Robert Wyatt
Rock Bottom

1)

“Rock Bottom” begins with the moon and with a melody not of this world. Like toy pianos, imagine...but what kind of toy pianos? Metaphysical? Hypnotic? Romantic? Childlike? What?

How the heck are these toy pianos? Does anyone know?

And then that voice...and that creature that comes out of the water different every time...and the “different you.” (Then how do you translate “different you”? And what would that be, please? The shadow? The subconscious? The blackest night?)…

We could go the difficult route and say that the different you is the dark side of the feminine principle and, by reflection, of the soul...or take the easy route and just think of our girl when she's angry.

That besides being an awesome yin-yang, “Sea Song,” the introductory track of “Rock Bottom,” is, in the end, a simple and incredible love song…and, in its incredibility, at a certain point renounces even words…and that voice, becoming nothing more than sound, wanders in the...the...the…

Alright, let's just say it wanders...

2)

“Rock Bottom” is an avant-garde album. Sweet avant-garde, but still avant-garde.

And it has a peculiarity that avant-garde albums usually don’t have: it moves you.

Like the other day Stefania, someone not very accustomed to frequent the Canterbury landscapes, nor indeed any other place of musical extravagance, well, as I was saying, the other day Stefania cried...

And I’ve seen the same thing happen to others, well, perhaps those more accustomed to certain sounds…

And this, when it happens, means that something profound has been touched (and that concerns everyone) starting not from reason but from what we might call basic emotions…

Ok, and how do I talk about such an album? Oh, I don’t know, I really don’t know…

And what if I started with the cover? But, wait a minute…

I remember...

3)

I remember a drawing...

A drawing where you see the sea, the sea as we all know it. There are seagulls, to say, and a boat in the distance, and a boy diving off a rock.

Then in the same drawing there is also a different sea.

And here’s a woman jumping for joy, and a man, who, yes, is swimming, but with one hand holds a string with some balloons.

Not to mention the mole and the hedgehog watching the scene from the shore.

Then, okay, there’s also a sandcastle, but I guess that’s the normal sea again. Always assuming there is a normal sea, since the sea is made of water and we walk on land. And never mind if we used to be fish, that was millions of years ago.

The drawing, the drawing I must have seen when I was a boy...well, the drawing, that drawing, is in black and white. Yet, I don’t know how to say it, it seems in colors. It must be the energy it conveys...or perhaps the naïve style...

But it doesn’t end here, because besides the normal sea and the different sea, there is also the deep sea, perhaps the very one where we were fish millions of years ago…

And the deep sea is all a teeming of improbable creatures that may not know the smile, but smile anyway.

And that smiling that shouldn’t be there is a bit like the colors that, although not being there, are there.

And anyway the strangest of those creatures (an animal, a plant?) seems halfway between a birthday cake and a piano…

“I was deeply struck by something I had read about the organogenic marine mud on the ocean floors: in the abysses there are things just as strange and bizarre as those we imagine on Mars” (Robert Wyatt)

4)

And I remember my friend Carlo, because my friend Carlo is someone who draws. He draws everything, but he’s amazing with little creatures.

Like, he would go into the meadows and become enchanted watching them, the little creatures I mean.

Then he would come back with those sheets full of sketches (butterflies, beetles, bugs, but also fabulous nameless beings).

Maybe even in a meadow “there are things as strange and bizarre as those we imagine on Mars.” They’re not as far away as those living ten kilometers under the sea, but it’s as if they were.

In any case, Carlo’s drawings were also in black and white, yet seemed in colors.

5)

And the teeming world of meadows reminds me of Ivor Cutler “Lengthen your stride by four centimeters and save the life of four percent of insects,” he used to say.

And it is Cutler himself, the most eccentric poet/educator, who closes “Rock Bottom” singing, over an eerie viola drone, a little story starring a mole and a hedgehog rolling towards the sunset, committing to destroy all the tires they can.

And his voice has the ironic grandiosity of a libertarian pope engaged in closing the most peculiar of rites.

And yes: moles, hedgehogs…

And, to leave nothing out, even Robin Hood and Little Red Riding Hood...

6)

Ah, traveling companions are important…

Ivor Cutler, imagine...a guy who, permanently dressed in knickerbockers and a fez, would hand out epigrams to passersby while riding his bicycle. And who used to say “I am not eccentric, it’s everyone else who is.”

Or Alfreda Benge, a fabulous girl with a funny smile, not only Wyatt’s wife, but also the author of the drawing I poorly described and which was, now we solve the mystery, the first cover of “Rock Bottom.” (Who knows why they changed it at some point?)

Ah, sirs, the world is so sad. We need people like Pope Ivor I and Alfreda.

Then of course, all the musicians involved, because if I think about how Mongezi Feza plays on the Little Red Riding Hood song, the trumpets of heaven/hell are nothing in comparison…

And if it were just him…

7)

But back to the mole and the hedgehog of Alfreda’s drawing.

They sit there by the sandcastle, doing exactly what they’re supposed to do, namely being a mole and a hedgehog.

The hedgehog, I’m not sure, but the mole is a real obsession for Wyatt...“Moles are a delightfully naive image of all underground and subversive activity: they’re capable of popping up in the middle of a concrete meadow, poking through any fake nature and jumping out in the middle of civilization.”

In short, they frequent the abyss, but unlike man, they are able to easily resurface.

Wyatt too ends up in the abyss on this album (or so everyone says) and even he resurfaces (again according to what everyone says).

He never really said it, but, well, there must be some truth to it.

8)

The mole reminds me of Gianlucio, a modest guy, with bottle-bottom glasses and a fabulous dorky look made of rat-gray pants and an argyle sweater.

Gianlucio never went out, but at school he fired off snappy jokes like “after the first romp you're already dead” or “if none of you gave a damn, maybe in the end you’d care more.”

We liked Gianlucio...and Carlo liked him too.

And Carlo would often draw Gianlucio, but he did it by giving him a kind of dashing smile like a happy little animal, the mole, indeed, but Wyatt’s mole.

Or maybe the one from The Wind in the Willows...

9)

Then there’s talking about the toy organ, a gift from Alfreda.

Because you never know if Robert, a classic case of hyperactive depressive, might get bored while she was busy shooting a film in Venice?

“Vacation? What is a vacation?”

Ah, so Robert sits in front of the lagoon expanses and plays. Out come tremulous notes that blend with the water games.

Listen to the beginning of “Alifib” and tell me if a scene like that doesn’t fit.

“Alifib”

Vibrant, intermittent, and subtly hypnotic notes accompany a labored breath...it feels like being in the womb...the zero point of life...the elementary stage…Yes, yes, the elementary stage…

(Which, Wyatt says, the artist’s task “would appear to be to rediscover the animal within the sophisticated human being”).

The elementary stage and the breeding ground of the tiniest forms of life…

(“At low tide you see all those little crabs scuttling along the moss near the water”),

And perhaps those lagoon crabs are “strange and bizarre creatures as those we imagine on Mars.

Because Mars isn’t that far from Venice after all.

But there’s another real surprise in “Alifib.”

Those notes (which vibrant, intermittent, and subtly hypnotic accompany a labored breath), those notes serve to reach Wyatt’s voice…

We’ll come back to that voice later…

For now, let’s just say that the lyrics (Julian Cope dixit) are a “tower of baby talk,” or a jumble of garbled and senseless words besides the most bizarre way of talking about love.

Among those words, of course, there’s also the mole and this time it’s a water mole…

I told you, it’s a real obsession,

10)

A childish pencil drawing, incongruous fairytale animals, a toy organ, Little Red Riding Hood, Robin Hood, word games.

All things that refer to some constants of Wyattian thought and action, namely: not taking oneself too seriously, love for playful avant-gardes, passion for authors like Carroll and Lear, trusting instinct more than reason.

All elements present, and I believe even dominant, at the time of the very early Soft Machine.

In “Rock Bottom,” however, they are not at all dominant (except instinct, obviously) and are there to serve another function, namely to serve as a counterbalance, in a sort of pataphysical rebalancing, to an almost absolute lyricism that is totally absent in previous works.

Or perhaps what happened is that, while recording one of the most beautiful albums of all time, a mole, piercing the fake nature of a recording studio, popped up in the midst of all those esoteric musicians.

On the other hand, it’s poking out from my floor too…

Alas, I think I have a slight obsession too.

11)

But we were at the embryonic stage of “Rock Bottom,” namely Venice and the toy organ.

The second phase instead features a grand piano and a rather unusual place, a hospital.

Because, on June 1, 1973, during a party, Wyatt, dead drunk, somehow fell from a third-floor window. Hospitalized, in serious condition, he survives but loses the use of the lower part of his body,

He then spends six months in the hospital where, once able to get out of bed, he notices that piano…

12)

One of the things to immediately debunk is that the album refers to the trauma suffered. Both lyrics and music were composed beforehand. And, in no way, does it indulge in self-pity.

The consequences of the accident, however, had a decisive influence: both for the inability to play the drums, and for the great energy poured into its making.

And, if no longer being able to play the drums leads Wyatt to focus on keyboards and singing, the energy, due to the fact of still being able to do what it was believed could no longer be done, gives the album an expressive urgency so out of the ordinary as to touch the sacred.

To the point that knowing English is not necessary to understand that here we talk about the essential and wander (truly wander) in the heart of the heart of things.

The man who finds himself recording “Rock Bottom” is a man in a state of grace, where grace is nothing more than an expression that seems to have the naturalness of someone speaking about the only things that matter.

13)

The keyboards and the voice, we were saying…

For the keyboards, Wyatt draws inspiration from Richard Wright and his liquid, ethereal, spatial sound to which he adds a special vibration that really has no known origin.

As for the voice, instead, he draws on the wandering of Coltrane’s sax and certain studies of oriental singing.

The results are astonishing: a slender and heart-breaking singing navigating the finest intermissions and the most incredible melodies.

With the addition, here and there, of pieces of humanistic avant-garde, as if the idea of total music was not only utopian or, worse, pretentious.

It is music that resembles nothing else, at most other wanderers come to mind, like the already mentioned Coltrane, or the more esoteric Tim Buckley. Only in attitude though.

For the outcomes are solely, and exclusively, Wyattian.

14)

Divided between subdued and lunar moments and a kind of ultraterrestrial and romantic free jazz, between female magic and a desperate account of the world, between pataphysical irony and the sweetest emotion…

Between diving into that rocky bottom which the title alludes to and the breathless resurfacing where the essence of man is represented by a senseless nursery rhyme…

Divided? Oh no, not divided…because the album gives the impression of an uninterrupted flow…

Maybe it’s because music unites what man separates...and with this last historical phrase, hoping you’re not dead from laughing, I close…

15)

Ah no, I’m not closing yet…

I want to at least tell you that at some point you also hear Alfreda’s voice.

Alfreda responding to Wyatt’s nursery rhyme,

In that “tower of baby talk” one of the few intelligible phrases is “Alifib my larder,” which means “Alifib, my pantry.”

Because Alifib is Alfreda, of course.

And “Alifib,” the track I mean, at some point transforms into “Alife.” Wyatt resumes the same lyrics, no longer accompanied by his breath, but by an incredibly shrill free clarinet.

And if you want to know, for me that free clarinet is the famous “different you.”

Wyatt, as we said, resumes the same lyrics. But here Alfreda responds. And even her voice has a “different you” tone

“I was drunk and listening to all those ‘oh you are my this and my that.’ So I told him: ‘no, I’m not.’ And Robert replied: ‘Okay, then reply to me.’ So I wrote those words. Then Steve Cox recorded my voice and mixed it with the rest.”

And what Alfreda says is very, very “different you.” At least at the beginning...

“I’m not your larder, sticky jars and mustard. I’m not your dinner, I tell you old and soppy custard.”…

Then the tone changes completely and Alifib (Alfreda) (Alfie) is again the fantastic creature that emerged from the water at the beginning of “Sea Song.”

“I’m not your Larder, I’m Alfie your guarder”

“I’m not your larder I’m Alfie your guardian”

16)

And“Little Red Riding Hood hit the road”?

Coltrane meeting Crimson (or something like that) and words of incredible despair for music that is impossible not to describe as liberating. With Pope Ivor I closing with the mole and hedgehog.

And “A Last Straw”?

…………………………………...okay, enough for real now….

17)

And Carlo, the painter of little creatures and the Gianlucio mole?

Ah, I’m sorry the analogies with "Rock Bottom" are over. Also, because Carlo doesn’t even know who Robert Wyatt is. He’s a roughneck in terms of music and I suppose he only likes Led Zeppelin and the likes.

Besides, okay, a while ago he got obsessed with satyrs and nymphs...and he only drew satyrs and nymphs. And, for sure, for that stuff Plant and company are, in absolute, the most suitable musical reference...

Aloha...