Zero at the Bone: Emily Dickinson Rock
Sebastian Lockwood
It is a tribute to Emily Dickinson’s genius that her poems work as the sharpest rock lyrics ever written. I think she would be pleased, by now, to witness eighteen year olds leaving a performance singing: Just felt the world go by.
It is a cliché that you can sing Dickinson to just about anything – Pritchard speaks of hearing her poems sung by a chorus to The Yellow Rose of Texas – her 8/6 pattern makes this possible. Poets call this pattern common meter while musicians call this 8/6 as 4/3 and common time. Her poetry works from the hymn and chapel rhythms. Blues and it’s edgy child rock do the same. Our work was not to fit Dickinson’s lines to rock tunes but to write original rock and pop tunes that would illuminate the hard rock crystal of her work.
My first experience of this power was with Firemask, an alternative band writing originals. We were playing at The Middle East, Central Square Cambridge – we were sharing the bill with Skull Toboggan. Here was an excuse to turn the PA up to 11 and rip. We had been putting music behind my spoken delivery of, There’s a certain Slant of light. We did this and repeated the last stanza into a full rock crescendo of blazing guitars and screamed the last lines: … like the Distance/ On the look of Death – When we were done Skull Toboggan, all tattoos and facial metal, gave that song a cheer and said we wrote heavy lyrics – oh no we replied, that was Emily Dickinson – wow Dude, she rocks!
That was the first indication of that power. Later, jamming in the basement I returned to Dickinson’s work with my partner Nanette Perrotte who is the singer for the Nanette Perrotte Combo. There we coined: Emily Dickinson Rock, and began exploring her work to see how we could write original tunes for her lines. This coincided with Richard Colton, the choreographer, asking us to collaborate on a dance piece for Concord Academy.
One of the first songs we wrote for this was Zero at the Bone, with help from Chris Zerby of Helicopterhelicopter (Helicopterhelicopter.com) I knew that we would have to work with elision and rearrangement. This was daunting if not sacrilegious: like being asked to rearrange a Faberge egg with a pen knife. However, if the end result is students singing her lines, then it felt worthwhile.
A rock/pop song first and foremost needs a hook. A line that carves: like a rolling stone… I cant get no… Who are you… All we are is dust in the wind… (A superior line, Dickinson’s, Dust is the only secret, comes to mind.) I’m sure you can supply many more, but are any as good as: Zero at the Bone? Zero is a rock word as is bone, together they give that winsome blues passive aggressive delivery. Now when we return to the poem we find a number of other lines that have that gem impact: whiplash () in the sun… when a Boy and Barefoot… tighter breathing. Now add a simple bass line and build the song. We need verse, chorus and bridge. By using certain of the lines and arranging them to fit this matrix we achieve one of the most achingly beautiful blues songs imaginable.
Developing the song we worked on the constriction of…tighter breathing, repeated over and over before the release into: … Zero at the Bone – As we did so there was an eerie echo of Habegger’s description of the heavy, tighter, breathing of Dickinson’s last two unconscious days before the release.
There are lines and words that will not fit this medium – any words that are no longer in use we avoid: till , ‘tis ‘twas ‘twere tho’ thee… Or to achieve our effect we move a word like unbraiding to get the line: … a Whiplash () in the sun. Again: this is a song based on the original. Also a stanza like:
Many of Nature’s people
I know them
And they know me
I feel towards them
A transport of cordiality
Has words that will jar with the rock sensibility. Cordiality is not a rock word or concept! So the final song takes the lines that give the rock current edge and uses repetition to build the density of the line until the audience has that line carved on their mind like a, Slant of light. When the audience leaves the performance they do not yet have the poem: A narrow Fellow in the Grass. But when they return to that poem they will feel and hear those lines with a new intensity – they will find a gut resonance with the poem that will lead to an intellectual relationship. (For those of you who are players the chart for, Zero at the Bone is included here at the end of this article.)
The premise here is that with Dickinson, as with most genius, it is more important to know the poem than to understand the poem. Great poetry has great resistance. By hearing the lines with an emotional force, the student can feel the power. I have written about this in an article called, Poems and Dreams: the Minefield of Hermeneutics –
Teaching what we do not understand, available at Odysseylive.org.
Having written the show for Concord Academy with 18 dancers involved, we now find ourselves writing a new version of the show that is a stand alone rock show. The presentation here is straight rock band; vocals, keyboard, drums, electric bass and guitar – the band dressed in white with a black backdrop. On the backdrop are written in hand key Dickinson words: degrees, snow, noon, light, lily, slant, now, eternity…The band plays the songs and there are elliptical and poetic narrations that segue between songs giving biographical sketches. All poems used are printed in full in the program.
As we move into this work there are poems that are just too obvious: My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun, after all the temptation to use: None stir the second time – On whom I lay a Yellow Eye …but it is the less expected poems that work best. For instance, He fumbles at your Soul. Here again is the battle that seems so rock: the balance between ecstasy, death and eternity. The wrestlers at dawn. So much of rock held this challenge and most lost the fight: Morrisson, Hendrix, Joplin,Cobain. For Dickinson we have the outlines of the battle: the fierce evangelicalism of her time, the geography of death with the civil war and the more than 33 friends and family she lost to consumption in her life (Habegger 640). Against this backdrop there is her own fierce wrestling to win her art and her precious freedom. So a poem like, He fumbles at your Soul, speaks to that rock dilemma: ecstasy and reality– inspiration and discipline. And of course there is the great refrain/hook of: He stuns you by degrees. “ He” here can be: art, god, master, lover or self. For us, the point of the song is to etch that line onto the listeners brain so that they will return to the poem over and over with awe and come away singing that brilliant line.
In order to achieve the song it was again necessary to move lines and create repetitions, while at the same time holding to the integrity of the internal progress of the poem. I do not know whether that can be achieved without elision – and any Dickinson scholar is in horror of what was initially done to her poems so that one would not wish to change a dot or dash. Nonetheless, in the name of rock we proceed and so here is the new arrangement as song:
He stuns you by degrees
He fumbles at your soul
As Players at the keys
Before they drop full music on
Before they drop full music on
He stuns you by degrees
Your breath has time to straighten
Your Brain – to bubble cool
Before they drop full music on
Before they drop full music on
He stuns you by degrees
(bridge)
When Winds take forests in their Paws
The universe – is still– (repeat)
(music break)
By fainter hammers – further heard –
Then nearer – then so slow –
Before they drop full music on
Before they drop full music on
He stuns you by degrees (repeat over)
That scalps your naked
Soul –
The last two lines are spoken word over the chorus. It is very hard to achieve the intended effect – to be able to live up to the sheer power of those lines: viva rock and roll.
To be sure that the full effect of a Dickinson poem read aloud is achieved we do this with , There’s a certain Slant of light. Just voice reciting the poem from memory in a stillness at the center of the show.
We end the show with the hook-line: revolution is the pod…This piece is a collage song with lines taken from four different poems and built into a song. The rock echoes of revolution are many and perhaps best heard in Lennon’s: You say you want a revolution… With Dickinson we have her added sense of pod. This pod that is genesis, breaking forth, the chrysalis, the verdant revolution – spring. The song opens with her great rock question:
I’m nobody who are you
Are you –Nobody–Too?
This puts you in mind of The Who, and ends with this refrain:
Mine-by the Royal Seal!
Mine-by the sign in the Scarlet prison-
Mine-by the Grave’s Repeal
Mine-long as Ages steal!
Revolution is the Pod, Revolution is the Pod,
Revolution is the Pod, Revolution is the Pod!
If as Hebegger suggests Dickinson had achieved a pagan understanding of transcendence over death – then she again stands as a source for the rock ecstatic stance: live hard die young. For the Stones and Dylan this is now metaphorical. For both of those rockers horses played an important role: wild horses for the stones, and Dylan’s beautiful lilting, all the tired horses in the sun. At the recent 2002 Madison Square garden concert Mick Jagger wore a wild horse T shirt designed by McCartney’s daughter – there’s rock generation. For Dickinson, in the great poem of transcending death, the horses heads are toward eternity. The rock ethic we remember of the 60s is to live in the present: to be now. It is Dickinson’s greatest achievement to have found a discipline and solitude that allowed her to live utterly in the now: to have recognized that eternity is now.
Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away In Books, Modern Library, 2002
Pritchard, Talking Back to Emily Dickinson, U. Mass Press, 1998
Johnson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Little Brown, 1960