The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Travels with my tent
Novelist Sarah Moss measures out her life in camping trips, from illicit childhood holidays to wild adolescent adventures
We gave away the tent in the great dispersal of stuff when we moved to Ireland in July. I was sad to see it go, but I knew (as with much of The Stuff) that I was sad because it represented what was never going to happen.
I can, I find, measure out my life in tents. A very early memory is the brown floral print on the curtain my mother made to divide the children from the adults’ section of the tent with which we crossed Europe every summer. I lay tracing its patterns with my fingers, wriggling in the down sleeping bag that was too hot in the valleys and too cold at altitude, eavesdropping on the grown-ups who seemed to forget that the curtain gave them only visual privacy. That was the Car Tent, so called because it was too heavy to carry more than a few metres, made of orange canvas and held up by hollow metal poles that it was my job to assemble while my father spread the tent to receive them. We drove every August from Manchester deep into what was then the Eastern Bloc, camping wild across France, the Alps, Austria, compelled to use Soviet campsites in Hungary, what was then Czechoslovakia, East
Germany, Poland… My parents had friends in a union there. I didn’t ask and wasn’t told the details, but there were sometimes things in the car that were to be hidden from the border guards. We slept somewhere different almost every night, with different sounds in the trees or hills or walls, different smells on the air, a different way to dig a hole or find a lavatory, but the morning light through the orange tent and the rubber smell of the groundsheet were always the same.
There were also the mountain tents, which were lighter and smaller, and by then we had two of them because my parents had given up on the idea of curtain privacy. We carried the mountain tents high into the Alps, the Lake District and the Scottish mountains, and camped wild in places I learnt to choose: near a water source, in the lee of the prevailing wind, away from potential rockfalls (we learnt that one the exciting way) and anything you might fall off in the dark. Mountain tents are useful because you can start the day’s climbing at 6,500ft, making Alpine summits accessible to children who can’t make it from the last road to the top in one day, and I remember the comfort of looking down from the peaks and seeing the flash of the tent on the plateau below, knowing that there was the Primus stove and the Tilley lamp, and my sleeping bag and teddy waiting at the end of the day. I preferred to sleep with the flaps open and my head in the doorway, where I could see the stars and the dark bulk of the hills and feel the weather on my face all night.
My friend and I took one of the mountain tents, by then unfashionably heavy and bulky, on our first trip to Iceland in 1994. It was before there was Icelandic tourism – we went by boat from Aberdeen because there was only one, unaffordable flight each week – and we were students with so little money we ran out of food and ate grass with our noodles towards the end. We couldn’t afford campsites, though every few days we sneaked into one to use the showers. We thought we were camping wild, but we were 19 and daft; I’d like to apologise to the farmer who had to mow his meadow around our tent, and hope he would feel that justice was done when we were woken in the brief darkness by the noise of sheep cropping grass beside our heads, which sounds as if the dead are tearing their way from the grave to reach you. The Mountain Tent was refuge for Kathy and me, the place where we lay in the midnight sun chatting and reading aloud to each other, bickering over biscuits and the day, mentioned at both our weddings 10 years later, when she brought in fine black volcanic sand which naturally, obviously, got into our hair and sleeping bags and ears and underwear.
There was also the stormy night when the guy lines stretched in the rain, risking catastrophic contact between wet outer tent and dry inner layer, and I took my pyjamas off so they stayed dry while I ran around the tent tightening the lines naked on the dusky hillside. After that, there was a camping hiatus. I had no money for travel, and by the time there might have been holidays, there were babies and even I have more sense than to go camping with someone in nappies who wails for hours in the night (I’m sure it’s possible. Have fun).
We tried again when the kids were old enough not to mind being out in all weathers, eating primitive meals and finding earwigs by their faces in the morning, but it never really took; I couldn’t work out how to combine routines of family life with the tent. I don’t want lightweight plastic versions of all the domestic impedimenta I work with at home. If I have to chop vegetables and set the table and wash up, produce three meals a day, I’ll do it in a kitchen with hot water on tap, a stove with several burners and an ample supply of
One stormy night, I ran around naked, tightening the guy lines in the rain
On Sept 9 1978, two years before the film that would make them world famous, the Blues Brothers played the Universal Amphitheater in
Los Angeles, the first show in a nine-night run. The men sporting the pork pie hats and shades of Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues – comedy soulmates John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd – were already major names on Saturday Night Live. That summer’s Animal House had made Belushi a movie star.
And Briefcase Full of Blues, the live album they recorded that week, would soon go double-platinum.
“It was showbiz central in the rehearsals,” their sax player, Lou Marini, tells me. “Saturday Night Live was so popular and Danny and John’s star has risen so high and so brightly. I remember Mick Jagger being in rehearsals. We were getting standing ovations every night. People were freaking out. I was the outside horn player, closest to the audience. At one point, I looked over and Jack Nicholson was sitting in the front row. He looked back at me, raised his sunglasses up, and went ‘Wow!’ It was pretty cool…”
Later in 1978, Belushi and Aykroyd opened an after-hours drinking den in a rundown part of Manhattan – The Blues Bar. Robin Williams recalled the loos being so “funky”, you thought the rats might talk back. Yet David Bowie partied there, while Francis Ford Coppola and Keith Richards tended the (free) bar. Fellow SNL star Bill Murray admitted being “one of those Blues Bar people”.
The Blues Brothers owed their existence to another Aykroydowned speakeasy, the 505 Club in Toronto, where Belushi came scouting for improv talent in 1974. “We took one look at each other. It was love at first sight,” Aykroyd recalled. At the time, Belushi was a heavy metal fan and Aykroyd told him: “You’re from Chicago. You should know about the blues.”
They decided to form a band – and for that they needed a look. The hat and shades came from John Lee Hooker; the suits and ties were borrowed from the beatniks and bebop jazz style. John Landis, who would direct the 1980 movie, said: “Ultimately, I think the hats and glasses and outfits were just a socially acceptable way of doing a kind of blackface.”
The Blues Brothers made their TV debut on Saturday Night Live on April 22 1978 (performing as
“guest musicians” – an important credit that stopped NBC taking ownership of the characters). It looked like a comedy act: Elwood’s manic, bandy-legged moves; Jake, a ball of sweat-drenched energy. But Jake’s voice, just a few steps from Belushi’s famous Joe Cocker impression, was all gravel and grit. The Blues Brothers were more alter egos than comedy characters: comedians who were serious about the music. “The first time it was on, we were all like, ‘OK, Danny knows this is a bit of a joke, but John has no idea,’” said SNL writer Jim Downey.
Since that first night at the
505 Club, Belushi had fallen in love with the blues, collecting stacks of records, which he would play at soul-rattling volumes.
“John saw what the Blues Brothers were going to be long before anyone took him seriously,” said his widow, Judy Belushi Pisano.
They needed a real band, so they recruited an eclectic crew of session musicians. “Strong personalities – every single guy,” says Marini. “There were heated moments – a lot of them. Intense arguments.” But musically, they became an incredible live act: electrified Chicago blues fused with a Memphis-style rhythm section and blaring New York horns.
“The Blues Brothers went from hobby to obsession to national phenomenon in less than a year,” recalled Aykroyd. But not everyone was a fan. Marini recalls plenty of sneering – possibly because, with two exceptions, it was “a bunch of white guys”. “We got put down by everybody except real blues players! They credited us with reviving the blues and getting them more gigs,” he says.
Then came the film The Blues Brothers, which, like its climactic car chase, the critics condemned as an over-expensive wreck. It cost $27 million – $11 million over budget – and it shows: the film is wildly self-indulgent, and utterly brilliant for it. Its soul – in every sense of the word – is infectious.
But all was not well. Belushi’s cocaine habit had spun out of control. According to Marini, when everyone else was calling it a night, Belushi would be just getting started. “They’d be saying, ‘I’m all messed, I’d better cool it’,” says Marini. “But he was the other way, saying, ‘I want to see what happens next.’ He had that sort of romantic, rock star kind of thing. But he was so charismatic and such a generous and funny and wonderful cat to be around. Everybody just loved him.” Two years later, Belushi was found dead at the Chateau Marmont in LA, after taking a lethal dose of cocaine and heroin. The Blues Brothers had always been played as “real”: magazine articles and interviews were done in-character; elaborate back stories were created; the albums were fully credited to “Jake and Elwood”, only the liner notes giving a small “thanks” to Belushi and Aykroyd. And on the Blues Brothers’ final live album, Made in America, recorded on a 16-city tour to promote the film, the personae of Jake Blues and John Belushi blur completely. “How come I never do what I’m supposed to do,” he sings on Guilty, a song delivered from the perspective of a booze- and coke-addled depressive. “How come everything I try never turns out right?”
For John Landis, ‘the hats and glasses were a socially acceptable kind of blackface’