But I am not writing these lines for these reasons, but out of a delight and surprise shading into an unmistakable conviction. I am writing these lines because The Next Day, the recent album by David Bowie (released recently on Iso Records, and available almost everywhere), is the unlikeliest masterpiece of the recent popular song, the best album by an otherwise retired classic rock artist in many, many years. It kicks the shit out of that recent spate of albums by Neil Young and Crazy Horse, it is better than anything the Stones did since Tattoo You (which is mainly good because of Sonny Rollins anyhow), better than anything Van Morrison has done since Avalon Sunset, better than anything Dylan has done since Time Out of Mind, better than anything Brian Ferry has done since Mamouna (nineteen years ago), better than anything Joni Mitchell has done since Mingus, better than anything Jimi Hendrix has done since Electric Ladyland, better than anything Elvis Costello has done since Blood and Chocolate, better than anything Paul McCartney has done since Run Devil Run, better than anything associated with the Who since Who By Numbers.

It’s a remarkable and completely unpredictable masterpiece by a guy in his later sixties, an album that doesn’t sound like anything else happening in 2013, except that it sounds, in some ways, like a lot of the very best work David Bowie has done (though let us not engage in the ridiculous job of figuring out what was the last all-but-perfect David Bowie album–after the period in which Bowie was unassailable and shipped a lot of units, he was a whipping boy, though many of the albums that critics loved to dislike have great material on them,[1] the first Tin Machine album is far, far better than anyone was willing to admit at the time, and Outside is far better than anyone admitted at the time, and Black Tie, White Noise is far better than anyone thought at the time, indeed it was all but overlooked, and Reality and Heathen both are better than anyone really adjudged them to be), and while most people think that the high period of David Bowie ended with the improbable domination of Let’s Dance in the thirty years since there has been a lot of great music by David Bowie, much of it underrated, and inadequately understood.

Which implies that: David Bowie is an artist who has to land just right with culture and history. He has to release the right album at the right time, and he has to, alas, vanish from the court of public opinion in order for us rightly to appreciate him.

In the present environment, the environment of Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber and One Direction and Maroon 5 and Lil’ Wayne’s lackluster new album, David Bowie sounds like a titan, like a behemoth of song, but it’s not only because of his context, it’s because he made a great album, which has more passion in each composition than most people manage in entire albums; wait, that’s not only it, David Bowie made an album, when most artists these days make a few singles, or a couple of YouTube videos.

And anyway, the vanished-for-ten-years thing is a little bit overstating the case, because I believe Bowie last appeared on stage in 2006, so that’s more like seven years (or the same amount, roughly speaking, between appearances by Fiona Apple), and the guy had angioplasty, and probably thought he was going to die, and may well have had a reasonable expectation of dying, that is, he collapsed onstage according to some accounts, had to leave the stage, and he probably really doesn’t want to get back on a stage, and who can blame him, and anyway the whole issuing-bonds-on-future-earnings part of the Bowie story means that Bowie is relatively secure and didn’t need to make an album, he doesn’t have alimony to pay to a brace of ex-wives, and so why did he have to make an album at all, he didn’t have to make an album, there’s nothing to prove; as the Isolar press office has indicated, his feeling is that he doesn’t want to make an album these days, unless he has something to say, and, apparently, now he has something to say. Indeed. He seems to have a great deal to say, and a lot of it is befitting the preoccupations of a man who had a brush with death (in this way, yes, not unlike Dylan on Time Out of Mind), namely a lot about war, lost love, failure, romantic struggle, the heavy burden of the past, and so on, on an album like one of those extremely dramatic days where the gray of the horizon is indistinguishable from the sea, the wind howls, and there is a glimmering of longing that permeates the half-light.

Now, Bowie, the artist who no longer has anything to prove, has indicated that he is unavailable for comment about The Next Day, because there is only the work, and anything beyond the work is sort of what this album is about, “The Stars (Are Out Tonight),” viz., in which a preoccupation with celebrity is some kind of devastated pathology, one with which Bowie feels oddly sympathetic in the song (and the video, which you have to see, because it’s like a little movie it’s so good), despite having formerly been a “star” himself. Onto the “stars” we project our confusions and desperations, onto the “stars” we project the lives we do not lead. Ergo, there is only the work now, and the silence is part of the work, the work is otherwise complete, the way it is complete with Thomas Pynchon, and the way it was with J. D. Salinger, but, that said, and I can hardly believe it is the case myself, I have somehow persuaded David Bowie to part with a few words on the subject of this album.

I mean, I persuaded Bowie, somehow, to give me a sort of a work flow diagram for The Next Day, because I wanted to think about it in light of what he was thinking about it, I wanted to understand the lexicon of The Next Day, and so I simply asked if he would provide this list of words about his album, assuming, like everyone else waving madly trying to get his attention, that there was not a chance in hell that I would get this list, because who the fuck am I, some novelist killing time writing occasionally about music, and yet astonishingly the list appeared, and it appeared without further comment, which is really excellent, and exactly in the spirit of this album, and the list is far better than I could ever have hoped, and it’s exactly like Bowie, at least in my understanding of him, impulsive, intuitive, haunted, astringent, and incredibly ambitious in the matter of the arts; Bowie is a conceptual artist, it seems to me, who just happens to work in the popular song, and he wants to make work that goes somewhere new, and this is amply demonstrated by the list.

What I propose here is that I use the list to make a few observations about the incredible excellence of The Next Day, as a way of explaining what I think he’s after, or as a way of collaborating with the ideas in play, and in this way will a really great album be illuminated, given the opportunity to blossom further, later into the season, etc.

So here’s what David sent me (and I should thank him for doing it, and so I fervently thank him here):

Effigies

Indulgences

Anarchist

Violence

Chthonic

Intimidation

Vampyric

Pantheon

Succubus

Hostage

Transference

Identity

Mauer

Interface

Flitting

Isolation

Revenge

Osmosis

Crusade

Tyrant

Domination

Indifference

Miasma

Pressgang

Displaced

Flight

Resettlement

Funereal

Glide

Trace

Balkan

Burial

Reverse

Manipulate

Origin

Text

Traitor

Urban

Comeuppance

Tragic

Nerve

Mystification

Bowie’s list was left-justified, but probably because he didn’t want to take the time to center justify, and also his list was purposefully double-spaced, and so came with the same amount of white space that you’re seeing, and, you have to admit, it’s an incredibly provocative list of words for the album.

I was really excited to speak to this list, and to apply this list to the songs of The Next Day, but the very first thing I had to do was simply to enjoy the list, because it’s a great list, and it has the word chthonic on it, and this is one of my very favorite words, and you have to admit, additionally, chthonic is a great word, and all art that is chthonic is excellent art, and art that has nothing chthonic about it, like, let’s say, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” that is art that’s hard to withstand.

But in this case, when Bowie says chthonic, it’s obvious he’s not just aspiring to chthonic, the album has death in nearly every song, and Bowie, after the angioplasty, can deploy his word choice with a newfound sense of confidence, though we can wish that this were not the case, we can wish that the artist didn’t have to suffer. But confidence is always a good thing as regards the intricacies of lyrical composition, and so chthonic has personal heft behind it, as does isolation, which is a word a lot like Isolar, the name of David Bowie’s management enterprise, and there’s also vampyric, succubus, violence, funereal, effigies, and burial, just in case the chthonic part were not clear enough, as well as hostage, manipulation, traitor, and the incredibly grim resettlement.

And there, near the close, is the difficult if not impossible to use word tragic. But I’m jumping the gun a bit.

Effigies

One thing that is beautiful about The Next Day is David Bowie’s face. David Bowie’s face is a thing that has often been written about, and which has been often fetishized in the context of his work, especially in the period between ’72 and ’77 or so, when he was more than beautiful, when he was radiantly beautiful and oddly casual about how beautiful he was (what else could he do). The David Bowie of The Man Who Fell to Earth was so beautiful that it was almost hard to look at, but his beauty was remarkable enough to lend him a certain amount of power that he might otherwise not have had, a power that he was penalized for in certain circles (some of Lester Bangs’s carping about Bowie, in those days, seems to me to be about Bowie trading on the perfection of his beauty). Having interviewed him myself once (I think it was 1995), I can say that in middle age (he was younger than I am now as I write these lines) he was still startlingly good looking, but he was no androgynous naiad. He was an older guy who looked great. What he is now, meanwhile, is a man in his sixties, and there’s no point in disputing that, though he is as beautiful as a man in his sixties could be and looks years younger. Still, the package of The Next Day casts off the earlier Bowie. And the jacket of The Next Day, which uses a cocktail napkin, a white square, to block out the David Bowie of “Heroes,” lies in wait for those who would make the mistake of looking for David Bowie the fetish; likewise, the highly stylized photograph of Bowie in the package makes him look about as haunted and rough around the edges as he could possibly look, and it’s the beautiful Bowie that seems like an albatross now, even to Bowie himself,  it’s the whippet thin androgyne from outerspace wearing a g-string or a dress that’s the effigy, or all those suicidal coke-addicted paranoids who can’t even remember making Station to Station, who gave interviews high saying things much regretted later on, those effigies are bodies left to rot in a hollow tree, and the challenging part of the metaphor is that Bowie can still, apparently, feel the too-famous-for-his-own-good young man back there, in the wreckage, and feels him like a sequence of ghosts informing what he has to write, and he keeps trying to kill them off (like on the back cover of Scary Monsters), the effigies, the undead, they keeping coming back, because everybody has to come to some compromise with the early work, you know, when it’s produced in public, and the effigies, here, haunt the enterprise, in the lyrics and occasionally in a wafting of melody of texture from the past, which drifts over the dark landscape . . .

Indulgences

The papal kind, I think we’re talking about, because there’s nothing indulgent on The Next Day, which is a rock and roll album ex post facto (when there is really nothing left of rock and roll). And unlike, say, Earthling or Black Tie, White Noise, there’s little that’s programmed about this album, it sounds mostly like two-guitars-bass-and-drums (when I interviewed him in 1995, Bowie said: “I don’t trust high tech,” even though he’d just worked with Eno on Outside), and that alone is remarkable, because there just isn’t that much of that Velvet Underground ensemble approach to be heard in the world these days. I have a theory that the later life recordings of an artist often revert to some of the earliest music an artist will have encountered, so that John Lennon’s Rock ‘n’ Roll sounds like the late fifties and early sixties, and Paul McCartney’s Kisses On the Bottom sounds like the big band sound, or there’s the recent Van Morrison skiffle and jazz releases, or Rod Stewart’s standards albums, and so on. Bowie has a reputation for being a la mode, up to date, but in this post-historical period of Bowie, he no longer feels a pressure to be a la mode, and as a result there is only rock and roll here, with a bit of chanson (which is a word that Iggy Pop used to describe Bowie’s music once), and a bit of art rock, and some strange noises, mostly courtesy of Gerry Leonard and David Torn (on experimental guitars) and Tony Levin (on fretless bass)—but mostly just rock and roll. How do papal indulgences cohere with the album? Is it because of the power dynamic of the papal indulgence? In which the wealthy and powerful can purchase their way to enlightenment? The injustice thereof? What kind of world is it in which indulgences can be purchased? Is this the dystopic world that Bowie has so lovingly detailed year after year (“Cygnet Committee,” from Space Oddity, e.g., or Diamond Dogs, or Outside)? The world in which all is power and powerlessness, and woe upon you if you’re on the wrong side of that equation?

Anarchist

The military conflict theme on The Next Day is unmistakable. There’s the witty and also deeply disturbing “I’d Rather Be High,” which begins with Nabokov on the beach, and ends with a much grimmer verse: “The Thames was black, the tower dark/I flew to Cairo, find my regiment/City’s full of generals/And generals full of shit/I stumble to the graveyard and I/lay down by my parents, whisper/Just remember duckies/Everybody gets got . . .” It’s not the warm, faintly comical pop stylings of “Modern Love,” nope. Not only do we have a great lyric here, but Bowie’s hatred of a rhyme, which has been in evidence since the Berlin trilogy, if not earlier, frees him up to say what he means instead of being hemmed in by the end rhyme (which, you know, is not native to English language verse anyway), but it’s also true that the military cast of The Next Day does not necessarily imply anarchist in the sense that Bowie is perhaps using the term, as in opposed to government in all cases, it implies violence, funereal, traitor, et al. I can only think, when seeing anarchist in a musical context, of John Lydon rhyming anti-christ with anarchist by making the last syllable of anarchist have a long i sound. The pronunciation (in the Lydon model) is as anarchic as the music. And maybe there’s a way that this kind of anarchist applies (I believe I am not shrinking from the annotation of war and military imagery in the album, we’ll get to that)—in that Bowie overturns the applecart with The Next Day by making a racket as no one of the pensioners age should be capable of making a racket, with two guitars, bass, and drums, all while John Lydon is making a killing in Los Angeles real estate (not bothering, ever again, to write another song with the Pistols,  and trying to reform PiL without any of the original members of PiL). Bowie, who outlasted the Year Zero of punk by making Low and “Heroes,” is more anarchist than the anarchists of that bygone time, but even more so he is anarchist about what the popular song is in 2013, making songs without choruses, songs without hooks, and without end rhymes, so that the anarchism is not only in the violent uprising of the themes, and in the music history impact of the album, but in how it thinks about song structure, which is that it resists pop song structure at almost every turn . . .

Violence

The violence is obvious. There is an abundance of violence.

Chthonic

The song “The Next Day,” which starts with a smart drum snap and which immediately gives way to a snappy glam guitar filigree, which song does, to some degree, have a hook (“and the next day, and the next day, and another day”), is about martyrdom, and has an early Christian extremity to it (“they whip him through the streets and alleys there,” or: “they chant for his death”). It isn’t allegorical in a Christian way, it doesn’t map onto the Passion exactly, but it has resonances. Especially in the hook, which is, after all: three days. The hook features the very number of days between martyrdom and resurrection. The three days in which, if you are a student of this particular story, Jesus of Nazareth is supposed to have traveled down to hell for a look-see. What’s more chthonic than the harrowing of hell? A song about shooting guys on the beach? Again: death in almost every song on The Next Day, no matter how tuneful and engaged the music, no matter how beautiful, there is death, but instead of the whole album being excessively dark, it is somehow by turns outraged and elegiac, in short, it isn’t accepting about the chthonic here on earth, and this can only be as a result of Bowie’s hard times on the way to making this record, and the paradox is almost Nietzschean (like thoughts of suicide have gotten me through many a lonely night), an album about death becomes Bowie’s most animated and lively album in decades. I remember a period in which Bowie allowed the desperation to be buried in the mix (try listening to “Always Crashing in the Same Car:” I was going round and round in the hotel garage), when his desperation was in inverse proportion to his muted tones, but, as they say, no atheists in the trenches, and this reminds me: it is, apparently, frequently the case that patients in the cardiac unit suffer with depression after cardiological intervention, not, perhaps, simply because nothing says impending demise like a heart problem, but also because there is something about the process that effectively gathers up and inaugurates the depressive symptomology like few other bodily complaints, and so it is perhaps not inexact to think of The Next Day as a manifestation of this post-cardiological syndrome, but in this case the post-cardiological transcends the inert qualities of the depressive.

Intimidation

Is it we who are meant to be intimidated? Or is Bowie a bit intimidated too? By the scale of his ambition? By the material? By the high body count?

Vampyric

David Bowie misdirects autobiographical interpretation, often, by laying claim to reportage and fiction as songwriting methodologies, and he cloaks himself, further, in the cut-up. When I interviewed him, he observed that he worked somewhere near to half the time as a lyricist in the cut-up tradition, and he even had, in those days, a computer program that would eat the words and spit them back in some less referential form, and with this in mind it’s possible to overlook the singer-songwriter in Bowie the better to concentrate on the conceptual artist and art-rock stylist. Thereby we might chase down all the references in The Next Day, noting, e.g., that Bowie was reading, during recording, according to Tony Visconti, about medieval British history, about kings and queens (by which we suppose, perhaps, that he was reading Wolf Hall), and finding in the feudal, a political template for all the blood and gore. Vampyric seems to allude to a feudal era, until we gather that it refers, perhaps to “How Does the Grass Grow?” and its couplet, “How does the grass grow?/Blood blood blood,” or “Waiting with my red eyes/And my stone heart,” a chilling concoction to be sure, even with those poppy ya ya yas that serve as its refrain (somehow suggesting, to me, the days when Bowie had Warren Peace as his backing vocalist often), you could go down this road, and you could fail to remember how almost all art is autobiographical, even ostensibly reportorial work is autobiographical, and even the cut-up can be frankly autobiographical, and that even when Bowie was most third-person, most objective in his work in the past, there was a way that he was expressing himself, and I for one do not entirely believe that when we say vampyric here that we are talking just about Middle Europe and about actual vampires with motor scooters and fashionable clothes, but also about Bowie’s recoiling from the landscape of popular culture, and about how that feels, about the blessing of recoiling, no more making the rounds of the late-night talk shows (which he did for the Reality Tour), no need to hit the stage again, no dealing with the tour managers, and the band, and the record company (Iso Records, as I understand it, is Bowie’s own label, and he licensed the recording to Columbia, which means, in effect, that this is self-released), and fans, and the last time Bowie did it, he not only had a heart attack, but he got hit in the eye by a “gift” lobbed from the front rows. (And a lighting guy fell from the scaffolding and died before a show.) I’m sure this stuff happens on a lot of tours. But when the end comes and you can let go, let go of the vampyric part of being a famous musician (and Robert Fripp, Bowie’s guitarist on a couple of records, used exactly this word vampyric to describe the relationship between performer and fan), there is a real freedom in that relinquishment. Reminds me of a famous writer friend of mine who said to me once: They have no idea how easy it would be to stop. Still, this neglects the loss you would feel about retirement. Ian Hunter, Bowie’s acquaintance, and for whom he once wrote “All the Young Dudes,” had a song on this subject, on his comeback album, called Rant (2001), the song being “Dead Man Walking,” (“What am I supposed to do now?/Crawl down the hole of monotony?/The silence is deafening/The phone never rings . . .,”) in which this schematic of retirement is laid out with especial poignance. The incredible thing about vampirism is how much we long for vampirism, for the attention of the vampire, and for how delightful the bite is going to be, all of that Twilight bluster, it’s not necessarily about teenagers who are inconstant in their celebrity relationships, it’s also about wanting the endless relevance of the vampire  . . .

Pantheon

A simple task to talk about a pantheon of Bowie influences, like Anthony Newley and Nina Simone and Tom Verlaine and Lou Reed and Marlene Dietrich and Little Richard and Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland and James Osterberg and Brion Gysin and Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol and Florian Schneider and Robert Zimmerman and Mick Jagger and John Lennon and Charles Mingus and Bette Davis and Martha Graham and Willem DeKooning and Paul Bowles and William S. Burroughs and Walt Whitman and George Orwell and Yoko Ono and Scott Walker and Black Francis and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, and when we list them like this, they are like the overwhelming and ancient temple in Rome, the one with the MacDonald’s franchise right across the street—overpowering, indelible, kitschy.

Succubus

It’s interesting to think about Bowie’s relationship to the love song, especially in this period in which, by all accounts, he is exceedingly happily married, and probably far from the time in his life in which temptation or inconstancy were everywhere around him. He was always accidentally a writer of love songs (“You’re a such a wonderful person/But you got problems/I never touch you”), or perhaps love was admixed with other concerns, more vital concerns, as in “Heroes,” which is about Berlin and the Wall and about how love may not, in the end, be enough to protect us from the political problems that gave us the Wall in the first place. “China Girl” is another worthy example, we assume that the middle eight (“I stumble into town/Just like a sacred cow/Visions of swastikas in my head/Plans for everyone”) is Bowie’s eruption about power in relationships, also a sort of regretful repudiation for some things he might have said when younger and less astute about politics, but it completely changes the picture of what appears to be a conventional love song. That said, there are some apparent love songs on The Next Day, or, at least, the girl is never long absent from the equation. Among the best of these is “Boss of Me.” Let’s note, in passing, that it is often an endearing and excellent thing when Bowie apes an American idiom (as in “boss of me”), and deploys this idiom like a native, despite his quintessential Britishness. Second, it’s really possible that this song is in part about being a father and a husband, and about how in the process of being a father and a husband, no matter your age, no matter how celebrated you are, you are remade as a supplicant, and servant of the enterprise, a teammate, a subject; moreover, in this track, “a smalltown girl like you,” when applied to Bowie’s wife, or his daughter, would be ironic, and well within the parameters of Bowie’s point of view, a point of view known for understatement, irony, and dramatizing in a Brechtian way. But it’s also possible that I have totally got this one wrong, and really “Boss of Me” is, in fact, about a succubus and the bridge with its weeping and lost blue sky and its small town dying is about the way that a relationship with a succubus, a passionate relationship with a succubus, is important as an archetype for the difficulties of a long relationship, the sense of loving despite everything. It reminds me that Bowie, for all the talk of his sexuality and the hard periods of his life, has basically been married twice, and, in each case, for long stretches, and it’s very probably, actually, that he’s a committed and loving and stable guy, and the songs come from an equal and opposite place, or perhaps the romance happens in a way to stabilize Bowie, who is otherwise kind of vulnerable to the material and its rather menacing parameters, and “Where Are We Now?” is about this, too, the single, and n.b., that producer/engineer Tony Visconti, himself, expressed some curiosity about “Where Are We Now?” as the single, because it’s a ballad, but to misunderstand how important this song is is to misunderstand Bowie a bit. “Where Are We Now?” frankly recalls the era of the Berlin trilogy (German place names, e.g.), and it frankly recalls a love from that time, a kindling of love in a very challenging time, especially evident with the “walking the dead” refrain. Where are we now is the question about what happened to the decades, what happened to all that we thought we were going to do, and the implication is that there’s grief associated with this question, and Bowie’s lovely controlled reading of the melody brings this grief to the fore, especially in the big one-four section “as long as there’s sun, as long as there’s rain, as long as there’s fire, as long as there’s me, as long as there’s you,” well, the refrain does in fact ratify a reliance on other people, and there’s a great guitar solo by Gerry Leonard, and there’s some really good drumming, and as far as I’m concerned, this song does exactly what a pop song should do, which is make me rethink my certainties a little, it makes me feel a little bit, it causes me to admire songcraft, and it never feels particularly ironic, at all, and it never feels, at all, like Bowie is in the rear of the image, but actually, contrarily, it feels (sad in its summoning of the past) like he is passionate to reach out, and this reaching out does not feel artificial, or merely professional (as it did, let’s say, on the albums immediately following Let’s Dance), but specifically genuine.

Hostage

(See Violence, above)

Transference and Identity

I’m taking these two together, because they seem like related ways of speaking to the same problematic. They relate to an instability of ego in the David Bowie subject, as constructed in the work. For example: remember when Bowie used to complain that he had trouble getting out of character after doing Ziggy Stardust? And then, despite the fact that he wanted to get away from Ziggy, wanted to shuck Ziggy, there were further characters, Halloween Jack, the Thin White Duke, and so on? Remember all these characters? Here’s the obvious point: David Bowie is that legion of personages. In fact, who the fuck is David Bowie? David Bowie is a made-up name, a name to hide behind because David Jones is not exactly a reliably professional avatar, and every phase of the David Bowie performance art piece is an adoption of a character because of this insufficiency of self, or because, let’s say, of an admirable wish to protect himself from the onslaught of the vampyric audience, but in either case, it is safe to say that Bowie, had he read Deleuze and Guattari, would have understood his approach to be something like schizo-identity in L’Anti-Oedipe, an instability of self (“the monster was me,” from “Width of a Circle”), we have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition, why have we kept our names, purely out of habit, in which identity does not mean any fixed thing, and whereas identity is dependent on the overcrowded society in which one finds oneself—who I am is who I am with a particular person—Bowie’s schizo-identity is fixed only by his relationship to particular moments of music—he is remade by the project. The question would be, I suppose, how much of this is willed (I remember that Nicholas Roeg warned Bowie about The Man Who Fell to Earth, that he would have trouble letting go of the character), and how much is involuntary. One of the blessings of the later seasons of life is how much more settled we get, how much more imperturbable, and it is true that Bowie seems, now, more secure than he has been at any time in his life, downright smart and affable and reasonable, not the vulnerable and melodramatic and impossible beauty of youth. And yet: is there a way that the subdivision and spinning out of repetitions of conflict and loss on The Next Day, martyrdom, political instability, vampirism, is another example of the musical schizo-identity, a frank acceptance of the fact that this is who this guy is, this is the guy who is not one guy, but a platoon of guys, and on this album, this platoon of guys is dug in, and they are holding guns and knives, and trying rather desperately to stay alive.

How does transference figure in this? Well, first I have to say that I am delighted that this word is on Bowie’s list, because it’s a big can of worms, and it indicates a facility with the terminologies of analysis, and I for one really want to believe in a David Bowie who is well acquainted with the terminologies of psychoanalysis. The question is what kind of transference are we referring to. To get to that question, I have to engage in ekphrasis, and describe a photograph I saw of Bowie in the studio during The Next Day sessions. It’s crazy to think, but I was going around my business in New York last fall, teaching class at NYU, and so on, and only ten or fifteen blocks from me, David Bowie was going every day to the studio, and nobody knew about it, nor did they know that this masterpiece of a record, with its almost Rilke-ish level of imagistic madness and density, was right here in our midst. Anyway, there’s a photo of Bowie from the studio, and there he is, David Bowie, not exactly shaven, wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Now, I happen, this morning (because right now, in order to write this piece, I am eating and sleeping and breathing David Bowie), to have watched a video of Bowie and Annie Lennox singing “Under Pressure” at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert (which also features a spellbinding, if bizarre, performance of “We Are the Champions” by Liza Minelli), from 1992, when Bowie was in his mid- or late forties at that event, and he was, well, an incredible specimen, in his perfect suit, and his perfect hair, and in the context of this performance he did the Tony Bennett thing, very smooth, until the end of that song (that is a very very very very good song, in my estimation, it has everything going for it, a great bass riff, a great verse, some really nice handclapping, and then just when you think you’ve got the message worked out, and it is not significantly deeper than “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” it gets to the bridge, which is not exactly a bridge, but a song within the song, maybe, “because love’s such an old-fashioned word/And love dares you to care for/The people on the edge of the night/And loves dares you to changes our way/Of caring about ourselves,” and this is maybe the first time that you ever thought David Bowie indisputably had something profound, urgent, necessary to say about love, and the song takes flight, and offers you the challenge it alludes to in the lyrics), at which moment Annie Lennox kind of stole the show a little bit, it was Annie Lennox who realized how important it was to inhabit this lyric, Bowie didn’t want to risk it, wasn’t willing to go that far (he still hadn’t entirely learned the lesson of 1992, of “Let’s Dance,” viz., that if you can’t save some lives with your art, what is the purpose of your art?), but still they got somewhere by the end, and Lennox put her arm around David, and you aren’t sure if they scripted it, and you aren’t sure if they are doing it for Freddie, but suddenly the song was incredibly moving, the song was about how if we don’t get to this exploration of love somehow before the end of our time here, we have wasted our time, it’s a truth that cannot be ignored, and when it was over, this performance, it looked like Lennox wiped a tear from her eye as she left the stage, but not Bowie, Bowie was wearing the suit, and he was about to get into “All the Young Dudes” with Ian Hunter and Mick Ronson (truly one of the great guitar players ever), and he was cool, and he didn’t risk it, he sang great, and did his thing, ever the professional. How to square these two things? David Bowie at the Freddie Mercury tribute, smart and professional and smooth and perfectly turned out, and David Bowie at the studio in the Village wearing jeans and a t-shirt, looking like a studio rat (the same look, the electric effigy, is briefly on display in Tony Oursler’s video for “Where Are We Now?”. You can say that jeans and a t-shirt are what one wears in the lightless and intensive space of the studio (some awful things can happen in there, and you need to stay flexible, responsive), or you could say it was simply a bad day, and Bowie didn’t have anything else to wear, or you could say that something has happened. (I love the way Joseph Heller used this phrase in the novel of the same name: something happened. A novel is a piece of art made out words in which something happens. A film is narrative made out of celluloid, or ones and zeroes, in which something happens. An album of songs is a sequence of musical expressions in which something happens. And a life is a sequence of days, weeks, months, years, in which something happens.) I’m going to say that when Bowie uses the word transference to describe The Next Day he’s talking about the phenomena of something happening, for a lack of a better way of putting it some kind of maturation ritual. Something happened that may or may not have to do with leaving the stage with chest pain in 2003, and while it would be unwise to assume that David Bowie will never perform again (he has “retired” from performance before), I am going to say that something in the transferential way of things is what has taken place, and that Bowie has gone from understanding himself as a performer to understanding himself as, I suppose, part of the audience for the performance. That’s why “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” is so unsettling, because Bowie seems to understand, from inside, the audience, and without judgment. “From behind their tinted window stretch/Gleaming like blackened sunshine.” What’s required to perform a stadium show? To play a stadium show you have to look at the audience like it’s not a human environment, like it is absolutely free of the human, of the individual, like there is not a person out there, just a seething mass of emotional predictability, and in some ways this traversing of the human is costly (I assume it’s part of why musicians get so fucked up on the road). But Bowie has migrated, through transference, to a new relationship with the audience, in which he understands the audience again, and feels himself to be part of it. I admit there are some strange formulations that result: “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” seethes with resentment of the stars, too, it understands how the idols get erected simply so that we can consign them to their twilight, but that doesn’t mean that Bowie has not done something miraculous and rare for a rock and roll musician, he has spoken honestly (without romanticizing) about the condition of the audience for the popular song. And he was thrown in with that audience, the people on the edge of the night.

Mauer

This item on the list seems designed to trip up the incautious exegete. There is certainly a town in Germany by this name, and given the general political upheaval leitmotif on The Next Day, as well as the patently autobiographical references to Berlin in “Where Are We Now?,” it is perhaps no surprise that a German reference of this kind occurs on the Bowie’s catalogue of intentions and pretexts for the album. In a way we might file this reference under mystification, which comes at the end of the list, and which is a sort of a point of origin for Bowie’s work as a whole, were it not for the fact that he mentioned mauer once before (during a similar list of words that referred, I believe, to the album called Heathen). What is it about Germany, in general, that seems so germane to Bowie’s work? We can speak to the Wall, because mauer is German for wall (and this is summoned up by the Potsdamer Platz reference in the aforementioned “Where Are We Now?”), and to the schism and impoverishment and destitution and disaffiliation of Germany at the time that Bowie lived there (with roommate James Osterberg), we can speak to the fascist glimmerings in any and all Germanic reference, and Bowie’s later life anti-fascist tendencies (and this reminds me, in no specific way, of Heimrad Bäcker’s Transcript, a truly magnificent appropriated text consisting of nothing but textual ephemera from the Nazi era, in particular from the holocaust, which is meant as the commencement of a never-to-be-completed atonement for Bäcker’s own teenage participation in the Nazi Youth); Berlin was where Bowie began to work his way out of what ailed him psychically, and where he did his best work (up until, let’s say, Heathen/Reality/The Next Day, which are albums of bittersweet retrospection), and it is also a resurgent country, a reunited country, a country that is obligated to try to keep the EU together in the present moment, all of which is properly ironic, in the context of the Berlin that Bowie knew and loved, and if all of that is not enough, in the metonymy of “Mauer,” there is also the fact that Mauer, in Germany, is the site of a certain proto-hominid excavation, namely the homo heidelbergensis, who as I understand it shares a certain common ancestor with homo sapiens and the Neanderthal, but it is noteworthy for its larger brain. It would be reasonable to assume that Bowie is alluding to his time in Germany, to the Wall, it would be reasonable to assume that Bowie is commenting on the politics of Germany, it would be reasonable to assume that Bowie is referring to a specific battle in Mauer that I, by virtue of incomplete education in European history, cannot properly grasp, but I believe it would be unwise to assume that he is not also referring to the proto-hominid of Mauer, homo heidelbergensis, and its larger brain.

Interface and Flitting

(See Indifference, below)

Isolation

There is perhaps no more potent subject in the canon of David Bowie. It is also one of the two most powerful subjects in the popular song: there are two subjects in the popular song:  love and isolation. The songs that are about longing (“Tears of a Clown,” “Til I Die,” “In My Life,” “Gimme Shelter,” “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together Again”) are really about isolation. The music does two things. It either celebrates moments of union, or it details moments of apartness. And given that Bowie has not often written unalloyed love songs, his songs are more often about isolation and apartness. At least, this is the case if my dialectical reasoning is appropriate. The Next Day is, it’s fair to say, his most isolated record in a long time. I am not referring, by saying so, to the isolation of two years making the album in secret in the Village, but more to the concerns of the album, which do not amount to a concept-album’s unified field (there are not, after all, very many concept albums in Bowie’s output), but which do suggest thematically where he’s at now, and where he’s at now, whether musing about history or creating astringent confections of a precisely Bowieish sort in “Valentine’s Day,” is in a landscape of perturbation and mass-murder and loneliness. Indeed, one of the of the most memorable songs on the album (which deliberately recalls both “Five Years” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” from Ziggy Stardust), is “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die,” which borrows a line from The Beatles, and which has that harsh second person of “Positively Fourth Street,” in which Bowie, the reasonable adult, seems to be excoriating a certain devastated acquaintance “I can see you as a corpse/Hanging from a beam/I can read you like a book/I can feel you falling/I can hear you moaning in  your room/Oh see if I care . . .” The singing is heartbroken, passionate, the treatment has a bit of gospel (like “Five Years”) to it, and the second-person direct address is so outrageous, so vicious, that it simply cannot be possible that this is a constructed response to an actual person (“Oblivion shall own you/Death alone shall love you”). No one is this bad. And so: there’s no conclusion that satisfies but that Bowie is speaking either to a class of people, metaphorically, or that he is speaking, somehow, to himself. The latter would be more dramatic, more singular, more artful, more lasting, more arresting, and so I choose to believe that he is speaking to himself, yes, and therefore with perfect knowledge of isolation.

Revenge

The above (isolation) leads naturally to the question of revenge. I have often argued that revenge is a bad motive for art-making, because it naturally inhibits the free play of human emotions, and that free play is essential to the unpredictable qualities of art. “Positively Fourth Street” is a good example of revenge gone wrong. Whatever the folk music promoter said that enraged Robert Zimmerman so profoundly, however wrong was the point of view of this fellow, it did not merit the bile of the lyric, and frankly if not for the excellent melody and the mid-sixties perfection of the arrangement, we would not rate “Positively Fourth Street.” The first line is great, and the song goes into steep decline thereafter. Revenge, if it is really about trying to lay waste to one’s enemies, is a shallow impulse indeed. Perfect for the playground, and nowhere else. Having compassion for the desire for revenge, however, for the desperation of the impulse, is interesting, and is an advanced form of honesty. “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die” is very close to a revenger’s tragedy, unless it is a lacerating example of self-examination. “If You Can See Me,” meanwhile, is also a harrowing and apocalyptic song, and full of some dark feeling that is not so far from revenge, but which perhaps has too much sorrow, and too much moral outrage, to be simple-minded in the way of revenge. It seems to me to be written from the voice of America itself. It has one mangled, portmanteau’d line: “American anna fantasticalsation (sic)” which is perhaps the strangest line on all of The Next Day, and not necessarily the line I would quote if I were to single out the album’s most felicitous and memorable lyrics, but which nonetheless indicates the mutant DNA of the song, which seems of Bowie’s cut-up style. “If You Can See Me” does not resolve into any easily interpretable meaning, until it gets to its dramatic zenith, “I will take your lands and all that lays beneath/The dust of cold flowers prison dark of ashes/I will slaughter your kind who descend from belief/I am the spirit of greed a lord of theft/I’ll burn all your books and the problems they make.” After which the song, and its skittery syncopations, its synthesizer pulsings, gives in to some lovely bass fulminations from Tony Levin. Revenge? Revenge on the horrors of the United States of America, occasional home of David Bowie? Payback for the grim politics of its nation of origin? If yes, what a fitting subject for revenge, and Bowie has not done such a good job of it in a long time (since Young Americans, e.g., or “I’m Afraid of Americans,” or “This Is Not America”). Bowie goes back to this mid-Atlantic anxiety on “I’ll Take You There,” one of the bonus tracks, which is catchier, and just as outraged, but perhaps somehow less revolutionary than “If You Can See Me.” But in either case one feels inspired to sing along.

Osmosis

There are many layers to the osmotic qualities of The Next Day. For example, it seems to me that Bowie, by largely refusing to perform the songs, or talk about the songs, is asking that the media apparatus come to understand the songs through osmotic means, a spontaneous net movement of solvent molecules through a partially permeable membrane, attraction rather than promotion, and in this Bowie has been not only exactly right, but right in way that is astonishing, because in this day and age, which is the day and age of American Idol, e.g., he is managing to create the environment in which the album makes its case without blunt force trauma, the rank lattice-work of deceits and fabulations that is promotion. In this sense, yes, we get the thing by osmosis, and by no other means (and for these reasons, it should be obvious by now, it is likely in my interpretive zeal that I am frequently wrong about the subjects of these songs). But I would like to speak to another layer of osmosis here. And that is the way the music feels less anally compulsive and overly controlled than most music sounds these days. It’s as if the musicians, many of them longtime participants in the Bowie canon (Visconti goes back forty-five years, Earl Slick goes back forty, Gail Ann Dorsey goes back fifteen years, and so on), have utterly absorbed the back catalogue osmotically, so that the touches of Bowie emerge from the skein of textures—here’s the drum part of “Passenger,” here’s the drum part of “Five Years,” here’s the an e-bow part that sounds like Robert Fripp on “Heroes,” here are backing vocals startlingly reminiscent of Lodger—but never in a way that seems to trade on past triumphs, rather to build on past triumphs. No example, better indicates this supplementarity of the osmotic approach than the baritone sax stylings of Steve Elson. Bowie himself was known to play saxophone in the old days (a primitivist saxophone that was nonetheless texturally fascinating and kind of sexy), but on “The Dirty Boys” and elsewhere Elson recreates Bowie’s very simple sax parts, and surpasses them with a deftness that is delightful. He never sounds like one of those David Sanborn/Clarence Clemons sax players who reduces everything to a simulacrum of R&B; if anything Elson sounds a little bit like a refugee from a Mingus or Sun Ra session, and he improves every song he plays on (he gives “The Dirty Boys” its Weimar Republic vibe and recalls both Aladdin Sane’s excellent “Time,” and “Sweet Thing” from Diamond Dogs). If this is how osmosis works, through non-verbal reproduction, through a partially permeable membrane, then it is working very well indeed.

Crusade

The Middle Eastern kind, I think, the religious kind, the inadvisable kind, the kind where tens of thousands of Europeans have to travel into Byzantium overland and beyond to try to keep the infidels from seizing control of Jerusalem only to botch most of the crusade. Many lives are lost.

Tyrant and Domination

(See Violence, see Hostage, above, see Traitor, below)

Indifference

(See Interface and Flitting, above, and Glide, below)

Miasma

The nearest dictionary at hand gives the following example for miasma, “a miasma of despair rose from the black workshops.” And this does seem to describe The Next Day exactly, even before I remind you that miasma specifically refers to a “highly unpleasant of unhealthy smell or vapor,” and that it comes from the Greek for defilement. No album of popular songs has as yet exactly recreated the sense of smell, the olfactory, and few try, but maybe The Next Day tries to be synesthetic in this way (and thus a Nabokov reference, as he is the celebrated example of synesthetic tendencies), to make a musical analogue for an unhealthy vapor, and thus likewise the Balkan conflict (see below), the Transylvanian countryside and the undead thereof, the destitution of American experiment, the WWII, and so on. Death everywhere. All about finding the right way to suggest the unhealthy vapor, but then rendering most of it in rather agreeably melodic settings that induce you to breathe deep the unhealthy vapor, without knowing exactly what is taking place. It would be an appropriate undertaking for a conceptual artist who is capable of working across platforms (and it reminds me of a Brian Eno interview I heard in the early nineties wherein he said that most of his deep thinking, at the time, was given over to perfume), and into new terrains.

Pressgang

We are not referring to the literary magazine from Butler University, nor to the Irish music ensemble from Portland, Maine, nor to the children’s television program on British television (although remember that Bowie does have a daughter of just the target age), but actually the original term: the gang of under-assistant thugs tasked with impressing into military service young men abroad in the land. As in that melancholy and extremely moving song covered by the Fairport Convention on Liege and Lief (an album that has a lot of impact on me, and though Bowie, in managing the triumph as a glam icon, in the early seventies, suppressed some of his folksiness, which was much more present on Hunky Dory, e.g., and Space Oddity, than on Ziggy Stardust, it may have had some impact on him as well), “As I was out walking along Radcliffe Highway/A recruiting party came beating my way/They enlisted me, entreated me/Until I did not know/And to the Queen’s barracks they forced me to go.” The pressgang is the reservoir of force that insures that military power has an endless supply of personnel. It’s a fascinating and sinister part of military life, and it’s an even better word, one of those classic Anglo-Saxonisms, and apparently dates to 1690. One thing I admire about Bowie is the simplicity of a lot of his word choice. Like a line like “boys, boys, it’s a sweet thing, sweet thing . . .” Not a lot of syllables there, totally singable, very Anglo-Saxon sounding. And maybe it’s the language itself that is the pressgang, implying a certain kind of oversimplification, one that threatens to overpower the veiled and sinister allusiveness of the Bowie canon. Even when he’s trying to be especially sinister, there’s often a melodramatic and performative quality, though perhaps melodrama isn’t accurate, and if I were post-structurally inclined, I would create a coinage to especially render the weird, dark campy quality of the early canon of Bowie: malodrama:  “And in the death/As the last few corpses lay rotting on the slimy thoroughfare/The shutters lifted in inches in temperance building/High on Poacher’s Hill/And red mutant eyes gaze down on Hunger City/No more big wheels/Fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats/And ten thousand peoploids split into small tribes/Coveting the highest of the sterile skyscrapers/Like packs of dogs assaulting the glass fronts of Love-Me Avenue/Ripping and rewrapping mink and shiny silver fox, now legwarmers/Family badge of sapphire and cracked emerald/Any day now/the year of the diamond dogs/this ain’t rock and roll this is genocide.” Not only is the opening of Diamond Dogs, the proem, closely related to the destructed landscape of The Next Day, with its perfume of military casualty, but it also features the kind of Old English reliables that often animate Bowie the lyricist: shutters, wheels, fleas, rats, cats, tribes, glass, mink, fox (flea is actually proto-Indo-European, which means there’s almost no older word, and rat goes back to Sanskrit), only peoploids seems to post-date Chaucer, and in this environment, this environment of word choice simplicity, pressgang is actually a late bloomer (1690), because it has to wait until there, is, e.g., a English Civil War or a Glorious Revolution.

Displaced and Resettlement and Traitor

Given Bowie’s very adult attention to realpolitik and the inevitable appearance on this album of international conflict, it makes sense that there would be extremely subliminal reference to the troubles in Israel and Palestine. Let me stress that there is probably no one beside the writer of these lines who would resort to Israel and Palestine and the displacement and resettlement, and absolutely no evidence that any lyric on the album specifically deals with this subject, and no evidence that Bowie has a position on the subject that he has issued publicly (though some people think that “New Killer Star” from Reality is similarly inclined), but he is married to a Somali and has a half-sister married to an Egyptian, so it would be hard to imagine that he is impervious to the Middle East, and as there is a radical compassion on The Next Day, a compassion for the victims of power and politics, it is not such a stretch. Whether the displaced population is Bosnian Muslims, or Egyptian Coptic Christians, or Malian musicians, unable to practice their craft, the album has an odd and virtuosic ability to find a welcome analogy for the suffering, on “How Does the Grass Grow” and “If You Can See Me,” and “Love Is Lost,” to such an extent that the first-person “I” of the conventional pop song vanishes, upon scrutiny, and Bowie seems to be emptied out of The Next Day (which is perhaps part of the purpose of the effacement in the front cover), in a way that is related to the Emersonian model. Bowie becomes so involved in the nature around him, not a wholly admirable nature, it’s true, but a nature nonetheless (a nature of impoverishment, a nature of loss, a landscape of privation, a landscape of suffering, a nature of schism, a landscape of isolation, a landscape of grief), so involved that he is swallowed up, and the “I” becomes analogy, is almost completely free of the facts of David Bowie, in a way that we associate with more spiritually informed writers, with Emerson or Gary Snyder or Emily Dickinson or Robert Creeley, but maybe this is the growth that has taken place in the seven years of silence, and during Bowie’s recovery from heart disease. Bowie is swallowed into concepts like displacement and resettlement, and he sees how the witch-hunting follows, and the use of such an ugly, painful word as traitor. And this chain of signifiers goes with the chain above that includes violence and hostage. And below with funereal and burial.

Flight

Word known to all men.

Funereal and Burial

(See commentary above on angioplasty and lineaments of international conflict, see chthonic, see violence, see hostage).

Glide

There has to be a word on Bowie’s list that runs contrary to all the other impulses, or else the album would be completely explicable, and possessed of a unitary purpose, and not only would this be unlikely for David Bowie, its unlikely for anyone at all. If Bowie were available for press, his representatives could make clear to him this word doesn’t belong on the list, because there’s nothing here that sounds like it glides, nor is there a gliding aspect to the music, which is too thorny, eruptive, and vulnerable, to glide. I associate gliding with Bowie’s reggae version of the Bowie/Pop composition “Tonight,” from the album of the same name. It’s hard not to imagine that Bowie was shocked and miserable during Tonight, that he was, perhaps, rendered impervious to his own music, such that he would agree, if pressed by a producer, to allow a xylophone solo on the title song, in order to give the title song that extra special Caribbean feel, and some fancy strings and horns of the Philly soul variety, and of course, a duet with Tina Turner. Now, let me say that I happen to approve of the glide in this song, “Tonight,” especially because the song contains the lines: “No one moves/No one talks/No one thinks/No one walks tonight,” which perfectly captures the period of its release. I do not aim to criticize what could easily be a metacritical performance, an unvarnished conceptual take on whatever a rock and roll album, a pop album, was alleged to have been at the time. I do not aim to criticize, but rather to indicate the possibility of the glide. Or what about Never Let Me Down, with its gated reverb on the drums, and the rumored appearance of a David Bowie electric guitar solo? The material is inconsistent there, and even the artist himself considers it a nadir, but it resulted in Tin Machine (whose first album, as I’ve said above, is a great album as far as I’m concerned). Never Let Me Down it is an artifact of glide in that it does not compromise insofar as it does not bother about the art in art rock. The glide, then, is a kind of career approach, and it is the antithesis of The Next Day and its structural intensity, its rejection of careerism, which is so admirable, so overpowering, so revolutionary. But there’s no such thing as an artistic project that doesn’t sketch out its opposite, and perhaps The Next Day is sketching out is opposite here.

Trace

This is one of the really powerful words on Bowie’s list, and one about which it is easy to have a lot to say. What kinds of traces do we imagine we hear on The Next Day? First we imagine we hear a lot of traces of Bowie as he has created his unique vision elsewhere. There are the guitar-based pop songs of the Spiders from Mars period on “Valentine’s Day” and “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die,” and pop-punk songs of the Lust For Life period on “Dancing Out in Space” and “I’ll Take You There,” the experimental art song of Scary Monsters in “The Stars (Are Out Tonight),” the further-out weirdness of Lodger on “Dirty Boys” and “Love Is Lost,” Low makes an appearance on “Plan” and in “I’d Rather Be High,” but these are just traces of what came before, not full-on intertextual obsession, or self-parody. And there are traces of the contemporary, too, of things happening now, that would otherwise appear to be completely absent from the album, like the click track and the drum programming that sometimes animates the percussion section, that keeps it from having the light, human touch that Bowie drummers past have been so good at, likewise the advanced guitar textures, the ambient guitar, which can only come from a period of digital effects that were alien when Mick Ronson was doing his thing on the early Bowie recordings. There are the traces of Bowie’s advancing years. (Much commented on has been an alleged charge of vocal weakness on the album, but I will say that I hear nothing of that. On the contrary! If you want to hear some vocal weakness, listen to David Live, when constant touring really diminished Bowie’s range. On The Next Day, it is my belief that Bowie has quit smoking and suddenly can sing in ways he has not sung in decades. He has all of the David Bowie singing voices past, the boy cherub of Hunky Dory, the crooner of Station to Station, the soul singer of Let’s Dance.) There are traces of the wisdom-of-advancing-years in the set of concerns taken up by the album, but not at all in the muscularity of the performances. There are hints of Europe and hints of America. There are strings on the album, arranged with particular excellence by Tony Visconti and Bowie himself in some cases, and these are wonderful, and they run in crosscurrents against the melodies of the verses creating George Martinesque instances of counterpoint that are as beautiful, in terms of arrangement, as anything I have heard in recent years. The seriousness of string arrangements somehow exists as a trace but not as a pretension. (These also recall, e.g., Mick Ronson’s unforgettable string arrangements on Ziggy Stardust and on All the Young Dudes and on Transformer.) And as with all Bowie albums, there are hints of the future, because he is never so much concerned with what’s happening now as he is with what’s going to happen, whether it’s the numerology of 1984 or of the millennium. I could go on and on and on about the gnomic qualities of the lyrics, how fragmentation and allusion make it almost impossible to arrive at any certainty about the album. So that the trace, of which Derrida spoke at such length, seems to be the art of this album, as if a residuum is all that we can speak of, fragmentation and trace and residuum are the way, because there is no uncontested truth and no uncontested narrator of the truth. We are speaking therefore from a post-dialectical residuum, a presence and an absence as in the following: “The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself. The trace has, properly speaking, no place, for effacement belongs to the very structure of the trace.” There is no real meaning to the contemporary discourse, and in Bowie’s songs, the meanings exist like a wash of references, these songs are about a flux of meaning, a collision of meanings, or: they are composed of traces.

Balkan

Balkanization, too, goes with the trace (above). Balkanization is the nature of all present things, all unities break down into constituent elements, and all constituent elements break down into further constituent elements, and the process of observation changes the elements under scrutiny, so that their nature is unfathomable. In Europe they understand Balkanization, because Balkanization is next door in Europe, Balkanization is part of Europe, is at one margin of Europe, and Balkanization exhibits the contamination principle, which is to say that it is unwise to rule out Balkanization, because Balkanization is liable to emigrate into your work force, in, e.g., the little canoes and flotillas that the Albanians used to traverse the Adriatic in search of employment in Western Europe. I have seen “Balkanization” used to refer to the Internet, and nowhere, these days, has quite the Balkanizing instantaneity of the Internet, where an audience, as soon as it is identified, is immediately divided and conquered, so that no audience, nor the possibility of substantial audience is ever again possible. But the Balkans are also a dividing line, a mauer, whether metaphorical or actual, between Eastern and Western Europe, between the traditions of the West, and the traditions of the “Orient,” between Constantinople and Istanbul, between Austria-Hungary and a great array of disorderly neighbors, the Serbs, the Russians, the Italians, etc. When Tony Visconti says that Bowie was also reading about history while writing The Next Day, you can imagine that he is, in part, also referring to this Balkanization. Imagine the pressure of Franz Ferdinand, upon going visiting in Sarajevo. He was, it seems, an unpleasant guy, given to dark prognostication, and he liked to shoot animals, trophy hunt, and off he went, at odds with Franz Joseph, emperor of the Austro-Hungarian empire, as always, and the Black Hand tried to lob a grenade at him at first, and when that didn’t work, they shot him and his wife. You can read the dialogue between them, he and his wife, upon finding that they had been shot. The opening bell in the great carnage of the First World War.

Reverse

As in backward masking?

Manipulate

Bowie has a reputation for carefully controlling his surroundings, and for being an astute maker of his own myth, and there has never been a moment, really, when he has not made the album he wanted to make, to the best of his ability. Does that make him a manipulator? It does not take a genius to see the incredible creativity in the way he rolled out The Next Day. Album finished, without record company input, recorded for two years in New York City, in secrecy, videos made without leaks, a viral marketing campaign based on the negations of the album cover in which other iconic images were covered over with the white cocktail napkin of the album cover. It’s all incredibly smart, and, from a media-related standpoint, well played. When I interviewed Bowie in 1995, I did notice (while being, it’s fair to say, so nervous that I could barely talk) that Bowie never answered a question he didn’t want to answer, seemed to have his answers well prepared, knew exactly what information he wanted to convey to the New York Times, for whom I was writing at the time. He taught me a lot, that day, when he was probably thinking he was just talking to an irritating cub reporter. He taught me a lot about how to be a professional with respect to what you make, and to believe in it, and to do the best you can in terms of making sure the work gets some of what it deserves. I think manipulate kind of has too many negative connotations to refer to what Bowie does here, on this album, or in his career as a whole, but it’s also fair to ask: how does the artist react to the industry in which he works? It is the industry, in the end, that manipulates, and it’s up to the artist to try to preserve a space in which he can work unmolested, as much as this is possible at all, by opposing the machinations of multinational industry.

Origin and Text

These two terms go together like revolver and stylus, like magnetosphere and death ray, like meat scraps and papyrus, like arbitrage and gouache, like rotundity and bubo, like altimeter and wind shear, like manatee and sample sale. If there is no origin, there is no text, or so it would seem, but how exactly do we define an origin? If the history of recent revolutions in the Far East have taught us anything, it’s that an origin can be rejiggered, reinterpreted at any time, reconstituted with a heavy wind and a few vanishing calendar pages. With the cocktail napkin front cover, Bowie gives notice that no particular origin will be respected, that the unmoored continental version of the story, in which there are only the traces of what we have in front of us to interpret, will be the version of the story today. It’s a very Anglican theology, if we were going to think of the album as a sort of Anglican text: we accept no outside authority as regards our relationship to the work, only the text itself, no purple-headed priest, just the book, the album as a text of a kind, and we left to engage with it without interference, without the history of rock and roll weighing us down, without the David Bowies past, without the characters of David Bowie past, without the record company, without intermediaries at all, just the book, the text, the album, and our relationship to it, the assumption is that there is text, that’s the Anglican version of the thing, but if the destabilized, origin-free version of the David Bowie album, the radically post-modern version of the thing, is what we’re really engaged with, then the mistake is to think of the album as the sole province of textual analysis. That is, after all, the point of the Next Day viral marketing campaign, that the effacement, the defacement of The Next Day, can be worked out on some of the other excrescences of contemporary society: just place the white cocktail napkin over the offending image, and proceed to make your work with silence, exile, and cunning. There is no text, really, or everything is the text, and there is no artist, because he prefers not to clutter up your relationship to the work by being present in it. There is a textual basis, and there is an origin, for this work that appears to have no origin and no text. Or: the textual analysis of The Next Day, that masterpiece, should not be confined to The Next Day, because the technique and themes of The Next Day expand outward beyond the confines of the album itself.

Comeuppance

Another of the great Anglo-Saxonisms of this project, a word which gets its shape because of a certain defilement of standard English usage, in this case American, at least if you believe the first in-print occasion authored by William Dean Howells: I was led away, and I got my come-uppings, or the other fellow’s come-uppings, for I wa’n’t to blame any, and I always said so, and I guess the judge would say so too, if it were to do over again. That’s from the late 1880s, and it signals the Mid-Atlantic anxiety of The Next Day, as well as the theme of retributive restitution (comeuppance, it is said, refers to appearing before a judge), unless you accept the nearly coterminous Cornish version of the thing (comeuppance referring to being flogged), —in actual Cornish dialect—which is then brought to the U.S. by Cornish immigrants, where the word takes root in the sense that we have it now. Unclear, because this is the way of The Next Day, whether the album delivers the comeuppance or whether the artist is himself recipient thereof, and that is part of the paradoxical sense of the whole. The would have to be a perceptible difference between album and audience, between theme and lyricist, for us to have complete command of comeuppance. And there is not.

Tragic and Nerve

We come to the end with tragic and nerve, though there is no end here of the traditional sort for a number of reasons that are very contemporary and (by now) very routine, viz., there is no one end of the album, because there are various albums, different bonus tracks, depending on which version you buy in which country, these once meant to reward certain buyers, but now meant to suggest that there is no canonical text; furthermore the rumor mill already opines that there is another album’s worth of material leftover from the Next Day sessions. So there are many redactions of The Next Day, guises and disguises of The Next Day. One deluxe edition ends, it’s true, with “I’ll Take You There,” and the line Who will I be in the USA?, which line repeats themes we recognize elsewhere in the album. And yet one ending, a most harrowing and ominous ending is to be found in “Heat,” the “actual” “ending” of the album if, e.g., you buy a vinyl edition of the thing, the end of side two. The last song. “Heat” calls forth the specter of Scott Walker. Astute fans of Bowie will recall not only that Bowie covered Scott Walker’s “Nite Flights,” back on Black Tie, White Noise, and that he acted in the role of producer for a documentary on Walker, but the mutual contamination goes further than this, as Walker himself was influenced in a significant measure by Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, and the palpably transitional Walker composition “The Electrician,” on the last Walker Brothers album bore many of the birthmarks of Bowie’s Berlin methodology (you can almost hear “Warszawa,” from Low in it); moreover, Bowie commented at one point about a girlfriend in the late sixties who allegedly preferred Walker’s voice to his own; there’s also a lot of a mutual influence from the likes of Jacques Brel and Kurt Weill. Bowie and Walker are cut from a similar piece of cloth, and Walker’s recent albums, with their uncompromising anti-pop veneer, their dense and impenetrable lyrics, their shards of melody set against fields of non-musical cacaphony, some of it incredibly dark, perhaps even more than dark, seem to orbit around Bowie, as Bowie himself, in his most European modality, sounds a bit like Walker. Walker’s albums have a remarkable and stifling aspect, like they are teased out of some fold in Dante’s Malebolge where the suffering is in the shadows and the murmurs are barely perceptible. For me, Walker has an absence of melody—he seems to be improvising melody over the samples of industrial machinery and unearthly drones. The feeling is tragic. At least, it’s tragic if we can reanimate the word a little bit, so that tragic doesn’t feel as depleted as it sometimes feels.

Bowie starts “Heat” with a sort of a two-chord drone, fashioned mainly from some synthesizers and a lovely bass part by Gail Ann Dorsey, and his singing, in the lower part of his register, recalls the croon of Lodger, but with an indebtedness to the Walker of “The Electrician.” The lyrics, too, with the allusion to Yukio Mishima’s dog in the first line (“Then we saw Mishima’s dog/Trapped between the rocks/Blocking the waterfall”), have the high-art ambitiousness of Walker. The lyrical allusion here is to Spring Snow, by Mishima, part of a long multi-volume saga about the effects of Westernization called The Sea of Fertility. Spring Snow deals mainly with the years just prior to the First World War, which would imply—given Balkanization (above), and the WWII footage in “I’d Rather Be High” (which alludes to Nabokov’s The Gift)— that The Next Day constitutes a kind of anthology of songs about the world at war, the world at war is, in effect, the purpose of the album. And what is nerve, in this case, but a statement of the scale of the ambition of the album, and its web of global conflicts, most of them tragic. But even considering that this is the case, we still have not dealt thoroughly with the remainder of “Heat,” which in due course gives birth to its refrain, “And I tell my self,/ I don’t know who I am, and I tell myself,/ I don’t know who I am,” and then to, “My father ran the prison/My father ran the prison/But I am a seer/And I am a liar . . .” Do these lines allude, in the post-industrial Scott Walker murk of the song, to Spring Snow, and to a specific Mishima narrative? Are they meant to be taken as crypto-autobiographies by an artist who almost always hides behind a character? Or maybe they are larger commentaries not only on The Next Day as a whole, but on the larger body of song that is David Bowie’s work. Here is the skepticism with which we ought to greet that narrator (seer and liar) of the popular song, here is the lineage of that narrator (whose father is a prison warden, whose growing up is in a prison). I keep thinking of in terms of Jameson’s Prison-House of Language, as if the narrator of the “last song” on The Next Day, the dark, threatening dirge that ends the album, the masterpiece of an album, is a narrator who allegorizes the impossibility of a “narrator” who could confess about love and his life, but does not, who is a questionable narrator in just about every way, a subject of considerable torment, friction, pain, violence, terror, who is either seer, or liar, or both, and whose only linguistic utterances are inside of a tradition of imprisonment. The hard-to-fathom truth of The Next Day is that it manages to be all these things: harrowing, dark, violent, uncompromising, and a career summary of a kind, while being tuneful, even singable, on a great number of tracks. How many records do you buy these days where the entire thing has this kind of walloping impact? There are so many unforgettable songs on The Next Day that it is hard to stop playing the thing. The more attention you give it, the more layers it delivers. At first I didn’t get “Where Are We Now?” It seemed too sweet. But then it seemed anything but, and I loved it. At first I thought, “If You Can See Me” was a little Goth, but then I loved its syncopations and its backwards reverb and phasing. At first I didn’t get the incredibly infectious chorus of “Dancing Out In Space,” but then I couldn’t stop singing it, and in no case, at all, did I realize how strangely the words would unfold over the course of repeated listens. Never has an album been quite as resistant to interpretation as The Next Day, and rarely confident and unapologetic. It just doesn’t happen. Not these days. On the part of the exceedingly gifted artist who made it, it did require a lot of nerve. It certainly did.

Mystification

Mystification and triumphalism. Mystification and populism. Mystification and reification. Mystification and conflict. Mystification and hazards in psychoactive drugs. Mystification and reproduction. Mystification and other tales. Mystification and ambiguity in European literature. Mystification and reality. Mystification and social agent absences. Mystification and Fear. Mystification and repugnancy. Mystification and the origins of money. Mystification and secrecy. Mystification and tumor suppressors. Mystification and delight. Mystification and the scapegoat. Mystification and the unnecessarily sultry. Mystification and aesthetics. Mystification and social control. Mystification and the Russians. Mystification and better nutrition. Mystification and demystification. Mystification and crime. Mystification and catastrophe. Mystification and urban geography. Mystification and reasonable assurance. Mystification and morality. Mystification and coy sentiment. Mystification and creationism. Mystification and the simple solution. Mystification and misrepresentation. Mystification and the yellow dragon. Mystification and ideology. Mystification and irrationality. Mystification and false consciousness. Mystification and indeterminacy. Mystification and unjustified paternalism. Mystification and our victim experience. Mystification and perversion under the veil. Mystification and xenophobia. Mystification and hope. 

***

[1] A friend has challenged me to think anthologically about the later Bowie, as a way of indicating in how many gems lie there unexamined, and so here at the close I have come up with a fictitious Bowie anthology from 1990 to the present, called Outsider Artist. It’s in chronological order (because to do otherwise is to exert more art on these great songs than they require), and its track listing is as follows, and perhaps these notes could serve, in part as liner notes. Go back and listen to these songs, the old as well as the new, they deserve the attention.

1. “Crack City,” from Tin Machine

2. “I Feel Free,” from Black Tie, White Noise

3. “Jump They Say,” from Black Tie, White Noise

4. “The Buddha of Suburbia,” from The Buddha of Suburbia

5. “The Hearts Filthy Lesson,” from Outside

6. “Hallo Spaceboy,” from Outside

7. “Strangers When We Meet,” from Outside

8. “Little Wonder,” from Earthling

9. “I’m Afraid of Americans (Nine Inch Nails Remix, V1), from Earthling

10. “The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell (Stigmata Film Version), from ‘Hours’

11. “Slow Burn,” from Heathen

12. “I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship,” from Heathen

13. “New Killer Star,” from Reality

14. “Try Some, Buy Some,” from Reality

15. “Bring Me the Disco King,” from Reality

16. “Five Years (Live), from A Reality Tour

17. “Under Pressure (Live),” from A Reality Tour

18. “Breaking Glass (Live),” from A Reality Tour

19. “The Next Day,” from The Next Day

20. “Where Are We Now,” from The Next Day

21. “Valentine’s Day,” from The Next Day

22.  “I’ll Take You There (Bonus Track),” from The Next Day

***

Photographs of David Bowie © by Jimmy King.

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• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #38: Dinner at Martha’s House

So: I find I am often unwilling to understand originality and singularity at the moment I first experience it. Or: I am unwilling to be either formed or transformed without prior notification. This is a disagreeable fact of musical life. That said, the formations and transformations often take place whether I want them to or not, often with repeated exposure (how long did it take me to realize that Never Mind the Bollocks was hilarious and great?), which I suppose means that I am a cautious listener though at the same time one who prizes the genuinely original over the transiently, ephemerally novel (Go-Go in the late seventies, Shoegazing in the late eighties, Space Age Bachelor pad in the early nineties, Freak Folk in the middle oughts).

In retrospect, the teaching moments are profound moments, even if I am too stupid to realize they are taking place. And today I mean to describe and anatomize and document one such moment, and it goes like this: at my boarding school, St. Paul’s School, in Concord, New Hampshire, where I went to high school, you had to go to chapel four days a week. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. This was something that many students were trying to find ways to skip (despite the fact that if you skipped you got a detention of some kind), and which many others were trying to find a way to sleep through. Generally, chapel consisted of a couple of pieces of organ music, some kind of speech or stirring call to excellence by an educator, or perhaps a short musical performance. Then some announcements. The elapsed time was never longer than half an hour. I myself gave a bad speech there on one occasion, and also played piano once. I was also in the St. Paul’s School chorus for a couple of years, and we performed at chapel now and again—in robes.

In my senior year, one morning, a student a year or two behind me got up to give a speech in chapel (no one seems to be able to reconstruct the exact date), walked to the microphone, and said nothing at all for what seemed like an eternity. He just stood there, as close to motionless as you could get, and we sat and watched, half expecting something to happen, though nothing was happening, reading into the stillness of the performer, listening to the shifting of adolescents on stiff wooden benches, waiting, and waiting some more, and then when the eternity was over, he walked away from the microphone, and the postlude happened, and then the announcements took place, as per usual. For many students (see below), this event came and went with little notice, and without much discussion after the fact, but because I was doing some theater in those days, and was therefore occasionally in the thrall of the incredibly gifted professor of theatrical stuff, Robert Edgar, I recognized that something performative was taking place. In fact, I soon learned that the performance in question had been a very specific performance, of John Cage’s seminal work 4’33”.

The performer, moreover, was a student called Will Schwalbe, who was affable, brilliant, exceedingly well-mannered, but with an impish and unpredictable quality, of which the performance was but one noteworthy example. Schwalbe was known for his theatrical chops in those days, but he went on to be an editor of note (in fact, he was editor in chief of the press called Hyperion for seven years), and an Internet entrepreneur, and, most recently, an author (of the bestselling End of Your Life Book Club). Schwalbe’s performance that day took a lot of courage (I can’t entirely do justice to how intimidating the interior of that chapel is—you kind of have to see it), but it went largely unnoticed. I have polled a bunch of schoolmates who could plausibly have been there at the time, and the vast majority of my class was either not present, or not awake, and people closer to Schwalbe’s age seem to remember, but never heard about the John Cage part of the event at all.

For me something really stuck. I can’t tell you that I instantly converted to the work of John Cage that day, but I can tell you that I listened during the performance, and that various Cage principles began, in that setting, to work their fiendish and unpredictable way into my consciousness—chance operations, the I Ching, tape music, field recording, nature—such that by the time I finished college, a few years later, I was already very smitten by the strange, singular, American lineaments of that work.

The St. Paul’s students may not have gotten it. (“Yes, I remember that morning, but only vaguely, as a genius Schwalbe moment. Like other genius Schwalbe moments in memory, it is sorta misty.” “I do remember it, but I do not remember ever getting an explanation of what occurred. Unfortunately, I do not remember any discussions about it afterwards, which it should have provoked.” “No clue. Will was always doing something brilliant, so any particular event fades in the mist. Only chapel I remember in 4 years was when Jai Packard performed selections from Broadway hits . . .” “In retrospect was sorry to have missed it, but remember bagging chapel that morning for excellent traying on a snowy upper freaky with Ohrstrom and Coogan. Another silent celebration…” “Not in my memory, sorry. Hard to believe, though, since that would have been a pretty uncomfortable silence undoubtedly broken by whispering and giggling throughout the Chapel, and I would have thought it was sheer genius.”) But it is a measure of the surpassing excellence of educational life at St. Paul’s that we were exposed to this performance (notwithstanding some carping from faculty, ex post facto) at all, and to its revolution, via Will Schwalbe and his wristwatch, a seminal work in the modern canon of experimental music. Usually, in chapel, we learned a lot about Bach and Purcell.

And: it has been for some months now, in the aftermath of the John Cage centenary, that I have been revisiting his music, and not just the early piano music, which many people love (try “In a Landscape” or “Dream”), or the high period of chance operations (e.g., the incredibly lovely “Cheap Imitation”), but also the percussion music (of which the most interesting, in my view, are “The City Wears a Slouch Hat,” a radio play by Kenneth Patchen with a score by Cage, and “Credo In Us”), the tape compositions (“Fontana Mix”) and also the less well-known “numbered” pieces from the seventies and eighties, and so on. There is beautiful, lucid, moving music from each of the five or so decades in which Cage produced his revolution. Cage, as Alan Hall, English department chair, noted back in my St. Paul’s School class on Romantic Poetry (circa 1979), not long after Will’s performance, Cage was perhaps a more accessible writer on music than he was an accessible musician, and yet now we have the leisure to go back and face the work, fearlessly, and to listen for what is there, and to find that it is not so difficult, at all, especially as its influence has been so widely dispersed among things we know better. There is so much there.

Let me say, however, that my transformative experience, the one that I didn’t quite know was happening until later, happened largely because of Will Schwalbe, and his studies, in those days, of experimental and avant-garde theater. I, therefore, thought it might be enjoyable to talk to Will about what he remembers of the performance of 4’33” and to see how those years influenced what he does now. Which I do below. Will and I spoke the day after Christmas 2012 (a hundred years after the birth of Cage), in Will’s apartment, which is also remarkable for another of his passions: contemporary Chinese visual art. Will, as he always has been, was charming, funny, articulate, humble, brilliant, and possessed of a wildly diverse set of interests and preoccupations.

***

The Rumpus: Do you remember when you got the idea to perform for “4’33”?”

Will Schwalbe: I’ve got a pretty good idea. I was taking a class from a teacher named Bob Edgar, and it was a theater class, and he was very busy exposing us to theater of the sixties in particular. Late sixties, early seventies, and particularly I got fascinated with guerilla theater, and also with site-specific pieces. I was very interested in the stuff that was going on in the Judson Memorial Church. The idea of Judson church: performance in a church and religion as a kind of performance or spectacle. It really appealed to me. I don’t know if it was through that class or otherwise I learned about the Cage piece, but I got this kind of burning desire to do it in chapel. It fit the guerilla model too because I wanted to a whole series of things. That was actually just one of the series of things I did, guerilla style, around campus. So I sort of planned it as a series, and that was the first.

Rumpus: What were some of the other guerilla actions?

Schwalbe: There’s a little play, a brother and a sister and they scream at each other either about how much they hate their mother, or about how much they love their mother. So I’d heard about this play and it was a very short play, and I had the idea to do it in the dining hall. I think it was the dining hall called–what was the big room? Middle dining hall? Lower dining hall? Not the fancy one.

Rumpus: The regular one, the one we used all the time. For lunch.

Schwalbe: Exactly. So a fellow student and I filled our trays with glasses and cutlery and plates, and we walked in and we both, on cue, dropped our trays. Which caused a mess, shattering dishes, and everything, and which caused everyone to stop what they were doing and to wheel around. Usually people applauded. When the applause stopped we went right into this play. We performed this three minute play, and then we sat down. It was very exciting because by the time everyone figured out what we were doing it was over. It was really for our entertainment. That was the second one we did. I think there was a third guerilla action but I can’t remember what it was.

Rumpus: Who was your actress in that piece?

Schwalbe: Kristin Orr.

Rumpus: Of course. [Actually, as the events in this story are 34 years old, it now appears that Schwalbe may have used a different actress entirely, namely Christina Robert, who had this to say about the whole story by e-mail: “I know he walked into the dining hall at lunchtime. He walked into the middle of the room and announced the performance by dropping a tray full of silverware. It was very dramatic. I was part of it somehow—I think I had to stand up from my table and hold the space. There must have been a few of us scattered around. Thinking about it makes me miss the brilliance of that particular SPS community.”]

Schwalbe: Beautiful brunette, and she wanted to be an actress, and she was very game to go along with this. [The above could certainly be said of Christina Robert, too, without fear of injustice to either party. –ed.] I think actually she may have, I may have done a kind of spin during the Cage piece. She may have actually been there as a kind of accompanist, as though I was going to play and she was going to sing, or something. I can’t remember if that’s right.

Rumpus: Were these pieces for class credit, or just for your own personal development?

Schwalbe: There was no credit, no one knew I was doing them before I did them. I didn’t discuss them with Bob Edgar or of my teachers or anybody, I just did them myself. [Edgar, when queried on the subject, appears, to his regret, to have been absent from school on the day in question: “How annoying. I seem to have a history of missing things. The famous Harvard Yale game of the fall of 1968, for instance. I was a senior, so I was given a free ticket. My best friend and I went (as seniors we got free tickets) but left at the beginning of the third quarter, because Yale was clearly the better team and was trouncing Harvard”. –ed.] I thought in the spirit of guerilla theatre I just had to do it, and I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble and it would’ve ruined it if I told anybody. So the only person who knew was Kristin. Nobody else knew.

Rumpus: How did you approach the issue of getting permission to perform in chapel? Do you remember that?

Schwalbe: Well, I was a really goody two shoes. I was on the student council, I won awards, I got good grades. In a way I realized a part of the context for the piece was the fact that no one would see it coming, that if I had been what we used to call a Bad Att, you know, the kind of kids who used to stand around smoking cigarettes by the hockey rink then the context would have been different. Then there would have been skepticism about allowing me to give a speech, people would have wondered why, and the minute the performance started everyone would figure out that something was going on. So I knew I had the cover of being a good kid. I said I would like to speak in chapel, I made up a topic that was bland, and sure, you know? The kid wants to speak in chapel, let the kid speak in chapel. That was easy. And the dining hall one, we had no permission, we just did it. And it was over so fast. Some kids dropped their trays, and said something weird, you know, what are you going to do. But the Cage performance did have some mild repercussions.

Rumpus: Such as?

Schwalbe: Some of the faculty members were furious, they were furious, and I heard directly from a couple of them and then I heard indirectly from even more of them that they felt I had disrespected chapel, and that I had made a mockery of it.

Rumpus: Really?

Schwalbe: They didn’t get it. They didn’t get it and they were very angry.

Rumpus: Meaning they knew nothing of the Cage piece?

Schwalbe: Meaning they knew nothing about the Cage piece. They thought I had done just done–it was like I was Pussy Riot or something. [Laughing.] They were very mad but again because I was a good kid they could only get so mad. I think part of the ethos of St. Paul’s, which I internalized very quickly, was the idea of getting away with things. At least at the time we went there the prevailing ethos was: How much can you get away with? And if you can get away with it, you can do it. Really nothing was out of bounds that you could get away with, and if you got caught doing something then the crime was that you were stupid enough to get caught. It’s not doing the thing. Would you agree with that? [Laughing.]

Rumpus: I would say that is well put.

Schwalbe: So there was a kind of duality to performing these performances. I also remember one of the other plays I put on, in the art gallery, was about a boy who had an erection that would not go down—a hysterically funny little play. It has the single best monologue I know, which is the chant he says to himself to get his erection to go away. Which involves—I remember to this day—water falling, water, the lakefronts of Chicago, Detriot, the naming of wet or industrial places. Again, a couple people were annoyed about that play, they didn’t think I should be putting on a play about erections. But other than hearing that someone was irritated there were no consequences.

Rumpus: I assume Mr. Edgar would have instantly recognized what was taking place. Were there other masters, or members of the community who understood immediately ?

Schwalbe: I don’t think so. There were a few that were amused by it, but I think Bob Edgar, and the Barretts (who taught art) were the only ones who got it. I think, too, I was partially inspired by something he had done before we were there. He had put on a show for a parents’ weekend, and the kids had written it themselves, which started out quite earnestly, and then a kid kind of forgot a line, and then a prop was missing, and things got worse and worse. Bob wanted to see how long he could keep the play going before the parents realized it was a joke, and by the end sand bags wer falling from the sky, and the stage was chaos. But I love that idea of the kids got to essentially make their parents the play, to see how embarrassed their parents would be. And obviously one of the really interesting things about the Cage performance, was that it was an experiment and I wanted to see how people would react. I was fascinated to see how people would react, and I remember that very clearly. There was a real silence, a hushed silence, that turned into a nervous silence because you could hear the fidgeting. Then one or two people started to applaud like they were kind of in on a joke and they were applauding, and then everybody applauded, and then they stopped all by themselves, applauding, and more silence took place. Then there was nervous laughter, a little more nervous laughter, then that stopped. Then I got up and sort of took my bow and exited. There was a very distinct silence, and then a smattering of applause from people who either got it, or were just glad it was over. I really remember trying at the time to be very present for that because you know I wasn’t going to have that opportunity again, and the whole point was I got to hear this, what silence sounds like. It was cool and it was exciting for me because it was real. I didn’t know where this was going to go, I didn’t know what people were going to do, and, so, unlike so much theater that I was being exposed to then and I’m exposed to now, theater that’s totally predictable, this was an approximation of what theater really should be. This was live. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I felt a sense of danger. I really love theater but I go rarely because it’s so hard for me to find that quality of liveness, of unpredictability.

Rumpus: I couldn’t agree more. Now: you’ve talked about the performance in a theatrical context but I’m kind of just interested in whether or not, for you, you thought about it in the musical context. Did you think about it as though silence were a musical contribution to chapel and did you think about it as though that indeterminacy of applause and ambient noise were some kind of music? Like our normal musical fare in chapel?

Schwalbe: I was very aware that Cage was a musician. He wasn’t an actor, he was a musician. I was clearly aware that he thought of it as a musical piece. But because people knew that I liked to put on shows, I knew regardless of what I did they would see it as a performance. So I suppose I thought of it more as musical theater, an adaptation of what he did with musical theater context. But I definitely saw it as a musical event, bounded by that time, and that the sounds and the actions were a piece. That they were the composition. That’s why I had to remind myself to be aware, because you’re up there nervous and you’re excited and you’re just a kid, and I sort of remember saying to myself, You have to listen because you’re never going to hear this again.

Rumpus: What did you use for your timekeeping? Do you remember that part? Did you just use a watch?

Schwalbe: I just used a watch.

Rumpus: And you didn’t have a score, right? Because sometimes when people perform they use the actual score. Which, as you would suppose, is mostly blank.

Schwalbe: I didn’t have a score. But I had set up everything to indicate to everyone that there was a moment when I was about to begin, and so it definitely had a start. It wasn’t just standing up there aimlessly. I was very careful to behave in such a way that people would know it had begun—because it doesn’t work unless that happens.

Rumpus: A couple more questions, if I may. I find it incredible that you could have been insightful about all of this experimental theater stuff in those days, only to completely leave your theater career behind. Do you feel like this theater work was foundational for what you’ve become professionally since, or was it just an aspect of youth?

Schwalbe: No, I think it was pretty foundational. I was very turned on by the theater stuff. At the same time, and this is my amateur psychologizing, I was out gay to myself at St. Paul’s and realized very quickly—in that time, in that environment—that I couldn’t really tell anybody. There was actually one minister there to whom I spoke, and she sort of agreed that it was not a good idea to come out at St. Paul’s. At that time there had never been an out teacher or an out student. And so it just seemed too complicated. If I was a braver kid I might have done it, but I’m not sure that would have been a wise call. My life would have gone in a different direction. To some degree, I liked this theater stuff because it was like having a secret on the school and it was a way to play out with those identities, and I played out with them other ways. Actually for our class ring, even though St. Paul’s didn’t really have class rings, I organized a class earring for boys and girls, a big dangly clip-on class earring. Even though we didn’t really have proms, I organized a cross-dressing prom where everyone had to come dressed at the opposite sex. So the theatrical events and the plays I was in, plays like Spring Awakening, were also playing with secrets. When I came out in college some of the need for the acting out, literally acting out, went away, and then I saw theater in college as this means to an end. I put on two plays in college, again guerilla style, didn’t have anyone’s permission, I put them on in the basements of buildings. One was the very first AIDS fundraiser at Yale, to raise money for Gay Men’s Health Crisis and AIDS Project New Haven, and that was in 1983 and we raised a couple thousand dollars. Then, though this is probably too much biography, I got involved in Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the hotline, and the theater stuff I was doing seemed trivial. Just didn’t seem like where my energies should go. I wrote a long play, a play that has never been produced and I enjoyed writing that, I’m going to drag it out and do something with it some day. Then I become a journalist and then I found as I became a book publisher I felt people had so many things to say that I wanted to help them say. I just didn’t feel an urgency about my stuff and I didn’t feel that same kind of excitement around the theater or I didn’t feel like that’s where urgent things were happening, with some major exceptions, like Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, which is a great, explosive, artistic, amazing work that was really out there. For all these reasons I just drifted away from theater but I still feel passionately about the possibilities of the theatrical event, that live energy of theater. For me there’s still nothing like it, like in the work of Peter Brook, who I think, is one of the greatest living geniuses of the theater.

Rumpus: Agreed. And since you’re in literature now can we ask the same question of literature? Can literature still be dangerous?

Schwalbe: I definitely still think literature can be dangerous. A very tame example is Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks. Great novel, in some ways a young adult novel, lots of pot smoking kids. Try giving that to the kids of your more conservative friends and see what happens. They’re not going to be happy with you but you’ll create readers. Those kinds of books can be dangerous. That’s why I’m still excited about books, they can push people past their comfort zones, they can challenge. At their best they are not predictable at all. I mean a book, even a very, very popular book like Gone Girl. Which everyone is reading, it’s a big thriller, it’s great fun to read. It’s a really cynical book about marriage, I think it’s one of the most cynical books about marriage I have ever read. If you take it for a metaphor about marriage in general it’s kind of a dangerous book, and I think that’s cool. That’s part of what makes working in literature so exciting, I think, that you never know which books will turn out to be dangerous and exciting. Dangerous and exciting writing can come from anywhere.

***

Photo of Will Schwalbe by Michael Lionstar.

Related Posts:

• Swinging Modern Sounds #44: And Another Day
• Swinging Modern Sounds #42: Hey Man, I Thought That You Were Dead
• Swinging Modern Sounds #41: Utopian Communities
• Swinging Modern Sounds #40: A Miscellany of Musical Thoughts that Will Not Otherwise Appear
• Swinging Modern Sounds #39: Interview Within an Interview

But, whatever was the cause, by the time the band got to the last song that night I was in some kind of Tigris-Euphrates prophetic condition, which was the perfectly receptive condition for one of the band’s more recent compositions, namely “The Mesopotamians,” from The Else (2007). Something happened in me, therefore, something not unlike when Hunter Thompson had the radio (playing “White Rabbit”) thrown into the tub with him in Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. The most partisan fans of They Might Be Giants know well “The Mesopotamians” (official video here), because they know every song, but you may not, and you should (a fine live version here). A risky last song for a show, to be sure, but so good, so fully stuffed with reserves of melody and enthusiasm and transcendent capability, and also a great layer of, let’s say, metafictional energy, rock and roll about rock and roll, that I found myself understanding, if deliriously, the end-of-the-year nonsense, the notion that you might want to begin a new year feeling as though there were something glorious about human consciousness. (I spent the next day running a fever of 101, but that’s another story).

They Might Be Giants had that quality, the glorious-about-human-life quality on December 30^th, and they especially had it, that night, not when they were playing the old hits, as good as those songs are, but when they were playing new songs (“The Mesopotamians,” as well as the songs from their new album Nanobots), like this relatively new song about what it means to have been in a band so long (thirty years, give or take), that you feel like you are old as the oldest literary superheroes of Western civilization, so long in this band that the ups and downs of it are innumerable (“We’ve been driving around,/From one end of this town to the other and back,/But no one’s ever seen us,/And no one’s ever heard our band”).

Most riveting about the performance, moreover, beside the nearly operatic way that the voices interlock on the chorus at the end, was the performance of John Linnell, the writer of this particular song and its lead vocalist. Linnell is a very interesting presence in a live context. His presence suggests a good-looking and highly unpredictable camp director who is about to juggle flaming bowling pins. He has a tendency to hunch over his keyboard, he wanders around some when he isn’t central to the action, he smiles only when there’s a good reason to smile, and he keeps some of his energy in reserve, because, after all, he has spent more time touring than some of the people reading this piece have been alive. There’s something really punk about him, about the Giants generally, for all the reputation they have for entertainment, and humor, and canny hipness. Linnell almost dares you to think more of the moment than the moment deserves, and then he lies in wait to puncture your certainties. He’s just another guy, he seems to say (that is, he exudes a right sense of where he stands in the business of cultre), and these are just some more songs, which is not to say that everything, every preconception, every sacred cow, is not well worth a moment when it gets gored.

But to say this, to say that there’s something punk, something admirably skeptical about some of what They Might Be Giants do (remember “Your Racist Friend,” from Flood), is to miss the role that the music itself plays in these songs. I will say that this was what drew me to the band, almost immediately when I first heard “Don’t Let’s Start,” back in 1986. Melodies like this are not often written in popular music, in part because they are incredibly difficult to compose. Linnell, while looking slightly impatient with the whole party time atmosphere of a gig, is fully engaged finally when he is singing the melodies, and something in him seems completely altered, and suddenly he’s like some Buddha-manifestation, or, in a way, an warrior angel of melody, or maybe I’m saying this just because I had influenza.

I first saw Linnell play when he was in the Mundanes, a why-didn’t-they-make-it punk band in Providence in the early eighties, a band in which Linnell was not being used to the best of his ability at all. He didn’t write, he didn’t sing. Then, with “Don’t Let’s Start,” which is, after all the start of something of surpassing interest, the start of They Might Be Giants, he found the secret key to what to do with life, and the something-that-you-might-do-with-life is this: write soaring melodies. I loved this band fervently over the course of thirty years, yes, and I loved them sometimes without recourse to entertainment, but, rather, perceived in them a somewhat hidden reservoir of hard-earned sentiment and adult commentary, and sometimes liked them in ways they didn’t want to be liked (I resisted the band, the rhythm section, when it first happened, even though I liked a lot of players in that first band), and then somewhere around the turn of the millennium, I became acquainted with John Linnell himself, through friends, and have known him pretty well since.

This interview with John (just Linnell, no Flansburgh, not yet anyway) tries, in a way, to suggest the John Linnell I know personally, who doesn’t, as you might suppose, have the same characteristics as the John Linnell flaming-bowling-pins public figure. This John Linnell is markedly polymathic, is a supremely devoted husband and dad, is gentle, patient, wry, loyal to his friends, never behaves like a celebrity. This John Linnell may even feel, on occasion, that that other John Linnell is a burden. I invited Linnell, in early January, to talk by e-mail for a little while, in part because the band is in the process of releasing a new studio album (for adults), which already has two songs I really love on it (“Call You Mom” and “Insect Hospital”), though I have listened to it only a few  times, but also because I wanted to talk because of the influenza-and-“Mesopotamians” experience of 12/31, in which I seemed to be floating up above the club and capable, however briefly, of seeing my alien self cavorting with other species. Linnell and I talked for a couple of weeks by e-mail, almost always between 5:00 and 7:00 A.M.

***

The Rumpus: I would guess that a lot of longtime Giants fans would not know that you are a serious backyard astronomer. I’ve always wanted to ask what got you interested in this. And what have been some of the recent developments on that front? What have you seen up there?

John Linnell: Right away I’m having this kneejerk reaction to the idea of serious backyard astronomy. It really is an inherently pointless and unserious activity, which I’m sure is partly why I’m interested in it. There’s something a little autistic about looking up at the sky at night to make sure everything is right where the guidebook says it is. It does give me a dim sense of the unfathomable distances separating us from everything out there, which I take with me as I’m in bed falling asleep. This could an expression of the uptight and futile desire to make a mental diagram of the universe, or maybe the exact opposite, which is the desire to blow my own mind to smithereens.

As I write this the two largest members of the asteroid belt* are at opposition, which means they are as bright in the sky as they ever get. Vesta was visited by a space probe last year for the first time, so now we know exactly what it looks like up close. It’s a misshapen lump of rock the size of Arizona embossed with a distinctive snowman logo made of craters. Ceres (which is so huge it’s been reclassified as a dwarf planet) will be robotically probed in two years and is probably a spherical ball of ice. I’m hoping they find the black monolith there. They have both been slowly moving across the constellation Taurus, right next to Jupiter which looks pretty cool in the telescope, unlike the asteroids which are tiny points of light.

*Ceres and Vesta are among the objects checked off on the “How Many Planets?” song from Here Comes Science.

Rumpus: I have a lot of questions by way of reply to the above, but I will try to be mindful of an obligation to deal at least glancingly with the music, and you have brought up Here Comes Science, which I happen to love a great deal, my most immoderate love being for a song entitled “Meet the Elements.” My sense of things is that it is not the case that you learn the facts of the elements in order to disgorge them in this song, but rather that the song proceeds from a kind of surfeiting of information that has already naturally taken place. That is, you are so curious that eventually you have to write a song about the asteroid belt or in which you describe how table of the elements works, or in which you talk about experimental film, etc. True or untrue?

Linnell: True in many cases, I think. Here Comes Science and the rest of the “Here Comes…” series were albums with specific themes. The content was therefore mostly preordained but we gave ourselves some flexibility. Flansburgh really wanted to write a song about the electric car even though this was moving into the realm of applied science, which our advisors were politely suggesting we avoid. But he was compelled to write a brilliant song about it anyway. I would say that I probably leapt at the opportunity to write “Meet the Elements” (thank you for the compliment!) out of an impulse to talk about complexity emerging from simple materials, however I did do the bulk of the necessary research after I got started. I didn’t really know what rocks were made of until I had to look it up.

Outside of our themed albums the incubation process you describe is undoubtedly more the rule. I say undoubtedly even though maybe I haven’t really thought this through. Don’t the really good song ideas just appear out of thin air? For some reason I’m always repelled by the idea of encountering some compelling or troubling idea and rubbing my hands together while rushing home to sculpt it into music. My dad used to irritate me to no end by reacting to anything interesting by saying I should write a song about it. So, yeah, as you suggest it seems to require a necessarily mysterious gestation that will be poisoned by manhandling, meddling or, indeed, a plan.

Now, I’m also aware that this could be total bullshit. When you listen to artists talk about their own work there often seems to be a weird disconnect between what they think they are doing and what is actually good about the work. I must therefore grudgingly admit that I have some lucky rabbit foot kinds of work habits that I feel are indispensable but that I may be kidding myself, and that no one else would mind or even notice if I applied some deliberate idea-crunching formula for coming up with songs instead of waiting around for inspiration to strike. Did you ever hear Rivers Cuomo talk about his writing process? Again this might be him shining all of us on, but according to him he studies hit records and methodically synthesizes everything he hears, words and music, in order to produce his pop confections. Is this true? Does it even matter as long as we like the result?

Rumpus: Two things: 1) What I principally love about Here Comes Science, besides the fact (as on all your “kids” material) that the musical register makes no compromises for the alleged age of audience at all, is that to me it is a decidedly political album. The mere fact of talking about science as though it were “real,” as on, e.g., “Science Is Real,” is to say a certain something in 2009, in the polarized electorate of the post-9/11 America. It is to say that you cannot shrink from a position on the politicization of science. One must take a position. Incredibly brave on an album allegedly “for kids.” Electric car, yes! Evolution, yes! Table of the elements, yes! It’s an incredibly political album, as I see it, while never being self-congratulatory about it, or humorless. But even so, part of what’s so spectacular on “Meet the Elements,” as I see it, is the line: “You and I are complicated, but we’re made of elements.” This is an album of songs for children, though it is also political album, and yet here, however briefly, is classic love song moment, when the conceit of the song gives way to a rather deep and almost shocking truth about people in the struggle of getting along with one another, recognizing their complexity and difference. It was many times listening to “Meet the Elements” that I would get a tear in my eye every time upon encountering that line. 2) As to your question above (“Does it even matter as long as we like the result?”), which I suspect is somewhat facetious, it does indeed matter, for the simple reason that it is the lot of people who appreciate a certain artist to be interested in how the artist talks about what he does. Ergo: Rivers Cuomo would be Exhibit A in the category marked: Don’t Believe Anything He Says. But we still enjoy hearing him say that he studies hit records. I don’t believe him, but I like that he wants me to believe him. I haven’t asked a real question yet, so here’s a question finally. You mentioned, above, in the limpid and admirable line about the night sky above, the issue of sleep, and I can’t help but note that there is both a song on No! about going to sleep, and a song on The Else about falling asleep, problems obtaining thereto, and I can’t help but wonder if your interest in this moment, the hypnagogic moment, is reportorial, or personal, and, if personal, is it somehow related to what you are referring to as the “mysterious gestation.”

Linnell: I had to look up “hypnagogic,” but I’m very pleased to learn that there is such a word. I have nothing to offer, however, regarding the relationship between song ideas and that weird illogical state we pass through before sleep. When Henry was little I routinely read to him in bed at night, and very often he would wake me up by complaining loudly that I was no longer reading from the book, and that what I was saying didn’t make any sense, but sadly I could never remember whatever zombie gibberish I’d said to him. I have had a couple of happy occasions where I woke up with fully formed music and lyrics jangling around in my head but those are rare.

Thinking about the germ of an idea reminds me that one very typical starting point is a simple phrase, kind of like the title of a country and western song, that becomes the scaffolding for the rest of the lyrics. In this situation everything seems to follow logically from what is usually the chorus, unless one perversely tries to steer the song in a contrary direction to make it more interesting. But whichever way the stream winds we are still unable to locate the headwaters. The delightful short story “How I Write My Songs” by Donald Barthelme jumps to mind. Do you know that one? The narrator is trying to explain his creative process in simple, downhome language and quotes his own words, which are mostly banal blues lyrics with a few distinctly odd choices, and it being a Barthelme story you get the sense that while the narrator is describing mundane details of his life coincident with whatever song he wrote that day he’s skating over an unexplainable process with confident obliviousness.

I must credit Mr. Flansburgh for impolitely pushing the political agenda in “Science is Real,” which song (according to him) was partly inspired by the Louvin Brothers song “Satan is Real” (check out the cool album cover). We got some hate mail and a few hate comments online for that but it allowed us to talk openly about the supposed controversy of Evolution and the philosophy behind testable hypotheses. It got me interested in Karl Popper and the concept of falsifiability. I mostly don’t like it when entertainers rattle on about their politics, especially when they’re parroting familiar slogans that make your brain glaze over, but I appreciate being reminded of fundamental issues like teaching kids to think rather having them memorize facts.

Rumpus: Can we talk about Karl Popper a little bit? Or let’s put it another way: one thing I have always found excellent about your whole approach to life is the voracious reading part of it. And when you say that John’s song got you interested in Karl Popper, I can imagine—knowing you a bit—that that means you actually checked out a book or two from the library or bought some from Amazon and/or poked around in the subject for a while. Were you always reading in this way? Or did it appear, at some point, as a by-product of, e.g., relentless touring? I remember you telling me, at one point, that you read a lot of Proust on tour.

By the way, I know that Barthelme story well, though as I recall it is from Forty Stories, which I always felt represented not only a decline in productivity from Sixty Stories, but a mild decline in extra-base hits (as opposed to infield hits). However, I once wrote an essay about depictions of the popular song in contemporary fiction (using Pynchon, Grace Paley, and Donald Barthelme), and wrote at some length about that very story. It’s a good one (a triple, maybe). The interesting thing to me about Barthelme is that he is almost always an artist of metaphor: so when he is writing wittily about songwriting, we also know he’s talking about his stories–although maybe he is also parodying Bob Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” Barthelme, you know, always began his work day by “free writing,” which means he never knew exactly what he was doing, which, I suppose, is another way of saying “But whichever way the stream winds we are still unable to locate the headwaters.” (Which is a remarkable sentence.) In one interview I imagine I remember well, Barthelme said something like: it took him a long time writing, each day, to encounter the first sentence.

Linnell: There’s another Barthelme interview quote that sticks in my head. I’m probably getting this a little bit wrong but he said something about how he could only write a whole novel if the words “gathered unto themselves sufficient flesh.” Which is another way of describing writing as a kind of passive act, without apologies. I get the feeling that John Flansburgh for one would strongly disagree with this approach, and I sincerely don’t know which side I’m on although I’ve been in the cult of Barthelme since I was a young fellow. You’ve told me in the past about your issues with a certain other writer whose work gives you the unpleasant sense that he knows exactly how the book is going to end before he begins writing it. It’s an enlightening criticism and it makes me reconsider many of my cherished affinities, but I’m scared that I won’t be able to listen to certain music the same way anymore. Moreover, the aforementioned writer (whose work I had been defending) has publicly declared his preference for the Rolling Stones over the Beatles, which to me calls his entire worldview into question.

I now have to disclose the shameful fact that I have never read a single word of Karl Popper. His name keeps Popping up when the subject of the scientific method is under discussion, and I was interested to learn that he is associated with the idea of disprovable (as opposed to provable) hypotheses. Nothing can be unassailably proved, which is to say rendered a positive fact, it seems, but there are things you can demonstrate to be false, and this I guess is the basis for knowing anything definite. This is all secondhand information and I’m not articulating his concept very well but it appeals to me. I would have thought one of the ancients had come up with the idea, but Popper is of recent vintage.

Rumpus: What about reading and touring? Is it a thing to do while touring? Or is your always-reading-something-voraciously quality leftover from Amherst, etc.?

Linnell: I have an unusually hard time reading when I’m in a noisy place or if there’s people or video screens distracting me. I’m deeply jealous of people who can sit in a crowded place and pay laser sharp attention to a book. I did eventually make my way through the Proust over the course of several years of tours. It took that long partly because of my difficulty concentrating when there are distractions but I also found that I couldn’t really get what was going on in a single reading. As you know his sentences can run on for pages and his many digressions are sometimes punishingly abstruse. I wound up going very slowly, rereading some parts and also listening to a recording of Neville Jason who translated all the voices of the French social classes into English ones. His version of Baron Charlus was especially hilarious.

Lately I’ve been reading nonfiction. I like the history writer John Julius Norwich who seems to borrow his style from the great Steven Runciman. Both of them employ this phrase often: “by now emperor so-and-so was seriously alarmed.” Once I counted up the number of times Norwich said “seriously alarmed” in one of his volumes about Byzantium. It was, like, five. Colin McEvedy writes the text for the Penguin historical atlases that are laying around the house. He writes concise, erudite, and thoughtful prose and once in a while he checks to see if you’re still paying attention with lines like “In 1498 Charles VIII hit his big stupid head on a lintel in Fontainebleau and died, to be succeeded by Louis XII, who had a small head and a claim to Milan as well as Naples.”

Mainly when we’re on the road I’m struggling to keep healthy and together for the show. I don’t sleep very well when the bus is moving and we had some epic drives last year. While everyone else was asleep I spent many of the overnight drives watching The Wire. The rest of the band had already seen all five seasons so I could talk about each episode the next day with the other guys. We also had a 14 hour drive, mostly during the day, to a music festival and during that one I taught myself to solve the Rubik’s cube. Which for some nerdological members of our audience would be kind of “on the nose,” but at least I waited until I was in my fifties.

Rumpus: I feel despair over your factification in middle age, but I guess this is not unknown with the male of the species. I myself read a two non-fiction books last week. In part because The Golden Ass, which I have been reading recently (Rudin translation), is demanding enough to require breaks. Okay, so how does your photography fit into this unusual array of avocational habits? You like analogue photography exclusively, right? And what do you do with your photographs? I assume you have no interest in publishing, say, a book of photographs of Patti Smith, but are rather more private about this part of your life.

(P.S. Finally very close to fully healthy here, finally!)

Linnell: So glad to hear you’re feeling better. After I wrote you the mealy mouthed “something’s going around” email there was a news story about how this has been one of the worst flu seasons on record. Did you get a flu shot? I didn’t, but I should have. So, if I may ask, what were the two non-fiction books you read? I get the feeling that you are the voracious one here, Rick. I want to read The Golden Ass as well. One of our old soundmen was carrying around the Robert Graves translation and heartily sang its praises. In my imaginary library it is shelved near Ovid’s Metamorphoses which is in reality on a table in the bathroom upstairs. I think Karen is reading the Ovid in connection with your Dante group (somehow) but I sometimes pick it up and marvel at its kaleidoscopic words.

You probably know that I have a darkroom in the basement, which is where I get high on the fumes of something called Blix, a combination of bleach and fixer. I take pictures, I develop them and I scan the negatives and mess around with the images in Photoshop. As you correctly assume I don’t really want to make them public, partly because they would wither and crumble under scrutiny, but also it would make me self-conscious about doing it and I very much enjoy the luxury of this particular privacy. I do like to show off my collection of oddball old-timey cameras to anyone who comes over, but I can detect something in my friends’ polite smiles that tells me nobody else finds them as compelling as I do. The magnificent Univex Mercury with its one-of-a-kind rotating shutter!

Rumpus: The two non-fiction books I read were Elaine Pagels’s book Revelation, which is about the last book in the New Testament, and (according to my own view of the subject) how that total crock of shit managed to get pride of placement in the process of canonization thereby insuring that two thousand years’ worth of paranoid schizophrenics would have something to talk about. And the other book, which I haven’t finished yet, is Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing, which is about intertextuality and process poetry, and so on, on which subject I am at present teaching a class. I can, meanwhile, wholly recommend the new translation of The Golden Ass, which is published by Yale U. Press. The translation is very readable and very contemporary. The original, so far as I can tell, is hilarious, and impulsive, and unlike anything else on earth. Even Ovid seems, in truth, a bit tame by comparison.

All right, we have covered a lot of non-musical stuff, but I would like to ask a little something about melody. The singular part of what you do, it seems to me, is the melody part of what you do. I can’t really even fathom how beautiful your melodies are sometimes, and they seem, at least to me, often independent of the particulars of accompaniment. I imagine, somehow, that they are like J. S. Bach, in that they wander free of conventional chordal structure, which is more often the stuff of the pop song. I often hear a bit of Brandenburg concerto in these melodies, like they were written in stone four hundred years ago. And for me, it’s most interesting when the words are completely out of phase with the beauty of the melody, like on “Dead,” which is frankly contrapuntal when John F. sings the second line alongside you.  Do you sing these melodies first? Or hear them first? Or do you have to have a keyboard at hand? Is it again the case that there is no accounting for them?

Linnell: At some point I should ask you about your own writing process, as long as we are entertaining the concept of the artist as passive conduit for some exterior feed. I don’t think either of us completely buys this notion, or maybe it’s an example of begging the question (in the original, useful sense which expresses the idea that the premise itself force feeds you the answer). Where or what is this radio station from which one receives inspiration? I’m probably more of a soul deadening materialist than you, and if I had to come up with the prosaic explanation it would come down to a complicated system of stimulus and response with lots of beeping and blinking lights going on in the brain. But this would be me begging the question in the contemporary sense of “begging for a question” during the awkward silence that follows my dull, reductionist version of the mystery of creation.

You’re right, I am motivated by an urgent love for pitches going up and down in bewitching patterns that seem to be telling us important things inexpressible in words. What the hell. In Patrick Süskind’s Perfume he proposes a universe where the basis for beauty is in how everything smells, rather than how things look and sound. You are not really responding to the seemingly attractive curve in a girl’s neck or the sound of rustling leaves, but their barely noticeable scent which informs all your aesthetic responses. I kind of think something analogous is happening in songs. Richard Rodgers is secretly controlling our emotions using Oscar Hammerstein as a stalking horse. In this way you can get people to go along with verbal ideas that might otherwise leave them cold.

Bach himself makes a great case that atheists like myself should shut up and stop trying to spoil everyone’s fun. I have no explanation for how a mere human could produce such unspeakably great music. There are loads of deluded weirdos out there who believe all kinds of magical nonsense (some of them are friends of mine) and if any of them asked me to contradict myself and prove there is a god I would point to the Well Tempered Clavier. Which maybe brings us back to the Book of Revelations. I’m prepared to believe that people require mystery, however insane, that it’s a kind of painkiller.

Rumpus: I have often made the argument that prose is a kind of music, that the principles are really the same, especially in paragraph construction: rhythm, melody, occasions of silence, and so on. And I think my meager experiments in music are really opportunities to give myself license to listen more closely. And listening closely, it turns out, makes you a more interesting stylist. (The lie of much American contemporary prose is that there can be a kind of prose that is “transparent,” a kind of non-prose that automatically results in “content” not “form.” But my argument is that even an unadorned style is still a style, and that if you are going to have a style you should have a fully informed style, and, dare I say, a “beautiful” style.) In this regard, therefore, I think of what I do as not dissimilar to what you do. And when I am working well I sometimes believe I am intercessory. Not, perhaps, intercessory with respect to the divine, but intercessory with respect to language itself, and the music of language. The language happens through me. I like being its medium.

In your case, I almost always experience the event of melody as joyful. Indeed, there are not that many downtempo Linnell compositions. Is it your experience that the beauty of melody has to happen in an uptempo context? Does the uptempo quality of many of the compositions then make room for more complex lyrical sentiment? I have been especially delighted, since the advent of Giants “kids” albums, that the lyrics on the “adult” albums have become even more complex. You guys rightly described Join Us (2011) as being lyrically complex and I would go even further and say that it is genuinely dark and even sad occasionally, but that the sadness of Giants songs, the saddest of them, are usually mismatched (purposefully) with soaring melodies, or, in some of Flansburgh’s songs, with witty and virtuosic genre exploration. (By the way, some of my very favorite recent Giants stuff has been on Join Us, and the very amazing Venue Songs (2005), each of which, in some ways, is like the earliest iterations of the band, which is to say against the prevailing notions of limitless studio intervention.) And by the way did the title Join Us come from that really creepy track on My Life In the Bush of Ghosts where the sampled voice keeps saying “Join Us?”

Linnell: I am in full agreement with you about the unavoidable music of words themselves. I hadn’t really gotten wind of the current predilection for “transparent” prose but it sounds perverse, like some chic new restaurant that champions the total absence of flavor (it wouldn’t surprise me if there were such a restaurant). In general I support the struggle against the tyranny of form, or what Martin Amis calls the war against cliché, though it is an ultimately futile and unwinnable war. In the end you take the battlefield and become the enemy.

I do try to escape my joyful melody ghetto now and then and spend the day in other neighborhoods.  Marty Beller’s favorite song from Venue Songs is “Santa Cruz (The Catalyst)” which suggests an entire arrondissement we have yet to explore. For some reason Venue Songs grew into a kind of travelogue of pastiche, which was partly the result of the extreme constraint of writing, learning and recording each song in the space of a few hours. It was like we were dashing through the prop room and grabbing whatever materials were nearest. We were also unavoidably constrained from any studio intervention on the location recordings, so we leaned heavily on the mercurial talents of our band.

In the case of Join Us I infer that Flansburgh had been understandably weary of producing the whole album package himself as he usually does, with me standing passively by, arms folded, scowling unhelpfully at his suggestions for album titles. He prodded me to come up with a list of names and Join Us was somewhere in there. As with many things that we do on a deadline there may not have been much forethought and I’m not ruling out an unconscious borrowing. I do remember driving across California years ago with Mr. Charles Thompson and hearing him utter the phrase in response to the sudden apparition of a wind farm that stretched across the horizon. The windmills, we had observed, looked like a vast terrifying hallucination of identical robotic cult members. Shades of Don Quixote.

Rumpus: Having just seen the band play, I can attest to their great versatility, and this is, I think, a sheepish admission, because I was among those irritating Giants fans who balked at the first couple of albums with a “band,” because I was so used to the limitations of the two Johns and attendant devices—those limitations which were not quite limitations. But now I think the band is remarkable, turns on a dime, can play anything, and so on. Ergo: all bands should have such “mercurial” talents. I am about to let you off the hook, meanwhile, but I do want to ask a couple of questions about “The Mesopotamians,” which is the ostensible subject of this piece, because I was so moved by it at the December 30 show in Williamsburg. Can you go through the genesis of it? Do you remember?

Linnell: This example reveals something about incentives and inspiration. We had a deal for a couple of children’s books which were going to be illustrated song lyrics with a companion CD glued to the inside back cover, and John and I were tossing ideas back and forth for the theme of the final book. Mine was about a rock group with the names of ancient near-eastern kings. Now that I think of it it’s a little like Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, which is about a mythical baseball league with players named things like Gil Gamesh. Jesus, I just realized that I stole the whole idea from Philip Roth. I hope you don’t think less of the song now. Anyway there was originally going to be the Monkees-like theme song and then individual songs for each character, and the arrangements were going to reflect the instrumentation of the band. I had an autoharp sitting on my workbench at the time so one of the members was going to play that. I think Gilgamesh was supposed to be female and she had a song about wanting (as did her namesake) to live forever, but I grew disenchanted with the idea of drawing so directly from the original myths.

Here is the original demo [yes, you can listen here, -ed.] which has an entirely different verse form and the conspicuous autoharp accompaniment. I think I was trying to cop the Lovin’ Spoonful more than the Monkees. You can tell that the lyrics are less focused and the whole thing is a bit sleepier. Also faster for some reason.

The book concept never came together and about two years later I rewrote the verses and added the “I thought you were dead” bridge. I think the biggest improvement with the final version was getting the harmonies voiced better and in tune. I don’t have a pretty falsetto but the studio is very forgiving.

We are particularly beholden to David Cowles for his animated video. He recognized that the song needed to sprout hair and smell more like B.O. These are the first two drawings he sent us after he heard the album version. The Ed “Big Daddy” Roth guy immediately won us over:

Rumpus: Wow! That is excellent, that drawing, just great, but I am even more interested in the demo, which is very remarkable for a demo. That’s you kinda doing everything on there, right? Kinda astounding. I like the Philip Roth gloss, meanwhile, and for me it only increases the excellence of the song, as far as I’m concerned. By the way, as long as we’re being honest, I think, as I have told you before, I have stolen variants of the Giants line “If it wasn’t for disappointment, I wouldn’t have any appointments” multiple times in my body of work.

Okay, I’m going to jettison my theory that “The Mesopotamians” is an updated version of “Hi, We’re the Replacements,” from the era of the first album and I guess there is no intended calling-to-mind of the most underrated of B-52s albums of the same name (does no one but me think “Nip It in the Bud” is a masterpiece?), but I was especially delighted to hear “The Mesopotamians” at the show in Williamsburg show because it reveals the gems among the later period of Giants, which are sometimes overlooked in the nostalgic fervor about Flood. And: it was an incredibly delighted and delighting performance in an important moment in the set (last song before encores). You guys seemed sort of like The Mesopotamians at that moment. May I ask: did you know you had a unalloyed gem in this case, upon completion? Or do you sometimes (like, e.g., Bob Dylan) think the good ones are flawed and vice versa? And, since we are ostensibly here on the subject of the new album, was there a concept for the new album?

Linnell: I’m interested (thought not surprised) that Bob Dylan disagrees with received opinion on the good and bad songs in his catalog. It reminds me of that nagging feeling you get that people like something you did for the wrong reasons. Mostly, however, other people like the same songs we do, and boringly I usually know which ones are the front runners by the time the demo is finished. Sometimes a song doesn’t announce its pretensions until our band has had their way with it, and once in a while a song reveals its true lack of promise after we have polished the turd into a gleaming luster.

I too imagine that while performing the song we are temporarily costumed as the fictitious band The Mesopotamians, who are somehow so old that they seem to have emerged alongside western culture itself, but to me the other face of the coin is that they embody the loserdom that all bands secretly harbor. The vainglory and dumpiness of getting up on stage. Inevitably all the spinning plates will sooner or later come crashing to the floor and everyone will go back to their crappy lives. Even the Monkees had that kind of triumphant loser attitude. As did the the Replacements in our faux theme for them. I like any song that includes a band roll call in the lyrics, which we’ve done a couple of ways. My heart leaped the first time I heard NRBQ open with “Here Comes Terry, Here Comes Tom.” The Velvet Underground made up an amusing theme song for themselves when they briefly reunited in the ’90s.

I remember the B-52s song but unlike most of their excellent work it didn’t make much of an impression on me. I’m listening to it now and it seems germane to our conversation that Fred Schneider says he needs to read a book before he says anything. He says it right there in the song!

The new album—title: Nanobots—is bereft of any overarching concept, which is generally the case with the albums we didn’t record for kids. I guess we’re relying on the songs to suggest their own relationship with one another, because that seems to happen with everybody’s albums and because we’re struggling enough as it is with coming up with material without trying to connect it all up. I made a list of other artists’ sixteenth albums to see how Nanobots stacks up and while it may or may not be our Some Girls it perhaps compares favorably with Cher’s Prisoner.

***

Listen to the original demo of “The Mesopotamians” below:

Related Posts:

• Swinging Modern Sounds #44: And Another Day
• Swinging Modern Sounds #41: Utopian Communities
• Swinging Modern Sounds #40: A Miscellany of Musical Thoughts that Will Not Otherwise Appear
• Swinging Modern Sounds #39: Interview Within an Interview
• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #38: Dinner at Martha’s House

Doesn’t mean it’s all bad, understand. Because playing together is sublime. Playing music with other people, in my experience, is one of the most sublime things that people can do together. It is rarely easy. Not a band that has endured for more than seven or eight years has done so without personal cost. Look at the Kinks, look at the Who, look at the Rolling Stones, look at the Eagles, look at Fleetwood Mac, look at Aerosmith. And for every band that has somehow managed to stay together, or to reunite after some long interval of discontent, there are innumerable others who could not. John Cale and Lou Reed are both still alive. Even though the Velvet Underground would never be the Velvet Underground without Sterling Morrison, why do John Cale and Lou Reed not play together any longer? Because the intensity of their disregard, and their pride, prevents them from doing so. Michael Stipe grew so far apart from the R.E.M. sound, or this is my supposition, that he just couldn’t pretend, any longer, to be able to sing those jangly indie rock masterpieces from the early part of their career. Ms. Lauryn Hill didn’t want to fraternize with any other Fugee. Hall is tired of Oates. Simon appears to have complicated feelings about performing with Garfunkel. Axl seems to hate all of the original members of Guns ‘N Roses. Young will only tour with Crosby, Stills, and Nash if they will sing the entirety of the Living With War album.

And it’s not just the really legendary or successful bands who have this problem either. Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine apparently could not keep playing together. The guys in Slint can’t stand doing it anymore. Pavement only got back together for the reunion money. It took seventeen years for Bill Million to be willing to play with Glen Mercer again in The Feelies, And so on.

It never starts out this way. No band starts out this way. So how do they start out? For the purposes of this essay, they start out like a Utopian community. In fact, the idea of the rock and roll band changed dramatically during the heyday of the commune, during a period naïve enough to believe in Utopian communities. The Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane lived and played together, and they created a sort of idealized notion of how the band can do what the band can do (I remember seeing that band Thinking Fellers Union 201, in the nineties, and the highest praise accorded them by people who were in bands was: they live together). If you are all sharing a space, and rotating in the preparation of food and laundry, you will practice more, and the fact of your relationships with the other people in the band, you supposed ease with them, your unspoken communication with them, will become some of the raw material of the band. The band will lock in, the band will find its group identity. The much esteemed idea of woodshedding is a variation of the same theme. The band goes up to the country and gets its head together, does some woodshedding, until the material is secure. Which means that they practice a kind of Utopian community.[1]

Punk ruined this image, this Haight and Ashbury idea of community, as it ruined so many ideas from the easier, softer, hippier days. Johnny and Sid rode in the bus, and Steve and Paul flew from town to town, across the USA, because they couldn’t stand each other. The Ramones traveled in separate vans because Johnny stole Joey’s girlfriend and they rarely spoke again. In punk, intimacy and a sense of feelgood idealism were not integral to the music. Or maybe the early exemplars of punk were simply dealing with so much deprivation that they couldn’t see fit to organize themselves into Utopian communities, because they never felt Utopian at all. Or maybe, during punk and after, the Utopian model of band formation just took on a slightly more hard-boiled anhedonic aspect. Gang of Four, for example, had their brainy, slightly dour Marxist reputation, which was also true of The Mekons (to some extent), and Delta 5, wherein the Utopian rhetoric sounded like it came from the Little Red Book sometimes. Gang of Four all had their bastard moments, or so I have been told. Some of them probably were bastards, but if you believe the popular, critical line on them, they all subscribed to a united anti-rock-star purpose, and the compositions were by the group. Same thing with a “collective” like Chumbawumba. So there was Utopianism of a sort in punk, perhaps, just not the patchouli-flavored kind.

More recently, commune-oriented bands like Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros or Polyphonic Spree also traffic in this antique notion of the Utopian Community, inviting in, or so it seems, almost anyone who wants to join the band, and making the music that you might suspect a band of this kind of would make, neo-psychedelic music. It all goes back to Gong, or it all goes back to Henry Cow, or it all goes back to the Incredible String Band, or it all goes back to the Kweskin Jug Band and the Fort Hill Community. It all goes back to the notion that when you make a band, you make a kind of alternative ideological system, a place where the world, and its bourgeois conventions, are in arrest. You travel around the world, like a gypsy encampment, or like a posse of bounty hunters, or like mercenaries, taking few prisoners, creating your own ethics, your own theology, and you have teammates, people who will watch your back, and if someone throws a bottle at you, your teammates will hit him in the face with their guitars. An ideological and Utopian glue is what makes a band a band, at first; it’s what keeps it from splintering.

Perhaps no band recently has been more enamored of the Utopian community aspect of band formation than the band that is named after a bona fide Utopian community, the Brooklyn band called Oneida.

They started in high school, or some of them started in high school, and this is a worthy part of the Utopian mythology of any band. The band begins in that period in which cult-like communities of teenagers form apart from, or adjacent to the nuclear families of the constituents. I have written a little bit about the group of friends I lived with when I was away at high school (see Swinging Modern Sounds #10), and it’s fair to say that had any of us been able to play a musical instrument at that time—I was just learning—I’m sure we would have made a fine band, a band that sounded something like Lothar and the Hand People. (In fact, a guy who went to my high school was related to one of thmie players in Lothar and the Hand People.) We read deep in the Utopian literature, and we liked bands who were practitioners of this Utopian approach, and it was probably only our parents–who were footing the bill for our very expensive educations–who kept us from declaring ourselves wards of the state, so that we could be free to theorize and practice along the Utopian lines.

By coincidence, John Colpitts, also known as Kid Millions, drummer of Oneida, went to the very same high school I did, in New Hampshire, and this high-school was the furnace in which Oneida was first superheated. He may not have come up with the name Oneida there, nor his own pseudonym, and the lineup was not yet fixed, but he was drumming there, playing covers of The Cure and Joy Division, and playing on the ice hockey team (among other intramural activities). In this kind of a landscape does the idea of a band inevitably gain traction. Fat Bobby, who real name is elided here, also played with John Colpitts during and just after the boarding school years, and so some of the associations of Colpitts’s boarding school years, the years of idealism, the years of the Utopian, led to Oneida. The various players then went off to college, as you do when you are a graduate of a very good boarding school and Colpitts played with others in college, in a period when he was being exposed to a lot of music that was more Utopian than The Cure or The Smiths, let’s say, some krautrock, some minimalism. And among his acquaintances, during this college period, was the guitar player in Oneida who went on to become Hanoi Jane. It wasn’t long before, in New York City, all the relevant protagonists were in residence, including Papa Crazee, who left the band in 2001. And they decided to give Oneida a try.

The band name came to Colpitts in the library one day, and he claims not to have had any particular understanding of its significance at that time. A likely story. He claims not to have imagined that a Utopian community was a particularly good analogy for a band. He claims not to have noticed that a band and a Utopia and a separatist religious community were all alike in certain subliminal ways. Of the original Oneida, Wikipedia says:

The Oneida Community was a religious commune founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 in Oneida, New York. The community believed that Jesus had already returned in AD 70, making it possible for them to bring about Jesus’s millennial kingdom themselves, and to be free of sin and perfect in this world, not just Heaven (a belief called Perfectionism). The Oneida Community practiced Communalism (in the sense of communal property and possession), Complex Marriage, Male Continence, Mutual Criticism, and Ascending Fellowship. There were smaller Noyesian communities in Wallingford, Connecticut; Newark, New Jersey; Putney and Cambridge, Vermont. The community’s original 87 members grew to 172 by February 1850, 208 by 1852, and 306 by 1878. The branches were closed in 1854 except for the Wallingford branch, which operated until devastated by tornado in 1878. The Oneida Community dissolved in 1881, and eventually became the giant silverware company Oneida Limited.

Kid Millions asserts that by naming himself and his collective musical endeavor Oneida he was just coming up with a plausible name. He claims that he didn’t really know what kind of band Oneida would ultimately become, that the name would somehow shape the band. Was it the name that drove Oneida toward its highly experimental song structures of recent years, its mostly wordless compositions, its unconventional sounds, timbres, voicings? Would Colpitts and Oneida otherwise have written a lot of conventional pop songs with bridges and female backing vocal choirs? Maybe the form and content of Oneida only gradually became coincident, because there were some relatively conventional “songs” in the early Oneida catalogue. But in the early years they adjusted to their name yet. They were Utopian up to a point. The name had not yet exacted its price.

Or: for a while, let’s suppose, Oneida was young, as all bands are young at first, and they had some idealistic notions about all living in the same city and playing together a lot, woodshedding, but then the name began to have its effect, and Oneida assumed its tradition of pseudonyms (and here we can see the way that Oneida is not at all dissimilar, and even forms a kind of blueprint for the band called Animal Collective, which is also a very good example of the Utopian community, with its pseudonyms and side projects and group-oriented ethics), and came in the process to behave as though they understood the poignancy of traditions like Complex Marriage, Male Continence, Mutual Criticism, and Ascending Fellowship.

In due course, armed with pseudonyms, they also began to sound like some of what they had more recently been listening to: Can, Faust, and Neu.

What can we say about krautrock that hasn’t been said? That it was reactive, and perhaps reactionary, in that it was a radical response to being the generation after the generation that was in part responsible for a calamitous war, and that when Can, Fast, and Neu (and Cluster and Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk) were first doing what they were doing they were opposed to what had come before them in German culture, even as they were also reacting away from the European tradition of the art song, and finding ways, particularly via the work of Stockhausen (it’s a sign of the times that members of these bands constantly cite the influence of Stockhausen), to dismantle conventional Western notation and classical composition, likewise the reliance on tonality and development that we associate with Western classical music canon. Krautrock stood against the canon of German music, and against what was unsophisticated in rock and roll, in the same way that the Velvet Underground found an influence in the work of La Monte Young and Tony Conrad and Terry Riley, and bludgeoned rock and roll in New York City with what they were getting from the minimalists. That said, it is perhaps also true that Can be mapped onto the practices of the Oneida Community, especially, perhaps, the mutual criticism, part of it, as described here by the original Oneida Community itself:

THE little school at Putney went through a long discipleship before the system of mutual criticism was instituted. The process was perfectly natural. Love for the truth and for one another had been nurtured and strengthened till it could bear any strain. We could receive criticism kindly and give it without fear of offending. Association had ripened acquaintance so that we knew one another’s faults. We had studied the Bible systematically for ten years, and were trying to express our conclusions in appropriate external forms.

Oneida the band looks back not only to Can, the German band, but to Can’s reliance on some of the tropes of the Oneida Community. Mutual criticism, among Can, perhaps resulted in the removal of Malcolm Mooney, or Damo Suzuki, or even Holger Czukay (who, though a founding member, was forced to the side during the Can disco phase), and perhaps Oneida used a similar mutual criticism model in the period in which Papa Crazee moved on and formed his own somewhat rootsy band Oakley Hall, who by virtue of being named after a novelist, were obviously contingent upon a different set of traditions. The mutual criticism model may have been thus:

As oxygen combined with nitrogen is the very breath of life while pure oxygen is destructive, so criticism must be combined with love to be wholesome and healing. Christ was qualified to be the judge of this world by the love he showed in laying down his life for it. Criticism bathed in love wounds but to heal; bathed in personal feelings it leaves poison in the wound. There must be not only love but respect.

Having concluded with one phase of the mutal criticism model, arguably as it played out in an internecine context, a splintering context, Oneida began experimenting with the krautrock sound more earnestly, refining, transmuting, transposing, rehistoricizing.

The different order of sound became written in Utopian lines upon the release of the next album, Each One Teach One. A very remarkable record. Indeed, a friend of mine who is passionate about repetition (he appears, for example, Swinging Modern Sounds #12) urged me, for many years, to pay particular attention to the Oneida track called “Sheets of Easter,” from Each One Teach One (2002) as a high water mark, which for some time, to my shame, I resisted doing (he also likes Orthrelm a lot, and there I cannot tread with any regularity). But let me describe the excellence of the track. The voice begins the action, thus: the voice (Kid Millions, I think) sings “You’ve got to look into the . . .” And then a chorus of voices sings “light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light light” with one grinding organ chord for about fifteen minutes, and as with many Oneida songs the only “lead” instrument is the drums, but even here the variations in the drum part are only occasional, it’s really just the one chord, and you may be wondering if I typed in the repetitions of the word “light” above, or if I pasted them all in, and I wondered that about the song, too, if any of the song was looped, or if they played the entire thing, because it never moves off the grid really, it never slows down, and Kid Millions could have overdubbed the drums, in order to make sure that the thing never flags, but that doesn’t square with my knowledge of the band, the humanness of their project, and in the end it doesn’t make that much difference, because the more you listen to “Sheets of Easter,” as if watching the radiation emerge from a singularity, the more variation you hear, and you sort of never want it to end, and indeed, I am listening to it as I type these lines, and I never want it to end, I want it to be playing, and I would, if I could, just write an entire essay of thoughts I have while listening to “Sheets of Easter,” and now that I’m listening to all the guys singing “light,” I’m wondering if they are not singing “night,” just because “night” sounds more moving somehow: “night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night night.”

This is very satisfying music. There’s no room in the song for expression, and in some way, expression, in Oneida seems stupid. It’s not confessional, there’s not room for confession. There’s only room for what rock and roll is, the iteration of rock and roll. In Oneida, you hear exactly what a rock and roll band is and does. (I think in “verse three” they sing “sight.”) A rock and roll band is about an idea of sound, and the sound, according to this argument, is loud, and there are a lot of overtones, and the sounds of amplifiers, and simply indicating the sound is enough, and variation in the sound would only distract, and it would only seem embarrassing, overweening, and so stripping away variation, and harmonic movement, is to strip the thing to the purest example of what music is, and there are few examples more powerful than “Sheets of Easter.” Even “Sister Ray” feels a little bit vain by comparison, a little bit Rococo. The best analogies would be the sludgy metal of SunnO)))) or Earth. But SunnO)))) doesn’t really care about rhythm at all. And Earth, at least in its more recent vintage, does actually like to move off the one chord occasionally. So Oneida, on “Sheets of Easter” is pretty singular.

What, you might ask, was the Utopian narrative in this next phase of the band, was it something like Ascending Fellowship? “We understand by the ascending fellowship, a state in which a person seeks companionship with those who are on a superior spiritual plane, so that the drawing of the fellowship is upward (italics in original).” Certainly, the direction of the band in the time after Each One Teach One was toward an expansion of the groove, and toward improvisation, and this despite the fact that “Sheets of Easter” would appear in some ways to be a dead end, uncircumnavigable. Well, there was one way to circumnavigate it, and that was to concentrate on the means of production, and thereby to practice Communalism, in exactly the sense it was practiced in the original Oneida Community, which in this case meant the inevitability of building their own studio.

For some bands, building your own studio is simply a way to make music more cheaply, and you can admire this thriftiness, which is in some way Utopian. But in another Utopian construct, building your own studio is like Wittegenstein designing his own house, or Jung designing his own house, which is to say, a variety of individuation, or alchemical study, but an individuation perhaps that is closer to Deleuze’s theory, which is more about flows and multiplicities, than it is about some supreme dead stop of identity. You make the studio that best coheres with the idea of the band, a fluid idea of a band, an Ascending Fellowship. Ergo, Oneida built their studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but in Williamsburg before it was what it is now, in a particularly arts-friendly building (Monster Island, I believe it was called) that offered reasonable rents, and rewarded Utopian thinking. The resulting space was dubbed the Ocropolis, and the band not only recorded there, but built a kind of Oneida think tank, with old beat up organs and parts of drum kits, and tapestries, and tie-dye up on the wall, and they played there, and recorded other people there, and had improvisatory events there, and sort of made a whole idea of the Ocropolis, which was as pagan and as iconic, with regard to Utopian thinking, as the original Acropolis. As when Deleuze says:

Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse. Difference is not phenomenon but the noumenon closest to the phenomenon. It is therefore true that God makes the world by calculating, but his calculations never work out exactly, and this inexactitute or injustice in the result, this irreducible inequality, forms the condition of the world.

(I saw Oneida play a show at the Ocropolis one night, and it was, as far as I could tell, improvised from top to bottom, and it lasted a very long time, but not the seven hours of one of their other performances, and the audience just kind of worked its way in among the instruments, and the lights were dim, and there was a lot of pot being smoked, and a lot of the guys in the audience had the sort of Appalachian-chic facial hair, and there were a lot more men than women, which is a kind of Male Continence phenomenon, and there was something very out of this world about the show, as though something was happening that could not, in any way, be perceptible by the world that, for example, was thinking about American Idol at roughly the same time. And yet: it bears mentioning that Kid Millions is an exceedingly polite and smart and well-meaning guy, and whereas you might imagine, once upon a time, that the members of Can might have played a Baeder-Meinhoff legal defense gig, or would have, perhaps, robbed a bank and given all the money to radical environmentalists, the members of Oneida don’t seem to have a public platform in the countercultural sense of the thing. They just play. They just sit down and play. The playing is the platform, and it’s about multiplicities of intent. The music is only about the music. And the music is an idea of music, and the idea of music is that nothing extraneous exists outside of the music, and that simplicity and rigorousness of intent creates the opportunity for what is Utopian, instead of fitting the music into the hitherto existing Utopian thinking, as, perhaps the Shakers did. The Shakers tried to come up with melodies that expressed what they were already trying to express, with regard to their theology. But Oneida builds its theology on what they are already doing with their music. So there is a strident normalcy to them. They could, it seems, have day jobs where they copyedit or write dissertations. And indeed all of Oneida have day jobs, because they are that kind of band, which is to say a Utopian band that only does what it does because it believes in what it does. You couldn’t dance at the show, thought it would have been a very good show to dance at, and there should have been dancing. There just wasn’t room enough. People should have removed layers of clothing, but Oneida don’t exactly seem like the kinds of guys who would approve of the removal of clothing for any prurient purpose, though you will notice that John Humphrey Notes, the founder of the original Oneida Community had this to say about sex: “I conceived the idea that the sexual organs have a social function which is distinct from the propagative function…. I experimented on this idea, and found that the self control which it requires is not difficult; also that my enjoyment was increased; also that my wife’s experience was very satisfactory, as it had never been before; also that we had escaped the horrors and the fear of involuntary propagation. This was a great deliverance. It made a happy household. I communicated my discovery to a friend. His experience and that of his household were the same.”)

So Oneida had the studio, the Ocropolis of their theology, and it was a place to work, a reliable place to work, and they could work all night, if they wanted to work all night, and they didn’t have to pay studio fees, and if they wanted an old unreliable organ in which they were duct taping down certain keys, they could leave it there, and it would not get fucked with, and they could go to their day jobs, and come back, and the Ocropolis would still believe in what they wanted to believe, which was a constantly shifting palette of beliefs. And their religion, their theology, would attract certain adherents, or acolytes, for periods of time, and there would be trance states of various kinds, kinds of trance states that are still permitted in a secular post-rock-and-roll present.

They got big in Europe. As I understand it, this was inexplicable to them. They were playing to modest crowds here at home, but suddenly they went abroad, and they were on covers of magazines, and so on. This is the thing about small, mobile, idealistic cults. They are never rewarded with adherents in their homeland. They are foretellers of future things doomed to go disbelieved at home. So Oneida had to go abroad, and, for a while, they were showered with attention and success abroad. The Ocropolis was reflective of this state of affairs, of the increasingly recondite attentions of the American music audience. If the math rock idiom made possible some of what Oneida became, that idiom also faded, after a time, and the bands that were synonymous with it have all found the world harder than once they did. Tortoise, Labradford, Trans Am, and so on. Oneida, arguably, had something in common with this period. What constituted a certain wave form of difference, however, what Oneida had that some of these other bands did not, perhaps, have, was an unmistakable ethical system, a utopian ideal.

In addition to their recording studio, the Ocropolis, Oneida also, after a time, came to possess a record label, called Brah, and a web site that went with the label, a web site that was sort of like what the Black Panthers might have used. Or perhaps the web site and the label were like the silverware manufacture of the Oneida Community. The web site constituted an Oneida Community in this world, the postmodern world, that was separate, and historically bound, but constitutively similar to the original Oneida Community and its occasional broadsides and publications on such things as Mutual Criticism and Ascending Fellowship. The web site, that is, became a public relations vehicle, but because of its Utopian vision and world view, Oneida, the band, is not able to use a web site as a publicity-oriented resource in the usual way. Instead, there are ethical questions posed by the web site, and ideas about history, and preoccupations with the intertexts of the rock and roll world. Oneida, as depicted (inconsistently, incompletely, as a series of public relations fits, as flows, as discontinuities), is a Hegelian entity, concerned with dialectical tendencies. In any event there came to be a web site, and a recording studio, as real world analogues to the Utopian thinking present in the increasingly uncompromising music itself. (An analogy, which is not a perfect analogy, but which nonetheless will serve for the moment, would be the MC5 during the period of its political rabble-rousing. This period did not last for long, and it seems to have been fomented primarily by the band’s manager, and certain members of the band have since recanted as regards the political rabble-rousing of the MC5. But the MC5, during the period of their militancy, accomplished something that virtually no other band has managed to do in a sustained way since, to sketch out a complete countercultural system of presentation. Many bands, even when utopian, merely attempt to have cultural and political axis to their project: I’m thinking of Rage Against the Machine, e.g., who sounded like they would follow every political thought to its conclusion but who did not entirely rage against the machine. Zach de la Rocha has been more political on his own, and Tom Morello has been more political on his own, but the assemblage known as Rage Against the Machine sounds more militant than it is. Gang of Four: same problem. Gang of Four in its most popular period (“I Love a Man In a Uniform”) is diagnostic, not programmatic. The MC5 did more than diagnose. The Jefferson Airplane, on Volunteers, or Blows Against the Empire, did more than diagnose. They militated. And, at least in the case of MC5, at the time it did not seem like an act, even if the act was later tamed.) The albums that signify, for me, the later and more militant Utopian model of Oneida, are Rated O, Preteen Weaponry, and Absolute II. None of these albums can be relied upon to have a lyrical statement in support of any particular politics or program. They are not about that kind of Utopian vision, the kind which requires a particular program of action (I’m thinking of Scientology, for example, whose totalitarian tendencies in the matter of prescription are well known.) Oneida is emblematic. They act in the spirit of Communalism and toward the unified collaborative vision of community.

Often there is a groove (see Preteen Weaponry, “Part One,” e.g.), in later Oneida, but there isn’t always a groove, sometimes there is just an idea, and for my money, the best and most recalcitrant examples are on Absolute II, where there is not a groove but a sort of sanded-away melodic idea, a remnant of a melodic idea, often keyboard-based, and often something is shimmering in the background, whether some electro-magnetic fields of guitar, and then some drumming, some rhythm, whether acoustic, or, on occasion, some synthetic pulsing of some sort. Is this not a band that is organized around drumming? Sometimes there is a whisper of drumming, though that is still a kind of percussive something or other. On “Pre-Human” is it looped? Is this a specifically pre-human, meaning pre-historic, or Holocene notion of sound, that is what happened prior to the Ice Age, or prior to the asteroid strike, prior to the Mystery Cults, and in looking upon that early iteration of planetoid history, there is sound, but there is not exactly music, so any advanced idea of melody would be unwarranted, instead there should just be the sound of sound, and this sound often repeats, and often lays out and takes a breath, and the moment when music takes a breath is a beautiful thing because it is like the cessation of human activity. Maybe all of the universe, in the Oneida formulation, is a form of repetition followed, at regular intervals, by a cessation of music. Is the anxiety of the a rest proportional to the amount of music that precedes it? “Pre-Human” hovers just this side of drone, without melodic development, in oscillations of stopping and starting. There is almost no sound on this track that sounds like a conventional rock band. Sometimes with Oneida you are able to say, oh there’s a Vox organ, but on Absolute II, it’s hard to do even that. It’s more about overdriven amplifiers, or something cooked up with effects pedals and a little bit of computer intervention.

And, on Absolute II, “Pre-Human” is followed by “Horizon,” which actually has some human voice—so disguised by effects that it’s impossible to attribute a particular intention to the voice. Some phase-shifter-and-amplifier noise is also taking place in the mid-range, and occasionally you imagine you can hear a guitar string being struck. My god, that sounds almost exactly like an electric guitar, and yet, we are twelve or thirteen minutes into an album by Oneida, and so far nothing like a drum has happened at all. Is it relaxing? Is it relaxing like a new age kind of thing? It is not relaxing. You can imagine watching proto-hominids eating a slain, vivisected water buffalo to this music, and also you can imagine the even dispersal of atomic fallout to this music, or you can imagine the demolition of stadia to this music, and all of what the human is, at the horizon line, is recontextualized, and made small by this music, which wants to supplant the merely human with something else. “Gray Area,” which is the third song owes a little bit to SunnO))), and in that spirit gigantic tectonic plates of guitar chording occasionally permeate what otherwise sounds like some factory machinery that someone has mistakenly left in the on position. If one were pursuing a positivistic course of study and asking whether or not a factory continues to make factory noises, iterations of labor, even when deprived of labor and its aggrieved practitioners, the answer would have to be: “Gray Area,” by Oneida.

And yet none of this prepares us for “Absolute II,” the track, which bears almost no resemblance to music at all. And that is what’s exciting about it. There are, again, a few moments when someone appears to pluck a guitar string, but otherwise the members of Oneida and their confederates and satellites are concerned primarily with trying to find ways to use the studio, the computer, the effects pedals, and so on, to produce anything but conventional improvised music. It should bear mentioning, while we are it, that there is nothing here that sounds anything like rock and roll. Rock and roll? I think maybe “Absolute II” is more like free jazz, or serious music, than it is like rock and roll. I can think of no rock and roll band that considered itself thus, except, arguably, certain “psychedelic” bands during the space between songs, when they were animated by hallucinogens.

And no drums anywhere. On “Absolute II.” No conventional drum kit that I can locate, even though, if we were to bear down on the question, we might say that it is a drummer’s band, in the final analysis. It is somewhat the vision of drummer Kid Millions that makes Oneida what it is. He certainly did not go out of his way to include his own instrument on this record. (And the title of Absolute II reminds me of a similarly uncompromising album from the seventies: No Pussyfooting. Allegedly, that album title came about because Robert Fripp did not want to compromise, in any way, on the minimalism of the approach. And Absolute II, is likewise absolute in its approach. Absolute II is absolutist, and apparently represents a recommitment on that score, not that there was a lapse, after Rated O and Preteen Weaponry, which are also demanding.)

The heartbreak of all Utopian thinking (and this is why, for example, Nathaniel Hawthorne left the experiment at Brook Farm, and wrote The Blithedale Romance in part as a satire of the collective impulse) is that the second law of thermodynamics works on Utopia just as it works on all things. The idea, whichever idea it is, gets deracinated. Or the thinkers themselves lose their edge. Or a unanimity of spirit cannot endure. This last is perhaps the most frequent outcome—certainly in bands, as we have discussed. The unanimity of spirit fails, and the principals fall into dispute. In the Oneida Community, communal marriage ran so afoul of the common attitudes of the community’s neighbors, that Noyes, the charismatic center of Oneida, was forced to flee into Canada, where he suggested that maybe monogamy was a better idea, whereupon people began to drift off. We cannot know the interior of Oneida, because their statements and interviews are few, and somewhat gnomic, and the pseudonyms prevent a personal attachment to the individuals, and perhaps the principals of the sound, the abstraction of the sound, prevent a sense of confessionality or easy intimacy. And maybe this even applies to the band members themselves. Maybe they don’t know the meaning of Oneida except that they know the applied force of Oneida. But the facts remain: in most Utopian communities, there comes a time when you can still feel the Utopia, but you experiences it as a rash of differences.

In this interpretive view, this faintness of the original binding agent is coincident with: the live performance at Columbia University of a rendering of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music for chamber orchestra (again, see SWS #12). This was a spectacular show, and they handed out earplugs at the door, and you would have had to be a moron not to wear the earplugs (I wore them when I saw Oneida play, too), because the racket coming out of that orchestra made those louds shows I have seen, like Hüsker Dü, or Glenn Branca, seem tame by comparison. There was really no sense of how the thing was proceeding, there was no outside of the squall in order to assess its progress, there was only inside it, the feedback, almost like it was a military conflict, or an earthquake or volcanic eruption, but there was a real sense of mood, and the mood was of the transcendental possibilities of ordeal, and Lou and Laurie Anderson were there, looking both animated and slightly cadaverous at the same time, and I can’t think of a music performance that I found as Utopian as this one, except maybe La Monte Young’s Second Dream, that brass piece, at Merkin Concert Hall; this was like that, that seminal, that original, that outrageous, that new, and Kid Millions was in the audience that night, too, perhaps seventy-five members of extremist rock bands were in the audience that night, all determined, at the end of the ordeal, to found new Utopian communities. And in the case of Kid Millions the new vehicle was called Man Forever, which, unlike Absolute II, was not about an absence of drums, but more like an absence of any melody instruments. Man Forever, initially had only drums.

There was a subsequent performance of this ensemble of drummers, Man Forever, and I believe it was at the Issue Project Room on 6/25/2010, and I think there were maybe seven or eight drummers, maybe more, and I cannot tell you how they cued one another, anymore than I can tell you how the chamber orchestra heard its entrances and exits in the Metal Machine Music ordeal. I know only that the Man Forever performance was incredibly physical, and that it was summer, and every drummer got up from behind the kit completely drenched. The thing you don’t know about continuous drum rolls is that they do sort of make a melodic sound, and perhaps Kid Millions tuned all the snares. For me, Man Forever was more about the brutal power of simplicity. It was about saying that if rock and roll is about the drumming here is rock and roll taken to its absolute limit, so that is no longer the thing of its origin. The supplement of rock and roll. Kid Millions took the feedback and bow-on-strings screech of Metal Machine Music, and instead constructed a rhythmical language, and the impact was immense. Thus a new rhizome in the expanding, and attenuated, Oneida empire was born, a reconstitution of the entity called Oneida. A Man Forever album followed (and another this year, 2012, on orange vinyl), which has some elements contained within it which are suspiciously close to the possibility of melody, but which is still attuned to the possibility of rhythm and drone, and the Theater of Eternal Music, and the disturbances of consciousness that follow upon the drone.

At the same time, perhaps there was some crumbling in the presuppositions of the Utopian concept. First, the arts-related building in which the Ocropolis was housed, along with many other collectivist, utopian, arts-related groups were doing all things Williamsburg, was emptied out (and demolished to make way for the euphemistically named “redevelopment,” and here’s a shot of the process happening: http://www.brownstoner.com/blog/2012/12/finally-demo-for-monster-island-in-williamsburg/), and, all at once, there was no longer a recording studio that was primarily, if not exclusively, made available to the impulsive and spontaneous musculature of the Oneida entity, and, second, Jagjaguwar, the label that distributed Brah, the Oneida record label, made clear that it would not exactly lie awake with regret if the Brah release schedule came to an end. What kinds of records were released on Brah? All kinds of records that would be of interest to the kind of person who wanted, mainly, that Oneida should go farther, compromise less often, and burn the rock and roll idiom to the ground, as if it were a building about to be “redeveloped.” I liked some of these albums a lot. Some of them appealed mainly to the ears of Kid Millions, but those are very interesting ears, very engaged ears. Every now and then there was a Brah release that I found surpassingly excellent, like Shinji Masuko’s Woven Music, which had moments where it sounded, well, slightly prog, and a bit ecstatic, that is, not exactly NYC, not exactly created in order to burn an idiom to the ground, but rather to ennoble, and uplift, and so on, mixing, in fact, classical guitar, nylon strings, with electronics, and if it weren’t so ecstatic, and satisfying on that basis, it would have been intellectually suspect. But Jagjaguwar had made clear that these albums, which did not, in all likelihood, sell copies in the tens of millions, were not absolutely necessary to its plans for Jagjaguwar itself, and so the label came to an end (and the spirit of complete disclosure, I should say that my band, The Wingdale Community Singers, did in fact have a song on one of the next-to-last releases on Brah, Koozies, Woodies, and Beer, a benefit album, which also, this album, contains a breathtaking acoustic rendering of “Sheets of Easter,” by a band called Fireworks), and in this way all of the things that seem to suggest the possibility of utopia, the inevitability of Utopia are stripped from the Utopia, and we have to deal with what seems like disappointment, or the commitment to rally and reframe Utopia, and what seems like the end of Utopia, or the abrading of Utopia against the rocky surface of the second law of thermodynamics, becomes an aspect of Utopia, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses trying to come up with yet another statistical rendering for the apocalypse, the others having proven incorrect. All things decay, and music decays, and the music makers decay, and new Utopians spring up in their wake, and this is just how it goes, and you wake up one day, and you look back on what you have done, and everything you did in your youth somehow seems better than what you are doing now, but you are not one to get up on a chair and kick it out from under your feet, you are one to keep making things, regardless, and that is what has happened with Oneida, which could have gone on to make silverware, right? Selling the name Oneida to Sears, or somebody else, so that the Utopian part of the project becomes merely a capitalist trademark.

Is Oneida still Oneida? What does it mean to be Oneida? Is there really a band called Oneida? Are the principal players in Oneida still in Oneida? I could answer these questions. I could run these questions by Kid Millions, or Hanoi Jane, or Fat Bobby, and give you the answers. I could perhaps extoll the many virtues of a recent splinter-recording, by People of the North, itself a title from Each One Teach One, a recording in this case entitled Border Waves, made by Kid Millions and Fat Bobby, or, transparently, two-thirds of Oneida, a recording which in every way is an heir to the utterly uncompromising Absolute II, or which more exactly sounds like a combination of Absolute II and Man Forever. It has only three cuts on it, and each of them takes a good ten minutes of reiteration before it has said what it needs to say, which is simply that sound is music and music is sound, and the admixture of sonic effect with drum is enough for things to sound like some vestigial musical attempt, like a mere statement on wave/particle duality that happens to have musical elements, and this is where we are, and where we should be going, and this is what Brooklyn is like, and this is what the world is like now, it is faintly sinister, and it is repetitive, and it is all deprivation and environment and simulation and Venn diagram and arrhythmia and desperation and atypical calm, and this is Utopia, in a way, Utopia is what remains after the Utopia has spent itself. It’s hard to imagine that this band could have been started at a boarding school, or some combination of a boarding school and some of the finest colleges in the northeast, where people should have been reading The Grapes of Wrath, or writing papers on the line of succession in the United States in the event that both president and vice-president were assassinated, or were trying to come up with a new drought resistant wheat to plant in Mali, or were writing about whether Jesus intended to found a religion, etc., not making music that is as challenging to the orthodoxies of contemporary music as anything anyone has done since the Velvet Underground, all while being, at the same time, kind, reasonable, professional people with day jobs. Oneida is a Utopia now, in its later, more mature guise, its somewhat splintered guise, more so than ever before, more committed, more resilient, more punishing, and I can think of few recent bands, few recent Utopian communities, whose work I value as much.

Appendix One:

During the six months that it has taken me to write this piece, the band called Oneida has somehow seen fit to release a new album, A List of the Burning Mountains (Jagjaguwar), an album that in some ways does not exactly vary the formula of the last ten years, not as much as Man Forever has done, but which does indicate that the band’s new studio, and the work produced there, amounts to continuity with respect to the old Oneida theological world view, indicating its reluctance to fall away from the action of Utopian thinking. I will say that while it is often hard when listening, with Oneida, to figure out what is a keyboard and what is a guitar, because the noise being generated in each case is similar, it does seem as though Hanoi Jane, guitar player, is taking a spot in the front of the mix that he has not taken in a while. It is true that Shahin Motia could also be that guitar, or they could both be that guitar, because now the Oneida community has seen fit to grow a bit, but whichever way you spin it, there is guitar on this recording that has not been quite so present for a while. Moreover, there is a kind of Stockhausen aspect in the resistance, on A List of the Burning Mountains, to an improvisatory center. The compositions shift dramatically. The album, which consists just of two sides (in this way like the recent Man Forever recordings), two songs, develops, but in each case it develops somewhat erratically, with impulsive twists and turns that remind me of the electric Miles Davis of the mid-seventies, where the cues were hard to predict and the changes in tempo and mood eruptive and jagged. Davis, according to legend, owed some of the conceptual thinking to Stockhausen, but in the case of Oneida, it could just as easily come from Can (some of whom, after all, studied with Stockhausen). The jacket of the album looks like a French paperback, or like something from Semiotext(e), and gives away very little of what went into the recording, as is so often the case with Oneida. Having assumed, during the six months that I was working on this piece, that Oneida, as a collective, was sort of now replaced by Man Forever and various splinter projects, I am shocked not only by the appearance of A List of the Burning Mountains, but am shocked that the sixteen years of Oneida have only hardened the resolve of this collective entity. I imagine, by the way, that A List of the Burning Mountains refers in part to the wildfires of Western states, and the tendency of these to burn out of control without intervention when the fires in question are far from population centers. This is an apocalyptic image, though it is also a thoroughly routine one, at least if you come from AZ or CA or NM. The list of burning mountains would, in this way, be a long list, but also one that is mildly terrifying. I can remember my own first encounter with a burning mountain in AZ, and how strange it seemed to me that the mountain was just burning, and no one was attending to it, you can imagine a burning bush up there, you really can.

Appendix Two:

Here’s some more writing by John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of the Oneida Community:

WHO first preached the gospel? I am inclined to answer, Mary Magdalene. She was the first to find that Christ had risen from the dead; the first to whom he spoke after that event. He directed her to go and tell the disciples that she had seen him, and to say to them from him, ‘I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God.’ That message was the Gospel—glad tidings of the event by which salvation came—and it was first announced by a woman. In the organization of the church Christ appointed twelve apostles,who were strong men and important officers. This was the conspicuous part of the organization. What was the dynamic? Was it a feminine apostleship? We may safely assume that the most important facts in this matter are not on the surface, but must be ascertained by esoteric examination. The fact that Mary preached the gospel before the apostles—in fact preached it to them—and stood between Christ and them in the most important message that ever went forth from heaven, warns us to inquire carefully as to the place that woman occupied in that organization. We have some hints showing an essential connection between the women who were attached to Christ, and his mighty works. For instance in the case of his first miracle—the turning of water into wine—the agency of a woman was notably present. The affair is recorded with minuteness, as the beginning of the glory that was manifested through Christ in his miraculous career; and we are told particularly that the mother of Jesus was with him when that work was done, and that she summoned him to it. She found that the wedding party at which they were guests was lacking wine, and she spoke of the want to Jesus. Why did she interfere in this way? What reason had she to expect that he would help them? Did a mysterious understanding exist between him and her about the matter? Evidently some element of the work in hand, whatever it was to be, had a commencement in her as well as in him. Her inspiration it would seem ran before his. He answered her suggestion by saying, ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come.’ But it appears that it had nearly come, and that she was not much ahead of the clock. She did not answer him, but assuming again the existence of a secret compact between them, said to the servants, ‘Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it;’ and, as if in obedience to her, he went right on and performed the miracle.’

After he was expelled from Yale, John Humphrey Noyes declared himself perfect and “free from sin.” He was arrested for adultery in 1847, and he was arrested for statutory rape in 1879, after which he fled the country to Canada. His son later helmed the Oneida Limited Company as it moved aggressively into a manufacture and sale of flatware.

***

[1] A surpassingly obvious example of this band-as-Utopian-enterprise is Todd Rundgren’s side project called Utopia, commenced in the early seventies and lasting, for a time, as a large-scale idealistic community full of ethereal notions (“City in my head/Utopia/Heaven in my body/Utopia/It’s time for me/For me to go/City in my head”) modeled, to some extent, on Mahavishnu Orchestra, another band that seemed as though it were exceedingly idealistic, spiritually adept, but which only lasted, in its first iteration (Jan Hammer on keyboards, John McLaughlin on guitar), for a few years, before infighting drove them all apart.

Related Posts:

• Swinging Modern Sounds #44: And Another Day
• Swinging Modern Sounds #42: Hey Man, I Thought That You Were Dead
• Swinging Modern Sounds #40: A Miscellany of Musical Thoughts that Will Not Otherwise Appear
• Swinging Modern Sounds #39: Interview Within an Interview
• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #38: Dinner at Martha’s House

***

Los Lobos is the best live band in the United States of America.

If they were not Chicano, I think, everyone (meaning the white reviewing establishment) would agree with this assessment. And maybe, in the next five or ten years, when they become undeniable elder statesmen (as opposed to just being middle-aged guys) this will be obvious, as it should be.

Having seen them play not long ago at Brooklyn Bowl, courtesy of Jolie Holland (of whom more below), who was sitting in on a couple songs, I was completely transfixed by their greatness. Not only is David Hidalgo surpassingly gifted at everything musical, but the band as a whole is remarkably versatile wherever you look. The bench, as they say, is hugely deep. Which is to say: there were also amazing performances turned in by Cesar Rosas, Louis Perez, and Steve Berlin, each of whom got a moment (or many moments) in the spotlight, and the rhythm section consisting of Conrad Lozano and a charming and hilarious and amazing young drummer whose name I did not get (is he the Cougar Estrada named on the web site?) was brilliant and locked in throughout.

The band is tight, so tight that the word is sort of meaningless, and they can play in any idiom on earth. And the solos, if you like that sort of thing, and I do, were just unfathomable. They played a few covers, and one of these, “One Way Out,” the old blues song made popular by the Allman Brothers, came in the middle of a jam where they got lost for a while. Cesar broke out the riff, and David started singing as though it had been planned all along, and the audience knew all the words.

The show was loose-limbed, funny, beautiful, proud, with just enough anti-professionalism to remind you that they got their start at the edge of the punk scene, and, for those who really care about the intricacies of band life, watching Rosas and Hidalgo work together, two astonishingly inventive players who have given decades to playing on the same stage, amounts to a dynamic live music experience unlike few I have seen in a long while.

The only other band even worth talking about in the same way, in the United States of America, is The Roots. And that band, while astounding, does not have a soloist like this band does. Los Lobos has several great soloists. This show reminded me what I want music to be about, what I want rock and roll to be about. At one time, this approach, this bar-band-touched-with-greatness approach was not unknown. Now is it as rare as, well, wolves in the wild.

***

Can’t Believe The Books Broke Up Already.

I really loved the cut-and-paste project known as The Books. They thought about music in a way that I imagined I very intuitively understood, which is that they mixed laptop grooves with acoustic instruments and very excellent and strange samples. At their best on The Lemon of Pink, their second album, the samples kind of were the verses of their pop songs, though there was no ignoring the essential qualities of the cello in how the songs became as complex sounding and virtuosic as they did. Paul de Jong was a great presence in the music that way. The closer the songs came to songs, the less interested I was, but for all that there was still something deeply surprising and new about The Books throughout their brief life, even on the somewhat sad and riven last album, The Way Out.

Most laptop music skews toward dance. The Books did not. They were surprisingly devoted to the samples as samples, but the acoustic part of the of thing often had a paradoxically Appalachian flavor (and that’s appropriate since, if I am not misinformed, Nick Zammuto was actually hiking the Appalachian trail at one point while they were working on an album).

Eventually, I guess, there was bad blood between Zammuto and de Jong, or at least aesthetic disagreement, and the collaboration was no more. It’s always depressing when this happens in bands you like, when there is Mould vs. Hart, or Simon vs. Garfunkel, or Reed vs. Cale, or Davies vs. Davies, or Gallagher vs. Gallagher, or Lennox vs. Stewart, or what have you. Time is the avenger, and all good collaborations untimely come to an end, through death or entropy.

Still, there is a very interesting box set out, now, of everything The Books released, entitled A Dot in Time, and it’s a limited edition type of thing. Totally worth pursuing it seems to me, and especially because the primary format in this case seems to be the LP, with lots of extras, a DVD, and a USB drive, so you can have all the tracks that way too. It’s sad to lose a band that seems at the height of its powers (only four studio albums into its career), but the box set is a fine record of what they did, and, I think, they lasted as long as The Clash.

***

You Cannot Deny that Recent Single by the Beach Boys.

Look, I understand that there are ways that the reunion version of the Beach Boys bears no resemblance to the Beach Boys, I know that significant members of the Beach Boys are no longer living, in particular Carl Wilson, whose singing is sorely missed, and I know that Brian Wilson is in his seventies, and I know that it is hard to admit to yourself that rock and roll is now best practiced by people in their seventies, that whatever this idiom is, it is now often performed by people who qualify for Medicare and Social Security, and I know, further, that there is a guitar break in this song, “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” that is borrowed from Toto, undeniably so, and I know that almost anything that involves Mike Love, who I believe once referred to “Good Vibrations” as “avant-garde shit,” involves surface affability in a baffling and irritating way, I know all of this. And I know that this is more the band that recorded “Kokomo” than it is the band that recorded “California Girls.” Which means that “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” the single, cannot possibly be good.

I further believe that digital recording is the enemy of the Beach Boys, because it makes vocals that were beautiful in a natural way sound as processed and auto-tuned as anything you might here on the “radio” these days. And there are too many session musicians playing on the song. And the lyric rhymes “when I” with “antennae.” All true.

Why then is it so good? Or if not good exactly why does it get under your skin somehow? I can’t think of many singles that I have loved in the last decade. I am not the sort of person who listens to a single. I listen to a body of work. I listen to a career. The kind of “radio” I like is the kind that plays a lot of deep catalogue, or which ignores everything happening in contemporary music. I like the radio that consists of all possible musics. But I can’t seem to let go of this song right now, and while “That’s Why God Made the Radio” is frankly nostalgic in a way I am suspicious of—as is the entire album of the same name—there is something that is very moving about the fact of this music, about its anti-rock qualities, its anti-contemporary qualities. I think it has to do with the fact that concerns about adulthood are addressed therein—getting older, recollection, grief—in a way that is just not possible in a musical market that concentrates entirely on instantaneity.

But that’s not all. One thing seems to remain of Brian Wilson, that genius, and that is a relationship to the complex possibilities of harmony. And at this point his idea of harmony, whose roots are in harmonies from the 1950s, in chromaticism, is so unusual as to be completely singular, and totally American. Even on a song like “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” which apparently dates back more than a decade, and which is nothing like the beautiful and reflective songs that end the album (a sort of a suite—“From There to Back Again,” “Pacific Coast Highway,” and “Summer’s Gone”), there is on offer a half-century or more of ideas about harmony. This is something that almost no one else in American music is capable of. Only Brian Wilson.

“That’s Why God Made the Radio,” the song, is mostly a frothy opportunity for a big out-chorus, in which just about everyone still alive in the Beach Boys family sings. All those voices. Why wouldn’t this be beautiful? There is the joy of these artists singing again. The fact of this joy. But more than that there is the joy of hearing all of American music for nearly sixty years distilled, summarized, and even, yes, advanced a bit.

“That’s Why God Invented Spotify” would be a more likely single these days, but what we actually have here, a middle-aged hymn to a dead medium, is far more interesting.

***

I know that Scott McCaughey is a sophisticated musician, with great talent, and an arresting array of projects and interests, all of them of surpassing musical interest, e.g., The Baseball Project, and The Minus 5, R. E. M., etc., but apparently I like the stuff that he whips off with one arm behind his back, the most elemental part of his output, viz., the Young Fresh Fellows, who now have another album out, called Tiempo De Lujo (Yep Roc), which they recorded in some alarmingly short amount of time that would be measured in days not weeks.

I hold my breath with excitement about new YFF albums, which means that I am frequently blue with oxygen deprivation because the albums do not arrive very often anymore. I think there have been three in the last decade, and this new one therefore arrives almost hurriedly, because there was a really good one just a couple of years ago (I Think This Is, 2009).

Tiempo De Lujo does not quite have the varnish of compositional premeditation that I Think This Is had, but who gives a shit? What’s good about a YFF album is the awesome camaraderie of the thing (McCaughey and Jim Sangster and Tad Hutchison have been playing together for about thirty years, and Kurt Bloch, the newcomer, is now at the 25-year-mark), and the thrill of reverently pilfered decades of rock and roll, and the excellence of the rhythm session (Sangster is a remarkably melodic bass player, and drummer Hutchison is a force for chaos, but in the best possible way), and Kurt Bloch’s great solos, and McCaughey’s made-them-up-just-now lyrics; look, there are a lot of bands who put a lot of hard work into what they do, and they have shit to show for it, and this band just turns on its incendiary enthusiasms when they feel like hanging out, and the results are incredibly winning and far more reverent than they appear to be at first blush. This is the kind of thing that makes rock and roll mean something again. Perhaps this album was not premeditated, but it has a lot of living in it, and it’s funny as hell, totally punk, and just as in-your-face as The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest, the first YFF album from 1984, and it mentions Dr. Zizmor.

The Young Fresh Fellows are just as good as when they were legitimately young and fresh, in fact, they are more great, because they don’t need to make a career of this. They only need the joy, and there’s plenty of that on Tiempo De Lujo.

***

I’ve already said everything I can possibly say about Jolie Holland, but that would mean that I wouldn’t get a chance to write about her cover of “Rex’s Blues,” by Townes Van Zandt, which is on her most recent album, Pint of Blood (Anti-).

You can listen to the album version here, and that version is accompanied by piano and violin, i.e., Holland playing everything, and with a sort of sprung rhythm wherein the accompaniment really is accompaniment—the voice is the leading edge of the thing, and the piano just fills in around it. As a player of the fiddle, Holland is absolutely sublime, absolutely sublime. There is no fiddle player in contemporary music who touches her. Only Carla Kihlstedt reaches these heights, and she comes from the conservatory world. Holland originates from her own special hideout, and so there is no one quite like her. But by describing the waves of trembling fiddle I fail—as I am bound to do—to describe the emotional punishment of this song, and this is what I must attempt. The lyric starts likes this:

Ride the blue wind high and free
She’ll lead you down through misery
Leave you low, come time to go
Alone and low as low can be

If I had a nickel I’d find a game
If I won a dollar I’d make it rain
If it rained an ocean I’d drink it dry
And lay me down dissatisfied

The lyric doesn’t get any less dark thereafter—it is never a good old time. Everybody knows what happened to Townes Van Zandt, and his version of the song (probably the best version, or the least unfussy, is on Live at the Old Quarter), his rendition of the devastation and self-slaughter, takes a stridently impassive approach to the subject matter. He’s just telling you how it is. Holland means something entirely other. For one thing, Holland makes the melody count. It’s a beautiful melody, but Van Zandt plays it as a country song, while Holland is a lot closer to gospel. Gospel, to these ears, is more appropriate, musically, because you can kind of live in the melody a little bit, but gospel is more appropriate thematically because Holland, by slowing the whole thing down and contributing some wordless runs between the verses, accepts the self-slaughter and cares about it, whereas Van Zandt just indicates the likelihood that such things happen, of which he was exhibit A. Van Zandt sings “Rex’s Blues” like Hank Williams, which means that he sings it like someone who is going to die. Van Zandt sings it in both the third and first person (he’s singing about Rex, but he’s singing as Rex). But Holland sings it in the third, the first, and the third (she’s singing about Rex, she’s singing as Rex, she’s singing about Van Zandt), which means she has more layers, and while Van Zandt’s recording is sympathetic with Rex, it is not compassionate, because compassion is not a country music virtue (compassion is unmasculine), but Holland solves the problem by being a woman, and by using the gospel idiom to moor her compassion. Is there a first-person layer to Holland’s transcription? Is she singing about herself too? You could make the argument, which would mean it would have yet another layer, as in this verse:

Legs to walk and thoughts to fly
Eyes to laugh and lips to cry
A restless tongue to classify
All born to grow and grown to die

Which is perhaps partly about lost love, and so perhaps there is a love-love dimension to Holland’s recording. Which gives it at least four possible readings. Probably my favorite line in the whole is this “restless tongue to classify.” Did Van Zandt mean what he seems to mean? It’s an indictment of language, and the tendency of language (after Aristotle) to prove and ratify taxonomy above all, and in that business of differences, to endanger the speaker, to make the speaker a subject of language, and to feel in that paradox (the speaker is the subject rather than the speaker) an annihilation—a hard line to sing, in a deeply grim verse, but Holland seems to sing it with its full force. Maybe a line about epistemology in a verse about lost love all makes some kind of peculiar sense. At least it does in Holland’s recording.

All of this is to say: I think Jolie Holland’s rendition of the song is better than Van Zandt’s. Holland embodies and purges the horror of this lyric, by making the thing more compassionate, and Van Zandt wasn’t a legend as a singer anyway (and we are used to the notion, in the era of Bob Dylan, that good singing is an impediment). He was a writer first. And herein is a remarkable development. There is no other singer in the “indie rock” world who is an effective interpreter of songs. There are others who occasionally cover a song (Bonny “Prince” Billy covers songs exceedingly well sometimes), but there is no one who has that incredibly effective ability to interpret, the way, viz., Karen Dalton did, the way Nina Simone did. Holland has that kind of interpretive talent. She dashes off interpretations (I have been lucky enough to hear some of them) sometimes without thinking twice, though her instrument is so singular, so unusual that wherever she concentrates it, there is magic. You can see how she even reinterprets her own interpretations, by watching her revisit “Rex’s Blues” here, for guitar accompaniment:

Pint of Blood is otherwise originals, and Jolie Holland is a remarkable writer, too, but it takes time for originals to register, to reach their full flower. (Which is why I’m writing about a record that came out 15 months ago.) Interpretations have their impact more quickly, if the tune is familiar. “Rex’s Blues,” while not well known outside of Townes Van Zandt circles, has that familiar feeling, a melody we should have known already. And Jolie Holland makes it even more important, more indelible than it was before.

And the last thing I’ll say about this is: I was listening to “Rex’s Blues” while writing notes about the Purgatorio of Dante recently. And I loved how the second verse of the song, with its water imagery (“If it rained an ocean I’d drink it dry”) cohered with this marvelous passage in the Purgatorio, from Canto V (Mandelbaum translation):

You are aware how, in the air, moist vapor
will gather and again revert to rain
as soon as it has climbed where cold enfolds.
His evil will, which only seeks out evil,
conjoined with intellect; and with the power
his nature grants, he stirred up wind and vapor.
And then, when days was done, he filled the valley
from Patomagno far as the great ridge
with mist; the sky above was saturated.
The dense air was converted into water;
rain fell, and then the gullies had to carry
whatever water earth could not receive;
and when that rain was gathered into torrents,
it rushed so swiftly toward the royal river
that nothing could contain its turbulence.

Turns out Jolie Holland knows her Dante, too, and I’m not ruling out the possibility that she knows there is a connection between the fluvial imagery in Van Zandt’s underworld, as interpreted by Holland, and Dante’s purgatory.

***

Marcia Bassett is not a noise guitarist, because among other things the word “noise” when applied to music is incredibly stupid, where music is concerned it is a remarkably unuseful word.

Marcia Bassett, whom I only met a few weeks ago despite the fact that we are in the same Dante study group, is also known as Double Leopards, or at least formerly was, on occasion, and also records as Zaimph, and was, on this night that I heard her, playing with violinist Samara Lubelski, who has also played with Thurston Moore, among many others.

Things came out of Bassett’s guitar that are not supposed to come out of any guitar, and the relationship between the guitar and the violin (which also had a lot of pedals and mischief going on) was sublime. They played for half an hour for so, one song, improvised entirely (as far as I can tell), with no breaks, no commentary, and so on. This was, it’s worth saying, incredibly feminine music somehow, though abstract. It was graceful, calm, without being sentimental, abstract without being stupidly abstract, and there was no boyish self-centeredness. It was just remarkably beautiful music that sometimes sounded like a train, sometimes like an earthquake, sometimes like a siren passing in the street, and sometimes like a mouse climbing over the surface of an autoharp. Or sometimes it sounded like a hamster on a wheel. Or sometimes it sounded like an Ed Wood sound effect. There were collisions of melody, where you least expected it, and these were delicate and inviting, not Wagnerian.

So where would the noise part of the thing occur, if it is as I’m saying? Somehow, we have all come a long way from the days when noise was noise, which means: we tolerate a lot of dissonance, and we tolerate a lot of things that would have bugged us in the old days, explicitly non-musical sounds, and so on. These things sound beautiful, which is why Marcia Bassett and Samara Lubelski’s performance was beautiful, even though it was not sentimental, and was never obvious.

After Marcia, at Union Pool on the night in question, was Alvarius B., formerly known as Alan Bishop, formerly of the Sun City Girls (and co-founder of the awesome Sublime Frequencies label), one of the really great and interesting bands of the nineties (and they did, in fact, record an album called Dante’s Disneyland Inferno, which I am trying to scare up at the moment), and his performance was so stylized, provocative on purpose, deliberately nasty, and also rather sublime, all at once. And this morning I thought of him as one of the somewhat redeemed tyrants, sitting in the valley, surround by flowers that are more beautiful than precious metals, namely Marcia’s performance. He is still untrustworthy, slightly terrifying, highly moving, while Marcia, in the difficult opening act was full of compassion for him before he had even done what what he was going to do.

***

Owen Ashworth must have been reading Raymond Carver.

I knew about Casiotone for the Painfully Alone over the years, Ashworth’s first band, knew people who loved them without reserve, and I always understood the mix of British New Wave and Phil Spector and Suicide (the band) and incredibly bleak lyrics, but somehow I personally didn’t feel as painfully alone as the music required. (Which is not to say that I didn’t feel painfully alone on occasion.) I suppose I wasn’t ready. What would help me turn the corner? Seeing Owen play live, which I recently did at the Music Hall of Williamsburg.

This show was sort of a testament to the power of live music for me, for the following reasons: 1) Ashworth played a Fender Rhodes electric piano live throughout the show, and it sort of trumped the synthetic qualities of the Casiotone recorded work. Though you may think Ashworth doesn’t do anything but write the lyrics, and the machines do the rest, there is sophisticated melodic thinking going into those parts, and by paring away almost everything except the Fender Rhodes for the show, he reveals the music inside of the conceptual apparatus. And 2) by doing so he makes the drum machine seem less in control. The drum machine patterns he likes, which are really simple and uninflected (and the drum machine he likes is seriously old-fashioned and primitive), are something to work against in the live setting, and I loved every minor imperfection of entrance and exit, or the moments where he’d stop the song and then have to turn off the drum machine at the same time, it was where all the robust humanism of the songs started to leak out at the edges, and 3) he was a little bit nervous (opening for the excellent Mark Kozelek), and the nervousness made his voice, which is a blunt force instrument, even a bit more plangent, because he wobbled a bit at first, and, 4), perhaps most importantly there’s something about singing these songs to people as opposed to singing them in the privacy of your own home that requires a certain commitment. Yes, Ashworth’s songs are about a failure to communicate or about failure to reap all the rewards of contemporary life, and when you sing about these things to people, and people respond with a fair amount of warmth (as was the case here in the mostly staid neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn), it gives the whole thing a little bit of veneer of, well, redemption.

Moreover, there are some facts, in this new Ashworth regime called Advance Base, that make the whole a little triumphant. What’s with the name change? Why no more Casiotone for the Painfully Alone? Because, perhaps, Ashworth is no longer painfully alone himself. Because, perhaps, Ashworth is now a father, among other things, and being in the enviable position of someone who knows someone who knows him, I got to chat with him briefly after the show, and we traded kid stories. And I got to see a couple of pictures of Rosalie, his daughter. A very moving moment, and you could hear, in the conversation, how some of Ashworth’s natural skepticism about this mess that is human relations has given way, a little bit, to some excitement and even significant joy about parenting. Advance Base, then, might refer to the advanced accomplishment of not writing songs about the failure to connect in your studio on headphones, quiet enough that no one else can hear.

There’s something celebratory about this new Owen Ashworth, who, it must be said, is an incredibly sweet guy on first impression. The simplicity of the music and the absolute refusal either to compromise, or to worry especially about vocal delivery, do make Ashworth sound like Leonard Cohen, a little bit, a contemporary analogue, wherein even untoward showoffiness in the area of lyrics is de trop, but if you bear down on the Ashworth lyrics, which are all 7-11s and television shows and shitty American car models and bad holiday dinners, the aesthetic to me is just as artful as Cohen, only more minimalist-realist, as if he spent all his formative years reading Carver or Frederick Barthelme. I admire these lyrics so much. I wish I were this good as lyricist.

And then there’s one last point worth making and that is for all his wobbly sentimental/anti-sentimental vulnerability and his refusal to appear unduly professional in his recordings, Ashworth is also poised and committed about what he does, happy to be there, totally present for his vision, or so it appears, and this is at some variance with the serotonin deprivation of work, but totally winning. He’s a big, bearded, lion of a guy, and he appears to love making music, which makes it easy to love him.

***

And I tried to understand the Taylor Swift phenomenon this morning, but I do not understand.

I get that it is considered inhumane or bad form to say that music that breaks all sales records has no redeeming merit whatsoever. I remember those icy and condescending ripostes by Kelefa Sanneh about how the rock audiences were irrelevant to where music was in the middle oughts, and I’m sure he would say something laudatory, as one of his colleagues at the New Yorker has done, about how pure and confident and American Taylor Swift is, but I just want to say, it is not that I want to like things that are obscure or unpopular, it’s that the things that are heavily machined by the digital processing of the day (and few things are more heavily machined than, e.g. “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together Again,” her new single) sound utterly dead to me, like some flattened squirrel on a country road. Or these songs actually do sound to me like what the undead would sing if they were capable of singing.

I know that Robert Christgau, and others, have bent over backward to try to find something redeeming to say about Taylor Swift, like that she has a real knack with a chorus, and she tells us true things about what teenage girls or young women really feel, as though she were the Lena Dunham of the pop world (which she is not), but I remember all of that faux-confessionality from Jagged Little Pill, and from Natalie Imbruglia, and one summer’s bold and true lyrics are next summer’s post-menopausal antiques. I defy you to sing the words “Isn’t It Ironic?” without being ironic. And what about: “I’m all out of faith/and this is how I feel.” By Natalie Imbruglia? Feeling good about that one now? So I find the allegedly refreshing and honest lyrics of Taylor Swift repellant and artificial, as if thought up by a middle-aged Swedish guy with a coke and Ritalin problem, and if I had to listen to them for long I would probably have to run screaming form the room.

I respect Taylor Swift’s ability to steal from every available popular form of the moment, viz., “country” and pop and hip hop and electronica, but there is nothing in this music that does anything new besides fusing together a mandolin with a programmed drum track, and so I say it is inert, like the flattened squirrel, manufactured, ungenuine, and when we are forced to listen to two or three more of these albums, we will, as people do with relentlessness generally, begin to form a hard impenetrable exoskeleton to the work of Taylor Swift, and we will begin to hate it deeply (those of us who didn’t hate it already), and we will say horrible things about it and about her. This will not matter, because her parents work in finance, and she has good manners, and she’s going to marry up, and she’s going to get into the movies (not just guest appearances in CSI), and she’s going to launch some clothing lines at Target (no, wait, I think she already did that), and a personal fragrance (I think she did that too), and parlay all her bad press into some self-serious complaints, making good on every opportunity to monetize her career at the expense of making actual art.

Look, I normally only write about things I like, things I care about, but I can’t stop myself here. Taylor Swift represents what makes me want to die about popular music. She makes me want to die. If it’s all going to be like this—merchandising opportunities, branding, cross-platforming–the marble slab of post-mortality, then I am not interested in popular music. I don’t give a fuck. Taylor Swift makes music about as interesting as Olestra-based products, or Swiffers in multiple colors, or tiered Jell-O dessert products, or milk from China that has lead in it, or home cosmetic surgery, or rectal bleaching. Her publicists are adept at creating an ersatz Taylor Swift who appears to resemble a young woman with hauntingly insistent nostrils. But that does not mean that she is not a Swedish Ritalin-addict’s idea of the popular song, created by committee for demographic penetration. More than a million people bought her album in the first week. And every one of them was duped.

***

Oh, and I never did finish the Universal Thump interview I was going to do.

I cherish both Greta Gertler and Adam Gold, the principal players in this band, the Universal Thump, and truly admire their first full-length album (more here), especially for its arrangements which are extremely lovely and ornate, but they are shy and busy, and are in Australia getting married, and I don’t like pestering people, so here’s all we got so far, which was entirely from Greta’s point of view. Read a few lines, and then go and buy some of their songs. You’ll be glad you did.

Q: Can you describe the early history of Universal Thump? How did you meet? Was love always a feature in the music? Did love precede the music? How were the two integrated?

A: In July 2008, I asked Adam Gold if he’d play drums with me at a show at Barbes. I had previously had a tuba-rock band called The Extroverts, which had imploded for various reasons. Before that I performed solo under my own name, with a lot of different musicians. Adam and I had been friends for a few years, having met through mutual friends who are musicians too. We had always wanted to collaborate, musically. Adam is an incredible and very supportive musician and I’d always been so impressed with his work, particularly in the band Moore & Sons. But it just hadn’t worked out for us to work together until that fateful Barbes gig.

I scheduled a rehearsal with the band a week or so before the gig. I knew I’d always liked Adam a great deal as a friend, unconditionally. But fairly quickly after that rehearsal I fell completely in love with him (not just his drumming). The two – love and music – were pretty closely integrated from that time on. Many songs I wrote on the album are inspired by that time in 2008 – by our getting closer and also going through periods of separation. And the process of beginning “The Universal Thump” was enabled by our love for each other. Prior to that time, I really wasn’t sure I wanted to make another album. I did have a collection of songs that I had written that hadn’t been recorded, and there seemed to be forming a body of work that I really wanted to record, but I was feeling pretty bleak about making another record. Adam suggested we try it, and was so supportive of doing it that we began working on it in his studio, Oh Real Yum.

We also went on a whale-watching trip to Canada around that time – an adventure that we had together very early in our relationship, which inspired the process of trying to find the sound and the shape of the album together. We began by gathering ‘field recordings’ of sounds we were hearing, and imagining them intertwined within a sparse landscape of instruments. But the album gradually grew into a more ambitious orchestral pop album with over 60 musicians. I don’t think either of us realized that the album would take four years to complete, and we’ve gone through ups and downs with working on it so closely together. It’s been important for us to take breaks from the recording process. But I feel that ultimately working together on it has brought us closer. I’m really very proud of it.

Q: Can we go back slightly and talk about why you weren’t sure you wanted to make another album at the time that Universal Thump began? Just the vicissitudes of the music business? Did it have to do with working in NYC as opposed to in your ancestral homeland of Australia?

A: At the time that The Universal Thump began I was still somewhat recovering from the break-up of my previous band, The Extroverts. As the name suggests, there were certain strong personalities and dynamics within that band, that both made it exceptionally fun and raucous, and also prone to implosion. The rhythm section comprised of tuba and marching drums, there were two electric guitarists and me on Wurlitzer and vocals. We rehearsed, performed and recorded together in NYC for two years. We made a great record – “Edible Restaurant” – which really captures the live, theatrical sound of the band. It was the first time I’d managed to gather a steady band together in NYC, which was quite difficult as everyone was so busy and had numerous other musical projects. But it was something I’d always wanted. In the end, there was one too many “tuba tantrums” and we had to part ways. After channelling so much energy, passion and drive into that project, I was somewhat wary of heading down another collaborative venture, especially with someone that I was beginning a relationship with.

Aside from all of that, yes, the vicissitudes of the music business were also getting me down, after putting my songs out there as a solo artist, with The Extroverts and generally pounding the pavements of NYC for several years. Without any label, management or other music industry backing, it all gets a bit overwhelming…  I guess my way of dealing with that disappointment was to express it as a fear of making another record. But honestly, I’m too addicted to making albums to ever stop. And, whether or not Adam and I were in a relationship, I had always wanted to collaborate with him musically. I have unconditional and unlimited respect for and trust in his musical talents, and I was thrilled honored that he wanted to work on an album with me . . .

Related Posts:

• Swinging Modern Sounds #44: And Another Day
• Swinging Modern Sounds #42: Hey Man, I Thought That You Were Dead
• Swinging Modern Sounds #41: Utopian Communities
• Swinging Modern Sounds #39: Interview Within an Interview
• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #38: Dinner at Martha’s House

Big Dipper was primarily an indie rock band, I suppose, one with a loyal following, and they recently began playing together again. And this interview occurs, more or less, on the occasion of their first studio release in twenty-two years, called Big Dipper Crashes on the Platinum Planet, a brilliant and blue album, let us say, one that features all that was great about the band in its early indie heyday, the aforementioned extremely literate and often moving lyrics, slightly off-kilter but extremely inventive guitar parts, a very tight-band sound, a mid- to uptempo enthusiasm, and an ambition that is not unlike boutique chocolate manufacture: they have no need to conquer the world, but just to dazzle in brief bursts of dazzlement. Big Dipper are satisfied with doing the brilliant blue in just the way that they do it.

Now: as to the structure of this interview itself: my friend Marc Woodworth, poet, editor, and occasional writer on music was once in a high-school band with Gary Waleik, co-founder of Big Dipper (co-founder, it should be said, with Steve Michener and Bill Goffrier and Jeff Oliphant), and has kept up with him over the years. More on this below. I decided to create an opportunity in which Marc could have the chance to speak to Gary on the record about the Big Dipper legacy, after which, because it is always extremely interesting to know the terms in which an interview is conducted, I would myself interview Marc about his interest in Big Dipper, and his friendship with Gary Waleik, and also about middle age, rock and roll, and what sustains us during the time in which the body begins to decay. This constitutes the interview within or behind the manifest content of the interview, which is primarily the excellent new Big Dipper album (I like “Hurricane Bill” a lot, as well as “Robert Pollard”), and maybe there should always be a teasing out of the context, which is brilliant and blue, as the years stretch out before us and we do what we can despite the high cost.

 ***

INTERVIEW PART ONE

Marc Woodworth: The single “Robert Pollard” from Big Dipper Crashes on the Platinum Planet—your first new album in nearly 22 years—is a paen to Guided By Voices’ master songwriter. Is the song a product of hero-worship?

Gary Waleik: I don’t have many—if any—heroes, so I feel a little awkward having written that song. Robert Pollard made the collage that’s on the cover of the record, too. And he and I worked on an album together as Mars Classroom [New Theory of Everything, 2011]. Maybe we’ve hitched our wagon to his star in an untoward way, but at least we’re plowing some of the same musical ground he is. I’m a bit self-conscious because the song is obviously inspired by my fandom, but hopefully it’s more than just a fan song. I wanted to explore the idea of talent and will, how they relate to each other and how they relate to individual artists. I felt that Pollard, Paul McCartney and I made for an interesting case study. I think there’s some interesting triangulation there. I sent Robert Pollard the song along with a few others before Big Dipper Crashes on the Platinum Planet was finished and his wife Sarah emailed me (Bob doesn’t use email) that when he got the CD he spent several hours in the car riding around the neighborhood with some friends listening to it. So “Robert Pollard” made the rounds on one of Robert Pollard’s musical “Freedom Cruises”—as he calls them—so there’s that, at least. And he told me that Big Dipper was the 20^th best rock band of all time. Of course, I had to ask him who was nineteenth and without a smile or the slightest hesitation he answered, “T. Rex.” I might actually put T. Rex below Big Dipper, but I certainly wouldn’t put big Dipper in the top 20, I can tell you that.

Woodworth: It’s worth mentioning that Mr. Pollard was listening to Big Dipper well before anyone outside of Dayton knew about Guided By Voices . . .

Waleik: When we were working on the Mars Classroom project together, I sent two or three songs that he didn’t end up using for the record. They were the weirdest ones. It was almost as if he couldn’t fathom that one of the songwriters for Big Dipper could write psychedelic or proggy songs. He clearly wanted to go with a pop sensibility that reflected his understanding of Big Dipper. He stuck to that aesthetic. It was the right way to go.

So, no, I don’t think of Robert Pollard as a hero or a deity, but I do think of him as the best rock songwriter that the world has ever known. That’s highly subjective, of course. You can point to songwriters who have had much greater material success, a lot more chart success, and who will probably be remembered longer than Robert Pollard, but no one in the rock pantheon—from Bob Dylan to Paul McCartney to John Lennon—can lay claim to a body of work like his.

Woodworth: If we can think about the new Big Dipper album as a coming to terms with middle-age, one of the features of that accounting clearly has to do with where you are as an artist, one who, at least with your original band, hadn’t recorded and released a full lp’s worth of songs for a very long time. You write about yourself without a shred of ego—and maybe even with a little touch of masochism—as a ‘minor’ songwriter. How do you feel about your place as a writer and musician?

Big Dipper, 2012

Waleik: We’re more comfortable with where we are as songwriters than we’ve ever been. I think that’s part of being an effective songwriter. You have to know what you’re good at. You have to know what your interests are. You have to know what sort of effort you need to put behind the writing and what sort of will is required to do it. It’s a constant struggle because all these factors waver—they ebb and they flow—and if you’re lucky enough to hit a time when all of them are on an upswing you take advantage of it and write all you can. I don’t have as much time to write now as I did when Big Dipper was a full time concern, but in some ways it’s easier now. I like the new songs a lot.

Woodworth: That makes me think middle-age rock can be more incisive than young man’s rock—in part because the coming to terms with the self that happens later in life can be more telling and vital and scary than even the most inspired inventions of youth.

Waleik: Face it, most rock songs written by twenty-somethings are purely about the ego and maybe some of our new songs are too but at least they’re not at all egotistical. We couldn’t even write that way when we were in our twenties. We were writing songs that were downright odd, weird, and eccentric, and perhaps some of the best of them were rather spiritual. Can you imagine Bill Goffrier ever writing a song even remotely like “I’m Too Sexy”? Now we can write outside of ourselves even more easily, maybe even crush our egos a little bit as I do in the song “Robert Pollard.”

Woodworth: Bill’s song “New Machine” with its desperate opening question, “What do you get for the man who ruins everything?” has an edge born of too much self knowledge and more attack than perhaps anything he sang in the band’s hay day…

Big Dipper, Hoboken, 1988

Waleik: Clearly, that song signals the acknowledgment of a breaking point in a relationship and in it Bill gives himself a few lumps as he moves on. So, yes, in some ways this is a very penitential record, but it’s also a record imbued with a real sense of adventure. Our drummer Jeff Oliphant’s song “Princess Warrior” is pretty remarkable. There are songs about surviving serious illness and maybe even particularly about surviving cancer, but can you think of a song written about a spouse’s surviving cancer that has that much genuine pathos wrapped in comedy? Jeff doesn’t in the least trivialize the ordeal his wife went through—and he went through along with her—and yet the song is fun, a celebration of beating the cancer. Somehow, it works. The first verse ends with the line, “Now she’s got double Bs—that chest is good to go.” Jeff’s wife was a little angry, not because he was writing about reconstructive surgery after a double mastectomy, but because he got it wrong: she actually has double Cs. I would imagine some women might feel self-conscious about their husbands writing songs on that subject, but to Tracy’s credit, she took it in the spirit that Jeff wrote it. There’s a lot of love in the song. Jeff’s always been great at working with the sound and feel of language in unique ways and you get the rich wordplay and the unexpected idioms in “Princess Warrior,” too, but now there’s a lot more depth to go with it.

Woodworth: I’ve always understood the band’s interest in what you called earlier the eccentric—the astral plane, the paranormal, the metaphysical, even the sub-oceanic—not so much as nerdy or quirky but as a reflection of a dissatisfaction—for the imagination at least—with the known, the real, the mundane.

Waleik: Maybe we have a harder time dealing with the mundane than other songwriters. Some writers are very good at working with what really happened to them on an ordinary day and making that quotidian experience into a wonderful song. We don’t have that gift. We had to go to other realms to find a songwriting style. I’ve heard some criticism about that too: “Why can’t you write about real issues? Why can’t you write more poetic songs about the human condition?” I think we do write poetic songs about the human condition but we have to move several light years away in order to find them.

When we were writing songs for Big Dipper in the 80s, Bill and I would watch PBS documentaries together about the latest theory on the origin of the universe or Fermat’s Last Theorem and we’d talk about them. We’d find themes as writers that might apply to people even if they didn’t care about those particular subjects. The song “Humason” [from the album 1987 album Heavens] became a love song when it could have simply been a song about the obscure astronomer Milton Humason. His major contribution to science had to do with red shifts and blue shifts and Bill found in that a metaphor for love—love moving away, love moving closer. Back when we put out Boo Boo, Heavens, and Craps there were a lot of reviewers who criticized the lyrics for being shallow and sophomoric—novelty songs full of gimmicks. I disagree. If you scratch the surface, that sometimes awkward, even goofy surface, there’s a lot underneath. Bill is one of the more underrated songwriters and singers in rock history. I put him up there with just about anyone.

Woodworth: Can you talk about how the release of Supercluster, the Big Dipper anthology that Merge released in 2008, the reunion shows you played when it came out, and now putting out a new record settled or didn’t settle the emotional fallout from Big Dipper’s demise in the early 90s?

Waleik: We felt miserable over the way things ended in 1990 when we put out Slam, our first and only record with Epic. Steve Michener, our original bass player, left the band. Everything was all wrong. This was not where the arc of our career was supposed to end up.

Before we signed with Epic, we knew the band wasn’t going to last very long if we just kept putting out records and working our butts off on the road without starting to sell records so we said, “What the heck—we’ll sign.” We thought maybe they would rescue us from the indie rock doldrums. We were doing better than many indie bands at the time, but we knew it couldn’t last indefinitely so we threw our hat into the big ring to see what would happen. We were working as hard as ever, but pretty soon it was clear it hadn’t been the right move. But there we were.

I remember feeling shaky while we were making the big-budget video for “Love Barge,” the single from Slam. Our budget was $40,000 and we engaged the services of a very well-known video director. We had wardrobe assistants and makeup artists, catering and a big film crew with tracks for the cameras to move on. We were filming in this appalling shooting gallery of a warehouse on the banks of the East River where we had to watch out for the needles. I even donned a leather jacket, of all things, that belonged to a petite wardrobe girl—if you look carefully, you can see that the sleeves are half way up my forearms. I think the video was played once or maybe twice on MTV. Contrast that with our first video for “Faith Healer” in 1987 that we made for a couple of hundred bucks and with some home-made ingenuity. It had a certain nerdy wonderfulness—we were dancing unashamedly and awkwardly in cardigans and old baggy striped shirts, telling stories around a cardboard cut-out campfire, wearing fractured bone-shaped headpieces that we could fit together in pairs. And it played a lot on MTV—there was Downtown Julie Brown introducing us in her accent and incorrectly as THE Big Dipper.

After Slam failed and Steve left, Bill and I stuck it out for a couple more years and wrote some good songs and had some fun doing it. Those songs—eventually released on Supercluster seventeen years later—were written as a way to get back to what Big Dipper was good at doing: not making songs for a record company that wanted a top 40 hit, but creating idiosyncratic songs that were true to the way we had always written them before. But the more we wrote that way, the more acutely aware we became of the fact that it didn’t really matter. Even though it was clear that the record industry was going to make a colossal push to bring indie bands to the masses—that the whole industry was retooling for that purpose—we were left in the dust because of our horrible episode with Epic. It made no difference how much more committed we were to writing songs, how good the songs were, or how much local airplay we were getting because our name was mud. We couldn’t even get the smaller indie labels interested—we had already burned our bridges with Homestead and no one else wanted to touch us. We eventually understood it was time to close up shop. If writing good songs were the only thing required for success, then we’d be a lot more successful by now.

The 2008 anthology and the mini-tour we did when it came out put a positive punctuation mark on everything that had happened with and to Big Dipper. When we played the hometown Boston-area show at the Middle East in Cambridge in 2008 I didn’t realize it was going to be an 18+ show so I was surprised when we took the stage and there was a significant number of kids wearing yellow bracelets indicating they were younger than 21 but older than 18. They were dancing around and very obviously mouthing the words. It was neat that bunch of college students knew our music after all that time.

We intended to put it to bed after that—and we could have done so and felt like we’d arrived at some version of a happier ending. Then Robert Pollard asked if we’d open for his band Boston Spaceships which all of us wanted to do. After that, we decided to record a couple of songs in my modest basement studio and the tunes started sounding really good. Before we knew it, we nearly had an album’s worth. Since we were that close, we wrote a couple more songs—and, boom, we had a record. I harbor no delusions about our inability to sell a lot of records. It doesn’t much matter—we’re playing with house money. If we find that a couple of critics like us and that’s all that happens, that’s fine—I suppose that’s all we ever really had anyway. 

***

INTERVIEW PART TWO

Rick Moody: So, Marc, what were the first circumstances in which you, the interviewer above, first heard Big Dipper?

Marc Woodworth: Gary sent me a copy of their first EP, Boo Boo, when I was living in the Appalachian foothills of southeast Ohio and wasn’t following indie music. I assumed it was an LP and played it at 33 1/3. I thought my friend and former band-mate had delved into some misbegotten form of demonic sludge metal before I figured out my mistake. It sounded much better at 45 RPM.

Moody: How was Gary your “former band-mate?” How did you first meet him? And what do you mean you weren’t “following indie music?”

Marc Woodworth (left) and Gary Waleik in their high school band, 1978

Woodworth: I met Gary during our first year in high school in Concord, Massachusetts, when we formed a rock band. We first played together in the living room of an uncharacteristically modern house with lots of glass, the family house of another kid who ended up not being in the band. Like Gary, he was a big Stones fan, but, unlike Gary, he sported a dead-ringer British Invasion haircut. I once proposed the song title “Time Waits For No One” for an original number and remember Gary asking “What?” with a wince, incredulous that I didn’t know that title was already taken. I knew the four Aerosmith albums backwards and forwards in ninth grade, though.

Gary had an uncle who possessed an awe-inspiring mid-60s Strat (I seem to remember a fringed leather strap but I might be embellishing) [Editor’s note: Gary confirmed, post-interview, the existence of the fringed strap, still intact and attached to the guitar, which he adds is a 1964, pre-CBS model] that with its natural brown finish (no hard glossy patina) was a talisman of that halcyon era we’d all missed and fetishized. Gary’s Uncle John had hard-won good taste in music which he shared, along with the actual LPs, with Gary whom I imagine was a little mortified at our desire to cover, say, Styx’s “Suite: Madame Blue” or other such product of that curious decade’s purveyors of arena rock. Along with a lot of classic rock, the music of the 70s behemoths was our band’s staple fare until we started to ride the New Wave to cover songs by Talking Heads, The Cars, and Devo.

It would be interesting to compose character profiles of the guys who became college indie rock successes before their ascendance—I expect many of them would have been, like Gary, very intelligent, steeped in good music at a young age, and wary of rock clichés, both personality-wise and musically. Our high school band ended up writing and recording a few originals and Gary posted one a while back at Rock Town Hall for a feature called My First Band. Track 6, “Practical Nurse,” on the cassette icon at the link below is our entry:

http://www.rocktownhall.com/blogs/my-first-band-rock-town-hall-s-talent-less-search

Marc Woodworth (striped shirt) next to Gary Waleik (mustache) in high school

When I first heard Boo Boo, those high school rock band days seemed further away than they do now. I was in graduate school and wanted to make up for lost time by immersing myself in “serious” music—I was very self-consciously focused on remaking myself during those years—so I’d largely stopped listening to popular music and missed the mid-80s emergence of indie rock. Then “Faith Healer,” this brilliant slice of noisy, agitated pop, jittered through the speakers. I didn’t really know what to make of it.

Moody: Really? You were able to put rock and roll aside completely? I remember that time (New Day Rising, Let It Be, The Good Earth, etc.) as one of the most fertile of rock and roll periods? Did you catch up with that music later?

Woodworth: I’ve probably flattened the narrative to make it all or nothing, but I didn’t listen to much new music for a couple of years. I remember writing a seminar essay on Handel’s L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, ed il Moderato and it felt like that’s all I listened to for 6 months. I still played records I already liked on occasion and heard via college radio in the car when I spun the dial bands like R.E.M. but I missed a lot of really good music in the mid-80s that I only heard much later.

Interesting that you mention the Hüsker Dü record because I came around to them only after seeing Bob Mould share a bill on the Workbook tour with Big Dipper. In fact, once I returned to the Boston area in late ’86 and started going to Dipper shows, I tuned back in. I saw a small and moody Galaxie 500 show early on, liked a band called Christmas that sometimes played with Big Dipper, and learned about bands such as Camper Van Beethoven from Gary. Most of the music that I love has come through friends who have deeper musical resources than I do. I rely heavily on others—are you like that too or do you like to find your own way to new music?

Moody: As the interviewer in this portion of the interview, I believe I am under no obligation to answer questions of any kind! Okay, so did anyone else from your band with Gary achieve greatness? And what were your other bands as a young person?

The Chlordanes with cousins and later Big Dipper bandmates Jeff Oliphant (left) and Gary Waleik (right) with their uncle John

Woodworth: Gary’s success went unrivaled by anyone else in the band, though one very talented guitarist, Jim Wooster, had a couple of gigging and recording post-college outfits, including an excellent band called Courage Brothers, in the Boston area and still plays in a group with the president of Berklee. The high school group with Gary was a four-year concern and the only outlet I had for my, um, musical talents as a youngster which mostly consisted, first, of wearing Robert Plant-esque kimonos (sewn by my step-grandmother) and, later, Cars-like thrift shop vintage suit coats and striped shirts while aping the stage moves of my rock Gods in a manner that seems in retrospect precariously close to unhinged for a somewhat introverted and self-conscious teen. Gary at the same time also played with his aforementioned Uncle John and his cousin Jeff Oliphant (later Big Dipper’s drummer but then a mere boy) in The Chlordanes. I remember vividly their song “Bag Man” with its chorus of “It’s tough being a bag man / taking out other people’s stuff.” I was somewhat amused but mostly disoriented by The Chlordanes who eschewed the high drama that I sought from rock music in those days. I didn’t have as much of a sense of humor and they did. The line between the Chlordanes and Big Dipper is much more direct than the line between our high school band and Big Dipper, safe to say.

[From Gary, on the interview above and below: The only thing I’m not comfortable with is the use of the word “greatness” in describing me or Big Dipper. I think it’s a big stretch to use that term. Am I/was I and are we/were we good? Yes. Sometimes maybe even approaching something like great. But we remain as we were so many years ago…a quirky little band with a flair for melody and a bizarre penchant for inspiring a truly odd collection of influential and, yes, great, people who have gone on to do some pretty amazing things. To wit: Pollard, Jeanine Garofalo (her personal assistant informed me she was a huge fan and used to come see us all the time when we played in Boston), Jonathan Lethem, Camper Van Beethoven, Bob Mould, Paul Westerberg, Mark Lanegan (he once told me, when he was in Screaming Trees, that “Big Dipper should be bigger than Screaming Trees. You write great songs. We don’t”), That Petrol Emotion, and probably some others I’m forgetting. I’ve come to the (late) realization that BD’s purpose, on this planet anyway, was not to become that big, breakthrough 90’s band (that would be Nirvana) or own the Billboard chart or go to “the toppermost of the poppermost” or anything silly like that. We were meant to inspire, quietly and humbly, others who can help, or at least entertain, this planet better than we can. On the Platinum Planet things would likely have been very different. But, alas, we crashed.]

Moody: My acquaintance with Big Dipper was simply that I loved a lot of Boston stuff in that period (my love for Human Sexual Response/Zulus, e.g., has been documented multiply, as well as Breeders, Belly, Volcano Sons, Mission of Burma, etc.), and this was part of that scene. I think they have a unique lyrical approach, which I admire. Lugubrious, satirical, funny, true. Also I like the guitar sound. It’s really clean and simple. Given that you are working on editing a book on local music, you are in a good position to talk about what else you liked in your hometown in those days when you emerged out of the mists of Handel. So what else did you like? And did you go to a lot of shows?

Woodworth: I admire Big Dipper’s lyrics, too, in large part because of their intelligence and texture. I told Gary when we conducted the interview that Bill’s capacity for extended—even extreme—metaphor and the way the band exploits the sound and surface of language distinguished them from a lot of their peers. You’re never looking through a lyric to get to a big truth or a pat emotion. The words themselves are never interchangeable or merely transparent, a ‘window’ on ‘content.’ The pleasure, beauty, and emotion of the songs reside IN the words themselves. I expect that’s one reason Robert Pollard (to whose music Gary introduced me) is a big fan of Big Dipper.

My interest in lyric writing during that time led in other musical directions. There was a strong mix of indie and folk in Boston and Cambridge during the mid to late ’80s. When I was going through a divorce and living in an unfinished and more or less uninhabitable house outside of Harvard Square that an editor friend was restoring, I’d spend as much time as possible away from the sawdust and power tools. Instead of going to the library to write a dissertation, I often spent nights in the square sitting on a curb and listening to Mary Lou Lord, who busked on the street and in the subway. She turned me on to a lot of music and chose great songs no matter the genre and without regard for how ubiquitous or obscure they were. A set in front of a steamed-up Brattle Street flower shop on a cold fall night might include Dire Strait’s “Romeo and Juliet,” “Thirteen” by Big Star, Richard Thompson’s ”Wall of Death” and Shawn Colvin’s not-yet-released “Steady On”—all songs that are very writerly. Mary Lou was also a friend to, fan of, and sometimes collaborator with local bands and would cover, say, a Dumptruck song just before singing a Simon and Garfunkel classic.

I became interested in singer-songwriters and spent as much time in coffee houses and folk venues as I did in rock clubs. Even with such a rich indie rock scene and so much happening in Boston at the time, the rock shows often seemed compromised by that tepid Boston self-consciousness, a wait-and-see attitude. I embodied it too—and perhaps I’m even projecting it. For a long time, I thought that was just the way of club shows untiI I started many years later going to Guided by Voices gigs in other cities and feeling that out-of-body energy and communal uplift that makes rock much more than a spectator sport. But back in the late ’80s, I often felt more comfortable at folk venues—storied places like Passim but also more or less nameless ones in the suburbs and at churches.

Moody: How does all this sit with writing poetry? How has what you do been influenced by all this rock and roll?

Woodworth: I maintained a rigorous separation between literature and rock for a long time. I don’t think any poem I wrote before 2005 bore the influence of what I might have gleaned from rock or folk songwriting either as a listener or amateur songwriter. When I was writing a book for the 33 1/3 series on Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand, I became increasingly interested in Robert Pollard’s lyrics and the way he generated them by trusting his own intuitions as a writer. The energy and variety of his lyric writing along with his unwillingness to let himself be shut down by self-doubt suggested itself as an interesting model. I’ve since written poems under the influence of something like that open way of putting words together. That aesthetic is like what Jack Spicer understood by poetic inspiration: taking dictation from Martians. I don’t know if the poems I’ve written that way are any good, but I’ve enjoyed the freedom to push language and, more, to be pushed by it.

Moody: How did you get to be the Bee Thousand guy in the first place?

Woodworth: Gary handed me a copy of Guided by Voices’ Do The Collapse when in came out in 1999 and said he thought I’d like this band. I hadn’t heard of them. Do The Collapse was their major label debut, produced by Ric Ocasek, and features full production unlike Bee Thousand or the other mid-90s ‘lo-fi’ records that made the band’s name. I wasn’t particularly a lo-fi-ophile so wasn’t inclined to be unnecessarily dismissive of a fully produced record, but I didn’t fall head over heals for it either. I liked it well enough that when Isolation Drills came out a couple of years later, I took some notice. That was the record I fell in love with—it’s one of Pollard’s greatest albums. The songs with a big rock vibe hit the sweet spot for a guy who grew up in the 70s and yet it also boasts writing that is the antithesis of embarrassing anthemic rock lyrics.

My mother was dying at the time I found that record and my Guided by Voices ‘conversion experience’ had something to do with revisiting my past as an adolescent when we were a family and more or less intact through the displaced and complicated nostalgia of Isolation Drills.  Though it’s not self-consciously retro, parts of it might have been on a record I’d loved in 1975 but, of course, they weren’t and couldn’t have been. In fact they’re not really songs that sound like 1975 at all, but songs that sound like they were written 25 years later by someone who loved rock songs in 1975—which is exactly what they are. The songs carry a densely layered sense of time and become more dimensional from how much of the past registers in them—and there’s the attendant feeling of loss that runs through the album even though there’s no particularly direct announcement of time and loss as its subjects. I find it hard to explain how listening to Isolation Drills while I was losing my mother allowed me to experience the past we shared, mourn it, and negotiate the realities of the present.

From there, I worked through the Guided by Voices catalog and have to admit that Bee Thousand took some getting used to for me. I wasn’t an acolyte the first time I heard it, but I was taken in by its obvious pleasures and came to love the less accessible aspects of the record even more as it grew and grew on me.  At some point, I was listening to almost nothing but Robert Pollard music and felt I had to do something with my immersion to make it less unseemly. I wrote David Barker at Continuum out of the blue and asked if he might be interested in a book on Bee Thousand for 33 1/3. He wrote back that he’d long wanted that title for the series and that there was an open call for proposals coming up. I sent mine in and he accepted it.

I have Gary to thank not only for all the music he made with Big Dipper, but also for my introduction to Robert Pollard’s songs. When the reunited Big Dipper opened for Robert Pollard’s Boston Spaceships at the Paradise in Boston several years ago I was there, the same club where I’d seen Big Dipper in their heyday. It may not have been a cosmic alignment on the level of a grand trine, but it was a major convergence of a lot of the music I love—and the history that attends it—at one time and in one place.

Moody: That’s an incredibly beautiful answer, and it gets to some of what I always want to ask of music now. I want to ask of music now what is its use value? If the music can’t be employed over a variety of periods, in a variety of times, if it cannot be made useful in times of great sorrow and times of contemplation and times of celebration, etc., then it is just not interesting music for me. Music whose only purpose, e.g., is to cause me to dance, that is not interesting music to me. What you’re saying about Isolation Drills and grief is really moving, and partly because the manifest content of that record (which I really love, too, especially “How’s My Drinking?”) is about something like grief (life on the road), but also because it really is very upbeat in spots, in tempo and sound (“Glad Girls” is on there, right?). So you used Isolation Drills as treatment for the isolation of grief, but then that led the employment of Pollard and his idioms across a great spectrum of feelings. I guess part of what we’re saying here (both in my interview of you and your interview of Gary) is: how do you employ rock and roll, a music of youth, in middle age? So do you care to attempt to answer that question yourself?

Woodworth: Wallace Stevens writes that poetry is that which helps us live our lives. That’s a fine definition of music as well. Maybe I’m deluded, but I don’t think of rock music as particularly the music of youth anymore or as necessarily less complex or rich than other genres of music that might be thought of as more ‘serious’ (pace Adorno). It’s just music and music for me, perhaps more than any other art, has been a guard against loneliness—and also a way to experience a full rather than empty kind of solitude. Listening can offer the solace of human connection without requiring anyone else to be in the room. So I look to rock music—if we can put under that category everything from Guided by Voices and Fairport Convention to Yes and Rufus Wainwright—for the same reasons I look to any art: for confirmation and connection. That confirmation is an ontological necessity for me.

It’s also true that my “use” of music has changed radically in at least one significant way in middle age. Listening to music with my children, singing together and playing songs with them, has brought a lot of pleasure of a different kind to my experience with rock.  I love hearing my daughter in the back seat singing along in her particular voice to “I Am The Walrus” or “Best of Jill Hives,” replacing half the words with ones she’s invented because she doesn’t know them all. There’s no loneliness in that moment at all—just music as family bond and shared pleasure. We were listening to satellite radio yesterday on the way back from school and “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” by Tame Impala came on. My 9 year old asked, “Why do they sound so much like The Beatles?” She picked up the Lennon-sound-alike vocal immediately along with that highly compressed Revolver drum sound—and we talked about that as we listened. So I guess we’re back in the altered but recognizable territory of rock iconography: kids riding around in a car listening to songs.

Moody: Last question: how does this middle-aged cure-for-loneliness use value of music apply to the new Big Dipper album?

Woodworth: One of the virtues of hitting middle age is that it can be a good time to come to terms with yourself. If you’re lucky, you have enough experience to allow a degree of self-understanding and a version of self-acceptance. You see your limitations clearly but they don’t infuriate you quite as much. There’s something of that understanding on the new Big Dipper record. Gary’s thinking about himself as a songwriter (in the context of writing a terrifically accomplished and memorable song, “Robert Pollard”) with a clear purchase on who he is and who he isn’t, all without rancor. That feels right. That song is also a very open statement of appreciation for someone else’s gifts. The ability to appreciate the accomplishments of others without your ego getting in the way is a very healthy thing. Curiosity about the world and an element of wonder were always at the heart of Big Dipper’s music and those qualities have only deepened and become richer on the new record. When I listen to Crashes on the Platinum Planet, I just feel a lot of admiration for what the band has done and simple happiness that they’re making music again.

Related Posts:

• Swinging Modern Sounds #44: And Another Day
• Swinging Modern Sounds #42: Hey Man, I Thought That You Were Dead
• Swinging Modern Sounds #41: Utopian Communities
• Swinging Modern Sounds #40: A Miscellany of Musical Thoughts that Will Not Otherwise Appear
• SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #38: Dinner at Martha’s House

The revolution doesn’t happen all at once. There are incremental bits of progress along the way, markers of change, but you don’t always see them that way. You’re just listening to music, liking the things you like, not evaluating based on the political criteria. But then in retrospect “Gloria” by Patti Smith seems like a watershed, like nothing that has ever happened before. Or “Tattooed Love Boys,” by the Pretenders is shocking in its directness and completely bizarre in its time signature. There are these intermittencies along the journey, like “52 Girls,” with its crazy fake girl group sound and aesthetic, or “Hanging on the Telephone,” or “Rip Her to Shreds,” by Blondie, or “Tell That Girl To Shut Up,” by Holly and the Italians, or Robin Lane and the Chartbusters, or what have you. There was a woman who desired, and lived and was not a muse, and she made music that somehow told the truth, and the truth moved you, and then, in regarding her, you came to see how things changed.

One such song for me, an incremental strep, a song that seemed to come out of nowhere, fully realized and totally new, was a song called “Total Control,” which I first heard on the radio at the tail end of my high school years in 1979. The thing I liked about “Total Control” at first was the total simplicity of the chords, the slightly somnolent tempo, and the mixture of soulful Phil Spector-ish girl vocals with totally in-your-face lyrics. The chorus, which represents the big dynamic shift in the song (the verses are quiet, the chorus is big) is thus: “I’d sell my soul for total control over you.” This was a big change from “Help me, I think I’m falling in loooooove again.” (And no disrespect to Joni Mitchell!) It was, and remains, an incredibly moving thing to hear a woman sing that line: “I’d sell my soul for total control over you.” Women aren’t supposed to be the ones who make that particular deal. It’s the men who historically barter their souls. In fact, nearly every intersection in the South features a boy guitarist trying to find a taker.

And yet here is “Total Control,” by The Motels. Everything about “Total Control” is strange. The introduction seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the song (though it is essential to how it takes flight), a little string-dampened thing that goes through a couple of passing chords before it lands on its very traditional “Hang On Sloopy” progression, though here played with an understatement that is funny and tasteful, all this while the singer, the aforementioned Martha Davis goes, “Looking counter clockwise, knowing what could happen, any moment maybe you, maybe even you . . .” It’s the counterclockwise that gets your attention, initially, as if indicating that the thing is not going in the direction you imagine it’s going to go, which it’s not, while the second verse slips in “steadfast collapse,” where “looking counterclockwise” summoned you forth before, and then the third verse includes “stay in bed, in stained sheets, my head hurts, I repeat, maybe you, maybe even you . . .” the first appearance in the modern pop song of stained sheets, and all of this coincident with the faux-delicacy of “lover’s touch, it’s pure delight,” which you cannot be sure is not being offered ironically, and all of this, anyway, is balanced with the chorus, “I’d sell my soul, I’d sell my soul, for total control over you.” Myself, I would not sing that line without legal indemnification. It’s bound to fuck you up in the long run, a lyric like that. Only the courageous singer can attempt it.

When you consider what The Motels did later, some rather gigantic hits, e.g., like “Only the Lonely” and “Suddenly Last Summer,” each with its stylized and occasionally ironic moments, it’s pretty clear that the Martha Davis romantic narrative is astringent, dark, ambiguous, noteworthy for failure, funny, torchy, in a sort of Marlene Dietrich or Judy Garland way. She’s the kind of singer you can imagine putting a hand to her forehead to swoon, meaning both that she is swooning and that the gesture is bankrupt and that you can’t take all of this seriously; and yet to say this, that in this way she was a little bit like Judy Garland, misses how soulful her voice is, how very nearly gospel it is. She has some Irma Thomas about her too, or some Ronnie Spector, too. Still, “Total Control” for me is more obvious because its musical treatment is unironic, less show business, than when they got more famous. It’s not punk, because that would be to be too programmatic, but it has some shares ambition with punk, and that’s why I liked it in the first place, and why I like it still.

“Total Control” is a song I think about a lot, and have thought about a lot, over the years, on that list of songs that kind of got away, but which I think are incredibly great, and should be better known, and if I ever record that album of covers “Total Control” would be on it, along with “Gigantic Transatlantic Trunk Call,” by Miracle Legion, and “Spoiled” by Sebadoh, and “Winona,” by Matthew Sweet, and “The French Inhaler,” by Warren Zevon, “History, Part Two,” by the Minutemen, “Look For the Good in Others and They’ll See the Good in You,” by the Chills, “Hallelujah Europa,” by Jonah Lewie, “First Light,” by Richard and Linda Thompson, and and so on. And it was in this regard, thinking about “Total Control,” that I happened upon a video of Martha Davis with backing band (youngsters who are willing to live in a van and go out and play the hits) performing the song in front of an American flag, audience indifferent and wildly engaged in equal portions, both gabby and worshipful, while Martha is turning in a moving, intense, funny, indisputable performance of the song. It is true: Martha Davis is no longer an ingénue—it’s thirty years since this song was recorded–and that is part of why this is an incredible video. Her voice—despite, one surmises, innumerable cigarettes—is amazing, full of the wisdom of experience. And she is not above a performative gesture for the sake of rhetorical power. I found this video riveting, and so I figured I would have to meet Martha Davis somehow. You know, you say these things, like I would like to meet so and so, and most of the time it never happens, and that’s fine, because, by and large, meeting the people you once admired is a disappointing affair. But I found a way to get to Martha Davis, and it further transpired that I was going to be in the West this summer, so I asked if she wanted to do an interview about “Total Control.”

I did not expect to be invited to dinner. Davis lives north of Portland, and I was driving to the Oregon coast, and so instead of conducting the interview at a neutral location in the city Martha invited me (and Laurel Nakadate, who took the uncanny photographs included here) to dinner, which was pasta and salad, and also to see her farm, her llama, her cow, her donkey, her pigs, her goats, her turkeys, her ducks, and her many dogs and cats. She also played a bit of guitar in her living room, and introduced us to one of her daughters, Maria. Martha, the mom in this story, is strikingly beautiful still, but totally approachable, and she has lived through a lot more than just The Motels, viz., the late sixties in Berkeley, a couple of divorces, suicide, estrangements, the death of her pet monkey, the inconstant affections of the listening public, and so on. She is funny, philosophical, wise, and warm, in a way that makes you feel lucky to have met her. What follows is the transcript of the interview portion of the conversation, but there was a lot else we talked about, like: the seventies, books, drugs, the record business, marriages gone bad. I felt like I had known her a long time. She doesn’t seem like a revolutionary, like one of the revolutionaries who made music by women sound more like the lives of women, but in my life, anyway, she was just that, a revolutionary.

***

The Rumpus: So when did “Total Control” come about?

Martha Davis: There you go starting the interview.

Rumpus: The personal digital device is already recording.

Davis: A professional! Umm, I had actually written that song, in the before time, with the other, first Motels band. When I was going out with Dean Chamberlain. That song is dedicated to Dean because he broke my heart. I wrote it as a punk rock song (singing). So I just had the lyrics sitting around and one day in the rehearsal studio Jeff started playing that melody and I just sang those lyrics along with him. Which is why I think it has the power that it does. It came from a very angry place, and it came out very calm and weird.

Rumpus: The playing is so restrained, and the lyrics are so intense and angry.

Davis: Obviously it wasn’t premeditated. It was just something that happened in the rehearsal studio one day and Jeff started playing and I just started singing the lyrics over it. So God bless happy accidents.

Rumpus: Musically, it’s punk mostly in its simplicity–it’s a 1-4-5 chord progression, and it’s not really syncopated or anything–like an American version of what a punk song might sound like. But you’re saying that you actually really thought it was going to be more of a punk song at the first blush of composition.

Davis: At first it went [sings noise]. I don’t write a lot of punk songs but I wrote that one. It just goes to show you what can happen.

Rumpus: That’s back when you were rehearsing in the same studio with The Go Go’s.

Davis: It was our studio and they came along and they wanted to show the space. So we said, “Sure, come on.” They’d come in, and the microphones would be down here covered with, like, dayglo lipstick. Then we got signed first and they were like, “Oh man that’s so cool. We’re moving our gear to your side of the room and maybe we’ll get lucky too [laughing].” And they certainly did. In fact we’ll be playing with the little go-gets at the Hollywood Bowl, on September 29^th.

Rumpus: Did you think about punk at that time at all? Or did you just think: I’m writing whatever song I’m writing?

Davis: It was hard for me to not do what I normally did. I don’t listen to a lot of pop music. I listen to David Bowie, I love Eno. All the guys in my band know everybody and what they’re doing, what they’ve done. I’m not that kind of person. I don’t listen to that much music. I listen to NPR, so when I listen to music on the radio I listen to classical music. I don’t think I’m doing it on purpose necessarily, but there is something about keeping it pure. I mean, we’re all influenced by stuff. I would say my biggest influence is David Bowie and I don’t sound anything like him, sadly.

Rumpus: So maybe it was just sort of historical pressure that caused you to get slotted into Punk/New Wave.

Davis: We went through some strange things. We moved down to LA in ’75. Dean was working at Warner Brothers, and he actually went to the finance department to get a loan. They asked, “What’s it for?” And he said, “For a demo.” They said, “You guys are ready to make a demo?” He goes, “Yeah, that’s why I want the loan.” So they paid for us to make a demo. I can’t remember all of the songs. Anyway, we got passed on by Warner Brothers because we were too weird. And that was, like, six months before the industry decided that punk was in. Because the thing is we were railing against the California sound—Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles. We wanted something different, something edgy and weird. Punk hadn’t even happened yet here, so, we did this demo and they said, “No, sorry you’re too weird.” Then punk hit and then we were too melodic.

Rumpus: Right.

Davis: Because we did have melodies. New wave just opened a lot of possibilities for everybody because you had so many different types of sounds. It was all over the place, and that was the only way we could kind of fit in. How do you guys feel about mayonnaise?

Rumpus: Mayonnaise?

Davis: Well, I came up with this new dressing the other day, and I really like it but it involves mayonnaise. I don’t know, some people are very sketchy about mayonnaise.

Rumpus: I’m fine with mayonnaise.

Davis: Let’s see if this works, it’s good.

Rumpus: Here’s another question about “Total Control” then. Is it an allegory about the music business?

Davis: No.

Rumpus: Not at all?

Davis: Not from where I’m coming from.

Rumpus: How about when you sing it now?

Davis: No. The song has gotten more emotional to me because of different things that have happened with that song, if you want to hear a good story. As soon as I get this avocado sliced. I was touring in Paris . . .

Rumpus: What if I was to say we should have a bowl to put the olive pits in?

Davis: Do you remember Policy, my solo adventure?

Rumpus: Yeah.

Davis: The sax player, Larry, he became my boyfriend. (I like to do that a lot.) We were together six years. Actually, engaged, but at one point he had this secret stealth project he wouldn’t tell me about. So that sort of sets up a flashback in the story: I was in Paris in the eighties before I ever met Larry, long ago, and I was on a press thing. It was just me not the band. And my EMI rep there was this guy Lauren, who was amazing . . . and very beautiful. It was Paris, he was beautiful, I was . . . me. So I had this amazing affair with this guy for three days. Incredible. Super cool. I always thought I would hear from this guy again, sooner or later. Never did, never ever. Turns out the secret project Larry’s been working on, years later, is with this Brazilian singer, a model person, and she wants to do “Total Control.” It was, she says, her boyfriend’s favorite song. Her boyfriend Lauren who died in an automobile accident. Yeah! And that was their song. She even told Larry that they had it on the answering machine back in the days when people did things like that.

Rumpus: Wow.

Davis: I used to think: why did I never hear from this guy? We had an awesome little thing! And it was so sad. So often times when I sing “Total Control” I think of that.

Rumpus: It’s such a dark lyric.

Davis: It was dark times, you know. You have no idea. Before I was signed, I had two small children, I had moved to fucking LA from Berkeley, which was crazy. I had no money, I was living in Echo Park, and it was not friendly. I was living in a hell house, there was a maniac living down stairs who ended up killing himself by walking into traffic on the 101. There were paint sniffers in the basement. It was HELL, it was hell, and you know, Dean, the guy I wrote the song about was the first guy—after my husband—I loved. (My husband I fell in love with when I was twelve.)

Rumpus: When are you going to finish the part about Dean?

Davis: Oh, I was so in love with Dean, and we were in the band together, and I met him because we were in the band together, and then we fell in love. Then it crumbled, and it was really hard because we were in the same band, and we were so poor we were all living together. I think Dean and I were actually sleeping in the same bed but we really weren’t together anymore.

Rumpus: That’s the kind of shit you only do in your twenties.

Davis: Yeah, and that’s why I sold my soul for total control. That’s where it came from. You’re so torn because the desire to do the music is so huge. I said: It can never come on stage. No matter what we’re going through it cannot come on stage.

Rumpus: Did that prove feasible?

Davis: I found it more difficult when Tim, my guitar player and boyfriend during the Careful/Apocalypso era, got rough with me a couple of times right before we went on stage. Dean and I worked out good. Do you know the story about how the band, the first band, broke up?

Rumpus: I read something about you serially inviting everyone to a bar and firing them.

Davis: No, no that was the actual band that was signed to Capitol. With the first lineup we were playing the Starwood, in LA, and we’d been doing pretty good, and one night this guy comes up and says, “Dude, there’s a guy from Capitol records that wants to talk to you guys. I think he might want to make a deal.” And I’m like, holy shit. So I meet with this guy, Carter, who sadly died last year. He was this amazing, amazing record business guy. I was so nervous I think I spilled a glass of wine in his lap or something, but he was really sweet. He said, “I think you guys have something great, I would really like to talk to you,” and blah blah blah blah blah. And I went back to the band, and said, “Hey, this guy wants to sign us.” Robert, our drummer, says, “Well, I’m quitting the band.” And everybody was, like, “Oh man!” Robert and I were connected. In those days, we were playing a lot, opening up for Van Halen and stuff. They weren’t signed yet so they were pulling these large crowds and all these girls, and the guys were, like, We should play more like those guys. I was just listening to David Bowie, and me and Robert the drummer thought: No, we need to be more like this. So there was a real musical divide, and that night the band broke up. It took a while to get the next version together.

Rumpus: So you met the Van Halen meatheads?

Davis: Eddie was so cute when he was little. All he would do was play his guitar. David was hilarious. I would drag my kids with me everywhere I went. One time I took my daughter and  she was standing by the stage and David Lee Roth comes over and does one of his rock poses, my daughter just rolls her eyes, pretty much shuts him down on the spot. She was nine.

Yeah, those were some crazy days.  Phil Spector came down to one of our shows, too, and pulled a gun on one of my children.

Rumpus: So one of your children is on the long list of people that Phil Spector pulled a gun on..

Davis: Yes.

Rumpus:  Along with Leonard Cohen and the Ramones.

Davis: Everybody. That guy. Maybe just a too much, too young. He was nineteen when he became a millionaire. What was that in the 1950’s? That’s not good for anybody.

Rumpus: If you were to describe an ordinary act of composition for you, how would you describe it?

Davis: First of all I never ever sit down to write a song—unless it’s an assignment. Generally, I’ll be going about my own business and then part of a song will come along. Something will inspire me, something will happen, and not one but two or three songs will come in a day.

Rumpus: Really?

Davis: The most I’ve written is ten songs in a day.

Rumpus: Chorus first?

Davis: It used to be only music.

Rumpus: Only music, then you write the lyrics later? Really?

Davis: I never think about lyrics, ever. It’s spew and edit, mostly I just try to get out of my own way.

Rumpus: Did you just say . . .

Davis: Spew and edit.

Rumpus: Spew and edit, okay. When you say music first, do you have a guitar in your hands or do you just sing a melody?

Davis: If I’m in the mood I’ll have the guitar in my hands but usually I’ll just sing the melody. Really, I come at my songs from all directions. I started from just playing my guitar in my room. I would just go there and that was my solace, and I’d go and make stuff up. I’d be sitting there playing, messing around, thinking I had found a new chord even if it was something basic. It’s quinoa pasta, by the way, I’ve been trying to do the gluten-free thing.

Rumpus: Have you noticed a dramatic difference?

Davis: I’ve noticed I’ve lost some weight. Bread is so wonderful and easy, and delicious. I think we’re going to have dinner now.

Rumpus: Alright.

Davis: Songwriting is weird because especially now at the ripe old age I am, and as long as I’ve been doing it, it’s just natural to me now. I seldom ever change a word.

Rumpus: It just tumbles out?

Davis: Fully made. I’ve written with a lot people. I’ve done a writing session with Diane Warren.

Rumpus: Wow. What was that like?

Davis: Painful. Like a job. Whereas I let the things fly out, she’s agonizing over stuff, and it was stuff that was not good. I’ve written with Carole King.

Rumpus: She’s a hero of mine. As a songwriter.

Davis: She’s pretty awesome.

Rumpus: We just got that demo collection of hers, The Legendary Demos. It’s unbelievable. There’s not a bum note in the whole thing and it’s not even the definitive recordings. She’s got some intense genius.

Davis: She’s amazing. That whole school . . . Something happened in pop where what’s good about it is gone. There isn’t the same kind of heart put into things. I think it’s the computer.

Rumpus: Sure.

Davis: A song is a thing. It’s an entity, it’s an art, it’s a story. It has a pay off. It has all these parts that should be there and the only way you can get there is to travel the road to its end. And people started going, oh that’s a cool bridge, let’s plug it in here. I don’t know . . . I’m not saying that the computer isn’t a great tool . . .

Rumpus: Did you do a lot of digital editing on the recent albums?

Davis: Not me.

Rumpus: Or did you record live in the studio?

Davis: The songs were all written as songs with no shenanigans. I mean, we recorded digitally like everyone else. But I’m still old-fashioned that way. I think a song is a song is a song, and it should be written as such.

Rumpus: So when you make three songs in a day do you have a specific agenda? How you want things to come out?

Davis: It depends. I mean, with the kids’ album—that’s the one where I did ten songs in one day—you know what you need to do. Songs come out of thin air, and I always love when that happens. When I was Capitol I was always under pressure to write something, that’s not a way to write a song.

Rumpus: Did you know when you were writing monster hits? Did you know “Only the Lonely” was a monster hit when you wrote it?

Davis: No.

Rumpus: No?

Davis: No, no idea.

Rumpus: On a song like that did you know where the lyrics were going in it and what role they would play?

Davis: All I do is get out of my own way. I was blessed with this because of my mom, probably. I would blame her for my lyrics. She was a very brilliant woman, who wanted more than anything to be Virginia Woolf. She wanted to write. She was a Phi Beta Kappa English major at Berkeley. She love, loved, loved her literature. For bedtimes stories my sister and I got Henry Miller.

Rumpus: That explains it!

Davis: She really loved the stream of consciousness. Words don’t have to mean anything but they can mean something. That whole thing of it’s not about the literal meaning of the word but the feel of the statement, you know, and she gave me all that. I was in the slow reading class, and I never read books until I was older, I was really lame that way. Now, I love books.

Rumpus: So when you wrote “Suddenly Last Summer” you didn’t think about the Tennessee Williams reference? You just liked the sound of “suddenly last summer?”

Davis: I knew two things. I liked alliteration and you can’t copyright a title. Incidentally, I met Roy Orbison and I apologized to him about the title [“Only the Lonely”] and he was like, No I like your song. With “Suddenly Last Summer” I didn’t see the movie until after I had written the song.

Rumpus: So you didn’t know there was a little cannibal subtext?

Davis: I had no idea. The really good stuff comes from your subconscious. That’s why it’s so important to get out of your own way and not to be smart about it. Just let it happen. That song started, I remember it distinctly, I was sitting in the backyard in Berkeley before I moved to Los Angeles. If I was in the house that meant both of my parents were dead, so probably ’73 maybe. I was sitting in the backyard and all of a sudden this chilly wind came up. It was the end of summer, and it had that bite to it, like winter was there, and at the same time I heard the ice cream truck. I said, this is probably the last time I’ll hear that this summer. At the same time I was thinking about myself, at twelve years old, losing my virginity over the summer, and your life will never. . . . You know, things change that you can never bring back. And so, years later—when did I write that song, ’80-something? Ten years later maybe? Three o’clock in the morning I am awakened by [sings melody], it woke me up, and the song came out. That a song can percolate so long, it’s so awesome.  Okay, so when did you first hear “Total Control?”

Rumpus: Well, I was in high school in New Hampshire in the ’70s. I went to private school, I actually went away to school when I was 13. So I was in Concord, New Hampshire, and as you can imagine Concord, New Hampshire, was slow to get the message of the revolution in rock and roll. There were a lot of deadheads in my school, the preeminent music at my school was Grateful Dead, Traffic, Allman Brothers Band, the music of the aristocracy, it turned out. I listened to a lot of stuff that a lot of people found totally unlistenable and I was kind of happy about it. You know, Roxy, Bowie, Pink Floyd. Proggy stuff. So senior year, a few odd things happened. The first thing was I worked at the radio station. I was asked to do this weekly show where we would play a new record in its entirety. And I had to play Armed Forces by Elvis Costello and the Attractions. And in the course of that I got to this song called “Green Shirt,” do you remember that song? [Sings melody.] It’s this totally weird chamber piece, not a representative song on that album, totally paranoid lyrics. I thought, “Oh my god, there’s something really different happening that I knew nothing about.” So I instantly became obsessed with that record, and got the other two that came before it. And for me that was the leading edge of the thing that happened about when the first Motels album came out. I started trying to find out about the other things that would be nominally grouped with this item, “Green Shirt,” that had come to mean so much.

Davis: And you didn’t have Pandora then did you?

Rumpus: We had nothing. We had fucking Rolling Stone magazine. And there were all these Boston bands that would occasionally play in Concord, and we had a dance at Saint Paul’s where two sets were played by an up and coming band called The Cars. So they played to three hundred prep school students, and they played “My Best Friend’s Girl” three or four times because they only had the one set, and that was it. I began to realize that there was a set of presumptions at work in this new music that were really different from, say, the Allman Brothers Band, or Jethro Tull. And: there was this really good Boston radio station with an overnight deejay called Oedipus. Did you ever meet that guy?

Davis: WBCN?

Rumpus: Right. That guy had a show at, like, eleven at night, where he would only play new music, and someone there had your album, liked your album. Sometime on that show I heard “Total Control” and it had all the aspects of what I thought was so good. Namely, like, any person could play the guitar part, the 1-4-5 chord progression for most of it, singable chorus, very dramatic chorus, and then the darkest, nastiest lyrics. Not a sentimental moment in the entire thing.

Davis: Do you know how many have not been able to play that song? I’ve lost musicians that seemed fine and they get to that song because it is so slow and, and the arrangement is a little strange. People get lost.

Rumpus: The weird part for me is the sax solo.

Davis: Does that freak you out?

Rumpus: Yeah, because I was very anti-sax, very against horns in those days.

Davis: Uh huh, I understand. We have our things, and it’s funny how you grow out of them. That was my concept, I really wanted horns. Like in a film noir. I’ve never lived in New York, but all I picture are these wet alleyways and the sound of a saxophone bouncing off the pavement. I mean that’s what I wanted, that one guy sitting out there blowing kind of thing.

Rumpus: Everything except the sax appealed to me righteously.

Davis: Did you really like get in a trance and then the sax came and you were like, Ahh! ?

Rumpus: A little bit. Like: how can I love this song if it has the sax? But I loved the song so much that I persevered. For me it’s the obtuse angle of the song that is of interest, not only because I think it’s an allegory for the music business.

Davis: It’s an allegory for life.

Rumpus: How people relate to other people, what it means to have ambition and so on. But the larger question is: how does the revolution take place music? What is the structure of musical revolution? There are little stepping stones on which massive change takes place, and here’s some song that you made up because the guitar player started playing slow in the studio one day and you start singing these words over it but because of the slow motion of the tempo and the way the guitars work to me it sounds of a piece by the Velvet Underground or Iggy Pop something that was all about moving us in a direction where music didn’t have to do with the bromides of love.

Davis: Which is exactly what we were fighting against. That homogenized, rich, full, beautiful sound. And trust me the tempo and dynamics in “Total Control” are quite profound.

Rumpus: And I love about those old records there was never a click track. Those bands you can actually hear the tempos change a little bit. That sounds beautiful to me.

Davis: The jazz album [I Have My Standards, as yet unreleased] was so cool because I got Marty Jourard to come down, the original [Motels] sax player, and a bass player, and a drummer. I’d never even met the upright bass player. I’d met the drummer but never played with him. [Barking] Chico! Really? Is there an animal out there in danger? Is the barn on fire? Or are you just an asshole? So it was me, Marty, Alan, and Pauly. And we didn’t have one rehearsal and Marty made some charts and we cut it in two days. It was so awesome and we didn’t have a click track, and I was singing all day for ten hours a day. I should bring a copy so you can have it to take with you.

Rumpus: I remember hearing “Suddenly Last Summer” on the radio and it was one of those great events for me because you were a band that I thought was sort of my secret, and then suddenly everyone was getting it. And the idea that you would write a song that had a Tennessee Williams allusion in it–for a guy going to university in creative writing in the eighties that seemed exceedingly smart.

Davis: My mom probably read it to me when I was young.

Rumpus: I was always interested in popular artifacts that had great complexity lurking in them and that’s why I liked those songs.

MD: I feel downright sophisticated.

Rumpus: Maybe the sad part of the story of the Motels is that the record companies, you know, exerted influence over some of the later stuff.

Davis: Mmhm, yeah.

Rumpus: They got in the way of the writing—but the writing is what’s so great. So they didn’t know what they had.

Davis: I’m a firm believer in taking responsibility. And I let that shit happen. I think the first album is the most effective album, it kind of had what we wanted. Look, as long as I’m making music I’m happy, but later I started realizing I’m not as happy as I could be because this stuff sucks, and by the last album . . . Well, the Policy album was supposed to be a Motels album but it was so far removed from anything I wanted to do that I literally called my lawyer and got him to get me out of the deal. I said: I can’t do this. This is killing me. At first you start drifting from your purpose and then AH!, I’m drifting out here and there’s no life preserver in sight! It’d probably be better for me financially if I wanted fame or anything like that. I need to not be in debt anymore, and that’s the hard part now that I’m managing myself. I enjoy having the control, I enjoy knowing I’m representing me, as opposed to other people who have misrepresented me.

Rumpus: And who took money along the way.

Davis: Yeah, 20 percent. So it’s good. Logistics and me are becoming, if not friends, acquaintances. Hey, are you guys done?

Rumpus: I think we’re done.

(Postscriptus: The Motels website is here, including upcoming tour dates, and I commend to people who like excellent songwriting two of Martha Davis’s more recent efforts: This (2008), which sounds very much like The Motels, only contemporary, and her beautiful, plangent autobiographical suite of songs, Beautiful Life.)

Related Posts:

• Swinging Modern Sounds #44: And Another Day
• Swinging Modern Sounds #42: Hey Man, I Thought That You Were Dead
• Swinging Modern Sounds #41: Utopian Communities
• Swinging Modern Sounds #40: A Miscellany of Musical Thoughts that Will Not Otherwise Appear
• Swinging Modern Sounds #39: Interview Within an Interview

From a smorgasbord of intelligent humor to choose from I keep returning to the second poem, “Based On a Book Of the Same Title.” Stein writes:

By definition of vicious infinite regression
I don’t like to talk to philosophy majors
They have the truth and the truth is

that there isn’t one, so on Saturdays they
wear overalls and stare at their reflections
and try to guess whose childhood was worse

These two opening stanzas show Stein in the range of her depth and breadth. She begins with what appears as a poetically altered use of the philosophy term infinite regression, but in fact, Stein here cleverly shows the frequent poetic nature of even the driest logic terms. Vicious infinite regression defines a certain type of infinite regression. As is her wont though, Stein takes material from her world around and uses it for her own art. Its insertion into the poem allows the more abstract philosophical term to take on a more human weight. From there she launches into her style of long sentences displaying her perfection of the craft of enjambments. Her enjambments provide much of the humor and depth as they take what sounds like a weighty serious sentence and finish it with a more joking punchline as in the image of philosophy majors sitting around pretending to discuss the essential issues of the world but really guessing who can claim the crown of suffering.

Her prodigious knowledge of the arcana of pop culture somewhat requires that you
read this book with your Wikipedia app by your side, but Stein will never let you down. I now know the most prolific author of the choose your own adventure series (R.A. Montgomery), that Rattawut Lapcharoensap is not a symbol or a clever way of saying anything, but a real person, and that epistolaphobia is a world made up by Edna St. Vincent Millay to describe her fear of writing letters. She essentially asks the questions, what do or can we do with all of this Total Noise, this onslaught of information of which we receive too much of.

With the help of Wiki and my because of my own obsession with culture, I discerned
many of the less explicit allusions: Choose your own Adventure series, numerous references to Greek mythology, Czech operas, Slavic mythology, the Little Mermaid, Seinfeld, Dating websites, Judy Blume, The Oregon Trail (The Computer Game), Risky Business, the myth of Isis and Osiris, He Man, The Diary of Anne Frank, Spielberg’s cult comedy 1941, and the last recorded found fossil of a female aurochs now in Switzerland, and all of this just an incomplete list that does not include her explicit references to other books, or movies or TV shows – (Ayn Rand, Miss Universe Pageant, Facebook, Leaves of Grass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and an acoustic cover of the popular Outkast Song, Hey Ya, by Matt Weddle, for starters.) On top of the plethora of allusions, Stein’s embrace of jokes with a set up and punch line, bordering on comedic sketches, along with snatches of everyday dialogue torn from their context creates a poetry for poetry lovers and haters at the same time. It retains the density of classic poetry with the fluidity of prose. And yet, with all of her emphasis on the here and the now, the immediate details of reality regardless of their stature, she balances this out with a heavy reliance on her fascinating imagination. She will often reimagine or provide both commentary and different twists to old myths. Never content in mere mimicry Stein embodies these stories with new life. Anne Frank posts her life to YouTube, a jealous girlfriend wishes herself more self control than the mythic Rosalka, the operatic inspiration for the Little Mermaid, and she riffs on the plot of Risky Business all with ease.

Her purposive use of esoteric pop culture along with the bastions of digital society speaks to something in of itself regardless of its specific use in the poems. It serves as statement of intentions, a manifesto of sorts, poems as instructional for what poetry can do. In a way, this is both ambitious and ostentatious without the negative connotations. It shows itself off as different so as to claim territory for poetry, territory we once upon a time might have called “low-brow” but that now we call the mundane. When we speak of this beauty of the mundane we often conflate different categories within this umbrella concept. The modernists, such as Proust, Joyce and Woolf, embraced the mundanities of life, but did so for specific purposes. Proust catalogued the most nitty gritty fleeting details of society partially to capture the scene, tone in a sense of realism, and partially because anything and everything could launch Proust into the realm of meaning. He reveals the tiniest idiosyncratic detail to contain all the secrets of the world.

Post-Modernist writers focused on many of similar topics, but usually with different
intentions. The pure and early postmodern writers uses the topic to explore the idea that we can separate between high and low brow at all. These new realms also allowed these writers to explore areas of culture generally denied a right of entry into literature, but again, in order to take apart these constructions we create for society and value. To the extent that this porous categorization holds true, David Foster Wallace acted more as a modernist than a postmodernist writer. He looked into a state fair, a cruise, a porn awards weekend, poorly written sports autobiographies with a second writer, and of course, tennis and saw the heartbeat of the world.

In a sense, this fails to satisfy the idea of the beauty of the mundane because in the end these authors turn the mundane into the meaningful, the rare, the stunning, the all purposive, something essential. A true beauty of the mundane we not need to justify itself with a reach upwards. It suffices in its own gracefulness. With some qualifications, Stein’s poetry revels in this type of artistry as well as in the playfulness and scope of her imagination. She speaks poetry that speaks, uniquely, to our time. (Banksy sits next to Jeremiah, after the destruction of the Jewish temple and gives him an idea for a tattoo based on a Banksy quote: As soon as you meet someone you know the reason you will leave them. ) Her poems serve as puzzles to piece together, riddles to solve, beauty to appreciate, jokes to laugh at, and of course, sadness to empathize with.

In the end, regardless of her stance on the nature or direction of poetry, I want to
console Ms. Stein. A deep and perceptive sadness permeates all of her poetry, even the playful. She feels the enormity of life as a shadow of our powers of imagination. We can dream and imagine the most beautiful situations, give the flesh and spirit through our poetry, but life too often appears to let us down. However, her use and commentary on imagination highlights both the redemptive and destructive relationship our fancy flights and the gritty realia of life. At the same time that imagination can console a person shattered by heartbreak, it can undermine the shininess of reality, or create a world to escape through thereby avoiding problems or inflating reality to melodramatic proportions. Our pains feel mythic when seen through a more realistic sense they might seem trifling, petty, and almost laughable.

After reading this book, I wanted to tell her that all her fantasies can come true. Tell her that some men out there are plain awesome. I want to tell her that people love people not just for their beauty but for their prodigious imagination, that all of us, or many of us, perhaps the best of us worry about the future, about whether we can handle the vicissitudes of parenthood, about fame, that most of us will not drop our children, or disfigure them emotionally anymore than our parents did to us, that sometimes we think about Lindsay Lohan too much too, that we all feel and think of dating sites the way she does: a necessary evil like dentistry, that sometimes we too, perhaps as a guilty pleasure, perhaps out of a naive sense of hope, read self-help books about self-actualization, about finding “el uno”, that sometimes we hide in books or in the past, or in the future, or that we all use facebook for shady endeavors. I want to tell her all of this but I imagine, brilliant as she is, she knows this better than I do. She writes with a young insouciance proper to her age, and yet, with the weight of wisdom of life lived. What then can I possibly say to her? In fact, like the best poetry I felt comforted by her, by her empathy for both the playfulness and sadness in life.

Related Posts:

• The Collected Poems by Marcel Proust
• “Collected Poems” by Jack Kerouac
• Selected Translations by W. S. Merwin
• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević

This turn of events, in which the band most likely to succeed is a conservatory-trained chamber ensemble which has no conventional front man, is remarkable to me, because it is so unlike what I imagined would attract me to the popular song in my youth. In my youth, it was understood that musical ability and expression were at opposite ends of a certain dialectic of contemporary music making, and you could rely on this set of truths for a long time—from, let’s say, The Stooges to Fever to Tell, or nearly forty years—and I for one never saw any particular reason to revise my opinion here, viz. that a minimum of ability was necessary to tell the truth. Nevertheless, something started to happen in the last ten years (and I believe I will have occasion to speak more of it in future posts), and, I imagine, it kind of started with Sufjan Stevens, or Sufjan Stevens and two contemporaneous bands who do not quite interest me—Arcade Fire and The National—each of whom have “orchestral” offspring. Suddenly, in the last ten years, it became a badge of honor to be able to play. And to arrange. What is most astonishing to this listener, in the case at hand, is that now the ability to play and the ability to write moving songs do not seem like they are obverses of one another. Take, for example, “Disgrace Note,” from Info Nympho, of which more is to be found below. In the age of Fine Arrangements, which is the age in which we find ourselves, in which Joanna Newsom can tour with an orchestra (in 2006) and somehow fail to elicit comparisons to the Moody Blues, excellence in timbre and texture and arrangement will somehow enhance expression. Such is the situation with the thoroughly excellent Cuddle Magic.

And I haven’t even mentioned the lyrics yet. Although the songs on Info Nympho are composed by various members (“Hoarders,” e.g., is by singer Kristin Slipp and deserves your fervent listening), especial mention must be made of the songs that Ben Davis writes with his brother (and lyricist) Tim Davis. Compositions by brothers are always interesting, and always feature, it seems to me, some special density of consciousness. The decision making with songs by brothers is always away from view, hard to parse, difficult to explain. In this case, the relationship between the brothers is even more interesting, because they are not full brothers, they are half-brothers, and are separated by nearly a decade, and because Tim Davis is a non-performing member of the band, though he did once make a very excellent video of Cuddle Magic (which is to be seen here, c.f., Scorsese’s long take from Goodfellas), and because Tim Davis is not just a lyricist for Cuddle Magic, but is a rather extraordinary art photographer, and videographer, and all around conceptual Renaissance person, and, if all of that is not enough, Tim Davis also used to write experimental poetry. Info Nympho relies at important moments on the density of Tim Davis’s lyrics. These lyrics find ways to adhere here to his brother’s crazy line lengths (there’s not a tetrameter in sight), but these lyrics are also often funny, and often inscrutable, and fall often into wordplay (as in the title), and allusion, instead of relying on, let’s say, confession, which one might more frequently associate with the contemporary song. This work, the work of brothers, is part of what makes this band unique, the trajectory of fraternal esteem, and so I felt like it might help explain why Cuddle Magic is most likely to succeed if I could somehow ensnare both brothers in a conversation, which proceeded by e-mail between the beginning and end of July 2012. I have left the eccentricities of punctuation and style intact. This is, in fact, how the Davises communicate.

(P.S. Info Nympho is available now on FYO Records. And the Cuddle Magic website is here.)

The Rumpus: You guys ready for some questions?

Ben: Yes.

Tim: Mmm hmmm

Rumpus: At what point, Ben, did you integrate Tim into the songwriting for Cuddle Magic? Were you already writing with the band? What was it about Tim’s lyrics that seemed essential to what you were doing?

Ben: Tim and I wrote songs together for almost as long as I can remember. Initially perhaps Tim would play piano and I would sing and make up the songs, melody and lyrics over Tim’s or our father Peter’s chord progressions. I don’t remember the exact process with great clarity but a lot of these early (maybe I was 5-10 years old) songs are actually well documented on cassette tapes converted to digital.  Some of the hit titles included “I’m the weirdest person in the world”, “Big Hair”, and “Blue Birds”.

Later I started writing songs on my own culminating with an album I came out with in high-school. Even then I remember asking help of my brother with lyrics for some songs for instance a fast melodic run in a song that ended up with the Tim Davis lyric, “met in the back of an ATM bank where the sunlight of heaven had lit up the mall” which was actually a J S Bach quote in the melody of my song, “if we fall”. It seemed at that point the roles had switched from Me improvising lyrics to Tim’s music to Tim writing lyrics to my music and melodies.

Then we started writing songs together starting with “Sandinista” from the first self titled inside out album (lyrics on the outside). This song kind of marks the beginning of Cuddle Magic, thus Tim was there from the very birthing of the band.

Rumpus: Tim, what’s your recollection of these early efforts? Can you remember titles and lyrics as well? And was lyric writing related to your early poetical efforts?

Tim: Interestingly, Ben and I, at age 3 and twenty, started learning music at the same time. So when he was three and four, I was just learning to tinker around on the piano and the banjo and guitar. I’d sit around plunking out chord progressions, and Ben would just absolutely fluidly make up melodies and lyrics on the spot. He could sing perfectly on key and make up perfect little tunes. I’ll never forget one early one that got recorded but then lost, “Frog man was a silly, He jumped higher than the ceiling”  [what a great off rhyme] “He jumped higher than this world. He went on the sun some day. He flied up to the moon, He flied up to Mars, Mars has two moons.”  Then he interrupted himself and spoke, “I’m not kidding Mars does have two moons.” And finished, in song, “And they both live in your head!”

So I was writing poetry, but it was very disjointed and experimental, and writing song lyrics seemed impossibly constraining at the time. Having Ben generate them naturally was like hitting a Comstock lode of lyrical playfulness. I don’t think I really appreciated how musical he was because he was so funny with words. But one day I took him to go inner tubing down a ski mountain (class alarm!) and we were listening to music in the car. I think it was Elvis Costello. When we got near the mountain he started getting a little perturbed, and said, “Tim, can you turn off the music so I can look?” I realized at that moment that music wasn’t some fun activity for him, but the essence of how he interacted with the world.

Rumpus: Do you think you each could talk a little about your father’s impact on this process? What his music—his gigs, his life as a musician—meant to you, and to the two of you together? Tim, maybe you want to go first?

Tim: OK. I’m in a motel in Erie, Pennsylvania. Perfect time to reflect on daddy-o. Ben and I are from different batches, so we’ll have differing feelings on this. I moved to Georgia with my mom when I was seven, so I never had the musical training Ben got. But I know my inner mirror reflects pop’s freedom and giddiness. When I was little he was playing in rock and pop bands. It was the early 70s and I see sweaty longhairs playing 12 strings in sunny fields. So I  have a template for a musical lifestyle, but no real support. But I’m still inspired by him — the easy joy music brings him. He whistles “How High The Moon” absentmindedly when he’s doing dishes.

Ben: I owe a lot about what I know about music to my dad; maybe more than I can remember. I do remember coming home from school sometime after I turned 9, and playing electric bass in guitar lessons for other older kids in his little teaching studio on the way to the bathroom in the first floor of 28 George street.  I don’t really remember learning the basics on guitar, but I remember I could play it.  Also he claims to have taught me ear-training while listening to the country station in the car when I was five years old. I probably could have, and still could take advantage of his massive knowledge more, but even just living with him and eventually gigging with him was enough to be inspired by him.

Rumpus: I’m asking about your dad, because I keep thinking, in this context, of the big Dylan interview that David Gates did (1997, I believe), when Time Out of Mind came out, and Gates asked Dylan if he and son Jakob used to sit around and play songs together. My recollection of the moment in the interview is that Dylan is, if not offended, at least sort of non-plussed, and says, in effect: “Of course, what do you think we’d do?” So I’m wondering if musical stuff is a currency in the family, and way of talking about the world, and, e.g., if you ever all three play together?

Tim: Tim here. Well, you’re talking to someone for whom, until recently, music has a painful pathological ache. Writing Cuddle Magic lyrics was really my first way back INTO a musical family, from which somewhere deep inside I felt isolated. For years I was pretty embarrassed at my lack of facility, almost like a prodigal son who’s returned from his wanderings to find out he no longer understands his native language, though he speaks perfect Turkish. So, no, we rarely played together, because I was (and anyone who knows me will be shocked at this) shy about it. For me, I was writing songs before I was really playing music with other people. It took the Hootenanny that my wife started at the local pub to get me out into the world.

Rumpus: Well, I want to hear about Ben’s recollections of the “musical family,” too, if there are any more, but I’m wondering, Tim, if you can just expand on Lisa’s hootenanny at the local pub, what this means, what you experienced there, how the transition took place.

Ben: He also always encouraged me to do musical things. I took violin lessons when I was two. I had piano lessons when I was five. I got a tiny electric bass when I was nine. These are ages when a father’s influence must be present in a way for these things to even take place. I definitely remember playing with my father as being a teacher student kind of relationship. When I was in high-school and interested in jazz, he would play tunes with me. He would play piano and I would play bass. I remember him stressing the importance or rhythm and playing simply in order to be good at supporting the other musicians especially as a bass player. I remember playing some of my first gigs with him. Playing at a contra-dance or a swing dance. And being surprised at how free he was and how he never had a set-list or counted off tunes. Just went into them. I remember always comparing different teacher’s comments to his. Like one teacher wanted me to play longer notes, whereas Peter liked shorter ones. I also remember being exposed to all sorts of bands he was in growing up, as I went to festivals, dances, shows, or witnessed rehearsals in-which he was involved.

Rumpus: This is all really moving to me. In my family, there was musical aspiration, but not very much talent, so there was always a lot of casting around for answers to questions. I remember trying to get my mother to teach me how to count fives and sixes once, and she just wasn’t any good at it. All right, Tim, can you talk about the hootenanny and the dawning of musical interests in your adulthood some?

Tim: So here I am, a man for whom music is all wrapped up in an absent, divorced Dad; a poet who hasn’t been at all satisfied with what poetry is for in his culture. Along comes this much younger brother who is busy being as pure a musician as there is, and I start writing words for the melodies just leeching out of him. I am able to strap my writing into a vehicle that is driving down a long clear lovely road, and am able to feel in touch with being a musician. Meanwhile, I go see Vic Chesnutt, and am utterly blown away by how sly and aching a song can be at once; how smart and how real. The Greeks thought the soul lived in the phrenos, the diaphragm, and we westerners are always debating between the head and the heart. With Vic I knew immediately to split the difference: it’s in the throat. So for years I wrote for Ben’s throat from mine, taking placeholder lyrics and mashing them with Vic-y humor, flatulence and sorrow.

On my 40th birthday, Lisa [Sanditz, Tim’s wife] organized a hootenanny at the Black Swan, the local pub here in Tivoli. My father was there, and a roomful of local musical types. I was paralyzed with fear (and birthday heartburn) and refused to play. But thanks to John Rosenthal, a terrific local musician and the quiet Sunday night bartender, we kept going, playing every week. And the more I played and sang, the more physical the idea of songwriting became. I started writing ditties for the hootenanny crew, including a chronicle of locals called “Carpenter to the Stars.” so once I found I had a public voice, I found my private one. I started writing tons of songs, shuttling between piano and guitar when things got hard, and trying to be Vic Chesnutt in my throat.

Rumpus: Well, that is a very beautiful pair of paragraphs. Before we come back to specific songs, which I want to do (songs from Info Nympho), I want to ask Ben a little about the formation of Cuddle Magic. So Ben, can you recreate a little bit the way in which Cuddle Magic came about?

Ben: Cuddle Magic came about when me and Christopher [McDonald] started playing songs together in various configurations….

Some interesting people were on the scene, including Columbian percussionist Toupac, and Australian singer Sophia Brous, and inspiring midwestern table player Mike Pfaff.  There are some early recordings of some of the first “Cuddle Magic” songs with some of these and other fine musicians.

Then a few quick shuffles were made and we were recording “Sandinista” and “Lonely Red” in a practice room, including last minute addition of Alec Spiegelman coming down to record with us, stepping out from a Balkan brass band rehearsal he was in upstairs. After recording these songs it was obvious that we needed to record the rest of the “Cuddle Magic” self titled record together.

This line up has also morphed over the next two albums but has more or less stayed relatively consistent.

Cuddle magic’s existence was to build upon “sandinista” and other such songs, as the basis for its existence.  ”Sandinista” was a co-write with my brother, and musically it represents a certain relationship between simplicity and complexity, something complicated masked by something simple. So Tim’s lyrics are inherent in the existence of Cuddle Magic. So to answer your question of how soon, I would say immediately.

I was always so impressed with Tim’s ability to write clever lyrics that sounded good — to any melody I could come up with!

Sandinista was a very exciting time for us.

As far as the difference between what I was doing before…  Cuddle Magic’s sound, having to do with my specific collaborators, inspired me to develop material better than I had before.

Rumpus: Can we talk about a couple of specific songs? Maybe “Sandinista” is a good place to start? I’d like to hear exactly how the composition works, and how the collaboration is part thereof. So Ben, what did you have first? Melody? Or guitar part? Or are they identical?

Ben: I remember working on “Regular Unleaded” [from the band’s first album, Cuddle Magic] with Tim. We had an A and a B section, which I was trying to make the same length although they were in different time signatures. The A section was 8 measures of 7, the B section 7 measures of 4. There was this crooked piano groove with a sustained melodic pad on top of it, and I left Tim to work on the lyrics in a chapel with a piano. I wandered off to a swingset and while swinging, came up with the melody for the chorus. I jumped off the swings and ran back to the church and Tim had finished the lyrics.

This method of songwriting started with “Content/Contempt” [from Picture] I was studying tabla Tihais at the New England Conservatory and felt challenged to write songs that didn’t have traditional verse/ chorus/ bridge forms. So I bought a bunch of graph paper and started thinking about numbers. I came up with 10, 11, and 12. I thought those would be good numbers to have displacement and resolve within one pop song length. I started looking for the lowest common denominator. If the whole song had 660 beats, then 10 would go into that 66 times, 11 would go into it 60 times, and 12 would go into it 55 times. Before I had any melodic or harmonic content, I started thinking of ways to break up these 60 beats. Finally, I came up with 20 twelves, 20 elevens, and 20 tens. Three sections. This I turned into a piano part. Then dividing equally into the 60 elevens, I made up a melody in 11. It would start at the beginning of the song in the first section polyrhythmically against the 12. Because the first section was 240 beats long and not divisible by 11, the melody starting second section was out of phase. From there the whole composition was a balancing act of rhythmic complexities. I tried to make the song sound simple and beautiful despite its complex origins.

Rumpus: That’s the kind of answer I knew I was going to get eventually. And am excited to get. So, Tim, can you remember coming up with “Regular Unleaded” or “Content/Contempt” and what kinds of challenges do you face coming up with these incredibly unusual rhythms? I guess, considering your poetry was not in meter, this kind of lyric differs from what you were used to writing.

Tim: Cuddle Magic came along at a time of transition for me. I had spent a decade in New York as a downtown poet, writing in experimental forms and working in publishing. I began photographing — seriously taking pictures — in the New Directions office where I was an editor. I began to feel overwhelmed by how directly and thoroughly a photograph could communicate. Poetry had always been a set of anguishing exercises for me, a tightrope walk. Photography felt like sliding down a slope, gravitational and vivid, meditative and real. You make a photograph all at once, and when successful it’s as easy as swallowing. Writing is very very hard, with pitfalls all along the way. So when Ben and I started writing songs together, and I was given these strict rhythmic forms, it was a form of release. That movie about Temple Grandin taught me something about the process of writing in pre-set forms. The cows, even led to slaughter, are comfortable when penned in, constrained. Writing songs, which communicate directly to the emotions like photographs, in predetermined forms, helped me write with more ease, with more communicativeness and more directness. On the other hand, I new that the tone of my poetry — ironic, flatulent, goofy, punny — would make unexpected and strong song lyric writing. Again, I loved Vic Chesnutt, who wrote lines in songs like “Christian charity is a doily over my death boner.” So I wrote “Sandinista,” which is really a love song for my wife, Lisa Sanditz, but pretends to be about a hot terrorist: “Floating down a stream of love named/ for insurgent dames/ on the scent/ of the least resistance.”

Songwriting has helped me keep being a poet in a world where I long to actually communicate. Here’s the whole song:

Sandinista
You make me glad that I met ya
Adorable beast,  yeah

Hands and feet,  yeah
And all the bits in between,  yeah
Sandinista

Floating down a stream of love named
for insurgent dames
on the scent
of the least resistance

Sandinista
giddier than a drunk priest, yeah
And just a bit bleaker

You’re a guerilla
with a hot terrorist’s keester
Sandinista

I am just a hand grenade that
dangles while you dance
through the rain
of a fierce Nor’ easter
STANDING ON THE D.M.Z OF HOW YOU LUST FOR
STANDING ON THE D.M.Z OF HOW YOU LUST FOR ME

On the beach, ya
You caught a fish but released her
Sandinista

Sandinista
Watching you polish your piece, yeah
is like being kissed, yeah

Rumpus: Tim, so do you think, now, in terms of writing lyrics FOR Cuddle Magic, that is, to help Ben express what he’s already trying to express with the music, or are the themes your own to pursue? And if they are your own to pursue, how do you think about what constitutes a Cuddle Magic song for you?

Tim: I write the lyrics to Cuddle Magic songs with all the vectors I think any songwriter does. Sometimes Ben’s melody will come to me at a moment of content-richness. For example, we sat down to write together Christmas morning a few years ago, and I immediately got a call saying that Vic Chesnutt had successfully committed suicide. I felt totally paralyzed for a few hours, but then wrote “Disgrace Note,” all about suicides.

Disgrace Note

I can’t write a song
with Vic Chesnutt gone, no

The sun won’t stay down
Albert Ayler’s drowned, oh

Go screw God again
Richard Brautigan’s gone

Let it trouble you
D.F.W’s dun got gone

Donny Hathaway,
Margaux Hemingway  Stole themselves away

Walter Benjamin
sucking down morphine

Nikki Bacharach
in a plastic bag

Phil Loeb never rose
from his overdose

One shot to the head
Killed George Eastman dead picture it

Mary Margaret Ray
And then Spalding Gray, Stole themselves away

Breece DJ Pancake
never will awake

Darkness before noon
filled Arthur Koestler’s room

Are these choruses
Diane Arbus’s?

I can’t write a song
with Vic Chesnutt gone, way long gone
with no note of disgrace
the Late great Johnny Ace, Stole himself away

At other times, I feel the need to bring irony, wordplay, or humor, to a sonic world that is very complex, but gorgeous, sweet, and sincere. It’s almost an effort to make sure Cuddle Magic doesn’t sound like “Cuddle Magic.” So, for example, “The Packaging,” played for me by Ben while I was in a swimming pool, was about falling in love with product mascots.

The Packaging

When I met you I thought I had
maybe seen you around here
But there were no coincidences
that our two lives could spare

I asked about your upbringing
and barreled through your C.V.
But when your overcoat slipped off
You couldn’t it keep it from me

Argo Corn Starch® Indian
I feel I know you better than
most of the real life women that I’ve
met on this side of the packaging

There are some prejudices that
persist throughout my whole life
And one that I can’t seem to shake
is that bald guys look alike

But once while mopping up the floor
I almost lost my bearings
A rakish face looked out at me
with one seductive earring

I don’t want to make a scene
I have strong feelings, Mr. Clean
I melt like ice cream when you stare out
from your throne there on the packaging

Things are mostly things to me but
every once in a while
An object rears its ugly rear
and stands out in the pile

The hundredth bottle on the wall
might prove to be quite numbing
but one real shapely jug can make
a dead man keep on coming

Oh, Mrs. Butterworth shame on you
Leaving me sitting in sticky goo
Whenever I get my hands on you
I become one with the packaging

Sometimes a concept I have been working out in other realms meet up perfectly with something Ben is scratching at. That’s how it worked for “One Useful Song,” in which I tried to imagine the empirical uses for a song. I had written a poem called “One Useful Poem”:

One Useful Poem

Hey you fat fuck why not
recite this poem in semaphore
about 500 times?
One vigorous aerobic reading, w/ dumbbells
will burn off half a tub of slaw
Do it daily and you’ll look pithy

Once you’ve iced, transcribe this poem
around Grover Cleveland’s portrait oval on the
thousand dollar bill
and post it to Darfur
(Cleveland himself, BTW, at sixteen
had a job transcribing the blind
hymnnalist, Francis Jane “Fanny” Crosby’s poems
so you’re in good company)

OK. This poem kills fascists.

And it’s cellulose so it
absorbs gerbil whiz.
Fold it in your breast pocket
on the off chance its thickness
might divert stray
shrapnel off the Inferior vena cava

Poetry is the opposite of bureaucracy
so reading this reduces big government.

You might have a long boring experience
in a terminal or power outage
It might be nice to have a poem on a piece of paper
lying around. All flights are cancelled.
Even backup generators damaged in the blast.
You want to sit and listen to some hard earned silence.
Luckily, poetry, Maurice Blanchot diagnosed,
“protects against revelation.”

Revelation condom: Walt Whitman. Revelation
diaphragm: Emily Dickinson.
Poetry is prophylactic
also for your ears.
Don’t tell me you haven’t hated having
“Do You be-LIEVE in Life after Love?”
stuck in your head after passing a
supermarket or boutique.
This poem is scientifically formulated to be
Cher’s almost-posthumous comeback
ditty’s exact antidote.
So if you live within range of satellite radio
always have it onhand.

“Horned owls have one ear that opens up and one
that opens down.”
That’s Marianne Moore in “The Student,” her
attempt to tangle up poetry and fact.
Ms. Moore quoted Dewey in her diary:
“Surely there is no more significant question…than…the reconciliation of the attitudes of practical science and contemplative aesthetic appreciation.”
She then wrote, “Swordfish are different from
gars.” But why bother?
This poem, printed in an unread magazine or
small press chapbook
and stored in boxes in my basement
is as factual as anything you can name.
As practical as ballast.
I wonder if walls weren’t the first facts.
Build one with this.

“One Useful Song” was much less angry, less doctrinal about why a work of art fails to be useful:

If  you were/ waiting for a plane/ stuck in terminal B with nothing but your palm to read/ you could sing this song to me/ instead of staring at the TV
Let’s say you/ got lost while camping/ it might be tempting to panic out there all alone/ but CDs reflect the sun/ use this one to Mayday home

How could this song be more/ than musical decor, or sonic petits four/ Could it have some real use/ like a foolproof excuse/ or bulletproof glass at the liquor store?

This song could/ contain some secret code/ which the powers that be don’t know informs our operatives/ that it is unsafe to give/ your real name if taken captive
If you have/ Jingle bells in your mind/ this song could neutralize/ that toxic little melody/ it’s kind of a remedy/ for the corporate licensing fee

How could this song be more/ than musical decor, or sonic petits four/ Could it have some real use/ like a foolproof excuse/ or bulletproof glass at the liquor store?

Rumpus: Ben, I was going to ask about “Disgrace Note,” which may well be my favorite song on the new album, and I was wondering if you could describe what your reaction is upon getting a lyric like Tim’s—so challenging, so heartrending. Do you feel it completed the song you had in mind, or took the song in another direction entirely?

Ben: “Disgrace Note” was written much like “Content/Contempt” — phrasing first… and then melody/chords/arrangement after.

I had the entire song (arrangement, drumbeat and all) when I brought it to Tim. I had some other more incomplete seeds of songs with me too. It was during that few days that we had planned on writing songs together that Tim learned about Vic’s suicide. It was kind of a no brainer that the song should deal with the issue for Tim and soon we had, “I can’t write a song with Vic Chesnutt gone no”. from there Tim brought up a huge list of names of suicide victims on Wiki.

I remember being so satisfied by the emotional strength of the lyrics of “Disgrace Note,” which sometimes can get lost in the genius of Tim’s wittiness in other songs. This song had both.

Rumpus: What do you think the songwriting means to you guys as brothers? And what does it mean for the band?

Ben: Well, songwriting is about creating a little world for a few minutes that music can live in. Sculpting that time into a shape that flows forward in a certain way until it is over. It is the taking of separate parts, the lyrical ideas, the emotional idea, the sounds, the rhythms, the forms, the melodies, and putting them all together into one thing.

It’s about the process, and how you get to the end point as much as the end point itself.

Rumpus: Tim?

Tim: I’ve never collaborated with anyone before. Photographers a are pretty solitary lot, drifting through the world like big gaping open mouthed whales. So the opportunity to work with someone else is genuinely thrilling. The fact I genuinely trust and admire that collaborator is even better. And that he’s my brother is cream on the cream. But there’s more. I love Cuddle Magic, the band. I could easily imagine working on these songs and then finding them in embarrassing treatments by idiots. But the songs go into this crazy musical mixing chamber and come out just played so goddamn well. I just got to have a bunch of Cuddle Magicians on my record, and they each brought so many good ideas and so much pure musicianship. It was pure and perfect. Alec and Cole wrote and played the horn arrangements, Kristen worked on the backing vocals. They’re like a roving band of musical hobos who happen to be trained geniuses.

Ben: Songwriting with my brother is such an amazing thing because it allows me to share in the making of creative projects with my brother. He has always been an inspiring person to be around, and has an adventurous spirit! I remember when we went camping long ago in the everglades, he convinced me to sneak into a campground late at night. Artistically I think he is very brave and takes risks that some other people wouldn’t take, lyrically going where he isn’t supposed to go. And in the same way that I try to make complex musical ideas ‘work’ by making them sound simple, I think he is able to make complicated ideas fit abstractly into the tight puzzle that is the rhythmic schemes of my songs.

It’s a relationship I cherish greatly. I think not that many people get to share with their family such an intimate and important aspect of their life. I’m excited about what the future has in store for us. Can’t wait to build more on the templates we have been developing for collaboration!

Related Posts:

• Swinging Modern Sounds #44: And Another Day
• Swinging Modern Sounds #42: Hey Man, I Thought That You Were Dead
• Swinging Modern Sounds #41: Utopian Communities
• Swinging Modern Sounds #40: A Miscellany of Musical Thoughts that Will Not Otherwise Appear
• Swinging Modern Sounds #39: Interview Within an Interview

***

This is what the sky looked like.

Who can prove I am still alive?

Do you have expectations?

Can I tell you one other story?

I want to let my Bulgarian friends know—

The world is full of magical things.

Identity is one of life’s great milestones;

Postcards are my attempt to fight back.

My mother suffered from dementia;

She hated being called nice,

And then it was over.

An actor in white suede rubs his chest hair—

With all the wildflowers in bloom

I can hear my neighbor listen to porn.

A cesspool of sin is nothing unusual,

Another day of battle at high school,

Hey, there’s some salmon right there,

I see the high pressure front coming in,

Why not stick in a paw?

If you sit at the table you take some bad beats.

He kicked me, he dragged me through the woods.

Pain is not a punishment,

Pleasure is not a reward.

Human moments are strung across an abyss.

Maybe heavy drinking?

Wanna pick up girls?

Is an action a confession?

You are midway to a creature home,

Trained in subterfuge

Now the door is the known land,

The unknown is reduced to a nervous system—

Fingerprints, are they an outgoing obligation?

Admitting to loneliness is admitting that

The sky is beginning—

I love the word gloaming.

***

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