BETWEEN THE TWO LIVES

Between the two lives of J. B. Stanislas, the first which had not even begun for it seemed that Stanislas’ destiny was to remain a stillborn child and the other which has to be attributed to the crucial Christian miracle which many dwellers of this planet want to believe in, well, between the first and the second coming of Stanislas to the world, Nick Garrie was trying to get rid of music, but he never actually put down the guitar. Even when he was a ski instructor in Switzerland, he would play and sing for guests although he mainly chose standards over his own tracks. Here and there, he would squeeze in a song of his own and never mentioned it was his. Of course, tourists would believe that those songs also belonged to the cream of pop music used for setlists of gigs meant to provide background music to evening chats and a few drinks on decks and in hotels.   

He would occasionally return to songwriting, recording and concert performances, moving along the parallel track as Nick Hamilton. What he did was not irrelevant and as Hamilton he attained even greater success than as Garrie. His album Suitcase Man, on which he collaborated with Alun Davies and Gary Conway, Cat Stevens’ former supporting musicians, was an immense success in Spain, where it held the first position on pop music top lists for months. The same key unlocked the door of Leonard Cohen’s Spanish tour for Nick Hamilton in 1984 and he became the artist who opened concerts for the Canadian bard. Instead of playing in front of dozens of people, for the first time, he got the opportunity to perform in front of thousands. However, he did not earn a fortune. As was usual with Nick, his music achievements did not include huge sums of money. 

Suitcase Man had some great dedication songs: Back in the 1930, Wine and Roses and Freda M Garrie, the latter two written for Nick’s late mother. Lone Ranger in the Sky was an immortalized picture of a long-lost friend from school. The pacifist Smile, from a small body of songs co-written with Francis Lai, was to be remembered. With its atmosphere worthy of David Gilmour and Peter Gabriel from the 1980s, Smile is a woeful dedication to young men hurrying to combat only to die on the remote shores of foreign countries. It was an antiwar song once performed by Nick on a Japanese tour which included moving moments of interaction with his audience in Hiroshima of all the places. It is a song which Nick Garrie never performs at his concerts as if he had packed and locked it in a trove of memories that used to belong to Nick Hamilton, but it is also a song that will never become outdated.

Nick Hamilton ceased to exist when Nick Garrie found out online how many people worship the album The Nightmare of J. B. Stanislas. He took back his real name and started performing more often, in line with the renewed interest in his work. However, the Internet is one thing, and the real interest of the audience another. It goes without saying that Garrie was never able to play in great arenas and sold-out stadiums, except when he opened for Leonard Cohen, but he would too often perform in front of only a few dozen listeners, partly due to the habitual impassiveness of his concert organizers who poorly advertised his performances and partly due to his own uncertainty about the point of reconnecting with the exhausting chain of marketing, management, organization and attracting audiences. His devotees mostly stayed on the Internet though. But Nick had learned long ago that not all rivers got to their predestined seas and that life simply gave everything to some, and almost nothing to others, but that nothing, paradoxically, could be someone’s everything.

Garrie’s setlist from 2011, kept after a concert in a small Scottish town called Doune, shows that Nick performed thirty-three songs that day, of which only eight were his own. Garrie was not sure even about those eight, whether he should perform them or stick completely to the renditions of songs by other, more famous songwriters, while he was pondering if the audience would be able to communicate with his art. The setlist shows that in the first years after his comeback Garrie tended to favor other artists’ music to the detriment of his own songs. The list has a documentary value too: it shows Garrie’s inspirations and role-models from his youth, which he stayed faithful to in his old days. Among more or less expected artists, there were the names of Tim Hardin, Tom Paxton, Neil Young and Peter Sarstedt, whose romantic classic evoking the spirit of European waltz, Where Do You Go To (My Lovely), was the song that talked to Garrie in every single sense. It was the song which he could have written himself. 

Nevertheless, Stanislas demanded more room and space in his second life. And Garrie agreed to respond to this demand.

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

Translated by Igor Cvijanović