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August 17, 2022
Ray Robertson's Playlist for His Novel "Estates Large and Small"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Ray Robertson's novel Estates Large and Small is both poignant and heartwarming.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
"This wry novel follows a struggling used bookstore owner and Grateful Dead fan as he grudgingly moves his store online, decides to teach himself two millenniums of Western philosophy, falls in love and attempts to pin down the point of life."
In his own words, here is Ray Robertson's Book Notes music playlist for his novel Estates Large and Small:
In a novel that features a Grateful Dead-besotted protagonist, a Grateful Dead-heavy soundtrack is inevitable. The movie opens with the titles and the soundtrack’s first number, the slow-building, faintly ominous, but ultimately redemptive “Terrapin Station”.
1. Grateful Dead, “Terrapin Station”
Jerry Garcia famously told an interviewer that the Grateful Dead’s music was like licorice: listeners tended to either hate it or really, really like it. “Terrapin Station” is my green licorice. I liked licorice—I even liked black licorice, although, as with most people, I preferred red—but green licorice? Green licorice was akin to roasted chicken potato chips or vanilla Coke—why? Why mess with a good thing? As stylistically wide-ranging and musically and lyrically out there as the Dead had ever gotten—the deep space slow dance of “Dark Star”, the brocaded lyrics of “China Cat Sunflower”—they’d never gone prog. (although “The Eleven” might have come close). Progressive rock was ostentatious, orchestral-tinged rock music with sub-Tolkienian lyrics, and what could be less aw-shucks Dead than the laughable pomposity of Emerson, Lake and Palmer or Atom Heat Mother-era Pink Floyd? Yet here was “Terrapin Station”, almost imperial in its slow-building, chorus-less musical construction wedded to words that, even for Robert Hunter at his most profligate, were more than a little rococo ripe, what with its tale-of-yore tone and references to lions’ dens and ladies with fans. Green licorice. Yech. Who needs it?
I do—you do—we do. Chemically-created jade junk food should be consumed in small portions, but if it exists, why not give it a try and attempt to enjoy whatever pleasures, however less than perfectly nourishing, it provides? As William Blake wrote—I’m quoting from memory, I might be a bit off—The pride of the peacock is the glory of God and so is green licorice.
Suggested version: 1/22/78, Eugene, Oregon
2. Grateful Dead, “Scarlet Begonias”
Bright and bouncy and brimming full of the kind of anticipation and ardour that accompanies any new love affair, “Scarlet Begonias” presages Phil’s meeting Caroline, an ex-postal worker who’s contacted him because she wants to sell her home library. “Once in a while you can get shown the light/In the strangest places if you look at it right.”
Suggested version: 10/17/74, San Francisco, California
3. Bill Evans, “Jade Visions”
Caroline is a jazz buff and Phil isn’t, but when they have their first “date”, at her house, and this comes on the radio during dinner, he’s intrigued. He thinks it sounds like it was made by a trio—just piano, bass, drums—and it isn’t jumpy jittery like a lot of jazz, which is one of the reasons he’s never been much of a fan. Jumpy jittery is the human condition—who needs their very own nervous soundtrack? But this is lively without being frenzied, energizing without being overpowering, open-ended but not anarchic.
Suggested version: Sunday at the Village Vanguard
4. Traffic, “Dear Mr. Fantasy”
The Lazy Rooster is Phil’s local. Heraclitus, he learns from his philosophy studies, said that the only constant in life is change, but Heraclitus never drank at the Lazy Rooster. On the weekends (which are to be avoided) the clientele is younger, hipper, and better off than it used to be, and there’s even a menu now that includes things like Cajun Bacon Caramel Corn and Liptauer with wasa crisps (whatever that is), but even after COVID-19 made it an outdoor patio-only proposition, at the right time of the night on the right day of the week it’s still the Lazy Rooster, a sort of Polish redneck bar where its customers’ tendency toward paralytic drunkenness and talking aggressively loud about things they don’t understand are among its principal charms. He hadn’t planned on dropping by, but it’s the perfect recipe for a quick cold one (or two): a warm night, nothing to do, and no one waiting for him at home.
Traffic is one of the few rock bands Phil’s been listening to since he decided he needed to cut down on his Dead consumption. He punches in the letters and numbers on the jukebox and out comes “Dear Mr. Fantasy”, Steve Winwood’s aching vocals and the marching, menacing rhythm setting the night’s tone.
Suggested version: Dear Mr. Fantasy
5. Lucinda Williams, “Drunken Angel”
Another late night at the Lazy Rooster, another slightly blurry jukebox selection. Dilapidation and self-destruction with as hummable a chorus as one could ever wish for.
Suggested version: Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
6. Grateful Dead, “Dark Star”
Any movie that is Grateful Dead-centric has to have a scene where “Dark Star” is heard. “Dark Star” is a long, long song and it’s all about jamming, deep space jamming. One of the band members once said that “Dark Star” never stops, it’s always playing somewhere in the universe, it’s just that sometimes the Dead tap into it for a little while, for twenty or twenty-five minutes or so on this or that particular night.
Phil’s favourite “Dark Star” is from a 12/20/69 gig at the Fillmore in San Francisco, and is otherworldly as only something cooked up in the hothouse of planet earth could be. And as Phil recounts to Caroline, no one had heard a second of it since those lucky people who were actually there that night on December 20th, 1969 heard it. Right up until 2012 when a woman who used to be married to someone who used to engineer for the Dead found two boxes of reel-to-reel tapes in her attic and returned them to the band for potential release. The music—that “Dark Star”, that perfect “Dark Star”—which everybody assumed was lost forever, a moment in time whose time had come and gone and was never going to exist again—was suddenly alive again. “It’s like,” Phil continues, “if life is just a bunch of moments, tapes like this one are stolen moments, the good stuff that time tries to cheat us out of that we somehow manage to experience and enjoy again anyway.”
Suggested version: 12/20/69, San Francisco, California
7. Miles Davis: “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down”
The more time Phil spends with Caroline, the more her taste in jazz broadens both his musical boundaries and his awareness of his life’s increasingly shrinking margins. Miles Davis’ sometimes abrasive but frequently transcendental jazz-rock experimentations in the late-'60s/early '70s first open up his ears, then, eventually, his consciousness.
Suggested version: Bitches Brew
8. Grateful Dead, “The Other One”/“Stella Blue”
A Grateful Dead concert is like life: nothing exists in isolation, everything is connected to everything else, the song that came before is quite often essential to the success of the one that comes after. Here, we begin with “The Other One,” which explodes—rages and rages, Garcia, by song’s end, punishing his guitar with uncharacteristic power chords again and again. By the standards of “The Other One’s” 69–74 heyday, when twenty-five-minute renditions weren’t at all unusual, this one is startlingly brief (just over seven minutes), but this only distills its brute power, accentuates the impotent fury embedded in Garcia’s brutal attack. What did he know—about himself, about the Grateful Dead, about the world—that the delighted audience that night didn’t? Who knows? Probably not even him. But his guitar did.
After the storm, the calm, “Stella Blue.” It’s everything that the previous song wasn’t: tender, sorrowful, otherworldly, and when Garcia’s final solo reaches lift off at around the six-minute mark, it sounds like his soul is crying, it sounds like it’s wailing. And it’s crying for all of us, for everybody listening, even if none of us, including him, have a clue why it’s all so terribly sad and yet still so incredibly fucking beautiful. That’s okay. His guitar does. And that’s enough.
Suggested version: 10/21/78, San Francisco, California
Roll credits . . .
Ray Robertson is the author of nine novels, four collections of non-fiction, and a book of poetry. His work has been translated into several languages. Born and raised in Chatham, Ontario, he lives in Toronto.
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