TWAS 171: Mark Eitzel, Chris Whitley, Largo

[glenn mcdonald]

The War Against Silence
www.furia.com/twas

Dreaming of America
The War Against Silence #171, 7 May 98

Mark Eitzel: Caught in a Trap and I Can't Back Out 'Cause I Love You Too
Much, Baby
Chris Whitley: Dirt Floor
Largo: Largo

Mark Eitzel: Caught in a Trap and I Can't Back Out 'Cause I Love You Too
Much, Baby

I hated West, Mark Eitzel's last album. I don't hate albums easily, or
often. This is more a product, lest you think I'm bragging about my
benevolence, of low tolerance than high. I buy records the way cynical
commercial fishermen trawl for tuna, and if I haven't actually killed any
dolphins in the process, it's through their wariness, not my consideration.
Having done this for a few years now, and paid some attention to the
characteristics of survival as new music flops around on my deck (that
metaphor had one of the shortest useful lives I can recall), I've become
the world's leading expert on what I'm going to like or not. I have a few
even more pointless talents (e.g.: I can solve those iron blacksmiths'
tavern puzzles just by looking at pictures of them, which would be a great
party trick except if you can't do it, too, you'll have no way of verifying
that I'm right), but this one, if nothing else, saves me a lot of time. I
can usually tell after no more than two playings, and sometimes
considerably fewer, whether an album and I have any potential common
ground, and if we don't, I move on to something else. The stronger my
disgust, the shorter my patience, so getting to genuine hatred is almost
inherently impossible, like filling a bathtub to the ceiling.
The things I come to detest most intensely, then, paradoxically, are
the records I have some reason to believe I'll like, some misguided bit of
stubborn faith that keeps me listening beyond the point where I would
normally have given up, so hatred has time to build. In Eitzel's case, I
didn't get much out of the solo album before that, the jazzy 60 Watt Silver
Lining, either, but his first one, the frayed Songs of Love Live, is one of
my two favorite live albums in the world (Runrig's Once in a Lifetime is
the other; they have nothing in common), and the seven-album run of his
late band, American Music Club, produced five and a half albums (my
personal omissions being United Kingdom and the noisy parts of The Restless
Stranger) that to me make Morrissey seem, along the axes of both melancholy
grandeur and searing miserablism, like a grouchy Power Ranger. And so
while the idea of Mark making a record with REM guitarist Peter Buck, whose
emotional demeanor usually seems closer to an off-season sports mascot
doing a little light yard work, sounded frankly ill-conceived, I was
confident that Mark's personality could withstand dilution.
The problem with this theory is it assumes, automatically, that Peter
would exert pressure towards good-natured jangliness, which Mark would
resolutely resist, thus establishing a profitable tension. It never
occurred to me that Mark would cooperate. The amiable, meandering record
they assembled made so little sense to me that I played it several times
before I could do anything but sit, dumbly, waiting for the real record to
start, right up to the second it ended. I felt as if Mark Rothko had been
hired to paint a magazine cover, and had turned in a careful portrait of an
impish puppy pulling on the pants leg of a cherubic toddler; I kept staring
at it waiting for the subversive twist to materialize. There is a
subversive twist to it, right? There has to be.
There wasn't. Some time around uncomprehending repetition four or
five the truth finally dawned on me. Eitzel was serious. West wasn't
flirting with jangly pop conventions, it was a jangly pop album. Placid
anticipation gave way in an instant to abject revulsion. I had to turn the
stereo off. This sounds like a figure of speech: surely I didn't have to
turn it off, I just preferred to. I won't debate the physiology, but I'm
reporting my subjective experience truthfully. I felt, literally, like if
I didn't turn the album off right that moment, and never listen to it again
in my life, something horrifying and irreparable would happen to me. The
album is a tear in the universe, through which life-force drains out. But
if I keep the jewel case closed, I think we'll be all right. Probably I
should get it re-shrink-wrapped, just to be sure.
Caught in a Trap..., to my profound relief, is a return to what I
think of as Mark's essential genius and correct character. Although there
is a wide spectrum of arrangement styles between the parts of Songs of Love
Live when, alone on stage with nothing but a microphone and his guitar, he
completely forgets about the guitar, and the florid orchestral rush of
AMC's "Johnny Mathis' Feet", they are linked by a pervasive aura of
emotional desperation. Mark's songs hurt, like he has been stabbed with a
pain so sharp it runs straight through him and draws blood from us, too,
all the way on the other side. His music wraps around the blades of his
lyrics in various ways, sometimes leaving them out to rust and sometimes
working them into intricate wrought-iron fence-work. As long as you have
the sense to say no to pastel balloon-animal menageries, there's no real
shortage of possibilities. Much of Caught in a Trap... is just Mark and
his guitar, again, and the handful of band songs also tend toward the
minimal end of his spectrum, compared with the slide-guitar and sighing
country harmonies AMC often favored. The difference between the stage and
the studio, however, is enormous. On Songs of Love Live, and when I've
seen him play solo, in person, it's pretty clear that playing guitar and
singing, at the same time, is hard for him. I have the same problem,
myself. But where I attempt to compensate by just hitting my guitar
harder, hoping to frighten misshapen chords into the proper alignment, Mark
instead scales back his accompaniments to the smallest possible number of
notes required to give the impression of musical context. In the studio,
with the luxury of multi-tracking (which did wonders for me when I figured
it out, too) (OK, maybe "wonders" is the wrong word), this isn't necessary.
Eitzel's idea of a "full" guitar part hardly impinges on Mark Knopfler's
territory, even so, but it's more than enough to make Caught in a Trap...
sound thoughtful, rather than trapped in the middle of a total nervous
collapse. "Are You the Trash" pulses with a series of odd, oblique and
insistent chords, like Philip Glass trying to write a Ramones song. "Xmas
Lights Spin" is like an Ani DiFranco riff slowed down to one-eighth speed.
The delicate "Auctioneer's Song" is the weary ghost of a half-remembered
etude. "White Rosary" is strung across unresolved two-note oppositions
that beat against each other like bells. "Atico 18" could be Paul Simon in
an introspective moment. "Sun Smog Seahorse", despite the
Guided-by-Voices-like title, is the album's most abstract interlude, more
like a pair of Calder mobiles tangling slowly than like folk music. Of the
songs where he has help, "If I Had a Gun" sounds like Bruce Cockburn under
sedation, "Goodbye" is languid and distended, "Cold Light of Day" noisy and
strained. Only a couple songs edge particularly close to mainstream pop
equanimity, "Queen of No One" building from a spare snare tick to swirling,
passionate choruses, and "Go Away" easing into a steady, if harried,
mid-tempo canter.
And anyway, as with every other record of Mark's that I like,
eventually I stop hearing the music on Caught in a Trap..., altogether, and
am left in the grip of his words. (This is perverse, since I believe he is
one of the greatest living songwriters, but the scale of art has always had
much to do with what you can afford to waste.) There's no lyric sheet, but
he sings clearly, so all you have to do is listen. Perhaps the most
arresting thing, to me, about Mark's songs is that almost every one has
some awkward moment or two, passages where the phrases are half-formed, or
only half fit into the meter, or hang poised above an obvious rhyme for an
agonizing moment, but finally can't think of any way to evade it, as if his
need to say these things is so pressing it precludes polishing the verse,
and yet almost every one also has some insight that freezes me in its
glare. (This is probably true on West, too, for all I know, but I can't
remember anything he said, and I'm not going to risk opening the case
again.) "He's always giving you free advice / On ways you can avoid
telling him 'No'", starts "Are You the Trash", eviscerating a relationship
so thoroughly that it makes no difference how the rest of the song tries to
make amends. A host of images whirls by in "Xmas Lights Spin", but "Words
ten feet high made of teeth" and "Just another saint that was made broken"
stay with me. "The camera eye pans slowly over the sheets", opens
"Auctioneer's Song", and I'm caught wondering whether the camera eye is us,
or the subject's own longing to wring drama out her (?) predicament, or
somehow both. "If I Had a Gun" is the emotional inverse of Bruce
Cockburn's "If I Had a Rocket Launcher", indignation turned restlessly upon
its owner. "He's brittle as Goodwill dishes", "He's good only for leaving
quarters behind", "He's a gold mine in reverse", "He's the crocodile who
swallowed the clock", goes the litany of "Queen of No One", on the way to
fashioning a defiantly triumphant chorus out of "Raise a toast to being
empty inside". "It's two in the afternoon, I've been here since seven a.m.
/ I've been hiding out on somebody's private property", he says in "Cold
Light of Day", but I don't know whether this is a straightforward
description of homelessness or an admission that seven hours in a lover's
house (or his own?) amounts to the same thing to him. "Atico 18" is a
merciless catalog of disappointments, but the twitch in Mark's voice as he
says "Craig and Jose"'s names is the only trace of hope I need. "The
prison guards just try and sell me these little yellow pills", he cries in
"Go Away", which I take (but would Mark know the 20/20 song?) as a
plaintive rejection of the healing power of sunny pop music. But different
injuries respond to different treatments, and if sunny pop music and Mark
Eitzel's desolate clarity don't right the same sets of wrong, then by
playing both we can fix twice as many.

Chris Whitley: Dirt Floor

Although my disappointment with Richard Thompson's last few albums hasn't
reached the level of my aversion to West, it's still severe enough to
bother me. Richard and Linda's I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight and
Shoot Out the Lights are two timeless classics, in my taxonomy, moments of
the solo live album Small Town Romance are on par with Songs of Love Live,
between them Amnesia and Rumor and Sigh have at least five more songs I
adore, and Watching the Dark is only an inane out-of-chronology running
order away from being the Platonic Form of a career retrospective, but the
only thing on Mirror Blue I ever feel the need to hear is "Beeswing", and
the double-album you? me? us? can't even muster enough appeal to alleviate
my irritation at the typographic unwieldiness of the title. It's as if
Richard's allowed his withering sneer to envelop him, so that his songs are
now wholly constituted out of bitterness, instead of just being edged with
it. I don't know what has become of the effortless melodies of "Walking on
a Wire" or "Galway to Graceland" or "When I Get to the Border", which it
seemed to me could carry a singer's voice, rather than vice versa. Now
Richard slides off the edges of all his words, as if the weight of his
loathing is too much for any single note to support.
I'm not sure what I really want from him, instead. More songs like
"1952 Vincent Black Lightning" sounds like a great idea on paper, but
"MGB-GT", the vehicular sequel on Mirror Blue, is not what I meant at all.
I thought "Turning of the Tide" was electrifying, but that sort of
big-production rock seems so unlike Richard's recent work that I keep
thinking I've misremembered and it was really a Warren Zevon song. He's
not going to reunite with Linda, and between her memory and his entrenched
solo identity, I suspect duets are no longer possible (then again, I bet
Patty Griffin and Gillian Welch could both hold their own with him). It
may be that I don't want anything new from him, at all, and can happily
spend the rest of my life accumulating stray covers of his old songs.
But one of the reasons I'm reluctant to accept this simplistic notion
of closure is the surge of excitement I feel listening to Chris Whitley's
new album, Dirt Floor. Whitley's last one, Terra Incognita, reminded me of
Amnesia, and had some noteworthy guitar histrionics, but it doesn't take a
very long or cleverly engineered bridge to get from Richard's most
conventional moments over to the nearby mainstream. Since then, either
Whitley got tired of angling for an adult-contemporary crossover, or else
Sony got tired of it for him, and Dirt Floor is about as far away from
Terra Incognita's sculpted howl as you can get without invoking the word
"Flamenco". Recorded in one day in a cabin in Vermont (the credits don't
actually say it was a cabin, but if it wasn't it should have been), with
almost no overdubs that I can detect, and released on Messenger Records,
about whom I know nothing, this album (provided nine songs in twenty-seven
minutes qualifies as an "album" in your system) is startlingly close in
feel to Richard's Small Town Romance. The two men's guitar styles aren't
especially similar, but the wiry timbres of Chris' steel guitar and banjo
are similar enough to Richard's trademark tones to reinforce the parallel
regardless. Chris' voice goes from candid twang to a few fleeting moments
of sweet, tentative falsetto, but keeps circling back to the same sort of
pinched, but earnest, low flutter Richard used to sing with, winningly
unsteady, like he'd rather not sing these songs himself, but has
temporarily run out of other options. The record's only percussion is
Chris' foot stomping, to keep time, but since that was the one thing I
liked about Chris Smither, who is otherwise too much of a blues
traditionalist for me, I'm pleased to hear the simple device translated
into an idiom I like better. In the end the record is a little too brief,
in conception as much as in duration, to be a decisive advance of the start
of the art, but it does suggest that there's more life left in Richard
Thompson's old methods, yet, and if nobody can pry him free of his
contempt, maybe we don't need him in person after all.

Largo: Largo

The other stray bit of Anglo/Americana I've been listening to this week is
this unlikely experiment in cultural synthesis from ex-Hooters leaders Rob
Hyman and Eric Bazilian, and producer Rick Chertoff. I wasn't a Hooters
fan, originally, and the people pelting Joni Mitchell with beach balls and
chanting "Hooters, Hooters" were the low point of the 1986 Amnesty
International concert at Giants Stadium, I think, but I've found Hyman,
Bazilian and Chertoff lurking behind enough albums I did like since then
(notably Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual, Patty Smyth's Never Enough and
Joan Osborne's Relish) to recognize that their tastes and mine have some
resonance. I went so far as to buy a three-for-a-dollar vinyl copy of
Nervous Night, at some point, to see if it sounded better to me, now, but
it didn't. The loose end has nagged at me, faintly, ever since. Largo,
then, finally supplies the shared past they and I ought to have had, from
which their other work can now conceptually, and retroactively, be derived.
The album's ostensible rationale is rather more complicated and
ambitious. Starting from Antonin Dvorak's "Largo" theme, from his ninth
symphony, the record sets out to construct a sort of patchwork musical
encyclopedia of the mythic America that inspired it. Given the confusion
of ethnic impulses that intermingled, often uneasily, on the way to forming
a distinct American identity, this project is bound to touch on a dizzying
array of referents, so it shouldn't be too surprising that the record's
guest list ends up looking like one of those people-of-the-world murals
commissioned by well-meaning city councils to go on the blank side of some
building that would have had windows there if it were in a better
neighborhood. Dvorak's theme, to open the album, is provided in a yearning
Celtic style by the Chieftains. Taj Mahal arrives to add a bluesy wail and
some Juluka-ish guttural African grunts to the simmering "Freedom Ride",
which otherwise has a distinctly Hooters-esque hum to it, including
farfisa, hurdy-gurdy and Hooters drummer David Uosikkinen. Rob Hyman and
Cyndi Lauper duet on the quiet lament "Cyrus Moonlight", Rob's sparkling
piano and Cyndi's bowed dulcimer mirroring their operators' vocal waltz.
David Forman and Levon Helm alternate lead vocals for the gospel
exhortation "Gimme a Stone", the Dixie Whistlers supplying a chirpy
background riff. "Hand in Mine"'s duet finds Hyman doing his best Tom
Petty impression, and Joan Osborne her Emmylou Harris. Hyman then plays
the theme again himself (because that's what you do with a "theme" in
classical music, right?), this time on a Hammond organ with a stiff,
church-like cadence, whose trills must be intended to have some Indian
flavor, since the track is titled "Vishnu Largo", but I don't hear it. The
predatory "Disorient Express", with Forman singing again, must be a nod to
Chinese railroad labor, but using banjo in place of sitar gives it a kind
of embarrassing fast-food-ish inaccuracy, and I'm relieved when Cyndi
returns to slither through the sultry "White Man's Melody", whose
conflation of Elvis, Caruso, Jolson, Liberace and native Americans makes
more sense sung that it does written down in the booklet.
The African chapter comes next, ushered in with Taj's voice-and-dobro
performance of Lightnin' Hopkins' incantatory spiritual "Needed Time".
"Banjoman", though, sounds more like "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner"
than anything else, and the prominent use of a Jew's harp in the song
raises more cultural questions than it answers. "Largo's Dream" has
another African protagonist, but between Forman's calm singing, Hyman's
restrained piano and Giovanni Hidalgo's gentle percussion, the song ends up
sounding like a cross between Santana and Bruce Hornsby. There's no time
to linger, though, so we're off to Garth Hudson's saxophone-heavy version
of the theme, which threatens to slip into "Amazing Grace", and from there
to the clattering Celtic reel "Medallion", with Willie Nile doing a wildly
unconvincing job as the song's narrator, who's supposed to be a Pakistani
cab driver. The song slips, though, without warning, into a bizarre,
soulful and inspiring melodic rewrite of "The Star-Spangled Banner", with
some semi-African backing-vocal chants whose absence from the official
version seems glaring and insulting once I've heard them here. Just when
the history is starting to achieve some ethnic traction, though, they
abandon it completely for Carole King's "An Uncommon Love", an achingly
pretty and stunningly irrelevant pop song with Carole and Joan Osborne
trading vocals and the Chieftains, Rob Hyman and William Wittman (another
frequent associate; he recorded and mixed Nervous Night) filling in the
rest. The Chieftains try to get things back on track with a reprise of the
theme, but it's not enough, and the perky finale, "Before the Mountains",
with Little Isidore, Johnny Stompinato, Jr. and an Isley Brothers quote,
wanders off in some other direction entirely.
But the more chaotic this album feels to me, and every time I listen
to it it seems like another little bit of it unravels, the more fiercely
fond of it I become. It's difficult to imagine what Dvorak would have made
of Hyman and Bazilian's corruption of his motif, and I doubt he would have
recognized his inspirations in their explications of them, but the album
itself is a magnificent example of exactly what it fails to explain. The
Great American Spirit, with which Dvorak was so taken, is not calculated,
balanced, sensitive or analytical, it's a boisterous, unruly outpouring of
unchecked enthusiasm. It doesn't incorporate other voices, it drowns them
out by cheering, and then ends up imitating them, badly. The nonsensical
clamor of America is its most endearing and identifying trait, and the
country's microscopic attention span is often its best incentive for
change, its myopia the necessity that gives rise to its best inventions.
What could be more American than a history textbook that decides, halfway
through, to be a detective novel instead, with a bunch of pictures of Cindy
Crawford in the middle because, well, she's pretty? This explains, in case
you were wondering, why the rest of the world often treats us like their
neighbor's idiot son. But it also explains why, even when we're basically
behaving like imbeciles, we're still generally having a lot more fun than
they are.

Copyright (c) 1998, glenn mcdonald

The War Against Silence is published weekly at www.furia.com/twas, and
posted to the newsgroup rec.music.reviews. It may not be distributed
elsewhere without my explicit permission.