Hurrier Cobden, 1853. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Music & Friends

The pleasure of thinking and talking about music goes way back for me. Maybe it began when I was eight or nine, when my sister and I listened to 45 rpm singles: Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died” and Wild Cherry’s “Play that Funky Music.” I tried to imagine a whole city, dead. We’d listen to the record two or three times, sleeve it, and then listen to Wild Cherry. We wanted to be white kids who could lay down the boogie. We wanted to understand our music. I found that shared pleasure with my friend Bobby, too – in his backyard when he narrated Buddy Holly’s life while we built airplanes from balsa wood. We sang “Peggy Sue” and flew the planes until they splintered. I went home buoyant with song.

One of the great twined pleasures of music and friendship is that the pleasure of sharing both doesn’t fade. A few months ago, my friend John Smolens stayed with me for a couple of nights as he worked his way downstate and out east. We went out for burgers and beers and talked about the Traveling Wilburys, Roy Orbison, and Bruce Springsteen. On our way home, we listened to Mark Knopfler’s Ragpicker’s Dream. I’d never heard it. How had I missed it? A little gap, and a friend who filled it. Such is pleasure. Later, we had whiskey at the kitchen table and took turns pulling CDs out and playing songs – our own private juke box.

After John left, I pulled out Shangri-La, Knopfler’s 2004 album that followed the album I had missed. John lives in Marquette – mining country – and so, in his absence, I played “5:15 a.m.,” which shares the tale, or parts of the tale, of the 1967 “one-armed bandit murder” in Newcastle, England. It is lovely and sad and too easily summarized as a song about the murder of Angus Sibbet.

Two Histories

Sibbet’s body was discovered by a collier on his way home from the mine, and Knopfler’s song shifts (almost abruptly) to address mining history as much as it addresses the one-armed bandit murder. The two histories – one a murder related to 20th century gambling and the other a much larger history of mining – feel juxtaposed in Knopfler’s song, and he uses that juxtaposition effectively. When I listen to “5:15 a.m.” I can’t help feeling that Knopfler organizes the song to emphasize the greater tragedies related to mining. He’s addressing two kinds of death. One is modern, and in the modern death it’s harder to separate blame between victim and killer. Nobody is innocent. The other kind of death is old – Knopfler moves into a whole different century – and those deaths freight a different kind of tragedy. There’s a palpable sense of injustice in mining deaths. Colliers were poorly paid, and most didn’t have a hand in the pot. They died in all different ways that were all the same: burned from ignited methane gas, blown up in explosions of coal dust, drowned by flooded mines, crushed by tubs, trampled by ponies, dragged into machinery, infected by wounds, broken by long falls down deep shafts, exhausted. Angus Sibbet got shot in the backseat of a Jaguar. He’s a victim, but a different kind.

Sibbet was 33 when he was killed in 1967. He’d been working for a couple of brothers in the entertainment business, which, in 1960s Newcastle, was run by criminals and defined, mostly, by gambling and pornography. Newcastle, then, was known as the Las Vegas of the North. Sibbet’s job was to collect money from fruit machines installed in men’s clubs. The machines were supplied by a company run by two brothers, Michael Luvaglio and Vince Landa. Sibbet had (allegedly) been embezzling money from the slot machines for years and living beyond his means. He was known as a playboy. On the night he was killed, he had left one nightclub, La Dolce Vita, and was headed to meet Luvaglio and another man, Dennis Stafford (who managed one of Landa’s clubs), at another club, the Birdcage. He never made it. A miner on his way home from the colliery at 5:15 in the morning discovered Sibbet’s Jaguar Mark X parked under a railway bridge. The miner found Sibbet’s body in the backseat. Sibbet had been shot at least three times. Luvaglio and Stafford were convicted and given life sentences, but both men were released after serving 12 years. The case is pocked with inconsistencies, and Luvaglio has a personal website devoted to his “fight for justice.” It’s a little strange to visit – too direct of a connection, perhaps, but if you’re intrigued, here’s a link: http://www.villain-or-victim.com.

Knopfler devotes about half of his song to Sibbet’s death and to the culture that surrounded it and led to it. It’s easy, in some ways, to divide the song into two parts, A and B, in which A (1967) is populated with Sibbet, the workingmen’s club, the giant car – a mark ten jaguar, bullet holes, one-armed bandit men, flashy suits, money, levers, cash cows, nightclubs, a birdcage heaven, La Dolce Vita, swag, and big pay days. Part B (1867) includes cracked seams, black diamonds (coal), toil, black lung, tub and stone, young and old, a heaven defined by sunlight and sweet air, hewers and crutters, child trappers and putters, little foals and half-marrows, barrows, old hod boys, and rolleywaymen. The hinge between the two parts appears most obviously in the reference to “the mother lode,” which bridges both sections, simultaneously referring to the money Sibbet siphoned and to the coal deposits around Newcastle.

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