Being the youngest of 8 children, many stray albums found their way into my grubby little hands as I grew up. One of them was Melanie’s “Born to Be”. I have no idea who brought it into the house, but I think it was abandoned. I listened to it and grew attached to the raw power and bluesy darkness of the music on it. One of the songs was “I Really Loved Harold”. I found it haunting.
The narrator recounts how she was told when she was little that she would go to heaven if she was good. Now, she says, she is a long way from heaven, because she tried to find it herself. She thought she loved Harold, then she thought she loved John, and then Alfie, and “almost” Tom. She loved them “so easy” and loved them “so free”, that she realizes that heaven will not want “to love me”.
It is a dark song, far darker than I even remember, and I remember it as dark and, like I said, haunting. This young woman had sex with several men. She was what some of the boys in my class at school would have called a “slut”. The relationships failed and she moved on in a desperate search for the “heaven” of romantic and sexual love. But she realizes her mistake too late: heaven will not want to shine on her.
I wonder if she performs the song today, in her concerts (which she still gives, as kind of a nostalgia act). It would highlight the strange, archaic quality of the song– from a time when a girl who willingly had sex with more than one man could be called a “slut”. It is amazing that she put it into a song, a confessional song.
Her most exquisite verse:
Hallo, song of the willow, The dreams under my pillow, Turned to tears that I cried. Beauty and love are our riddle, Never to answer, but always to try. And, boy, did I try.
There is a raft of novels in that verse: the quest of a young woman to reconcile her ideals of beauty and truth and love with the reality of being, perhaps, ill-used, or with the realization that whatever it is men want from these relationships it was not hers to give or to take, in an enduring sense. Ill-used? Today, feminists would have a different term for it, but they would be just as inadequate in defining it as Melanie was when she “tried”. The difference is, Melanie knows it’s a riddle, and reaches for poetry to express it. The feminists think they know it but if they do, they can’t express it. The feminists think men don’t know it because if they did know it they would admit that the feminists are right.
So if you think Melanie was old-school compliant and dependent you might be surprised to read about her history with record labels and promoters. She was her own woman, as independent-minded and formidable as any one, willing to dump a major recording contract when they didn’t respect her artistic integrity.
Another thing I remember about Melanie was a bizarre appearance on Ed Sullivan. Sullivan usually looked a bit askance at pop acts. He presented them because he wanted to be relevant and kind of hip but you could tell he didn’t know what to make of them and longed to get back to the talking Mexican mouse. When he introduced Melanie, however, he clearly was impressed by something about her. She was sitting on the floor of the stage surrounded by friends– one thinks of the word “acolytes”– looking groovy and priestessly and magical, and Sullivan chatted with her for a moment and she seemed totally befuddled by this strange man in a suit trying to ingratiate himself with her. She smiled as if Sullivan were talking in a language she didn’t understand and she didn’t want to be rude.
She performed “Peace Will Come According to Plan”, if I remember correctly.
She also appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Again, she is clearly respected and admired by the host: unusually, Carson tries for sincerity. And you can see why: she seems utterly authentic and real. You can almost see Sandy Duncan and Ed McMahon on the couch shrinking from her in fear. For God’s sake, don’t ask me if I believe in peace or spirits or mother earth!
An exquisite performance of “Lay Down”. Note that really strange audience she is performing for, in Germany. They look like they have no idea. They clap like they had been instructed to just before the performance. Precisely on the beat, yah?
The evil twin of “I Really Love Harold”, by the way, is Alanis Morrisette’s “Unsent“. In one generation, the experience of casual sex has been transformed from shame and despair to how good it felt to cry in front of him for the first time or fall asleep on his couch.
[whohit]A Long Way From Little: Melanie Safka[/whohit]