33 rebellions per minute
"the road to hell is paved with cuties working on their theses"
2000
Tris McCall, IF ONE OF THESE BOTTLES SHOULD HAPPEN TO FALL
Keeping the personal update to one paragraph this time: if I can find someplace affordable in what frankly is a horridly crowded housing market, I will be moving to Boston this summer (July? Maybe as late as September). Putting my rent money where my mouth is, I intend to become a political organizer for ACORN (Associated Communities Organized for Reform Now). ACORN's major accomplishments include being the main force behind the Community Reinvestment Act, which forces banks to make housing loans available to people who live in what banks considered "risky" (i.e., black) neighborhoods, and being the prime mover behind a couple dozen recent Living Wage Laws that require city-subsidized businesses to pay, at minimum, about 35% more than the $6-7/hr ACORN pays its organizers. I don't know that I can get the job, mind you. I was offered the job in St. Louis, but didn't want to move there. ACORN's bulk work, after all, is organizing the poor and working-class to their own local concerns -- getting a police foot-patrol or a convenient subway stop, tearing down an abandoned building or renovating it into cheap housing. If I'm going to work for community activists, I should move somewhere I have a sense of place, of belonging, of connection to the local news. However much I joke about my mental map of Boston being essentially a grid linking all the used record stores, and despite the fact that I lived there exactly two years, I still read the Boston Phoenix. I remember my favorite Cambridge ethnic restaurants, I miss taking long walks down ugly but tree-lined sidewalks, I miss the rare but real occasions where I'd hop on the train and, 30 minutes later, have three interesting new anecdotes and the phone number of someone who might make my life more interesting. I have a couple of friends in Boston who remind me of all the events I'm missing. It's home.
What? I should be reviewing Tris McCall's album? Fine. IF ONE OF THESE BOTTLES SHOULD HAPPEN TO FALL, produced by the Loud Family's Scott Miller and just as Scott-inflected in the songwriting, contains 15 good-to-brilliant pop songs and two good weird intermission tracks, and is very likely to be #1 on my Best Albums of 2000 list, seven months from now. You can buy it from sending $5 -- yes, five dollars -- to
hilary jane englertYou can afford it. I think the album's worth $20, so I bought copies for three friends, of whom at least two think it's great.
1014 palisade avenue
union city, nj 07087
The album opens with a clip-clop snare/kettle drumbeat, fast cymbals, and what sure sounds to me like a Tom Lehrer sample: "You know the nice thing about a protest song, is that it makes you feel so good". What makes "the New Jersey Department of Public Works" a protest song, though, is a general public environment of anti-government cynicism: sung with the reassuring heartland warmth of a fertilizer commercial, the song celebrates mass transit, irrigation, parks, and the building of power lines as if everyone automatically accepted those as blessings, which of course we do. There is more, later, where that came from. Such as the lilting acoustic "Dear Governor Kean", an adapted poem by Elizabeth Post, which is far less direct, unless you take "small boys love, big men hate/ ple-e-e-e-ease, please legislate" as a literal command. The brilliantly titled "I Am The Law (In The Ointment)" chants "who built the Trenton Station? Who laid out Jersey City? Who counts the cops on Grove Street?". "I Can't Get Up Out Of My Chair" -- like Scott Miller investing a Green Day song with twice the chords and an unfamiliar new basis for verbal self-abuse ("what's wrong with being 'small and demure' for 'reasons of aesthetics'?", Billie Joe whines inside a pair of parentheses) -- complains "There's a world of great causes to support/ In fact there's so many that I feel a little short/ Catch the word on the street, forty stories in the air/ And I can't get up out of my chair". "It's Not The Money, It's The Principle" borrows from "Rapper's Delight" to urge various Tris-approved Jersey politicians "ya don't stop". "Hung By A Jury Of My Peers", which opens up from the studied monotonous guitar and woodblock of the Feelies into whirring synth hooks, shiny feedback, and a rousing melody halfway between folk and musical comedy, is personal, but no less clearly a song about economic class resentments.
When Tris subtitled the album Jersey Songs By Tris McCall, though, it was not essentially the New Jersey government he was thinking of. The rest of these songs have social commentary as one element, but if they aren't quite about people, always, they're about archetypes, based on people (college to thirtysomething, mostly) he's known in a lifetime spent in his state. There are smartass songs, sure, which I don't mind. "He's A Sagittarius" skewers pickup artists with lines like "We know foam follows function/ So we learn to move with the utmost unction", the astrology joke "when the jovial and saturnine combine in trines/ to line up the martial arts of the mind", and the Gabriel Garcia Marquez nod "a hundred years of solipsists". "Mad About Us", percussively pianistic, stars an impoverished TV-viewer planning violent revolution if the sitcoms don't get any less stupid. The staccato, nerdily assaultive "Had Too Much Sugar", meanwhile, is my favorite punk song in years: "Cutting class all week/ Scolded by the teacher/ Tried to slap her cheek/ But I couldn't reach her/ She is rather tall/ And I've not had my growth spurt/ Running through the mall/ With TCBYogurt/ I'm a psychopath/ All jacked up on pectin/ I won't do my math/ I only like dissectin'". Sometimes wildly inauthentic voices are the most insightful (which does remind me I should hear Dan "Homer Simpson" Castellana's pop album sometime).
"Missing You", on the other hand, is a simple song of love and impending jealousy, a quaintly archaic piano tune with rhymes to pass for Cole Porter by way of John Southworth. "Janie Abstract", mingling love, hate, and worry for an overachieving/ underconsidering girlfriend, is a 2:36 tumble through a showroom demo of what a Loud Family melody sounds like, something like "Room For One More, Honey" and "Sword Swallower" mashed through some Mission Of Burma guitar crashes and a blippy little keyboard hook. "Girl With A Gun" is a love song impressed with female macho and quick-trigger self-reliance ("Look how quick she react coming out of the flat/ With a flurry of buckshot for the coppers who can't hang with that/ Can I tag along just to show what I got?"). "The View From New Jersey", a sentimental, quietly dramatic piano-based song, sings to a post-grad commuting to a generic rapacious finance job, "too sedate to smash the state and too tremulous". "You're special, but nobody really cares/ 'Cause they'll confer degrees on anybody with the cash to blow/ You decide yourself if that's unfair", he sympathizes with just a hint of an edge, but the song's course has her realizing, to her astonishment, that she's happy in New Jersey after all. Why not? He is.
BOTTLES's liner notes are full of explanations of the lyrics' repeated Hudson Country (and otherwise) references. Tris defends the records of Mayor Sharpe James and Mayor Bret Schundler, describes the ups and downs of life in Hoboken and Weehawken, ventures opinionated descriptions of Twilo & Neil's and the Echo Queen, tosses in local linguistic history and geography. I shall be moving to Boston, more than anything, because it is the only place I could even begin to write in such loving detail about. Only begin, of course, and I'll need to work on that, but how many albums are so useful as to infuse me with such a healthy jealousy?
Which is less important than great songs. The melodic swoop of "Janie...", the adrenaline of "...Sugar", and the shameless mainstream sincerity of "View..." all make deserving contenders for my song of the year list. But we should all be fair and admit that my favorite song here, "Lite Radio Is My Kryptonite", outlines the real reason I'm planning to get a new job. "Why work? Why not fill your days with joy?", it asks. And then, insouciant and gleeful and doomed, spinning alternative scenarios and ripping them up, it answers its own question. I don't have a buyer for my magnum opus, and while I do have an illustrator for the children's book I just wrote, I'll have to figure out how to market it to its true natural audience of stoned adults who'll be "off the grid" long enough to be "roasted alive by the Federal Government". I don't know whether I really want a Living Wage, or just squatter's rights; I've spewed the rhetoric for both. But since I'm against stealing music (Napster and most full-album dubbing included), and even more against not acquiring it, I'll do some nice useful work for now.
Links to other sites on the Web
© 1997 bokonin@hotmail.com
Get your own Free Home Page