Here is a brief followup to my recent post on Jon Anderson of the band Yes, and Divine Mother Audrey:

Thanks to Frank Weathers at Patheos for linking to R&T in this post on Mr. Anderson’s use of the work of the influential Anglican/Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton for the song “Hold On”.

Mr. Weathers also links to this 2011 interview, in which some religious matters are touched upon. Mr. Anderson says in the interview that “I think if you let go of preconceived ideas you’ll find everything in this life. For me my understanding is God is all that is, God is everything, all that is, and your true God is within and that’s the power that you have as a human being. This life is for us to discover the divine within. And that’s really the key to life in many ways for me.” That reminded me a lot of what he said to me on the train in 2004, when I told him I was a theologian: “It’s all true! Buddha is Christ, Krishna is Christ, Moses is Christ, Muhammad is Christ.”

Here’s the song “Hold On”, inspired apparently by a line from Chesterton performed in 1984. Is transcendent rock music compromised or elevated when everyone in the band takes such fashion risks? My answer: both.

Tommy Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

This brief note is a followup to my recent post on Mata Amritanandamayi and her influence on rock musicians J Mascis and Jason Becker.

I vividly remember Jon Anderson of Yes introducing his “spiritual teacher,” Divine Mother Audrey Kitagawa, at a show in Madison Square Garden in New York City in May 2004. (I have blogged here at R&T about meeting band members on the train the next day.)

Toward the end of the show, Mr. Anderson invited Divine Mother Audrey up to the stage.

High-quality video of the moment is here, but I cannot embed it in this post. A lower-quality version is here:

Lots of things are happening here. I think the band must be a little surprised. I think the band was not fully briefed, but then again they must expect this from Mr. Anderson. You can see bassist Chris Squire walk across the front of the kit, maybe going to sit offstage once he realizes that this is going to take awhile. (The next day, I helped him carry his bags off the train onto the platform at South Station in Boston.) You can hear keyboardist Rick Wakeman in the background trying to keep up with the Divine Mother, and he does an admirable job by starting off with mood music, and then trying to urge her along by offering an assertive orchestral swell when he thinks she is getting to the end of her speech.

The band members must know that they were in danger of losing the audience — which they were. You can hear the catcalls, impatient yelps, and random “WTF” sorts of expressions as she leads the crowd wait —- did I mention that this was happening in front of tens of thousands of fans at Madison Square Garden?!

So she led us through the Gayatri Mantra — a very interesting excerpt, with an important history, from the Rig Veda. (See the wiki discussion here.) She gets a fair amount of the fans to chant “Om” and “Peace” at the end. And then she announces, while Mr. (more…)

This post is part two of my reflection on Jon Anderson and Vangelis’ song “He is Sailing.” Part one is here.

Immediately the song begins with syncopated synthesized sounds that evoke a plucked guitar atop a familiar high-hat-snare rock beat, just a hair removed from a too-clean-and-shiny disco sheen. Beneath it trowls the fruity fatness of 80s synth-bass sounds, which are mildly bombastic and evoke a certain gravitas and lightness all at once. This is the sound, in that era, of “new age” music, or the kind of “space music” that some US radio listeners will recognize from the show “Hearts of Space” (which I listened to regularly on public radio in Kansas City in the 1980s and ’90s).

The evoking of that atmosphere is not incidental to the potential theological significance of the song. Indeed, the cultivation of a particularly “spacious” sonic atmosphere all the way through will prove crucial to the way the song becomes available to a theologically-interested hearing. “Space music” is a kind of pop-orchestral synthesized music that typically aims to represent — and induce — a feeling for the whole, or perhaps an intuition of the inescapability of the whole-as-promised, a taste for the grandeur of a beyond that calls us out of all the forms of gravity that bind us. A percussive and melodic drone of electronic pulse and tone invites the listener there. (There are certainly no drum or guitar solos in this musico-spiritual world.)

Why do these sounds clearly work this way for some hearers, while others find these sounds merely tedious, trite, or otherwise forgettable? Is it the heritage, in the Western tradition, of orchestral music and romanticism in service of the cultivation of awareness of the sublime, a heritage variously appropriated today? Or is it that music somehow expresses religious sensibilities, like those charted by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, that some people simply seem to have while others just as simply do not?

We have not yet gotten to the lyrics, but I will try to turn to those in the next installment.

Tommy Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

“I don’t care if it['s] about religion or not, the song is awesome!”

“We played this at my father’s funeral. It uplifted my soul. Amazing song.”

“Simply pure and beautiful.”

“A match of sound, made in heaven for us mortals to enjoy – Jon and Vangelis.”

These are some of the comments on the YouTube page for the song “He is Sailing,” recorded by Jon Anderson and Vangelis for their album Private Collection (Polydor, 1983). Jon Anderson was for several decades the lead singer of the famous rock band Yes, and Vangelis is a world-renowned keyboardist and electronic musician. In the 1970s and 1980s they collaborated several times.

When I was in college (1987-1992), I discovered Private Collection, as part of a general discovery in depth of Anderson and Yes. This was probably through a recommendation made by someone on an email list (“listserv”) for the rock band Rush, which I started reading soon after I got on the Internet in 1988. Lots of Rush fans were also Yes fans, and we often emailed recommendations to each other and traded tapes and videos through the mail. It is also possible that I found this album by browsing at local record stores in 1988-89 in midtown Kansas City, as I was a student at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Somehow I found this record (in cassette form, no doubt), and listened to it on my Walkman. When “He is Sailing” came on, I was fairly deep in the throes of a conflicted but nevertheless evangelical Catholicism, of the film The Razor’s Edge (the Bill Murray version), of various relationships with women, of playing college rock band music, and of overall religious questions and questions about religion that seemed to not only make for the weave of my everyday life but also to loom large at various big turns in my life. Into this “normal,” if particular, late-adolescent maelstrom came Anderson+Vangelis’ “He is Sailing,” a tune that, like many other songs by these musicians, had cosmic aspirations while hinting at revelatory origins. Here is the song:

I have now had 23 years with this song, and also met Anderson on a train several years ago and saw him perform solo, and so have had both time and motivation to let it steep theologically. I am not sure how well I can render that steeping in blog posts, but I want to try, if necessarily briefly and somewhat superficially. I’ll pick it up in a followup post.

Tommy Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

Tonight I walked into Times Square through a pleasant sea of people and warm spring air to BB King’s music club, where I went to see Jon Anderson in concert. Anderson was the singer of Yes, a legendary and influential English art-rock band.

Showing up a few minutes before start time, I was surprised to find the club utterly packed, and had to settle for squeezing into a space next to the bar at the back of the club, leaning left and right around shoulders and heads to glimpse Anderson 100 feet or so away, and sometimes had to content myself with watching one of the two video screens to either side of the stage.

The crowd was what you might expect of those who are wild about music that began as 1970s progressive rock: heavily male and white, 40- and 50-somethings. (I sometimes feel like Yes and Rush concerts are reunions for guys and some women who all grew up under the same psycho-social roof in the 70s and 80s: a little nerdy, a little brainy, not at home in the prevailing social orders of youth but much more at home in the world of fantasy and nature mysticism. And when I see guys with jean jackets or still proudly sporting mullets, I think to myself, “You are my people!”)

Such associations are far from incidental to the comprehension of a Jon Anderson concert, because so much of the evening had to do with recollection of music that spoke from the times of fans’ adolescence or young adulthood, framing those years in a now-pantheistic, now-panentheistic, wash of hermetic images that fit multiple moods and frames of mind while also referring them to a mysterious beyond, sung by the elfin Anderson and his unusual pop voice (which sounded in warmly clear and generous shape tonight).

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I am very late to this video party, but by reading the year-end New York Times account of memorable phrases in the USA from 2010, I came across this one: “double rainbow.” Did I miss something? It turns out I missed, in a theological and also in a mystical sense, everything. For the “double rainbow” in question is a remarkable video made by a man who lives in Yosemite and was overwhelmed by a rainbow that he saw outside his house.

This clip, which attracted many millions of views, has attracted a fair number of makers-of-fun, skeptics, and killjoys. But color me utterly captivated. If we take it as what it presents itself, as a man overwhelmed by a rainbow, nay not even a single rainbow, but something I had never even considered possible to observe, a double rainbow, then this guy seems to be having something close to what many of our religious traditions would call a mystical experience. How could I have missed it — especially teaching undergraduates this semester? Why did they keep this pearl of great price buried? Take a look for yourself, and notice the variety of ways in which he allows himself to be overwhelmed by the suchness of the rainbows having residence not only in his landscape, but in his world, in his existence, his feeling of presence-to these rainbows. It is enough to remind one of the famous phenomenologist of religion, Mircea Eliade, for whom the encounter with “this rock, this tree, this city, this mountain” — in the words of Eliade’s friendly interpreter, theologian David Tracy (in Dialogue with the Other, page 66) — are elected by the sacred to disclose “the sacred time of the origins of the cosmos.” We are in the presence of a “disclosure of power,” argues Tracy (in one of the remaining modes of Catholic experience and argument which I can defend and with which I — and clearly many others — can associate myself and ourselves). Here is the now-famous video:

And when this fellow, “Bear” Vasquez, whose mystical experience became a media event, appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel show, he started off winningly, with humor and a rare public relativization of sexual and drug experience in favor of a nature mysticism:

But while as R&T readers know, I have a wide latitude for the theological calibration of profane experience,

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