Mountain's 'Nantucket Sleighride (to Owen Coffin)'
Created | Updated Jul 31, 2003
Impressions of a Personal Search for its Meaning
The Web is just that.
One thread or another vibrates, seizes your attention. Follow it down, down, but be prepared for it to deliver ghastly sustenance.
The opening bars are profound and brooding. Deep within them, two chords echo. Baleful and enthralling, familiar and yet unrecognised. Soon you will realise that this is whale-song.
It is the Spring of 1975. This School has a Progressive Music Club. A Golden Youth proffers his new LP, and as always his approval briefly secures the devotion of shiftless acolytes. But today one track is different in style, poignant and mysterious among the monotonously strident guitars. A timid soul speculates about its meaning, and is mocked into silence. Nonetheless, the song will haunt him now.
Goodbye, little Robin-Marie
Don't try following me
Don't cry, little Robin-Marie
'Cause you know I'm coming home soon
It is the Summer of 2002. A colleague drives to a business meeting. The song on the CD stirs memories. Borrowed and taped, the lyric is pondered. Its ambiguity becomes a distraction, and the Web beckons. Nantucket Sleighride. The first sites referenced describe the Space Shuttle, but they merely parody an older notion. Another fragile craft dragged headlong into the blackness by monstrous energy.
My ship's leaving on a three-year tour
The next tide will take us from shore
Wind-laced, gathering sail and spray
On a search for the mighty sperm whale
The harpoons strike home, and the once-placid sea boils with blood and foam. Flukes thrash, the lines snap taut across the thwarts with a ferocity that might sever limbs. These tiny boats are torn away, dicing with oblivion until the leviathan's will is exhausted.
Starbuck's sharpening his harpoon
The black man is playing his tune
An old salt is sleeping his watch away
He'll be drunk again before noon
It is the February of 1821. The dessicated Whaleship Essex1 drifts eastward, all too slowly for the salvation of its wretched crew. A young Nantucketer draws the fateful lot. His remains will sustain his shipmates, one his friend and executioner, another his uncle and guardian. Through Coffin's dreadful sacrifice, Ramsdell and Pollard will survive. All that their rescuers will find of poor Owen is the bones they clutch and covet.
Three years, sailing on bended knee
We found no whales in the sea
Don't cry, little Robin-Marie
'Cause we'll be in sight of land soon
A hundred and fifty years have passed in an instant, and Felix Papparlardi grows in fame and veneration, the bassist and founder of Mountain, producer of the fabled Cream. Time rushes down onto the April of 1983. Somewhere in Manhattan's Upper East Side, Gail Collins squeezes the trigger and her husband is blown away. The courts will never satisfactorily establish her motive or intent. One songwriter goes to jail for the murder of the other.
Fly your willow branches
Wrap your body 'round my soul
Lay down your reeds and drums on my soft sheets...
Several years ago, the Golden Youth inherited his father's farm, and killed himself soon after it failed. The driver-colleague called just now, announcing his sacking, sudden and arbitrary. The timid soul is no longer young, but listens on, preoccupied, chastened.
...There are years behind us reaching
To a place where hearts are beating
And I know you're the last true love I'll ever meet
For this is an American story, pregnant with the enigma of that land and its people. The song will play forever, still weaving its tale, too terrible to forget.
