Marvel: Ramses Shaffy’s Seven Commandments

In the iconic Weimar swan-song movie Cabaret, liberal-democratic 1933 Deutschland throws itself a final champagne-soaked party before the Nazis come in and churlishly stomp the balloons with their jackboots. In one of the film’s most famous scenes, a satin-draped Liza Minnelli delivers, from the stage of a nightclub, a vivid 11th-hour lecture on the evils of sitting alone in a room. She waves her arms around, Minnelli-like, shakes her cropped Minnelli hair and using her weird guttural Minnelli vibrato to great effect, preaches hedonism to the martini-quaffing sophisticates at their tables, a doomed pre-war demimonde who seem not to need the lesson. What good is sitting alone in your room? She asks them. Life is a Cabaret! 

It’s a chastening song, particularly for those of us who favor sitting alone in a room. But the point is well taken. Life is happening out there. Get out of the house! For some that’s easier said than done. Some are trapped behind plate glass, figuratively and otherwise, straining for a glimmer of what the rest of us take for absolute granted. We may all be stardust (CSNY ca. 1968) but that fact is not always manifest. We don’t all feel acquainted with the indefinable stuff that pours into the evening boulevards. We don’t all feel the sparkle. To some, the Aurora Borealis is an enormous mildew-stiffened shower curtain. The complicated world is cluttered with half
empty glasses.

Ramses

Enter Shaffy. In 1933, the last year of the Weimar fest (and the last year for quite a little while that fishnet stockings would figure in Berlin nightlife), a future lovable shaggy-dog Dutch troubadour with the unlikely name of Ramses Shaffy was born in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. 

If the shaggy Dutch-French singer was not born under a lucky star, the winking empyrean vault would make later reparations. Ramses’ Egyptian diplomat dad would ditch the fam before his birth (they would meet for the first time in the ‘80s), and his Polish-Russian countess mother would raise him in Cannes. On contracting tuberculosis, and in clear cahoots with the Fates, his mother would then pack him off to Holland. 

This wounded high-school dropout’s self-discovery and reinvention as a young artist in the candlelit clubs and grottoes of Amsterdam, his rise as a beloved truth-telling cabaret figure in his own right, the boozy brawls and chemical gauntlet that would nearly kill him, his nationally beloved artistic partnership with Liesbeth List (their Shaffy Cantata is a completely strange, heart-elevating, and wordless choral pop tart that’ll have you hopping like a mosher) – these are the subjects of a lengthier essay. If you can imagine.

sing, fight, weep, pray, laugh, work, and marvel

In 1972 Shaffy would pen a song of such throat-cramping emotional uplift it would define him forevermore; a crazy diamond called ‘Zing, Vecht, Huil, Bid, Lach, Werk, en Bewonder!’ The tune is an evergreen Dutch classic whose theme and melody and “sing it from the rooftops!” message are transcendent. I have long carried the song like a talisman. Its exhortation is piercing. 

The tune unfolds like a supernova on slow boil. By the end it’s throwing off whatever penetrating rays a supernova throws off. The first time I heard it, my sketchy command of Dutch gave me pause. Could this guy really be singing what it sounded like he was singing? Is it rational to yell something like that in a pop song? The title is the chorus – a command delivered in a fever of joy. First, though, the verses tenderly catalog the various shades of remove that define the ‘quietly desperate,’ as Thoreau would say.

‘For the one in the corner, behind glass, for the one with the slammed shut windows, for the one who thought he was alone; you must know this now; we are all together.’

‘For the ones with the firmly shut books, for the ones with the soon-forgotten names, for the ones who seek in vain; you must know this now; we are all together!’

The band America tried this sort of outreach with Dan Peek’s pleasant but fairly limp tune ‘This is for All the Lonely People.’ Their advice? ‘Don’t give up until you reach for the silver cup and ride that highway in the sky.’ Uh… thanks America. It always sounded to my teenage ears a little iffy. So I have to reach for this thing, this silver cup? And then, I guess… die trying? What… do I fall off the chair or something? I don’t want the Highway in the Sky yet! Just give me the freaking silver cup! 

Shaffy’s remedy is more declarative, and in the mesmerizing live performance video of the song has the added benefit of being shouted though an unrehearsed smile of solidarity.

Sing! Fight! Weep! Pray! Laugh! Work! Marvel! 

These are the basic food groups of Human Life on Earth, shouted as a joyous assurance – and just incidentally a tidy summation of the Dutch national character as I’ve come to know it. Hoo boy.

gezelligheid 

The Dutch have perfected what I call “artful satisfaction with the quotidian.” The word is gezelligheid, which any translation gizmo will present as the English word “coziness.” That doesn’t quite capture the simple, daily, at-rest glory of the word. The Dutch are also guileless with their friendship, back-slapping to absolute strangers, and happily, irremovably tangled in the threads of daily existence. Oh, and all those tulips! None of the spokes on the Wheel of Life are lost on the Dutch. And I have never seen a performer put a song and message across as wholly and triumphantly as Ramses Shaffy does this one. I include a possibly annoying link to the vid at the bottom of this treatise. At around 2:40 you can glimpse the power; he is reaching an inner crescendo on the last verse, barely containing himself. 

As Shaffy’s exultation increases, the middle backup singer in particular looks at him worriedly, or is just possibly in thrall to his carbonated, toothy unprofessionalism. “This is a job, dude. What’s all this?” Shaffy is alight. He wheels on the studio orchestra and you see his bony back exhorting them with the message. “Marvel! MARVEL!” He’s beside himself. It’s a strange and moving thing to see.

Amsterdam’s Icarus

In later life Ramses Shaffy’s incandescence would dim, as seems to be inevitable in these cases. He would succumb to drink again in his late-middle age, then very publicly be swept up in a kind of cocktail-enhanced Alzheimer’s called Korsakoff’s Syndrome, making addled public appearances and eventually living in a sort of convalescent group home; the outer flame apparently snuffed by the most mortal and ordinary poisons. He would finally manage to throw off the demon booze in his final years and then would be stricken with cancer. The thanks he got.

But heilige coe! When he shouts out his message – and he is still shouting it out – the flame isn’t sputtering, nor will it. Who would dare write a song chorus like this? “Sing! Fight! Weep! Pray! Laugh! Work! Marvel!” 

An orphan who found the goods. Shaffy’s litany should be in the Dutch National Charter – and very nearly is.  

Here is Ramses Shaffy exhorting the lonely.