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.

Catching Up with Stephen Malkmus

THE other day I spoke to the former leader of what may've been the greatest band of the '90s -- Stephen Malkmus of Pavement. Their mix of melody and noise electrified me during my misspent youth, and it was gratifying to see the band reunite a few years ago and actually play like they meant it.

Malkmus, who recently returned to Portland after a couple years in Berlin, has a fine new record out on Matador. He'll be touring soon. Here's my interview. Just don't expect straight answers from him. I've spoken to him several times over the years -- on each occasion he gets a bit friendlier and a bit more cryptic.

Dave Allen on Rock Music and the Internet

RECENTLY I've been corresponding with Dave Allen, bassist for the British post-punk group Gang of Four. His ideas on digital culture -- mostly strongly opposed to those of David Lowery and David Byrne -- are as forceful as his bass playing on Entertainment!

I'll point out that I disagree with Mr. Allen on much of what he says; I'm less optimistic that the new system will work out for musicians (and I have seen from quite a close perspective how it works out for most journalists.) 

For example, he argues that there has been no golden age for musicians, that making a living has always been hard, and so on. Well, of course, that's all literally true, but just because a system was not perfect does not mean it has not gotten substantially worse.

I could argue to anyone who tells me, say, that Congress has run aground that we've always had conflicts in Washington, going back to the 18th century, and that Ted Cruz is just a latter-day version of whoever... Same with arguments about income inequality, or anything that matters. This argument does not help clarify where we are at present: You do not have to acknowledge the existence of a golden age to want things to be better or to resist and criticize the way they have gone. 

But Allen's an extremely sharp guy, a lively writer, and he deserves to be heard. Here's our Salon conversation. 

David Lowery vs. Silicon Valley

CAMPER Van Beethoven's singer David Lowery has become the most ornery of those fighting for musician's rights. He's erupted over piracy, Spotify, lyric websites, and the battle between the surviving Beastie Boys (with the ghost of Adam Yauch) and GoldieBlox.

I speak to him for Salon here.

He makes a pretty good case for what's wrong with Silicon Valley techno-utopianism, which leaves artists out of the revenue stream.

(Lowery and his argument also make an appearance in my book Creative Destruction, which comes out next year.)

Digging the New Dean Wareham

DESPITE our well-documented bias for things West Coast, the Misread City gang has a deep and abiding love for the work of Dean Wareham going back to the Galaxie 500 and Luna eras. The day after seeing Luna on its first US tour (opening for the Sundays, if memory serves, and before the first LP), we walked to the local record store in Chapel Hill to pick up the band's Slide EP. (It was what we imagine kids in the '50s used to do.)

Dean -- whose roots are in Australia and New Zealand and whose early bands were based in Boston and New York -- has recently moved to Los Angeles. He's also just released his first solo record, an EP called Emancipated Hearts. (Check out the track called Air.) We spoke to Dean about his new work, the state of the music business, and his feelings for California.

Dean Wareham plays Thursday night at Largo at the Coronet, one of LA's best clubs. We'll be there. Here's our Q & A with him.

You’ve been in a number of semi-famous indie bands – Galaxie 500, Luna, Dean & Britta – and are now releasing what I take to be your first solo recording. How is it different from leading a band, and is it strange feeling to be on your own?

 To tell you the truth it still feels like a band effort, these are musicians I have been playing with for some years now: Britta Phillips on bass and Anthony LaMarca on drums, and augmented on this mini-LP by producer Jason Quever, who played keyboards and electric guitar. So anyway, technically yes it’s a “solo” release because it says so on the front of the record. I’m doing all the singing, and I write all the lyrics and melodies, but I depend on those around me to help figure out the arrangements.

That’s not so different from how I’ve been recording my whole career. Perhaps the difference was at the mixing stage, Jason Quever mixed it, and I was there too, but we didn’t have a whole band sitting behind him making comments. Last night the four of us had a rehearsal at Jason's studio in San Francisco and the band sounds really good, both on the new songs we recorded together but also on the Galaxie 500 and Luna songs we are doing.

You’re known for songwriting, but you’ve always had a great knack for covers – Wire’s Outdoor Miner, Jonathan Richman, Sweet Child of Mine, and so on. What makes a song right for you to play, besides, you know, liking it?

Picking covers is hit and miss. Just because I love a particular song does not mean I can pull it off vocally. I covered "Distractions" by Bobby Darin, a sly anti-war song from his folk period. But my rendition was not quite successful. Nor was Luna's rendition of "Dancing Days" by Led Zeppelin, though at least there is a bit of comedy in my singing that. Anyway I do look for songs that are under-appreciated, lost even. 

One of my favorite tracks on here is the digital-only number, Living Too Close to the Ground, an Every Bros song significantly less well-known that, say, Cathy’s Clown. How did you stumble upon this one and what made it seem right for you?

The Everly Brothers are amazing, first for their rhythm guitar playing (and this is more evident in the ‘50s songs), but there is also this ‘60s period where they recorded a number of great albums for Warner Brothers, albums that didn’t do well at radio (at least in the States, they were more popular in England). They were probably out of fashion, but they kept making records. “Living Too Close to the Ground” I think was written by their bassist (though I’m not positive about that, I’ve read a couple different things); anyway it is a great lyric and their recording is haunting and weird. I’m happy with how mine turned out too — there’s a delicious slide guitar solo in there — played by Jason.

You’ve written in your memoir Black Postcards one of the best assessments of the shift from the label era of the ‘80s and ‘90s to our current post-Napster musical universe. Lots of raging debate right now on Pandora, piracy, the joys of going it alone with Kickstarter, etc. Be brief if you like, but how are you enjoying our brave new world?

I didn’t quite realize as I was writing my book, that it was about something that was disappearing, a world of compact discs and tour support and even indie labels giving healthy advances to bands. The book ends in 2005, since then of course many more changes. Back then it was the early days of piracy (or filesharing), now people are just as concerned about streaming.

As you say, there have been some interesting discussions online lately, David Lowery arguing that the internet revolution has been terrible for musicians, and others writing about the dangers of Spotify — and on the other side Dave Allen, formerly of the Gang of Four, arguing that “the internet doesn’t care” and that we are simply in a transitional phase between technologies, with new markets being formed. Maybe that's true; certainly the old marketplaces are disappearing and we can see that with our eyes. Dave Allen also points to artists like Amanda Palmer and Trent Reznor and says they’ve got it figured out -- so what’s wrong with the rest of us? Which sounds like an updated bootstrap argument to me, something Dickens would make fun of. We hear similar thoughts from Thomas Friedman, that if we can continually reinvent ourselves and learn new technologies, we’ll be fine. 

At any rate there have always been challenges, being a recording artist or musician has never been a very reliable job. I know the 1990s were good times for the music business as a whole, it was a golden age where they convinced everyone to replace their vinyl collection with compact discs, how great was that? And if your band had a hit at radio, then maybe you did well. 

It is an interesting time to be in a band; there are certain advantages — it’s cheaper than ever to make recordings and distribute them all over the world, via the miracle of Internet and social media. It's easier than ever to reach your audience. The problem now is it’s more difficult to sell music. We hear a lot that music should be free. Sure, it should be free, and so should health care and education, and recording studios, and my rent should be controlled too. But unfortunately we don't live in that world.

You moved to Los Angeles earlier this year. What’s it like for a longtime New Yorker, originally from down under, to land in California? What do you like here and what do you miss about the East?

I lived in Sydney, Australia, from age 7 to 14. I only know Sydney from a child’s perspective, but Los Angeles reminds me of that city — the sprawl, the perfect weather, the Eucalpytus and Jacaranda trees. I have only been here six months but Los Angeles certainly has its charms, its rich history, good food, plenty of culture. But I miss some of the freedom of New York, where it is much easier to go out at night, easier to wander the streets or ride a bicycle. Life in Los Angeles, as John Cassavetes said, is life by appointment. But the truth is I spend most of my time at home, avoiding traffic, playing guitar, running my record label, making sure the social media is updated — pulling myself up by my bootstraps.

Radar Bros and Overseas at the Satellite

Still buzzing from some recent cultural highs -- Keith Jarrett's Standards Trio at UCLA Royce Hall, the Glass/Wilson Einstein on the Beach at Los Angeles Opera -- we're looking forward to a smaller but no less welcome event in town this week. That's LA's own Radar Bros -- who we've written about several times -- with Overseas, the new collaboration between Matt Kadane (Bedhead, The New Year) with Daniel Bazan of Pedro the Lion. They'll be at the Satellite on Wednesday.

The Radar Bros, on Merge Records, are well known to Angeleno indie fans, tho still probably not celebrated enough. With roots in the '90s "slowcore" scene that's also included Spain and Acetone, they've become tougher and a bit harder. (The joke used to be that they were the only band in history that played slower when they performed live.)

Here's a video from a song on their latest album, Eight.

Overseas is making its first trip to the West Coast, with a self-titled recording.

The Kadanes (Matt and his bro Bubba, proud Texans) are on a very small lists of musicians: We (I think) everything they're recorded. The new band extends their old work -- Bedhead and The New Year had the mix of aching melody and mellow instrumental chaos that makes the best indie rock. They appeal to the side of us that wish The Feelies or Luna had made a dozen more albums apiece.

Here's a video for one of their new songs:

We'd love to tell you more about how much we love these groups, though since we're completing Creative Destruction, a book about the evisceration of the creative class, we must keep moving.

Hope to see you at Spaceland, er, the Satellite. Both bands are in San Diego on Thursday.

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.

Futurebirds Take Flight

ONE of our favorite newish bands, here at The Misread City's sleekly refurbed listening room, is Futurebirds, from Athens, Ga. Some listeners compare them to My Morning Jacket and Crazy Horse -- I certainly here that, too. But to me they're a mix between the two great chapters of Athens music -- the southern shamble of early R.E.M. (especially the echoey Fables-era band) and the neo-psych Elephant 6 bands like Olivia Tremor Control.

Photo Jason Thrasher

Of course, a lot of groups have smart influences. But these guys have the songs as well, complete with great melodies and hooks.

Here's their song, Virginia Slims, from their record Baba Yaga (Fat Possum). It takes a minute to build, but ends up in power-pop heaven.

Catch Futurebirds at the Echo this Tuesday night.

Cable TV and the Niche-ing of America

TODAY I have a story in Salon looking at the golden age of cable TV post-Sopranos, and contrasting this with the economic/technological forces in the culture right now.

And I ask: If HBO, or AMC, can find a profitable quality niche -- and stay in business -- can a jazz club? A book publisher? Theater company? I also look at the world of indie rock labels.

I speak to the authors of two new books, Brett Martin, of television chronicle Difficult Men, and producer Lynda Obst, of Sleepless in Hollywood.

The Glory of Big Star

THEY were nearly invisible -- barely even a memory -- during most of my formative years, and you'd never hear 'em on the "classic rock" stations that dominated radio programming in most of America. But when various indie rockers started to sing this band's praises, they became a legend, at least among a passionate few.

And that mix of injustice, lost opportunity, creative isolation, cult passion and eventual rebirth is all part of the story told in the new documentary Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, which opens today. It's our favorite movie about rock music in many moons.

Big Star, of course, was born in early '70s Memphis, and led by former Box Tops singer Alex Chilton and the troubled/ brilliant Chris Bell. They sang timeless pop songs like September Gurls, Thirteen, the Ballad of El Goodo and In the Street, and made a very complex/ deep/ troubled third album called Sister Lovers. (Strangely, they were signed to Stax, the soul label.) They captured a far wider range of emotions than almost any '70s band I can think of.

Musicians like the Replacements began to talk them up in the late '80s; the doc shows a bit of their wonderful song Alex Chilton, and includes testimonials by Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo, Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub, Chris Stamey of the dB's and Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream. And who knew the photographer William Eggleston, one of the pioneers of color photography, was a fellow traveler, and played piano on one of their records?

The band's music been remastered or something; it's never sounded better.

For what it's worth, I lead a very impassioned but strictly amateur band in my garage, the Subterraneans, devoted to early indie rock and its roots. We play a lot of VU, Neil Young, early R.E.M., Replacements, and so on. Most nights we kick off with the heavenly chime of September Gurls.

Tonight, you'll hear that one for sure.

The Return of Camera Obscura

WHY is it that so many of the band we like here at the Misread City -- a site dedicated to West Coast culture -- come from Glasgow, a city whose cold/rainy weather and Victorian/industrial cityscape is about as far from sunny coastal California as we could imagine?

It may be because so many of these bands seem influenced by '60s West Coast pop -- Pet Sounds, the Mamas and the Papas, the Byrds, Love. Or it just might be that for all our regional chauvinism, we are willing to recognize musical quality, especially when it comes in the shape of great melodies and songcraft.

One of  our favorite Scottish bands, Camera Obscura, has a new album, Desire Lines, which comes out next week. (The snappy single "Do It Again" is getting a lot of play on KCRW.) We've loved this band since we heard their early song "Suspended From Class," and dig the new record heavily. Try this video for this somewhat gloomy song I really love, Fifth in Line

HERE is our interview with the group's lead singer, which took place when My Maudlin Career, the last Camera Obscura record, came out.

They're at the Wiltern on June 18. A much more assertive live band than you'd guess from all the wistfulness. See you there.

Sarah Polley, Director

SARAH Polley, the actress and director, has a new, very well reviewed film out. A few years ago, when her directorial debut, Away From Her, was released, I had lunch with her at the ArcLight. That film was based on an understated short story by the master Alice Munro, who I also spoke to.

HERE is that piece, which I wrote for the LA Times.

My main memory of that encounter was saying, somewhat clumsily, "Oh, you're Canadian, do you know the music of Ron Sexsmith? He's Canadian too." Instead of pouring her ice tea on my head, Ms. Polley -- who I found smart and engaging throughout -- beamed and raved about how much she loved Sexsmith's music.

I'm very eager to see her new Stories We Tell, a documentary about family secrets.

Speaking of new docs, I'm also curious to see the film Deceptive Practices, about the magician and storyteller Ricky Jay, who I absolutely adore. (That link takes you to the website, and the trailer, of the film.)

Folk Duo The Milk Carton Kids

YOUR humble blogger caught a very good show at Largo last night by the LA folk duo The Milk Carton Kids. I've dug their Gillian Welch/Dave Rawlings-like songs on their recordings -- their mix of old-time vocal harmonies, smooth melodies, and bits of guitar dissonance -- but the show took it all to a higher level. (Others will hear the Everly Bros or early Simon and Garfunkel.)

Beautiful ingredients: The between-song banter was somewhere between Richard Thompson and improv comedy, and the guitars were a '50s Gibson and Martin. (Not sure why THIS isn't coming up, but it's one of my favorite songs of theirs -- try it.)

I say all this not just because these guys -- whose new record, The Ash & Clay, is recently out on Anti -- are like a younger/cuter/more talented version of Slowpoke, the acoustic duo I was once in.

Don't take my word for it -- Joe Henry likes em, too.

As strong as the show was, I would have liked to see them encore with a cover -- Townes? Scud Mountain Boys? Delmores? -- or bring onstage Punch Brother Chris Thile, the godlike mandolin player who the Kids sometime open for. Their style is very sharply worked out, but I'd like to see an occasional wrench thrown in to get them moving a bit.

Also enjoyed the opener, a band of very young Tennessee kids called the Barefoot Movement, playing spirited old-time music on guitars, mandolin and double bass.

I'll be keeing my eyes and ears peeled for the Milk Carton Kids.

Discovering Nick Drake

THE other day I spoke to Joe Boyd, the Britfolk impresario, because of his new tribute record, Way to Blue. The album is in honor of Nick Drake, who Boyd helped discover way back in the late '60s, and whose career was delicate, melancholy and all too short.

Today, Drake is revered not only be neo-folkies but by the leading jazz musician of my generation, pianist Brad Mehldau.

Boyd, of course, also had a role in Newport '65, the birth of Pink Floyd, Richard Thompson and Fairport Convention, AND produced what may be our favorite R.E.M. record, the enigmatic third album Fables of the Reconstruction.

Boyd got his start as a preppie New Jersey teenager who helped coax blues and jazz great Lonnie Johnson out of retirement.

Here is my conversation with Boyd, whose memoir of the musical '60s, White Bicycles, I cannot recommend highly enough.

British History and Texas Music

A SHORT, insightful new book about the making of the modern world – told in microcosm – has just come from the pen of a noted indie rocker.

Here at The Misread City, we’ve been impressed with the melancholy genius of Matt Kadane since the first record, What Fun Life Was, from his old band, Dallas slowcore quartet Bedhead. Like the group that followed, The New Year, Bedhead was defined by melodic songwriting and intricate, understated guitar playing – VU’s hushed third record, with a bit of Sonic Youth and New Order, a hint of Texas twang, and almost no effects. (I wrote about The New Year for the LA Times in 2008, and the video for their song "Disease" appears near the end of this post.)

Turns out Kadane (who led both groups with his bearded brother Bubba) spent much of his musical career getting a doctorate at Brown; these days he teaches history at Hobart and William Smith College in upstate New York.

In any case, Kadane’s new book is The Watchful Clothier: The Life of an Eighteenth-Century Protestant Capitalist. This is the kind of history we like – lucid, free of jargon and with a clear narrative and analytical direction. (Full disclosure: The Watchful Clothier appears on Yale University Press, the house on which I will publish my own work on the perils of the creative class, sometime next year.) It takes off from some ideas of one of our favorite historians, Christopher Hill. whose book on English radicalism, The World Turned Upside Down, inspired song sung by Billy Bragg song. (The Watchful Clothier, for what it's worth, includes an endorsement from the important historian Joyce Appleby, though it awaits its treatment by a British pop artist.)

What follows is my Q and A, conducted by email, with the historian and indie rocker. I ask Kadane about both sides of his amphibious identity.

Protestantism and the market economy are two of the key forces in the modern West, and have been specially joined at least since Max Weber and maybe since the Puritans. How did your "watchful clothier" seem like the right lens though which to gaze at these big issues?

The clothier, Joseph Ryder, lived in eighteenth-century Leeds where he ran a small business.  Leeds was one of the great cities of the industrial revolution and was undergoing big changes during Ryder's life, which ended in 1768, right around the time that industrialization was noticeably beginning.  But already while he was in his active years, the population was growing at an unprecedented rate, more and more people were becoming wage laborers, the cloth that the town produced was heading to markets further and further afield, and all these things played a major role in laying the framework for modern capitalism.  Ryder was, at the same time, a deeply pious and traditional Protestant and wrote a two and a half million word diary to document his religious life.  So he lived at the intersection of these big religious and material forces, and he's an ideal case study for seeing how they interacted.

Today, Protestantism and capitalism seem pretty comfortable with each other -- in many parts of the American South and Midwest, for instance, they both stand triumphant, with arms joined. But in the 18th century you chronicle, they seem to be in some serious tension with each other, don't they?

I agree that they now they seem designed for each other.  Mega-churches meet all the basic definitions of big business.  There are also, to be fair, subplots that complicate the story, more selfless social activists within the various denominations, and so on.  But the way things largely stand today is pretty different from how they were envisioned in the centuries closer to the Reformation.   Sermons back then railed against acquisitiveness, successful parishioners wrung their hands even when they balked at the idea of maximizing profits.  What complicates this image is that the Puritan ethos was also partly responsible for a new more relentless mode of striving in the world.  For reasons that I think Max Weber was basically the first to see, and however much the argument may need to be modified, Protestantism at its most scrupulous, at its most unguided by external authority, and in the right economic setting could encourage secular ambition as a way to overcome anxiety about salvation.

The nature of Christianity changed during this period, as Newton took hold and the Enlightenment reinforced the prestige science and rationalism. "A watchful God had become a watchmaker," you write. What happened and how was it felt at the time?

Christianity in the eighteenth century is hard to describe without qualification.  This is, after all, the age of the first great awakening.  But if traditional Christianity in western Europe was reasserting itself, this was in large part because it was also changing in the hands of rationalists, who may have been a minority of the population but who for that very reason were also radically vocal.  In the eyes of these anti-traditionalists, Jesus was often seen as a mere man, God was conceptualized as a sort of mathematician who designed a universe according to such sublime laws that it could run itself without Providential intervention, and the notion that humans are fundamentally depraved no longer seemed tenable.  Religious figures who were coming to think this way were also especially successful by the later eighteenth century in getting their message across to the emerging industrialists.  Churches throughout the north of England that had more or less been Calvinist at the beginning of the century were actively looking for religious radicals, particularly Unitarians, to start leading the flock.  Historians have more or less known that this was happening, but what has been missing from the story is the sort of parishioner's first hand account that Ryder offers.

Ryder recorded in his diary something like 5,000 sermons that he heard preached throughout Yorkshire, and what this record shows are two really interesting things.  One is that the new religious outlook, with its emphasis on the dignity of humans and the humanity of Jesus, had a natural affinity with emerging commercial self-interest.  Puritanism could also encourage economic striving to overcome anxiety about salvation, but it had a much stricter definition of what counted as economic excess.  And it's much easier to be fully self-interested if, for example, you actually believe that you're worthwhile rather than utterly depraved as Puritans thought.    So to accommodate the remarkable wealth that industrialists were generating, the religion of so many of these people had to soften on certain points.  A more rationalist religion was more compatible with more materially rational expectations.  But then the other thing that Ryder shows is that this religious and cultural shift could unsettle more conservative parishioners, who nevertheless stuck it out with some of the chapels that were basically turning the old Puritan ethos upside down.  Ryder went to his grave feeling like the ministers who were telling him to love himself a little more were actually getting Christianity wrong.  So I think you have to see religious change in the Enlightenment for the incredibly complicated process that it was.  But once you do see that, then the reason that the cultural effort to decriminalize self-interest was so concerted becomes intelligible--and this really was a decades long effort on the part of opinion makers like David Hume, Adam Smith, and others.  It was hard to convince people, the very sorts of industrious people who Smith theorized could make the nation unprecedentedly rich, that the traditional Christian take on wealth was exactly wrong.  Trying to transform self-interest from a vice into a virtue was such a massive cultural project for people like Adam Smith because people like Ryder, however poised they were to bolster the wealth of the nation by virtue of their industry and enterprise, were committed to a sort of morality that Smith and others saw as antithetical to capitalism.

What surprised you the most in your research as you dove into Ryder's life and times?

That he was actually interesting.  I recognized right away that his diary was an incredible source, and I knew I had to try to do something with it, but I was put off by his perspective.  I had originally been much more interested in the radicals.  But I didn't just grow to like him, which is in any case not a necessary condition for writing about someone.  I grew interested in how torn he was.  He equivocates about everything, not just commerce.  He could come across rioters and feel for them, but only if they were rioting from need and in reaction to unfair laws.  He had a deep sense of social propriety but could still feel sympathy for a maligned woman who showed up at his house drunk one night looking for spiritual advice.  He dressed down his household workers who helped him make cloth and afterwards confided to his diary that he was just as undisciplined in his youth and should think twice before feeling superior.  Those same workers were often orphans who he seems to have been attached to in at least of couple of cases, in no small part because he and his wife tried but failed to have children of their own.  And then that wife, a woman he never actually names in his diary, was an object of serious ambivalence.  When they married just a few months after the woman he was really in love with got away, he found her less exciting than his diary.  A few years into the marriage they had grown emotionally attached, and he was devastated when she died before her fortieth birthday and he had to go on alone for another decade and a half.  By all accounts people also liked him.  Maybe not surprisingly.  Ambivalent people see things from at least two angles, and that can make them much more empathetic beings than the dogmatists.

Which historical school or method are you most indebted to, and why is is important to you?

When I was an undergraduate I had a picture of Foucault on the wall beside my desk, still such a great picture from the interview he did in Vanity Fair in '83, not long before he died.  I don't see him in the same exalted way, but one thing I took from him I still believe:  doing history can usefully denature the present.  You get the same insight in Marx, another big influence.  Nietzsche too.  But Foucault also made me think that a key part of the story was the early modern past, especially in western Europe.  In graduate school I fell more under the influence of people like Weber, Pierre Bourdieu and others who more or less assert the importance of culture as a motive force even while staying tuned in to the material.  And when trying to describe culture I've learned not just from Clifford Geertz but from the major figures in semiotics who I avidly read as an undergraduate, from practitioners of microhistory like Carlo Ginzburg, from the British Marxists historians, especially Thompson, Hill, and Hobsbawm, that last of whom, despite his flaws, was particularly inspiring as one of my own teachers in graduate school.  A number of historians have also directly taught me the importance of archival research.  Margaret Jacob stands at the top of that list.  Her energy and curiosity in the archives are legendary, and she has had major insights about the enlightenment and the causes of industrialization because of her willingness to undertake some pretty unromantic labor.  I could say the same about my undergraduate mentor William Taylor, one of the great colonial Latin Americanists, whose footnotes will make you tremble.  Really I could say the same about two other guys who I worked with in graduate school, Tim Harris and Phil Benedict.  When you approach history as a philosophy student, as I did when I first began graduate school, there's a real temptation to be theoretical at the expense of contemporaries' experience.  I'm grateful to the theorists who can so clearly lay out the big questions.  But if I hadn't been encouraged by these historians I've just named, and they're not the only ones, then I don't think I'd have anything remotely useful to say about what happened in the past.

For a musician or music fan, there must be a double resonance to studying northern English industrial cities like Leeds or Manchester. Not only did they experience what you call "the birth pangs of modern capitalism" more acutely than anywhere else, these cities have produced more than their share of great rock music -- Gang of Four, Mekons, Joy Division, Smiths, Stone Roses, many more. Do you see any relation between those early-modern social forces and the culture that emerged much later?

I guess I don't see much of a relationship when it comes to religion.  In the centuries that separate these bands from the people I look at in the book there's a good case to be made that Christianity has almost died in Britain.  With the economy there may be more of a connection.  These bands are to de-industrialization what Ryder was to pre-industrialization.  And without the industrial revolution, Manchester and Leeds would still likely be small towns with little of the context--gritty urban decay, university life, radical class politics, and so on--that helped define those bands and their sound, especially when their music was recorded by Martin Hannett.  It's a great question, and I wish I had a better answer.

Congratulations to Matt Kadane the historian -- what is next for Matt Kadane the indie rock star?

The New Year is two-thirds finished with a new record.  The basic tracks are done and in the case of a few songs we're further along.  My brother and I also have a new band with David Bazan and Will Johnson called Overseas.  We just finished mastering the first record, which is set to come out at the beginning of June, followed by some shows in August on the east coast, west coast, and in Texas.  I'm excited to play music again.