I received everything that Garrie managed to share with us. As a matter of fact, not one of those twelve people at the concert could allow themselves any kind of reticence in front of this traveler from afar. Since there were constant technical problems with the sound and since very unpoetical buzzing and electric crackling were adding something unwanted to every Garrie’s song, I shouted to him to unplug from the PA and sit with us. “Great idea,” he answered, disconnected his guitar cord, got off the chair, moved aside the microphone and then easily lowered himself on the edge of the stage and sat there. From that moment on, it was as if a group of close friends acquainted with some precious secret knowledge was sitting in the same room and taking part in the night whose mildness and beauty would move everyone, and maybe even change some of them. Between the songs, Milan and I briefly and quietly commented on classy “Englishness”, harmonies, melodies, and French chanson elements, while the touching song My Dear One, which belongs to Garrie’s later work, was the one that made both of us better people, at least for a moment. This elegiac cantilena about dignified aging which leaves no significant marks, gently danced to with a hundred-year-old granny in a sweet video, carried the chorus that both of us would happily sing to beloved women in our imagined future: “Age hasn’t touched you, my dear one. Age hasn’t troubled you at all.”

That was the song that Milan took with him in his personal cardiogram, as a relic which he found at the concert by chance. The song which changes a man deep within, such were its transformative powers. On top of that, my friend was wondering where our British guy got his will from to come such a long way for a concert like this. We agreed that it does not pay off if you are a musician of today. But this was not a musician of today. He came to Novi Sad from another time and was simply … a legend. Anonymous and famous at the same time. Paradoxically well-known because global media radars did not catch him when they were expected to. A spontaneous chat with the audience after the concert said another thing about him. This master of the pop song is a markedly natural, funny and warm human being. Experienced, learned, and meek. The grounded dreamer who is never, not for a moment, groundless. Unburdened with the urban-mythic status of his debut in 1968. The man who tries to be at peace with himself, just like the recent album Life is People by Bill Fay claims, and Fay is very similar to Garrie in being another initially neglected and later glorified gem on the thriving English songwriting scene. The man who could, as pointed out by my friend from the beginning of the story that connected us, come right out of my book.

Excerpt taken from Legend of a Grounded Dreamer (a story about Nick Garrie, a forgotten genius of pop music)

Translated by Igor Cvijanović