Caught in the nightmare of war, the author as a young boy seeks refuge in music

It wasn’t some intention you wanted to attain or follow, as if it was a “calling”, or a premeditated goal, to grasp hold of something and make it yours. It was rather in the way of instinctive guesswork, which was its main characteristic and appeal, not like wanting something new or pushing the limit of what was known to you. But it’s an incremental thing happening at random and between these events, other things happened in life and intervened to broaden the geographical perception of the world, in terms of geopolitics, in terms of foreigner culture, in terms of ways of going about and living, and you had to compartmentalize all the aspects to analyze parts and components to get the bigger picture; the world in its entirety, its divisions, its politics and historic implications, its cultural aspects, its philosophy, to be able to compare and understand, if you thought that it was your aim to understand.

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Things happen, and suddenly you thought that it just happened only for you, and there was a predestined symbiosis between yourself and the development of ideas.

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My father would let me drive his Mercedes on Sunday morning going to Tripoli, to supervise and teach me because I was 15 years old, to give advice on how to behave, steer and control the speed when overtaking trucks from Jounieh, along the Casino du Liban, Jbeil, Byblos and Batroun, or not to change gears on a curve or use the brakes suddenly on a wet asphalt.

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I would tune in to Radio Blue on the FM station, with foreign songs on the waves, put on my sunglasses and drive at a moderate clip following the contour of the coastline, all the way to Tripoli. My known world would slowly expand enclosing orange groves, the olive trees, the fig orchards on the arid land, stunted by the winter sea gales and the summer’s lack of water. My father would make me stop by the vendors along the road to buy a wicker basket of those honey dipped white figs, and give me one to taste, asking me if I knew why they tasted so sweet?

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"It’s because they are not irrigated regularly, it’s because they lack water." He would say, as if passing a piece of wisdom to a younger generation. He would talk about why the seagulls hovered at the embouchure of Nahr Ibrahim, where in antiquity, Adonis, the Babylonian God was killed by a wild boar. “It’s because the water is brackish, and the fish of the river water get dizzy when they come into contact with salty water, the seagulls know it when the two water mix and they plunge to pick up the fish”, he would say.

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This was the heyday of the natural environment, when people had no interest in living in tall buildings. Everything was at eye level, the sea, the sun, the sky, and you didn’t have to look for it, it was there all the time, like you were on a holiday, indefinitely.

Life was beautiful, you could look in every direction and never see a parking lot, the sea and sky were of the sweetest blue where a breeze from heaven rippled, and one Sunday there came on the waves the song of Me and Bobby McGee for the first time, and I thought “waah, who was that?”

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Serendipity, driving between roadblocks and armed men on the coastal road to Tripoli, listening to Janis Joplin, during the war. This is how it happened, song after song, book after book, year after year.

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It was a reaction to the immediate environment, to what we knew of the world in general, which was what we heard in songs mostly, like the Yellow Submarine, Angie, early Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green, Seniõr, or Idiot Wind, songs that shaped our perception of what western songwriters thought of the world.

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When the world gave us the war, it suddenly materialized when Lennon said “Give peace a chance, or War is over if you want it”, but in Lebanon it was not over and it looked like it will never be over, and so we didn’t really wonder why people killed each other when we met the Simonian School of Commerce near the port of Beirut, we always thought we were different and had eccentric tastes, Harry and me, when we met in his room on the third floor flat in Zalka, to play all those records.

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It was an extraneous event, like it was not an immediate concern, because it had no artistic or definitive answer, it was open ended in a way, and it didn’t solve our problems, which was how to make sense of the world as it was, without a war, not to bequeath hatred to others, not to see violence and pretend it didn't exist. It was extraneous because it didn’t impact our consciousness, or haunt us and wake us up in the middle of the night, in the middle of a dream, sweating, as if we were   guilty of murder.We would hear them driving fast in their jeeps, honking and shouting to clear the crossroads of other cars as if there was an emergency, and they would fire their automatic guns as they drove by. Sometimes we would hear echoes of rockets exploding, and the electricity would be cut automatically. Black out all of a sudden, as if someone had pulled the plug. Then a neighbor in the building would start a generator, near the garage by the pine trees, and we had to close the windows if we wanted to hear the songs without the motor reverberations and the gasoline smell.

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We found three salients as bulwarks in the enemy’s territory to stand against these events, fast driven jeeps and sporadic gun shots.  

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The Concert for Bangladesh was first, Woodstock second, and thirdly The Last Waltz.The Bangladesh concert was before Woodstock because Harry was an unconditional fan of Georges, even if Woodstock was chronically antecedent to it.

The Last Waltz was my contribution because I had bought the triple cassette in Antwerp when I worked as a mechanic on the Sea Star cargo ship in ‘82, the year the Israeli army invaded Southern Lebanon. The ship was carrying frozen meat that stopped over in Alexandria, Egypt, where I also bought the Super Session record with Cooper, Bloomfield and Stills, on a dark street, in a dark shop.

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I saw standing near the racks in the meek light bulb inside, perhaps 30 watts, the form of a man adumbrate in a doorway of what was perhaps a ground floor flat, the smell of wood and the desert on a hot 40 degrees night, feel the dampness held in the stone walls like that of a basement.

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These were the three watchtowers around which we dug the moat. In between, there was of course all the names of the guests that complemented the scene, and they were more or less the same, it was like the same big band from all over the world coming together with the same metaphysical want to find an answer or a meaning to life, each according to his capabilities and virtuosity, in writing lyrics or playing guitar. There was Blowing in the Wind, Masters of War, Music from Big Pink, Dark Side of The Moon. 

The Pink Floyd was always in the background because there was a record shop near Harry’s place named after the band, a physical presence which made us feel nearer to the band every time we drove past, and the aficionado owner Georges Abu Jawdé has replaced Pink with Disco, Disco Floyd, that being the period of Boney M and Donna Summer, but inside he had the poster of Live at Pompeii on the wall, with Nick in a sleeveless cotton flannel on the drums, sporting a mustache, a horseshoe mustache as it was known then.

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It was like the unconscious shaping of the moral character of the time in which we were, and individually, we had our own preferences. Individually as opposed to the collective idea of reality in which people in general wanted to believe, or perhaps were incapable of choosing other ways, and to which we were adamantly opposed and therefore admitted no compromise. It was a sine qua non condition to never enter into a negotiation to question the choices we made, and this was asserted every waking hour. Our only reaction to it was “Niet”, and we didn't indulge in protracted discussions of the Cold War between East and West, right and left, liberal or social.

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These choices by themselves were like bubbles existing in their own metaphysical microcosm, under the umbrella of dissent and opposition, to reverberate against a nihilistic tendency of the material society, one ugly facet of which was at play in the ongoing war and the ramifications we were the spectators of, living and breathing the waste and destruction on a daily basis, year after year.

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We had our own choices. Myself I liked the story-like songs such Visions of Joanna or Queen of the Eskimo. The succession of the lines was like a vista opening into a metaphorical space and gave me a leeway to get out of the existing conditions. It was more like a struggle finding an exit from an impasse, a glimmer at the end however far it was in the future, a reason to face the routine of nothingness as our world shrunk by the day and our imagination traveled.

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It was not a famine, or a genocidal war that the country was involved in such as in Gaza today, broadcast live on TV all over the world. It was a quiet war, with bursts from time to time, of rockets exploding here and there. The flare of explosions was visible at night from our roof, as the building dominated the surrounding neighborhood, and we would sit in silence by the parapet wall and hear the echo of explosions traveling in deep muffled thuds through the distance on the sea.

We had food, electricity, and everything was in ample supply, during the war years. We could go to the movies, restaurants, drink in cafes, life was as usual but was interrupted as if by an invisible hand forcing separation and enmity between people who lived together in peace.

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We could go to record stores and buy these vinyls even though we were a thousand miles away.

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Harry was a Beatles fan, through and through. There was no discussion about it, and I understood why by identifying the anger of John Lennon in some songs and thought that's what Harry liked as well. The day he played Don't Let Me Down, the rooftop concert version was like a stick of dynamite exploding in his third floor room at Zalka. Lennon's facial expression, if you were not attentive when he sings the line “it's a love that lasts forever”, was not a smile but a smirk at the establishment, showing his teeth like an enraged creature who wanted to stay polite, a nonconformist anger edge naturally coming from within accompanied by the light touch of Billy Preston's trickling keyboard notes. It was real anger I never noticed in Dylan except on Idiot Wind Live on the Rolling Thunder Review Tour when Bob had white paint mask on his face and a bandanna wrapped around his head.

Harry had a three feet poster of the Fab Four framed on the salon’s dinner table above ivory statuettes and stuffed lizards his father brought from Nigeria when they lived there. He had pictures of himself on the famous Penny Lane and the zebra walk from his visits to London, and received magazines from England to keep abreast of the latest trends of the new bands like the Boomtown Rats and Duran Duran.

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From our ensconced environment the songs were the window to the world we looked at from another continent, the Middle East, as if we were lagging behind and could never be part of, because of wars, kidnappings and blowing up of airplanes, a violence we had no affinity with, but it was our homeland with its oriental folklore, the songs of Fairuz and Sabah, the true voice of the Levant celebrating the Mediterranean hospitality and la joie de vivre.

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We wanted to go away because we wanted a physical separation from the war, because there were no limits or frontiers when the horizon said “come to me”.