Listening to My Life: American Music Club and the Dregs of Winter

[Illustration by Edward McGowan]

February in Columbus, Ohio, means the fourth consecutive month without sunshine. Eight months of the year, it’s a great place to live. But during the winter, a dismal pall settles over the city. Too far south to offer much in the way of invigorating winter sports, but too far north to escape the general crud, the typical Columbus winter day features ominous grey clouds, sleet and temperatures hovering around 35 degrees. Coincidentally, this is also how Dante describes the innermost circle of hell.

Mark Eitzel—lead singer and songwriter for California mopesters American Music Club—was born here. I know of no better way to explain the gloriously conflicted fury and resignation that permeates his music: Yeah, he suggests, the horror will probably pass. Then again, it might kill you before it does. No songwriter is better suited to soundtracking these desperate February days when it seems spring will never arrive.

The American Music Club album I play most frequently this time of year is Mercury, the band’s 1993 shot at the big time on Reprise Records. It’s a wondrous thing; dissolute lounge music from the world’s most mournful bar—the kind of place where the patrons read James Joyce and Samuel Beckett in darkened corner booths, the jukebox plays Elvis Costello and Patsy Cline, and everybody’s a smartass with a broken heart.

The album sold squat, perhaps sabotaged by Eitzel’s unremitting gloom, and by his conflicted attempt at “stardom.” After all, this is a record that features made-up dialogue between Eitzel and Johnny Mathis. And Johnny shuts him up and puts him in his place. “A real showman knows how to disappear in the spotlight,” the imaginary Mathis tells him.

But Eitzel doesn’t know how to shut up or disappear. He’s a barstool poet with the soul of a romantic, and he declaims in the proud tradition of everyone from Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac to Tom Waits and Craig Finn. This approach permeates every song on the album, but I hear it most clearly on “If I Had a Hammer,” which bears the same name as the song written by Pete Seeger and popularized by Peter, Paul, and Mary, but is light-years removed from that protest anthem’s hopeful resolution. This hammer is more likely to crush the songwriter’s skull. It’s a quiet, resigned, despairing tune that erupts in impotent fury, capturing the essence of Mark Eitzel’s philosophy: Life sucks, but what can you do? I love the song for its unbearable sadness, and because Mark Eitzel is the poet of February grey:

Give me the keys to your theme park
Bury me under your layer of snow
And watch me ride all the rides
Around and around I go

I don’t know if I’ve reached the bottom yet
And I don’t know if the ice has finally begun to set
I feel time pass like a joy I tried so hard to relearn
But somewhere along the line
I passed the point of no return.

It’s claustrophobic winter music for people who’ve been inside too long. Even the album’s final track, “Will You Find Me?”—which at least posits the possibility of being found—fades away in a wash of wistful strings. It’s a nice thought, Eitzel seems to be telling us. Now back to reality. There are other American Music Club albums, some of them almost as good as Mercury, but none of them sustains the mood of loss and despair.

I can’t remain in those desolate regions very long. But in mid-February, sinking
under a succession of drab, interchangeable days, it’s just about the best music in the world. Sunshine? What’s that?