33 rebellions per minute
"I saw Peter, Paul, and Moses playing ring around the roses"
1961
Chad Mitchell Trio, AT THE BITTER END
Living in Massachusetts instead of Iowa has been a wonderful opportunity to see live music. Or, as I regularly phrased it years ago, "rock concerts". It has come to my attention, however, that I don't in fact attend rock concerts any more, if by that we mean bands using electric guitars. Since the Loud Family toured here this summer, I've seen live performances by Cindy Lee Berryhill (solo with acoustic guitar); Mary Timony and Madigan and some other people I liked but forget (solo with guitar, cello, or tapes); Science Park and Don Lennon and Double Dong opening for the They Might Be Giants side-project Mono Puff; They Might Be Giants; Jennifer Kimball (solo with guitar); and, two days ago, Dan Bern (solo with guitar). This upcoming month, April '99, I intend to see Ani DiFranco, Lisa Germano, and Dar Williams, all of whom I've wanted for years to see play live. Rock shows just seem less fun to me.
The problem with rock shows, I've decided, is that rock bands use them to play their songs. You're puzzled. Well, that's not all bad, of course, especially if there's context. As in, Tizzy are a terrific female-fronted hardcore band with excellent rhythmic sense and a Throwing Muses grasp of melody, and their only record is 4 years old and basically inadequate, so there's a point to seeing them in concert. Or a Loud Family concert allows you to stand up front bellowing things like "Making nice to girls not knowing they'd prefer a thoughtles bastard!" and "How did you come to this sorry impasse?" and "False alarms, crypto-sicko, babes in arms" in a crowd of people who've memorized the words with you, never worrying for a second if you're in tune because no-one can hear you over the amps, and never worrying if the lyrics are unhealthily anti-social because they can't be if everyone is singing and dancing to them. Nonetheless, as a general rule, if I want to hear a band's rock songs, I can buy their CD. I can play it at home and not need earplugs or proof of age. I can sit or stand or exercise or design inept clay unicorns as I listen. I can enjoy the fact that maybe the band has decided to _produce_ the sounds instead of relying on the momentary sobriety of an anonymous soundman. And I don't have to buy tickets.
What I end up recalling and retelling from live shows, then, is the personality (or simulation of such) that only seems to occur in folk or geek-rock settings: Cindy Lee Berryhill borrowing the main act's synthesizer, accidentally kicking it into drum machine mode, pausing, deciding to play the keys anyway while rapping "Now here's a little story I'd like to tell/ about the day the music went to hell/ ... um... somebody help me with this?". Or the two-male one-female Double Dong establishing that their name (unlike the also-local 2-male 2-female Half Cocked or the _also_-local 3-female 1-male 3.5 Girls; ah, college towns) is not a throwaway but a signal of the most wholeheartedly lascivious, yet artfully geeky, set of choreography imaginable, from the moment when their leader impersonates an android Elvis The Pelvis on. Or the solo synth-guy who is Science Park deciding for Halloween to be disguised as the leader of a three-piece, two-rehearsal grunge band (they were much better than the real ones I've seen open).
Or Dan Bern. If I owned his albums yet I'd just review those, but until they arrive I'm left with the concert memories. The long song/routine about being asked by God to receive a new commandment was nice (Dan lies naked and prostrate before God; "Dan, you're on the 14th floor". Dan lies naked and prostrate in the basement; "Dan, the elevation here is 3300 feet". Dan takes a flight to Phoenix, because all flights go to Phoenix even if they're New York-to-Boston, and rents from Budget Rent-A-Car because Hertz and Avis don't like dealing with naked guys, and drives to the lowest valley in California; "Dan, the age of specialization is over". "You want me to tell the world that you have an eleventh commandment and it sounds like a Time Magazine editorial???!". "The age of specialization is over... ELEVENTH commandment?". "Yeah, you gave Moses ten". "I think I would know that". Dan as performer makes whooshes of rain, crackles of lighning, abrupt creaky noises of windows closing; "Did you remember the upstairs window?"; half-creak/ whoosh/ crackle/ whoosh/ "Oh, shit". Dan: "It rained for forty days. And sixteen nights. The nights were drier than the days. I don't know why", God: "Moses did at least leave in the one about the moose, right?"....). And I'll probably never know if he improvised or planned the bit where he started a song about strippers attneding his shows, paused for "I can't sing this in front of my Mom", paused and started over, tossed in a lyric about concert location Northampton, paused for "you guys think I just tossed that in for you, right?... well... I thought this might be going somewhere", motioned a tossing of the song out the window, and started something else. But here's one he obviously planned: his song about how nobody would have murdered those Tate people if they'd heard their leader's shitty record first and had realized (chorus) that "Charles Manson's real name is {wince} Charles Krautmeyer. Charles Manson's real name is Charles Krautmeyer. Charles Manson's real name is Charles Krautmeyer. Who ho ho, ho, ho ho, ho ho ho, ho". Instead of just asking us all to sing along, he went into a complex and improbable story in which we had to sing in order to save his friendship with Pete Seeger. So we sang, as instructed, in the styles of Seeger, of Bruuuuce (tuneless macho bellow), of TUNNEL OF LOVE Bruuuuce (tuneless drawn-out inarticulate mumble), and people we had to guess from hearing Dan. And I realized that yeah, of _course_ the point of music is communal sing-a-longs. Of course the point is voices, acoustic guitars, goofing around, and a saving sense of sincerity and insight that floats in and out when you least expect it. Dan Bern doesn't remind me of anyone performing today, despite his close ties with Ani DiFranco and her band; he reminds me of the '60's folk I grew up on. I never bought a record til I was 16 years old, but I was going well out of my way to skew Mom's choice of what to play from about age 8. My favorite band-- three voices in choir-pure, meltingly perfect harmony, but otherwise no more complex than Mr. Bern-- was the Chad Mitchell Trio. My favorite album was their first, AT THE BITTER END. It's still wonderful.
"Hello Susan Brown" and "James James Morrison Morrison" (with its A.A.Milne-written lyrics) epitomize this record. The lyrics, harmonized over a single acoustic guitar, are fun to sing, and of possible but non-emphasized significance, with the chirpy anti-parent subversiveness of "James..." given far more thought than the contemplative "Coffee grows on white oak tree/ the river flows with brandy-oh/ go choose someone to roam with you/ sweet as chocolate candy, ohhh" and rousing "I lost my true love on that ragin' canal" of "Hello...".
"The Great Historical Bum" opens with exaggerated banter and has the bandmates theatrically (and harmlessly just off-key) arguing the merits of each others' education and wisdom, merging only for a sprightly baritone chorus. "The Golden Vanity", on the other hand, is an old-fashioned ballad with ships and fair maidens and sinking and death and an evident moral. "A Very Unfortunate Man" is a silly but useful fable about the hazards of marrying for beauty or money that does pretty clearly date the album's pre-Sexual Revolution naivete, but is hardly any more ridiculous or less charming for it than it was anyway. And so it goes through a pre-Vietnam folk record where the politics are subtle or absent, where the mood is happy-to-be-here even when the songs are sombre, where even the occasional raggedy-ass moment is simply attractive, and where everything is a delight to pull out an autoharp to and harmonize with your kids. I don't have kids, of course; so for today, I guess, I just have to be one. Okay.
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