Nobody Visits. Nobody Grieves

From the Timeline on the Official Ray Davies website:

January 4th 2004 - Ray shot while pursuing a thief who had snatched the purse of his companion in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Ray recuperates in New Orleans hospital where he writes the Morphine Song and others.

No less a rock-poet authority than Pete Townshend considered Ray Davies (guitarist, lead singer, and songwriter for the Kinks) a “Poet Laureate” because he “invented a new kind of poetry and a new kind of language for pop writing that influenced me from the very, very, very beginning.” Note that Townshend doesn’t call Davies merely a poet of rock ‘n’ roll, but rather a poet—full-stop.

It's difficult to find fault with that assessment.

The knock against Davies is that his songs could tend toward the nostalgic, even approaching the sentimental. Welllll...maybe. Some of the great Kinks songs that could be accused of straying into nostalgia—”Victoria”, say, or “The Village Green Preservation Society”—have enough of a hint of witty sardonicism to them to keep them from falling over the cliff into cheap emotionalism. But Davies’ nostalgic/sentimental tendency is also a significant part of the reason he’s such a great composer: “Morphine Song” (from Davies's 2007 album Working Man's Café) skirts that territory. It could easily have fallen into the trap of becoming, on the one hand, either mean-spiritedly sarcastic (the narrator’s remarking Nelson's "perfect mullet" could have devolved into ridicule—the mullet being, after all, the longtime go-to tonsorial signifier of the stereotypical knuckle-dragging, low-class lout—but doesn't); or, on the other, lachrymosely sappy, especially with the character of Brenda the alcoholic, who remains too complicated, well-limned, and unexpectedly sympathetic (despite her bitterness) to be so one-dimensional.

Instead, “Morphine Song” manages to be deeply affecting, thoughtful, and heartfelt. It could succeed only if Davies took those chances, insisted on walking up to the very edge of the precipice, refused to shy away from possibly toppling over into excess; and he does consistently take those chances, both in his solo songs and in the songs he wrote for the Kinks. He probes deeply into his characters' inner lives, and risks becoming off-puttingly mawkish about them. Absent his willingness to hazard that, though, he couldn’t possibly have found such depth.

“Morphine Song” was inspired by Davies’s experience in a New Orleans intensive care ward after he had been shot by a mugger, but that fact is absent from the lyrics, and the story itself is not really about the "I" of the song, its first-person narrator: He, like Davies himself, is an acute observer of the behavior of the people around him, with an eye for telling details, both small and large, that are revelatory about their interior lives—about what makes them tick.

He can, as it were, hear their hearts beat:

Listen to my heartbeat

Yeah, all fall down

Someone help me

Off of the ground

Listen to my heartbeat

 The song starts off with a heartbeat (the narrator's own) and a "London Bridge Is Falling Down"-like simple rhyme, sung in a child-like, sing-song way, which sets a certain tone for the piece as a whole, suggesting that it will be about basic, essential, fundamental themes—which, indeed, it is.
In the first verse, Davies introduces the characters of Nelson and Starr, who represent, symbolize, the life force; and in the next verse, Brenda "the alkie", who is afraid she is dying (and may very well be dying, for a death is possibly alluded to in the final verse), and with whom the narrator clearly identifies:

And opposite me

Brenda the alkie

Coughs so deep

It's the drugs

And the drink

It could happen to anyone

Sure makes me think

At almost exactly the halfway point of this 4:20 song—at, in other words, its very heart—its heartbeat-like rhythm stops after the narrator notes that

[T]he bed beside her [Brenda]

Is full of cables and leads

Nobody visits

Nobody grieves

This caesura effectively underscores the especially devastating nature of the image: Cables and leads are lines that enable connections—between machines, between various types of technological equipment, and, when used for computer networks, they enable connections between people. But here, in this image, they lie in disuse on a bed next to Brenda, who is alone and disconnected from anyone else.

Nobody visits. Nobody grieves.

At the very heart of "Morphine Song", Davies plants this very basic, irreducible and, I would guess, nearly universal fear that we are all alone in the world; that nobody cares or even notices us when we're alive and that nobody will notice or care when we die. The song expresses our fear: that Brenda's fate is our shared fate, at least potentially.

And even though the slow heartbeat of the song starts up again with the life-affirming image of Nelson and Starr ("He's got ten grandkids/ She's the third missus"), we soon witness Brenda's heartrendingly sad departure:

They wheel her out

She starts to cry

"If I don't get better

I'm gonna die

I'll go cold turkey

Till I'm clean

I'll go to jail —

But you get the morphine"

Even if she recovers, she evidently has a jail sentence hanging over her and she envies the narrator because his wound allows him the narcotic escape that the addict Brenda herself—who seemingly has nothing else in the world—is no longer allowed.
The refrain "Listen to my heartbeat" is nothing less than a plea that someone notice your existence, and in the end, Davies asks us to notice Brenda, see that she's fallen down, care enough to want to “help [her] off of the ground”. He asks us to acknowledge that it is our job to care and to help. Because it could happen to anyone.

Even you.

And caring, helping, is how you prove that you have a heartbeat.

It's this compassionate humanism in Davies' songs that I, for one, find so compelling and affecting; because in the end, it's up to us to prove that it's just not true that "Nobody visits/ Nobody grieves"—in this instance, Ray Davies was there to listen to Brenda; he wrote a song lamenting her passing, so that we all might grieve for her and for all the Brendas of the world, about whom nobody seems to care, whom no one will miss because nobody noticed them in the first place.

Davies gently reminds us that we should care—we need other people.

Because we all fall down; and when we do, we all need someone to help us off of the ground.

[Ray Davies turns 76 on June 21, 2020]



Selected Resources

Davies, Ray. Working Man’s Cafe. Includes “Morphine Song.” Available for download from hoopla music.

Davies, Ray. X-Ray. Davies’ autobiography. Also available as an ebook on hoopla.

Kinks. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society

Sesame Street. “The Alligator King”

- by Tom G., Hopewell Branch