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.

Christopher Hayes' Twilight of the Elites

OVER the last year or two, I've given myself a crash course on social criticism -- wonderfully grim and eloquent books by Bell, Ehrenreich, both Packers (Vance and George) and various "mass culture" theorists of the '50s. I hope to get into some of them over the next few months.

One of the best of them is Christopher Hayes' Twilight of the Elites: American After the Meritocracy. I'm often stirred or intrigued by a book, but it's not often that one really changes the way I think. Hayes's book, which looks at the meritocracy that followed the WASP establishment, is one of a very short list. He considers how a system that supposedly rewarded talent and intelligence helped lead us into the Enron debacle, the mishandled Middle Eastern Wars, the Great Recession, baseball's steroid scandal and the mess that is the Catholic church.

I should say that the premise of this book very much goes against my grain: I've thought over the years that belief in a meritocracy was what my family had instead of religion or a sense of ethnicity. But reading Hayes argument and reflecting on how nasty the 21st century has been made things look different. (The book has recently been released in paperback.)

If you still have bitter memories of Judith Miller, Dick Cheney, Bernie Madoff, the cardinals who looked the other way during the pedophile scandal, and so on, Twilight of the Elites will help you make some sense of it all. They're the new "best and brightest," and just as fatuous and dangerous as Halberstam's gang that got us into the Vietnam War.

HERE is a Salon Q+A with the author by my friend David Daley.

Willie Nelson at the Hollywood Bowl

SOME years, concerts at the Hollywood Bowl become the highlight of the summer. I know I'll miss a lot of things about Los Angeles whenever we end up departing, but these night with the sun setting and the scent of eucalyptus from the canyon will be very near the top of the list.

This year, we've only been twice so far. We saw the fireworks on the 4th of July, a show at which I learned that Josh Groban is not the anti-Christ (and you can quote me on that.)

Our second visit was for Willie Nelson's show on Saturday night, which was devoted mostly to 1978's Stardust album. I know I'm not breaking any news to say that the show was damned good -- Willie has long been one of the most consistent major artists. Even with what at times could be heavy orchestration (conducted by Beck's father, who has a smile and body language eerily like that of his son), the richness of Willie's voice came across quite well. (The tones of his battered classical guitar, which makes Glenn Hansard's Takemine look brand new, came and went during the first song or so, but showed up quite well thereafter.)

Stardust, of course, was Willie's throwback standards record, a real about face after albums like The Red-Headed Stranger. We are now, 35 years after its release, about as far from Stardust's original appearance as it was from the American songbook -- "Blue Skies," "All of Me" -- that inspired it: It's doubly retro. The highlight for me may've been his reading of "Moonlight in Vermont." Some non-album tracks -- "All the Things You Are" -- were also strong. One of my favorite of his songs -- "Funny How Time Slips Away," the brilliance of which I was recently reminded by the L.A. band Spain -- seemed rushed. This is a number about regret and the perspective time offers. It needs room to breathe.

This said, that was about as good a show by an 80 year-old as any of us deserve. What a titan.

Texas troubadour Lyle Lovett opened. Your humble correspondent has been an admirer, in theory, of Lovett for a long time. But I've always wanted to like his recordings -- which represent an attention to detail, a worship of Townes Van Zandt, a literate take on the country-folk tradition, etc. -- more than I do.

The Bowl show really won me over. Part of it was Lovett's banter and stage presence -- here's someone who really loves doing this, and was especially honored to be opening for St. Willie. I loved his fingerpicking as well. But to large extent it was the way Lovett handled his band -- a bunch of great players, and everyone got room to take a brief solo on almost every song. It was like a great jazz band playing country -- Western swing at its best.

What the hell happened to the shuttle bus back to the LA Zoo, though? Something clearly went terribly wrong.

The Runaways: Queens of Noise

THESE days I am digging Queens of Noise, the new book by Evelyn McDonnell, onetime Village Voice rock critic now settled in Los Angeles. The book, subtitled The Real Story of the Runaways, looks at the ‘70s LA punk/hard-rock band best remembered, probably, for a teenaged Joan Jett, the song "Cherry Bomb," and some pretty amazing feathered hair.

I’ve admired McDonnell’s work for two decades now, and have since gotten to know her a bit, and for a year taught more-or-less alongside her at Loyola Marymount University, where she is a professor of journalism.

Here’s my conversation with McDonnell about Queens of Noise, which she will discuss at Book Soup on Wednesday.

What drew you to the story of the Runaways?

It's a great rock'n'roll story that had only been told in parts, and seemed well past due for a complete treatment.  I also saw it as a narrative that's bigger than music: It's a coming of age story about young women crossing boundaries and expressing themselves — their sexuality, their anger, their rebellion, their fears — in ways that hadn't really been done before. There were girl bands before the Runaways, but none of them had the kind of exposure (so to speak) and global experiences that these musicians did, at a pretty young age. It's also a peek into a fascinating, rich time and place: Southern California in the mid-'70s. There are all the elements of a great story, period, in Queens: tragedy, comedy, mystery, drama, sex, drugs, crime, etc. With an awesome, under-appreciated soundtrack.  As a woman just a few years younger than the Runaways, with my own California roots, and a deep love of music, I also personally related to their saga.

You describe the band members as creatures of the Sprawl. Give us a sense of what early-70s Southern California – the world that made the Runaways – was like.

 This was a period when the California dream epitomized by the Beach Boys was wearing thin — fault lines were rupturing. Decades of incredible population and economic growth had slowed precipitously; there was Watts, Manson, smog, overspeculation, etc. The members of the Runaways lived miles apart from each other in this car-dependent Exopolis. They were suburban girls, from the Valley, Orange County, Long Beach. But LA also had Hollywood, which was not just a place of Tinseltown fantasies: it was a bohemian mecca for all the outcasts and weirdos, for the queer kids and the runaways (small and big R). It was a place for experimentation (with drugs and sex), for hedonism, for liberation and libidos, and for exploitation. It was a place to escape those suburbs, and it's where the Runaways came together.

How much access did you get to the musicians and to band manager Kim Fowley? Did all the major characters speak to you?

Kim Fowley, Jackie Fox, and Vicki Blue gave me quite a bit of time explicitly for the book. I also interviewed Joan and Lita, once each, for the book. Cherie would not do an interview for the book, but I had interviewed her a couple of times for the Sandy West thesis/article that was the root of the book. I never interviewed Sandy before she died but I talked to her family. I also had interviewed Joan and Lita for other articles over the years, and I was able to draw on that material, some of it never published before. Plus all the other interviews listed in the back.

Within the first few chapters of the book, you write about the debate between architecture scholar Reyner Banham and art critic Peter Plagens on the nature of LA, and get into the work of Joan Didion, William Gibson, and others. What’s the right amount of context in a book like this?

As I said, I saw this as more than just the story of one band: I also saw it as an important, emblematic piece of cultural, social and feminist history. Those contextual pages are a tiny sliver of the book. I think they give the book a bigger, broader meaning and perspective, but some critics seem to feel you can't take a band like the Runaways that seriously. It's an anti-intellectualism that seems strange to me as a fan of Greil Marcus, Ellen Willis, and Jon Savage, but is rampant in rock-critic criticism.

How do the Runaways fit into the history of women in rock?

They were clearly pioneers, in terms of the scope of their accomplishments at their age and in a relatively short period of time: five albums, multiple national and international tours, magazine covers and hit records (in some countries). Obviously, there were girl vocal groups that preceded and outsold them. And there were other bands where women played instruments — some great ones, like Fanny and Isis. But the Runaways achieved a level of at least notoriety, and also genuine success, that had eluded other bands. Obviously, some of that was based on the fact that they were not shy in their sexual presentation, and in that sense, their legacy is mixed.

Looking back, almost four decades later, what is the band's long-term influence or legacy?

Because of Joan's and Lita's subsequent success, the Runaways have been taken more seriously in retrospect than they were during their brief career. Whereas some of the early female punks repudiated them, later generations — from Riot Grrrls to the Donnas to Miley Cyrus — have been more sympathetic to the barriers they faced and how they faced them. They were a key transitional figure in the evolution of both punk and hair metal, particularly in Los Angeles. They were friends with and peers of the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. But although those bands were clearly just as Svengali-driven and gimmicky, they always get taken more seriously. I think the Runaways' legacy is up there with those bands, and deserves to be acknowledged.

Rachel Kushner and Laura Owens

RECENTLY I spoke to novelist Rachel Kushner, whose The Flamethrowers is far and away among the most celebrated novels of the year, and artist Laura Owens, whose recent show of recent paintings in her own Boyle Heights space reminds us why she became the youngest artist to have a career retrospective at the MOCA.

The two -- longtime friends and aesthetic allies -- talked about their own work, their respect for each other, and their hopes for the future. The story, HERE, is from Pasadena magazine, now helmed by my former LA Times editor, the mighty Maria Russo.

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.