Yeah, Talk To Me Of Mendocino-The
Voices From Up North The Music Of The McGarrigle Sisters
By Zack James
“Jesus, Seth did you hear that Kate
McGarrigle of the McGarrigle Sisters had passed away,” lamented Jack Callahan
to his old-time high school friend and fellow folk music aficionado Seth Garth.
Seth replied that since he no longer wrote music reviews for anybody, hadn’t
since The Eye the newspaper that he
had written for had gone out of business that he did not always keep up with
the back stories of those who were still left standing in the ever decreasing
old-time folk performer world. Jack’s sad information though got Seth to
thinking about the times back in the early 1970s when he and Jack had gone out
to Saratoga Springs to visit a cousin of Sam Lowell, also an old time friend
and part-time folk aficionado, who thenn lived in nearby Ballston Spa and had
invited them to go to the Caffe Lena to listen to a couple of young gals from
Canada who would make the angels weep for their inadequate singing voices. In
those days Seth was free-lancing for The
Eye so he had called Oakland, California where the newspaper then had its
offices to see if they would spring for a review, a paid review of the
performance. They agreed although there was the usual haggling over money and
whether they would actually use the sketch.
That night after Lena’s introduction (the
late Lena the legendary, now legendary, owner and operator of the coffeehouse)
the McGarrigle Sisters did two sparking sets, a few songs in French, since they
were steeped in the increasing bilingual Quebec culture which was demanding
French language equality in the heated nationalist period when many were
looking for independence. They also did a wonderful cover Heart Like A Wheel, a song that Linda Rhonstadt had had a hit with.
But the song that Seth found his hook on, the one that he would center on to
insure that his piece was published (and paid for) was Talk To Me Of
Mendocino, their homage to Lena who desired to go out and see the place along
the rocky ledges of Northern California, land’s end. (Whether Lena ever went
out there subsequently Seth was not sure but he rather thought not since she
was totally committed to the club in those days, was something of a homebody
and perhaps wanted the memory more than the actual experience.)
Seth mentioned to Jack that night that
the sisters had evoked just the right mournful tone in presenting the song, and
recalled how majestic they had thought they place was when they and their wives
(Seth’s first wife, first of three, all
failed, Martha, and Jack’s one and only Chrissy) had gone from San Francisco up
the Pacific Coast Highway and basically stumbled on the place with its sheer
rock formations, fierce ocean waves beating against the rocks and the then
quaint and unadorned town that sat just off the rocks. So Seth was able to
close his eyes and envision travelling from the overheated, over-crowded
over-wrought East and pinpoint a map to head out West “where the rocks remain.”
The rocks, the ocean, our mother and some solitude in world gone mad with
having to run away from what it had built. Seth was sorry that he had not been
back there in many years. Hoped that Lena did get to go out to the rocks and
glad that Kate and Anna McGarrigle spoke of the place, made it immortal in
song.
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