Note: to the readers of this intermittent bulletin, I recognize in what follows that I am violating the compact I made a couple of months ago, to cover only unsigned, unreleased, or self-released music, and I want to assure you that I take that compact seriously, and will return to it very soon. Nevertheless, I have spent the last ten days or so having the following exchange with my good friend, the poet (and critic) Michael Snediker, on the new album by Antony and the Johnsons, The Crying Light. Since in the meantime I am trying to finish for this venue some notes on repetition in the genre known as grindcore, I’m attaching my exchange with Michael as a stopgap, with the hope that—despite its subject being a more established artist—it will be of some genuine intrigue to people interested in the voice and point of view published herein. I promise to get back to my regular beat very soon. In what follows, Michael goes first, and I reply, etc. …more

I was going to start this post by talking about Bruce Springsteen. I was going to start by saying that there was a certain moment in the output of Bruce Springsteen when I realized I was no longer interested—because he had become too professional. The moment was: “I’m On Fire.” I was going to say -since “I’m on Fire” was coeval with “Born In the U.S.A.,” among his finest compositions- that maybe our greatest success sows the seeds of imminent failure. Maybe our beginning is our end. Maybe we’re born astride the grave, professionally speaking. Maybe it’s inevitable in music and literature (and art generally) that we get promoted to a point of incompetence. Or maybe there’s just something perverse in me that gets bored once an artist ascends to the peak of cultural impact. Maybe it’s really hard to make a masterpiece—whatever that is, whatever culture needs for it to be—and upon doing so, upon making a masterpiece, it’s really hard for the artificer to want to bother with the heartache of the thing all over again. Maybe most musicians, at the end of the day, just want to be professional. Maybe that great ambition of the rock and roll player, to quit his day job, is the beginning of the end. Maybe you should always keep your day job.

Also: I was going to say that my late sister turned me onto Springsteen, ahead of the curve, giving me The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle some months before that other record came out and made him a household type of name. And maybe because my sister is no longer living, The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle is one of those albums (along with Zuma, by Neil Young, and Collaboration, by Shawn Phillips) that will always seem like an unsurpassed masterpiece, even as it seems, for me, wreathed in death. Maybe what’s great about music is what we use it for, and not its innate qualities. (I can remember driving to the beach in Rhode Island, in 1983, listening to “Sexual Healing” by Marvin Gaye, and for me that’s what that song will always summon.) Maybe music, even more than literature, is owned by the listener. Every artist, when contemplating quitting the day job, when contemplating a profession in music, should remember that the casual listener is no auteur theorist. They give a shit mainly about what’s playing on the radio on the way to the beach.

Meanwhile: I’m trying to write an essay about Antonin Artaud right now and in this capacity I was reading Jacques Derrida’s essay about Artaud’s drawings, where I came across the following lines, concerning Artaud’s total inability to render in “professional” way: “The awkwardness . . . comes from another source and is submitted to. Artaud means to reappropriate this hand and this body against what he calls ‘the drawing principle,’ that is, against the strict organization of that kind of know-how which regulates itself by foreign forces and compromises with them.” What a strange, beautiful thought! That awkwardness (inability, refusal to improve) is to militate against an academy of compromises! This is, for me, exactly what “unprofessional” music does. Having said this, I should say that I do understand that when Bob Dylan commenced to imitate the singing style of the late Woody Guthrie he was, in truth, making just this sort of compromise. And thus I know that Dylan, the trickster, is just as guilty of professionalism as, e.g., Whitesnake. And I further know that all the indie rock kids with their constructed inability and their Will Oldham-style imperfect intonation, can be just as calculating.

Still, it’s with the guilessness of the truly unprofessional musician, the crudity of means, the foregrounded impulsiveness of the unprofessional musician, that you occasionally get a glimpse of what music really is, and what human psychology really feels like. The unprofessional musician really cares about what she does, because she only does it when she cares about it. The professional musician has a mortgage, a contract, kids, a model girlfriend, managers, and hangers-on, and he can’t stop playing even if he wants to. He will flog the horse until the horse collapses between his legs.

I bring all of this up as regards a songwriter I really like. A somewhat “unprofessional” type. Timothy Bracy, you’ll probably remember, was in a band called the Mendoza Line (named for the lowest acceptable batting average for a professional baseball player), who broke up in 2007 after making nine or ten albums over a ten-year period. The band, after some years of shifting constituencies, eventually hardened into a lineup that featured Bracy and his wife Shannon MacArdle as singers and songwriters—backed up by some really good players streamlining the vision. In this way, they made three very fine albums, culminating in 2007’s “farewell” package, 30-Year Low. This is one of my favorite albums of recent years. It’s really, really great, and not enough people heard it. 30-Year Low is mainly a country and folk-rock inflected affair, with a little Velvet Underground around the edges, likewise a little post-punk (especially on Shannon’s songs). But the whole never feels like one of those genre exercises. Because, most importantly, these are songs with words, songs that glory in words, and which, in their rush of images, shy away from nothing, from no confession, from no unsavory incident: “I’ve seen the whole three-act play, I’ve seen the poster and trailer,/and I never thought I have to pay so much attention to one girl just to nail her.”

Why was this the last album, you ask? Well, apparently paradise wasn’t so paradisal. Maybe it was never paradise at all, because the songs seemed sad as hell even before Tim and Shannon’s marriage fell apart. But by the time of 30-Year Low the principals could, if the songs are any indication, barely tolerate each other. The songs, whether autobiographical or not, are full of savage accusations (“She follows all your work/she’s got a fucking kitty on her shirt”), and there is the implication that many drinks were apparently drunk, and there was bad behavior on the tours (they even have a song called “Mistakes Were Made”), episodes of middle-of-the-night histrionics, and then the marriage was over, and what was left behind was one of the very finest documents in song about love and the lack thereof ever. Right up there with Blood On the Tracks and Rumours.

After that? Shannon made a solo album and seemed, well, extremely adept at getting in the last word, while Bracy sort of kept to himself, except for a few solo shows (he also holds down the keyboard spot in the band called Bird of Youth, which mainly features the preternaturally talented Beth Wawerna). But in retrospect, upon reflection, it seems it was Bracy who was the real writer in The Mendoza Line, not McArdle. Bracy’s voice, which is to Bob Dylan’s voice as John Prine’s voice is to George Jones’s voice, is a brokedown and sodden thing, perfect for giving up entirely. His voice sounds like surrender was written on his birth certificate. His voice sounds like it never met a melody that couldn’t be improved on by mumbling and deciding not to bother. But the words, the words (“Baby, don’t you think you’re being a little too drastic/there are things in this world you can’t buy with plastic;/you blew threw your cash like a Klondike miner/you made me feel the lash of the intelligent designer”), the words are so frigging great that you don’t care about his voice (you come to love it, in fact) likewise his by-the-book rhythm guitar playing (ditto). He writes like almost no songwriter of his generation, with an absolute vision of and a total commitment to the ugly truth, even if the truth emphatically does not flatter him in this his third decade (“Trading’s mixed, the dollar’s weak, productivity has reached its peak, now you’re lying in the basement contemplating a 30-year low”).

And so we come to the bulletin: in this unprofessional present, this disagreeable now, Bracy is attempting to get a new band off the ground. Fitfully, with mixed emotions. Is it taking so long because he associates the whole band thing with unadulterated pain? Is there any point, when your ex-wife has become so efficient at the deployment of her side of the story (taking a page from the Mia Farrow and Claire Bloom finishing schools), to making another album? Why bother? Still, against all the prevailing wisdom, Bracy intends a new band. The band, so far, is called the Collection Agency (a growth business with which Bracy has apparently had acquaintance in the time since his divorce settlement). And Bracy has a running sequence for his album, and a number of really good demos, many of them leaning on the 12-bar blues more than on recent Mendoza albums, and all of them appropriately skeletal, even naked.

Of the songs I’ve heard the best is one called “Doug Yule.” Doug Yule, it will be recalled, was the guy who joined the Velvet Underground after John Cale was dispatched, and who, with reliable if barely inspired work ethic, played Lou’s foil on Loaded. After even Reed had left the band, Yule insisted on making a last Velvets album by himself. This album is effaced from nearly all accounts of the Velvets. Doug Yule, the very height, therefore, of professionalism! Let me quote: “Nico said ‘I cannot make love to Jews anymore’/That’s what she said when she broke it off with Lou./And a man can work, but can he pay his dues anymore?/Like the Velvets in the time before Doug Yule./Doug Yule, Doug Yule/Life just can’t be this cruel/Why can’t I feel the vestige of new beginnings?/Doug Yule, Doug Yule/Spare me one more year through/I swear I have another album in me.”

It’s a duet, on this demo, between Tim and Beth Wawerna, she singing the part that Shannon might once have sung with warbly southern dipthongs. You can feel Bracy’s grief, here, his good humor (despite everything), his foreboding, and his absolute love of music history, which undergirds everything he does. But you can also feel, in these demos, Bracy refusing to do something, refusing to finish, committing to some of what neglect offers, which is exile and cunning and pathos, committing to awkwardness, in the face of excess professionalism, in a song about excess professionalism. Which is to say, for good or ill, that Bracy is another gifted songwriter, a sublime songwriter, laboring mostly outside of the music business, making songs for his MySpace page, biding his time. And as a result, in “Doug Yule” he has quite a bit more to say than you’ll find, e.g., in that new single, the one with the preposterous whistling on the bridge, from the famous New Jersey bar band.

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See Also: Rick Moody’s Music Blog Swinging Modern Sounds

I think it was in 1986 or thereabouts that my friend Jim Lewis gave me a bootlegged cassette of a live radio appearance by Peter Holsapple and Syd Straw (with, I think, Ilene Markell, on bass and backing vocals–all of it taking place on KCRW). Jim was my close friend in college, and he went on to become a novelist and journalist. These days he lives in Austin, Texas. Chief among the many bands that Jim made me aware of, back then, were the dB’s, featuring Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey, and I became such a devotee of the dB’s and the other architects of the “Hoboken sound” that I actually moved to Hoboken (in 1985), and lived there for about seven years. I lived a couple of blocks from Yo La Tengo, and used to see Chris Stamey on the bus going into the city. I went to Maxwell’s, the club that served as the epicenter of the Hoboken sound, a lot. I got Bob Mould’s autograph there once. Anyway, the Straw/Holsapple cassette had something really luminous about it. Peter and Syd played a bunch of dB’s songs, those from LIKE THIS and THE SOUND OF MUSIC, as well, as some of Straw’s songs from the Golden Palominos album, BLAST OF SILENCE, on which she sang. And I’m pretty sure they covered their amazing duet, “Never Before and Never Again.”

Somehow I’d missed the Straw era of the Golden Palominos. I had their first album, a much artier affair featuring Arto Lindsay, Bill Laswell, and John Zorn, et al. And I’d heard some of VISIONS OF EXCESS on the radio station, including “Omaha,” the song on which Michael Stipe sang. But it wasn’t until I heard the KCRW show that I understood what incredible singer Syd Straw was. I admired Holsapple already (and I ran into him on a plane once, when he was touring with Hootie and the Blowfish–and let me tell you there’s something strange about running into the heroes of your young adulthood when they are playing in Hootie and the Blowfish), and he shines on the bootleg, too, but Syd’s voice, which is part faux-country, part Broadway, and a fair amount Vaudeville, really struck something in me. Especially on songs like “Diamond,” Holsapple’s song from BLAST OF SILENCE, and “Listening to Elvis,” a Straw song from a Hoboken sampler called LUXURY CONDOS COMING TO YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD, Syd had some bittersweet (emphasis on bitter) and tragicomic (emphasis on tragic) quality that could not help but move even the casual listener. I wore out that cassette.

Then what happened? She released a solo album about the same time, and based on the popularity of the Golden Palominos, she got a major label deal. The first album has a lot of great New York players on it, Marc Ribot, most of the dB’s, most of the Paliminos, including the elusive Peter Blegvad, and so on. Still, that album didn’t haunt me the way the radio show had haunted me, and I kept it around for a while before selling in some purge of insufficiently-listened-to items. After which, ten years passed. That’s how it goes in stories like this, stories about time and the effects of time: ten years pass. A lot happened in those ten years, but of import for the story is the fact that my music biz friend sent me a promotional copy of Syd’s first album in ten years, War and Peace. By then Syd was living with the guy who managed Wilco, and was recording with this pretty amazing bar band called the Skeletons–in a stripped down format, doing nothing at all as slickly or as homogenously as on her first album. There was a desperation to the record, as though Syd couldn’t bother to take the time any longer to polish up the dark parts of her autobiographical impulse with love song varnish. And nowhere was this more evident than on its hit, a song about the New York that she knew when she first moved there to perform (as, among other things, a backing vocalist for Pat Benetar), “CBGB’s.” A song about a real bartender at that late lamented club, and his band The Nylons, and the moment of chemistry between the real Syd and the real bartender (“I was married for a while/It ended in tragedy/Oh well, enough about me”), and the fact that nothing much ever came of it. ”CBGB’s” ends with a reiterated and entirely painful inquiry by the narrator, “Remember me? Hey, remember me?” But it’s not just the particular bartender that Straw is trying to recover, it’s the time, the ambition, the promise of youth, the belief in music, in the so-called redemptive power of rock and roll, not to mention the belief in love. As on the rest of album, which seems composed of one grim breakup after another, it’s the trying not to give up that commands our attention.

A couple of years later, I was teaching at Bennington College when Loudon Wainwright III showed up to perform. The guy who ran the writing program at Bennington had very good taste in songwriters, and so he invited up Loudon for a show, and Loudon in turn brought along this friend of his to sing on a couple of songs. Syd Straw. I had never seen Syd in person, had never seen her do what she does, and because it was Loudon’s gig, she didn’t steal that dimly lit limelight. But afterward everybody went back to the faculty “dorm” and sat around singing songs. I tried to persuade to sing “CBGB’s” and finally she complied, though she complained a little bit. It was already snowing outside, and while we sat in there, the snow piled up. It was incredible to hear Syd sing her lament for a totally, irreversibly, irrevocably lost youth with just a few people sitting around, a couple of really great novelists, a poet or two, Lucy Grealy, Loudon Wainwright, and so on.

We became pretty good friends after that. Syd and I did. Or, to put another way: ten more years passed. Because that’s how it goes in these kinds of stories. What did Syd do in her next ten year layoff? She played a few shows, especially on Valentine’s Day, got in various kinds of arguments with whoever was booking the show, she found fault with the musicians that were backing her (and usually I attributed this to a) the fact that the players were, in fact, not good enough, and b) that Syd was and is so talented that she just wanted people to play with the kind of grace that she brought to her efforts), and then there were always unsettling stories, gigs where she got arrested for quarreling with the police before the show, horror stories about romance and about her family, her parents, both of whom died after War and Peace, siblings who were either into some dark stuff, or who would scarcely lift a finger to help, and so on. Always the hard way, as Syd always put it, and it sure was the hard way.

Then some years back Syd started talking about making another record. How was she going to do this, exactly, since she’d been dropped by the thieves at Capricorn Records, and she was chronically “financially embarrassed,” as my grandfather used to put it? And she was kind of stuck in central Vermont, forever trying to avoid the punishing winters and their attendant heating bills, and there weren’t any of her awesome musical confreres there, the guys who might be willing to sit in on a few sessions out of love for this difficult, brilliant singer. Over the years, all the labels rejected the album, some motherfucker stole the master tapes, and Syd was, as far as I could tell, five guitar solos from being done. This went on and on, and I for one, because I believe that time is the avenger, that time lays waste to everyone, to every bit of talent that has he hubris to appear in the world, never believed that Syd’s album would be finished. Not because I didn’t believe in Syd, but because I don’t believe in time.

And then without any fanfare, it was done! Pink Velour, it’s called, and most of it orbits around the title song, about Syd’s mom, who not long ago passed away. That’s a beautiful song, but the one I want to talk a little about is last song, “Actress,” which manifestly deals with Syd’s avocational, or occasionally vocational interest in the thespian pursuits, but which is more concerned with the travails of Hollywood failure (“Then I failed my screen test/Fucked up my audition/I’m an actress/In a town that’s full of them/Act as if you care”), as a way of talking about everything that Syd Straw once believed in, as a singer and songwriter (“I’m having that kind of career,/I’m having a kind of career/I came here to become a star, but this is my life so far”). As with a lot of Syd Straw songs, since Syd’s guitar playing is in the beautifully rudimentary category, the song comes to rest on a one-four chord progression, and settles in there for about four and a half minutes, as Syd’s new band (a heterodox group of very talented jazz and rock veterans called Plankton who have the wherewithal to go wherever they are sent by the chanteuse) brings all the dynamics to the part where she mumbles a few more devastating self-lacerations and accusations, during the long slow fade: “Always rely on the kindness of strangers,” and “Who am I anyway, when I’m not acting?,” and “Why don’t you come over and see me sometime?” And so on: trying not to give up.

If this song doesn’t make you cry, you aren’t listening carefully. But what does it tell us about where music is now, because that’s the reason to write about it (besides, that is, writing about it to bring your attention to it). Most popular songs, with their puppy-love advice-column nonsense, tell me nothing about how life is actually lived, and as such, they are incapable of moving me. Doesn’t matter how good the performances are. Probably part of the reason for this is that the record companies, who are not immune to demographic calculations, are chasing the disposable incomes of the young, and so they hew to songwriting that addresses young people. But what about adults? Who the hell, then, is making records for adults? There are a few obvious examples, the baby boomer icons (long past their best work), but otherwise the vast majority of popular music is made not to stand the test of time, but to be wiped away by time. The collateral damage is just about every songwriter of a certain age, every songwriter who tries capture in the amber the heartache of middle age, and the giving out of the ambitions that sustained her when she was young. There’s no mercy in it, there’s no mercy in the world, there’s no mercy in time, unless there’s the occasional glimpse of the fact that we are not, in this suffering, alone.

by Rick Moody

Arthur Danto, the Columbia University philosophy professor and frequent writer on contemporary art, has often referred to this “historical present” as a time after the history of art. What he seems to mean about this, I think, is that once Warhol made the Brillo box pieces, art had come to the end of a certain historical imperative. Anything after that time was at liberty to be whatever it felt like being, there was no urgency to be one thing or another. Pop, abstraction, narrative painting, landscapes, they all could coexist in the strange marketplace of the present. It’s worth asking what Danto would say about jazz. …more

Introduction

Everybody knows the book business is in dire straits these days. The news comes in awful fusillades from the daily press. But in part the book business looks so dire right now because it has mainly been indemnified against the kinds of downturns that have afflicted other media in the digital age. Books are not pirated the way movies are, in Asia, and elsewhere, and the digital storage of the book hasn’t taken off the way it has in the music business. In fact, from my vantage point, the music business, the place where I have probably spent the greatest portion of my disposable capital since my teen years, is the canary in the coal mine of twenty-first century culture. It has lost much of its economic dominance in the last decade, and it has lost control of the form that, through a variety of iterations, has been its shining face for forty years: I speak of the album. The album, insofar as it is a thing that people make and buy from large multi-national corporations, is basically dead. This is not news. However, what happens after the death of the album is, …more