by Timothy White
"You know, Nine Inch Nails had this tour bus before us," says Ed Kowalczyk, lead singer and lyricist for the band Live, showing a sly grin as he surveys the dark, quasi-deco decor in the front of the grumbling vehicle. "That's why we had to get somebody to bless if afterward, to get rid of the strange vibes."
"Aw, how ban can Trent Reznor be? He's from Pennsylvania, too," quips Live guitarist Chad Taylor. "And he also played in a marching band like us. I mean, the last bus we had was much scarier; the thing was actually old enough to have been used by Jimi Hendrix, and the motor exhaust pipes had a leak in them that was sending the fumes back into the coach. We thought we were getting great sleep every night until we made a connection with the splitting headaches we had the next morning. We're lucky it didn't kill us all."
"That bus," agrees Kowalczyk, "was definitely bizarre."
"And it was weird," Taylor summarizes with a shudder, "that when we first got it, we'd even thought about putting our name backward on the destination sign over the front window: EVIL."
It's a chilly Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1995. The four members of Live (including drummer Chad Gracey and bassist Patrick Dahlheimer) are riding through New England, passing handsome Amherst, Massachusetts, porches hung with Old Glory, as they continue an extended trip that began in southern Pennsylvania. For over three years, this group has been touring the country playing its highly agitated brand of spiritual rock, while satisfying a smoldering curiosity about its own place in a society out of balance.
Live's chief spokesman is Kowalczyk, a native, like his companions, of semi-industrial York, Pennsylvania, the nation's first capital during the American Revolution and the current site of a tourist culture steeped in the staunch historicism of patriotic wars. Live is an intensely American band at a juncture in popular music when that designation has lost its obvious textures. Just as our social experiment has forfeited much of its nationalistic fervor, the bands that epitomize our character are of a cerebral, searching variety, no matter how sinewy the sonic approach: Nine Inch Nails reduce nihilism to its pep-rally aesthetic; Hole renders the debutante's coming-out ambitions with Rocky Horror Picture Show coarseness; R.E.M. reinforces the eloquent pop decorum of Revolver-era Beatles; Phish and the Dave Matthews Band preserve the shambling nonchalance of the Grateful Dead.
Live, for its part, has inherited the working-class transcendence of U2, personalizing it in order to truly touch its own generational constituency. Pained by the spiritual hollowness of its time, and stimulated by a kindred circle of writers and thinkers (Henry Miller, Jiddu Krishnamurti) from a similarly unsettled era, these young men are challenging themselves to find a fresh and edifying outlook on a world running down.
Between now and Christmas, Live is poised to become one of the biggest bands in the world, its reputation based solidly on its emotionally sweeping stage shows, its image propagated by frenetic videos in which a bare-chested and brooding Kowalczyk urgently tries to decipher our culture's fundamental poverty of faith. On 1991's "Operation Spirit (The Tyranny of Tradition)," an MTV Buzz Bin favorite that ignited the band's first album, Mental Jewelry, Kowalczyk leapt satyr-like around a night-time bonfire. Kowalczyk and the band were in a dark forest, dreaming, on the "Selling the Drama" clip from Live's second album Throwing Copper, the singer stringy-haired and bespectacled as he strode through the shadowy wasteland shouting, "I've been here before." Summer 1994's "I Alone" picked up where the previous scenario left off, the face-pulling boy in the script now a man standing in the throes of an obsessive romance; "I alone love you/I alone tempt you," the spindly vocalist insisted as a snake crawled up a withered apple tree. Which brings us to "Lightning Crashes," an uncommonly moving visual narrative showing a bald angel by turns bereaved and beatific as she makes her unseen rounds of humanity's primal hellos and goodbyes.
Each of these songs is now a staple of the modern-rock airwaves, but none appeared in record shops as commercial singles, the group preferring to gradually guide radio programmers and listeners toward its album-length statements. The strategy worked. Invading the imagination like secular prayers, the two dozen incantatory selections on the almost-gold Mental Jewelry and the two-million-selling Throwing Copper have penetrated deeply into the popular consciousness, conveying the eccentric candor of a mature rock quartet whose members are barely into their 20s.
The passion and meaning of Live's musical content is never far from the surface during two days spent in and around Amherst with the four musicians during the northeastern leg of a 22-city college performance schedule. Having made music for a decade, and still in the grip of boyhood solidarity, Live has no protective offstage persona, and no separation from the sense of place that fuels its emerging art.
"Social commentary, stories from York -- we just try to balance them all against the rock 'n' roll business pressures and each day's personal feelings, so we don't become some kind of maniacs," Kowalczyk summarizes dryly.
Still aggrieved by the loss of Barbara Lewis, a high school friend whose death in a car accident in 1993 prompted the dedication of "Lighting Crashes" to her memory, Kowalczyk also laments the fatalistic modern folly that his hometown's flagwaving attractions seem to exemplify; York County is one vast monument to the American Revolution, and the impeccably preserved battlefield at Gettysburg is just 40 minutes from the front steps of William Penn Senior High School, where Live and its local supporters hatched their dreams.
These demonstrations of private loss and public remembrance are linked in the band's music to what they perceive as a mass belittlement of ordinary life's moment-to-moment value. In the words of Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986), upon whose writings the lyrics of Mental Jewelry were based, "There is chronological time, time by the watch, that is necessary... But every other form of time -- that is, 'I will be,' 'I will do,' 'I must not,' -- is not true... You know what sorrow is... the sorrow of being lonely, the sorrow of not achieving something you want, the sorrow of not seeing clearly, the sorrow of frustration, the sorrow of having lost somebody whom you think you love... Beyond this sorrow, there is still greater sorrow: the sorrow of time... All our existence, all our books, all our hope is tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. This admittance of time is the greatest sorrow."
"I just picked up Krishnamurti's You Are the World in some kind of New Age bookstore when I was 18, surrounded by all this baby-talk psychology," says Kowalczyk, "and I read it and thought, 'Damn, this is so unique.' As a band, we never sat around and did think tanks about Krishnamurti. It was just something that I had found that inspired me so greatly that the music jelled us into this thing that got us on our way.
"His basic philosophy is that all knowledge is limited, so no matter how elite you are in the world of knowledge, even if you were a saint, as long as your idea of God or truth or whatever is projected from that limited source, then it is essentially not true." Thus, Krishnamurti disdained all gurus and rejected all disciples, arguing for the humility and selflessness essential for genuine personal transformation.
"My whole belief system about Mental Jewelry and our band was that we would always be this nucleus of musical and spiritual power and strength," continues Kowalczyk. "That was the whole idea with that record. After we toured for it and moved out of our homes and started to have this weird lifestyle, for the first six months after we finished and began thinking about the next record, Throwing Copper, we absolutely didn't know what was next. We had a whole system of getting from A to B -- which was to get onstage and make as much of an impact as we can, so we explain to our parents why we didn't go to college." The band explodes in laughter.
"But once we got there," adds Chad Taylor, "it was 'Where do we go from here?'"
"So we decided to go back," says Kowalczyk, "and take a look at where we came from our town, our friends, our roots. A lot of the history of Live has a cart-before-the-horse quality, and that's okay, but we need to be honest about that too. For us to be about 19 years old, from working-class backgrounds, and suddenly be selling 400,000 copies of Mental Jewelry at a point when I, for instance, didn't own ten records of my own, was pretty odd. So we wanted to slow down, relax, not be so theoretical in the new songs, and explain what we've experienced to our fans."
He smiles, exhales, and begins. "I wrote 'Lightning Crashes' on an acoustic guitar in my brother's bedroom shortly before I had moved out of my parents' house and gotten my first place of my own." Kowalczyk says that the video for "Lightning Crashes" lends itself to many misinterpretations of the song's intent. "While the clip is shot in a home environment, I envisioned it taking place in a hospital, where all these simultaneous deaths and births are going on, one family mourning the loss of a woman while a screaming baby emerges from a young mother in another room. Nobody's dying in the act of childbirth, as some viewers think. What you're seeing is actually a happy ending based on a kind of transference of life. The dedication to Barbara Lewis came after the song was written. But it was something that we hoped would honor the memory of a girl we grew up with and help her family cope with sorrow -- which it seems to have accomplished -- in a fashion in keeping with the theme of the song."
To give another example of the intimate archaeology woven into Live's repertoire, the Otter Creek picnic area pictured on Throwing Copper's back cover and immortazlied on its opening cut was a key adolescent stomping ground for their friends. Located off Route 425 in Airville, Pennsylvania, beside the tributary that feeds into the Susquehanna River, the park was the site of a fond rite of self-assertion.
"As kids," says Kowalczyk, "we built this obstacle there to back up the water so it was a divable swimming hole. The hysteria of the song itself might be what Mark Twain would have sounded like if he did crack-cocaine before writing Huckleberry Finn" -- big chuckle -- "but actually I'm trying to relate the creek and our dam to all the sadness in the world. We felt you have to dive into it to endure it and escape it."
As the bus turns onto the campus of the University of Massachusetts, pointed in the direction of the 6,000-seat Mullins Center, Live is less than three hours away from the biggest date (excluding Woodstock II and multi-band stadium bills) of its short career.
"The challenge today is to get the volume right," says Taylor as he bounds into the sports arena for the sound check. "We've been too loud lately."
As if to illustrate an antidote, Kowalczyk straps on a gleaming gold Les Paul guitar and begins strumming softly, his drab gray T-shirt and rumpled jeans in stark contrast to the elegant scarlet curtains behind him. Taylor joins Kowalczyk at the mike for reedy fragments of vocal harmony, and as the gentle strains of "Turn My Head," an unfinished love song to Kowalczyk's new girlfriend, float across the empty auditorium, scattered roadies and arena crew all pause in their tasks listen: "...caught in your mystery... turn my head, it's aimed at you..."
To unravel the enigma of Live, one must piece together testimony from all participants. Unlike too many of the nondescript one-hit combos lately cluttering the so-called alternarock community, Live consists of four discrete individuals whose personal distinctions are mirrored in their musicianship.
The boyish Kowalczyk is as easygoing and unaffected as his maintenance-free crewcut, his most heartfelt hypotheses too breezy and self-deprecating in tone to cause anyone to mistake him for an ideologue. Born Edward Joel Kowalczyk on July 16, 1971, and raised within the York city limits, he is the first of two boys born to Edward Floyd Kowalczyk and Mary Weigel. The parents of Live's future leader divorced when he was seven, and Ed and his younger sibling were raised by his mother, who worked as a legal secretary.
Self-taught drummer Chad Gracey (he once studied jazz saxophone) is the tall, dark, and deferential son of a carpenter; his tactful practicality and innate sense of precision are amplified by the ferocious swing of his dexterous percussion style. The son of a computer programmer, bassist Patrick Dahlheimer is the ruddy-complexioned wiseacre whose ready sarcasm masks a profound vulnerability and a visceral melodic skill at his instrument. Gregarious lead guitarist Chad Taylor (the two Chads appear blissfully unfazed by the redundancy) is the drawling great-grandson of a dairy farmer, bragging with a faint blush that he can still milk a cow ("It's kinda scary; I wouldn't admit that to many people"), but excessively modest about his remarkable flair for the inflective riffs and rousing arrangements.
Lounging around one of the cozy conference suites of the rambling Lord Jeffrey Inn (named for British army officer Lord Jeffrey Amherst), the fellows pass the morning before the concert sipping coffee and filling in the blanks with instinctive interspersion.
The boys first met at Edgar Fahs Smith Middle School, back when the two Chads and Dahlheimer had an instrumental trio called First Aid. Shortly after losing the Great York Talent Hunt under the name Action Front, they invited Kowalczyk to a band rehearsal in the attic bedroom of Gracey's house on Newberry Street. "The first thing I sand with the band," admits Kowalczyk, "-- and it was meant as a joke! -- was Bryan Adams' 'Summer of '69.' We never covered it or anything, but somebody was just dicking around, and I joined in."
Kowalczyk got the job as singer and Chad Taylor tutored him on guitar as the group adopted and discarded other named like Paisley Blues before settling on Public Affection. The name, as well as the inaugural composition "Useless Moves," was sparked by the sight of an inept romantic encounter in a school hallway. The band fared far better at its own public bow when it commandeered the instruments during another group's break at the hip biannual dance at the Temple Beth Israel. "The hired band had been playing standard rock'n'roll," recalls Taylor, "but we did the music everybody was just starting to listen to, the new wave hits of the day." The rapid-fire, five-song salvo consisted of "Pretty In Pink" by Psychedelic Furs, R.E.M.'s "Begin the Begin," "I Melt With You" by Modern English, Simple Minds' "Don't You (Forget About Me)," and "Boys Don't Cry" by the Cure.
"It went over huge and people were freaking out," says Taylor. "As soon as we were done, people started leaving the dance -- that's how we got the next dance."
The first formal temple gig took place on November 25, 1987, the day after Taylor's birthday, and the night -- heavily promoted with posters and flyers -- was a sellout in excess of 400 heads at four bucks a ticket, with a swarm of turnaways at the door.
Taylor's most vivid memories of that event -- not necessarily in this order -- are of Dahlheimer's tufted bandstand approximation of Robert Smith's early-Cure tousle ("Need that can of mousse!" Dahlheimer says), and the ultimate response of a young woman down in front. "There was this girl we knew from school, Dana, that flashed us -- full-on -- boobs and the whole works! My dad was there and I was afraid he would run and tell me to get off the stage, 'cause I was all happy and trying to tell the rest of the band in mid-song. Matter of fact, I'm still happy. And I instantly decided that that was going to be my career."
The overnight notoriety of Public Affection led to a wealth of bookings at Mercersburg Academy, the York YMCA, and clubs like Chez John, the Silo, and the Club Chameleon, the last of which became a kind of headquarters. By day, Kowalczyk and the Chads toiled in the kitchen of a Princess Street eatery called Granfalloons, Dahlheimer coming by to hang after he got off work as a counter clerk at a cigarettes-and-smut emporium called Book Land.
Between school, slinging grease, and weekend shows, Public Affection approached and then pestered local booking agent David Sestak, who'd put out the word he was looking for a baby band to manage. Sestak refused the band's calls until Taylor's father phoned him and said, "Either you're going to listen to this band or you're going to make the biggest mistake of your life."
Sestak listened, liked what he heard, and said they needed an independent release to shop. No one had the ready cash to finance studio sessions and manufacturing/promotion, but Taylor refused to give up. "Somewhere along the line," he says, "I decided that if you had to have money you had to talk to people who knew how to get money and how to use it. My dad was a general contractor and I talked to his boss, who was the only millionaire I knew. He said, 'Well, how I financed all our nursing homes is that I sold junk bonds.'"
So Public Affection sold $5,000 worth of junk bonds at $100 apiece in 1989 and cut its own ten-track cassette album, The Death of a Dictionary, releasing 2,000 copies on their Action Front Records label and hawking it at shows or in local outlets like BBC Records in downtown York. The photo portrait on the cassette's J-card showed a flamboyantly forelocked hair band that could have subbed for New Kids on the Block. But teenyboppers punching up Dictionary in hopes of finding new pop heartthrobs would have recoiled as if seeing roaches crawl out of a rose.
Regardless of his coiffure, Ed Kowalczyk can only croon his brand of rock as if he's got jumper cables clamped to his jaws, and Dictionary's gloriously rantful material has the same hectic metaphysics and pixilated propulsion of the average Live melee. Although only "Good Pain" found its way from Dictionary to Mental Jewelry, the whole record could certainly pass muster in contemporary Live packaging.
Armed with this audio calling card, the group was dispatched to Manhattan's Lower East Side by David Sestak on a steady basis. "David just kept putting us in CBGB like twice a month as Public Affection," says Dahlheimer. "We played there maybe 25 or 30 times. Eventually we got a demo deal from Giant Records, which was big shit for us. They sent us a young guy named Jay Healy who'd worked with John Mellencamp and R.E.M. and we went with him into a studio in Philadelphia on the midnight-to-6:00 AM shift for three nights."
Giant passed, but told the band the demo was theirs to shop. Around this time, a guy named Phil Schuster from Overland Productions began surfacing on the guest list at CBGB, the 9:30 Club in D.C., and other stops on Public Affection's saloon circuit.
"David and our comanager Peter Freedman said there's interest from this one label, Overland Productions, which turned out to be Radioactive Records," says Dahlheimer. "We did another showcase at CBGB and Gary Kurfirst came backstage and said, 'We're gonna do great things together. I'll be talking to you.'
"We said, 'Who was that bald-looking dumb motherfucker?'" concludes Dahlheimer with an affectionate guffaw. And so they were signed to Radioactive, with former Talking Head Jerry Harrison coproducing both their albums.
Taylor digests his group's rather swift attainment of a record deal into one taut term: dynamics. Pitted against armies of grunge, postpunk, and alternative rivals contending for A&R execs' approval, the foursome's secret weapon, in Taylor's estimation, was endless schoolboy instruction in band rudiments and orchestration.
"Don Carn, who gave Patrick and I guitar lessons in middle school, was not your ordinary music teacher," says Taylor. "He gave me a permanent pass to hook out of class and come sit in the music room with Ed, Chad, Patrick, and a couple of girls. And this guy Harry Kehler, the high school symphonic and marching band director, had a huge impact on us, teaching us dynamics and arranging. I can remember begin in a trumpet section and understanding crescendos and decrescendos. I'd like to tell people it's all instinct, but I still think that when I write guitar parts I write trumpet parts."
"The lyrics come last," Kowalczyk adds. "A lot of times it's just syllables and nonsense. No words, just sounds and a melody."
Incidentally, the name Live didn't arrive until the band was concocting a fit tag for the first Radioactive album. They had a hundred ideas scrawled out, and Mental Jewelry was originally the title of "Mirror Song," which features the lyric phrase: "Flags and mental jewelry's all I know." Gracey said at the time, "I don't like our band name either."
"The suggestions were Live, Alive and ten other names," says Taylor. "We put the names in a hat and drew out Live. We said, 'Everybody sleep on it, and I had a dream of Matt Gracey, Chad's cousin and our guitar tech, wearing a Live hat -- just like this one I got on -- and I thought it looked good.
"I woke up and my first call was to Ed. I said, 'Live is it!' He said, 'Too ambiguous.' I said, 'Exactly. Trust me.'"
"I thought it was cool," Dahlheimer finishes, "because it was such a blank name."
The sellout crowd at the University of Massachusetts is tolerant of half-hour doses of Sponge and Love Spit Love. But a polite donnybrook erupts when the lights dim and a spotlight follows an expressionless Ed Kowalczyk to the lip of the stage as he intones the spooky first couplet of "The Dam At Otter Creek": "When all that's left to do / Is reflect on what's been done / This is where sadness breathes / The sadness of everyone."
Chad Taylor paces behind Kowalczyk, fanning out the clipped guitar figures of the funereal anthem, as the singer slips into a swaying crouch, undergoing his nightly mutation from calm scion of an eighth grade history teacher to lunatic orator from the third circle of Hell. Dahlheimer steps from the murk to pluck the liquid throb that detonates Gracey's drum fusillade, and another Live revival meeting is instantly in full tilt.
But this is no rude blare. Tumbling into the uplifting "All Over You," the 14-song program repeatedly crests and subsides on a progressively higher tier as Kowalczyk's shrewd prosody of verse and rhythm finds new spaces and sudden drops in the surrounding pitch. Mullins Center begins to feel like a great diaphragm, expanding and contracting in synch with Kowalczyk's shivering chest cavity. The music is happy, frightening, fearful, devout, defiant and deeply moving.
"This song goes out to all waiters and waitresses who serve all the schmucks in Amherst," Kowalczyk snorts impishly as Live launches into its witty, withering putdown of selfish patrons in "Waitress."
As the music segues from the pensive "Take My Anthem" into the poignant "Lightning Crashes," the crowd is on its feet in rapt communion, as Kowalczyk states soothingly, "I thought this next song was about living and dying, but now that I'm a year older, I think that it's about rising and falling."
More than a few spectators' eyes well up with emotion when "Lightning" fades, as a roar erupts for an encore. Live rushes back to hammer out "T.B.D.," a splendid "Shit Towne" and a snarling "White, Discussion" before disappearing into the frigid New England night.
The next morning, Kowalczyk is his customary content and collected after-concert self as he ambles through the lobby of the inn, getting ready to roll out for this evening's commitment at Western Connecticut State.
Once the latest round of shows is done, he's looking forward to spending time at a new home he bought in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that he says is "just a five-minute walk" from the historic house of former U.S. President James Buchanan, the only bachelor to occupy the White House and the man best known for his inability to prevent the Civil War.
Everything in Pennsylania is named for a military hero or a politician, he jokes, noting that Americans can never evade their troubled past. Lancaster, however, is also the point on the map that Henry Miller most admired in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, an account of Miller's three-year trek by motor vehicle across the World War II-era United States. To Miller's mind, the Amish inhabitants of that area, "clinging stubbornly to the ways of their ancestors in comportment, dress, beliefs and customs, have converted the land into a veritable garden of peace and plenty... They live a life in direct opposition to that of the majority of the American people -- and the result is strikingly apparent."
"Except," Kowalczyk confides, "for the roofer who's gonna do my house. He has a cellular phone, and he's Amish, but because it's battery-run and he doesn't have to use the Lancaster town electricity, he justifies it because it's self-contained."
As for Kowalczyk, he's comtemplating his own mild compromises and mid-course adjustments to avoid becoming the aforementioned rock maniac.
"For the first record," he reflects, scratching his stubbled mane, "with each show we were like a football team going out onto the field, and when we got off the field we analyzed the game. Now we're getting better at just coming off-stage and relaxing, while still staying in the stream of what we're doing. We're probably gonna have to go from this present intensity to a record that's somehow on the lighter side so we can survive for another couple of years."
The last time I speak to Ed Kowalczyk he's calling from backstage in Tampa, Florida, enthusing about the Henry Miller works he continues to read ("Tropic of Cancer changed my life") and how they inspire him in his music.
Now he's getting into the good shit, I tell him, the torrid, libidinous memoirs that got Miller's book banned in America for a quarter-century.
He laughs and tells me a line he's put into "Turn My Head" that his girlfriend didn't even know how to react to. "It's cool," he says, "because it sounds so serious, but I'm not sure it's even a sexual reference."
So what's the line?
"I've fallen down / Drunk on your juices."
And this is on the next album?
"Yeah! The band thinks it's one of our best songs ever!"
Certainly sounds like another side of Live. If they can just rent the right tour bus, let's hope the road will go on endlessly.
© 1997 jmunz@ps-mpls.com
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