The Sorrows of Gene Clark

HERE at The Misread City, we're huge Byrds fans, and Gene Clark is, some days, our favorite member of that great L.A. band. With the Byrds he wrote and sang songs like "I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better" and "Set You Free This Time"; his country-tinged solo career was rich and varied, and included Tried So Hard" (covered by Fairport Convention and Yo La Tengo), "Why Not Your Baby" (covered by Velvet Crush) and some soulful collaborations with Byrd Chris Hillman.

But there's always been a sense that the Missouri-born Clark, who left the Byrds during their heyday, in 1966, because of his refusal to fly, never quite arrived. (This is the guy, of course, who co-wrote "Eight Miles High.") There is a strong Clark cult among musicians and fans of country rock, but it's not nearly as large as that commanded by Gram Parsons. Much of the poignant work of his solo career remains largely unheard.

Clark was reticent, often anxious, sometimes self-destructive and did not love the attention the group's fame brought. And he felt deep disappointment that his 1974 record, No Other, which he recorded in Mendocino and was intended comeback, never hit. It was a lasting sorrow for a musician whose best work is about loss and missed connections.

So it gives us great pleasure to see a number of indie musicians -- Beach House (pictured), the Walkmen, Grizzly Bear -- performing a handful of tribute concerts to Clark and this oft-overlooked album. They're at the 9:30 Club in D.C. (a club important to me as a teenager, for what it's worth) and in Brooklyn this weekend.

Here's the New York Times' Jon Pareles:

A British Invasion beat carried Clark’s early songs with the Byrds, like “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” — which, in a typical Clark touch, brings uncertainty to its chorus, “I’ll probably feel a whole lot better when you’re gone.”

But rock often gave way, during his solo career, to something closer to the country music he had grown up on, transformed by his lyrics. His songs have been recognized as a foundation for what would later be called alt-country or Americana. Clark wrote story songs as stark as traditional ballads, and deeply haunted mood songs like the two chosen by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss — “Polly Come Home” and “Through the Morning, Through the Night” — for their 2007 album “Raising Sand.”

Yet “No Other” is no one’s idea of down-home roots-rock. Mr. Clark and its producer, Thomas Jefferson Kaye, gave it a far more lavish palette, and even the songs that start out countryish end up in realms of their own. There are gospelly female choruses, horns, synthesizers, Latin percussion, wah-wah violin and, in “No Other,” a bruising fuzz-toned bass line played by a phalanx of overdubbed basses. The head of Elektra/Asylum Records, David Geffen, was furious that a $100,000 studio budget had yielded only eight finished songs, and the label barely promoted the album. In a notorious Hollywood incident, Clark and Mr. Geffen nearly came to blowsat a restaurant.

Now, let's have a Gene Clark tribute in the state he called home for much of his career. Let's start with the city in which his old band was formed -- Los Angeles.

Rick Moody and the Wingdale Community Singers

HERE at The Misread City, we’re longtime fans of Rick Moody’s novels (The Ice Storm), short stories (Demonology) and music writing (collected in On Celestial Music and posted generally on The Rumpus.) His admirers include Lydia Millett, Michael Chabon and fellow Puritan Thomas Pynchon.

But we’ve only recently caught up with Moody’s folk/modernist band the Wingdale Community Singers, whose latest album, Night, Sleep, Death, splices their music with (among other things) the poetry of Walt Whitman. Moody sings and plays guitar in a band that also includes Hannah Marcus and David Grubbs of Gastr del Sol.

We spoke to Moody about Skip James, his Taylor guitar, Saint Augustine, Brooklyn, Bob Dylan, the sounds in his head, and what the band means to a writer like him.

Let’s start out with some sense of your favorite artists within this country/folk tradition you guys seem to be plying. Who are a few who shaped your approach?

I think it has been revealed over the years that the guy all three of us love in equal measure is Leonard Cohen. Once you get past him, we diverge slightly. Hannah Marcus is really in an Old Time/Irish music kind of way, these days, and can tell you everything about Alice Gerrard or whoever is the hot new fiddler. Dave Grubbs knows a lot about innovative and experimental music, but has lately been doing guitar transcriptions of Gesualdo. He also loves, as I do, Skip James, and often seems to have such a breadth of early recorded music under his belt that one is surprised by his learning. But then he is a very brilliant guy. I probably have more mundane taste by comparison, in that I also like some well-known music in these areas. The Harry Smith anthology. Johnny Cash. John Fahey. Martin Carthy. Fairport Convention. Even Simon and Garfunkel. That guy from Minnesota. And I am not averse to contemporary acoustic music, either, if it is played with the requisite level of dread. Sam Amidon, for me, really gets to the dread sometimes. Jolie Holland. The Be-Good Tanyas.

We assume that a novelist who is in a band is some kind of showoff, charlatan, dilettante, or opportunist – it’s like the way Letterman used to be able to say “actor-singer” and we’d all bust into derisive laughter. Where did this come from?

Do you mean why is it so funny? I dunno! I always played music, lifelong, took voice lessons as a kid and so on. So for me it’s not a footnote in my life, but very central to my life. I just happen not to be as good at it as I am good at novel-writing. I understand this rubs people the wrong way, and I kept my musical interests under wraps for a long while. But I think creativity is sort of a general condition, not a genre-specific condition, and after a while it seemed stupid to me to pretend that I hadn’t given a lot of my life to music. I recommend not dismissing this work out of hand because of my writing, but I also recommend against listening to these records as the work of Rick Moody the novelist. This is the work of a band, with a very group-centered approach, and it’s a band that has been together a long time now (ten years). We know who we are and how we work together, and the individual identities are not as important in the Wingdales as they are outside of the Wingdales.

 

You’ve written that being in a band – and especially, singing harmony -- has improved your novel writing. Has it done anything to your music writing?

I’m a lot better music writer these days because I actually have experience in the studio and onstage. So I can, in fact, write from songwriting experience, and recording experience. Before I only wrote from listening experience, which, however passionate, is different from trying to write and play the stuff.  I am not a sophisticated musician—I will never score parts on a staff—but I am not a total idiot either, and that, I expect, makes me a better music-writer.

Your band has found an oddly resonant space halfway between the Carter Family and Richard and Linda Thompson. How does fellow Brooklynite Walt Whitman fit into this?

Whitman is not the only guest lyricist on the new album. Andy Warhol is source material for Hannah’s song “So What?,” and Augustine of Hippo is cannibalized for “No Rest,” and one song is made entirely out of fortune cookie fortunes. The point was to disrupt the confessional lyric a little bit. We are trying not to be singer-songwriters in the usual way, we are trying to be songwriters in the more broad sense of the thing. Whitman is obviously a great touchstone of Brooklyn identity, and we are from Brooklyn, and we are all big readers, so Whitman is not a stretch. He’s someone we love, as we love Lightnin’ Hopkins or Karen Dalton. And why shouldn’t his songs be set to music? They happen to be very hard to set, because of scansion issues, but that’s part of why it was fun.

These days, nobody wants to be among those who booed Dylan at Newport. But is there something valuable and irreplaceable about acoustic instruments? (I’m aware that there is an organ or something on this new record and an electric guitar on some of the earlier stuff.)

Well, here, I’ll say an unpopular thing. I don’t think those Dylan gigs with The Band were so great. I understand it was a brilliant gesture, and I like the electric guitar as much as the next guy, but I think the acoustic Dylan is more masterful in some ways. On the 1966 authorized boot, I thought the “Visions of Johanna” recording was way better than the electric stuff.  For me, it’s about how much you can strip away. The more you strip away, the more emotionally resonant the material is. (See,Good As I Been To You, e.g.) This is true on a lot of punk recordings too. I think Suicide, for example, is an extremely emotionally resonant band, and there’s obviously nothing acoustic about that music. The fact is, the more musicians are on the stage, the harder it is to have everyone pulling toward the meaning of the song. When there’s only one personthere, then you definitely have a shot. The acoustic instruments are valid because they are really quiet, and they leave a lot of room for singer and song. This seems good to me. But those Billy Bragg albums where he plays solo electric are good. The late John Fahey recordings on electric are good. And very minimal. For me acoustic music is minimal music, and that’s what I like. 

What kind of guitar do you play and how important is it to you? Do you have any kind of models for your guitar playing?

I play a Taylor acoustic with onboard electronics, so I can plug it in. But I also have a Canadian acoustic that my brother-in-law got for me last year, a cut-rate affair with no particular legend attached, that should bebad, but which is extremely good, with excellent resonance in the lower strings. I really love it a lot. (Its name is Tex.) I am not a gear hound, at all, because I came from punk rock days, when people banged the shit out of their gear, or used really substandard gear. If I think it’s really about the song, then obviously I’m not going to give a shit about the guitar. I have a Mexican Telecaster, but it will not do what I want it to do, at all. I would like to get a Rickenbacker and will some day. My models for guitar playing would be people like Alex Chilton and Chris Stamey, who are rudimentary, but sort of ecstatic at the same time. I love Tom Verlaine too. Or Sonny Sharrock. But I will never be a player like that. For me it’s just about sketching out the chords and letting the band do what needs to be done around me.

You come from a tradition, at least in part, associated with hostility to music and the arts in general: The Puritans are famous for ripping the singers’ benches out of churches – leaving only “bare ruined choirs” – smashing the stained-glass windows, etc. How do you find yourself a musician 500 years later? Do you ever want to smash everybody’s instruments – Pete Townshend-style -- in rehearsal?

I think acoustic music in general, and especially in some of its idioms—gospel, blues, folk—are not immune to a church interior. I think God, if not the fire-and-brimstone God, then some other more sympathetic God, is not antithetical to acoustic music of the kind that we play. Melancholy is kind of numinous. But as for wanting to smash my guitar, SURE. I definitely identify with Pete Townshend’s feeling that there were sounds in his head that he couldn’t get down in song. I feel that way a lot.

Brooklyn Composer Gabriel Kahane

I'VE been hearing about the rock songwriter and chamber music composer Gabriel Kahane for a few years now, and was glad to have the chance to speak to the hipster hero about his new piece, based on Hart Crane's The Bridge, which makes its West Coast debut this weekend.

I also spoke to the esteemed Jeffrey Kahane and got a sense of how Gabe's eclecticism grew out of family tradition. HERE's my piece.

Speaking of music, here at the Misread City we're quite broken up about the death of Levon Helm, even though we saw it coming. His work with the Band and as a solo artist has moved a lot of people.

And this Sunday I will be at the LA Times Festival of Books, interviewing novelist Anne Rice. Hope to see you there.

Ozu's Films vs. Adrian Tomine

It's one of the best and most natural aesthetic marriages imaginable: The nuanced, meditative Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu and the nuanced, meditative comics Adrian Tomine, best known for the Optic Nerve series.

Tomine has designed some covers for Ozu's lesser known films, The Only Son and There Was a Father. Here is more info on the films, which the Criterion Collection will release next week. I love Ozu's films -- especially Tokyo Story and the season films like Late Spring, which date from the late '40s to early '60s -- but must admit I have not yet seen either of these two.

Ozu's films are known for their quiet tone, their emotional poignance, the low setting of the camera and the lack of conventional cutting. Some of them look at the tearing of family and traditional society.

I've written about Tomine -- who grew up in Sacramento and lived in Berkeley for years before a recent move to Brooklyn -- several times; this  is the first and most complete. This week The Misread City spoke to him about the Ozu project.

When did you first discover Ozu’s films, and how did they initially strike you?

When I was in college, my mom gave me a vhs copy of Ozu's film Good Morning, and I liked it quite a bit. I immediately connected with the quotidian subject matter and pacing...it had a lot of the qualities that I admired in the work of my favorite cartoonists. I think it's a good "gateway" film into Ozu's work because it's got so much genuine cuteness and silliness. If you dive right in with something like Tokyo Story, it can be pretty devastating.

Your job illustrating this project is to capture and create a visual style… What makes these films visually distinctive?

I think a film scholar could answer this with much more sophistication, but from a personal point of view, I feel like Ozu's visual style could be compared to the cartooning style that books like "How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way" are adamant about avoiding. It's like the supposedly boring side view of Dr. Strange walking into a room, as opposed to the "worm's eye view" of him dynamically bursting through the door. In other words, it's clear, straightforward, honest, devoid of flash, and it's absolutely perfect. .

There's also been a lot written about the famous "Ozu shot," but I think that's the kind of thing that works on a completely subconscious level...you'd never ask, "Why are we looking at this shot of laundry flapping in the wind? What does that symbolize?" I think the beauty of those shots is that they make you feel something that's otherwise inexpressible, in a way that's absolutely particular to that piece of film.

There’s a quiet, cerebral and detail-oriented quality that Ozu’s films share with your comics. Do you see that kind of connection?

I'm sure my critics would argue against that kind of connection, but I will say that I've admired Ozu's films for a long time, and I've learned a lot from them.

A few years ago you wrote your first Optic Nerve with an explicitly Japanese-American theme, and you’ve helped to recover the comics of the Japanese artist Tatsumi… Do you think you see and hear Ozu differently because of your Asian roots?

I think so. When I watch an Ozu movie with my wife, I think we're having fairly different experiences. Obviously a lot of the content is universal, but for me there's a strange, surprising feeling of recognition of certain character traits and behavioral tics that I can see in my grandparents, my own parents, and even myself to a degree. Something about just entering into that world is very comforting to me. But maybe this has more to do with Ozu's filmmaking abilities than the simple fact that he was Japanese. There's a huge amount of Japanese art and culture that leaves me as alienated as the next guy.

What’s next from the desk of Adrian Tomine? 

When I got married a few years ago, my bride-to-be forced me to make some kind of "wedding favor" to give away to the guests. This struck me as a particularly bizarre idea, especially since we were already giving them all the food and drink they could ever imagine. Anyway, I think she had in mind a little card or something and I ended up funneling all my pre-nuptial anxiety into the creation of a comic book about the process of getting married. Since then, I've slowly been adding pages when something would occur to me, or if I just needed a break from my more precise, premeditated work. Now I think I've got almost fifty pages of material, so Drawn & Quarterly is going to put it out as a little book. It's loose, joke-y stuff, and for that reason, I thought it would make a nice follow-up to Shortcomings.

I'm also making slow progress on another, more "real" book, which will most likely be serialized in several issues of Optic Nerve before being re-packaged as a "graphic novel." But like I said, progress is moving slowly, especially now that I've got an 8-month-old daughter and I'm constantly running out of my studio to either change a shitty diaper or watch her do something cute.


Art courtesy Adrian Tomine

The Found Footage Festival

SO much of what's supposed to be really funny ends up being just crude, shocking and sophomoric -- sometimes all three. that's why i was so blown away a few years ago when i attended the first national tour of the Found Footage Festival, which came to Hollywood's M Bar, not only was it genuinely hilarious, it was an original turn on both indie/DIY and on the trash-can aesthetic that runs from duchamp through "found" magazine.

there was a lot of great, weird stuff salvaged from the dustbin of history then. part of what i remember was a truly cheesy macdonald's training video for custodians (did you know they used to call them "mc g's," as in, "so you're the new mc g!") also memorable: teen-star corey haim's video boast, "my myself and i," the film of a young austrian weightlifter who would later become governor of california, on a trip to rio de janeiro to dance the samba, discuss his favorite part of the female anatomy, and set world-class groping records. (okay, some of that was crude and shocking, but in a good way.)

HERE is my piece from today's LATimes. The show kicks off tonight; Friday i go to check out the latest installment, which involves a hellish 1987 dating show, at the M Bar.

as i say in the piece, it's like the opposite of a film festival: these guys go seeking out the very worst, and often find it.

Photo credit: Found Footage Festival

Birth of a Wine Shop

ANYONE interested in wine, or how a small business gets off the ground, should check out this series of youtube videos about the birth of colorado wine company -- conceived as the dream of a restless young couple in brooklyn who left everything they had in new york to drive to eagle rock, LA, to build it from the ground up.

HERE is the first of the four little segments of the show "radical sabbatical." you can also cut to the chase with segment two. (maybe because it was recently passover, i read it too fast as "rabbinical sabbatical," which doesnt sound like quite as much fun.)

in the show, john nugent and his lovely wife jen talk about their ambitions, the hoops they're jumping through, upgrading an old space, their push to get open by christmas. there's more drama than you'd think. "here we are, the future location of colorado wine company," john says, without much confidence, standing in front of a papered-up storefront. you cant help shouting, good luck -- you'll need it!

what's interesting now, in 2009, is how many of their goals they've met. the place i know matches the original dream for it -- an accessible but still sophisticated shop that serves as a meeting spot for the neighborhood -- oddly well.

it's also hard not to feel a little sadly nostalgic watching this: the shop opened in 2005, in a very different economy. how many johns and jens out there have dreams they are not able to pursue, neighborhoods they are not able to enrich, because the economy was allowed to get so bad?

Photo credit: Colorado Wine Co.