This is ... a piece I wrote on Mark a few months after his death [in January, 1993 -ed]. It was part catharsis, part for his family, part in response to some comments I'd heard on his music, part for a book in progress, and part for an article in IMAGE...
I JUST WANNA BE HEALED: The Music and Message of Mark Heard
In August of 1992, Mark Heard passed away. A few weeks earlier--within a month of the release his album Sattelite Sky, one of the highlights of an already brilliant recording career--he had suffered a heart attack after a late night concert in Chicago. Days later, a second more severe heart attack left him in a coma from which he never recovered. But Mark's integrity both as a human being and an artist, his honesty, his faith, and his profound insights into human nature provided for a collection of moving, insightful songs that have touched many lives and will not be forgotten for a long time--songs that will certainly withstand the winds of time.
I get lonely sometimes / It's not your fault
I'm a man who follows his own tracks until he's lost
I'll keep on going round and round until I'm found...
It's not you. I'll be okay I'm just a jerk is all
It's alright. It's just my foolishness. It's not your fault.
And finally and perhaps most poignantly, he saw himself simply as "a broken
man":
Sun comes up like a yellow bus tracking over oceans of dust
One day's miracle is another day's rut
But day keeps breaking like it always does
I'm not a loner / No sack-cloth and ashes
Just a heart on a tether with a vagabond mind
But this will be a broken man come shivering out of his wintertime
But, though Mark may have seen himself as a broken man--a vision of Self
that we all must in some way share if we are truly honest--to those who
have had the chance and privelege to hear his music, Mark Heard will be
remembered as one of the most profound and brilliant songwriters to have
walked the dust of this earth.
There were many varied sides to Mark's music, but his personal and artistic integrity was always a defining aspect. A consequence of that integrity is that he refused to compromise either his "message" or his art for the sake of popularity or commercial success. And so, unfortunately, he never achieved the quantity of either that his talent deserved; there are many who have never heard the name Mark Heard. Yet those who have taken the time listen to his music have rarely come away unmoved. For not only did he live a life of integrity himself, but his songs challenged others to strive for that same integrity and honesty themselves. Honesty toward others. Honesty toward themselves. And honesty toward God. One of the dominant themes of his albums was his condemnation of "plastic halo" Christianity: the idea that Christians should always be smiling and happy, that they were not allowed to feel grief or tears. Or worse, that they must always be stoic and never even know true laughter.
These plastic halos / They seem so out of place
Behind the mask lurks a scarred and fragile face
We lie so spiritually / Familiar smiles displayed
/ Misleading masquerade.
We hide our pain / We try to laugh
Fools to think our tears would provoke holy wrath
Heard also criticized the self-righteous pride that can go hand-in-hand
with the aching but hidden hearts that accompany such plastic halo
thinking.
But we believe so well / Don't we tell ourselves
Don't we take exclusive pride that we abide so far from Hell
We might laugh together / But don't we cry alone
For the ashes and the dust we've swept beneath His holy throne.
Of course this is not a phenomenon of Christiandom alone, but rather as
Mark points out it is a sad reflection of our whole modern western culture.
When something shakes your fiber / And stirs your deepest soul
Just learn to be a liar / Hold back your tears
Hold back your tears like you've been told
Remember the way life's supposed to be
A frank and honest face could well destroy society.
Mark's integrity and honesty also caused him to take seriously the troubles
of the world around him: to refuse to ignore the falleness of humanity. For
Mark, this went far behind the "token social consciousness" that
characterizes most of popular music. His music was characterized by a
deeper concern for the "festering waste and all of the wounds that we see
bleed." He did not want to be blind, but to remove blinders. To have the
scales knocked from his eyes. And to knock the scales from the eyes of
others. To really see the Victims of the Age that we live in. He was
disturbed by local "playground with the padlock and chains on the gate."
And even more disturbed that we as a society (and perhaps as a church)
refuse to see these things, but choose instead to be "lost on purpose."
Of course at times that made his music disturbing to listen to. Disturbing
in the sense that it challenged us all a little more than we like to be
challenged. It would be much easier if those troubled souls out there
remained simply "faces in cabs":
All the hearts that are going to break today
All the lovers who won't come home tonight
Nobody feels the dynamite / They're just faces in cabs.
Mark's honesty also led him to write some of the best love songs of the
past decade, though his "love songs" were sometimes hard to recognize as
such. For Mark Heard did not deny the fallenness of the world, or the
wickedness that surrounds us. When he sang of love, it was not a sappy or
sticky-sweet romantic feeling that is ignorant of the world's troubles, but
a deeper love that persists despite it.
Just when I can see light at the end of my pipe dreams
Something's not the way it seems. It can pull me under overnight
And all the dreamers in this town wake up to lay their sweet dreams down
Everything is alright / That's the way it goes babe
Everything is alright / We'll cope and keep close babe.
Indeed, in a song that could have come directly from I Corinthians 13
(though it used little of the same language) he personified Love herself:
Scarlet is the color of her heart against the night
Prism of her innocence fracturing the light
She will take her stairwell down to dark and heartless streets
And spend her season singing songs to infidels and thieves
Love is so blind. It's so blind.
Even the love of Mark's "romantic" songs is a love that persists not only
despite the troubles without, but also despite the troubles within. And a
love that is not proud, but quick to laugh at self:
You can't recall me on my own and you are amused
But this knot is not a noose / I love her
/ I'd do it all again / Don't pity me
Yet interestingly enough, when Mark praised his own wife in song, it was
not so much for her knowledge but for her innocence and simplicity:
Say she must be mad / The girl has got no nerves.
She will throw no stones / Knows no dirty words.
She will stumble on something good to say
In the darkest scene of your darkest day.
She don't feel no threat in living
Asks if I've got a kiss to give her
She dont' have a clue but she's mine.
In addition to Mark's challenging integrity, his keen insight into human
nature also stands out in his lyrics. Perhaps his honesty allowed him to
see more clearly than most of us. Or perhaps he just cared enough to
listen more. Either way, the characters in his story-songs are profoundly
real.
Billy is a man who let care slip from his clutch
He stares with the eyes of a man who's seen too much
His capital's gone. His dues are unpaid.
His heart is surrounded with a barricade.
He knows you don't need to be conscientious at a masquerade.
And he can't see the light.
Keeps his eyes shut tight
In search of a blissfull ignorance.
And he can't find peace in a society
That would reward him for his nonchalance.
These songs often leave you reeling with the thought: I know that person.
Or perhaps: that's me.
Miss Misfortune sails down the rails with her
brow to the window pane
The scenery that she sees in her soul doesn't
match with the blur in he brain
She can trace the tricks of the tracks like
the ribs of a rattlesnake
'Til all her pastel chalk lines of fact are erased
like a schoolgirl's slate
She is reading her own tatoos
Her diary is the evening news
She can't give a damn on cue
On a freight train to nowhere
If she were not scorching the rails with
the haste of a bolting ghost
There would be no reason to fear the
death-rattle in the engine's throat
She could call for the mini-cams or take
up a gun or be poltically correct
But that kind of justice still preys on the
ones with the stones hung around their necks.
And his insights go behind individual human nature to culture as a whole.
His biting criticisms of modern western culture match the very best of Bob
Dylan or Bruce Cockburn.
Babe they say that this world is better than the last
I wouldn't know--I have no way of living in the past
Where once there was a garden the streets have overflowed
From the Golden Gates to the East Bloc states you can
hear creation grown
If there is a shining beacon out across the amber waves
it lies hidden on the teeming shores beneath the burned-out Chevrolets
And the eyes that scattered high-rise hopes across the fruited plains
see TVs glowing in the projects through the greasy window panes
However with all the songs that Mark Heard wrote in his nearly twenty years
as a recording artist, and all the subjects that his lyrics touched upon,
the one central theme that most dominated his work was a deep sense of
longing. A longing for the end of this darkness and the Light that will
follow.
When righteousness almost prevails but loses out to what sells well
Life goes on but numbness takes the bitterness from the taste of hell.
When years of error leave a trail but still we walk it meaning well
I know it will not be like this forever.
Oh. It will not always be this way.
Oh. This curtain will be torn away.
Perhaps this longing came from Mark's deep awareness of the suffering
around him. Or perhaps it was intensified by the pain that he himself
felt. During his career he was burned by the music industry, by churches,
by magazines. His last (and perhaps best) three albums were almost never
recorded because he had given up on the whole mess and said he'd never
record again. Mark suffered the pain of rejection not only from much of
the secular world because it did not like his faith, but from much of
Christiandom because he refused to compromise his artistic integrity, his
personal honesty, and his vision; he refused to couch his message in a
language acceptable to a narrow little sub-culture. Mark consistently
refused to be confined or boxed-in. He desired something better.
There's an oasis in the heat of the day.
There's a fire in the chill of night.
A turnabout in circumstance makes each a hell in its own right.
I've been boxed-in in the lowlands, in the canyons that think.
I've been pushed to the brink of the precipice and dared not to blink
I've been confounded by the whirlwinds of what-ifs and dreams
I've been burned by the turning of the wind back upon my own flames
Knock the scales from my eyes
Knock the words from my lungs
I want to cry out.
It's on the tip of my tongue.
But most fundamentally his longing seemed simply to be the result of his
deep Christian faith, a faith that there would indeed be a World where pain
would come to an end.
Every now and then I seem to dream those dreams
Where the orphans suckle and the slaves go free
Touching that miraculous circumstance
Where the blind ones see and the dry bones dance
And I long long long for a world without end
The kind of thing that I ain't never seen but in my dreams.
Mark Heard did appreciate the beauty and joys of this world, and the love
of his wife and child. This is clear in the penning of some of the simpler
"folk" songs like "Appalachian Melody" and "Moonflower" from his earlier
days, as well as in his many love songs. But it is also clear even in his
later works like "Go Ask the Dead Man" or "All Too Soon", when the longing
aspect of his writing was more dominant.
Moon on the rise. Gold ball of bees wax drifting through space.
Wind in my eyes. Caught in a draft of time and place.
No crowds. Moon and me only.
Surf pounds. I'm suddenly lonely.
All too soon, summer is over...
I love this life drifitng through my hands.
Indeed Mark was critical of the attitude that one should spend their whole
life dreaming about Heaven to the extent that they cared nothing about
earth. Mark's longing came not from caring too little about the humanity
around him, but from caring too much. He was a flame that burned brightly
and intently.
Less than a year before Mark himself died, he sat at the bed of his dying
father and watched him suffer in excruciating agony. As I reflect on
Mark's death, the words that he penned about his father continue to ring in
my ears.
I saw the city at its tortured worst
And you were outside the walls there
You were relieved of a lifelong thirst
I was dry at the fountain.
I knew that you could see my shame
But you were eyeless and sparing
I awoke when you called my name
I felt the curtain tearing.
Treasure of this broken land
Parched earth give up your captive ones
Waiting wind of Gabriel
Blow soon upon the hollow bones.
We do indeed live in a broken land. And Mark was a priceless treasure.
For him the curtain was torn away earlier than any of us expected, and much
earlier than any of us wished. We will grieve his passing for a long time.
But we can rejoice for him. His captivity has ended. The parched earth
has given him up. He has finally been relieved of his own lifelong thirst.
He has gone to join both his father and his Father. And somewhere the dry
bones are dancing in the wind of Gabriel that waits for us all.
Copyright 1997 Miles O'Neal, Austin, TX. All rights reserved.
Photo Copyright 1992 by ?. All
rights reserved. Used with permission.
Actual quotes belong to the quoted individuals.
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