MYTHS, MELODIES & METAPHYSICS: - Prefab Sprout

stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually
as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn
from them - if you want to. Just as some day, if you have something to offer, someone will
learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education.
It's history. It's poetry."
Caulfield hated cliques - the way that Catholics stick together, intellects stick together
and the guys that play bridge stick together and even the way the guys that "belong to the
goddam Book-of-the-Month Club stick together." McAloon sought to avoid the phonies
and to steer clear of their cliques. He toyed with the press, suggesting such things as "you
won't find Prefab Sprout releasing a song called The King of Rock 'n' Roll", and insisted
upon remaining detached from the 'center' of the music scene in London, opting to remain
in the more familiar surroundings of County
Durham. He wasn't interested in the lure of overnight successes, at least not at the
expense of letting his values 'go to the birds'. Money, in McAloon's mind is OK if it helps
to "go towards the pension fund and whatever" but always ends up making you,
according to Catcher, "as blue as hell".
The song Bonny could well be a story about the death of Caulfield's younger brother,
Allie, whose baseball glove Caulfield carried around with him everywhere. McAloon's
lyric, "I'm lost in heaven and I'm lost to earth" could relate to Caulfield's feelings after
Allie's funeral: "All the visitors could get in their cars and turn on their radios and all and
then go some place nice for dinner - everybody except Allie. I couldn't stand it. I know it's
only his body and all that's in the cemetery, and his soul's in Heaven and all that crap, but
I couldn't stand it anyway."
McAloon and Caulfield agree on speeches and flowers being mere 'peripherals'.
Caulfield exclaims, "Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody" and McAloon
writes, "Words don't hold you, broken soldiers" and "save your speeches."
In Couldn't Bear To Be Special, McAloon originally penned the line, "it joins a list of
things I'll miss like cheap cigars and pretty girls I'll never kiss." He played around with it
and adapted a few teases from The Catcher, changing it to, "like fencing foils and pretty
girls I'll never kiss." In The Catcher, Caulfield had left the fencing team's equipment on the
subway and as a junior at college, wasn't permitted to bring girls to college football
games. For those uninitiated, The Catcher told a story of an intelligent, maturing young
man, Holden Caulfield, and must not get the impression that the novel promotes violence.
On the contrary, Caulfield was too "yellow" to kill the phonies.
The only connection between Caulfield and John Lennon's murderer, Mark David
Chapman, was symbolic. Caulfield was keen to act as a saviour for children and erased all
the obscene graffiti on the school walls. He wanted to be The Catcher in the Rye.
Chapman's act was to murder Lennon, who he interpreted as having become 'phoney',
after having stood up for so much in public and at the same time was living it up in a
hypocritical lavish lifestyle.
Chapman saw himself as The Catcher in the Rye for his generation. Would it be too
much to suspect McAloon's intentions touch on this generalization?