WILD TRADE CENTER.
Cat Stevens sang, “Oh, baby, baby, it’s a wild world.” I used to have all his records. Cat Stevens was one of my idols along with Neil Young and James Taylor. So many moving songs, so many extraordinary miniatures, delicate, crystalline. The music of Harold and Maude. Uncompromising lyrics over heartbreaking melodies, lyrical but simple. As if this singer/songwriter had been touched by something greater than him, as though he had access to some higher power. “When I’m alone,” he said, “the songs just come.”
Time leaves you nothing
Nothing at all
(“Time,” 1970)
Oh mama, mama see me, I’m a pop star
Oh mama, mama see me on the TV
(“Pop Star,” 1970)
Trouble, oh, trouble set me free
(“Trouble,” 1970)
Cat Stevens’ great theme is the loss of innocence. The beginning of “Where Do the Children Play?” resonates oddly at 9:15:
Well I think it’s fine, building jumbo planes […]
Will you tell us when to live,
Will you tell us when to die?
I could play the game of terrible omens by quoting “Morning Has Broken,” “Home in the Sky,” and also an earlier song: “The view from the top can be oh so very lonely” (1967).
Cat Stevens had the simplicity of the true poet, but to me he was more than that. He was my brother in loneliness, my friend, my fellow traveler. I would hang out in my bedroom in Texas for hours, barefoot on my bed, looking at the album covers. His acoustic guitar gave me a feeling of peace. Back then, album covers were twelve inches. When records were replaced by CDs, music became “the record industry.” It sent out a message: music in its plastic packaging is no longer a thing of contemplation but consumption. I could talk to you for hours about the crying trash can. On the album cover of Mona Bone Jakon, there’s a gray trash can crying a single tear. Can you think of a better metaphor for our times? We’ve created a world of crying garbage cans. I love the strange titles, too: Tea for the Tillerman. Teaser and the Firecat, and the overblown Elton John-style covers. And the lavish arrangements (Rolling Stone called them “lush”). The violins on “Lilywhite” (1970): the finest bridge in pop music since Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.”
Cat Stevens tried to say something, then he disappeared.
You will still be here tomorrow
But your dreams may not
(“Father and Son,” 1970)
He wrote all these masterpieces in the same year—between January and July 1970—at the age of twenty-two, while in hospital recovering from an almost fatal bout of tuberculosis. The romantics’ disease: a bad cough left untreated made worse through an excess of drugs, alcohol, women, and sleepless nights. It is in hospital that Cat Stevens lets his beard grow.
On December 23, 1977, having sold 40 million copies of his albums—seven of which were Top Ten albums throughout the seventies—Cat Stevens disappears. The star of the swinging sixties, the shy guy who had groupies screaming his name the moment he stepped out of his Rolls-Royce, who was permanently recording or touring, lived the rock-star life, drugs and sex in luxury hotels, the only Englishman since the Beatles and the Stones to have become a star in America, the man who sold out Madison Square Garden two nights running (the audience gave standing ovations in the middle of the songs), Cat Stevens turns toward Islam in 1977. It is his brother who offers him the Koran. He visits a mosque in Jerusalem. On July 4, 1978, he changes his name to Yusuf Islam. He is thirty-one. No star of his magnitude had ever given up everything so abruptly. He auctions his white piano, his gold discs, and distributes the money among various charities. He announces that he will never again write except to communicate the word of Mahomet. When Salman Rushdie is condemned to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini, Yusuf Islam declared on British television that “the punishment for blasphemy is death.” This is the same man who wrote “Peace Train.” He wears a turban, a long beard, babouches, and traditional Arab dress. He funds a Koranic school which he set up on the outskirts of London. He considers himself to have been “saved by Islam.”
I should have converted to Islam, like Cat Stevens and Cassius Clay. I would have left Carthew Yorston behind. I would have adopted an Arabic name: Shafeeq Abdullah. I would have renamed Jerry and David: Mohammed and Ali. I would have stopped eating bacon.
Oh, baby, baby, it’s a wild world.
I make this solemn oath:
If we make it out of here, I’ll convert us to Islam.