Don't Look Back

Son of the god Apollo (proficient on the lyre) and Calliope (Muse of epic poetry), Orpheus was a richly gifted musician admired for his immense skill with the lyre as well as his lyrical acumen. Orpheus is thus largely seen as an archetypal figure for the poet and musician. Legend has it that soon after he married Eurydice, his young bride, she died. The inconsolable Orpheus descended into Hell in order to get her back. Improbably, he charmed the gods of the underworld into accepting his demand that she return to the land of the living with him. His demand, though, was subject to one fundamental condition: he had to walk ahead of her from Hell, and must not look back until both of them were safely in the sunlight. But, alas, Orpheus looked back at the very last moment, and Eurydice vanished. (Milton: “I woke, she fled, and day brought back my night.”) Having lost his beloved wife twice, Orpheus vowed never again to touch a woman. His swearing off women earned him the wrath of the Maenads, devotees of the god Dionysus, and as a consequence he was torn to pieces. His dismembered body parts were gathered by the Muses and buried, and his lyre became the constellation Lyra. (In J. W. Waterhouse’s famous painting, “Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus,” his head and lyre are discovered floating side by side.) The figure of Orpheus is thus more than the archetype of the artist as poet and musician, but also the figure of the artist who has the power to exorcise death by his song, the power to descend into Hell—and return. As a figure unafraid to confront the darkness—and more importantly, to conquer it—Orpheus is a figure for immortality.

I’m by no means the first to observe that the blues is Orphic in the sense that it confronts the darkness and conquers it. Understanding the blues is much like understanding jazz, which reminds me of the famous line of Louis Armstrong, “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” In “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin characterized the blues as “the only light we’ve got in all this darkness,” while Langston Hughes observed, “For sad as Blues may be, there’s almost always something humorous about them—even if it’s the kind of humor that laughs to keep from crying” (qtd. in Saadi A. Simawe, ed., Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction From The Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison, p. 66). The existential theme underlying the blues—I can’t go on, I will go on—is one that Samuel Beckett recognized: the hope that emerges from recognizing one’s despair. Freud observed that the feeling of anxiety couldn’t be questioned because it is absolutely and unquestionably real: one doesn’t “doubt” the feeling of anxiety because it is indisputably true. Despair is also real, in the sense that it can’t be doubted. But it can be fought, which is what I take to be the meaning of the injunction at the center of the Orphic myth, “don’t look back.”

In “Run Through the Jungle,” a song I take to have been inspired by Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on my Trail” (as was Creedence’s “Bad Moon Rising”), John Fogerty sings:

Thought it was a nightmare,
Lo, it’s all so true,
They told me, “Don’t go walking slow
‘Cause Devil’s on the loose.”
Better run through the jungle,
Better run through the jungle,
Better run through the jungle,
Don’t look back to see.

The Devil, the Hellhound, “the voice of rage and ruin”—these are all tropes for the darkness that the music serve to dispel (or at least ward off, like apotropaic magic), and why Orpheus’ singing is capable of transformation, why he allegedly could charm nature itself.

A Few Songs With the “Don’t Look Back” Theme:
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, “The Lyre of Orpheus”
Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Run Through the Jungle”
Charlie Daniels, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”
Don Henley, “The Boys of Summer”
Madonna, “Jump”
Robert Pete Williams, “Prisoner’s Talking Blues”

This article explores the Orphic theme that informs the Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (2004). There’s also Belle & Sebastian’s “Like Bob Dylan in the Movies” that references D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back (1967), an orthographically incorrect title that is apparently a deliberate reference to the Orpheus myth. The early Bob Dylan was also inspired by Johnson’s “Hellhound On My Trail”: “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” owes as much to Johnson’s surreal, apocalyptic image of “Blues falling down like hail” as it does to metaphorical nuclear fallout. Later Dylan songs such as “Man in the Long Black Coat” also strike me as being influenced by Robert Johnson’s demonic Hellhound as well.

Orpheus And The Boys of Summer

Yesterday afternoon while running errands I happened to hear on the car radio Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer,” a very compelling tune that I hadn’t heard in quite some time. Inevitably I began to think about its meaning. While the lyrics invite us to unpack the meaning of its repeated figure, “the boys of summer,” I’m convinced its underlying meaning resides (consciously or unconsciously, it makes no difference) in its invoking of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. First of all, here are the lyrics:

Nobody on the road, nobody on the beach
I feel it in the air, the summer’s out of reach
Empty lake, empty streets, the sun goes down alone
I’m drivin’ by your house though I know you’re not home

But I can see you, your brown skin shining in the sun
You got your hair combed back and your sunglasses on, baby
And I can tell you my love for you will still be strong
After the boys of summer have gone

I never will forget those nights
I wonder if it was a dream
Remember how you made me crazy?
Remember how I made you scream
Now I don’t understand what happened to our love
But babe, I’m gonna get you back
I’m gonna show you what I’m made of

I can see you, your brown skin shining in the sun
I see you walkin’ real slow and you’re smilin’ at everyone
I can tell you my love for you will still be strong
After the boys of summer have gone

Out on the road today I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac
A little voice inside my head said, “Don't look back. You can never look back”
I thought I knew what love was, what did I know
Those days are gone forever, I should just let them go

But I can see you, your brown skin shining in the sun
You got that top pulled down and radio on, baby
And I can tell you my love for you will still be strong
After the boys of summer have gone

I can see you, your brown skin shining in the sun
You got that hair slicked back and those Wayfarers on, baby
I can tell you my love for you will still be strong
After the boys of summer have gone

And here’s a version of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. For convenience I’ve taken the version of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth from the Encyclopedia of Greek Mythology (the full version can be found here):

Orpheus fell in love with a nymph named Eurydice and blissful was their life together until one day she was pursued by a son of Apollo, the minor deity Aristaeus. In her headlong eagerness to escape, she stepped on a poisonous snake, was bitten and died. Disconsolate, Orpheus found a cave which lead to Hades and followed Eurydice to the Underworld. Here his musical charms were so persuasive that the King of the Dead permitted the minstrel to take his sweetheart Home with him—on one condition.

This condition was so simple that it takes some explaining to account for Orpheus’s failure to heed it. Perhaps he could not bear to keep his eyes off their beloved object for a moment longer…. In any case, he did the one thing he had been forbidden. He turned around and looked at Eurydice, and she was lost to him forever.

The meaning of “The Boys of Summer” hinges, like the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, on seeing. “I can see you” is repeated five times; “I saw” is used once. And while the “I” insists on his vision (and vision incites his desire—his “love” for the object of desire), the “I”/eye fails both to control and grasp his desire—as in the Orpheus myth. He seeks it, possesses it, but ultimately loses it. Orpheus-like, the “I” vows “I’m gonna get you back,” but like Orpheus comes to the realization that he cannot “look back. You can never look back….Those days are gone forever,” a realization this is reiterated wherever he turns his gaze, for instance, “I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.” Interpreted psychoanalytically, Jacques Lacan would say that the song enacts a “world of the Other” in which the subject (the “I”) has no place. The “I” is continually cast out from the very world constructed by his desire—the underlying meaning of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth:

Nobody on the road, nobody on the beach
I feel it in the air, the summer’s out of reach
Empty lake, empty streets, the sun goes down alone
I’m drivin’ by your house though I know you’re not home

A once vital and vibrant world is “empty,” drained of meaning. Interestingly, the “I” consistently remarks on the desired’s sunglasses (later referred to as “Wayfarers,” a brand of sunglasses). An inevitable association, it seems to me, is John Fred & His Playboy Band’s “Judy in Disguise (With Glasses)”—see my interpretation of the song here. In the context of “The Boys of Summer,” the meaning resides in the fact that he can’t see her eyes, only the (sun)glasses which cover them. He remembers her recurrent “look,” but not her actual reality.

And “the boys of summer”? His own lost youth, a figure for loss that becomes sentimentalized. Again, the “I” is alienated from his own desire: most certainly memories, strong memories, are constructed out of desire.

The award-winning video to the song can be found here and is worth watching.