Schnipper’s Slept On
- story THE FADER
Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it’s Sonny Sharrock’s Ask the Ages. Listen to “Many Mansions” below, buy the album and read Schnipper’s thoughts on the record after the jump.
Sonny Sharrock, “Many Mansions”
A bit more than ten years ago, my grandfather had a particularly bad case of diverticulitis and was hospitalized for some time. It was, by all accounts, a wonder he did not die. He was mentally skewed and physically writhing. Unsympathetically, the hospital workers had strapped him to the bed with a mesh vest. I wish I did not, but I remember watching him roll over in pain and seeing his testicles, as he was not very well covered. I didn’t tell anyone about that. I remember sitting outside of his hospital room thinking about how he was going to die really, really soon and I would never see him again. Except then he didn’t die. It took a long time, but he got mostly better. Physically he didn’t fully recover (though what do you recover to at eighty?), walking hunched and slow, but now, at ninety-three, his brain is surprisingly sharp.
From 1950 until last July, he and my grandmother (who is six months older than him) lived in Valley Stream, NY just past the border of Queens. They moved there from Brooklyn not long after my father was born and did not move away until it was no longer plausible for them to live on their own. The house was bought for less than $20,000 back when your union would purchase the mortgage from the bank and they became your lender. It had a garden, padded toilet seats and an unreplicable smell of wear, kasha and inexpensive fabrics.
In the past few years my grandmother’s mind has slipped away, though her body stays healthy, a reverse parallel of my grandfather. They moved last summer to a Hebrew home in Connecticut close to my parents. The home’s literature describes itself as “exquisitely designed and richly appointed,” which means it’s like a super nice hotel where they cook you two kosher meals a day and clean your really big one bedroom apartment once a week and you can take exercise class. My grandmother, unknowingly trapped in her Alzheimer’d mind, hates it and berates my grandfather for moving her there. He understands that when she calls him a killer she is not speaking from a well place, but it still has taken a toll. The surprising silver lining to her incessant barrage, however, has been that my grandfather wants to talk about it. This is unusual because any time I saw my grandfather up until my grandmother started losing her mind he said very little. I have so many distinct memories of him coming to our house and sitting at the end of the kitchen table reading the sports section of the paper, not trying to talk to my sister or me. He wasn’t unfriendly, but he also wasn’t interested. I never felt that that lack of interest was one in us, but just rooted in the idea that little closeness would emerge between people almost seventy years apart. Past the basics, really, what did we have to talk about? So it’s possible that it’s a coincidence, that I’m now old enough that he wants to talk with me, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like he’s a combination of bored, annoyed and scared. Honestly, knowing it is ridiculous and awesome that he is still alive, he wants to tell me his story. Unfortunately, in the gruesome contrast of living with my grandmother, that story involves a lot of crummy things about her. (If you would ever like to be surprised, imagine your grandfather calling your grandmother a “bag of shit.”) On Thanksgiving, beside the fire, he outlined for me her reluctance to let him invest more deeply and the amount of money he could have made had he (”as rich as our cousins.”). He talked fervently about his belief that my father be allowed to graduate college without debt and the great debate he had with my grandmother about her getting a part time job to support this. He called her a fatass. As he spoke faster the words got gummier and harder to understand. I took a little break, got a beer, switched from the couch to the tiny brick by the fireplace. We talked about the election, which he regretted not voting in because he didn’t reregister in Connecticut. But he is happy Obama won, and told me he was pleased with his choices for economic team he unveiled the previous week. He told me about how his stepmother was an asshole but she helped him get his start as an electrician, the only good thing she ever did. He told me about how he and my grandmother had gone to seventh and eighth grade together but did not know each other. Then it was time to eat and he grabbed his cane and I steadied him to the dining room. He sat at the head of the table and ate heartily. When my mother asked, she told him the turkey was a bit overdone.
After everyone left, I went through the things in my bedroom. My dad asked if I could clean out the drawers of old sweaters and things. I found a pile of old papers in a deep drawer with a bunch of unmatched white socks. I had forgotten that I was obsessed with Anne Sexton, though I can’t remember if that was during high school or college. I wrote a paper about her tenderly morbid poem about her grandmother, “Walking in Paris.” Sexton had found a pile of letters her grandmother had written from Paris in 1890, and Sexton herself in Paris seventy years later, was communing with her through the same streets her grandmother trod. I come, in middle age,/ to find you at twenty in high hair and long Victorian skirts/ trudging shanks’ mare fifteen miles a day in Paris/ because you could not afford a carriage./ I have walked sixteen miles today./ I have kept up.
My grandfather told me about growing up in Brooklyn, younger than I am now but not too many miles away, during the Great Depression. He laughed when I told him I have no money. When we went back to his home I saw a form letter from the Obama campaign set out, thanking him for his support. When my father and I said goodbye and shut the door on him I felt guilty for leaving him with her, but I don’t know what else to do.
I found in the back of my Anne Sexton book notes for a presentation I gave in high school. “Anne Sexton. Born and raised and lived in Boston. In and out of hospital for depression. Multiple suicide attempts before she did it. Poetry written at the urging of her psychiatrist. A cathartic sort of thing. Wrote personal poetry, confessional style. About herself. Recurring theme of death and wanting to die. Religion. Being a woman. Being middle aged and looking back and wishing for youth. Looking for what is good in life.” Hundreds of pages of lushly elaborate poems about rotting bodies and total death is not the same as simply talking to your grandson, but it’s not different. My grandfather told me he was surprised he was still alive. He didn’t say it with disdain, but there was a solid lack of joy. Sexton’s lack of interest in living came from a separate place, but both she and he are dealing with it with personal language, by communicating about their pain and looking back at youth. She was and he is both at their best closest to death. I’ve never enjoyed time I spent with my grandfather more than the past year if simply because he now tells what he feels.
The other thing I found in my bedroom was this empty Sonny Sharrock CD case (that is my mother holding it above, I left it in Connecticut). I have no idea where the CD is. This was his last record, recorded in 1991, two years before he died of a heart attack. In the sixties, when he was young, Sharrock, a guitarist, made blistering records of quick guitar shred, often with his wife Linda wailing away. He stopped playing for some time, though he revived his career in the late ’80s. I don’t know if he expected he was going to die, but he clearly had something left to say. Ask the Ages, which he recorded with fellow oldsters saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and drummer Elvin Jones (who is also dead now) is a slow plodding rock/jazz album. It sounds seedy and occasionally corny, but is never unwanted as the downhill progress of an over-the-hill great. “Many Mansions,” by far the album’s best song, is a rerecording of 1969 Byard Lancaster song Sharrock played on, “John’s Children.” But here, twenty-two years later, with the pith of age, Sharrock has a burst of life and the song swells. Seven minutes deep he is making his guitar beckon and squeal, working calmly from a plaintive caress to a wild flail. In his New York Times obituary, Sharrock is quoted as saying, “In the last few years I’ve been trying to find a way for the terror and the beauty to live together in one song. I know it’s possible.” That is true of “Many Mansions,” true of Anne Sexton’s poetry, true of every time my grandfather says the word “bullshit” to me. It’s depressing to think that after youth they are so often coupled, but as a young person their entangled lessons are heartening.
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- posted on Dec 2, 2008 in SLEPT ON
- tags experimental, rock, Sonny Sharrock
