The Pixies Return

Here Comes Your Band
The Pixies Return As Indie Darlings
by Adam Perry for Boulder Weekly
11/11/09

It’s true, there was great American rock in the years leading up to grunge, but the reason sweetly-fierce alt-hardcore bands like the Pixies never made it big in the mainstream is complicated. Sure, if Black Francis had been a little more attractive and a lot more depressed, it’s perfectly reasonable to believe the Pixies would’ve beat out Nirvana as the cold water to rock n’ roll’s face that killed off the barrage of pop-metal nonsense. Let’s be real: “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (which Kurt Cobain admitted was a Pixies parody just before his death) was a killer song, but the Pixies were among a significant number of groups that emerged before Nirvana and were arguably better than the subsequent multi-platinum “alternative” bands from Seattle.

In 1993, no less than David Bowie, who has covered the Pixies, remarked to a French magazine “when I heard Nevermind from Nirvana for the first time, I was really, really angry. This was a total Pixies rip-off.” You simply can’t argue with the Goblin King himself.

So what caused the Pixies (formed 23 years ago in Boston) to release five imaginative and affecting albums from 1987-1991 and then call it quits, having never tasted widespread success? Francis has said that his main influences were Iggy Pop and the Beatles, but most of the uniquely violent and cuddly tunes he wrote for the Pixies included bursts of abrasive hardcore-inspired music that was much heavier than Funhouse or “Helter Skelter.” In fact, Nirvana even hired Steve Alibini to produce In Utero because of his brilliant engineering work on the Pixies’ incredible 1988 album Surfer Rosa but ended up remixing the whole record because it sounded too harsh.

In other words, spastic charges of razor-sharp guitar and lyrics about “gigantic” black penises and “tattooed tits” don’t sell in the States, even if they show flashes of genius. “Here Comes Your Man” made it onto MTV for a while, but unlike Nirvana the Pixies didn’t really have any radio-ready hits to follow it, and thus the Pixies were relegated to cult-hero status while those who road on the coat-tails of their sound (from Blur to Bush) became millionaires.

Still, despite the Pixies’ bittersweet career, one thing’s for sure: 1989’s Doolittle is a true American masterpiece. NME named it the 2nd best album of all-time a few years ago, and its darkly-themed screamo-infused pop has deeply influenced everyone from Radiohead to Weezer.

Talking about his love of the Pixies in the band’s 2006 documentary loudQUIETloud, U2’s Bono said that the Pixies were “one of America’s greatest-ever bands” and featured “one of America’s greatest-ever songwriters.” Those facts are no more apparent than on Doolittle, which includes at least five bona-fide underground classics in “Debaser,” “Here Comes Your Man,” “Wave of Mutilation,” “Monkey Gone to Heaven,” and “No. 13 Baby.” Just in terms of songwriting, Francis took the most experimental aspects of the Talking Heads and David Bowie and infused it with early-80’s American punk; but as a band the Pixies coalesced brilliantly to create one loud, original sound on Surfer Rosa and Doolittle.

It’s one thing to lament the fact that Doolittle was the blueprint for many far-more commercially successful alt-rock bands that followed the Pixies, but a superior option is to just put the record on and be blown away by the simultaneously jagged, soulful, brash, charming, wicked and spiritual world that Francis and Co. created. Even better, you can see the reunited Pixies perform Doolittle in its entirety at the Fillmore in Denver on Monday and Tuesday.

The band broke up amid in-fighting and substance abuse in 1993, at least partly due to Francis’ lack of inclusivity when it came to songwriting, but their ongoing reunion has brought the story behind the break-up to light. To begin with, talented bassist/singer Kim Deal, who would go on to front the platinum-selling Breeders, wanted more of her own original work on the Pixies’ albums. Francis, born in 1965 as Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV (a given name only outshined in popular music by Brian Eno’s Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno), wasn’t interested in democracy.

In 2006, long-underrated Pixies lead guitarist Joey Santiago told Mojo that Deal “wanted to include her own songs, to explore her own world, [but] the way Charles saw it, the band made pizzas, not cookies. In the end, Kim realized it was Charles’ bag, that he was the singer.”

Near the end of their first go-round as a band, the Pixies started getting more recognition as an important American band; they even played stadiums while opening for U2 on their 1992 Zoo TV tour. However, the animosity between Francis and Deal was too much, and in 1993 Francis told the BBC that the Pixies were breaking up, informing Deal of the news via fax, which he later owned up to regretting. Francis went on to a diverse and occasionally incredible solo career as Frank Black, utilizing what Kristin Hersh once called his ability to “write any song in any genre and make it fly,” but the influence and attraction of the Pixies only grew in their years apart.

The band’s 2004 reunion tour was a massive success; somewhat like Rage Against the Machine’s comeback, the Pixies’ second turn as indie darlings has included a large amount of high-paying festival gigs and multi-night runs in major cities. The group, who are now all on good terms with one another, have only released one new original song since 1992 (2004’s iTunes-only “Bam Thwok”) but plan to record a new album next year.

Living up to his customary capriciousness, Francis repeatedly stated last year that the Pixies reunion was over. He told the NME “whatever we do in the future is gonna have to be fresh. I have to see if the band as a whole wants to go into the recording studio for a new record. That makes sense on some level. For us, there’s gotta be an angle. It can’t be just playing our old songs over and over.”

Maybe playing one old album over and over is a way for the Pixies to duck Francis’ self-imposed standards. Either way, it’ll be a blast.

Christmas from the Embryo

I’m finally writing CD reviews again, and they’re short ones for the Albuquerque Alibi (Albuquerque Weekly). Alibi is a great paper run by smart, friendly people I’m excited to work more closely with once I make the physical move from Colorado to New Mexico later this month. Anyway, here are my first two shorties for Alibi:

The Flaming Lips – Embryonic
Release Date: Oct. 13, 2009

A keystone in the wall of weirdness the Flaming Lips have built over the past 25 years has been the Oklahoma band’s unique ability to juxtapose bizarre music and lyrics with cathartic optimism in songs like “Do You Realize??” However, the band’s 13th album, last month’s Embryonic, stunningly takes their notorious weirdness to hell and leaves listeners there, surrounded by dark and versatile psychedelic rock. Embryonic – somewhere between early Floyd and Miles Davis’ Get Up With It – turns ecstatic and eccentric frontman Wayne Coyne’s usual oddball tales of love saving the world upside down with lines like “I believe in nothing” and “love is powerful, but not as powerful as evil.”

Bob Dylan – Christmas in the Heart
Release Date: Oct. 13, 2009

To the surprise of virtually everyone, Bob Dylan recently took time from his “Never-Ending Tour” to record a collection of holiday standards called Christmas in the Heart. The album’s proceeds are going to charity, and as he approaches 70, it’s nice to know that Dylan is apparently still having fun. Just learning about this album’s impending release was enough to brighten curious smiles and raise the eyebrows of fans who probably thought “the dark prince of folk-rock, the former protest singer and reluctant voice of a generation recorded ‘Silver Bells’ and ‘Here Comes Santa Claus?’” But between Dylan’s gravel-gargling voice and his cheesy backup singers, Christmas in the Heart is mostly just terrifying. Please hide this album from children.

Diane Klammer Reviews “Fotographs of Bones”

Yesterday the wonderful Diane Klammer, author of Monkey Puzzle Press’ latest stellar book of poetry Shooting the Moon, wrote this fantastic blurb about my recent collection Fotographs of Bones:

“Adam Perry manages to break through the barrier of the real to the surreal without losing a bit of authenticity. The literary experience he gives the reader is touching, startling, immediate and completely unique. This is an electric journey. To go, you don’t need the drugs, you don’t need the booze, you don’t need the sensory deprivation chamber. All you need is this book.”

INTERZONE Interview

Interzone, the Naropa University writing & poetics department’s official newsletter, is published twice a year and usually features student, faculty and alumni news, plus a feature interview. This fall, the wonderful Megan DiBello (an MFA student at Naropa) interviewed me for Interzone and about half of our conversation ended up as the November, 2009 Interzone interview. You can see the entire issue here, or just check out the interview below:

Megan DiBello: When did you start writing?

Adam Perry: I didn’t start writing poems until I was about 19. I lived in West Virginia for about five months and hated it there; I felt really isolated and started writing mostly cut-up poems, having been a huge fan of William Burroughs. I began submitting my poems to small print magazines and online journals and had a lot of success, which led to correspondence with some really great and knowledgeable people, like Charles Potts (who ran The Temple Magazine out of Walla Walla, WA) and Steve Silberman, a poet-turned-journalist who was Allen Ginsberg’s teaching assistant at Naropa for a while in the late 70’s. When I made the huge decision to drop out of Pitt move to San Francisco at 21 years old–having never been west of the Mississippi before and knowing only one person in California–both my poetry and my journalism came to a near halt as I focused on “finding myself,” finding work and being in all kids of San Francisco rock bands as a drummer.

Last year, I decided to go back to writing again and finish my degree and figured Naropa was the best place to do it. I’ve been incredibly inspired not only by the unique and powerful teachers here, like Bhanu Kapil and Maureen Owen, but also the community of artists and activists that have made me feel at home. People like Joyce Joseph, Aimee Herman, Tiffani Parish, Rebecca Diaz and many others–they’re all creative activists and authentic warriors in their own way; they’ve all been able to not only prove they can do the “college” thing of retaining and regurgitating information, but they’ve also been able to develop original voices, which doesn’t happen at most colleges. So we all challenge and inspire each other, and I think we all feel like the sacred honesty we engage in together manifests in our work. I remember last April, when a bunch of us were celebrating the release of Fotographs of Bones, a collection of my work that ended up being the first-ever book from Monkey Puzzle Press. To me, it felt far better to have the poets I love the most in Boulder read a few things of their own and then read from my book than it might have felt to have a night of my own, celebrating me. Saying “you’re all in this book” to a room full of friends and meaning it was unforgettable.

MD: What is your involvement in the community?

AP: I’ve participated in a few marches and played a few benefit concerts as a guitarist and (sometimes) singer in the little acoustic duo my girlfriend and I started last year, but compared to my hardcore activist friends – especially the amazing Ryan Hartman – my involvement in the community is nil. Since returning to school I’ve returned to freelance journalism, having arts & culture articles published just about every week in Westword, Boulder Weekly, the Daily Camera and a few newspapers in New Mexico, and it’s nice to meet people who already feel like they know me from reading my articles or my blog, but I’m not sure if interviewing the Fleet Foxes and Girl Talk or getting into Red Rocks free to review the Flaming Lips really counts as community involvement. Being a musician and suffering from the serious affliction known as music geekdom is fun, and it gets me a little money and a lot of albums and concert tickets, but there have only been a few times when I wrote something that made me feel like I was engaged in the community. The sad thing is that I’ve had to fight to get those kinds of articles – like the ones I’ve done this year on Yoga World Reach or Naropa’s alternative spring break in New Orleans – into the local newspapers.

MD: How do you keep writing as a career while at the same time attending school?

AP: I could be doing a lot more freelance work if I wasn’t in school, but it’s been nice to have a steady stream of articles to add to my portfolio–having the cover story for Boulder Weekly twice in a few months ain’t too shabby–and steadily develop contacts at publications around the country.

MD: What will you do after Naropa?

AP: Well, the due dates are questionable, but around the same time as graduation in December I’m going to be a father! I met my girlfriend the day I arrived in Boulder, on a cold January afternoon, and the indescribable journey we’ve been on (as partners and independently as artists and people) will fittingly end with a beginning. I’ll be leaving Naropa with so much I couldn’t have dreamed of when I left San Francisco for Colorado: a daughter, a beautiful published book of poetry, a substantial amount of student loans to pay back, and an incredible woman I want to spend the rest of my life with. I’m looking for a more full-time job in media or academia, most likely in San Francisco, Boulder or New Mexico, although we’re fairly open to moving somewhere totally new.

MD: Pros & Cons of Your Career?

AP: Getting paid to share your opinions and your passions is always great. And yesterday I got a gracious email from Ween thanking me for saying some honest things about them in a recent article. That kind of thing is better than money, but obviously money is where the cons start when you talk about a writing career.

At the beginning of this semester I was offered the A&E Editor position at Boulder Weekly, the kind of steady job in journalism I’d been dreaming of for years, but as the reality of taking the position got closer and the details became more clear, staying in school made more sense. Not to steer anyone away from writing, but in many cases you can make more money working at McDonald’s, and that’s not an exaggeration. Years ago, a painfully low-paying gig as an entertainment editor would’ve been perfect for me– and the guy Boulder Weekly hired after I turned the job down is young, smart, energetic and perfect for the job – but with a family and student loans to take care of, writing the kinds of articles I write now might be something I do as supplemental income while I do something else. Writing about music in particular is something I’d be doing whether I got paid for it or not, as music is as valuable and integral in my life as oxygen and writing just seems to be in my blood, but I’m not yet sure if a career solely in writing is in my future. Honestly, I’d love to work at Naropa in some fashion if they’d have me. Some kind of journalism class and/or program here would be fun to teach, and the prospect of a Naropa student newspaper is really exciting. There are so many great writers here and so many interesting people to write about and stories to tell.

Bob Dylan in Denver, October 2009

BALLAD OF AN OLD, THIN MAN
Bob Dylan in Denver, October 22nd, 2009
by Adam Perry for Boulder Weekly

Last Thursday night at Magness Arena on the campus of Denver University, my daughter experienced her first Bob Dylan concert…from the womb. It took 19 years on Earth for me to see a Dylan show – at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh, PA back in 1999 – and the old man’s Denver show last week was my fifth. I’ve now seen Dylan play in four states, but the current version of his touring band, and the 68-year old’s contributions to their eclectic performances, was something totally unexpected.

Launching into an explosive version of “Stuck Inside of Mobile” (from 1967’s Blonde On Blonde), it was clear Dylan and his band have their fire back. Lead guitarist Charlie Sexton, a highlight of Dylan’s touring outfit in the late 90’s and early 00’s who recently re-joined Dylan after a couple years away, lent the kind of dynamic improvisation and stage-presence that Dylan’s shows had been missing since Sexton and Larry Campbell both left for other projects. At times, Dylan chose to do an instrumental verse and just let Sexton fly, which was almost always exciting and entertaining, especially with brilliant young New Orleans-bred drummer George Recile supporting and responding to Sexton’s solos.

However, what really struck me at Magness Arena was Dylan’s unprecedented foray into Vegas-style lead-singer mode. For most of this decade, Dylan has played the bulk of his shows from behind an electric piano, but on about half of the songs he sang in Denver, Dylan chose to play neither guitar nor piano, opting instead to stand front and center, singing and erratically dancing while his band played. When you combine how Dylan squats, sways, gestures wildly with one arm and generally utilizes weird and hilarious mannerisms with his completely unpredictable (and sometimes awful) enunciations of incredible lyrics, the result is something you have to see and hear in person to believe. Amidst this spectacular quasi-karaoke incarnation of Bob Dylan, or perhaps because of it, my partner’s giddy exclamation of “look at his little knees moving!” was perhaps the highlight of the evening, along with our daughter literally kicking in time along to several songs inside her mother’s belly.

Dylan only played two songs (“Beyond Here Lies Nothin’” and “Jolene”) from his latest original album, April’s Together Through Life, and thankfully declined to perform anything from his strange new Christmas collection, which is as captivating as it is horrifying. As usual, Dylan played completely re-worked versions of some of the best songs in his massive catalog, including versions of “Cold Irons Bound” and “Honest With Me” that featured arrangements and attitudes reminiscent of the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,” “High Water” and other songs smartly featured the kind of thick, penetrating swing only a drummer like Recile can pull off, and “It Ain’t Me Babe” (which was virtually undistinguishable until the chorus) featured Dylan on guitar, filling in the instrumental gaps with his charmingly oddball idea of improvised melodies.

It’s thrilling how Dylan chooses to be challenged and inspired by Sexton and Recile every night as part of what he does for a living; looking at Dylan in his big black feathered fedora in those deep moments, singing lines like “my bewildering brain toils in vain through the darkness on the pathways of life,” it was hard not to be amazed that in two years we’ll be celebrating the 50th anniversary of his eponymous Columbia Records debut.

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Personal Bias: I’m writing my final thesis at Naropa University this semester on Bob Dylan’s lyrics 1997-2009
Random Detail: Dylan has closed almost every show for the past 20-some years with “Like a Rolling Stone” and/or “All Along the Watchtower,” and his attempts to sing the latter in a hollow, staccato kind of devious voice just make it sound terrible
By The Way: “Workingman’s Blues #2″ is turning into a classic, and the plight of the American economy is helping it along
Also: I need a real camera. Donations are welcome.

SETLIST
Bob Dylan
10/22/09 – Magness Arena
Denver, Colorado

Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again
It Ain’t Me, Babe
Beyond Here Lies Nothin’
Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)
Cold Irons Bound
Workingman’s Blues #2
High Water (for Charlie Patton)
Spirit On The Water
Honest With Me
Man In The Long Black Coat
Highway 61 Revisited
When The Deal Goes Down
Thunder On The Mountain
Ballad Of A Thin Man

Encore:
Like A Rolling Stone
Jolene
All Along The Watchtower

Please Sir, Some Words About “Fotographs of Bones,” please?

As some of you may know, I don’t spend all of my time getting paid by newspapers like Westword and Boulder Weekly to be a hopeless music geek. This fall I’m graduating from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, a Buddhist-inspired Liberal Arts college whose writing & literature program was founded in the early 1970’s by Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs. Such diverse, talented, intelligent and brave creative writers as Bhanu Kapil, Michelle Pierce and Maureen Owen have been my guides at Naropa (teaching me about hybrid prose, experimental forms, and walls of words, respectively)…and all three of those fabulous women writers were kind enough to write blurbs for the back of my poetry collection Fotographs of Bones, which was released by Monkey Puzzle Press earlier this year.

Former Naropa student Nate Jordon, Editor (or Monkey) in Chief at Monkey Puzzle, has been perhaps the single most hard-working and integral figure in the Boulder independent publishing scene for the last few years. Now approaching its 8th edition, Monkey Puzzle Magazine has been selling a solid 400-500 copies an issue, handling thousands of submissions from several continents, and in truth serving as Naropa’s official literary journal. Nate also began an increasingly successful run of solo books this year with Fotographs of Bones, which Irene and I presented at May’s Green Panda Poetry Conference in Cleveland, and later Travis Cebula’s Some Exits.

As Nate gets ready to unveil Monkey Puzzle Press’ newest solo book (Diane Klammer’s Shooting the Moon), he’s urged me to request that readers of Beautiful Buzz take a couple stray minutes to review Fotographs of Bones on Amazon.com. It’d really mean a lot in terms of visibility, and I can’t begin to tell you how much Nate Jordon deserves the support.

If you’re interested reading (and/or buying and/or commenting on) Fotographs of Bones, check out some Youtube videos of the book-release party we held at Saxy’s Cafe in Boulder back in April. There was music from Nate Cook of Ego vs Id; Joyce Joseph; Nara Bauer; Fabio Fina; and Nate Antar, along with readings from my book by many amazing Boulder poets, including Irene Joyce, who (unbeknownst to anyone but her and I) was already joyfully carrying our daughter who is due in December:

Rusted Root: Tribal Rhythms & 6 Super Bowls

Tribal Rhythms & 6 Super Bowls:
Rusted Root is Still Here
by Adam Perry for Boulder Weekly
10/15/09

Leaving the Fox Theatre after Dr. Dog’s fabulous (and packed) performance Monday night, it was hard to escape the realization that the current batch of diverse North American rock bands (which also includes Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, Fleet Foxes, Yeasayer and countless others) is better than any we’ve had since the late 1960s. Much of the “alternative rock” revolution of the 1990’s was a sham, or at least pales in comparison to the plethora of transcendent new groups currently touring and recording.

It’s clear now that, while underground bands like the Minutemen, Black Flag and Sonic Youth unequivocally kicked ass, much of what passed for rock n’ roll in the 1980s was so incredibly awful that Pearl Jam and Nirvana looked like infallible geniuses when they arrived in the early 90s.

In addition, back then we were made to believe that flash-in-the-pan neo-hippie wonders like Blind Melon, the Spin Doctors, and even Pittsburgh’s Rusted Root, with their 1995 MTV hit “Send Me On My Way,” were their generation’s Grateful Dead.

But, as the cliché goes, where are they now?

Rusted Root opened for the Dead on the late Jerry Garcia’s final tour, and When I Woke, with its impressive percussion, endearing flute solos and gibberish vocal rave-ups, made the top 40 in early 1995. Former Talking Head Jerry Harrison skillfully produced 1996’s Remember, which also cracked the top 40, but Rusted Root’s unique tribal rhythms and jam-rock grooves slowly turned into streamlined hippie pop. Sadly for Pittsburgh natives, Rusted Root failed to become the first-ever mega-successful rock band from the Steel City; and, other than math-rock deities Don Caballero, no Pittsburgh act hit the big time between Rusted Root and newcomer Girl Talk.

Not everyone would be proud to have been partly-responsible for inspiring the String Cheese Incident and dozens of other now-stereotypical “tribal” jam-pop bands. But Rusted Root co-founder and front-man Michael Glabicki recently told me that the band’s influence on the polarizing jamband phenomenon, which was just beginning as Rusted Root emerged in the early-90’s, doesn’t seem un-credited.

“I think it goes pretty noticed,” Glabicki said. “We are an original band [and] that connects to a lot of other original styles and bands. People enjoy hanging with us. I think because people can’t really attach us to any one particular genre the only thing we get credit for is being ourselves…and that’s fine with me.”

Glabicki also told me that coming from an underrated American city like Pittsburgh and then remaining there even as Rusted Root found considerable mainstream success still makes total sense.

“Pittsburgh is the great incubator,” he noted. “It spawns and rewards a good work ethic with originality…hence Rusted Root and six Super Bowls. We love it!”

Rusted Root’s latest album, this spring’s Stereo Rodeo, is their first studio album since 2002’s critically and commercially disappointing pop-heavy effort Welcome to My Party. Along with an exceptional cover of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds,” the “world-beat” aspect of the group’s sound is highlighted on the new 11-song collection. The inclusion of ecstatic lyrics, trademark late-era Talking Heads-meets-Santana grooves and percussion virtuosity recalls what made Rusted Root a remarkable and influential outfit in the first place.

However, Stereo Rodeo has more of a contemporary singer-songwriter feel than early Rusted Root, as if Glabicki was writing poetry while traveling through Europe and later juxtaposed it with rock music when the band got together.

“Yes, some of the songs were written exactly that way,” Glabicki admits. “’Animals Love Touch’ I wrote in Spain. It was definitely many different times and places for the writing. In general the songs were more intended to be solo songs at first. I explored the intimacy of them on solo tours in front of smaller audiences and decided later to bring them to the band. There is a lot of that intimacy retained on the album ‘cause the band was very responsive to it.”

Still, what immediately stands out in a good Rusted Root recording or performance is the extraordinary drumming the group has always been known for. Although acclaimed percussionist Jim Donovan is no longer behind the kit, Jason Miller (who teaches percussion at Mt. Lebanon High School in suburban Pittsburgh) has been admirably filling Donovan’s shoes since 2006 and repeatedly elevates Stereo Rodeo. Although, according to Glabicki, Rusted Root’s long-celebrated percussion section is actually the result of his eccentric guitar playing, which sometimes resembles Bob Weir’s oddball approach.

“The drumming in Rusted Root almost always stems from the rhythm of the acoustic guitar,” Glabicki said. “Jim [Donovan] is a great drummer [but] the great thing was the amount of time Jim and I spent in a room working stuff out. That’s what I think is unique about Rusted Root…that the acoustic guitar becomes more the backbone and the drums are sympathetic to it.”

As for the Elvis cover?

“I started playing it during a sound-check,” Glabicki explains. “I turned to the drummer and asked him to play a Latin beat and that was pretty much it. We played it that night and the fans loved it. At that point I felt like we had to put it on the album. Looking forward to bringing it to Colorado.”

That’s Not Bob Dylan

Thanks to Maureen Owen for giving me the assignment last week of writing a poem about or in the style of the blues. I got to thinking about the myth of the wandering bluesman (i.e. Robert Johnson, etc.) who walked this country with an acoustic guitar on their back and trauma in their blood. And then I remembered that this past summer our own living legend Bob Dylan was arrested for walking. And thus…

“I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like They Never Have Met)”
Based On A True Story
by Adam Perry
10/12/09

The poet-laureate of rock n’ roll is 68 years old
and released a #1 album in June
that includes a song called “It’s All Good”
and the line “hell is my wife’s home town.”
He’s still freewheelin’ like a complete unknown:

just as Charlie Patton rumbled through Mississipi,
Bob Dylan is still walkin’ dead streets
through the middle of nowhere,
through summer nights,
until his eyes begin to bleed
from playing over 100 shows a year.

Seems like a nice old man
and it’s true:
he’s on your block
just checkin’ out the houses
& enjoying some time out of mind
before his July gig at the local minor-league ballpark.

Dylan has written over 500 songs,
sold over 100 million albums,
played for the Pope and even won an Oscar.
He’s been divorced twice;
he almost died of a heart condition in 1997;
he found Jesus once and then lost him;
and now he’s content to ramble through small towns in the rain
like a folk-rock relic from a bygone era,
a wandering multi-millionaire suburban homesick bluesman
steppin’ over pavement, thinkin’ ‘bout the government
while you try to make the rent.

But wait…
Bob Dylan is walkin’ right into your yard;
not for shelter from the storm – just to look around
because there’s a “For Sale” sign out front.
He leaves, but you call the police:
“Hello, 911? There’s an old Jewish man,
about 70 years old in a blue hooded sweatshirt
walking down my street.”

Things have changed:
nobody just “walks around” anymore –
especially not in New Jersey.
There must be something wrong with the joker man
whose hoodie strings are blowin’ in the wind
as he discovers your neighborhood.

You follow the thin man, the rolling stone
down the block as he whistles and rolls his eyes.
A 24-year old female police officer takes the emergency call
and rolls up next to Dylan in her cruiser while you watch.

“What is your name, sir?” she asks.
“Bob Dylan,” he replies.
She doesn’t believe him.
“We see a lot of people on our beat,
and I wasn’t sure if he came from one of our hospitals or something,”
she later says.

“What are you doing here?” she asks him from her car.
“I’m on tour,” Dylan calmly shoots back, saying he has no ID;
he was just enjoying an afternoon stroll
rather than sittin’ in his hotel room gathering dust
or knockin’ on room service’s door.

“He was acting very suspicious,” the officer said later.
“Not delusional, just suspicious. You know,
it was pouring rain and everything.
To be honest with you, I didn’t really believe it was Bob Dylan.
It never crossed my mind that it could really be him.”

And now
the guy who pretended to be Woody Guthrie as a teenager
and then struggled with fame
as he refused to be “the voice of a generation”
and spent 8 years at home with his kids
during Woodstock and Watergate
is taken away in a New Jersey police car
for growing old as he walks down the drizzly street.

As the policewoman drives Bob Dylan to his hotel to find his ID,
they make small talk.
“He was really nice,” she says in hindsight.
“He asked me if I could drive him back to the neighborhood
when I verified who he was,
which made me even more suspicious.
But I pulled into the parking lot
and sure enough there were these enormous tour buses,
and I thought, ‘Whoa.’”

This never happened to Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf;
actually, the police probably would’ve held those bluesmen,
the last generation’s living legends,
at gunpoint for having the nerve to walk down the street.
But the young officer simply had a sergeant meet her -
and Bob Dylan –
at the hotel.
He opened the car door, looked inside at the rock legend
and said “that’s not Bob Dylan.”
They entered Dylan’s tour bus, were shown his passport
and told him “um, have a nice day.”

“I did not know what to believe
or where he was coming from
or even who he was,” the female officer later said,
and Dylan must be smiling.

Walking with Allen Ginsberg
through the cemetery in Lowell, Massachusetts
where Jack Kerouac is buried, Dylan once mused
“I want an unmarked grave.”
Look out your window:
sometime soon,
the hermetic rock star just might be on your street,
testing you to see if he’s succeeded.

Jolie Holland, Your Pizza’s Ready!

Jolie Holland (with opener Matt Bauer)
The Walnut Room
Saturday, October 10th, 2009
by Adam Perry for Westword

Better Than: Walking from Market St. Station to Walnut & 31st in the cold that postponed game 3 of the NLDS

No one shines like Brooklyn-based indie-folk goddess Jolie Holland. Just as Neil Young was the depth and edge of CSNY, Holland was the stand-out talent in the Canadian all-girl alt-folk group the Be Good Tanyas and for the last half-decade has excelled on her own. Last fall, Holland drew a large crowd to the Boulder Theater on the heels of her latest record (The Living and the Dead) and impressively nailed spot-on versions of most of that album’s songs, even though she was so under the weather that coughing between verses became a theme. Saturday night at the Walnut Room in Denver, Holland was healthy and full of attitude, and the vibe was at once magical and slightly heartbreaking: someone shouted out “you’re bigger than this venue!” early in Holland’s 80-minute set, and the singer-songwriter’s frequent banter included repeated complaints about having to tour-manage herself; having a certifiably insane current schedule of “five weeks with one night off”; and having to take the wheel for all-night drives to the next city, as she did after the Walnut gig to reach Sunday’s concert in Omaha. In essence, Holland mesmerized the devoted Denver audience as usual, but at times the reality of her increasingly mismanaged career made the caress of her dream-like voice seem bitter-sweet.

Holland’s infinitesimally small group of modern female singer-songwriter peers, including Neko Case and Feist, headline the Ogden and the Fillmore when passing through Denver. Sadly (although not for her fans), Saturday night Holland played a beautiful set of geniusly-crafted Southern indie-folk for just over a hundred people in an intimate (and incredible sounding) space where she and guitarist Grey Gersten were routinely interrupted by music and chatter from the adjoined-pizza restaurant.

Holland trembled and curled her lip as she sang unique throwback ballads like “Sweet Loving Man” and “Alley Flowers”; Gersten played with eerie improvised melodies by her side with a black and white Specimen Products guitar, sounding like a swirling mix of Jerry Garcia and Marc Ribot. The drop-dead gorgeous Holland once asked “What’s going on in there?” when the door between the venue and Walnut’s restaurant opened, letting in a cloud of sound as she engaged in near-constant chatter with members of the focused and awe-consumed audience who were up close…which was basically the whole place.

Instead of highlighting The Living and the Dead, Holland included great songs from most of her albums and threw in a few choice covers. With only Gersten at her side, she altered the lyrics to many of her tunes and deconstructed startlingly elegant originals from the dense rock sound they had with her full electric band last year to dusty, confessional compositions that showcased Holland’s voice and thrived without a net. As always, she was simultaneously shy, honest, confident and consciously hip, which somehow lands Holland’s male folk-rock contemporaries like the Fleet Foxes on the shelves at Starbucks but finds her loading her own equipment and competing with noise from cooks calling out “Chris, your pizza’s ready!” To be fair, the “1-2-3-4” iPod commercial was a huge part of Feist’s well-deserved mainstream success, but Jolie Holland really should be headlining 2,000-capacity venues (or bigger) too.

In his autobiography Chronicles, Bob Dylan said that in the 1980’he though of himself as a “folk-rock relic from a bygone era,” which almost caused him to quit the music business for good. Dylan was able to evolve again and move forward, but Jolie Holland’s problem is more complicated: the more she adeptly writes and records increasingly amazing antiquated (though original) music, the more her fans love and support her as sort of a “folk-rock relic” who arrived in the 2000’s to save the music world from these shallow times where Miley Cyrus qualifies as a great female pop-star. Unfortunately, the more Holland shies from taking the business side of her career seriously, the smaller her audience gets. In this journalist’s case, Holland reneged on a confirmed feature interview and then forgot to put me on the guest-list to review the show, claiming that she was “spacey as hell” and “forgot to turn on her cell-phone and check her music-business responsibilities for the evening.” It’s gotta be nearly impossible to get everything right when you’re managing your own coast-to-coast tour, but the little things are important.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Personal Bias: My soon-to-be-born daughter will someday find out that Jolie Holland’s albums were the soundtrack to her mother and father’s initial romance

Random Detail: Holland’s guitar strap snapped during the first verse of “Palmyra,” causing her to abort the song and do “Goodbye California” instead

By The Way: Holland could’ve made a career out of her sensational violin playing. She brought it out frequently at the Walnut Room and was particularly spectacular during the brilliant jam she and Gersten played out of “Old Fashioned Morphine”

Setlist:
Palmyra (aborted)
Goodbye California
The Littlest Birds
Palmyra
Sweet Loving Man
Mexico City
I Won’t Try to Make You Change Your Mind
Alley Flowers
New Song (Sweet Honey Girl?)
Oh My Stars
Real Tina Turner in My Time
Do You Have to Go Crazy
Death Cream
Old Fashioned Morphine
New Song (You And I Are the First Day of Spring?)

Punk Rock & Poetry in Motion

Q&A with Justin Sullivan of New Model Army
by Adam Perry for Westword
10/7/09

These days, a real punk band (sorry, Green Day) can almost never find its way onto the pop charts. But back in the day (see: mid-’80s), England’s New Model Army released political punk that didn’t merely sell to left-wing extremists. Almost thirty years ago, frontman/mastermind Justin Sullivan, who has been compared to punk legends like Joe Strummer and Dick Lucas, named New Model Army after Oliver Cromwell’s successful (at least for a while) 17th century antiroyalist forces; Sullivan’s intelligent, well-informed and captivating songwriting helped get the group signed by EMI, deliver a string of Top 30 British singles before descending to the worldwide cult status New Model Army holds today. We caught up with Sullivan recently and asked him about the Clash comparisons and how spirituality effects the band’s music.

Westword (Adam Perry): I heard NMA compared to the Clash before I was ever exposed to your music, but from the first song on your new record Today Is A Good Day, the influences are admirably all over the place. What inspired NMA musically from the beginning and what bands are influencing your songwriting and production more recently?

Justin Sullivan: I think we share with the Clash both a rough, raw romanticism and an internationalist attitude, but I never thought we had much in common musically. As you say our musical influences are “all over the place.” We all really like different things. Once we tried to agree on a single album by anyone in the history of music that we all unreservedly loved and failed to come up with one! I think that’s unusual for a band. I think it’s probably fair to say that we are a kind of “rock” band but at least two of us would claim not to like “rock” at all. Influences equal everything.

WW: “Everything is beautiful because everything is dying” seems to point to a kind of existentialism or even Buddhism. How does religion and/or spirituality tie into what New Model Army does?

JS: I was brought up in a Quaker household and still have a lot of respect for Quakerism, while I have also written several of the most un-Quakerly songs ever made: “Vengeance,” “The Hunt,” “One Of The Chosen,” etc. The idea that there is a spiritual aspect to life seems to me so obvious that I don’t need to question it, or join any particular clubs or creeds or cults to express it.

To me God is Nature and Nature is God, so I guess I’m a pagan of some sort, but in the end, even the nonsense “Religions of the Book” – Christianity, Islam, Judaism – each have a mystical wing that is interested not so much in the words of some prophet or other but in the very principles of light and love. So they’re all really the same. It’s all simple and easy and obvious and we’re all aware of that at some level. It’s the power-brokers of religion that like to make it complicated because they have their own different agenda.

WW: As a band that was once on major labels with hits on the U.K. charts, do you always feel “on the edge of something,” or is it actually more satisfying and engaging to play for small crowds that know all the lyrics and take your politics seriously?

JS: Actually I think we’re a very rare outfit in that we don’t belong to any movement or genre and we’ve never had a top-twenty hit in any country, and yet we’re still here and making great music thirty years later. In that time, much has changed but the basic principles and reasons we started making music remain exactly the same. We never did worry too much about how we were perceived. One journalist once said to me that his colleagues were terrified to say they liked us because they weren’t quite sure what we were going to do next week – and you can’t getter a higher accolade than that.

WW: “States Radio” is a great snapshot of being weary on the road in America. You guys have been touring for almost thirty years now – how have your experiences of zig-zagging across America evolved over the years?

JS: I first zig-zagged across America in 1975 as a wide eyed hitch-hiking teenager, and instantly fell in love with the whole of the American West, because it’s wild and weird and so beautiful. Other than in parts of Spain, we don’t have deserts in Europe, so it was a whole new landscape to fall in love with. “States Radio” is indeed a snapshot of Bush’s America which, with all the will in the world, the Obama administration will find hard to put right. Actually, when the flag-waving of the post 9/11 period began to give way to serious misgivings about the so-called “War On Terror,” the atmosphere reminded me strongly of 1975: a burned-out, bleached-out era of post-Vietnam and post-’60s “going to ground.”

WW: Is NMA’s sustained creativity and activism a result of growing up in opposition to Thatcher’s England or just a result of punk rock and poetry in motion? How do you stay so inspired?

JS: I like that: “Punk Rock and Poetry In Motion”; and I appreciate the compliment. I’m trying to think of a good answer but in truth…it’s just what we do.