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August 14, 1999 |
I knew only that his music echoed happily in my highly adolescent hollows. Whereas James Taylor -- if you were into one, you were into the other -- and his "Fire and Rain" pain poked at my teen angst like a bad- Sappy? Sure, we see that now. Those songs were the melodic equivalent of the treacly wine we liked so much then, before our palates knew any better. But dipping a toe into adulthood late summer nights on the beach I grew up near, smoking cloying clove cigarettes and mulling over the future's myriad mysteries with my high school pals, Stevens' music tasted just right. "Chick music," a sophisticated friend of mine sniffs, before confiding, "I remember doing an interpretive dance to 'Tea for the Tillerman' in my living room." I'm not sure how gender-specific Stevens' music was; I knew a lot of guys who learned guitar by plucking out the songs on "Tea for the Tillerman" or "Teaser and the Firecat." Perhaps the introspective, upbeat music appealed to so many because Stevens took it so personally himself, charting his own quest for love, meaning and peace (it was the early '70s, you know). The songs were of their time, true, but that sense of standing on the precipice looking out at something big and awe-inspiring is something every kid on the brink of adulthood can relate to. Born in London in 1948 to a a Swedish (Baptist) mother and a Greek Cypriot father who owned a restaurant, Stephen Demetri Georgiou was raised in a primarily Greek Orthodox home in Soho. He also attended Roman Catholic schools, a religious mixture he says left him both alienated and open. He has described his childhood as "lonely," telling an interviewer for Melody Maker magazine in 1975, "I was isolated from both the English and the Greek community. Our family was totally an island." The future folkie learned to plunk out tunes on his family's living room grand piano, which, he says, "was a status symbol in those days. And I was the first one to learn to play." While attending Hammersmith College art school in the '60s, he changed his name to Cat Stevens and began to work the coffeehouse and pub circuit, playing guitar and singing folk-inspired pop songs. He took the flashier moniker in a conscious effort to hide his Greek heritage, he has said, because "I didn't think anybody was interested. And I thought that it had nothing to do with me." Plus, he told an audience at Stanford University just this past June, "I couldn't imagine anyone going to the record store and asking for that Stephen Demetri Georgiou album. And in England, and I was sure in America, they loved animals." His animal magnetism and lilting voice were soon discovered by independent record producer Mike Hurst, who'd been a member of the folk-pop group the Springfields. Hurst helped Stevens record a demo in the summer of 1966 and land his first record deal. At age 19, Stevens released his debut album, "Matthew and Son" and watched it climb the charts. Its title song and the single "I Love My Dog" landed in Britain's top 10, and the young singer set out on a U.K. tour with -- wackily enough -- Jimi Hendrix and Engelbert Humperdinck, filling stadiums and partying like a pop star. But Stevens' second album, "New Masters," released in 1967, didn't sell quite so well, although it marked the beginning of his longtime collaboration with singer/guitarist Alun Davies, and the sensitive songster got his first taste of fan fickleness. Still, he continued his high-living ways. "They made me larger than life," he wrote several years ago in an essay called "How I Came to Islam." "So I wanted to be larger than life, and the only way to do that was to be intoxicated." The fast life skidded to a halt in 1969, when tuberculosis derailed his career -- and very nearly took his life. The stage went dark. The spotlight clicked off. And, during his year in the hospital, Stevens went into a serious spiritual tailspin. "It was then that I started to think: What was to happen to me?" he later wrote. "Was I just a body, and my goal in life was merely to satisfy this body? ... Why am I here? Why am I in bed? ... I started looking for some of the answers." "Fed up with Christianity," Stevens recalled, he began to read about Buddhism, in vogue at the time. He took up meditation and became a vegetarian. "I now believed in 'peace and flower power,'" he wrote. So did a lot of other earnest folks, and when Stevens returned to the music world with a fresh batch of introspective songs about his spiritual search and a new U.S. distribution deal, he hit the international big time.
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