The Big Red Room (2 of 4)

The TV special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown features a sequence in which Snoopy, fantasizing that he is a WWI flying ace, rages through an air battle in his doghouse plane and is eventually forced to crash land. He then journeys back to safety through dangerous terrain, travelling alone under the dark October sky through starkly wooded areas, over barren plains, under barbed-wire, through ditches and streams. The tone of this scene is unusually moody, even bleak. It stirred something in me. 

I felt bad for Snoopy, it seemed so lonely and scary out there. I wished I could be there with him, side-by-side, helping to evade enemy capture, finding a safe route back to the pumpkin patch. And so I was. The living room - red carpet and strange shadows in every direction - became that rough terrain. The couches and chairs and tables became the various obstacles and markers along the way. I was there. Layer upon layer of fantasy - me imagining I am friends with an imaginary dog as he imagines he is a downed fighter pilot. 

There was a song that played in my house with some regularity that provided an appropriate soundtrack to that imagined journey. My sister was a fan of British singer/songwriter Al Stewart, and I became fascinated with “Roads To Moscow”, a highlight of his American breakthrough LP Past Present and Future. In stark contrast to that fanciful battle scene from the Peanuts cartoon,  “Roads to Moscow” describes in vivid and poetic detail a very real situation from a very real and terrifying time in history. 

“Roads To Moscow” is a story song, much like a traditional ballad, told in first person from the point of view of a Russian soldier during WWII. The narrator describes the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the push towards the Kremlin and subsequent turning away of the German army back towards Berlin by the Red Army, with assistance from the harsh Russian winter. After years of fighting the narrator finds himself happily returning to his home and family, only to be imprisoned in one of Stalin’s Gulags on suspicion of being a spy. According to Wikipedia the song is based loosely on the experience of the Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who would go on to write One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich about his time in the Russian labor camps.

The song’s dusky mood is established right off with a stately, insistent guitar figure, overlaid with Spanish guitar flourishes that will provide color throughout the remainder of the track. Stewart’s singing voice keeps his British accent intact, and there’s a slight sea shanty feel to the melody that makes the whole thing seem like it might have emerged from the British Isles, despite taking place mostly in Russia. 

Stewart describes the initial phase of the German invasion in terms at once practical and poetic, with the Soviet aircraft rendered useless by bombs and the muffled gunfire an increasingly less distant sound. Particularly evocative is his description of the Red Army soldiers forced to move slowly, quietly, through mist and shadows, trees and fields, crawling on all fours. This is no doubt the bit that connected the song to the scene from the Peanuts cartoon in my brain.    

“Roads To Moscow” contains echoes of Leonard Cohen’s “The Partisan”, another slow, grim song about soldiers working in shadows to conquer a seemingly unconquerable enemy. It has a similar sense of pacing, of suspense and inevitability. But while Cohen’s song has a similarly quiet and haunting feel, much of its power is in its brevity, in the details it leaves out. Stewart’s approach is wider in scope, grand and cinematic. At one point Reich General Heinz Guderian is pictured as a windswept figure atop a ridge surveying the conquered territory below. Later, we get this wonderful description of destroyed German tanks in the bleak Russian winter: “two broken Tigers on fire in the night / flicker their souls to the wind.” 

One might be forgiven for finding the poetry overly rich or the epic scale overdone, especially as the choral voices enter midway through, singing a wordless sequence of three funereal ascending notes, repeated like a Gregorian chant. I half expected to feel that way when I recently re-listened, thinking that my admiration for it might be a case of fond memory obscuring schmaltz. I was only mildly surprised to find the song still quite effective, with an emotional pull that’s enhanced rather than diminished by devices like the abundant historical specifics or the dramatic, whirling string arrangement that wraps itself around the final verses. 

The momentum leading up to the denouement is hard to resist. After a combination of winter snows, tactical blunders, and Soviet resolve have driven the Germans back to Berlin, the protagonist finds himself on a train, excitedly heading home. Stewart bunches the words together in an accelerated rush, bass player at the forefront playing a spiraling, insistent pattern above the manic strings. 

Then comes the cruel, fatalistic turn towards which the song has been building. A curious thing sometimes happens with songs that contain a clearly arranged sequence of events, especially those that do not end well. We tend to end up listening repeatedly, and despite the fact that we know exactly where things are ultimately going, we still hope each time we listen that things might turn out differently. 

One line in “Roads to Moscow” always catches me up short. The narrator is met at the train station and debriefed by officials. They ask about his short time as a prisoner of war, the Germans having captured and interrogated him for a single day before freeing him. This makes him a potential spy in the eyes of Stalin. Here’s how Stewart’s narrator describes the exchange:

“‘They only held me for a day, a lucky break,’ I say / And then they turn and listen closer”. 

That last line, with the Soviet officials turning to listen, is painful in its simplicity. Very subtly, it carries an awful and inescapable weight, a fundamental truth about human nature and its boundless capacity for suspicion and fear. We are very weak, in so many ways.

The song ends with the singer staring at the winter sky from within a prison camp, listening to the wind, bereft of hope, no doubt remembering those officers and the expressions on their faces; piercing, expectant, wheels turning. 

Millions were sent to Stalin’s Gulag on the shaky basis of paranoia and pettiness, untold numbers died there. This after the millions upon millions who died fighting in the German/Soviet conflict alone. 

It would take many years for me to catch onto that harsh reality. When I was a child I only heard the sound, the feeling. Any notion of reality, of lives lived and fought for and lost, went completely by the wayside. As I pretended to cross strange and treacherous territory, Snoopy at my side, I only heard the mystery, the dramatic build- up, the lovely melodies. That tumble of words, the shadows and mists, all of it mixing with the deep red in that living room. The way Stewart’s voice takes on that uncanny lilt on the words “You’ll never know, you’ll never know” and the way that repeated phrase would haunt my memory for years afterward, when I couldn’t remember what song they came from and had to search through all the songs on any Al Stewart albums I could find to track it down. 

Al Stewart was describing a scenario that actually existed. If I only heard an imaginary journey, it was still a potent enough concept that I wondered whether I might have to face a real one someday. 

Reality and imagination would subsequently prove to be pretty fierce combatants.

to be continued