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Rating: "My first four albums were an apprenticeship, this is my thesis": it's Al Stewart himself who says it; and, even though this statement may seem almost like a lack of self-esteem, especially when referring to wonderful albums like "Bedsitter Images" and "Zero She Flies" (miles away from the unwarranted arrogance of many phony superstars), it is essentially true. The commercial response is still modest, but "Past, Present And Future" is the first great masterpiece of maturity for Stewart, the first album centered on historical themes, with all the allure that can derive from this, especially for me, and an eclecticism that emerges with strength and inspiration. Unlike the airy sound with often American-like traits of its successors, "Year Of The Cat" above all, which would introduce him to a wider audience, PP&F presents a more reflective style, not as bitter as "Love Chronicles" and not as essential as in "Zero She Flies," but the folk-blues component is still present and rooted, enriched with new ideas and stylistic contaminations.
By choosing not to include an elegantly midtempo and divinely arranged song like "Soho (Needless To Say)" in "Orange," Al Stewart sacrificed the qualitative level of the 1972 album, however enriching "Past, Present And Future" with another fresco of picturesque urban life along the lines of "In Brooklyn" and "Electric Los Angeles Sunset," which ideally seems to represent the present in the general context of the work. The future, in turn, is expressed with the only other song on the album that deviates from historical themes, an absolute novelty for the stylistic range expressed so far by the Scottish artist: "Terminal Eyes", a courageous but counterproductive choice as a launch single, because it is a song with very little radio-friendly sound, making extensive use of vocal overdubs, keyboards, and strings, which create a bizarre yet original redundant sound full of echoes and reverberations, perfect for a visionary text loaded with unsettling metaphors and not easy to interpret.
Anyway, the album is titled "Past, Present And Future" not by chance, with the past coming first as the main source of inspiration: a rather recent past, still alive and carved in memory, that of "Post War World Two Blues" even lived in the first person; a beautiful song both in sound and concept, a classic folk rock with all the potential to become an evergreen: an autobiography and a personal artistic manifesto inserted in a broader context populated by iconic figures like Churchill, Eisenhower, Harold MacMillan, and Robert Kennedy. Of course, there are also more in-depth portraits of less known personalities like John Fisher, a hero of the English navy between the mid-1800s and early 1900s, honored with the evocative ballad "Old Admirals", enriched by brass that perfectly recalls the atmosphere of a sumptuous military parade, or "Warren Harding", a brilliant and amusing folk uptempo and sharp parody of the American dream, based on the vicissitudes of the namesake president of the USA from 1921 to 1923, known more for the embezzlements involving many members of his government than for his political action. The songwriter also turns his attention to Nazism, the fierce and cannibalistic one of the Night of the Long Knives, seen from a blurred perspective, like a distant flashback in "Last Day Of June 1934", a typical and elegant ballad of his, characterized by a wonderful emotionally climaxing finale, with a certain bitterness shining through: "The couples pass me by, they’re looking so good, their arms around each other, they head for the woods, they don’t care who Ernst Roehm was, no reason they should, just a shadow that hangs in the air", so Al Stewart sings about the inexorable fading of memory.
Nazism is also the central theme of the emblematic song of "Past, Present And Future," one of Al Stewart's greatest masterpieces, "Roads To Moscow", which depicts it in a much more vivid and direct manner in its most ambitious and titanic undertaking, leading to its inevitable fall: eight minutes of goosebumps, a narration accompanied by a tremulous and incessant mandolin and solemn, deep female choirs, a measured march where you can almost feel the icy winds and snow of the Russian winter, failure and ruin observed firsthand by the eyes of an ordinary soldier, who does not fully understand his orders and the reasons for the war, but who can describe better than anyone else the slow yet inexorable agony of defeat. The choice to close "Past, Present And Future" with "Nostradamus" is smart and fitting, and this folk ballad, which approaches ten minutes in length, much calmer than "Roads To Moscow," ensures a grand closure for a superb album: a lulling, dreamlike atmosphere, which slowly comes to life evoking the prophecies of the controversial French scholar: Napoleon, Hitler, Francisco Franco, the three Kennedy brothers, the Berlin Wall, and other mysteriously vivid omens.
This opens a great musical and thematic cycle destined to extend until 1980, the most well-known and commercially successful Al Stewart, who from then on will proceed by gradually refining the stylistic specifics of his music, in a well-defined and linear path and not with abrupt changes as in his early years. While it is true that the subsequent "Modern Times" will be his first significant commercial success, "Past, Present And Future" is the starting point for the mature Al Stewart, a forgotten masterpiece to be passed down to posterity.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
02 Warren Harding (02:37)
I'm leaving my home in Europe behind
Heading out for a new state of mind
New York town is calling to me
Dollar an hour from the company
Warren Gameliel Harding
Alone in the White House, watching the sun
Come up on the morning of 1921
I just want someone to talk to
To talk to
To talk to
I've got no shoes upon my feet
I've been all day with nothing to eat
It sure gets hard down here in the street
But I know where I'm going to be
Warren Gameliel Harding
Playing cards in a smoke-filled room
Winning and losing, filling the time
I just want someone to talk to
To talk to
To talk to
Don't go down to the docks tonight
The cops are nosing around for the site
We moved the booze just before daylight
They won't find it now, it'll be alright
Warren Gameliel Harding
In Alaska running out of days
Leaving the ladies, God moves in strange ways
I just want someone to talk to
To talk to
To talk to
Don't leave me here on such a lonely day...
Don't leave me here on such a lonely day...
03 Soho (Needless to Say) (03:53)
Rainstorm, brainstorm, faces in the maelstrom
Huddle by the puddles in the shadows where the drains run
Hot dogs, wet clogs clicking up the sidewalk
Disappearing into the booze shop
Rainbow queues stand down by the news stand, waiting for the late
show
Pin ball, sin hall, minds in free fall
Chocolate-coloured ladies making eyes through the smoke-pall
Soho (needless to say)
I'm alone on your streets on a Friday evening
I've been here all of the day
I'm going nowhere with nowhere to go
Football supporters taking the waters
They're looking round for the twilight daughters
Non-stop strip club pornographic bookshop
Come into the back and take your time and have a good look
Old man laughs with flowers in his hair
Newspaper headline "Midde East Deadline"
Jazz musicians are down on the breadline
Soho (needless to say)
I'm alone on your streets on a Friday evening
I've been here all of the day
I'm going nowhere with nowhere to go
Soho feeds the needs and hides the deeds, the mind that bleeds
Disenchanted, downstream in the night
Soho hears the lies, the twisted cries, the lonely sighs
Till she seems lost in dreams
The sun goes down on a neon eon
Though you'd have a job explaining it to Richard Coeur de Lion
Animation, bar conversation, anticipation, disinclination
Poor old wino turns with dust in his eyes
Begs for the dregs from the bottom of the kegs, man
You've never seen a lady lay down and spread her legs like
Soho (needless to say)
I'm alone on your sheets on a Friday evening
I've been here all of the day
I'm going nowhere with nowhere to go
Soho (needless to say)
I'm alone on your streets, or am I dreaming
I've been here all of the day
I'm going nowhere with nowhere to go
06 Roads to Moscow (08:00)
They crossed over the border the hour before dawn
Moving in lines through the day
Most of our planes were destroyed on the ground where they lay
Waiting for orders we held in the wood - word from the front never came
By evening the sound of the gunfire was miles away
Ah, softly we move through the shadows, slip away through the trees
Crossing their lines in the mists in the fields on our hands and our knees
And all that I ever was able to see
The fire in the air glowing red silhouetting the smoke on the breeze
All summer they drove us back through the Ukraine
Smolyensk and Viyasma soon fell
By autumn we stood with our backs to the town of Orel
Closer and closer to Moscow they come - riding the wind like a bell
General Guderian stands at the crest of the hill
Winter brought with her the rains, oceans of mud filled the roads
Gluing the tracks of their tanks to the ground while the sky filled with snow
And all that I ever was able to see
The fire in the air glowing red silhouetting the snow on the breeze
In the footsteps of Napoleon the shadow figures stagger through the winter
Falling back before the gates of Moscow,
Standing in the wings like an avenger
And far away behind their lines the partisans are stirring in the forest
Coming unexpectedly upon their outposts, growing like a promise
You'll never know, you'll never know
Which way to turn, which way to look, you'll never see us
As we're stealing through the blackness of the night
You'll never know, you'll never hear us
And the evening sings in a voice of amber, the dawn is surely coming
The morning road leads to Stalingrad, and the sky is softly humming
Two broken Tigers on fire in the night flicker their souls to the wind
We wait in the lines for the final approach to begin
It's been almost four years that I've carried a gun
At home it'll almost be spring
The flames of the Tigers are lighting the road to Berlin
Ah, quickly we move through the ruins that bow to the ground
The old men and children they send out to face us, they can't slow us down
And all that I ever was able to see
The eyes of the city are opening now it's the end of the dream
I'm coming home, I'm coming home
Now you can taste it in the wind, the war is over
And I listen to the clicking of the train wheels as we roll across the border
And now they ask me of the time
That I was caught behind their lines and taken prisoner
"They only held me for a day, a lucky break", I say;
They turn and listen closer
I'll never know, I'll never know
Why I was taken from the line and all the others
To board a special train and journey deep into the heart of holy Russia
And it's cold and damp in the transit camp, and the air is still and sullen
And the pale sun of October whispers the snow will soon be coming
And I wonder when I'll be home again and the morning answers
"Never"
And the evening sighs and the steely Russian skies go on forever
08 Nostradamus (09:45)
In the east the wind is blowing the boats across the sea
And their sails will fill the morning and their cries ring out to me
Oh, Oh
Oh, the more it changes, the more it stays the same
And the hand just re-arranges the players in the game
Oh, I had a dream, it seemed I stood alone
And the veil of all the years
Goes sinking from my eyes like a stone
A king shall fall and put to death by the English parliament shall be
Fire and plague to London come in the year of six and twenties three
An emperor of France shall rise who will be born near Italy
His rule shall cost his empire dear, Napoloron his name shall be
From Castile does Franco come and the Government driven out shall be
An English king seeks divorce, and from his throne cast down is he
One named Hister shall become a captain of Greater Germany
No law does this man observe and bloody his rise and fall shall be
Man, man, your time is sand, your ways are leaves upon the sea
I am the eyes of Nostradamus, all your ways are known to me
Man, man, your time is sand, your ways are leaves upon the sea
I am the eyes of Nostradamus, all your ways are known to me
In the new lands of America three brothers now shall come to power
Two alone are born to rule but all must die before their hour
Two great men yet brothers not make the north united stand
Its power be seen to grow, and fear possess the eastern lands
Three leagues from the gates of Rome a Pope named Pol is doomed to die
A great wall that divides a city at this time is cast aside
These are the signs I bring to you to show you when the time is nigh
Man, man, your time is sand, your ways are leaves upon the sea
I am the eyes of Nostradamus, all your ways are known to me
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