Author: Ross Johnson

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Music Record Reviews

Hurts So Good

The Pernice Brothers hail from Northampton, Massachusetts, a smallish New England town with a colorful history and a thriving bohemian arts scene (see Tracy Kidder’s 1999 book Home Town for a look at life in Northampton during the final decade of the last century). Joe Pernice, the band’s main songwriter and singer, writes tunes that have a very identifiable geographic context and feel. His previous combo, the Scud Mountain Boys, even named one of their recordings simply Massachusetts. What the Band did with a certain notion of rural American life on their second, eponymous, album, the Pernice Brothers more or less do with the subject of poisoned romance in a small New England town: illuminate their subject with songwriting that is at once universal in theme and yet regionally specific.

The Band comparison may be a little misleading: The Pernice Brothers are anything but artful rustics playing with a 19th-century farmhand persona (although the Scud Mountain Boys got lumped in with the new sincerity/alt-country/Americana thing in the mid-’90s). And the Pernice Brothers don’t really sound that organic, either. Like the Band, they have created a hybrid that finds few comparisons or competitors. But where the Band blended traditional country, folk, R&B, rock-and-roll, and obscure strains of American popular music to make a sound quite familiar but also singular, the Pernice Brothers draw their sound from less vintage sources: British Invasion rock, the Grassroots, ELO (a heavy dose), the Smiths, New Order, Pet Sounds-era Brian Wilson (who doesn’t these days, right?), and even the crybaby emotionality of Mark Eitzel’s American Music Club. And they take these disparate influences and blend them into a style with surprising emotional power and impact. It’s as if that crafter of ’60s radio hits, Jimmy Webb, got locked into a recording studio with Robbie Robertson and crew and said nobody could leave until they completed an album of great pop songs.

The Pernice Brothers’ latest, Yours, Mine & Ours, is that album. “The Weakest Shade of Blue” starts things off with a chorus that features a hint of Lou Christie, the master of high-pitched ’60s teen screech. (I say you can’t go wrong with a spot of Christie on the vocal side.) “Water Ban” sounds like Richard Butler of the Psychedelic Furs with some Turtles-style singing on the chorus. “One Foot in the Grave” is Smiths territory marked by Johnny Marr guitar. “Blinded by the Stars” is pre-disco Bee Gees (before Miami, before Travolta, before excessive amounts of hairspray, before wigs) — pretty and desperate. “Waiting for the Universe” is heavy ELO with a dash of Furs again. “Judy” is Chad & Jeremy with a hint of Peter & Gordon. (Say, weren’t they the same act when you get down to it two Brits with Beatle cuts and Everly Brothers harmonies?) “Sometimes I Remember” is as modern as the Pernices get, with a New Order rave-up featuring a Pete Hook kind of lead bass line.

Joe Pernice is definitely the focus here (he’s a bit like the Band’s Robertson in being the group’s prime mover, but, unlike Robertson, he has a great voice and a sense of humility that finds expression in almost all of his original tunes), but the band isn’t just a one-man show: The rest of the group contributes just the right accompaniment at every juncture. The Pernice Brothers are masters of dynamics, their sound swelling or fading expertly whenever a song arrangement dictates. But the depth of their music still derives primarily from Pernice’s vocals and lyrics. Those vocals are often just a husky whisper, Pernice’s voice controlled and dry-sounding yet wildly emotional and expressive at the same time. Joe Pernice is that unlikeliest of creatures: a “soul singer” who never breaks a sweat.

And his lyrics: Well, I’m a tough crowd considering that I despise most original rock lyrics since about 1966. In my mind, Joey Ramone was a great lyricist who sometimes veered toward the pretentious, so I pretty much loathe the “poetry of rock.” Given a choice between listening to instrumental or vocal music, I’ll almost always opt for music without intrusive human voices. But there are exceptions to this blanket dismissal, and Joe Pernice is one of them.

Pernice earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and is a published poet/author. He’s as caustic and brilliant as the late poet John Berryman, but Pernice’s obsessive demon is not booze or the siren song of suicide (though he does sell a Pernice Brothers T-shirt emblazoned with “I Hate My Life” at live dates; I plan on buying one at their Hi-Tone show). It’s the curse of romance or, more simply, the existence of “the other” that troubles him. There are people in this world, women mostly, who cause him a ton of aggravation and hurt. His original tunes are not really love songs as such but more like superbly crafted paeans to romantic misery. Pernice is a master at hiding his closet romanticism with barbed contempt. The nasty, eviscerating one-liners in his songs serve to distance him from the raw pain and yearning he feels in a relationship. He’s a brainy romantic who hides behind a facade of cruel words — but what words! Thanks for suffering in such an articulate way, Joe: Your pain is the listener’s gain.

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Music Music Features

Vital Organs

My introduction to Medeski, Martin & Wood came about four and a half years ago while I was in New Orleans for a riverboat-cruise gig during one of the Jazz Fest weekends. I was driving to the dock with my drums and I happened to pass a JF event featuring MMW and Galactic. Furry, drunken third-generation hippies were sloshing out into the street and gamely doing a version of what I’ve come to believe is a Jerry G shuffle, knee-deep in the empty cups and keg beer oozing in front of the performance tent. The sight of Corona-swilling dolts in shorts, sandals, and tie-dyed T-shirts — pardon the hippie-bashing — choogling made me queasy, but I had the car windows down and the soundtrack to this beery bash was surprisingly smart and tuneful.

No meandering Widespread guitar boogie or forced Meters nostalgia (that patch would be best left to New Orleans’ Galactic who are definitely not in the same class as the Meters when they had Ziggy Modeliste as their drummer apologies to Galactic Stanton Moore one decent drummer can’t save a sinking, stinking jam-band ship with his pretty-tasty playing) wafted out of the speakers to accompany the vision in front of the tent. The closest comparison I could come up with was organist Jimmy Smith, who churned out a ton of “soul jazz” organ trio records in the ’60s. Funky like Smith but with a bit better material than the cover versions Jimmy (or, more likely, his producers at Verve) picked for that endless string of albums he did back then. I pulled over and listened awhile until I had to leave for my sparsely attended riverboat throwdown. I made a mental note to not be prejudiced against a great-sounding band with such an ugly-looking audience.

And there’s the rub or at least a question worth asking: How can such a rotten musical context (meaning the stank-hippie jam-band scene there I go again) give birth to such a sharp-sounding group like Medeski, Martin & Wood? A butt-burning question that this prejudiced geezer can’t find a reasonable answer for. Maybe there’s something wrong with my less than generous perception (you think so? duh) of this milieu. Perhaps indulging in endless, aimless solos with clattering rhythm sections that strain soooo hard to be funky is a worthy approach for bands trying to reach the bong-huffing, record-buying market currently ensconced in dorm rooms all across America. No matter what context MMW sprang from, they simply sound good and transcend any jam-band connotations. End of the hateful anti-hippie diatribe, I promise.

Okay, so what is it that separates MMW from the noodling, doodling crowd? What puts them head and shoulders above the 10-minute conga-solo brigade? First off, their rhythm section, Billy Martin on drums and Chris Wood on bass, plays together seamlessly in the way that Al Jackson Jr. and Duck Dunn did. (No, I’m not overstating this bass/drums combination here; they are as “locked-in” as Duck and Al were on their Stax stuff.) They know how to groove in an easy manner without driving a riff into the ground, and they always sound funky in an unforced way.

Their choice of instruments and the resulting tone probably have a lot to do with how different MMW sound from the rest of the pile-driving jam-band herd. Wood plays a Hofner Beatle bass (you know, the violin-shaped bass Paul McCartney played during most of his tenure with that group; in fact, he’s still playing it 40 years later), which sounds warm and less than well-defined. No modern basses for this boy, no thumb-slapping of strings (ugh) either. Martin plays a vintage four-piece budget-line drum kit made by Rogers in the mid-’60s and uses only hi-hats and a ride as cymbals. No multi-tom kits with a dozen useless crash cymbals for Martin, just a basic drum set with no frills on which he plays the beat of a song and not much else. Martin cut his teeth playing with trumpet player Chuck Mangione in the ’80s, so you have to surmise that pounding the tubs along to such horrible scra with the greasy-haired, bearded one prepared him to drum in such a tasteful, minimal way with MMW.

And then there’s John Medeski on keyboards. More specifically, he plays organ, piano, and clavinet. He’s not exactly a minimalist, more like a percussive keyboard player in the way that the melodic instrument players in James Brown’s ’60s touring band all played percussion lines. Everybody played drums in JB’s band then, more or less. Medeski has been known to use a Hammond B-3 organ wash (à la Booker T. Jones, Steve Winwood, Garth Hudson, and even James Brown himself on the instrumental organ-led LPs he cut for Smash Records) in live performance. On record he plays simple, funky lines that perfectly complement Wood and Martin. His clavinet playing is particularly reminiscent of Sly Stone on There’s A Riot Goin’ On.

Their last four records for Blue Note (let’s see, that’s Combustication, the live Tonic, where they returned to an acoustic trio setup of piano/bass/drums, The Dropper, and this year’s Uninvisible) have all sounded very much alike to these tired old ears. The Dropper had Marc Ribot on guitar, Tonic was all-acoustic, and Uninvisible had some horns, but they keep making the same good record over and over again. No objections to that practice from this hack. Prog rockers and earache experimentalists MMW ain’t. If anything, they’re the unlikely realization of one of blowhard Brian Eno’s mid-’70s musical concepts — grid-like music that sounds as if it has no beginning or ending. They are also very easy to dance to, so watch out for leadfooted, dirtbag hippies at the New Daisy on Saturday, December 7th. Just close your eyes and listen without prejudice.

Medeski, Martin & Wood

New Daisy Theatre

Saturday, December 7th

Categories
Music Music Features

Myth Music

Music critic and self-styled cultural historian Greil Marcus can be blamed for and credited with many things in the last 30 years or so, creating an American music mythology that has more to do with what he wants American music to be than what it really was or is. This mythologizing has led to some great writing (Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces) and a fair amount of crackpot theorizing (Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley In a Land Of No Alternatives).

Marcus knows the danger of plumbing for an elusive purity in music, but in the last few years, he has fallen prey to this predictable trap by championing a form of American roots music (see Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes). For Marcus, it seems that American music was invented wholly by musicologist Harry Smith on his early-’50s Folkways compilation Anthology Of American Folk Music, with that aesthetic rediscovered by Bob Dylan in collaboration with the Band on The Basement Tapes in ’66 and ’67. One could say that, in a major way, Marcus has helped to bring about the “Harry Smithization” of American music, resulting in numerous singers and musicians trying their hand at murder ballads and paeans to cheap corn liquor. Some of that mythic Americana roots fodder has been okay. Much of it, plain awful.

But Marcus does deserve a measure of credit for his notable championing of husband-and-wife indie duo the Handsome Family as on a par with his beloved Smith/Dylan/Band trinity. With their 2001 release Twilight, the Handsome Family took more than a few small steps out of the “Greil ghetto” by recording in their living room using a Macintosh G3 and Pro Tools, a rather sophisticated recording approach for them. They retained their “purity” while creating a slightly slicker hybrid compared to the recordings that came before. The production on Twilight is pretty sparse, but there’s a pop singer of sorts struggling to get out.

That emerging crooner would be Brett Sparks. As on previous recordings, wife Rennie handles the lyrics and husband Brett plays most of the music and sings. Now living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the couple were based in Chicago for a number of years. Their lives in that city informed and infused much of their recorded work with tales of urban misery; Twilight is their goodbye to Chicago. Like all previous Handsome outings, it has its share of creepy, dark lyrics.

Pro Tools gave the Handsome Family a chance to use a conventional-sounding bass-and-drums foundation on most of the record’s songs. On 1998’s Through the Trees and 2000’s In the Air, Brett and Rennie utilized either a cheap-sounding drum machine or an odd collection of percussion instruments as drum tracks. The pairing of the drum machine or a plastic garbage pail with Rennie’s solid, dry bass-playing gave the music an odd flavor. The sound was intentionally quirky and therefore distanced from the horrors they were singing about on those two recordings.

By using a more conventional guitar/bass/drums foundation on Twilight, the Handsome Family comes across as perverse and sincere at the same time. It’s like they were hedging their bets and diluting their emotional impact by employing nonstandard instrumentation on earlier recordings. Songs about murder, madness, and suicide can sound kind of ironic and cute if they’re played on exotic instruments. Those same songs sound threatening and disturbing when a more conventional country-music formula is used.

Remember “Psycho,” Leon Payne’s tribute to deranged mass murderer Charles Whitman (Elvis Costello did a version on his 1980 country album Blue), and how the MOR Nashville backing track contrasted with the unhinged lyrics and vocal delivery?

Well, a lot of Twilight is like that grotesque ditty because the words are unsettling and the music is so, well, normal-sounding. A murder ballad played on an autoharp and mandolin is kind of sweet and detached. A murder ballad with a somewhat lush country-music production is downright unnerving. And that’s what the Handsome Family opts for on their latest.

Plenty has been written about Rennie’s lyrics. They have been praised as short stories à la Flannery O’Connor, as brief fables that function as literature on their own without accompanying music or Brett’s vocals. They’re not quite poetry, more like plain speech that startles and amuses. Many of her lyrics are bleak but almost always tangibly funny as well. They stand alone quite well. However, with a voice as expressive and heartbreaking as her husband’s, they don’t have to. There are echoes of Charley Pride, Scott Walker, Richard Manuel of the Band (if Manuel had been a baritone; Brett has the late singer’s gift for languid, liquid phrasing), and numerous other classic country and pop singers in Brett’s voice.

Greil Marcus got it right for once when he said that the Handsome Family had taken up Harry Smith’s mantle more fully than anybody else these days. And that’s not a myth, by the way.