This is the musical equivalent of me coming into your homes and rubbing soothing oils all over your body. If you’re driving at the moment, you’ll have to give that a miss, I’m afraid. - John Peel, cueing up Alcatraz on 9 April 1993.
Despite Peel’s warm words, my own initial reaction to this piece of chilled out trance from Dag Lerner and Rolf Ellmer aka Peyote was that it was a little bit more bombastic than I’d been expecting. An observation which leads me to wonder if I’m at all qualified to be passing any judgements on this blog. For all that, my notes did say that it would be worthy of a second listen though. And I listened to it several times before eventually deciding that I would pass on including it. But, when I was writing the summary post for this 9/4/93 show, I listened back to the tracks I was rejecting from my original list of selections, and it was at that last gasp moment that the beauty and wonder of Alcatraz made itself obvious to me.
To see the word Alcatraz is to think immediately of the prison that was on the island until 1963, and which was immortalised in the movie, Escape From Alcatraz. Certainly, the track features plenty of percussion which evokes the sound of people hammering away at steel and stone as if to try and break out and get closer to the muffled sounds of thunder which punctuate the opening stages of the track. And yet, I also captured a feeling of stifling humidity within the music too. Granted, this could be said to be conjured by the aural image of a crowded prison cell during a heatwave, but those thunderclaps and the percussive shakers which are used, also took me to the open plains of the desert and a feeling of desperately trying to find shelter from an approaching storm. I don’t know how it’s possible for a piece of music to suggest both confinement and open space, but Alcatraz does so.
And then at 3:27, we start to pick up the sounds of singing; faint and indistinct, but also hearty and celebratory. The lyrics are close to gibberish, but I can make out a refrain of “happy birthday to you” in there somewhere. The melody of the singing seems to predict Mumford and Sons, 20 years ahead of time, but I also hear elements of singing chain gangs and tribal songs. The latter of these makes particular sense when we learn that Alcatraz Island was occupied by a group of American Indians between November 1969 and June 1971, who took the island over believing that as it was no longer being used as the site of a penitentiary, it stood to be a piece of land to be reclaimed by descendants of the original American settlers.
Over all, I think that this period in the island’s history may be what is being immortalised here, with the thunder rumbles representing the mix of forces that saw the Indians leave the island over time. Either way, I’m ultimately very glad to include it on the metaphorical mixtape.
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