Appreciation of Cat Stevens, “Teaser and the Firecat”
Cat Stevens (a.k.a. Yusuf Islam, then just Yusuf, and now using both Yusuf and Cat Stevens) has never quite gotten his due. He could have been bigger than James Taylor. Both started off at about the same time in the same singer/songwriter genre. Stevens usually wrote better melodies and much better lyrics, he had a more expressive vocal range (although a reedier voice), and he could play more than just two or three guitar licks over and over. There’s room in the world, of course, for both Taylor and Stevens. But Taylor was more homespun American, and he cultivated more contacts in the exploding early ’70s California musical culture. Stevens’s later work was uneven, and his disappearances and reappearances from the music industry (with different names) haven’t helped his career. There was also that bogus charge in 1989 that he supported the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
Stevens was just not born to pursue maximum celebrity. He had a promising start in London in the late ’60s, making a powerful entry as a songwriter with “The First Cut Is the Deepest” in 1967 (later a hit for Rod Stewart, James Morrison, and Sheryl Crow, among others). But Stevens contracted tuberculosis in 1969. While he was recovering for months in the hospital, he began to reassess his priorities and trajectory. He studied religions, meditated, and wrote a catalog of songs about things other than drugs, parties, or puerile teen love affairs.
Mona Bone Jackson debuted a new sound and approach for Stevens in 1970. The record did well, especially in the UK, but it was a precursor to Stevens’s 1971 masterpiece, Teaser and the Firecat. While the album may not be as familiar to American audiences as other singer-songwriter classics that year from Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Don McLean, and others, it holds its own with the best of them. There’s not a song on Teaser and the Firecat that sounds dated 50 years later.
The most famous track is the last one, “Peace Train” (which Stevens hilariously pitted against Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” live at Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” in 2010). Other tracks also have a theme of peace. “Changes IV” and “Bitterblue” are upbeat rockers with catchy cross-rhythms that deserved to be hits. The lyrics to “Changes IV” add another car to the peace train: “Don’t you feel a change a-coming/From another side of time,/Breaking down the walls of silence/Lifting shadows from your mind.” Similarly, “Tuesday’s Dead” draws on calypso rhythms (which Stevens would later revisit effectively on his cover of Sam Cooke’s “Another Saturday Night”) with intelligent and unclichéd lyrics about changing the world.
The love songs are simple and heartfelt. “How Can I Tell You” and “If I Laugh” are quiet and humble, demonstrating Stevens’s unobtrusive but accomplished technique on acoustic guitar. I don’t know how the emotive “How Can I Tell You” has escaped becoming a Valentine’s Day standard, but it’s never too late.
The other song that did become a standard, along with “Peace Train,” is “Morning Has Broken.” It’s a traditional song, first published in 1931, but Stevens (with Rick Wakeman on piano) took it to the pop charts, securing its place in hymnals across religions and denominations ever since. It memorably conveys simple happiness in new beginnings.
Teaser and the Firecat was released in October 1971, a fitting benediction of love, optimism, and peace to a year that needed all of them in full measure.
