Stones is an amazing album. Perhaps one of the best. Like the Beatles white album or Fleetwood Mac's Tusk, even the cover is art. My copy, handed down from my mother who purchased it in 1971, has a subdued canvas colored background with a course linen fiber printed on it. In the middle of it is a photograph of Neil Diamond sitting on a park bench in front of a massive stone Italian-styled garden wall. An old and twisted tree stands in the right hand corner; a stone bust sits in a niche in the wall just left of center, just to right of Diamond, who sits stoically arms folded, his stone face looking out at the audience with no expression. He is barefoot, which with his stoic look and the old-world setting, gives his form the feel of a statue, adding to the crumbling, classical feel of the mostly monotone photograph of gray and olive. The cover reminds me slightly of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" album with the crumbling wall and portrait of the old man. There is the same heaviness about it.
The entire album is worth listening to, but I'll focus on side two. I believe this one side of vinyl contains some of the greatest lyrics ever written, although Neil Diamond only wrote two of the songs. I don't think that is a coincidence. Like Elton John's Blue Moves, this album is, in part, a reflective evaluation of the cost of fame. Elton John dealt with that by returning to his classical, jazz and blues roots. Perhaps, Diamond's decision to use other people's material is a reaching out to the void, hoping for an answer more significant than his own name. "I Am, I Said," his own song, definitely demonstrates the desire to be grounded in significance.
First, we have the title track, "Stones," one of Diamond's own:
The song starts with a simple strum of the guitar, and then enters the line "Stones would play inside her head," a startling image of uncomfortable weight and solidity oddly placed within the mind. He follows this up with the image of her bed being made of stones--no peace of mind and no rest for the body due to a solid mass that must be dealt with.
But, it's not a mass without meaning. We are not shoved into the nihilism of Hemingway here. This is not a world of nada y pues nada. The stones may be uncomfortable; they may be there to be dealt with; but they also provide shelter and shade for new beginnings:
You and me, a time for planting
You and me, a harvest granting
The every prayer ever prayed
For just two wild flowers that grow
on stones.
There is beauty here, but it isn't an easy beauty. It's more like the beauty the atonement brings, a grace that comes after the old has been broken down and something new takes root in the rubble.
This contrast of dark and light, of the jeweled flower among the rock, continues in the second song, "If You Go Away" written by Jacques Brel and Rod McKuen.
And then there's "Suzanne." Ah "Suzanne," what to say?... Leonard Cohen's lyrical masterpiece, but Diamond brings a weight to song that Cohen just wasn't able to do.
The song starts in the sensual world of materialism:
Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night forever
And you know that she's half-crazy but that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China
Cohen concludes the first third of the song with "For you've touched her perfect body with your mind." Then, the song pivots from sensual world of light and aroma to the weighty divine:
And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.
Next, comes Randy Newman's composition, "I Think It's Going to Rain Today," which also swings on a fulcrum. The first half of the song describes interior bleakness:
Broken windows and empty hallways
A pale dead moon in the sky streaked with gray
Human kindness is overflowing
And I think it's going to rain today.
Here, "Human kindness is overflowing" is sarcasm, as indicated by both the music accompaniment and the lines that follow:
Lonely, lonely
Tin can at my feet
Think I'll kick it down the street
That's the way to treat a friend
Human kindness is not overflowing.
Then comes the pivot. The music changes, becomes upbeat, and similar words take on new meaning:
Bright before me the signs implore me
To help the needy and show them the way
Human kindness is overflowing
And I think it's going to rain today.
Here, it's not the weather that will rain, but the human kindness that is overflowing, love filling the cup up to the brim and raining down on humanity.
Notice the repletion of imagery and themes here. "Stones" starts with the hard imagery of rocks, but ends by noting that the stones provide shelter for "two wildflowers that grow." "Suzanne" echoes the flower imagery: "And she shows you where to look /Among the garbage and the flowers," here garbage providing shelter for the flowers. "Suzanne" also repeats the imagery of stone in, "he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone". Here, that weight is ambiguous, depending on how you read the lyrics. The line could mean, his wisdom sank unnoticed by those that executed Him. Or, as the "you" in the song seems to refer to the speaker, as we don't all know a "Suzanne," it can also mean his that His presence sank deep into the speaker's soul with great redeeming weight, which is how I read it.
Although Diamond is Jewish, I would argue that in purposefully selecting the songs he has chosen, Diamond is setting up Christ as a symbol for human redemption, which is carried to its climax in "I Am, I Said."
Diamond begins by comparing his new home of L.A. with his roots in New York, saying that he feels "lost between two shores." Although this is clearly biographical and must be taken literally, I will argue that he extends the literal image out into a metaphor for the human predicament. We are all lost between two shores. We are here in this temporal world, "among the garbage and flowers" as noted in "Suzanne," but we also have a divine, spiritual origin that deep down we can't forget, which leaves us feeling lost, ghostlike, unreal, like Christ, "almost human" and yet "almost divine," "lost between two shores."
And so we cry out--not to other men--but to the void, the divine, the spark that brought us into being because the "emptiness deep inside" calls us back to our true home, that distant memory before we were here.
In U2 at the End of the World, Bill Flanagan makes light of Bono's claim that Neil Diamond is a serious song writer.
Bono looked down his nose at my sarcasm and asked, "Do you know what 'I Am, I Said' is all about?
Flanagan spews out the surface meaning with the depth of understanding of a Pharisee, giving the literal background which inspired Diamond to write the song with little awareness that poetry gains weight as it is written that moves it beyond the initial impulse in scope.
Bono, not flinching, asserts, "God is described as the great I am. So, in that song Diamond is calling out to Jehovah. 'I am, I said," means, 'God, I said.' To who? To no one there! And no one heard at all, not even chair! Do you see? It is a song of despair and lost faith by a man calling out to a God who isn't interested!"
I agree. Well, mostly. If you take only "I Am, I Said" by itself that is true. It is Christ calling out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" before being transformed. But, taking in all of Stones it is the calling out to God in pain the moment before rebirth.
It matters not that Diamond is Jewish. Poets borrow metaphors all the time. Christian poets tapped into Greek mythology for centuries. Besides Jews do believe in Christ--they just don't believe he has already been born and died; but the idea of rebirth out of hardship is nothing new to them.
In "Yahweh," Bono puts it this way:
Take this shirt
Polyester white trash made in nowhere
Take this shirt
And make it clean, clean
Take this soul
Stranded in some skin and bones
Take this soul
And make it sing, sing
Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still, I'm waiting for the dawn
It is almost as if Bono said to himself, alright the critics won't take "I Am, I Said," seriously because they won't take Neil Diamond seriously, I'll show them. I'll write my own "I Am, I Said," and they will take that seriously because "I Am Bono."
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still, I'm waiting for the dawn
It is almost as if Bono said to himself, alright the critics won't take "I Am, I Said," seriously because they won't take Neil Diamond seriously, I'll show them. I'll write my own "I Am, I Said," and they will take that seriously because "I Am Bono."
Of course I don't really think Bill Flanagan is an idiot. I think his U2 at the End of the World is a fine book. But, Flannigan is just one among many who for some bizarre reason are out to stone one of our finest song writers, Neil Diamond. Perhaps some day he will see the errors of ways and tap into the beauty of Stones. There is certainly sustenance there for those willing to listen.
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