Benjy Ferree: Come Back to the Five and Dime, Bobby Dee, Bobby Dee

Andy Whitman on Music

Here's a recipe for commercial suicide: write a concept album about an obscure-Disney-child-star-turned-adult-homeless-addict, sprinkle in liberal doses of surrealistic imagery, and toss in a variety of musical influences, from the strutting glam rock of T. Rex to the multi-tracked vocal bombast of Freddie Mercury to the raw country blues of Son House. That's what D.C. singer/songwriter Benjy Ferree does on his sophomore album Come Back to the Five and Dime, Bobby Dee, Bobby Dee. Naturally, no one will know what to do with this hopelessly convoluted mash-up. Naturally, it's a pretty great album.

Bobby Dee, in this case, is Bobby Driscoll, who starred in Disney's Peter Pan (among others), hit puberty, suffered a bad case of acne, was dropped by the studio, developed a nasty habit of sticking needles in his arm, and died destitute and unknown at the ripe old age of 31. Ferree tells his story in some detail, dropping obscure references to Driscoll roles and Disney plots, but he abandons the biographical ephemera long enough to get metaphysical, and that's when he's great. "Fear," the single that no one will hear, is terrific in its evocation of surrealistic existential dread, whipped up into a '50s doo-wop froth and capped by some fine Bowie glam histrionics. It's a brilliant song, the kind of thing Franz Kafka and the Dung Beetles might have sung around the oil-drum fire on some street corner in Philly. If "Fear" is the unmistakeable highlight, Ferree does himself proud on the more straightforward glam tunes, and his Marc Bolan impersonation is one of the best I've heard. It's all a little too insular and minutely focused to connect universally, but there are moments of real transcendence and beauty here. Bobby Dee is strange, quirky, and musically bracing. It's got no chance, but prove me wrong and check it out anyway.

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By Rap Music on February 12, 2009

Sounds like it's pretty cool

By big bill on February 16, 2009

this record so good, listening to it every day all day

By Andy Whitman on February 17, 2009

I keep coming back to this album as well. Pitchfork criticized it for being too minutely focused on Bobby Driscoll. AMG faulted it for being a concept record with a muddled concept.

I'd say that both the PFork and AMG reviews are partially correct. There is a strong, almost obsessive, focus on Bobby Driscoll. And the references to Driscoll and his career/life are so obscure and insular that it's very possible to hear those references as muddled. There are, for instance, numerous references in the album to "pieces of eight" and "doubloons." I'm sure that for many listeners those could create some WTF moments. They make sense if one happens to know that Driscoll played a major role in Disney's Treasure Island. But Ferree doesn't spell it out, and he assumes that the listener is already familiar with the minutiae of Driscoll's life, or that listeners are willing to do a little research. Those are probably faulty assumptions. But there's something doggedly thrilling about this album, akin to a three-page footnote in a David Foster Wallace essay, or Faulkner rambling on about Mississippi in a five-page run-on sentence. This album is either a work of genius or the most wrong-headed, misguided music you'll hear this year. I'm more inclined toward the former view, although I'll readily admit that it's a challenging and sometimes unrewarding listen. I've never heard anything quite like it, these glam blues, and although I hear the Jack White and Bowie, and Freddie Mercury influences, but I'm most impressed by the fact that Benjy Ferree has made an album that is, in many ways, without precedent. I'd probably give it five stars for its sheer uniqueness and for the doo-wop existential dread of "Fear," and then knock off a star because of those faulty assumptions.