Technically, there are not any cats in the old Al Stewart song, “Year of the Cat,” but its lyrics are evocative and elusive, so maybe there’s feline element to it after all. Even though I’m now old and jaded enough to roll my eyes a bit at its “mysterious exotic woman” trope, I still love this song, which I listened to incessantly back in 1976/77. (You can thank Al Stewart for jolting me out of my Barry Manilow phase.)
Since my vinyl is packed away in a box, I hadn’t heard the song in years and only rediscovered it through the magic of Facebook. This live version is heavy on crowd noise, thanks to a boisterous German audience (it aired on Musikladen, similar to Wolfman Jack’s “Midnight Special”) but its long virtuoso piano intro more than makes up for the noise.
We’re actually in the Year of the Cat right now, according to the Vietnamese calendar, which swaps out the cat for the rabbit. Nothing against the rabbit, but since it’s “my” year, I prefer to have been born in the Year of the Cat. Lucky me!
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
I like Al Stewart a lot, probably more so now than when he was popular. Since I have YOTC on CD, I enjoy listening to it every so often. He was a very intelligent songwriter; I’m hard pressed to think of anyone who both ascended as high in the pop charts and incorporated as much political history in their songs as he did. “The Ballad of Mary Foster” (from his 1969 Love Chronicles) was a provocative and poignant feminist work. (Unfortunately there isn’t a version of it on YouTube.) His “Palace of Versailles” captures today’s zeitgeist as well as anything, with ‘Bonaparte’s army’ a whole lot closer to us now than when he released the song back in the late 1970s.
Yeah, this is making me think I need to just spring for the CD. Vinyl is just too unwieldly (though we do still have a turntable). Somewhere in my dusty boxes is also a compendium of his early stuff – not the whole album, but much of Love Chronicles is on there, including “Mary Foster,” plus “Bedsitter Images” and loads of other great stuff. I spent a bunch of time browsing YouTube for his less-well-known songs but somehow didn’t turn up “Palace of Versailles.” Bingo. “Marais, your days are numbered/While we live hand to mouth.” Shades of the debt-ceiling crisis …
YOTC – the song – is one of the few by any artist to have a non-bootleg live version (on Indian Summer – Live) that stands up to the original (not counting the songs on Frampton Comes Alive, I can only add to that list a few Supertramp songs that appeared on Paris and the version of “No Place to Go” that appeared on Charlie Daniels’ Fire on the Mountain album.)
When I taught History of Western Civilization III (French Revolution to the present) at the U of Iowa a few years back I tried to get my students to make the connection between real-life events and Al’s “Roads to Moscow.”
Not much luck. (And, sadly, not much more when I tried to connect the Black Adder explanation – from the final episode of Black Adder Goes Forth – of how World War I started to, well, how World War I started.)
Hi Katrina! You’ve convinced me I need to get my paws on Indian Summer – Live.
While I teach in Women’s and Gender Studies now, my Ph.D. was in modern European history. I can empathize with your frustration with students who can’t or won’t make connections. I’ve found this easier in WGS than in history. A couple of years back, I taught the Nazi Germany class here at Ohio University and found that a smaller percentage of students were willing to invest in the class and apply their critical faculties than in my WGS courses. To be fair, the class was very large, and I have less experience teaching massive history lectures than I do with medium-sized WGS classes.
Are you still at the U of Iowa?