HOL Singles/mop-up

[PMANCHESTER@ccmail.sunysb.edu]

               State University of New York at Stony Brook
                       Stony Brook, NY 11794-3725

                                            Peter  Manchester
                                            Religious Studies
                                            632-7312
                                            11-Nov-1989 04:28pm EST
FROM:  PMANCHESTER

SUBJECT: HOL Singles/mop-up                                           

	In his defense against heresy charges, Meister Eckhart once 
said, "I can be in error, but I cannot be a heretic; because error 
is a matter of the intellect, but heresy a matter of the will."
       After all these years of staggering around with only a 
small circle of like-minded Kate Bush fanatics to test hypotheses 
upon and share scraps of hard-won information with, it is 
rewarding--if also a little stinging--to experience how quickly 
and effectively mistakes and misunderstandings get corrected by 
the Love-Hounds conversation.  As perpetrator of two recent ones, 
allow me for the record to accept correction.

"Spinning Pups."  
       Thanks to Maitland Bottoms <bottoms@radar.nrl.navy.mil>, 
David Heath <dave@boingo.med.jhu.edu>, and the others who 
corrected my mistaken surmise about this compilation.  Having seen 
it listed under Kate Bush in Schwann, at a time when HOL was 
already in release in Britain but its US release date kept getting 
postponed (to coincide with Hurricane Gloria, as it turned out!), 
I jumped to conclusion too quickly.  Thanks also to Jeff Hansen  
(hansen@cs.wmich.edu) for describing the record:
>   The Kate Bush song on _Spinning Pups_ is "The Man With the 
> Child in His Eyes."  I bought the disc for "Turning Japanese" by 
> the Vapors, and it was doubly bought when I saw the Kate track. 
> It also includes "TalkTalk" by Talk Talk, although I'm not quite 
> sure on this one.  I picked it up at a local used record store. 
> Apparently, the "pups" referred to are tiny magnets or some such 
> nonsense you toss onto phonograph as it's playing your favourite 
> "Milli Vanilli" album.  Nice cover picture of two pup-spazzed 
> kids and hereformentioned pups.

"Not this Time"
       Doug Alan insists I have the last line of the vocal wrong:
> It's "C'mon, we all SING" -- not "C'mon, we all sin"!
Having not been alone in hearing it my way, and being still 
uncertain based on the vocal itself, I am tempted to be stubborn 
here, but in fact, on song-structure grounds, Doug's version IS 
more plausible and I accept correction.  The line does effect a 
transition from the lyric to the choral finale, and it is quite 
natural that we all be enlisted to join in.
       Doug is also irritated that I like the song so much:
> A mighty song???  You mean that lousy song that might have been 
> really good if Kate hadn't totally botched it with a wretched  
> Journey-esque arrangement?
Here I do not repent.  I'll admit that it is more the lyric that I 
find compelling than the arrangement, so perhaps I should lay my 
head back on the block again and print the lyric that I hear:

       NOT THIS TIME
       Oh with the mind that renders everything sensitive
       What chance do I have to be here
       Put an end, put an end
       Put an end to every dream
       When you're near I feel you
       And I forget myself

       Not this time baby
       Not this time
       Not this time baby

       I dunno why I'm giving men undue woe every time
       And here I am a'wondering why I'm doing it again
       To the A, to the O
       To the A, to the O
       To the O that's bursting
       To keep me going and to keep the shit away
       I don't know what it is
       Every time you're near
       I feel you
       And I forget myself

       No, not this time baby
       Not this time out
       Not this time
       Not this time

       C'mon, we all sin(g)

To me this is Kate singing very directly and personally out of the 
deep ambivalence she feels in relationships.  The "baby" addressed 
seems to me to be an individual man, men in general, her audience, 
heaven and destiny; "not this time" means not tonight, not this 
time in our lives, but maybe also not this lifetime, not this 
world.  "To the A, to the O" I take to be Alpha and Omega (omega 
is "the O that's bursting," descriptive of the Greek letter), an 
ancient catholic liturgical image that she would have met every 
year in childhood at a particularly dramatic moment in the ritual 
for the Easter vigil mass, representing this whole creation as 
made total in Christ.  "What chance do I have to be here?  Put an 
end to every dream."  Does the "you" who draws near and lets her 
forget herself console her?  Or is it the same as "baby," so that 
she is constantly caught between some 'true' self she would keep 
to herself and the self that gets caught up in relationships?  The 
title line, at any rate, is sung with a very affecting complexity 
of emotion--strong decisiveness mixed with anguished regret.
       This at any rate is the take on the song that made "c'mon, 
we all sin!" seem to make sense to me, as a wise, human resolution 
that lets her keep on going.  Allow me to invoke it one last time, 
before I let go of it as my error.

       Among reasons I persisted in this mis-hearing is that I 
included it--along with this account of the A and the O--in a 
letter to Kate, to which she replied, letting it stand.  This is 
probably simply her courtesy, or that together with the delight 
she takes in enticing people to hear their own things in her 
lyrics.  But I mention this not in my defense, but as background 
to Ed Suranyi's commendable concern with getting the record 
straight:
>  p manchester writes:
>> called "The Organon Remix."  Kate acknowledged in 
>> correspondence that this was a spelling error on her part, 
>> since Reich's ranch in Maine was called "Orgonon," based on 
>> "Orgone" energy, with an o.
>     For the record, Kate never said this in "correspondence", 
> at least not that IED is aware of. |>oug claims (OK, informs us 
> with indisputable authority and credibility--satisfied, |>oug?) 
> that Kate told _him_ it was "unintentional". However, John 
> Carder Bush, when asked directly about the spelling, replied, 
> "It could be intentional." Since both |>oug and IED are now 
> agreed that Kate cannot always be believed, you can take your 
> pick of the available explanations of this spelling "error".  

       I was reporting from correspondence between me and Kate.  
The relevant paragraph of my letter to her of May 18, 1986 ran 
like this:

              "I am a 43 year old professor of philosophy and 
       speculative theology, which I believe I can verify by my 
       first remark, which is to complain pedantically that Peter 
       Reich follows his father Dr. Reich's practice of spelling 
       'Orgonon' as I have just written it, with an 'o', from 
       'orgone' energy, whereas your song title and lyrics for 
       "Cloudbusting" write 'Organon'.   Organon  was originally 
       the title given to the five logical treatises of Aristotle 
       by his editor of record, Andronicus of Rhodes.  It has 
       thereafter had some currency among philosophers as a title 
       for a general methodological tractate, or an 'instrument of 
       thought' in the sense of a fundamental logical mechanism.  
       I would not put it past you to be aware of this fact, at 
       least subliminally, and to have perpetrated a deliberate 
       pun.  But I rather suspect I have caught you in a spelling 
       error.
              "Of course maybe you have a whole thing with A and 
       O, Alpha and Omega":  my ears hear the lyric in "Not This 
       Time" as
              To the A, to the O
              To the A, to the O
              To the O that's bursting
              To keep me going and to keep the shit away.
       And certainly you're right that we all sin!"

In her reply (undated, but immediate), Kate writes:
              "I'm afraid the Orgonon mis-spelling IS a mistake 
       and we were aware of this as soon as we saw the 'copy'.  It 
       is very difficult to correct everything and this one 
       slipped through my hands but I find it a wonderful 
       experience when errors of this kind give birth to such 
       fascinating theories!"

[I am nervous about transcribing private correspondence, but this 
one issue seems to have come to her and the family from several 
angles, so I place this much of our exchange on the record.]

"Alternate Hounds of Love"
>> [Peter Manchester:] "Hounds of Love" is one of the most 
>> important of the single releases, because the 12" (12KB 3) 
>> presented "Alternative Hounds of Love," an early sketch of the 
>> song that goes in a different direction than the final version, 
>> and has become my favorite.
|>oug objects:
> What makes you think that this in an "early sketch" of the song 
> rather than a later variation?
Fair enough--it is only a surmise, but I would say a very natural 
one.  We know how Kate works; she works up a demo of a song, tries 
out various approaches to the vocal, looking for the feeling, the 
'ring' of the song.  "Alternate Hounds" has got the drum, strings 
(are they still synthesizer at this point?), and background vocals 
pulled together in the same arrangement as the album version, but 
the lyric seems rudimentary compared to the album version, all 
refrain in effect, and the vocal sounds to me like it is working 
more on feeling and expression than final design of the song, 
without the modulation and variation of the album version.  My 
assumption:  she released the song in its final form, but then 
decided she couldn't let go of the slightly different, bawdier, 
straight-ahead feeling of an earlier form, and shared it with us.

A O A O A O A O A O A O A O A O A O A O A O A O A O A O A O A O 
pmanchester@ccmail.sunysb.edu     >                             
    pmanchester@sbccma.bitnet    <     "C'MON, WE ALL SING"     
             Peter Manchester     >      --Not This Time