33 rebellions per minute
"Save me, sweet Jesus, I'll send you some money"
1999
Anton Barbeau, A SPLENDID TRAY
A SPLENDID TRAY -- Anton Barbeau's 4th album, but my introduction to him, based on its unanimous (two out of two opinions) hailing as his great leap forward -- deserved to enter a world in which the popular tastes in music are all biased in its favor. I find it astonishingly hard, sometimes, to remember that tastes _aren't_ all set for him. My knowledge of pop music when I grew up consisted of 1) Simon + Garfunkel, and 2) the Beatles. Even now, it's easy for me slip back, when convenient, into a worldview where Heavy music ranges from "Blessed" and "Helter-Skelter" outwards to "Save The Life Of My Child" and "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", where jauntiness all sounds like "We've Got A Groovy Thing Goin'" or "Rocky Raccoon", where reflectiveness starts with "I Am A Rock" and "Nowhere Man" but, in a show-off mood, becomes "the Boxer" or "Because". Songs like that are so obvious and natural that I was going to include the Lovin' Spoonful in that discussion; it took conscious, puzzled reflection to realize that "Summer In The City" joined my life the same summer that Sonic Youth and Pop Will Eat Itself did. Some nice chords, a pleasant melody with an interesting twist somewhere, professional production with hints of playful, irresponsible clutter: I like many albums that sound nothing like that, sure, but I can't imagine _not_ liking a good album that does. My Mom and Dad hadn't even met when SOUNDS OF SILENCE became, briefly, the best-selling record of all time, but somehow its success is more real to me than the career-threatening commercial flop of John Mellencamp's best, most S+G-like album (HUMAN WHEELS), or the triumph of Limp Bizkit, or the fact that I'll use Nine Inch Nails as an example of a band I like, when asked by someone who will clearly not be amused by long lists of obscurities.
In the pop-happy world of my imagination, TRAY's music would be a formidable asset. "Black and White Elvis" is a jaunty campfire singalong that explodes into an electric rock'n'roll chorus that would've been perfect for an era when the feedback on the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" was a shocking novelty. "Creepy Tray" is a 3-chord jangle worthy of the Connells if they let go of their self-conscious reserve. "Banana Song", blaring and awesome despite being recorded on 2-track, slips moments of McCartney-esque music-hall winking and an epic synth solo into its monotonous guitar assault. "Third Eye" recasts the melody of "You're Gonna Lose That Girl" into a bubbly, optimistic semi-acoustic setting with bits of piano and a solemn waltz-time bridge. "Cockroach Song", voice and one acoustic guitar, stretches Barbeau's somewhat thin voice (think Elvis Costello with better pitch but a Midwest flatness and hint of drawl), but winds over it a lovely, complex melody.
"Please Sir I've Got A Wooden Leg", synth/metallic, could be "Tom Sawyer"-era Rush after an inspired evening listening to Costello's ARMED FORCES, but nothing in the melody makes "please, sir, I'm just a Beatle doll, no relation to Beatle Paul" seem beside the point. "Gone", hi-reverb drums to the front, is darker, but the deflated "yeah... yeah... yeah" is too melodically right to not recall the Fab Four. The major/minor shifts and woodwinds and flowery organ of "Dazzle Girl" are more like REVOLVER than the dramatic hollow strums, and casually poly-ethnic ENGLISH SETTLEMENT drum textures, are unlike it.
Only on the 9th to 11th tracks, still melodic, does Barbeau lose focus on pop pleasures: "Once In Royal David City" builds sad folk balladry into church-organ grandeur, "Suicide Toad" is like Joan Baez only with pointlessly crappy singing, and "Sweetness Dream of Me" builds sad folk balladry, via lots of overdubs, into a distinctive, rather unraveling grandeur that would fit perfectly on a Neutral Milk Hotel album. But rather than leaving the album there, Barbeau makes the first genuinely clever use of the Bonus Track concept since 1980 (Boomtown Rats, MONDO BONGO). "Yum Yum Bubblegum" is listed, not hidden; it starts, in theory, right after the last echoes of "Sweetness...". But it starts with 45 seconds of soft guitar tuning and heartbeat-tempo woodblock, and that for a listener whose pop mood has already had chance to decay. Thus the phased guitar throb of the song, proper, jumps out of the speakers like the radio single that finally shuts the irritating DJ up. I never buy singles, because I don't like the effort of walking over to the turntable every three minutes, but I understand the psychological effect, the mixture of concentration, saved-up-for joy, and intense relief, that I'm losing out on. "Yum...", soaring like Fountains of Wayne imbued with the healthy confidence of the oompah-loompahs, simulates it for us.
Those, then, are the credentials TRAY should be flashing to the world stage. If only it could, the album -- which in real life you have to order from Frigidisk -- would then constitute an interesting experiment. The simplest way to interpret Barbeau's lyric-writing is as an assertion of form over content. "Creepy..." is, I think, a flawless model of one of pop music's elemental forms: does this mean "The sea was full of snakes/ The snakes were full of poison/ as I am full of blood and love/ and strawberries in season" is a the beginning of a manifesto, because it's in the verse position? That "My tray, my creepy tray" is a devoted celebration, because the jolly chorus says it is? That "Saturday, Saturday/ Pencil day, oh Saturday/ Saturday wasted, waiting Aivlys" is a pensive, anxious bridge because the music says it is? And if yes, can the world also learn to sing along with "third eye, third eye, not cuz I like you, just cuz I love you", whatever that means? Can "I believe in a rockin' pneumonia/ and I believe that's just the way it's gotta be/ and I believe that there's a bug on my begonia" serve as catechism like any other sacred teaching? Can "trapped in a motel room with Woody Woodpecker" be claustrophic, just because it's obviously meant to be?
I would have zero hesitation in answering yes. I have, in the odder corners of my music collection, three different attempts to set "the Jabberwocky" to music, none of them very good; isn't it much cooler to see someone prove Lewis Carroll's theorem about form in an original way, and to demonstrate in addition that it's not even necessary to make up new words if old ones can be refitted to new tasks? But it's not, in fact, easy to write in a completely meaningless fashion. "This language despises my two-sided poetry", Barbeau admits on "Sweetness...", and something in the structure of the language, or perhaps of human psychology (but can you untangle the two?), makes it very hard not to see stories here. "Sweetness..." and "Yum...", however different their musical functions, are back-to-back responses to romantic breakup, reminiscent and wounded. "Fixed my guitar, then I thought about you/ with four-hundred strums and a fingerproof melody/ So much to say, wanna spray it on you", the narrator marvels, trying to retrieve things; but "wonder if you've stepped out for some air/ Or maybe gone to buy yourself a chair/ To stare at and pretend that I am there", he then speculates, acknowledging that the idea of his presence might be more pleasant than the reality. "Suicide Toad", who "left behind a favorite sweater/ it loved him like a friend", leaves behind a note saying "If you're someone, know that I will be with you from time to time forever", so maybe those songs are a trilogy. Hmmm....
What I end up with, putting all the songs together, is a concept album for cringing, for cowardice. "Creepy..." doesn't fit; it seems, like "Third Eye", to be a love song, with the tray serving as a reminder of the beloved, as other relationships might be served by a photo or jigsaw puzzle or old event ticket. But "Banana..." seeks reward as essentially a paid, suited gorilla ("I broke the company rules for you, don't I get a banana"). The "Cockroach..." evicts the human narrator from its house. "Please..." immortalizes "I won't do what you don't want me to" as its singalong payoff. "Once...", which randomly mixes up three, four, or five fairy tales (depending if The Bible and The X-Files count), is a tale of moral comeuppance that starts with "I spoonfed my true love to weasels with cream". "Gone" and "Dazzle..." are more songs lost, helpless, after a breakup.
Is there a market for megahit anthems about pre-emptive surrender? That's what I wish we could find out. One almost wants to root against the idea; "Banana..." in particular makes a great anthem for subordinate bureacrats in the death machine (Nazi Germany, Exxon, RJR Nabisco) of your choice. But fear is probably underrated as a social good. Stop and be grateful, sometime, that virtually all death threats and bomb threats are bluffs. Be grateful that hardly any murders are committed without a reason, no matter how easy, and how well in accord with generic macho fun, it might be to take pot-shots at strangers from a 13th-floor apartment. And besides, the songs are fun, but they aren't exactly celebrations.
Most of us don't end up changing the world. I still want to, myself, and I haven't given up hope or effort, but even I have noticed that I haven't made big progress yet. Songs can express ideals, express worship, but it's not always fun to hang out with ideals between, for example, phone calls at some stupid (albeit useful) customer service job for some company one wishes didn't exist. A SPLENDID TRAY, for all its ridiculousness, could be an album the masses could relate to. I wish I could watch them try.
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