Cat Stevens “Father and Son” / Live at the Troubadour in LA (1970)
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(Below is from the Audiophile Style article by Josh Mound 3/15/22)
In March of 1968, Cat Stevens was diagnosed with tuberculosis and a collapsed lung. He spent the better part of the next year receiving treatment and recovering — first at the Harley Street Clinic in London, then at King Edward VII Sanatorium Hospital in the Sussex countryside.
Less than two years earlier, the eighteen-year-old Stevens rocketed to the top of the U.K. singles charts with his first single, “I Love My Dog.” Within a few months, two other, bigger singles followed. But in the midst of a personal — and, eventually, legal — conflict with manager/producer Mike Hurst over the direction of his sound, Stevens’s next few singles tanked, and his second full-length album didn’t make a dent in the charts in the U.K. or elsewhere. Even though he wrote his own songs, Stevens was seen as a teenybopper at a time when rock musicians were beginning to assert themselves as artists.
At King Edward, Stevens had to confront the possibility that at the age of 20 he was both washed-up and facing death. “To go from the show business environment and find you are in hospital, getting injections day in and day out, and people around you are dying, it certainly changes your perspective,” Stevens said later. “I got down to thinking about myself. It seemed almost as if I had my eyes shut.”
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While he was convalescing, Stevens’s friend sent him The Secret Path by Paul Brunton, billed as “a practical guide to the spiritual wisdom of the East.” As Stevens told Circus magazine in 1971, “I read that book once and thought about it, and I used it to meditate. There was nowhere that was quiet enough in the hospital. I had to creep out and there was this cow shed with a couch in it. I used to go in there and lock the door, then sit down and think. It was completely silent and that is where it came to me. It just happened. You reach that moment and you see it and say, ‘Of course!’ Then everything sprung from there like light.”
The Secret Path was the beginning of a transformation in Stevens that would culminate in his conversion to Islam in 1977 and subsequent retirement from the music industry.
“My convalescence gave me a chance to grow and develop, to grow a beard, which I didn’t have before. And symbolically that was to change my identity,” he told Classic Rock magazine in 2004. “When I came back, I found a whole new group of friends who understood me for being more than just a pop singer.”
The most significant effect of Stevens’s tuberculous respite and spiritual awakening was a reconsideration of the direction of both his life and his music. “Getting sick completely changed the course of my life,” he told Guitar World in 2021:
“I mean, up to that point, I’d been living kind of a shell of a life. I had not really developed an identity. And I’d been kept in my [early career signature-garb of] tuxedos, if you like, by the business and the agencies around me at the time. And so this was a chance for me to break free of the image and to kind of find myself. And I was looking very, very deeply into my psyche of who I was … and that spiritual exploration began in the hospital. But the illness didn’t stop me [writing] and, in fact, I started writing very soon.”
The new, acoustic songs penned by Stevens were in some ways simpler musically than his previous work. “I decided to start again with my approach,” he explained to Rolling Stone’s Ben Fong-Torres in 1971, “to go right back to what I started to do. [Now] I take exactly what I do [naturally] and do that.”
Chastened by his twin brushes with fame and death, Stevens’s new songs also came from a different place lyrically. “I started reflecting and all of the songs came out of that reality,” he told Sound on Sound in 2020. “It wasn’t put on at all, and I think that’s why they’ve got longevity.”
The first evidence of his new direction came with Mona Bone Jakon, released April 1970. With a Stevens-painted cover, the support of producer Paul Samwell-Smith, and the contribution of guitarist Alun Davies, it announced Stevens’s new sound and set the template for the three additional albums he’d release in the next two-and-a-half years. Tracks like “Maybe You’re Right” and “Trouble” — with their sparse, acoustic-based arrangements and plainspoken philosophizing — made clear that the new Stevens wasn’t the same artist as the one who’d become a teen idol in the U.K. just a few years before. Jakon nonetheless reached just number 63 on the U.K. album charts, falling off after a month, and barely cracked the Billboard 200 in the U.S.
It would take Stevens’s next album to alter his commercial prospects. Released in November of 1970, just seven months after Jakon, Tea for the Tillerman was a global smash that established Stevens as a major artist in the U.S. for the first time. It landed at number eight on the Billboard year-end album rankings, stayed in the charts for 79 weeks, and would go on to sell more than three million albums in America.
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The penultimate song on Tillerman is perhaps its most famous track, even though it wasn’t a radio hit. Few of Stevens’s songs have had the enduring power of “Father and Son.” Structured as a conversation between the title’s characters, the track began life as a song for a play about the Russian Revolution that Stevens’s was toying with. As he explained to GQ in 2020:
“Father and Son is probably the most prominent and profound song on the album. It doesn’t necessarily refer to my dad. It was originally written for a musical … [During my recovery from tuberculosis] I came back to my original ambition, which was to become a composer of musicals. I was living in the West End and musicals were a big thing in my life. I got together with Nigel Hawthorne and we started writing this musical called Revolussia. Essentially, it was about Nicholas and Alexander, the last tsars of Russia, and against that there’s another story about this family in the farmland, in the country. And the father, of course, basically wants to keep things as they are, while the son is really inspired by the revolution. He wants to join. And so that’s the inspiration for that song. That’s why I’m able to represent both sides — though I feel that my preference, my emphasis, was on the son’s side, and the father’s arguments were not quite as strong as the son’s, which is interesting. Change is basically the theme of the song.”
While Islam disclaimed the track’s personal connection to GQ, in other interviews he’s made clear that “Father and Son” was, at least in part, about his relationship with his own father. “I’ve never really understood my father,” Stevens told Disc & Echo in 1972, “but he always let me do whatever I wanted—he let me go. ‘Father And Son’ is for those people who can’t break loose.”
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Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam) / Viña del Mar International Song Festiva ib Chile (l2015)
For anyone who wants to take a deep dive into the Tea for the Tillerman album, there has probably never been any more detailed and enlightening review of this album than the article by Josh Mound quoted in part above. See the entire article in the NOTES section below.
The song “Father and Son” became perhaps his most enduring song over the years. It was recorded again in 2015 by Stevens in Chile, 45 years after he recorded it at the Troubadour in 1970. In the 1970 song, it was easy to see him as the son trying to talk to his father. But in this later version above, he is an older man, perhaps the father that young son was trying to talk to all those years ago. The contrast between the two versions – 45 years apart – is fascinating.
In 2020, Tea for the Tillerman was recorded again. Many believe this is the best recording of the album. The cover is a little different color and the album is called Tea for the Tillerman 2. See photos and an excellent article and review of the album in the Sound on Sound review below. Listen to the 2020 version of “Father and Son” below.
The lyrics to this beautiful, enigmatic song are reproduced below. It has a sadness to it yet offers so much wisdom to sons of fathers and fathers of sons half a century after he first recorded it.
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NOTES
Thanks to my brother Bill for sending links to the above videos and reminding me of this amazing artist.
Read the incredible Audiophile Style article by Josh Mounds for a deep dive into the Tea for the Tillerman album.
Read the Sound on Sound review of the new 2020 recording of Tea for the Tillerman.
Read a short bio on Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam)
Watch Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam) Tiny Desk Concert of 2014
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“Father and Son” Lyrics
Verse 1 (Father)
It’s not time to make a change
Just relax, take it easy
You’re still young, that’s your fault
There’s so much you have to know
Find a girl, settle down
If you want you can marry
Look at me, I am old
But I’m happy
I was once like you are now
And I know that it’s not easy
To be calm when you’ve found
Something going on
But take your time, think a lot
Think of everything you’ve got
For you will still be here tomorrow
But your dreams may not
Verse 2 (Son)
How can I try to explain?
When I do he turns away again
It’s always been the same
Same old story
From the moment I could talk
I was ordered to listen, now there’s a way
And I know that I have to go away
I know I have to go
(Refrain from Father)
It’s not time to make a change
Just sit down, take it slowly
You’re still young, that’s your fault
There’s so much you have to go through
Find a girl, settle down
If you want you can marry
Look at me, I am old
But I’m happy
All the times that I’ve cried
Keeping all the things I knew inside
It’s hard, but it’s harder to ignore it
If they were right I’d agree
But it’s them they know, not me
Now there’s a way
And I know that I have to go away
I know I have to go