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 Arthur Russell’s Love is Overtaking Me. Stream the title track, buy the album and read Schnipper’s thoughts on it after the jump.
On Sunday I started reading The Believers by Zoë Heller, a novel about a family, New York and Orthodox Judaism. The book’s first 17 pages are essentially a prologue and illustrate the 1962 meeting of Audrey and Joel in London, when she is a soft but forming British leftist and he is an unintentionally goofy yet bold civil rights lawyer in Europe on business. They meet at a party briefly and with one free day on his trip, Joel tracks down Audrey. She wants to see him but is headed to the country to see her parents. Joel invites himself along and they go to Audrey’s Polish parents’ house. After the somewhat awkward visit, Joel thinks he’s blown it, extends his hand in friendship. Audrey invites herself back to his hotel room, then after they sleep together, she invites herself back to America and the prologue ends. Until about halfway through this prologue, we get only Audrey’s perspective, a close reading of the party and its participants through her eyes only until we meld into the mind of Joel, as well, feeling awkward at Audrey’s parents’ house. The next chapter is the present tense, 45 years of complex marital bliss later. From here we are inside everyone’s mind, everyone thinking something about something. And, you know, something I never really noticed was that I don’t like is third person omniscient. In real life you never know what other people are thinking. It’s scary to have that kind of access, and anyway it’s much more fun to intuit if you’ve got the right type of background information.
What couples are thinking has been the realm of Louise Rafkin, who writes a weekly column for the San Francisco Chronicle about unique ways couples came together and their often surprisingly persisting relationships. But, despite these years of love profiling, Rafkin is herself single. In her “Modern Love” essay she writes of her unsuccessful desire to find the same kind of dumbstruck love her subjects are so often blindsided by. Her therapist urges her to lower her standards and learn to love. And while it doesn’t seem that she is opposed to that, she clearly wants a big smack of passion. I looked this lady up. She seems cool! She likes to surf, teaches Thai martial arts, is often on NPR and has a sweet dog. Can some 50-ish lesbian please find her and take care of her? If any of you are reading, she gets my endorsement. I don’t know what she’s really thinking she needs, but, well, that’s not my job. You and her can figure it out.
Tom Lee and Arthur Russell, seems like they had it. Russell, the prolific and multi-genre musician who died in 1992, lived in New York City with Lee, recording all day. Love is Overtaking Me is a somewhat surprising collection of Russell’s folk and country-tinged songs, spanning from 1973 to 1990. Lee wrote the album’s liner notes about his beloved, quirky partner of many years. He speaks of meeting Russell after his first hit, Russell trying to gather his momentum into some popularity and money, meaning the financial independence to write and record music, his singular passion. “I would soon learn that this quest [to make music] would spur him on throughout his life. These first impressions led me to be intrigued, admire, puzzle over and ultimately love him.”
Lee has done a number of interviews about Russell’s life and career, the most expansive being in Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell. Completed well after Russell’s death, and therefore without any first person narration by Russell of his own story, Lee ultimately becomes the most compelling character in the story, his diligent filing of the multitudes of music Russell left behind. He’s clearly a devoted partner, but also a faithful patron. We never learn much about Lee himself, though, as this is—and it always is—Russell’s story. What we skim about Lee himself is purely in his telling of someone else’s narrative. We published an interview with Lee in The FADER last year to promote Wild Combination. The best part of the interview is the end, when Lee talks about making a “clean break” and going back to school at 39 to be a teacher to young children. “I was used to Arthur staying up late—he would have his headphones on and there would be this constant plunk plunk tapping of the keyboards, all plugged in. And after awhile I would be up in bed like, ‘Will you stop doing that? I can’t get to sleep!’ In many ways, it was like any other relationship. When you’re in the midst of it and bickering over ‘You’re late for dinner,’ you’re not thinking, this guy’s going to go on to be an icon. You’re thinking ‘You said you were going to be home at six. The rice is done!’” This is, more than anything, the inner workings of an earned routine in a beloved relationship and, finally, Lee’s half of the story emerges equal.
I passed Tom Lee on the street last week. I have no idea if he is alone now or not, or, really, what “alone” is to him. He ends his liner notes for Love is Overtaking Me with some of Russell’s lines from the song “Love Comes Back”: We’re meeting in the moonlight/ when you are there/ rising in the moonlight/ love is back/ being sad is not a crime/ once you know that/ love is back/ so put your little hand in mine/ love comes back. I can imagine however Lee feels, this song must be a comfort. I hope he is happy, loved and loves.
Related:
- Christophe Lemaire Makes Us Feel Less Cool… And We Are Really Cool
- Q+A: Tom Lee On His Life With Arthur Russell
- March Is Schnipper Month: Q and R
- Schnipper’s Slept On
- Schnipper’s Slept On
- posted on Jun 9, 2009 in SLEPT ON
- tags Arthur Russell, psych/folk, Tom Lee
