PEACE TRAIN

Now I've been happy lately, thinking about the good things to come
And I believe it could be, something good has begun

Oh I've been smiling lately, dreaming about the world as one
And I believe it could be, some day it's going to come

Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace train
Oh peace train take this country, come take me home again

Now I've been smiling lately, thinking about the good things to come
And I believe it could be, something good has begun

Oh peace train sounding louder
Glide on the peace train
Come on now peace train
Yes, peace train holy roller

Everyone jump upon the peace train
Come on now peace train

Get your bags together, go bring your good friends too
Cause it's getting nearer, it soon will be with you

Now come and join the living, it's not so far from you
And it's getting nearer, soon it will all be true

Now I've been crying lately, thinking about the world as it is
Why must we go on hating, why can't we live in bliss

Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace train
Oh peace train take this country, come take me home again

 

WASHINGTON  -- The singer formerly known as Cat Stevens was making his way back to London Wednesday after being taken off a diverted trans-Atlantic flight by U.S. officials.    U.S. Muslim leaders say they want the government to explain why the singer was on a "watch list" meant to keep terrorists out of  the country.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge accused Yusuf Islam, the singer's Muslim name, of having some unspecified relationship with terrorist activity.  Islam, 56, took that name when he became a Muslim in the 1970s.  "Celebrity or unknown, our job is to act on information that others have given us," Ridge said. "And in this instance, there was some relationship between the name and the terrorists' activity with this individual's name being on that no-fly list, and appropriate action was taken."   Ridge said the intelligence that put the singer's name on the list came from outside the US, but he would not reveal the source.  He questioned why United allowed him onto the flight at all. Government sources said Islam's name was added to the watch list only recently and had been misspelled -- which could explain why airline employees overlooked it. 

The Boeing 747 had about 280 passengers and crew onboard when it took off from London's Heathrow Airport, United spokesman Jeff Green said. While the plane was in flight, the Advanced Passenger Information System flagged Islam's name.  The list is designed to keep terrorists or their supporters from boarding flights, U.S. officials said.  United Airlines Flight 919 from London to Washington was diverted to Maine after Islam's name turned up.  Customs agents alerted the Transportation Security Administration, which then ordered the plane diverted to Bangor, Maine, and away from the northeast corridor of New York and Washington. Islam, a British citizen, was held in Bangor before being taken Wednesday morning to Boston, where the Massachusetts Port Authority said he would be put aboard an afternoon flight to Washington. From there he will be sent back to London. In Bangor, the rest of the passengers were screened and continued on to Washington's Dulles International Airport after Islam was taken off the flight.

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said his organization wants a better explanation for why the singer was denied entry into the country.  "We are getting a little tired of this kind of Kafkaesque treatment of people, where vague allegations are made and actions are taken against individuals and organizations," Hooper said.  He said American Muslim leaders "need to know where the allegations are coming from."   I don't think we want to be in a situation where people are denounced by anonymous government officials and labeled as terrorists and that's it -- everybody says "OK, we don't need any more information."  "We need more information!!!" he said.   Muslim groups in Britain also reacted with anger and surprise at Islam's detention.

Other officials stated that Islam was on the watch list because of reported associations and his financial support for Muslim charities with terrorist connections.  But they would not disclose the names of those charities. Homeland Security spokesman Garrison Courtney would only say "the intelligence community has come into possession of additional information that further heightens our concerns of Yusuf Islam."  According to Islam's Website www.yusufislam.com , he is associated with three charities: Small Kindness for Humanitarian Relief, Islamia Schools' Trust for Education, and Waqf al Birr Educational Trust for Educational Research and Development and Scientific and Medical Research.

On his official Website, Islam has posted numerous statements in opposition to terrorist attacks, most recently the school seizure in Beslan, Russia that ended with more than 300 people dead -- about half of them children.  Islam also criticized the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States and donated a portion of the royalties from a four-disc set of his music to the families of the September 11th Fund. 

 

As Cat Stevens, Islam had a string of folk-rock hits in the 1960s and early 1970s, including "Peace Train," "Morning Has Broken" and "Wild World."  He dropped out of the music business for more than a decade after converting to Islam but returned to the recording studio periodically during the 1990s.                       

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A Sleeping Feral Cat and a Patriot Act of Kung Fu

Cat Stevens (a/k/a Yusuf Islam) is only one of many Muslims in the United States and  Europe who have been singled out in racial profiling since the September 11 attacks.  How is it that even a man of peace. a musician who wrote "Peace Train," a man who had spent the last 30 years living the life of a holy man, giving to charitable children's organizations ends up being treated like a petty criminal.    We all understand that security measures need to be increased; that borders need to be protected  from terrorists associated with  fanatical religious organizations; and that makes perfect logical sense during a time of war.

I have also endured an experience of racism. Possibly because I look Indian; my mother was Indian and my father was Tibetan. Even though I am from Kashmir, I am not Muslim, but a  Zen Buddhist and Taoist.  I used to wear a turban for many reasons. One being that at the time I had very long hair while studying yoga from a Hindu Sadhu  in India.

In  the winter of 2002, I was physically attacked by 2 men outside a bar in the Chelsea district of Manhattan.  It was 1 o'clock in the morning.   A few hours earlier, I had been practicing yoga at a Bikram studio a few blocks away.  One of the men blocked my path and began to mock my appearance using expletives which I would prefer not to repeat..  These young men seemed to be mildly inebriated by beer and possibly some other combination of intoxicants.  I  ignored them and intuitively turned around to cross over the street knowing what was about to occur. Then one of the men attempted to strike me with  a bottle of Beer to the side of my face.  I was left with no other alternative but to render them both virtually unconscious, through some simple strikes with my finger tips and feet to pressure points and locations on their bodies. 

One of the men awoke and ran; he fell over a garbage can that contained a sleeping feral cat, who out of fear, leapt and bit and scratched the man's face.  The other man  began to vomit beer and was moaning and resting on his hands and knees in a puddle of urine or beer (possibly both) as a result of a pointed kick to his over filled bladder. 

Kalitan Jagvonjeul, Dharamsala India April 21 2005

 

If you see soul in every human being , you see truly. If you see immortality in the heart of every mortal human being you see truly"

The Bhagavad Gita

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CAT STEVENS

(A Biography)

Once upon a time, in a flat above a restaurant called Moulin Rouge, in the heart of a magical town called Singlitter City, there lived a young boy.  He grew up in the city, amidst the steady rumble of traffic, the rush and bustle that never stopped, the smoke and dirt, the bright lights and the few patches of grey grass.  And because there was no real place for him to play in safety, the boy grew up with other interests besides playing conkers or raiding orchards. He learned for instance, about music and the happiness it can bring people.

The boy and his parents were Greek, so the music that they played to him while he was growing up was the music of that wise and ancient country. Full of richness, emotions, joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure, it was a good music to have as teacher, and the boy Learned well.

 

As he grew older, the boy started to write his own music. He was very good, and before long he came to the attention of a very important man who knew how to make people famous.  Now, not only was the boy very talented, he was also very handsome, so before long he and his songs were well known from one end of the Land to the other.  A lot of people bought his songs and magazines printed pictures of him which girls stuck on their bedroom walls so as to have him near them in their dreams.  The boy became very famous, worked very hard at his new job, traveled a lot, appeared in a lot of shows, and wrote songs for other people, who in turn became famous.

 

But all the time the boy became more and more unhappy. The songs people wanted him to sing were not the songs he wanted to sing. He was writing songs which were far better than the ones he was famous for, and try as he would to change their minds, the people who controlled his fame and fortune did not want him to sing those songs.  The boy became ill. So ill in fact that when he saw a doctor he was told to spend at least three months in a hospital or he would die.  So the boy went into the hospital for three months, and while he was there was able to think seriously about himself and his life. He did not like what he saw in himself, and so determined to make a complete break from the past.

 

For more than a year he did not work, but concentrated on his new writing. The money he earned from his early fame was enough to give him complete freedom, and gradually what he felt to be the real him surfaced.  Eventually he was sure he was ready. With the help of some friends and sympathetic people, he went into recording studios for a month and recorded a collection of his new songs.

 

The change from boy to man was complete. CAT STEVENS is back, proud and happy. And so are we.

 

 

CAT STEVENS ANSWERS SOME ?s

 

Q. How old are you now?

 

A. 21.

 

Q. We all know about ‘Matthew and Son, ‘I Love My Dog’ and...

 

A. ... ‘Here Comes My Baby’, ‘First Cut Is the Deepest’...

 

Q. Of course, I’d forgotten you wrote that.

 

A. Oh, a lot of people didn’t know I wrote that.

 

Q. And then, well not then, but about that time...

 

A. ... it started, I started to drift off.

 

Q. You went away for three months, to hospital.

 

A. Yeah. That was a result of the pressures of my life then. I was too hung up on what I was doing to worry about my health, and I just let it get to a head, and it got to the stage where another four weeks in the state I was in and I would have copped it. I went into hospital in September, 1968 and stayed three months. My lungs were really screwed up, really a mess.

 

Q. What did you do while you were away?

 

A. Oh, I took a load of records and books, and just got down to sorting myself out. I really got into meditation there, and that really helped a lot - that and Yoga.

 

Q. Do you still practice Yoga?

 

A. No, because I can’t get the peace I need in my flat. That’s why I’m looking for somewhere to live away from traffic and all the noise. I’d like to live by the Thames.

 

Q. What was so dissatisfying about your old way of life that made you want to change it?

 

A. Everything. The whole process I went through, being with a big anonymous company like Decca who are very into the Top 20 thing, very pop conscious. There are a lot of heavy pressures in that kind of set-up, all in a very fickle direction. In fact no direction at all apart from making instant large figures on paper.

 

There were the heavy agency figures who really didn’t know me. Like the minute I said I wanted to develop, that the stuff I was doing wasn’t really me or what I wanted to do, that didn’t interest them. What did interest them was how much I was getting that night and making sure they got half the bread before. That’s all they were worried about. And I just wanted a complete break from that because it just wasn’t the way I wanted to go. It was the way I had hoped it would go from the beginning, but it just didn’t work out that way.

 

Q. So how old is the material on "Mona Bone Jakon"?

 

A. Oh, very new. All written in the last three months or so.

 

Q. Well, what’s happened to all the songs you’ve obviously written in the past 18 months?

 

A. I’ve still got them, but the new songs are settled. Everything I wrote while I "was away was in a transitional period and reflects that and the doubts I was having. I wasn’t sure about my music, which was very frightening. You know, not believing in yourself is very scary. I was listening to too many people and that made me unsure of everything. I had to be sure about myself first, and I am now. I’m absolutely positive. It’s what I want, it’s what’s happened on record, it’s the way it should be.

 

Q. The album is very much on your shoulders too. There are no huge orchestrations to hide away in, just you, your guitar or piano, and small units of sound.

 

A. That’s exactly right. It’s something that hasn’t come out before. I used to play things like this to people and they’d ask why I wasn’t doing it on record, so I had to do it this way. Now it’s all down to me. What we did was to record the songs simply, then discuss with Del Newman, the arranger, how they could be improved. Not just added to, but improved, and we were very lucky because he was into what we were doing. That was one of the things that got out of hand before. Because it was all done on the session with these clockwork players who just read the music, sat down and played it. They didn’t feel it, or care about it. Sessions in the old days used to scare the hell out of me. I used to get all knotted up days before, just being scared about it. And you just can’t work in that frame of mind. So we just hit it from the roots with this album. Just me and guitar and piano. It’s the only way really.

 

Q. So what happens now, after this album?

 

A. Well, there’s talk about film music. I was supposed to be writing for a movie last year, but it was one of the things the studio cancelled when that money panic happened in Hollywood.

 

Q. Do you have a set-working pattern, or do you literally get a turn on at odd moments which may result in a song?

 

A. No. I eat, sleep and drink my music. It really does take up all my thinking time. It could be titles, anything. Anytime, anywhere, that’s the pattern. And when it happens, you just have to get it down because it may be important.

I got into electronic music quite a bit during The Big Rest. It’s good because it’s slightly upside down, freaky, and is a side of me, which comes out there. Then there’s the sweet, classical side that I occasionally rest on. But electronic music is disturbing. Stockhausen is still pretty incredible, and there are some people in Norway doing interesting things. Italians have a great feel for making electronic instruments.

 

Q. Finally, do you miss anything at all about the old days?

 

A. Not one thing. Truly - not a thing. The whole mess was a REALLY BIG DRAG.

©Photos Cat Stevens

We are born into the world of nature, our second birth is into the world of spirit. 

Bhagavad Gita