Classic Paste: The Best of Issues 11-15 (Aug. 2004 - May 2005)

There’s a mountain chill in the air on this first Saturday of May, and The Walker Center—located ‘on high’ overlooking the Wilkes Community College campus—has not only become a beacon for Americana/roots music, but also for a joy rarely witnessed in today’s industry-heavy landscape. Hosted by Swiss pickin’ trio The Kruger Brothers, MerleFest’s annual Midnight Jam kicks off with the fast and furious banjos of Jens Kruger and virtuoso Alison Brown.

But down a narrow hallway in a room sheltered from the sounds of the main stage, the pace is wonderfully chaotic as MerleFest’s best are mingling and having their own, less scripted jam. Near a mostly neglected smorgasbord of catered fresh fruit and shrimp cocktails, the musicians are casually scattered around circular folding tables, instruments in hand. A few discreetly sip whiskey from a flask in the corner. This is, after all, a dry county. ...

• "Loretta Lynn: Jack White Finds Gold with the Coal Miner's Daughter" by Matt Fink (Issue #11)

Genius is a peculiar thing. Even the most brilliant musicians can drift into stagnant creative waters, leaving them out of step with both the spirit of their seminal work and the contemporary artists they’ve inspired. It happened to Bob Dylan; it happened to Johnny Cash. And while she never became desperate enough to file for artistic bankruptcy by re-recording her old hits or doing a covers album, some would say it happened to Loretta Lynn.

“I think it’s hard for a lot of us out of her world to realize how much she has been lauded and how much acclaim she has gotten in her life,” says Jack White, producer of Lynn’s latest, Van Lear Rose. “She’s won so many awards and sold so many records and had so many people tell her how amazing she is. That’s a hard thing to deal with when people do that to you,” he says, undoubtedly having encountered the same in the media- and critical-frenzy surrounding The White Stripes. “You start to lose appreciation of what it is that you do, and you kind of become this thing that it’s hard to say what it is. But I think she has a really strong knowledge of her storytelling being appealing to people, and when she puts that in her music and when she tells it like it is, people go for that. I know she knows that.” ...

• "Wilco: In the Company of Ghosts" by Tim Porter (Issue #11)

"It was the most terrifying and beautiful thing I've done in my life," Jeff Tweedy says.

Two months ago, the Wilco frontman rushed to a Chicago emergency room in the midst of a panic attack. He’d been struggling to wean himself off painkillers prescribed for recurring migraines, and the pressure surrounding the impending release of A Ghost is Born became too great. Panic attacks and cycles of migraines-painkillers-detox were nothing new. But he had resisted treatment, not wanting to become a cliché—the rock star with an addiction. This time, however, the doctors made a new connection: His headaches and prescription drug abuse were likely tied to his severe panic disorder. ...

• "Marah: Grit and Redemption" by Jeff Leven (Issue #11)

This is a story about rock ’n’ roll.

It’s a story about rock ’n’ roll and a few boys—and, much later, a gal—from Northwest Alabama, who head out on the road—searching souls ramblin’ the highways of America, tearing up the countryside like a Tuscumbia twister…

This is a story about rock ’n’ roll and a band called Drive-By Truckers, a bunch of irreverent bastards with good hearts and big dreams, ready to show the rest of the world what The South is really all about, who wind up in Athens, Ga., where you don’t have to play in a cover band, where it’s cheap to live and there’re plenty of people to make music with …

And it’s a story about everything you have to go through to get people to hear your music in the first place—all the bullshit they never tell you about when you’re a runaway kid at a Springsteen concert with delusions of rock ’n’ roll grandeur: endless nights in stinking vans, stolen equipment, broken hearts, electrocution, hangovers, backstabbers, bad weather, divorce, death and destruction. And, if you’re lucky, you might live to tell about it, and you might live to do a whole lot more crazy, stupid shit…

• "Listening to Old Voices - Sinatra: A Frank Reappraisal" by Andy Whitman (Issue #11)

And it’s a good thing Earle is back in fighting form. He’s coming out of his leftist corner swinging hard with his latest TKO, The Revolution Starts … Now on Artemis. Two years ago, conservatives sneered and liberals cheered as the Texas-drawled singer issued his quasi-political Jerusalem and its lightning-rod ballad “John Walker’s Blues,” which tried to see through the eyes of American Taliban soldier John Walker Lindh. And that was a puff-gloved feint compared to Earle’s new bare-knuckled brawler, easily the most controversial record of his career. Sure, there are standard twang-tuned charmers like “Comin’ Around,” his dutiful duet with Emmylou Harris. But most of Revolution reads like an ardent activist’s final thesis from poli-sci class. The opening title track (reprised at the end of the album) lands the first blow between Duane Eddy-ish guitar licks: “I opened up my eyes and I took a look around / I saw it written ’cross the skies—the revolution starts now.” ...

• "The ?uest for a Change: On Tour with The Roots" by Jay Sweet (Issue #12)

"Yankees suck! Yankees suck!" chant a few thousand people on a muggy July afternoon in a concrete concert shed, amid the fluorescent jet-ski dealers, homemade firework stands, T-shirt shops, Harley detailers and endless lawn ornaments of New Hampshire’s Live Free or Die lake region. The crowd is almost entirely made up of white, male 311 fans, sun-burnt and pickled. And by the sea of red-letter capital B’s on shirts and backward baseball caps, not to mention the rising volume of their beer-soaked sentiments, they are also 100 percent Boston Red Sox Nation. This doesn’t bode well for the man onstage wearing a black-on-black New York Yankees hat. As anyone aware of baseball’s greatest rivalry knows, this could turn ugly fast, but the lidded offender deftly defuses the situation, proclaiming, “I don’t like ’em, I just like the color; hell, I’m from Philly!”

The crowd is assuaged because the Phillies—like the Red Sox—are a big-hearted bunch who play with underdog attitude and heated passion. Even though every year they end up bowing to their big-city rivals, faith is restored each season until whispers of “Could this be our year?” reach fever pitch. The same can also be said for fans of the band onstage, for they, too, carry the weight of expectations and potential only to repeatedly fall just shy of the brass ring. Yet we still believe, for this really could be the year for The Roots. ...

• "Brian Wilson Remembers How to Smile" by Geoffrey Himes (Issue #12)

The reality that pop music—capable of accommodating endless permutations of the same essential form—has evolved in any meaningful fashion is wondrously strange. Even musicians considered textbook iconoclasts have conformed to the same instrumental formula as rock’s earliest purveyors. The Clash’s blistering political discontent incited a generation of British youth to question the establishment and its inherited value system, but the band’s arsenal—guitar, bass, drums—contented itself in the status quo. As if we needed proof: these are wonderfully inexhaustible building blocks.

Of course, along came the computer age, which further peeled back the ceiling on what was considered possible. The synthetic quality of modern life found yet another expression, another cathartic voice, in manufactured sound. All of a sudden, musicians who spent their acne-bothered pubescence indoors staring at computer monitors and resentfully butchering piano scales found themselves holding the power. Synthesized music emerged and musicians turned their focus toward its full-scale exploitation in the interest of patching together some novel approach.

For many artists, it wasn’t enough to revitalize rock’s established “classical” form; say, strumming a dismally familiar I-IV-V chord progression on a Rickenbacker electric guitar fed through a vintage VOX amplifier and reheating an old Beatles vocal melody—admittedly derivative, but seldom a bad recipe. True genius, as they understood it, meant defying convention. For instance, you might consider looping the flutter of a Scissor-tailed Hummingbird’s wings, recorded in zero gravity, through a metal pipe, and then screaming Portuguese obscenities over the mix until your vocal chords are shredded raw (keep in mind, a film documentary of this quest may prove more lucrative than the sound recording itself).

As we’ve learned from studying genetics, however, the overwhelming majority of DNA mutations prove maladaptive; they simply cause functional and developmental aberrations, ultimately speeding the affected organism’s demise. The same holds true in music. But then there are contemporary artists who, like Darwin’s finches before them, have mutated in ways that equipped them to survive beyond their allotted 15 minutes or so. Some have even altered music for the better—The Flaming Lips, David Byrne, Radiohead, Wilco. And, of course, Björk, whose newest creation, Medúlla, sprouted legs and crawled ashore in late August. ...

• Review of N. Lannon's Chemical Friends by Jason Killingsworth (Issue #12)

Listening to Chemical Friends is the aural equivalent of receiving a full-body massage outdoors at twilight in a gently pulsing mid-summer shower while R2-D2 recites Shakespearean sonnets to you in his unintelligible but comforting robotic chirp. San Francisco-based Nyles Lannon (who thought it would be pretty cool to see his first initial in lower-case) has taken a break from his slowcore band, Film School, in order to record the most depressingly gorgeous album since Elliott Smith’s Either/Or. The Smith comparison is a fairly obvious one and doesn’t require a press release to figure out, but there’s a confessional tenor to Lannon’s songwriting here that necessitates a measure of vocal restraint. Fortunately, his voice attains the gossamer pre-dawn quality of Sam Beam’s without veering into the coffeehouse kitsch of Ben Gibbard’s girlish yelp.

Constructed from the ground up, Chemical Friends’ abundance of robust, finger-picked acoustic guitar lines provide most of the sonic foundation while subtle electronic effects glisten, whirr, scratch, pop, whiz or sigh in a trancey New Age euphoria. I can’t say exactly when it happened but, somewhere along the way, practitioners of electronic music (Lannon dodges the bullet here) bought into the filthy lie that a conglomeration of individually cool sounds must guarantee an exponentially cooler album. The math seems to work. But if you wrap all your pretty blinking colored lights around the naked branches of a Douglas fir’s cadaver, your toddler is still going to bawl when she scampers downstairs on Christmas morning. ...

• "R.E.M. - On the Shoulders of Its Own Mythology" by Brent Dey (Issue #13)

Spring, 1984: I’d just turned fifteen years old, and, as a burgeoning punk rocker, I was determined to make a black mark on the suburban landscape. My ninth-grade friends and I were so “bored, bored, bored with the U.S.A.” that we spent our free time watching episodes of The Young Ones, giving each other bad haircuts and escaping to downtown Atlanta. Our parents were blithely unaware of the life we led once the sun went down—drinking bottles of Boone’s Farm behind the Metroplex, conning our way into shows at the Buckhead Cinema & Drafthouse and pogo-ing until dawn at 688 Club.

When local college station WRAS announced The Clash concert at the Fox Theatre, we were undoubtedly going. Although “Rock The Casbah” had been co-opted by the jocks and preps at our high school, we still owned The Clash. My friend Lynn had liberated a copy of London Callingfrom the local Turtle’s record store just before Christmas, and, by the time the new year rolled around, we were speaking in Rude Boy lingo, calling each other “boyo” and “Jimmy Jazz.”

I painted anti-war logos—heralding the Spanish Revolution of 1939, a subject I’d ignored in my history class—on a white T-shirt, clamped a black felt hat on my asymmetric bob, and marched down to Turtle’s to buy tickets. The concert was scheduled for April 3, which fell over spring break; my folks would drop us off at the show, then, afterwards, Lynn’s parents would pick us up on Peachtree Street. For the hours in between, we were free—or, at least, as free as two underage middle class kids could be. ...

Before bands like The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers merged country and rock music, musicians from the two genres rarely mingled; they were more likely to flash a one-fingered salute than a peace sign to one another. Merle Haggard was a country musician, no apologies offered, and he let it be known he was willing and able to kick the sissy ass of any longhaired, psychedelicized hippie who felt inclined to burn a draft card or run down his beloved U.S. of A. In 1969 and ’70, at the height of the bitter cultural chasm that divided the country over the Vietnam War, Haggard sang “Okie from Muskogee” and “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” love-it-or-leave-it mortar shells lobbed in the general direction of the counterculture, notable as much for their inflammatory rhetoric as for their plainspoken patriotism.

As a countercultural wannabe at the time, possessed of a sissy hippie ass in the making, I could take a not-so-subtle hint. Merle may have played well in Muskogee, but in my neck of the post-Woodstock woods he was Public Redneck #1. If I thought about him at all, I thought about him with the smugness that comes from the certainty of one’s beliefs.

So maybe you learn something along the way. Merle Haggard has some tenacious beliefs of his own, one of them being the notion that regular people matter. They’re stuck in prison cells, driving big rigs, working the fields and drinking too much on the weekends, but not enough to drown the memories of lost loves and raw deals. So these days I’m more inclined to think Merle Haggard is Johnny Cash without the hip cachet, a no frills storyteller with an untamed colt of a voice and a penchant for nailing the desperate realities of hardscrabble lives. ...

• "My Mission to Burma" by Damien Rice (Issue #14)

The initial thoughts of the dirt and smell have faded into a more open acceptance of newness. Memories of Bangkok office girls, sitting sideways and helmet-less on motorcycle taxis, blur as the sharp focus of the ever-present cuts a deep hole into my consciousness. We exit a small van and move swiftly off the road and into a house that has become the new home for ex-political prisoners in hiding.

My body feels almost vulnerable, as though each story cuts off some skin, leaving me exposed to the mosquitoes. Waking up at night with itchy ankles and thoughts flying through my head like darts—tiny torture, a tease, a piece of sand in the mouth compared to the rock in the head these people have suffered for years.

Sleeping in a sticky jail in rusted shackles for 13 years on 15 teaspoons of rice a day—constantly beaten, eaten by every insect that fancies a man or woman not allowed to wash. How long is a minute for them? For me, waking in the night with an itch and an unease, the minutes move slowly. Yet, I can get water, cream for my bites, lamps to give me some light, a pencil and paper so I can write. Not to mention the knowledge that I can leave.

• "The Next American Music" by Amanda Petrusich (Issue #14)

It’s early morning as I drive east from Charlottesville, Va., rolling fast through the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains toward Richmond, past the cigarette factories and horse farms, shopping centers and snug residential grids. Soon I’ll swing onto the southern third of Interstate 95 and chug south for nearly 200 miles, eventually docking in Chapel Hill, N.C. In a few hours, I’ll shu e into Carrboro’s Cat’s Cradle, sip warm beer from a plastic cup, see friends and watch songwriter David Pajo—performing as Papa M—strum smirky folk songs.

While I-95 was constructed at the height of America’s romance with the road—around the same time Jack Kerouac propelled his bearded brethren out of cities and onto highways—the interstate’s contemporary incarnation is simply not that kind of road: gargantuan and numbing, impossibly dull, framed by fast food huts and gleaming gas stations, peppered by slabs of tire rubber, cigarette butts and crushed Coke cans. This morning I’m tired and bored; I count exits and yawn.

Over the last half-century, innumerable American highways have been similarly streamlined and demystified, rendered modern and efficient. Highway culture has changed, too, becoming lifeless, standardized, freeze-dried. Unsurprisingly, America’s landscapes are shifting in accordance, making way for brash human sprawl, conceding to “innovation,” yielding to our grimiest sins: Now, colossal mountain ranges are cut by strip malls, and white clouds are parted by thick gray exhaust. In response, America’s music is also changing, evolving, communing, and Americana—our sacred center—is in the midst of a self-reflexive revolution. ...

• "Mixed Media: David Lowery & Russell Banks" (Issue #14)

On a sharp winter morning, just before the onset of a European tour, David Lowery, frontman for Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, calls writer Russell Banks, author of such works as Cloudsplitter, Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter and new novel The Darling. The two have never met, but both share a passion for storytelling and truth in fiction. ...

• Review of Beck's Guero by Jeff Leven (Issue #14)

Welcome to Beck’s morning after. On the heels of Sea Change—his well-publicized dark night of the soul, a glowingly moody album yearning for sedative anodyne in the wake of an ugly break-up—Beck has to go out and, once more, face a world that has spiraled deep into his frayed nerves, gawked at his misfortune and appropriated his most personal musings for its own sundry purposes. (Ugly irony: how many couples have made out to this breakup album?) It’s an awkward spot, to say the least, much like facing a friend who bore sober witness to a night of drunken mewling when you were at your most desperate, or bumping into the next-door neighbor who probably heard every last slashing curse of your big fight on the phone. Blush and duck, boyo, your guts are showing. ...

• Review of Nirvana's With the Lights Out by Joshua Allen (Issue #14)

When authorities finally confirmed that the body was indeed Kurt Cobain’s, the perhaps-too-influential LA radio station KROQ decided to pay tribute by playing all four Nirvana LPs back-to-back. As the marathon came to an end and “All Apologies” slipped into its coda, I figured it would peter out and then we’d have a moment of silence in the form of dead air. But instead, as the final notes played, they laid on a collage of people who’d called in during the day to grieve and share and vent. All talking at once, obscuring the music.

Which is pretty much how things have gone for the past ten years. ...

It’s not every day that your first film wins an Academy Award. Of course, not everybody is setting out to change the way people think about an entire region of the country, either.

A Southerner, from the tip of his drawl to the toe of his cowboy boots, Ray McKinnon is the opposite of the bad-ass film characters he usually plays. He speaks so softly I have to strain to hear him. He’s polite. And when I gush about Chrystal, his first feature film—which moved me, as both a critic and a Southerner—he is humble and gracious.

McKinnon’s first short, The Accountant, won the 2001 Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film. No stranger to the industry, however, he has appeared in dozens of films, including O Brother, Where Art Thou?,Apollo 13 and The Missing. He starred as the Rev. H.W. Smith on the acclaimed HBO series Deadwood. And he’ll continue to act, but he’s definitely found a vocation on the other side of the camera. ...

• "Charlie Chaplin: The Director" by Robert Davis (Issue #15)

For a good part of the 20th century Charlie Chaplin’s disheveled, mustachioed character might’ve been the most recognized figure on earth, but his legacy as a filmmaker has waxed and waned over the years. Certain assumptions have settled in, making it hard to see the films for what they are.

The story of Chaplin’s life is like a fairy tale. By age 25, he’d risen from the streets of London to being virtually synonymous with cinema, worldwide. Movies had fewer geographical barriers than they do today—language was hardly an issue—and Chaplin’s films hummed through those channels with ease, thanks to their broad appeal. His nameless character, “the little tramp,” was down on his luck but had a gentlemanly air and took pride in straightening his hat, buttoning his tattered, ill-fitting coat and dusting off the crumbs of whatever knocked him flat. ...

• Review of Aimee Mann's The Forgotten Arm by Dave Sims

Aimee Mann’s almost singular devotion to themes of addiction and dysfunction would’ve become an artistic liability for most songwriters about three albums ago. It’s hard to think of another tunesmith working today who hits the same motifs and emotional notes with more consistency. From 1993’s Whatever to 2002’sLost in Space, Mann’s first-person protagonists invariably find themselves on the raw end of a doomed romance, ducking out under a smokescreen of half-mumbled mea culpas and a cloud of fatalism that makes Richard Lewis look like Zig Ziglar.

Relationships are, for Mann, both irresistible and toxic. No image captures this notion better than Lost in Space’s cover art, a row of high-tension power lines framed against the night sky like human silhouettes, their outstretched arms draped in wires that bind them together yet carry a lethal power. As Mann sings on 2000’s Bachelor #2, “One act of kindness could be deathly.” The female voice behind “Highway On Sunday 51” from Lost in Space is perhaps the archetypal Mann-equin, a hopeless, nakedly self-conscious figure constructed solely for the sake of modeling Mann’s reductionist view of romance: “The monkey knows how you’ll react / Creating want by holding back ... I propped my window up and then / I turned my back to lure you in ... Let me be your heroin.” Given her obsession with the human psyche’s remarkable complexity, the conclusion Mann reaches time and again is morose and simplistic: all of us are too screwed up to make meaningful connections with other human beings. ...

• Review of You Ain't Talkin' To Me: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music by Geoffrey Himes (Issue #15)

Something is happening out there in the hinterlands. A generation of young roots musicians are digging deeper than rockabilly, deeper than honky-tonk, deeper than bluegrass, all the way down to old-time string-band music. Bands like The Duhks, The Mammals, Old Crow Medicine Show, The Be Good Tanyas, The Foghorn Stringband, The Carrie Fridley Band, The Wailin’ Jennys, The Redstick Ramblers and Jim & Jennie & the Pinetops are attacking this pre-Pearl Harbor, rural-Southern music as if they’d just discovered the Klondike gold vein. And they have.

To understand why these 20-something pickers have jumped on the old-time bandwagon, all you have to do is listen to the late-’20s and early-’30s recordings by their heroes Charlie Poole, Gid Tanner, Dock Boggs, Clarence Ashley and Gus Cannon. These men didn’t showcase virtuoso solos like their bluegrass heirs; they didn’t spotlight honeyed singers voicing universal sentiments like their honky-tonk descendants. In their string bands, everyone played at once with barely constrained energy, and the lyrics favored the surrealist, absurdist worldview of the 19th-century folk songs they often recycled. ...