We are also … Unhindered by Talent

I can always count on my family to provide me with a wonderful assortment of media at Xmas that will exceed the time available to absorb it. Books are especially problematic as I’m a slow (if avid) reader and I almost never clear last year’s booty before the new batch rolls in. Music’s much easier to process since I can listen while I do some of those other “necessary” things like my job, but a big stash can be a challenge to process as I like to listen to the good stuff over and over to really get it in my head. Also, it’s hard to work everything I’d like to play from the prezzies into our family radio show. Ah, the trials and tribulations of a middle-class white guy.

One of the gift themes this year has been bits and pieces of the fallout from John Peel’s most unfortunate demise just over a year ago. Earlier in the year my birthday was graced (as reported elsewhere in these pages) with the complete Peel sessions by The Fall from WeatherGirl. Xmas continued the trend (although I sense that it’s near run its course) as I received both Peel’s biography, John Peel: Margrave of the marshes (from WeatherGirl), and the 2 CD set John Peel: A tribute (from WeatherGirl’s wonderful mum).

In fear that I just wouldn’t get to these things (the book esp.) in a timely manner, I pulled the biography to (near) the top of a significant and fascinating collection of Xmas books, and as a consequence I just finished it, a mere two weeks after receiving it. The book was only partially completed when he died, closing early in his time in the U.S. in the 60’s, but his wife Shiela and their four children finished it as a tribute, and did an excellent job. Shiela’s style and approach are obviously different that John’s, but there’s a clear rapport in the writing that no doubt reflects the rapport that lead to some 35 happy years together.

As I have mentioned here more than a few times, I loved Peel’s shows and greatly miss his influence, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading this telling of his life. In the end, though, that life is arguably not all that remarkable from the outside. Certainly he and Shiela can tell a few (OK, a lot) more stories about interactions with famous people than WeatherGirl and I can, but part of what made him such a wonderful influence over so many years is that he really didn’t care about fame or interactions with famous people. (One of the things he liked about Shiela was that she’d tell him when he was full of it when other, more star-struck, acquaintences were hanging on his every word.) The book, however, doesn’t tell us much about why he was who he was, or even much about how he succeeded in his crazy ways despite fairly consistent failure to “get it” on the part of his BBC superiors. Why, on the one hand, was he never fired and, on the other, weren’t more people like him hired?

All that said, I did thoroughly enjoy the book and suspect I would have really enjoyed knowing him and his family if my general inability to deal well with “famous” people had ever allowed such a thing. I doubt that anyone’s like to pay much attention to this book in 50 years, although my guess is that the music he championed over the years will continue to be important. It seems likely that the (sometimes small) ripples that spread from his work will continue to be measurable well into the future that if we just know where to look. I can imagine someone accepting a life-time achievement award decades from now and saying they owe it all to some old fart named John Peel that many in the audience won’t have ever heard of. And such is the way of life.

The CD set is quite a lot of fun, with a lot of really great songs on it. It tends to avoid his real noise-fest tendencies (no Extreme Noise Terror here, folks, we’re releasing this on Warner), although it does include an obviously necessary Captain Beefheart track (which must have caused the suits no end of grief, which would have thoroughly amused him). Also it arguably doesn’t sufficiently acknowledge the wonderful racial diversity of his tastes (no hip-hop?) which both he and Shiela discuss to good effect in the book, which is a bummer. It does, however, nicely capture his gender eclecticism with great tracks by people like PJ Harvey and Laura Cantrell.

One can’t do a post like this without a few quotes. I kept running across great little bits in the book, but always set them aside because I wanted to finish the book before I posted. In the end, I’ll go with the last paragraph of Peel’s letter to his agent outlining the events he’d cover in his biography:

There will be a very real danger of the book degenerating into a hymn of praise to Sheila but without her there would be no book worth writing anyway.

It’s clear from the book that John and Sheila really were a wonderful couple, and while he was the public bit of the iceberg, his wife and children were obviously a vital part of the life that enriched ours so. And, unlike all the stuff about having the White Stripes play live in their house, this is a bit I could imagine myself saying (and absolutely meaning!).

Of the various bits in the liner notes to the CD set, the best (by far) is the opening two pages by Peel acolyte and later colleague at Radio 1, Andy Kershaw. His ending is probably as fine an analysis as any of Peel and Big Media in the Modern Era:

The ethos of Room 318 [where Peel and Kershaw shared an office for a while] was one with which all BBC bosses should be tattoed: “We’re not here to give people what they want but what they didn’t know they wanted.”

…

With the Peel programme, we the listeners never knew what might be coming next. It was broadcasting rather than narrowcasting. And that’s radio at its most compelling and exciting. Thanks, brother.

Amen to that! One of the things I’ve always loved about college radio at its best is that it’s broadcasting instead of narrowcasting. I hope we can maintain that tradition.

In the end, though, how in the world could anyone hope to encapsulate (in book or CD) the wonderful breadth of music and ideas that Peel brought to us in that “low drone” that we all loved? The writing of this (overly long) post was set aside for a wonderful dinner of tacos while WeatherGirl and I talked about all of this. (I’d just finished the book, so I was pretty pumped.) For me, the most meaningful and significant comment to come in the wake of his death has been the mumbling and sometimes only semi-coherent tributes from the musicians whose lives were changed by John’s decisions to play their music. That, much more than the charming stories of home life or the harrowing tales of near misadventure on mountain roads, is the real legacy.

When we lived in Britain five years ago I thought several times about writing to John, but never did. Famous people (even famous curmudgeons like John Peel) scare me in stupid ways, and I’m always horribly anxious about intruding. Louden Wainwright III has lunch 20 feet from us here in Morris, and I don’t have the nerve to go up and say hello. Maybe he wanted to be left alone, but maybe he would have enjoyed the company, and I didn’t give him the chance to make that decision. Sigh.

I’ve been thinking since the John Peel Day last October that I’d like to write Shiela and their children a letter with a copy of my tribute radio show, as one more heartfelt (if ultimately pretty insignificant) token of what he meant to so many of us. I still haven’t done it, but maybe I should.