If I have a single musical hero, it's Robyn Hitchcock. Pete Townshend helped me get through adolescence and move on into adulthood, Andy Partridge of XTC has given me great amusement and enjoyment, and the guys in R.E.M. have provided comfort and inspiration, but if there's one composer/performer who's been consistently able to challenge me, intrigue me, and connect with me, it's Robyn.

Sure, he writes songs that seem primarily about fish, insects, glass and cones, but there's an awful lot of other things going on beneath the psychedelic imagery. For one, there's Robyn's extraordinary gift for melody, a gift which has remained in play ever since he got his start with the Soft Boys in the late 70s. An early tune like "Queen of Eyes" digs its hooks into your brain like a benevolent parasite and pumps endorphins straight into your hypothalamus; a recent composition such as "Alright, Yeah," does the same. Even Robyn knows this latter tune is a thing of startling beauty; he describes it in the film Storefront Hitchcock as a "comfortable song," one that's so unthreatening and tasty that "it's not even bland."

There's also his gift of abruptly bringing a song in close for a direct hit on the listener. There'll be a positive firestorm of hallucinatory images whirling around, and suddenly he'll throw out a line that speaks directly and pointedly of the truth. In "Serpent at the Gates of Wisdom," for instance, he starts playing with the Edenic myth, describing the birth of desire in Eve as "rolling down the frozen highway like a burning tire." It's a stirring and unexpected image, that tire, and you're expecting to go in all sorts of weird psychedelic directions when Robyn shifts gears: "Do you really serve the Devil if it's all God's plan?/ Good and evil need each other--honey, I'm your man." It's a marvelous twist--from surrealist to philosopher to tempter in one verse.

But my most recent Hitchcock purchase has delighted me for new reasons. It's called Robyn Sings, a title which doesn't immediately reveal that the two-CD set is a tribute by Robyn to his own musical hero: Bob Dylan.

I'd long known that Robyn was a Byrds fan, thanks to his covers of "Eight Miles High" and "The Bells of Rhymney" and the jangly guitar featured on tunes like "I Often Dream of Trains" and "Madonna of the Wasps." I could tell he was a Beatles fan, too--the quirky orchestrations and sweet-and-sour delivery of tunes like "My Wife and My Dead Wife" would evoke John Lennon even if Robyn hadn't dedicated his Respect album to the Smart Beatle. But somehow I'd missed the Dylan influence, or at least seen it only in the very real influence he had on the Byrds and the Beatles.

His versions of "Tangled Up in Blue" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" are marvelous, but the biggest treat for me is hearing him embrace his roots. In "Ballad of a Thin Man," the line "He says 'You're a cow! Give me some milk and just go home!'" is exactly the same kind of thing Robyn's been singing for twenty-five years in his own material:

"Something Shakespeare never said was 'You've got to be kidding.'"
"When you gonna see that love is dumb as well as blind?"
"She was sinister but she was happy, with a cheery smile and a poison blowpipe."
"And in the end, the color pink will do more damage than you think."
"And in a globe of frogs, a soul appears: the Word made flesh."

I'm very happy to know that my hero has a hero of his own, and that having one hasn't stifled his creativity one bit. Quite the opposite. It gives me some hope that I can continue to listen fondly to my twenty-odd Hitchcock CDs and still have a chance to write something that might hold up in comparison to "Cynthia Mask."

And if I ever do, you'll be the first to know.
9:03 PM

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