Aficionados have noticed that it's been quite some time since I last weblogged, and diehard fans may already have intuited why--I've been off-the-grid for most of October, working (once again!) the sugar-beet harvest in eastern North Dakota. In addition to sweetening your breakfast cereal, the beet harvest provides temporary, high-paying employment for a growing number of itinerant freaks (er, punks), who flock to the upper midwest each year to rake in two or three thousand bucks, a relative goldmine in our social stratum.
I described last year's harvest in some detail, and if I'm unable to lavish the same attention on this year's edition it's only because my poor brain is too truly fried. I will say that this year's harvest exceeded all expectations; it got off to a grindingly slow start, and the general forecast was for a piss-poor year--meager crop, crap weather, scant wages--but in the end we worked quite a bit, walked away with a couple of healthy paychecks and had some chart-bustingly debaucherous Good Times in the interim.
I won't go into the laborious nuts-n-bolts of working sugar beets--I did so last year, if you're really curious--but will offer at least some high(low?)lights from the last whirlwind few weeks, in no particular order: endless games of drunken, delirious rummy with heavy-metal soundtrack, as well as an rowdy, epic game of Acey-Deucey, quite possibly the silliest card game ever concocted, in which a growing crowd of broke+bored beet-harvesters gambled away the last of their pocket-change, reduced to wagering with pocketknives and bottles of booze; my trusted tape player, which pulled me through a 132-hour marathon out at the factory with scintillating books-on-tape (Walter Tevis' awesome The Man Who Fell to Earth) and bitchin' music (e.g. Beck's flawless Midnite Vultures, maybe the mostly deeply funky record ever made by a white dude) that fueled mid-shift dance parties, as well as my trusty fellow-taretaker Bill--Northern Californian fireball, humorist and artist-extraordinaire, with whom I had long talks ranging from crude and potty-mouthed to heartfelt and erudite, and with whom I also "decorated" the tare-shack with explosive sharpie graffiti, much to the baffled consternation of the day-shifters, who responded to our intricate witticisms with unvarying fuck u, queers--I'm afraid our more daring pieces ("Fast and Pray for More Butt Sex in North Dakota," Bill's naked lady getting sprayed by a leering skunk, etc., may have contributed to management's unprecedented painting-over (with black paint!) of nearly all tare-shack graffiti at the end of the harvest; and the steady, vigorous substance use which culminated in a small-scale riot and an orgy of bottle-smashing our last Saturday night and a pretty wicked porn shoot on Sunday (for details you'll have to wait for the Full Metal Faggot 2012 wall calendar--I'm certainly not spilling them here). There's just no telling what ~25 world-class fuckups can cook up, in terms of mischief, mayhem and inspired time-killing, over the course of three and a half weeks.
Few of us beet harvesters, it's true, have very worthy or extravagant plans for our two-or-three thousand-dollar payoffs; most talked of buying crummy used cars, or having ample beer + cigarette money for the winter months, and assuredly we'll all be dead broke again by the time we trudge back to Wahpeton in late 2012. But such is the romantic life of the itinerant punk-laborer, all booms + crashes, hilarious ups and equally hilarious downs.
Here at the cusp of a new year, I'd like to take a little amble down memory lane, back to the heady days of 2003. Only a very few Liam Warfield completists (count on one hand) probably know of my lost albums-- I've made six or seven, depending how you define "album". Several of these I basically just gave to my friend and musical comrade John Bellows; they've otherwise gone unheard. No great loss--we're not talking about masterpieces here. But in that delirious spring of 2003, I took my first tentative steps towards promoting myself as a recording artist. I'd just returned to Chicago after several intense months in San Francisco. I was living with my close friends Rollin and Todd in a messy garden apartment in Humboldt Park, and the war in Iraq had just begun. The general atmosphere, especially at home, was quite tense those first wartime weeks. All three of us, Todd, Rollin and I, were feeling a bit battle-crazed, and we all somehow simultaneously made record albums-- Todd at his friend Kevin's house and Rollin and I doing timeshare with the 4-track at home. We decided to release the three albums together, and have a house party to celebrate. Rollin's album had the delightful title Manlihood Likelihood, and felt like outsider music in the truest sense--the narrator of his songs had the bewilderedness of a crash-landed Martian, and the record sounded like a haunted answering machine. Todd's album was a collection of full-freakout jams thrown down with Kevin, their teenage brains sizzling with potsmoke and Sonic Youth. My album, which I apparently didn't title, I made and gave away probably ten copies of, a giant leap forward for my musical career. I found a copy the other day, which I'd stolen from John and stashed in some box. And, listening to it after all these years, I really like it! It's such a weird artifact, from such a weird and manic time in my life. I've decided it might as well be "out in the world", so feel free to give it a listen here, if you're really curious enough. You may or may not enjoy it. It's not exactly mellow listening. If Todd was all Bad Moon Rising, my touchstone at the time was Beck's Stereopathic Soul Manure, a sprawling, drugged-out sound collage of a record in the tradition of Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica (another house favorite). Under this spell, I recorded this collection of improvised songs, half-songs and disjointed fragments on a handheld tape-recorder and then sped up the tape to Alvin and the Chimpunks velocity (am I selling this thing, or what?); the whole album is quite literally rushed (17 songs in 17 minutes!). Musical merits aside--and you'll forgive me the tackiness of reviewing my own record--what fascinates me about this album is that it was was my immediate, visceral reaction to our plunge into war (and who'd have thought we'd still be fighting eight years hence?). While not addressed quite directly, the war is all over the album. There are several tracks where I'm guitar-dueling with newsradio; you can hear BBC announcers talking about Turkish troops in Northern Iraq. Another track consists simply of me reading the day's weather report, the only news coming out in those days that made any sense. Probably my favorite track is Zero, a snarky, literal response song to Bob Dylan's facile Blowin' in the Wind (How many roads must a man walk down? Zero. How many times must the cannonballs fly? Zero. Et cetera). Other standout tracks for me are Water into Wine, a reverie on alcoholic escapism, and My Bird, a deceptively jaunty little chord-organ tune full of debauched nursery-rhymes (Smoke a little hash/Throw up in the trash/Make a little cash/You dine and then you dash). I don't play a great deal of music these days; I hope to again some time, and hope to record some day as well--though I doubt I'll ever toss off anything as careless and careening as these 17 deranged little numbers. At any rate--Happy New Year to all!
Recent visitors to Vice Magazine's music blog--and, God help us, there may be thousands of them--can be forgiven for shrugging at newcomers Rainbow Bridge. Pictured in cutesy facepaint and thrift-store wigs, like some some slumber-party version of Animal Collective, the band is described as a "slacker-pop duo" from Olympia who write "big fuzzy songs" in the style of Daniel Johnston. They answer questions ("Who are Rainbow Bridge?") with an flippant obliqueness ("Have you ever hummed the word us?") that seems to flummox even the battle-hardened Vice blogger, who signs off with a sneering, "Thanks guys--that was interesting..." One reader comments below with a hipsters' world-weariness: "Ugghhh... do we really need another one of these bands?"I'm not sure exactly who he means by these bands, but I suppose we can take our pick--the indie-rock machine seems to throw an endless succession of cutesy, flippant, face-painted heroes at the slacker-pop charts, very few of which stick, and 2010 may well find this style on the wane. But the embedded video for the band's first single, Big Wave Rider, while a fairly straightforward, Times New Viking-style paean to surfing, hints at a deeper sensibility at work, and the diligent music fan might just be moved to do a little digging:
I hope they do, because Rainbow Bridge mastermind Adam Croce is one of our weirder and more lyrical rock 'n roll songsmiths, and his fascination with seemingly shallow subjects like surfing belies a more serious intent. I doubt Croce has ever been near an actual surfboard--Olympia, Washington isn't known for its its righteous waves. Like Brian Wilson before him, surfing is more metaphor than anything else; it's sun and fun, sure, but it's also a precarious dance with nature and gravity that implicitly can't last--and, as Croce sings, wipeout's insane.
And I suppose he'd know. I first heard of Adam through my friend Sergey, the excitable, Soviet-born singer and guitarist of San Francisco's east bloc-noise-thrashers Didi Mau. "You have to hear this tape," Sergey insisted as we drove around the Richmond one afternoon. The tape in question was the self-titled Broken Strings album from Adam Croce, a native San Francisco punker and onetime teenage member of local scuzz-pop bands like Los Rabbis and Tommy Lasorda. The story of Broken Strings, as Sergey related it me--and I make no claims as to its accuracy--went as follows: Adam, feeling feverish and disoriented, starting out walking one day; he wandered out of town and walked for a good many miles before ending up, somehow, on the lawn of a mental institution. Unable to satisfactorily explain his presence to the hospital personnel, they gently led him inside: I think you'd better come with us... he was kept there for a year. Upon his release, he holed up in a cabin on the fringes of the Bay, set up a 4-track and a bunch of gear and purged the whole ordeal in one epic, 14-song blast of tortured, vulnerable and eminently catchy deep-grunge. He played every instrument on the album, and the resulting album was being circulated by cassette-dubbing aficionados like Sergey--who likened his transcendent, dissolute opus to Syd Barrett--within weeks.
The Broken Strings album, recorded in 2006, which has finally found a proper release on True Panther Sounds, does pack a wallop. It starts off with some comparatively lite fare about girls and stolen cars, but soon gets down to some seriously heavy shit. The third track, Eyes of the World, for all its fuzzed-out simplicity, serves as a wobbly post-psych-ward mission statement in which Adam, preparing to traffic with the outside world, states his terms and conditions: Don't cover my mouth for me, he demands. I'm not afraid to sing. As the album unfolds and Adam, wide-eyed, surveys the beautiful, terrible surreality of millennial California, the music likewise ripples out from its scuzz-pop center to encompass elements of archetypal West Coast styles like surf, folk, grunge (the slamming Which Witch out-Nirvanas Nirvana with both its gnarly riffage and its psychedelic angst--When you love someone, stare at the sun/And don't hurt no one, Croce snarls), the lyrical dueling-guitars of bands like Built to Spill, and Beck's stoner-sampling style--bits of TV dialogue interspersed throughout the album suggest the mind-bending tedium of the hospital day-room which Adam's only recently escaped.
Surfing Everyday, midway through the album, is a cleverly contrarian precursor to Rainbow Bridge's Big Wave Rider; here Croce debunks rather than mysticizes the West Coast surf-lore. Out here in California/ not too many ride the waves, he states flatly. They got you believing that we're surfing every day! Croce's California is seedier and more complex--a "Golden State of Paranoia" where sirens and guns are far more predominant than bitchin' boards or little deuce coupes. As for the actual surfers that do remain, Adam can only mock their pseudo-worldview in regurgitated Beach Boys harmony: Dude, I'm bored--dude, where's my board?
The haunting centerpiece of the album, for me, is the sparse Straight on the Crooked Flats. Over spartan drum-and-piano accompaniment, Croce gives us a guided tour of Crooked Flats, not so much a geographical place as a psychological one--a sort of island resort for the broken and deranged. School bus dredges the lane, picks up only the insane/Drives back to the welcome mats at Crooked Flats, he sings with a certain laissez-faire, as if this was a daily routine. The facts here are familiar, but everything's been muddled and turned upside-down--On the high school track/Adolf Hitler runs laps/does his rounds there and back/while Jesse Owens claps--a disorienting collage of nightmares, fantasies and half-remembered history. As a document of mental dissolution, the song works extremely well--and is wildly catchy, no less.
I had the privilege of playing with Adam in 2008, when my band passed through Olympia--he agreed to play the show on a day's notice. Happily, he didn't seem at all broken or deranged; he seemed like a nice, healthy young man with a good head on his shoulders. I did worry at first about his musical direction when he started off his set with a cover of Porno for Pyros "Pets", but the rest of the set was fantastic--Broken Strings megahits and some great new songs, including an early version of "Big Wave Rider". We ended up playing in Adam's basement several days later, on our way back down the coast. The show was not a great success; the only audience member who was not playing with a band that night was K Records' Calvin Johnson, who left during our first song. But Adam was a gracious and charming host, and his songs were buoyant and lyrical bits of pop loveliness.
It's a shame that so many music fans, armed with all the new technology, have become so capricious and quick to judge--bands are appraised not by the strength of their collected output, but by YouTube clips and blog bytes. Tiresome as it can be wading through the swampy glut of modern music--and I certainly wouldn't recommend looking to Vice Magazine for musical guidance--there are real treasures buried in all that muck, and those with the patience to dig deeper on occasion might be pleasantly surprised...
My official function here is not music critic, but I'd like to try on the mantle for an evening, and tell you about the unequivocal Album of 2009: the new 9-song record from onetime Chicagoan Spencer Kingman, on loan from my upstairs neighbor, John Bellows.
Full disclosure, I'm a rabid partisan. John gave me Spencer's first album several years ago. I'd met Spencer in a kitchen once, when he lived in Chicago, and we had a conversation I barely remembered, about the desert. I listened to the album while painting a mural in my bedroom, in a dilapidated Wicker Park two-flat, and it had this alarming effect: on my first lazy listen, it was effete folky garbage, not at all the wild stuff I generally preferred, but on second listen a radiant otherworldliness began to emerge, and I was completely mesmerized. Singing in an angelic surfer-soprano, Kingman and his nylon-string guitar married devastating melodies with the lushest and most obtuse lyrics, rendered in a sort of Dada collage of transcendent imagery, tossing off delightful non-sequitors like, "Ooh, with a amazing grace/paint your face for the empire/Oh, and I can't remember what I just said on my deathbed." Like a young and hungry Beck Hansen, or even an acid-era Leonard Cohen, he romped around in wild pastures of language, plucking spiky little word-flowers with total abandon. I wore the record out.
The next time I heard from Spencer Kingman, his musical career had taken a surprising turn. I saw him playing at the Hideout with the not-yet-hyped Brooklyn band Dirty Projectors; he and bandleader Dave Longstreth were a brilliant pair of guitar foils, like Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, egging each other on to ever-greater heights of Afro-Martian rhapsodising. The cherubic Kingman was, it turned out, a fully-fledged guitar hero. The Dirty Projectors would go on, after Kingman's departure, to re-interpret Black Flag's Rise Above, the album earning them a pile of Pitchfork-induced hype.
From there, my knowledge of Kingman's musical biography is quite sketchy, based on rumor and speculation. Friends said, though they didn't sound quite sure, that he'd moved back to his native Utah, married a young Mormon woman and settled down to a life of religious domesticity. I even heard the somewhat far-fetched claim that his wife wouldn't allow him to play music, for religious reasons; I liked to imagine that while his wife was off at the Women's Bible Study class, or out running errands, Spencer would sneak down to the basement, fetch his guitar out of hiding, and dash off a few tunes. Whether there was any truth in any of this I haven't the faintest idea.
Then this album appeared. Apparently titled Free Doom--the words are scrawled on my CD-R--it doesn't seem to have been properly released, but is traveling via elicit dubs; it doesn't feel like an album so much as a hallucinogenic treatise, smuggled out of Provo on golden tablets. It's clear from the opening lyrics that Kingman's been doing some heavy musing. I was in the brotherhood of man, he sighs. Don't remind me. Interspersed with existential sloganeering--I'm out of glory, could you smoke me out?--are weird thickets of imagery that resist untangling but are sonically mesmerizing: But then she was alive/to swing her surgery around/and wave it like a partisan for the Lord. The songs, while steeped in this sort of religious idiom, radiate doubt and confusion--a sort of queasy rapture, as if someone had dosed the sacramental wine. Who brought the bad blood?, Kingman ponders cryptically. I want some good blood.
And if you're not in a mood to puzzle out the dense symbolism, there's the simple gorgeousness of the music, which lilts along with all the youthful melodicism of Belle and Sebastian but none of the twee. A lazy musicologist might slander Kingman's music, spartanly arranged with just guitar and voice, as folk--or worse yet, 'freak-folk' --but it is in fact nothing of the kind. Defying reduction, the music is pure emanation from whatever weird, luminous corner of the spiritual map Spencer has been holing up in, a world entirely his own.
I don't imagine I've sold the record particularly well; I'd beg you to simply take my word for it, but I'll go one better and offer to mail any reader of this site a burned copy of the album--a rudimentary form of music-sharing in this bit-torrent age, but all I'm technologically equipped for. I'll send it free-just let me know. Set aside a late-night hour, dim the lights, and go voyaging with young Spencer Kingman. As an authority on modern music, I insist upon it.
