Anyone know Garland Jeffries and in particular the song Matador

Cafe Society
1

This is now one of my favorite songs of all time and I have not heard it in years, nay decades, now a year past four decades. I had forgot about it and tonight it hit me in the heart. It came up on Spotify and I remembered it and remembered how much I loved it way back then. Christ it would take me quite a while to write about what I felt then at that young age so I will try to do so briefly - so many metaphors in the song, the Matador as an ideal (Garland is of Puerto Rican and African descent) instead of a Don Quixote joke - oh shit I am about to descend into Hemmingway love of Matadors- several paragraphs would be needed to explain why I am not talking about that - I am talking about an authentic song of feeling from Garland, an ideal he aspires to, not sure exactly what the song meant to him. Or to me, I am starting the song again to try and figure it out. And now here are some lyrics-

Silver sonnets reach the sky
Fight the battles and the blues
Wars of love and wars of art
Tonight the cape is what I choose
Goya’s in my Spanish heart
He will help me with my love
Dance the dance that lovers do
Rhumba with the velvet glove
'Neath the Barcelona moon
See one thousands violins
Golden trumpets soar on high
Waves and waves of joyful hymns
Silver sonnets rech the sky

Jeffies is gay, I think ths song is abouit as open about that as one could be at that time.

I should add (and I just realized I have buried the lede) I was raised in an evangelical church, and taught that one day Christ would return and save the world. And I got saved believing it. Rejected the church at 15 because they rejected evolution but held on to a belief, for a few years , that Jesus was real, just misinterpreted by the evangelical church. In this song at that time, the Matador was a Jesus metaphor. A true Jesus. After a couple of beers and a couple of tokes I would sing along waiting for the bettter world he would usher in.

By the time I was 18, forgot about that bullshit.

From now on will listen to this song as a vision of a beautiful future for all the world. Led by, for lack of a better word, a Progressive. Not a mythical figure. By a Matodor, or Mataoras.

2

Yes Garland Jeffreys [how its spelled on his LPs] was a fave for me in the late 70s +early 80s and he got a surprising amount of airplay in Australia’s version of adult oriented radio. Being an excellent musician didn’t hurt.

I luckily dodged the sorts of problems that led you to finding something in his music, so Matador didn’t stand out as much for me as some of his other singles and LP tracks, but I can see the resonance. Someone else from the same time whose music was pretty compelling to this late teen was Willy DeVille and his band Mink Deville.

3

I only know two Garland Jeffreys songs, “Matador” and “Hail Hail Rock’n’Roll”. Both are great and were big hits here in Germany, with an unusual gap of more than ten years between those two songs. The only trivia I know about Jeffreys is the fact that he and Lou Reed were big buddies. I seem to remember that he even sang background on some Reed recordings, but I’m not sure.

4

And Lou sang with him live in Lokeren, Belgium:

5

@EinsteinsHund, @Pardel-Lux - here’s something interesting. The only time (before this thread) that I came across Garland Jeffreys was via the John Cale album Vintage Violence. Cale covers a Garland Jeffreys song, “Fairweather Friend”.

Vintage Violence was Cale’s first solo album (1970) so I guess Cale must have known of Jeffreys through Reed.

j

6

I have that album! In fact it’s the only John Cale album I own (NOT the only one I know), but it never occurred to me that this was a Garland Jeffreys song, though usually I study liner notes thoroughly. Yes, Cale must’ve met Jeffreys through Reed. In my little research today, I learned that Garland and Lou already met in 1961 at Syracuse University, long before they had musical careers.

7

tbe version of Matador I was talking about was on the live album Rock and Roll Adult. I’ve now listened to the whole album, and I can say it is one of the best single LP live rock albums I have heard, up there with Zevon’s Stand in the Fire.