My eyes adored you

Roy Henry Alexander Gover was born in London in 1929. In 1959 he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue a career in art. In 2003 he passed away at age seventy-four.

To many, Roy was a dear friend and colleague. To the rest of us, he is an echo; reverb-laced words traveling to us from the past like radiation from a distant star long since burned-out. Roy has left this world, but his legacy survives in a plethora of homemade albums recorded on audio cassette during the 1980's, chronicling his personal experiences in song and spoken word. These tapes are modern archeological relics recovered from a bygone period in the Bay Area's amateur art and music scene when digital distribution and reproduction did not exist. Surviving copies of his work are therefore extremely precious, as Roy only produced them for his own circle of friends and acquaintances. It is only through imperfect analog copies and re-gifting that Roy's work has traveled outside its intended audience -- a mimetic labor of love that has long since been obviated and automated in the age of the Internet where original content can be reproduced and transmitted infinitely with little for the original object.

I therefore consider it an honor to have acquired some of these tapes from my dad, who in turn acquired them from one of Roy's old co-workers. It feels like a privilege, being privy to the intimate thoughts and musings confided in Roy's albums. In many ways, it's like the classic trope of finding a message in a bottle washed up on the shore: there's a common spiritual experience in discovering the trace of another soul in the void, a strong feeling of solidarity with this fellow human being the delineated within a text happened upon by sheer circumstance.

A typical Roy Gover album goes like this: Roy comes home, sets the radio to some easy listening orchestra music, has more than a few drinks of "scotchy-wotchy," and then starts sing-talking into the microphone about whatever's on his mind. It's a sort of musical diary/therapy session. He often talks to himself in multiple voices, creating the illusion of two characters named Tommy and Danny (his fictional recording engineer and band leader, respectively). If Roy doesn't like the music playing on the radio, or if there's a technical difficulty, he will often blame Tommy and stage a verbal argument with his alter ego

Category:

Music

Tags:

• quirky
• Ivor Cutler
• Vivien Stanshall
• spoken word
• san francisco
• eccentric
• Spoken word
• San Francisco
• poem
• poetry
• eyes
• funny
• Humour
• comedy