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ON THE COVER | NEWS & VIEWS | THE TOWN DANDY March 13, 2008
Greg Brown live Greg Brown For some people in the crowd last Saturday night at the Van Duzer, the first half hour of the Greg Brown show was fraught with doubt, confusion, even a little disappointment. Who was that masked man up there on stage? He was good, but he sounded ... different. He had no greeting for the crowd, just got down to business — walked on stage in a felt brown fedora, dark glasses and gray suit, sat down on a standard-issue metal-frame office chair ubiquitous in standard-issue meeting rooms in offices across the nation, picked up a guitar and started to play. His pencil-thin lips set in a straight, grim line opened a little to whisper-groan out some trackside blues, one after the other. The songs had their healthy chunk of clichés — trains and banjos, small towns and stray men buried alone with nobody but the preacher and an old woman watching from a nearby hill. Catchy, though, and professional. But, still, this wasn't Greg ... some wondered... . A man in the audience kept shouting out, in between songs, "Welcome to Humboldt, Greg!" No answer from the man on the chair with the guitar. Others fidgeted, wowed by the masked man's guitar prowess and bluesy authenticity, but confused. His set ended, he stood up and walked off to cheers. A few minutes later, Greg Brown — of course! — came on stage. Because, folks, that last man was Bo Ramsey — the guy who's played and recorded with everyone from Joan Baez to Lucinda Williams to, for the past decade and more, Greg Brown. Ramsey's an old pro in his own right, and though he's pale and grim his fingers float over the guitar strings like an angel's. Brown, however, is magnetic. Anyone who'd been a little confused felt foolish the moment Brown swept on stage looking like some kind of softened biker pirate in his pale blue suit over a black V-neck shirt, dark glasses, big hoop earrings, headwrap hat and graying goatee. He set his big frame down on another office chair next to Ramsey and opened up those full lips to rumble out half-swallowed vowels. When Brown sings it's as if he's eating something delicious, or swirling whiskey around in his mouth. His teeth gleam through his mustache. He's energy personified, and something else a bit more disconcerting, something sleepy, relaxed and roguish. Between his lover's drawl and Ramsey's hypnotic picking and sliding, it was easy to fall into a meditation that swung back and forth between the intimate and the funny, the love-found and the damned-I'll-go-my-own-way-now, from "I'm goin' away, 'cause I gotta busted heart. I'm leavin' today, if my TravelAll will start," to "And you move through my dreams like a trout moves through a pool. Sure I will do anything, but I blush at the reverie. Sleeper come and go with me." One oddly out-of-character — but very in-place — moment came early on, when Brown bust out his Bush Administration protest song. Most every folksinger and rocker has one. But that doesn't mean it's their best work. And while it jarred the mesmerized crowd out of its reverie into a frenzy of appreciative whoops — see, he gets it! — at least one annoyed person muttered after the show that it was a gross display of pandering; the audience ate it up because it was so obviously meant to be eaten up. Too easy. Brown's best moments were before and after that. And though a man who can write a hilarious, down-home lyric, Brown excels when he hits those notes that make you feel you're going to begin weeping even though you're feeling pretty good. As he sang somewhere down the road toward the end of his set, "Some things just get better and better and better than they've already been." Like his show. — Heidi Walters
Singer/songwriter John Darnielle, when touring alone with his acoustic guitar, would often introduce himself with, "Hi, we're the Mountain Goats." Darnielle is The Mountain Goats, just as much as Mark E. Smith is The Fall. A prolific songwriter, Darnielle has released his 15th recording: Heretic Pride. He has been recording material (via cassette only) since 1991, and the releases of B-sides and rarities have been overwhelming. And, as Mark E. Smith uses Can (or other Krautrock repetitions) as one of the Fall's musical boilerplates, Darnielle uses Lou Reed's Transformer-era, in particular, as his. In a 2004 interview with The Believer, Darnielle spoke of his growing fondness of Lou Reed's Transformer while in high school, setting him apart from his friends who were into prog rock. "My prog friends thought Lou Reed was a joke. They would say, 'Do you like this because it's funny that he can't sing?' and I'd say, 'No, that's not it,' and they'd say, 'Well it has to be, there no good guitar,' and I said, 'It's different from that.' They'd always argue that the only way you could like Lou Reed is if you were in some way laughing at the fact that he couldn't sing or that the songs were so simple." Darnielle has honed that same sort of simplicity with eloquent orchestration and subtlety. There's no confusing his spiky vocals, just as no one would confuse Lou Reed's deadpan delivery. But Darnielle has a better sense of melody (in other words, he does a bit more singing, rather than talking). For Heretic Pride, The Mountain Goats (the core band consists of: Peter Hughes, bass; Jon Wurster, drums; Franklin Bruno, piano and organ; and, Erik Friedlander, cello), in collaboration with longtime producer John Vanderslice and Scott Solter, create a sharp-sounding recording that matches the delicateness of 2006's Get Lonely or 2007's The Sunset Tree. However, the production of the songs on Heretic Pride is so clear that it brings out a certain jaggedness and edge that seemed lacking in the earlier releases. Darnielle's songs are inhabited by the usual cast of lost, down-and-out, inept, bipolar, tweaked-out, abusive characters. Instead of judging them, he inhabits them in personification songs. The title track, "Heretic Pride," for example, starts with a startling, uplifting vocal burst, "Well they come and pull me from my house/ And they drag my body through the streets/ and the sun's so hot I think I'll catch fire and burn up/ In the summer air so moist and sweet/ And the people all come out and cheer/ Rocks in the pathway break my skin/ And there's honeysuckle on the faint breeze today/ With every breath I'm drawing in..." It sets up a horrific, violent scene, with the narrator finding some bizarre joy being in the middle of this mayhem. And, in a sense, we, society, are "the people" in this dark story. The spare beauty of cellist extraordinaire Erik Friedlander perfectly frames Darnielle's nervous vocals in "San Bernardino," transforming this Southern California suburb into Southern Gothic. (Friedlander's latest releases can be found on the Cryptogramophone label.) And on "Lovecraft in Brooklyn," The Mountain Goats actually rock, propelled along by drummer Jon Wurster's snapping snare. Though Heretic Pride doesn't surpass the brilliance of 2004's We Shall All Be Healed, Darnielle continues to carve out his unique, simplistic and engaging form of songwriting/storytelling, by simply keeping faithful to the new album's heretic title: Darnielle is a true nonconformist, and like his characters he finds unusual joy in dissenting from the established order. — Mark Shikuma
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain Music, this weird and wonderful do-re-mi, welling up from the same ineffable place as our most basic expressions of instinct and desire — where does this stuff come from? Neurologist Oliver Sacks (Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) doesn't know, but he offers some strange and compelling portraits of how music can interact with the human brain, to both remarkable and detrimental effects. Over nearly 30 chapters, Sacks touches — sometimes much too briefly — on subjects from amusia (the inability to recognize music as such), to music composed in dreams, to pianists' phantom limbs. There are some amazing stories here, but when Sacks begins to really dig into what feels like the real human interest, the peculiar agonies and ecstasies perpetrated in people by music, he pulls back and digs into neurological minutiae. It's easy to gloss over these parts of Musicophilia, but they happen every few pages; some readers may wish to adopt the strategy of skipping ahead a few paragraphs every time they see the words "basal ganglia." Of course, Sacks is a neurologist, not an anthropologist, but some cases, like the man who suffers from irreversible memory loss but maintains his ability to play piano and conduct a choir, would be better told by someone who is less interested in brains and more in stories. It's worth noting that Sacks is largely concerned with classical music. The chapters that deal with musicians' neurological curiosities, like perfect pitch, dystonia (the gradual and inexplicable loss of ability to play an instrument) and synaesthesia (the ability to "see" or "taste" music), focus on classical performers and composers, and one wonders if there might be more interest in a companion volume dealing with pop music. Sacks makes it clear that Musicophilia was written mostly due to his own interest in music (he uses himself as an example of a handful of musical conditions), and in his world music is restricted to its relatively "high art forms" or as a therapeutic tool. Some pop phenomena, like the ubiquity of iPods and the increasingly annoying "earworms" — songs people just can't seem to stop thinking about — are mentioned. Surely these are worth further consideration. For these few faults, Musicophilia remains compelling due to its subject matter, which reminds us, simply, that music is buried way down deep in our brains and there's nothing we can do about it. It has a hold on humans, one that will likely remain unbroken even as we continually discard music's ephemeral tropes and genres like so many disco LPs. For better or worse, the songs are in our heads — and, one might add, hearts. — Joel Hartse ON THE COVER | NEWS & VIEWS | THE TOWN DANDY Comments? Write a letter!
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