‘Beware Of Maya . . .’

 by whiteray

As I look back over my musical life, there are hundreds of places, I suppose, where I learned something new or heard something new that changed the way I hear music. One popped to mind this weekend, when a Facebook discussion touched on the student union at St. Cloud State here in Minnesota. Formally titled Atwood Memorial Center, the union was the focal point of my college life during most of my years on campus. 

No so my first year. During the early parts of that year, I spent most of my free time on campus with folks I’d met during a summertime orientation; the latter portions of the year found me spending my free time hanging around the studios of the student radio station. The years of lazing away hours over coffee at Atwood with the folks we came to call The Table would come later. With one exception, there wasn’t much for me in Atwood during my freshman year., 

It was that exception that I remembered – not for the first time – this weekend. As school began in the autumn of 1971, Atwood had been remodeled and expanded, with the new sections being home, on the main floor, to an art gallery, meeting rooms, a small theater and a listening lounge. It was the listening lounge that pulled me to Atwood at least once a week during that year. 

The lounge itself was comfy: there were listening stations with easy chairs and sofas, with beanbags and large pillows. And on the end of the lounge was a small room with maybe fifteen turntables and a wide-ranging record library. A would-be lounger would go to the service window, and the student worker in the small room would take a student ID and a music request and would then hand out a set of headphones. The lounger would choose an open listening station and the worker would head off to cue up the record. 

All that remained was to plug in the headphones, turn the control to the assigned channel and listen to the music, maybe while studying or writing a letter, or simply relaxing to the tunes. (I think this is correct; it’s been almost fifty years, and some of the details might be fuzzy.) 

The lounge’s library numbered, I think, about fifty albums. I recall listening to Shawn Phillips, to Bobby Whitlock, to Derek & the Dominos, to Joe Cocker and to Leon Russell. I recall that listening to Leon Russell & The Shelter People sometime in early 1972 answered a question that had been lingering since Christmas. When I listened to The Concert for Bangladesh, which my folks had given me for Christmas, I was puzzled as to why George Harrison let Leon Russell sing one of the verses of “Beware of Darkness.” Not that Leon’s verse was badly done; I was learning to like the Okie’s idiosyncratic delivery. 

But in January or February of 1972, when I stopped by the listening lounge and popped on the headphones for a run through Leon Russell & The Shelter People, I learned that the album included Leon’s version of the song. And his taking a verse at the concert the previous summer made more sense to me. 

I don’t think the listening lounge lasted very long. I’m not sure if it was in operation during my second year of college, beginning in the fall of 1972, but I don’t think so. And I know for sure that it was gone by the time I came home from Denmark in the spring of 1974. It was a good idea, but I imagine there were reasons it was discontinued. And of course, these days, it would be unnecessary: We all carry our listening lounges with us in the form of streaming devices (or for old-fashioned folks like me, iPods). 

The memory of the listening lounge this weekend brought back memories of the above-mentioned “Beware of Darkness,” which at the time was one of my favorite George Harrison songs. Those memories got me listening again in the last few days to Harrison’s 1970 solo album All Things Must Pass. As I listened, I was stuck once again by “Beware of Darkness,” its imagery and message – and its willful obscurity – being very much of its time and of its composer: 

Watch out now
Take care, beware of falling swingers
Dropping all around you
The pain that often mingles
In your fingertips
Beware of darkness 

Watch out now
Take care, beware the thoughts that linger
Winding up inside your head
The hopelessness around you
In the dead of night
Beware of sadness 

It can hit you
It can hurt you
Make you sore and what is more
That is not what you are here for 

Watch out now
Take care, beware of soft shoe shufflers
Dancing down the sidewalks
As each unconscious sufferer
Wanders aimlessly
Beware of Maya 

Watch out now
Take care, beware of greedy leaders
They'll take you where you should not go
While weeping Atlas Cedars
They just want to grow . . . grow and grow
Beware of darkness (beware of darkness)