If
it’s Not the Weather, Hand me my Leather…
In
the immortal words of Amanda Marshall (not that I could
remember her name when the song came on in Radio Shack —
sorry, The Source — earlier this week), "Let it
rain." You’d think that after a month in the UK,
I would be sick of the sight, sound, and smell of grey skies
and showers — but no. Rather, I’m sick at trying
to sleep while oily sweat runs down my cleavage. Last night,
lying awake betting on which droplet would reach my navel
first, I thought that maybe my body’s precipitation
had precipitated the big R. I listened carefully —
there was a rumble, and a drop. Another drop, right by my
window, and another, all falling rhythmically, in the same
place. Perhaps a very small storm, just for me? Morning
light reveals the truth in the shape of my upstairs neighbours’
crappy a/c unit, grumbling and splattering from above.
The
clouds are hanging low in the sky as a seventeen year old
boy’s pants right now, and yet no thunder, no drops
on the sidewalk. Sitting on the ground in the dead brown
arena that was once Queen’s Park last weekend, it was
like I could hear the earth calling out for rain. I’m
not known for such hippie earth mama responses, being an
urban grrl born and raised — but, well, even in urban
centres of concrete and a/c, there’s there’s rain
and then there’s RAIN. England has plenty of the former,
that constant drip that makes the ground cover staff nervous
at Wimbledon, but not so much of the latter, although there
were a couple of lightning storms spectacular enough to
send my scaredy-dog to his favourite hiding place for hours.
But
it was in Berlin that I got switched on to the mighty potential
of RAIN. The kind that you feel in your head all day, like
a warning, like a sixth sense. The kind that says "OK,
if you want sun and air, you gotta have water to wash the
city clean." Toronto’s lost the balance right
now, which is why life currently sucks. I’ve been in
drought conditions before. I was in Colorado three years
ago, with forest fires raging and no rain for three months,
and then — whaddya know? — poet and performer
Cecilia Vicuña invokes rain, and there it is. We
were so thirsty for it, we watched each individual drop
(and there weren’t many) evaporate before it even hit
the ground.
As
I’m writing this, I can hear rumbles (don’t think
it’s the subway). I keep turning down the music, which
is Tori Amos’ latest album, The Beekeeper, seeing
as it was her performance that set off the heavens in Berlin
— or so I like to think. It was summer solstice, and
a full moon so close we could have bought her a drink (for
a handy explanation of this phenom, hit the NASA website:
<http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/20jun_moonillusion.htm>).
Then, leaving the concert high on Ms. T — boom. There
had been a little light rain earlier, but this was Niagara
from the sky, lit up from the inside by nuclear voltage.
Loud like being inside a drum machine. (Rumblins here may
have been the subway, or my pre-menstrual belly, after all).
Incredible, electrifying, cleansing — and that was
just the concert.
Seriously,
I believe that a performer of Amos’ stature is capable
of tuning up natural forces the way she might tune a guitar,
or of being in tune with them. I’m reading her book
Piece by Piece (written with music journalist Ann
Powers) at the moment, in weird compulsive/neglect phases.
It’s like double chocolate fudge cake with caramel
sauce and really good organic vanilla ice cream and pieces
of honeycomb — incredibly rich, incredibly complex,
but too much for a bear of such fried brain. I’ve been
a Tori fan since her first tour (before Little
Earthquakes came out, to be a complete snob about it),
in a "her music changed my life" way (although
never in a following her around the world way). I would
never hear a Tori song in Radio Shack (and that sentence
could end there) and not be able to identify the album,
where I first heard it, whether I’ve heard it live,
and possibly what its B-sides were as a single.
She
appeared in my life during a drought. My schoolfriends liked
New Kids on the Block (it was 1991, k?) and — oh, definite
thunder — and Madonna. I liked Joni Mitchell and Carole
King. They liked netball. I liked poetry. It was all heading
for disaster. It was Nirvana that changed things, not Tori
Amos, but in my mind they were related, not least because
I heard Tori’s cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
before I heard the original. I had never seen a woman perform
on stage like Tori did, never heard lyrics about missed
periods and evil schoolgirls and vampires. She was tapped
in to something I wanted. Fourteen years later, her book
tells me that she knows all this, that she made the music
because she looked around and saw a drought. So she came
pouring down. Not just in the music. She created RAINN <http://www.rainn.org>
to revolutionise the information and support available for
survivors of sexual assault in the US. Imagining fighting
back knowing that Tori is in your corner.
Can
Toronto really wait until August 25th when she
gets here for rain? I think not. Can we depend on a single
person, however iconic and powerful, to make change for
us? It’s time to stamp our feet and sing (in the event
that we can’t ban cars and stop building tall buildings).
Time to get naked and throw our heads back and take to the
sky.
he