Pages tagged “issue 21”

Split Personality: Ben Harper juggles ballads and funk on two-disc set

Ben Harper spends a lot of his time recording with well-known friends like Jack Johnson, Beth Orton and Gov’t Mule. And his last studio recording—2004’s There Will Be a Light—found him collaborating with The Blind Boys of Alabama. In fact, the two-disc Both Sides of the Gun is the first studio album filed solely under his name since 2003’s Diamonds on the Inside.

At just over an hour, these 18 tracks would fit easily on one disc, but Harper divides them by mood into Side A and Side B, as if this were a dusty LP. The decision to split up the tracks according to their mood could easily reflect the album’s title. Side A’s rollicking, funky bravado captures the power and control of someone with a loaded weapon, while Side B’s mellow, tender balladry represents the mournful resignation of someone confronting the very real possibility of death.

The album’s title track (on Side A) seems to confirm this theory: amid syncopated Hammond chords and guitar emerges Harper’s impassioned shout, “When you’re trapped, you got no voice!” Later, Harper maintains his high energy without such overwhelming traces of desperation. “Get It Like You Like It” carries the carefree, sing-along jubilation of the Stones’ “It’s Only Rock ’n Roll (But I Like It),” while “The Way You Found Me” is a bluesy love song with a sassy chorus (“Take me as I am / Or leave me the way you found me”).

Both Sides' second disc pursues themes of love from a more amorous standpoint. Harper sets the mood with lush string arrangements: a quartet amplifies the sensuality of “Morning Yearning,” while a single resonant cello grounds the tender “Waiting For You.” Harper’s seduction plot climaxes with the album-closing “Happy Everafter in Your Eyes,” with his overtly emotional voice delivering lyrics that sound like wedding vows (“All that I can give you / Is forever yours to keep”).

While sweet love songs unify Side B, Side A contains the album’s more dramatically pointed tracks. Harper rants about the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina in “Black Rain” (“You don’t fight for us / But expect us to die for you”), with strings adding dramatic accents.

The record’s most intense number is the anti-war “Gather ‘Round the Stone”—its diminished volume sounding out-of-place on the rowdier Side A, but its angry message fitting right in. Harper’s acoustic guitar combined with uplifting backing vocals on the chorus amplifies the protest in the verses (“There’s no freedom to be found / Lying face up in the ground”), making the song sound like an ancient spiritual. Perhaps the album’s sides are the opposite of what they initially seem: even when gripping a weapon in his hand, Harper chooses to sing quiet, pacifistic songs of love, while he finds the courage truly to speak his mind only when staring down the barrel of a loaded gun.

Fear of Music Technology: DualDisc format renders meaty set of reissued Talking Heads a dubious investment

In the summer of 1995 I got into a brief, not-so-amicable debate with an indie-rocker friend of mine over the importance of Talking Heads in rock history. Commercialized MTV crap, he sneered; David Byrne is an art-school geek who can’t find his vocal range. Not like my friend’s beloved Radiohead. Radiohead, as in "Radio Head," the sixth track on Talking Heads’ True Stories album, from which Thom Yorke and co. swiped their moniker to begin with. Of course, I know this now, music scribe that I am, and just how I would’ve used this information to twist my Sebadoh-loving, thrift-store-shopping, indie-snob buddy into submission is, to this day, the subject of occasional self-indulgent flights of hypothetical schadenfreude.

But I digress. In fact, my Jaguar-strumming companion’s misconception was partially justified, if only because Talking Heads’ sprawling influence over the rock landscape tends to be obscured by the late-career success of their record Little Creatures, with its hit singles and videos and beguiling hooks. But before this, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the most compelling intellectual frontman since Lou Reed—and the funkiest white rhythm section that never recorded at Muscle Shoals—collaborated with Brian Eno on several groundbreaking albums (without which there would be no Achtung Baby, Odelay or OK Computer). The Talking Heads not only occupy a prominent seat in rock’s pantheon, it’s hard to imagine the last 25 years in music without them.

So now Rhino has released Talking Heads’ entire studio output, remastered in both stereo and 5.1 surround, eight discs in all, stuffed into a small white “brick.” The packaging is attractive, and the content is a boon for completists and casual fans alike. Each disc is in the DualDisc format: one side is a CD, with bonus tracks, and the other a DVD with the 5.1 mix and a handful of videos. If ever there was an argument for the durability of the Heads’ unique contribution to 20th-century popular music, this is it. But there’s a catch.

The DualDisc format has proven somewhat controversial. The thickness of the disc had to be increased beyond the Philips/Sony CD specifications, and does not carry the official “CD” label. The CD side of the disc is actually unplayable on some systems, particularly PCs and car stereos. Nevertheless, a number of record companies, including—ironically—Sony/BMG, are getting behind the format, with the hopes that such “value-added” products will increase demand for physical discs and mitigate the effects of online piracy. So far the consumer response has been positive, but when considering an investment of nearly $150 for eight separate discs, small caveats become a major concern. One might legitimately question the wisdom of releasing such an important collection on such a young, unproven format.

One might also complain about the little things, if one has a mind to, and the little things pile up a little too fast. The videos average about three per disc, which makes for an inconvenient viewing experience. To enjoy “Burning Down the House,” a live performance of “Once in a Lifetime,” and an excellent early outdoor performance of “Pulled Up,” one must switch discs three times, or else rip the DVD content to a single disc, in which case one has yet another disc to keep track of, assuming a DVD burner is available. In addition, the cases are not labeled across the spine, making it impossible to find a particular title without dumping the contents and shuffling the discs like a deck of cards. The track listings are on the back pages of each insert booklet, the credits are confusing, and the extra copy tells us little beyond the fact that Heads keyboardist/guitarist Jerry Harrison thoroughly enjoyed creating each and every one of these 5.1 mixes.

Which brings us to the main reason most folks will purchase the Brick. I confess I find 5.1 mixes only mildly interesting and mostly superfluous to the enjoyment of music. There’s something inherently solipsistic about a 5.1 mix, an obsessive connoisseurism that runs counter to the raw, communal, celebratory spirit of rock ’n’ roll. But these discs, particularly Fear of Music, Remain in Light and Speaking in Tongues, are peculiarly suited to the surround experience. Brian Eno’s polish and ambience paradoxically enhance the live feel of the tracks. Listening, you get the sense of being thrust among the players in the middle of a performance, and almost feel obligated to pick up an instrument. On tracks like “Burning Down the House” or “Life During Wartime,” it’s just about impossible not to. I recommend the guiro.

With its packaging and format problems, The Brick won’t replace Rhino’s 2003 box set Once in a Lifetime as the definitive Talking Heads collection. And perhaps the biggest caveat of all is the fact that Rhino is going to release each DualDisc separately later this year. If you’re trepidacious about the format, you might wait and purchase one at a time, minimizing your financial risk. That said, the bonus material and 5.1 mixes alone make the discs more than worth the average $18 apiece, and in this era of changing formats and record-industry anxiety, it’s the most any fan could expect.

Metal swoops and fiberglass fins and sails. Perpendicular planes of glass and concrete jutting at 90-degree angles, bordered by tropical plants. A gleaming, skewed canopy painted in primary colors that beckoned diners down the Sunset strip. Although Googie’s—the Los Angeles coffee shop that launched an architectural movement—is a fading memory, its imprint on popular culture lives on.

Googie—a breathtakingly unrestrained architectural style, perfected by 1940s- and ’50s- era architects like John Lautner, Douglas Honnold and Wayne McAllister—flourished in southern California, coastal Florida and Las Vegas, locales where fantasy and escapism provided the fabric of daily life. Whimsical, and occasionally absurd, restaurants such as Pann’s and the Wich Stand, futuristic bowling alleys and drive-in movie theaters, and roadside gas stations, motels and burger stands sprang up virtually overnight. The effect was startling, as if Frank Lloyd Wright had embarked on an Electric Kool-Aid acid trip.

“New York and Miami had Art Deco, but here in southern California, we really excelled at Googie,” boasts Los Angeles-based journalist Chris Nichols.

MEET GEORGE JETSON…
According to Chris Jepsen, an employee of the Orange County Archives and the founder of SpaceAgeCity.com, a website dedicated to Googie history, L.A. provided the perfect incubator for the movement. “First, you had the blurring of indoor and outdoor living spaces, which was typical to mid-century California architecture,” says Jepsen. “There were a lot of contractors doing development for NASA and the U.S. Air Force out here, and workers tightening lug nuts on satellites at Boeing.”

Factor in the Disneyland and Hollywood scenes, which were both more comfortable with the fantasy element, and the fact that most Californians weren’t tied to tradition, and the West Coast was a prime breeding ground for Googie.

Alan Hess—author of 1985’s Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture, recently updated and republished as Googie Redux: Ultramodern Roadside Architecture—agrees. “The cultural attitude in the West didn’t put so many restrictions on architects,” he notes. “People were willing to break out of cultural conventions and accept a wider range of ideas, and the exuberance of Googie and its willingness to push the envelope while displaying great sensibilities made for some fantastic architecture.”

Facets of the style have permeated pop culture via iconic imagery like Holiday Inn signs, In-N-Out Burger joints, and McDonald’s legendary golden arches (not to mention landmarks like Seattle’s Space Needle and the Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport). Movies have also traded on Googie’s retro-future kitsch; the Coen Brother’s cult classic The Big Lebowski being one example among many.

THE ‘CAMERA OF DEATH’
Today, however, authentic Googie sightings are as rare as the ivory-billed woodpecker. Thumb through the pages of Googie Redux, and you’ll notice that most of the listings are annotated as “demolished,” with obituaries for Henry’s Drive-In, a Pomona oasis; Coffee Dan’s, a Hollywood hangout; and Ship’s Coffee Shop, an aerodynamic Westwood breakfast spot, piled up like commuters in L.A.’s infamous rush-hour traffic.

“In 1985, these Googie landmarks were a common presence in the L.A. street scene,” Hess writes in the foreword to his tome, adding that, “two decades later, it seems an urbanistic luxury… So much has been lost; only some have been saved.”

Both Jepsen and Nichols credit Hess’ book with fueling their own interest in Googie architecture. Jepsen was inspired to pick up his camera and begin documenting what remained. But, he quickly discovered, many Googie structures weren’t maintained, and when property values were compounded with deferred maintenance, some of the best examples of the genre were unceremoniously razed. “I was driving around Orange County taking pictures of stuff seconds ahead of the bulldozer,” Jepsen recalls. “At times, I felt like I had the camera of death, and anything I pointed it at was doomed.”

Nichols initially contacted Hess when a McDonald’s restaurant—one of the first franchises, opened in 1954—located in his Los Angeles-suburb hometown of Azusa was shuttered in the ’80s. “His book really changed my life,” Nichols says. “I realized that there were a bunch of these things, and a real order to the species. We ultimately lost the Azusa McDonald’s, but I got involved with saving another one, in Downey, which was a real vindication.”

PRESERVATION: AN UPHILL BATTLE
Hess also guided Nichols to the Modern Committee of the Los Angeles Conservancy, which, with 8,500 members, is the largest private preservation organization in the country. The ModCom, as it’s called, serves as a watchdog agency, educational outreach service and resource for construction firms involved in Googie-restoration projects.

“This has totally changed my life,” Nichols raves, “because working in modern preservation, you can possibly meet your idols. I got to be friends with some of the original Googie architects, like Wayne McAllister, who designed the original Bob’s Big Boys and El Rancho Vegas, the first resort casino hotel in Las Vegas. He and guys like Louis Armét and Eldon Davis were the kings. They made the interiors work, and with their exteriors, they made people stop and pay attention.”

Yet, as Jepsen cautions, preserving Googie architecture continues to be an uphill battle. “The tendency is to have this gut instinct that if you can remember a building as new, it can’t be important or historically relevant,” he says. “We’re at the cusp of people realizing the importance of this architecture, and most of it is already gone. Many of the best examples are lost.”

Hess’ book offers a guided tour of more than 100 Googie structures still standing in Los Angeles—places like Rae’s coffee shop in Santa Monica, the Mar Vista Bowl in Culver City and Canter’s Delicatessen on Fairfax Avenue. Thanks to his efforts, and the work of preservationists like Jepsen and Nichols, it’s still possible to gas up your convertible, put on some cool shades (and maybe some Martin Denny or Esquivel), and take a quick trip back to the future.

Sounds of Thunder: Intimate songbird whistles a new tune

Since her 1993 breakout release, Blue Light Til Dawn, vocalist Cassandra Wilson has fused blues, soul, jazz and a handful of other idioms into a unique and powerful amalgam. Unified by her smoky voice and highlighted by her savvy choice of covers, ranging from Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” (done with Afro Cuban accents) to a delightfully dusty take on The Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville,” Wilson has spent the last 13 years building a formidable catalog. While her deep voice bears a resemblance to Nina Simone’s, her style shares more in common with the powerfully intimate croons of Shirley Horn. Wilson’s vocal stylings also owe small debts to jazz greats like Abbey Lincoln and Betty Carter, but none of these legends possessed the front-porch magnolia sound distinguishing Wilson’s last five discs. On those recordings you expect to hear crickets in the background.

Her latest, thunderbird, offers a different sound. Produced by T Bone Burnett and bassist/keyboardist Keefus Ciancia, the recording’s broad, open sound is built around keyboards rather than small percussion instruments and gentle acoustic guitars. A stellar group of sidemen including drummer Jim Keltner and guitarist Marc Ribot flesh out the songs. But the change in music hasn’t altered Wilson’s overall aesthetic; she’s still delving deeply into the roots of the Delta and celebrating its eclectic possibilities. The recording takes its name from the Native American legend about the animal that brought calm and growth to its haunts, and Wilson claims this spirit guided the collaboration.

Wilson’s repertoire still leaps all over the map. She turns Jakob Dylan’s “Closer to You” into a twilight stroll, but she dips into her voice’s lowest registers to wring every drop of sultriness from Willie Dixon’s “I Want to Be Loved.” The traditional “Red River Valley” gets a magisterial arrangement highlighted by dense guitar chords. The record’s centerpiece is Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Easy Rider” which succeeds on the strength of Wilson’s quivering, lament-deepening vocals.

Over the last decade, Wilson—a Mississippi native who lives in New York City—had grown as a songwriter, deftly fusing urban meditations with rural sounds, but on thunderbird her originals seem less fully developed, as if she hasn’t quite figured out how to write for the new band. Burnett’s two contributions, “Lost” and “Strike a Match” resonate more deeply.

Wilson’s new sound may fluster the fans she’s gained in the last 10 years, but that’s been a hallmark of her career. When she arrived in New York, she fell in with the Brooklyn-based M-Base Collective in the ’80s; then in ’88—just when she seemed like the diva of the futuristic-jazz-funk crowd—she released Blue Skies, a collection of jazz standards with a traditional trio accompaniment. The disc became a huge hit. Many of her Blue Skies fans resented her Blue Light... material and the music that followed, deeming it a sell-out. But she eventually won over most doubters. And with thunderbird, she’s poised to do it again.

On the streets of London, gaping holes in the pavement threaten to swallow passers-by, a synchronized swimmer extends her leg from a High Street swimming pool and, in Edinburgh’s City Centre, a globe floats mysteriously. Enter the strange and fascinating world of sidewalk artist/illusionist, Julian Beever. No 3-D glasses needed here—Beever’s unique use of anamorphic illusion can make a flat plane of ground look completely three-dimensional. Though the illusions only work from a certain angle, Beever’s paintings are so convincing he can actually insert himself into them, dipping his toe into the swimming pool; standing precariously on a ledge awaiting rescue from Batman and Robin. He even creates a mirror image of himself—Beever and his chalk-clutching doppelganger kneeling head to head.

To view more of Beever’s mind-boggling artwork, visit his website.

Idyllic song cycle about packing up and starting over… in Spain

The third volume in Rouse’s fruitful collaboration with producer Brad Jones, following 2003 artistic breakthrough 1972 and last year’s Nashville, Subtítulo also represents the first effort from the Nebraska-born former Nashville resident since he moved to Spain, post-divorce. Despite the playful title, there’s nothing overtly Latin about any of the LP’s 10 tracks, not even the instrumental “La Coasta Blanca.” No, the influence of Rouse’s picturesque new locale is subtler than that, bringing a touch of caressing languor to the soul-pop lilt of his last two albums. With its gentle rhythms and 33-minute running time, Subtítulo seems slight at first listen, but the songs eventually marry, suggesting the progression from a dead end to a new start—one that’s clearly romantic in nature, turning on the balmy “It Looks Like Love” and “Wonderful,” both courtship songs of disarming forthrightness. The apparent object of Rouse’s affection, the perfectly named Paz Suay, even makes an appearance, dueting fetchingly on before-and-after tale “The Man Who Doesn’t Know How to Smile.” Only the emotionally petrified could resist such unselfconscious sweetness.

Angry aging rockers wanted for music-and-thought crimes

Special agent Foster adjusted his govt.-issue shades and scribbled thoughtfully in his notebook: Bone-rattling, darker-than-Sabbath, minor-key riff metal. Eastern flourishes. Explosive horn section. Three producers, yet sound remains seamless. Rowdy, Chuck-Berry-through-the-meat-grinder double-stop guitar bends. Venomous lyrics delivered with old-school garage-punk sneer. Hmmm. The clues at the crime scene all pointed to a notorious gang of Seattle ear-drum-rape veterans. Mudhoney. They were back, stirring up trouble as usual. But it wasn’t just noise violations and general lewd behavior this time. Nor was it just knee-jerk social commentary; it was abrasive, apocalyptic rock played by a bunch of Americans both pissed and scared shitless about terrorism, U.S. foreign policy and an unstable world—rock that’s bleak, violent sound aptly soundtracked the kidnappings and roadside bombs taking down soldiers, journalists and civilians in Iraq with such alarming frequency. But suddenly, mid-album, an absurd guitar figure—with a melody approximating Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music”—erupts, and so does a little bit of that oh-well-we’re-all-FUBAR-anyway, grinning-and-shrugging Zen-tinged Mudhoney nihilism, because sometimes the only way to keep your wits is to laugh in the face of impending doom. A song called “Hard-on for War?” Agent Foster could only shake his head.

Occasional Broken Social Scenester finds voice on new solo album

Part-time Broken Social Scene member Jason Collett is really a solo troubadour at heart—despite the wonderfully messy indie rock he makes with BSS, his inclinations lean more toward country and roots music. Collett’s new disc, on which he’s aided by members of the Montreal collective, travels the dusty paths of heartbreak and late-afternoon drinking via songs that range from droning acoustic-guitar reverie (“Tinsel and Sawdust”) to pointed, driving rock (“I’ll Bring the Sun”). Collett dispenses with the mundane conventions of the singer/songwriter genre as he forges portraits both intimate and worldly over engaging arrangements and lyrics.

(Above: Joseph Gordon-Levitt (far left) and Nora Zehetner (far right) star in Brick.)

Director/Writer: Rian Johnson
Cinematography: Steve Yedlin
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nora Zehetner, Lukas Haas
Studio info: Focus Features, 110 mins.

Dashiell-Hammett-inspired high-school noir full of stylish surprises

High-school sleuths are popular on TV—Veronica Mars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Hardy Boys, to name a few. Social cliques and hormonal tensions coupled with deceptively blasé suburban backdrops tend to refresh gumshoe maneuvers, even as murderous intrigue adds zap to all the Clearasil melodrama.

Brick, director Rian Johnson’s crackling debut, shakes up a genre that’s grown a bit routine, while indulging our familiarity with it. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Mysterious Skin, Third Rock from the Sun) plays Brendan, the smart, loner kid whose broken heart leads him to the local teenage underworld when his ex-girlfriend (Lost’s Emilie de Ravin) goes missing.

The plot springs along on dozens of smaller mysteries, as Brendan chases clues—scraps of paper with cryptic drawings, a cigarette butt tossed from a speeding car, the identity of a shadowy figure called The Pin—and throws a lot of punches at lunky obstacles with names like Dode and Tugger (Johnson deploys beat-downs the way Michael Bay blows up buildings). But Brendan quickly finds himself in over his head.

What compelled a Sundance jury to award Johnson a special prize for “originality of vision” was probably two things: his jittery edits, which tend to juxtapose stationary long shots with sudden close-ups, and his extremely mannered dialogue. The former captures and sustains a knot-in-the-gut feeling, intensified by composer (and cousin) Nathan Johnson’s brilliant abstract score—all throbbing violin and stark piano. The latter evokes the clipped lingo of Phillip Marlowe, cross-wired with David Mamet. Southern California kids who look like they should be in line for a Gwen Stefani show drop slang like “duck soup” (easy pickings) and “bulls” (cops) as if they were studying James Ellroy in English class.

The cast, which includes an impressively demonic Lukas Haas, rattles off these lines so quickly that it’s hard to always know what they’re talking about. Johnson’s habit is to jump to the next scene before the current one is fully complete, which keeps audiences on edge but often in the dark. (Oddly enough, that’s what makes Brick most reminiscent of another Sundance favorite, the kitchen-sink sci-? thriller, Primer.) Still, like those punches that lunge across the screen and send Brendan reeling toward his next clue, it’s a left-field surprise that’s worth the effort.

Youngdahl and Christensen in A Time For Burning

Director: Bill Jersey
Studio information: Docudrama, 58 mins.

Race and religion collide in the Heartland.

Omaha, Neb., isn’t exactly remembered as a key battleground in the civil-rights movement. But this documentary, produced by the Lutheran Church in 1966, captures a small but significant racial upheaval in that city as it unfolded. In an effort to foster dialogue and understanding between races, a white pastor attempted to initiate a modest program of interracial visits with a local black church. The resulting furor nearly tore his congregation apart. Bill Jersey’s verité approach, relying mainly on the narrative of events as they transpired, reflects the documentary school taking flight at the time (best typified by the Maysles brothers in films like the brilliant Salesman [1968]). The immediacy of the approach captures the frustration and anger of the participants. It’s particularly chilling to watch a pious, pipe-smoking church board member mask his bigotry as taking a practical approach, warning that “the timing is bad” for the visits. At the same time another member questions his very faith in light of the intolerance of his fellow congregants. While it’s an important document of the civil-rights struggle that took place 40 years ago, the film is all too relevant today. Bonus material includes commentary by Jersey and a recent interview with the eloquent Ernie Chambers, who was a barber when the film was made and went on to a long career in politics.

Life concept and design how-to based on intentional artistic chaos

With the ever-increasing number of home-design TV shows, Josh Amatore Hughes’ tutorial on how to redesign your life and living space is everything these shows aren’t: original, inspiring and funny.

Hughes is the originator of Punk Shui, a philosophy, an aesthetic, “the ancient art of urban survival” and a Vicodin-ditching “coping mechanism” all rolled in one. It’s what emerges when you saw in half all preconceived notions of how to live life and nail them to your wall. This book is both manifesto and manual for injecting Punk Shui into your home, your of?ce, your social scene and your prefab-discarding consciousness.

Those of us who don’t snap spikes around our necks—and those who typically run from books that smack of self-help—shouldn’t be deterred from checking this one out. Although the introduction assumes a distinctly bitter tone, the book itself embraces readers with all different tolerances for chaos.

Even better, the suggestions Hughes provides in sections like “Institutionalize Yourself” make you laugh out loud and, more importantly, don’t make you feel like you’re seeking therapy. Even if you don’t completely share Hughes’ outlook on life, reading Punk Shui will remind you of rules you’ve been meaning to smash.

Latest installment from graphic novelist appropriately splendorous

Harvey Pekar earned cult-hero status by telling his own story without flinching from the less-flattering details. He could hardly have found a better subject for this—his first longform book not telling his own story—than Michael Malice, the central character in Ego & Hubris.

Malice is a tough sell. He puts one teacher through mental torture, but finds it cruel when another spanks a child. He’s a conservative anarchist who can’t stand the religious right. And though he fights with just about everybody he meets, he believes the future is bright—or at least it would be if people stopped acting like idiots.

Following the same first-person format he employed so successfully in last year’s The Quitter, Pekar captures Malice’s complexities, getting into his head without bogging down the narrative with inner monologue. With the support of Gary Dumm’s clean, imaginative inking, Pekar’s biography is satisfyingly complete, communicating Malice’s life and philosophy in a succinct 160 pages. And while Malice and Pekar have a certain darkness in common, no one would ever confuse the two if they read The Quitter and Ego & Hubris side by side.

That’s a tremendous achievement, for Pekar and the graphic novel format he’s pioneered for more than 30 years.

With the DVD release of American Dad, Volume One set for late April, Paste talked to the real star of the show, Roger the Alien, who dishes the dirt about life on the set and in Hollywood.

Congratulations on receiving the DVD treatment. Are you excited at the possibility of invading every television viewer’s home? I figured you might be, especially since your family never even lets you leave the house.

Excited? Honestly Gail—based on your questions, I’ve deduced that your name must be Gail—I’m about to blow an orifice! Roger is about to drop, ya’ll! And the masses have chosen to celebrate me. I’m just tickled to give something back to TV after consuming so so much. I’m television’s Roger! I’m friggin’ famous!

Are you getting out of the house at all these days? Do people recognize you on the street?

Clearly, Captain Obvious, I’m an Actor, playing a Character on Television. In real life Roger gets around. If you had the decency to read the tabloids, you’d know I’m all over this town. “Roger chows down on fro-yo… Just like Us!” “Roger spills sour mash whiskey on his Uggs… Just like Us!” “Roger hits a valet with his Ferrari… Just like us!”

How does it feel being the only alien on the show? I know they’ve hassled you in the past about your weight and your looks. Hell, Stan almost shot you while under CIA pressure that one time, but do you ever feel discriminated against? Perhaps there’s some kind of union you could join for equal rights…

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m in one of those. The NCAACP. The… New Coalition of Alien Actors Coalition Program. I forget what it is. I send them a quarter and they give a kid in Africa a cup of coffee or something. Have I been discriminated against? Yes. Does it bother me? No. Clearly, I’m the breakout star, and the rest of the cast knows it. It’s a real Geisha house in here, jealous bitches! I’m like that black guy that won the Olympics. This role is my spandex jumpsuit and Sunday nights at 9:30 are my Torino!

Something I’ve noticed is that when you get a little down, you tend to turn to the sauce for comfort. Are the pressures of being a celebrity getting to you? Should we be worried?

Look, what can I say? When life gives me lemons, I make lemon cosmotinis. Then I drink them. Then, hopefully, life gives me a Percocet.

Along those same lines, I watched your rant on the American Dad website about the mistreatment of celebrities in society. You said some forward things about how you’re better than the everyday Joe or Jane. Do you really think you deserve better treatment than the rest of us just because you’re on a TV show?

Exsqueeze me? Where’d you get that journalism degree, the University of eBay? What are you, a Googleologist? That quote was taken out of context. The Joe and Jane to whom you refer are a couple of deadbeat art dealers I got mixed up with in Toronto during the SARS scare. Well, they flipped out when I came to pick up the paintings, which I PayPal’d for! Really violent stuff, they threw dishrags in my face, opened all their windows, turned on the vacuum cleaner… So I left without the art. And when I returned days later the place was boarded up. So, do I feel I’m better than them? Hells yeah. And, Joe and Jane, if you scumbags are reading this, I want my fake Ed Templeton paintings!

It really is a shame how you’re treated sometimes, but hey, we have an open forum here. You could get back at some of your castmates right now. Why don’t you tell us what they’re really like behind the scenes?

Well, Stan has really packed on the pounds since he got back from his “vacation” in South Africa. Get this, he actually wears a girdle under his suit! Those wardrobe girls have to squeeze Stan’s fat ass into a girdle! Ha! I think there’s some footage on the DVD… Anyways, Francine spends most of her downtime on set practicing material for her pathetic housewife gimmick of a stand-up career. Yeah, you can catch her at any amateur night with a three-drink minimum. Klaus is the most diva-licious of them all! He only drinks 72-degree Perrier water. I once saw him kick his empty bowl at a P.A! And Haley’s partying has gotten hilariously out of control—Oops, that’s my cell. TV’s Roger here… uh huh… uh huh… uh huh, riiight. Ok, ok, TTYL.— Apologies, that was my publicist. We were talking about my costars? Complete professionals, an absolute joy to work with.

If the smart folks at Fox greenlighted the movie Roger: The Untold Story, what would be the basic storyline? What would be the biggest surprise be for the audience, or for the Smiths?

Much like Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, I’m an unbridled genius with a dead brother. That’s right, tragedy is no stranger to Roger the Alien. Poor, dead, Esopoglop… Ooh! Do you think I’d get to play myself in the movie? What a juicy role… though they’ll probably call in a Ledger or a cross-dressed Theron to do the job. There are so few parts for non-humanoid actors. This is a humanoid-dominated business! I’m an alien and an actor. Not an alien actor! I’m a raconteur; I wanna tell stories!

What are your favorite shows about aliens? Which one does the most injustice to your people, if you don’t mind us lumping all aliens into one group?

You humans are fascinated by Alien culture, but mostly you get it wrong! It’s ridiculous. That cast of waif-ish drag queens on Desperate Housewives really poorly reflects on all of us. I can’t imagine what backwoods planet Hollywood pillaged to find those freaks. Don’t even get me started on Mork and Mindy starring Robin Williams, that obvious showboat! Drinking out of his finger, wearing suspenders… embarrassing. And Third Rock from the Sun, ugh! That dorky bunch couldn’t be more clueless. Cheap shots, all of them. Yes, exploitation helps young upstarts make a buck, but we’re not all clumsy oafs. I know it doesn’t jibe with your demo, Gail, but Star Trek Voyager got a lot of stuff really right… the episode with the Photonic Canon and the doctor singing opera, I got chills… Yeah, definitely check that one out.

Have you met anyone else at Fox? The Simpsons, the folks from Family Guy, perhaps even a cast member or two from The OC?

Yeah, yeah, Mischa Barton and I hang. We’re neighbors. I’m currently living in Margot Kidder’s old place, but I’m looking for digs in Malibu. I’ve got my eye on the home of a certain Britney Spears, but my accountant thinks any day she’ll drop the baby and her realtor will drop the asking price. In the meantime I’m enjoying the fabu young Hollywood domestic scene. Mischies pieces and I play monopoly with Jason Priestley every Wednesday. Throw a couple of steaks on the grill. You know, keep it chill.

Obviously, American Dad can’t go on forever, though we wish it many decades. Where do you see your career going after the show has run its course?

Just the other day I was jaywalking my Pomeranian in Beverly Hills, and Wanda Sykes approached me! Like, the Wanda Sykes! She wanted to go halfzies on a pitch for a Roger the Alien spin-off, but I told her that I won’t go all “Joey” on my fans. Besides, my new agent sees me as more of a leading man. Naturally, the next step is the big screen. I’m no fool; it’s all about branding. Perfume, sneakers, a recording contract, these things aren’t too far off for me. And I’m in no hurry to overexpose. Ballpark, I have at least 300 more years left in this life cycle.

Madlib makes move with made-up movie mood music

XXL’s Chairman Mao said, “You couldn’t pay me to listen to an instrumental hip-hop album.” Beat Konducta, Vol. 1-2: Movie Scenes might change his mind completely. Madlib is no stranger to the concept album, as his releases under the helium-snarled Quasimoto and vibed-out Yesterday’s New Quintet projects would insinuate. The track titles tell the whole story; Madlib decided to approach the Beat Konducta collection as the soundtrack to a film that only exists in his head. Hence, “Two Timer (The Pimp)” sports a swaggering upright bass and a triumphant horn interlude, while “Outerlimit (Space Ho)” drifts through ephemeral flute samples and a weightless tempo. The cuts are short and the transitions sudden, but Madlib flexes his production muscles, working with wildly different templates, speeds and moods. From the jogging bass line and horn flurries on “Electric Company (Voltage-Watts)” to the haunting falsettos on “The Payback (Gotta),” this wild pastiche demonstrates why Madlib is one of the most talented heads in hip-hop.

Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Writers: Hayao Miyazaki (screenplay), Diana Wynne Jones (novel)
Cinematography: Atsushi Okui
Studio information: Buena Vista, 131 mins.

Miyazaki’s winning streak continues while bringing beloved British teen novel to life

This past year saw a better filmic realization of British youth fiction than Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Diana Wynne Jones’ celebrated 1986 novel Howl’s Moving Castle held the ideal combination of whimsy and fantasy to match Hayao Miyazaki’s sensibilities. The film, as expected, is a feast for the eyes. Miyazaki’s background artists craft landscapes with majestic sweep and sun-drenched color. The quaint town of Ingary is bright on the surface, and careworn and gritty just below.

Leaving the Asian settings of North American breakthrough successes Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki blends Japanese culture with a reimagined Europe circa 1920, similar to 1992’s Porco Rosso. Young Sophie is something of a stiff, but discovers her youth after the Witch of the Waste ages her into a 90-year-old crone. Sophie wanders into the Waste seeking restoration, stowing away aboard vain wizard Howl’s ramshackle, lumbering home.

It turns out that Howl may not be the heart-devouring baddie his reputation suggests, as he risks his humanity to stop a brutish war. While Howl is away, Sophie bonds with Calcifer the Fire Demon (voiced by Billy Crystal), who keeps the steam-powered castle moving. “I can’t stand the fire in gunpowder,” Calcifer opines. “Those dopey guys have absolutely no manners.”

Eccentric pop auteur digs up vintage electronic instruments for hyper-melodic fourth album

Better known as a frequent Sufjan Stevens collaborator and touring band member, John Ringhofer has also spent the better part of this decade as the man behind Half-Handed Cloud, crafting meticulously quirky pop songs with a Sufjan-esque laundry list of instruments. For his fourth release, the master of the one-minute pop song employs a lost ’80s instrument called an omnichord—a combination of an autoharp and a synthesizer—to create prancing drum-machine beats and bubbling bass lines. The usual intricate assortment of horns, pianos and marimbas return to fill out the sonic tableau, but the synthesized textures push Ringhofer toward a delightfully idiosyncratic white-boy soul aesthetic, resulting in the most focused, melodically punchy and accessible release in his catalog.

Director: Fernando Eimbcke
Writers: Fernando Eimbcke, Paula Markovitch
Cinematography: Alexis Zabe
Starring: Enrique Arreola, Diego Cataño, Daniel Miranda, Danny Perea
Studio info: Warner Independent, 90 mins.

Wild yet charming day-in-the-life of two Mexico City teens

Comedies are rarely as gentle or closely observant as Duck Season, Mexican writer/director Fernando Eimbcke’s disarming debut. The film charts a wayward afternoon in a drab Mexico City apartment complex where best buddies Flama (Daniel Miranda) and Moko (Diego Cataño) intend to indulge themselves in hours of unsupervised bliss. Flama’s mother, in the midst of a bitter divorce, is away for the day. And the boys—at 14, a pair of rambunctious mop-heads in the awkward grip of puberty—are well-stocked with soda pop, porn mags and video games. The occasion becomes an unpredictable rite-of-passage, however: Rita (Danny Perea), a busty young neighbor, takes over the kitchen with a mind for more than baking, a power failure compels other amusements, and a simple pizza order leads to a surreal, existential conflict with an overgrown delivery boy who—through the agency of some marijuana—becomes a kind of guru; the one sympathetic adult in the boys’ lives. The plot turns on such small moments, detailed in long, stationary, black-and-white shots, that every nuance is magnified in emotional force. The teenaged actors touchingly capture the innocence of budding sexuality and the ambiguity of self, while Eimbcke manages to keep the tone light and improvisational, even as the story lurches into redemptive chaos.

In late 2004, husband-and-wife team Melkon Khosrovian and Litty Mathew launched Modern Spirits vodka out of their Los Angeles kitchen, hand-infusing vodkas with exotic ingredients to create flavors like Chocolate-Orange, Black-Truffle and Celery-Peppercorn.

Most of their products are still affordable for those on a bourgeois budget ($22.99 to $49.99 a bottle, depending on size and ingredients), but Modern Spirits’ Haute line of custom vodkas is strictly for the upper crust. Using questionnaires and personal interviews, Khosrovian and Mathew create flavor profiles for Haute customers, matching their clients’ personalities and specific preferences. For a recent customer, Mathew says, they fashioned a Lavender Honey flavor to evoke his favorite childhood summer in Provence, France. But creating such memories comes at a price: The minimum Haute order is 10 cases (120 bottles)—and comes with a bill of $15,000.

For more info visit modernspiritsvodka.com.

Full and fussy, big and buzzy; just don’t listen closely

As one of 2004’s most incessantly hyped bands, Secret Machines developed an overnight reputation as the connective tissue between the fussy, epic rock of Led Zeppelin and the fussy, epic indie-rock psychedelia of The Flaming Lips. The problem is that, while the band inventively conflates propulsive pop with dollops of proggy excess, its ideas tend to outnumber its hooks.

Consequently, the eight songs on Ten Silver Drops often fail to connect, a shortcoming exacerbated by Ben and Brandon Curtis’ less-than-commanding vocals and the occasional outright dud like the endlessly plodding “Daddy’s In The Doldrums.” But Secret Machines’ flair for crafting dense, intricately crafted soundscapes helps rescue it from its faults, as does the presence of the spirited ringer “Faded Lines.” Still, Ten Silver Drops rewards chemical enhancement more than it does rapt attention.

Hometown: Winnipeg, Manitoba
Fun fact: As a teenager, Doucet played in a blues band with his father, whom he hadn’t seen since his parents split when he was a child. “When I talk about it, it sounds like an after-school special; I feel like I’m pulling out a bag of puppies, but it was neat,” he says.
Why he’s worth watching: At 19, Doucet started touring and recording off-and-on as Sarah McLachlan’s guitarist; since then he’s been recording and gigging with numerous artists and has been on the road with Josh Rouse and Kathleen Edwards.
For fans of: Ryan Adams, Sondre Lerche, Randy Newman

While a broken heart probably never figured into singer/songwriter Luke Doucet’s career plans, the experience provided fodder for most of his new album, Broken (and Other Rogue States). Rife with references to cigarettes, alcohol and general debauchery, Broken—his third release—wryly and candidly chronicles the end-of-relationship state of mind while blending elements of country, blues, surf rock and more.

“I’ve cast myself as this Bukowski-esque character, which is a gross overstatement, but even if I have the smallest demon, I’ll wrestle with it forever,” says the 32-year-old Doucet, who has recently kicked coffee and cigarettes.

Doucet composed at least half the album nursing cranberry juice and soda at Ted’s Collision (a bar near his old residence in Toronto) after a period of heavy drinking. “Stopping was such a change of paradigm for me, and that factored into my songwriting,” he says. Consequently, the album takes an old-school approach: two sides. “It’s a bit of a generalization, but the first half of the record was written when I was drinking; the second half when I was completely sober.” Still, he maintains, “my problems were more existential than alcoholic.” Side one features the first songs he wrote, including the jangly single “Broken,” one of the most perfect dis songs in recent memory.

Now that he’s beyond the trauma and engaged to singer Melissa McClelland, it’s back to work. “I really want to create something positive. The hardest record to make and listen to is a happy one. Don’t worry though,” he adds with a chuckle, “if it’s colossally embarrassing, I won’t finish it.”

I consider it a public service that I stole a neon sign set to be scrapped from the back lot of the Young Electric Sign Company in Las Vegas. My mother the klepto never stole a neon sign from Las Vegas, though if she thought it possible I’m sure she would’ve. Instead she stole every ashtray from every casino where she ever sat her ass to play the nickel slots. Thank God, because they’re worth something now. I saw some of these same ashtrays at the Vegas Museum, a deserted place pushed to the back of one of those massive, newly built stucco-blobs at the end of Fremont Street. There, in glass cases, they have tons of ashtrays, from The Sands, The Dunes, The Stardust, The Thunderbird—all those awesome atomic-age hotels along the strip that have been, or are about to be, rubble-ized to make room for the invasion of the giant, bloviating eyesores that’ll replace them.

In fact, with all these huge hotels emerging you’d think Vegas is getting bigger, but it’s not—it’s getting smaller. Vegas, in fact, is disappearing. Thank God for the Neon Boneyard, which consists, literally, of two scrap yards and two part-time administrators frantically attempting to salvage these historical neon masterpieces. The Boneyard has hardly any funding, no advertising to promote its existence, or even signage, per se, except the lovely relics rusting into each other on the other side of the locked fence. After I talked my way inside, which wasn’t easy, I was agog. Here it is, I thought, Vegas.

You might be happy to hear that the old Golden Nugget sign is dilapidating nicely, and that the monumental sign from the Landmark Hotel sits, pretty and huge, all intact, like a well-preserved cadaver. But “Mr. Lucky,” the giant fiberglass Leprechaun who used to smile at you from atop Fitzgerald’s downtown, didn’t fare so well. He died a horrible death when a hobo crawled inside him one cold night and lit a campfire. Mr. Lucky’s steel-reinforced skeleton remains in place, though, like the bones of a giant sea monster that crawled ashore to die. Nowhere to be found is the marquee from The Sands—the quintessential ’60s Vegas-chic hotel where the Rat Pack used to perform—which was demolished in the mid ’90s. That famous neon marquee, the subject of so many photographs inside the pitiable Las Vegas Museum, disappeared.

A SLIPPER THAT STILL FITS
I first came here when I was seven, back when Vegas was Vegas, and the journey from the west consisted of almost nothing but an expanse of barren desert that hardly had streetlights, let alone life in general. And the first neon sign of note that greeted you from this direction was the famous Silver Slipper, a sparkling, three-story Cinderella number that rotated on top of a pole 10 floors higher still, with diamond lights rippling in peyote-trip patterns. While my mother won our rent’s worth of coin cups inside, my seven-year-old self stood directly under that spinning slipper and stared at it so long my corneas nearly cremated. It was literally the most incandescently beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

That was back before they paved over Fremont Street, transforming it into one big, interconnected, motorized-stool-accessible pavilion populated by booze-addled mummies. But hope is not lost. At the Neon Boneyard, the first thing—the very first thing—you see is the Silver Slipper. She’s old now, and dented, her bulbs broken, but she’s standing up, not lying on her side like most of the others. She’s still standing, still beautiful, still ready to welcome you, still able to muster some wonder from a misanthropic sea urchin like me. “You can touch her,” I was told. But I couldn’t. Some things belong out of reach.

I had to hurry to catch a flight, and accidentally left my salvaged sign in the trunk of my rental car. Ten minutes later I called Alamo to tell them I’d be back to pick it up, but it was already gone. “How can a 25-pound neon sign just disappear?” I bitched to them, though I shouldn’t have been alarmed. Neon signs disappear in Vegas all the time.

The Neon Museum is online at neonmuseum.org. Image courtesy of Laura Domela, whose photography book, Neon Boneyard, is now out on Lulu Press and can be ordered at domela.com.

When the entertainment industry starts to falter—when gutless executives pour waves of sequels and risk-free, cookie-cutter sludge into our cinemas and concert halls—we look to the fringes for someone to save us. Pink Floyd and Yes dropped one concept album too many, and punk music rose to destroy them; and every time Hollywood veterans grow too complacent, a new pack of rebels strolls out of film school ready to eat their lunch.

This could be the year it happens for gaming—and you’d be hard-pressed to find a business that needs it more. Of last year’s 10 top-selling games, only three actually came out in 2005. Budgets have climbed to the millions and even tens of millions of dollars, scaring game publishers away from everything but movie tie-ins, knock-offs of other hits, or this year’s update of Madden or Burnout. And even when a game wins space on the shelf at Electronic Boutique, it only has a few weeks to make an impression before the next big thing pushes it aside.

Developers, critics and—increasingly—gamers themselves have griped about this situation, but it seemed as if nothing was happening. Until last year, that is, when indie games started creeping into the mainstream. For me, the first sign of life was Façade. The work of self-described “artist-programmers” Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas, Façade has an unusual premise: you’ve been invited to dinner by your good friends Grace and Trip, who are celebrating 10 years of marriage. But as soon as you get there, they start bickering, and in no time they’re telling you their marriage is on the rocks. Your job is simply to talk with them, like they’re a couple of old friends, and help them work out their differences. (You can try it yourself for free at interactivestory.net. Here’s a gameplay tip: kissing either of them won’t help you save their marriage.)

Façade scored a lot of press last year, for obvious reasons. It’s closer to sex, lies and videotape than Halo; it offers an uncomfortable but intriguing experience where you least expect one, and it makes you smack your forehead and think, “Wow, we really could play games where people just talk to each other!”

Of course, finding developers with new ideas doesn’t help if you can’t get the games into stores—and that’s where we see the other half of the trend: new channels that skip the retail trap and bring indie games to the people who want them.

Veteran gamemaker Greg Costikyan and former Computer Gaming World editorial director Johnny Wilson have launched a new company, Manifesto Games, that’ll act as an “indie label” for games.

The annual Game Developers Conference hosts the successful Independent Games Festival, and last year’s winners ranged from cartoony sidescroller Alien Hominid to Steer Madness, a vegan-action game about a cow that saves other animals from the slaughterhouse. Darwinia (reviewed in this issue) landed U.S. distribution via the Steam-engine technology developed for Half-Life 2. And Telltale Games sells adventure titles over the Internet in regular “episodes” at $20 each; the first, Bone: Out From Boneville, adapts the Jeff Smith comic book in the style of a classic ’90s LucasArts adventure.

Even the Evil Empire, Microsoft, has given indie games a boost. When Microsoft’s Xbox 360 launched last fall, critics dismissed the derivative $60-a-pop titles that shipped for the system—but they fell all over themselves praising the Xbox Live Arcade, a collection of lower-budget games including another Independent Games Festival winner, Wik and the Fable of Souls. Available online through the Xbox Live Arcade, the titles cost around $6-12 each, and slant toward fast-paced action games and retro arcade classics. Who knows if Microsoft will leave room for anything radical, but at least they’re giving an outlet to a few small, creative shops.

So we could see a revival of the indie spirit that ruled gaming two decades ago, back when a lone developer could code a great game and sell it in a Ziploc bag. Widening the field will bring new ideas and fresh blood to a stale industry, and it could also expand our sense of what games can be, and of who wants to play them. An indie renaissance would draw new audiences the way that art houses have coaxed Hollywood-weary filmgoers back to the medium. And if that means playing some games where you have to watch married people scream at each other? Just remember: it can be therapeutic.

Dressed To Overkill: Long-awaited followup to career milestone sinks to middle

On paper there was every reason to believe that Ringleader of the Tormentors would be an epochal album. On the heels of the dazzling You Are the Quarry, Morrissey’s triumphant return to the stage and spotlight, he showed signs of a latter-day flowering. Taut and strutting, Quarry had ample doses of Moz’s clever-devil black humor, but on songs like “First of the Gang to Die,” they were delivered with such a sly and ebullient smirk that it no longer seemed like the emotionally defensive maneuver of a tortured melodramatist. Lurking through the songs and the surprisingly non-evasive interviews was a hint that perhaps the man so stereotypically associated with all things teenage-morose was growing ever more comfortable in his own shadow, myth and skin. Quarry introduced Morrissey’s fervent public to his new and endearing incarnation as an elder statesman, a one-man Rat Pack for the post-post-punk set.

And then there’s the matter of producer Tony Visconti. Apparently tapped in lieu of an overbooked Jeff Saltzman, the choice of this particular studio legend seemed all but providential. Throughout his storied work with T. Rex and David Bowie, Visconti has ranked among the foremost practitioners of the art of turning the pugnaciously flamboyant into the sublime. Who knew what fertile rains of alchemistic mutant magic he could bestow upon the second blooming of Stretford’s favorite gladiola? To top it all off, word leaked that the album was to be recorded in Rome, a city that’s mix of classicism and flash seemed the perfect foil for the refined, urbane Moz of the moment. Images of a man in a mauve three-button capering through the alleys of Trastevere humming a deliciously morbid couplet danced in the heads of all who read Visconti’s increasingly breathless blog and waited in rapt anticipation. So?

Unobjectionable, serviceable, occasionally flashing brilliance but never quite delivering, Ringleader of the Tormentors is a musical tug-of-war left permanently unresolved. The problem, sadly, is that the pairing of Morrissey and Visconti itself seems to have been ill-conceived. As a purely technical matter, Visconti’s sonic genius is apparent in sweeping rock symphonics like the Middle Eastern groove of “I Will See You In Far Off Places” (a sound admittedly captured over a decade ago by Morrissey’s Smiths bandmate Johnny Marr in The The) or the rain-soaked “Life Is A Pigsty” (the album’s best entry into the long, wonderful list of snarky Moz song titles).

But more often than not the production seems mired in gimmick or overkill. Whether it’s baldly taking a page from Bob Ezrin’s playbook and using a children’s choir or making the odd choice of occasionally doubling Morrissey’s vocals (which, if you think about it, almost never happens on Moz’s albums—in fact, that absence may be one of the more unique things about his recorded performances), the bombast of Visconti’s sonic layering all but effaces Morrissey’s effort, which is shrinking by his standards. While some arresting lyrical barbs pepper the album, Morrissey’s delivery is often uncharacteristically flat and forced—the sprightly quality that attends his best work seems lost in the pomp and gravitas. While the cutting guitars of Alain Whyte and Jesse Tobias (formerly of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, during their one-guitarist-per-week period) fuel such standouts as “You Have Killed Me” and “The Youngest Was the Most Loved,” and Ennio Morricone’s orchestra lends a curious Spaghetti Western flourish to “At Last I Am Born,” the songs themselves generally strain to fill the lofty, overwrought aural architecture Visconti builds for them—lonely ghosts in crumbling Roman temples of sound.

It’s certainly admirable that Moz and Tony got lost in the moment and went for something classic, but, on balance, Ringleader is strangely underwhelming.

Swedish heartthrob returns with classy '60s homage

We already knew that Nicolai Dunger had a sensitive heart, an ear for perfect melodies, and the husky but wavering voice of a man who’d chop wood for us all afternoon and then pour out his feelings over a roast-quail dinner. And with the U.S. release of Here’s My Song..., he’s back to charm us again. Compared to his last two discs—the exhilarating Soul Rush, and Tranquil Isolation, with its masterful Americana—Here’s My Song... feels more polite and more submissive to its ’60s-pop-folk sources (particularly Van Morrison). It tends to drift in its second half, especially on the endless “The Year of the Love and Hurt Cycle.” But backing band Mercury Rev matches Dunger’s growl whenever he asks, and the mellower arrangements are impeccable and classy. In his case, gruff charm still goes a long way.

Stories for Millions of Us, Everywhere: The damned and the damaged inherit the earth in this long-anticipated story collection

In “Screenwriter,” from Charles D’Ambrosio’s new collection, the narrator describes a young dancer at the mental institution they share:

A white moth fell like a flower petal from the sky, dropped through a link in the fence, and came to light on my hand. The cooling night wind raised gooseflesh on my arms, and a cloud of smoke ripped into the air. The girl’s gown was smoldering. A leading edge of orange flame was chewing up the hem. I rose from my seat to tell the ballerina she was on fire. The moth flew from my hand, a gust fanned the flames, there was a flash, and the girl ignited, lighting up like a paper lantern. She was cloaked in fire. The heat moved in waves across my face and I had to squint against the brightness. The ballerina spread her arms and levitated, sur le pointes, leaving the patio as her legs, ass, and back emerged phoenix-like out of this paper chrysalis, rising up until finally the gown sloughed from her shoulders and sailed away, a tattered black ghost ascending in a column of smoke and ash, and she lowered back down, naked and white, standing there, pretty much unfazed, in first position.

The terrible beauty of this passage typifies D’Ambrosio’s precision about characters detached from love, sanity or both. In “Drummond and Son,” a typewriter repairman’s wife leaves him with his adult, mentally distant son, who explains that he “laughs when he sees something sad.” Depicting characters with weak grasps on reality allows the author to unstick words from their familiar meanings. He often uses surreal language to depict disconnected, sometimes hallucinatory experiences. In the title story, for example, an emigrant from El Salvador struggles with English, calling his refrigerator “the dead fish museum.” In the typewriter-repairman story, he and his mentally disabled son spend their bus ride home reading pages of random, fragmented and nonsensical symbols customers have typed during the day. One reads, “???????????!!!!!!” The clearest statement offered reads, “God is dead.”

Disconnection from God is one of the central themes, depicted largely by the recurrent images of dead fish. For example, in “The High Divide,” the characters walk away from their camping spot and return to find the fish they caught “all burned to hell.” Significantly, it’s during this hiking trip that the father of the narrator’s friend announces he and his wife are getting a divorce. It turns out there’s little to protect these characters from suffering, since the author suggests their faith in prayer and family is about as useful as faith in Sasquatch, a creature the father calls “a myth.” “The Bone Game” concerns a man, Kype, whose self-appointed mission is to find the perfect spot to scatter his grandfather’s ashes. With his road companion, D’Angelo, he drives the grandfather’s Eldorado to an Indian reservation where a deaf woman tells him white men are fish. And, ultimately, he swims and walks along a stream littered with dead fish.

“Blessing” is a story in which the protagonist’s ne’er-do-well brother receives the gift of a large salmon that washes up on the Skagit River’s flooded banks. This is arguably the most hopeful story, as the river ordinarily offers up tree branches and washing machines when it rises and destroys homes along its banks. The salmon feeds the family and an old neighbor, and they’re able to hold back the river with sandbags, at least until the storm returns and dumps more rain. These are fiercely compassionate stories in which people suffer mentally and spiritually, and one type of suffering is analog to the other; one character will lose his mind while another loses his soul.

Despite the sad state of many of the characters, D’Ambrosio depicts them with humor as often as with poignancy. When Kype and D’Angelo pick up a hitchhiking young woman they tell her of Kype’s grandfather’s importance, his impact on people and his fame. Impressed, the woman drinks from a bottle of whiskey and says, “Here’s to Granpa.” “Here is Granpa,” D’Angelo replies, holding up the urn filled with the old man’s ashes.

Although many of the stories in The Dead Fish Museum were originally published in The New Yorker and elsewhere, this collection is more than welcome after the 10-year wait since The Point, D’Ambrosio’s highly acclaimed first collection. It’s most welcome because of the solace it offers. In “Blessing,” for example, the narrator finds a mysterious note written on a Christmas card in the attic of his newly purchased house. The note reads, “I hope these help. Love Milt.”

One imagines D’Ambrosio offering these beautifully written stories with a comparable intent to suffering readers who need help. At the end of “The High Divide,” orphaned Ignatius, his lonely friend Donny and Donny’s troubled father yell across the river and hear their echoing voices, “like there were millions of us everywhere.”

Dazzling gallery of the slaughtered and the demons who feast on them

Jon Langford, the Ernest Tubb of troubador artists, waits for daybreak at Tasty Town with the window-booth regulars.

It’s been a long, unbridled wait, through beds and bottles, through Thatcher, Reagan, Bushes, cronies, Mekons and Waco Brothers. Langford has all their numbers, to sing, to paint by. His heart, like Hank’s or Loretta’s, is in the right place, and just as shot through with one-way arrows. His mouth is full of the chicken that crossed to the sunny side of the road, making us laugh ’til our lungs strained. Nashville Radio is a dazzling gallery of the slaughtered and the demons who feast on them; Langford heaves it all into this book—paintings, cocooned fists, autobiographical writing, a companion CD and singalong lyrics—but the chewing sound won’t stop. The campfires fueled by Langford’s country icons, cowboys and cowgirls in flames, caskets chock with contracts—they’re as gorgeous as the sight of one’s own illuminated bones in the mirror.

Crawling out of the wrong end of a nightmare or dancing with death in dollar dress, Nashville Radio spills enough of your mama ’n’ daddy’s blood to make you doubt the West is history—or that this is even close to the end of the line.

[Ed. Note: Jon Langford is a Paste contributor.]

I’m sorry, Bubba… your poodle has heartworms

Sidney Thompson’s depiction of the South will be familiar to many. Sideshow—his new collection of short stories—is filled with hunters, carnival-sideshow freaks and families broken by death and divorce. The twist on the tried-and-true is Thompson’s surprise here—this is the South seen more through the prism of R.E.M. than William Faulkner.

In “The Floater,” Larry is a redneck hunter whose dogs have died in a fire. With his money tight after a recent divorce, he heads to the pound to find a new dog. Much to his surprise, he brings home a poodle… with heartworms.

“The Voyeur” examines the changing face of family. Set in a thoroughly modern South, a teenager, Bruce, finds himself torn between love for his dad and his growing attraction to his mother. A southern woman enjoying her newfound freedom with gusto, she insists that he call her Joyce. Bruce begins to spy on her to see if he can discover the truth of her sexuality—and possibly his own.

Thompson’s prose rings simple and direct, his narrative quick and sure. His real gift, though, is an eye for the subtle emotional connections we universally share. And what this Alabama-based writer finds just below the surface of day-to-day existence is a notable discovery—a South to which we can all relate.

Northwestern Patsy Cline with a graduate degree unleashes new album

In the same way Liam Neeson functions in the film world as gravitas-for-hire, the guest list for Neko Case’s new album reads like a receipt from the tumbleweed-skiffle department of a Tucson-area Rent-A-Cred; gracing this project are locals Howe Gelb, and Calexico, plus out-of-towners Kelly Hogan, Dexter Romweber and Garth Hudson, to name a few. Case, of course, still approximates a Northwestern Patsy Cline with a graduate degree, and while the stories she tells are mournful, her delivery remains buoyant. If an old spiritual (“John Saw That Number”) didn’t reveal her hand, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking Case was working to establish a new kind of magical-realist gospel, or Optimism Gothic. Despite the risk-avoidant, “for-grown-ups” tone of the arrangements, wrenching tunes such as “Dirty Knife” and “Lion’s Jaws” easily teleport the listener to a mystical denim prom with a very dusty welcome mat and decorations inspired by an outsider artist’s personal, widow-clogged Narnia.

The Balladeer of Darkness scores soundtrack of pure sundown

In addition to writing the script for The Proposition, Nick Cave co-wrote the soundtrack with Warren Ellis. As one expects from Cave, the atmosphere is tense and extreme, each note feeling stretched to its limit as time ticks away. “Martha’s Dream” lopes past with Ellis’ strings twisting in the wind. “Moan Thing” is aptly named, as it evokes the same haunted majesty of Tom Waits’ eeriest moments. Largely instrumental, and accented with narration that nearly suffocates from the tension, the soundtrack has a few moments when Cave emerges vocally to deliver sermons with his usual grave finality (“Down to the Valley,” “Gun Thing”). In these sorrowful moments set to piano and strings, Cave is master of his realm, singing from a heart of darkness inside the seedy nightclub of his soul.

(To read Paste's in-depth Q&A with Proposition screenwriter Nick Cave, director John Hillcoat and actor Guy Pearce, click here.)

(Above [L-R]: Calexico's Volker Zander, Jacob Valenzuela, Joey Burns, John Convertino, Martin Wenk, Paul Niehaus. Photo by Dennis Kleiman.)

Every Calexico album is full of unusual instruments and Garden Ruin is no exception. Behind its acoustic-based songs, listeners will find trumpets, cellos, vibes, banjos and a glockenspiel.

Where do they get all this stuff? Anywhere they can find it cheap. We asked singer/multi-instrumentalist Joey Burns about the band’s five greatest low-budget discoveries.

1. Emerson Answering Machine: “A lot of the songs on our first album were recorded on that machine using the ‘outgoing message’ feature,” says Burns. “That Emerson was the first thing that allowed us to get our sound recorded and play it back.”

2. California guitar: “A friend bought the guitar for me for a dollar, but when I played it, I noticed a buzz coming from behind the bridge,” says Burns. “I wound up putting a folded dollar bill back there, which deadened the buzz and doubled the value of the guitar.”

3. No-name violin: “I played a gig in Prague as part of Giant Sand where we weren’t allowed to take the money we made out of the country, so I used it to buy a cheap violin,” Burns explains.

4. '60s Italian accordion: “We bought this great old accordion in Boulder, Colo., and have been using it ever since,” Burns says. “Recently, it started falling apart, so our bass player dissected it and gave it new life by using the reeds as a makeshift bass harmonica.”

5. 1950s blonde K1 Upright Bass: “I bought this from a pawn shop in Salt Lake City, then realized I had to make space for it on the bus,” Burns says laughing. “I wound up giving it my bunk. It slept there for the rest of the tour while I was on the couch.”

(To read Paste's in-depth article on Calexico's Burns and Convertino, click here.)

Hometown: Nashville, Tenn.
Fun fact: York has been in the studio with Glen Phillips (of Toad the Wet Sprocket), whose album will be released early this year.
Why she’s worth watching: Paste liked York enough to put out her debut EP. And Kathleen Edwards recently invited her to open on an upcoming tour.
For fans of: Dar Williams, Shawn Colvin, Fleetwood Mac

Kate York has always had an affinity for sadness. “I remember holding the album and just staring at it,” she says of the Chariots Of Fire soundtrack she was given as a child. Her favorite song was the album’s dreariest, “Five Circles.” “It sounded so eerie to me back then,” she says. “Even when I was five, I was drawn to sad songs.”

It’s no surprise that York went on to record an album called Sadlylove, a title borrowed from a song by friend and fellow musician Matthew Ryan. “It just seemed to fit the mood of my record,” she says. “I don’t set out to make music that’s going to make people cry, but I like songs about pining and unrequited love. It’s universal.”

Despite obvious themes of heartbreak and isolation, a distinct sense of optimism runs through Sadlylove’s melodies, keeping the songs from veering into self-pity or melodrama. York’s understated lyrics, bell-clear voice and captivating yet simple arrangements feel fit to drown out the sound of the windshield wipers on a rainy car ride, to soundtrack a spell of post-breakup despair, or to make your good mood even better.

Produced by Music City-underground VIP Neilson Hubbard, who discovered York three years ago during a writer’s night at Nashville club 12th and Porter, Sadlylove features guest performances by Mindy Smith, Mack Starks and Matthew Ryan. After several years of recording and touring, opening for artists such as Patty Griffin, Shawn Colvin, Mindy Smith and Garrison Starr, York will release the record independently in May. She says she owes a lot to her temporary bouts of depression. “I don’t usually write if I’m happy,” she jokes. “If I’m happy, that means I’m out having fun, not sitting around writing songs.”

I missed the last four episodes of Arrested Development. Fox cleared its remaining inventory of the brilliant show off its shelves on a single Friday night, and my TiVo opted for sci-fi instead. My favorite sitcom since Sports Night—a similarly fated “critics’ darling”—unceremoniously ended, and I wasn’t even around to say goodbye. I thought I’d be able to replace it with Love Monkey, a quirky dramedy about a record-label exec leaving a major to work at an indie upstart. It starred Tom Cavanagh (Ed) and in its three-episode lifespan featured cameos from Ben Folds, Aimee Mann and James Blunt. It was fun, particularly since it delved into familiar territory for me. But alas, it was yanked after only three episodes.

A favorite local club also snuck its way out of my life a couple years ago—The Echo Lounge. The venue in East Atlanta Village—where I saw Karin Bergquist of Over the Rhine sing for the angels; where Pedro the Lion, Damien Jurado and T.W. Walsh played musical chairs; where Camper Van Beethoven reminded a crowd of thirtysomethings why the words “art” and “rock” belong together—was summarily shuttered, leaving nothing but memories, an amazing series of concert posters and a giant hole in our music scene.

It’s hard to see the things we love vanish. In this issue, we look at some distinctly American cultural relics that have either slowly receded—like the Googie architecture of Southern California (p. 50), disappearing building-by-building to make room for new development—or gone down swinging—like New York clubs CBGB and The Bottom Line (p. 20). And in her new Paste travel column, “The Ugly American” (p. 54), acclaimed author Hollis Gillespie chases down another vanishing national treasure: the giant neon signs of the Las Vegas strip. The Neon Boneyard is a monument of a city growing so fast it’s in danger of leaving itself behind.

Another American cultural phenomenon has spent more than 20 years growing towards iconic status—Oklahoma’s Flaming Lips. With only a single moderate hit in the early ’90s, “She Don’t Use Jelly,” these fearless freaks grew their vision of exuberant insanity from crude art-punk to elaborate spectacles encompassing mirrorballs, confetti, bubbles, streamers, inflatable aliens and animal costumes. A decade after most bands would have thrown in their fake-blood-covered towels, the Lips are just hitting their stride. Their last album, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and their festival-stealing live performances (most notably Wayne Coyne’s trek into the crowd in a giant, plastic ball at Coachella 2004) have poised the trio for full-on stardom as they release their 12th album, At War With the Mystics. They may even be headed to Broadway (p. 33). Senior contributing editor Jay Sweet took a four-day trip with the band aboard Xingolati—the “groove cruise of the Pacific”—and caught a glimpse of the diligence and care that takes place behind the Emerald City curtain (p. 64).

In addition to the articles and reviews in this issue and the accompanying CD and DVD, we launched a weekly podcast at the beginning of the year, the Paste Magazine Culture Club—OK, a goofy name, but one that reminds us not to take ourselves too seriously. With two months between issues, we wanted a way to cover smart entertainment with more frequency. Already we have interviews and live performances (plus a few exclusive tunes) from artists like Buddy Miller, Aqualung, the Fiery Furnaces, Marty Stuart, Duncan Sheik, The Frames, Brandi Carlile, Jay Farrar, Bennett Miller, Carlos Reygadas, the Beastie Boys and Josh Ritter—plus dispatches from Sundance and a selection of Will Johnson’s wickedly funny Ricky Henderson haikus. Subscribe for free at pastecultureclub.com or via iTunes.

(Above [L-R]: Joey Burns and John Convertino. Photo by Chod McClintock.)

Calexico co-leaders Joey Burns and John Convertino are sipping espresso at an upscale Italian restaurant. The place is attached to the L.A. hotel the band is staying at in the middle of a quick swing up the West Coast to introduce songs from its latest, Garden Ruin. The two bandmates, who’ve known each other since 1990, have a way of alternating comments on any given subject, like a married couple—which, in a way, they are.

“The problem with major labels is that it’s not about music, unfortunately,” says singer/guitarist Burns, explaining why the group he formed in 1995 with drummer Convertino—even with its typically hefty recording budgets—would rather live without the trappings of a big-time record deal.

“The majors are working with so much overhead that they need things that will bring in money right away, rather than allowing an artist time to develop,” adds Convertino.

“Whereas in the old days there was such a thing as A&R and artist development,” says Burns. “Over the years we’ve been doing that ourselves—developing as writers and performers, touring, getting better and more comfortable with singing.”

“So for us, that was the contrast,” Convertino explains. “It felt like, OK, we can start with a cassette and sell them for five bucks, and then the next step is a vinyl—only through a small independent label. And if people are liking the music, then we’re growing with them. That’s what we’re working for.”

With Calexico, record-making is the fulcrum of artistic expression, and the “studio” is any locale where the canvas is painted, whether a state-of-the-art facility or a living room. As an indie band, Burns says, “You have to be creative in dealing with any aspect of the music business. Being more inventive in how you record your music and your sounds inevitably shows how unique you are in the final result.”

These two veterans have experienced the recording process at both extremes. In ’94, while working with Howe Gelb in Giant Sand, they spent weeks in New Orleans’ posh Kingsway Studios cutting big-budget album Glum for Imago Records. But soon after releasing the LP, the label was shut down by parent company BMG, rendering the album dead in the water. A year later Burns and Convertino were in Tucson, capturing songs played on their newly acquired thrift-shop instruments [see sidebar] using an answering machine in the latter’s barrio apartment—their first recordings as Calexico.

“I used to leave drum riffs for my outgoing message,” Convertino explains, “and I thought the drums sounded amazing through the little condenser mic. And then Joey would start playing along, and that was our recording machine.”

Says Burns, “It was the most creative way to put music out there at the time, not thinking we were gonna do a project but just sitting at home, having some coffee.”

‘AN AMERICAN RECORD’
A decade later, Calexico, now a sextet, has grown into a distinctive, formidable entity that—having established itself on the outer fringes of the underground as an arty instrumental unit composing themes for imaginary Westerns—has moved ever closer to the conventions of pop, with no loss to the band’s accumulated indie cred. A previously unstressed reverence for traditional songcraft came sharply into focus on the band’s 2003 breakout album, Feast of Wire, on songs like “Quattro (World Drifts In)” and “Not Even Stevie Nicks.” The group followed those revelations by collaborating on an EP with singer/songwriter Sam Beam (a.k.a. Iron & Wine), as well as cutting a series of cover tunes from sources as diverse as Nick Drake and Tom T. Hall, the crowning touch being a breathtaking rendition of Love’s “Alone Again Or” that made the 1967 classic seem like the very template for Calexico’s sound.

All this set the stage for Garden Ruin, the band’s first album to focus exclusively on songs, bearing distinct echoes of influences like Neil Young, Gram Parsons and Lindsey Buckingham. “Here in the States we’ve just never really seemed to get off the ground as fast as we had over in Europe, and I was wondering why that was,” says Burns, recounting the album’s genesis. “Maybe our music was too eclectic or too diverse. And having toured with Wilco and Iron & Wine, I thought, let’s do an American record for America, and see where America is at.”

To do it right, the partners set another precedent, for the first time working with an outside producer on their own music. They went with onetime Dwight Yoakam bassist JD Foster, whose motivational production approach they’d experienced firsthand while playing on Foster-helmed projects for Richard Buckner and Laura Cantrell. They chose him, says Burns, for “the feel. It’s all about the feel and dynamics. He directs—he gets involved. With JD, you get decisions made and you move on. His line was always, ‘It’s about the process; it’s about how you get there.’ That became my mantra.”

Since 1997, Calexico has been signed to Chicago indie Touch & Go (whose founder, Corey Rusk, is no neophyte, having put out his first seven-inch 25 years ago), and the relationship is basic indeed: 50/50 after expenses and sealed with a handshake. “We’ve done it long enough that they can trust us, and we can trust them,” says Burns. So they upped the ante, not only hiring Foster but laying out for extended studio time at Tucson’s Wavelab (where they tracked and overdubbed), and then headed east to mix at world-class Brooklyn Recording. While Garden Ruin is the most expensive album Calexico has ever made, it cost just a fraction of a typical major-label project.

“We’re smart about how we spend money,” says Burns. “We try to be realistic.”

Convertino seizes the moment. “As much as you’d love to have a big bus and the cocaine and the girls and stuff”—he pauses for effect—“you’re not gonna make any money that way.”

“And no one will take you seriously,” says Burns.

(To read about Calexico's favorite musical thrift-store finds, click here.)

(Mates of State [L-R]: Kori Gardner, Jason Hammel. Photo by Terry Loewenthal)

It’s an old rock cliché that being in a band is like being in a relationship. But for married duo Mates of State, this cliché has been a way of life through four albums of organ-driven indie pop, full of girl-group harmonies and dueling vocals about love and all the issues that come with it. As the couple gets ready to hit the road behind its latest album, Bring It Back, we asked organist Kori Gardner and drummer Jason Hammel what they thought the five best or worst things were about making music with your spouse.

1. Egos Stay In Check: “It’s impossible to get too big of a head when you’re around your husband or wife,” says Gardner. “If Jason starts thinking he’s great, I’ll call him on it. I can tell him the truth in a way I might be afraid to with others.”

2. Every Moment Is Spent Together: “People ask how we spend so much time together without killing each other, but we’ve gotten used to it,” Gardner says. “It’s like we’re in the beginning of a relationship when you stay up talking until 5 a.m. and want to spend every moment together. For most people, jobs and real life intrude at some point and you forget those feelings. We don’t have to deal with that.”

3. You Have to Fight the Rock ’n’ Roll Myths: “Because we’re married and have a kid, people assume we’re a domestic, family act and that we’re not rock ‘n’ roll,” says Hammel. “But the two things are not incompatible. Kori actually got pregnant on the road—it was backstage while Death Cab was playing.”

4. Booking Practice is Easier: “We started Mates of State because people in our previous bands wouldn’t show up to practice,” Gardner explains. “Now, we don’t have to tell everyone when practice is—we just do it in our house on our own schedule.”

5. No Groupies Required: “When you’re married, you can have sex on the road anytime you want,” says Gardner. “You don’t have to wait for groupies.”

(Above: Leo Gregory as Brian Jones in Stoned)

Director: Stephen Woolley
Writers: Neal Purvis, Robert Wade
Cinematography: John Mathieson
Starring: Leo Gregory, Paddy Considine
Studio info: Screen Media Films, 102 mins.

Unraveling the peculiar murder of The Rolling Stones' legendary multi-instrumentalist

Freshly ousted from The Rolling Stones and still feeding an insatiable drug habit, guitarist Brian Jones sank to the bottom of his swimming pool on July 2, 1969. The 27-year-old Jones’ toxicology report revealed relatively low doses of drugs and alcohol, eliciting the coroner to declare “death by misadventure,” and prompting fans to spend the next several decades cooking up loads of conspiracy theories. Stephen Woolley’s Stoned magnifies the most prominent hypothesis: that Jones’ thorny relationship with Frank Thorogood (Paddy Considine)—the working-class builder he hired to renovate his country home, Cotchford Farm (the former dwelling of Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne)—led to his death. Stoned slowly establishes how and why Thorogood was so easily lured into Jones’ web of emotional and financial enslavement, and, in the film’s dizzying climax, Thorogood—who supposedly confessed to the deed on his deathbed in 1993—murders Jones in Jones’ own backyard.

Thorogood’s assimilation into Jones’ universe is weird and riveting, but Stoned is ultimately a story about girl trouble, and its inadvertent misogyny is both irksome and uncomfortably apropos—legendary muse Anita Pallenberg (played by the beguiling Monet Mazur) pumps Jones (Leo Gregory) full of drugs, then ditches him for Keith Richards when she witnesses the scope of his addiction. Pallenberg spends at least 80 percent of the film topless, and nearly every other woman in the Stones’ story is either an enabler or a sycophant. Consequently, it’s not terribly hard for viewers to draw a line, however faint, from Jones’ death back to Pallenberg’s curt dismissal, and to watch several women try, and fail, to save him: Jones’ disarming spiral into depression and dependency is anchored by a broken heart, and even if it’s Thorogood holding him under water, suspicious eyes still inevitably drift back to the naked ladies screaming in the background. See Yoko Ono: it’s always the girl’s fault.

Jones’ post-Pallenberg love interest, the Swedish-born Anna Wohlin (Tuva Novotny) eventually wrote a book about his murder (2001’s The Murder of Brian Jones), and Woolley used it, along with two other speculative books, to assemble the film’s narrative. According to British reports, Woolley also hired a private detective to track down a fourth, previously untapped source—Janet Lawson, a London nurse and Thorogood’s girlfriend at the time of Jones’ murder. Lawson’s supposed testimony makes Stoned the most definitive statement of Jones’ demise.

The rest of the Stones pop up periodically, all sporting either terrible haircuts or ridiculous wigs, and Woolley seems to inherently understand the weaknesses of his subjects—Jones’ intense blues fetish (he even declares Thorogood’s partial blindness “partially cool”) clashes with the Stones’ poppier tendencies, and Jones’ career-killing insistence that rock ’n’ roll stay rooted in the Delta should anoint him a hero of sorts for rockists everywhere. Stoned marks Woolley’s directorial debut (he’s better known for producing), and his penchant for using wobbly camerawork and foggy montages (accompanied by Jefferson Airplane’s default drug anthem, “White Rabbit”) to convey drug abuse is a visual tic that, however accurate, is also pretty tiring. Regardless, Stoned is intriguingly subtle about Thorogood’s exact motivations, and Considine’s expert portrayal of an easily seduced everyman is spot-on—which means Stoned is not only a surprisingly good rock ’n’ roll biopic, it’s a fascinating meditation on the wicked lure of fame.

(Above [L-R]: The Little Willies' Dan Rieser, Norah Jones, Lee Alexander, Richard Julian, Jim Campilongo. Photo by Bill Phelps.)

After finding international fame, touring the world, winning multiple Grammy awards and selling millions of records, Norah Jones could still be found at her musical home and launching pad, tiny, Lower East Side club The Living Room, sitting at the piano on a pile of telephone books.

Sure, she could’ve been selling out Madison Square Garden, but who needs the pressure? Better to just round up your favorite partners in crime (fleet-fingered guitarist Jim Campilongo, singer/songwriter Richard Julian, bassist/boyfriend Lee Alexander and drummer Dan Rieser), dub yourselves The Little Willies (a “Willie Nelson cover band”) and have a downtown rave-up to blow on some steam.

Shedding the pressure is the name of the game, Jones says, noting that the loose format gives her the freedom to sing and play any way she wants. “In this band I can play a drunken piano lick; it’s awesome and it fits,” she says. “I feel like the most fun thing for me in this band has been really playing piano more.”

Almost by accident, this low-key side project now has its own commercially released CD and songs of its own, the most amusing being show-closer “Lou Reed,” which imagines the title character “cowtippin’.”

“Lee and Richard took a road trip and it came out of their head,” Jones says. “They got back and they were just giggling like little kids—like some stoners, which is funny because they’re not. I finished it with them and it’s a pretty absurd song.”

The Willies also are covering more than Willie Nelson now—Townes Van Zandt, Kris Kristofferson and Fred Rose are among the names credited. “It covers probably 70 years of songwriting,” says Campilongo. “… what I like about it is that we all kind of do it our own way which gives it some nice continuity.”

They have Campilongo partially to thank for that, courtesy of his signature Fender Telecaster spinning out jaw-dropping leads, particularly on Kristofferson’s “Best of All Possible Worlds” and Nelson’s “Gotta Get Drunk.”

Most Monday nights you can catch “Campy” at The Living Room. And if you have the right insider tip, you just might just catch the Willies, too. As Jones puts it, completely seriously, “We can get a quick easy gig there because we know the owner.”

Other People’s Stories: A great reporter disappears from his own memoir

No one who’s ever published a book should review one, because empathy for the victim—the author, rather—undermines objectivity.

Suppose you’re renowned journalist Gay Talese. You’ll soon be 74 and your memoir, A Writer’s Life, will be published in April. At the very moment your proofs go out to reviewers, your wife the famous editor is buried up to her bifocals in the James Frey-memoir scandal, the first in a chain of breaking scandals that promises, at least, to re-introduce truth-in-labeling to the literary marketplace—humble truth, a porous levee against the blood-dimmed tide of mangy, redundant memoir threatening to wipe out literature altogether.

Talese is not the first author cursed by wretched timing and cruel coincidence; a friend of mine published the best book he ever wrote on Sept. 11, 2001. So I feel Talese’s pain acutely. And I swear I opened A Writer’s Life with high hopes. But it’s one of the strangest damn books I’ve ever read.

Talese provokes none of my usual prejudices. He’s not an autobiographer who experiences his own life as an intoxicating epic. If anything he’s the opposite, a celebrity mildly surprised he’s someone from whom the public might expect a memoir. He leaves the peculiar impression that he was tempted to write one but lacked the stomach for it.

Still, he’s hardly shy. When he needs help with a story in Beijing, Talese calls Henry Kissinger—no response—and the president of Nike, Philip Knight. But like many celebrated reporters, he finds introspection intimidating, and admits it. “I had no idea what my story was,” he writes. “I had never given much thought to who I was. I had always defined myself through my work, which was always about other people.”

Bull’s-eye. With that gift of self-knowledge, Talese might’ve saved this book, or written another. Instead, good as his word, he ducks behind a dozen stories that belong to other people, and he stays behind them, all but invisible for 400 pages. Talese has written himself a supporting role, barely a speaking part, in the story of his life.

Ironically, the rare personal passages are some of his best; I love Talese in his Army uniform visiting his father’s native village in Calabria and recognizing—on a host of cousins—all the castoff suits and dresses his fashionable parents had sent “home” to Italy.

The workaholic, emotionally remote parents who raised him above their tailor shop in Ocean City, N.J., are more intriguing than many of the ephemeral figures who dominate A Writer’s Life. But not, apparently, to their son. He introduces us to many characters we might not choose to meet, who answer many questions we might not have asked them. Then it dawns on us—these odd, unpromising stories are writing projects Talese has previously aborted. Talese the memoirist seems less committed to validating his life than clearing his desk.

This sounds harsh. Yet a full fifth of his manuscript concerns John and Lorena Bobbitt, the trailer-park Jason and Medea whose grisly little story should never have escaped from the back page of one-paragraph wonders and horrors. (See the onion bagel that resembled Mother Teresa! Behold the image of Christ on a screen door!)

Talese once wrote a 10,000-word New Yorker profile on the Bobbitts that was mercifully euthanized by editor Tina Brown, who in this case served as a model of good taste and good sense. Her rejection must’ve been so tactful that Talese failed to hear the message—“Don’t do this to yourself, Gay, for God’s sake.” The entire embarrassment, or most of it, is published here at last.

It’s more painful than you can imagine. Talese is disarmingly candid about his struggles and false starts in recent years—only one book of new material, Unto the Sons (1992), has appeared since 1980. But with Nan Talese and Tina Brown to counsel him, why has he chosen to publish his mistakes?

Respectful attention must be paid to a tireless, conscientious reporter, one of the most influential journalists of his generation. Here, Talese is no casualty of the metastasizing memoir industry, fueled by tabloid voyeurism and the Oprah cult of personal redemption, mass-producing material for non-readers. He may embody a more radical critique of the memoir, one embraced by great writers like Beckett and Borges, who hold that the details of a writer’s life are of no interest whatsoever; a writer exists only as the sum of the stories he creates, collects, embellishes and passes along.

Maybe. Whatever else, the storyteller bets all his chips on his judgment—and dreads that day when the good stories, the thin ones and the lame ones all begin to look alike.

Birthplace: Montreal, Canada
Favorite Authors: Christopher Buckley, Raymond Chandler, John Cheever, T.C. Boyle
Favorite Bands: Beastie Boys, Madlib, Jurassic 5, Cut Chemist
Inspirational Directors: Alexander Payne, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater
Fun Fact: Ran track-and-field at the Junior Maccabiah Games (the Junior Jewish Olympics)

Jason Reitman grew up around film. Days after his birth in 1977, he joined his producer/director dad, Ivan, on the set of Animal House. By 10, he was making home-video shorts; at 13, he got his first job in film, as the production assistant on the elder Reitman’s Kindergarten Cop; and at 15, he directed an award-winning public-service announcement with actors from his high school. As son of the man who directed blockbusters Stripes, Ghostbusters, Twins and Dave, he was immersed in comedy, but it took smaller-scale, more idiosyncratic comedies to convince him film was his future.

“I was probably 15 or 16 years old the first time I saw Slacker and Clerks, and then Bottle Rocket,” Reitman explains at Sundance, where his first feature Thank You for Smoking had its U.S. premiere. “And those three films in succession really changed my view of what a comedy could be. I’d grown up watching big-time comedies, but when I saw what Kevin Smith did with Clerks, it just changed me. I suddenly said, ‘Oh, that can be a movie and that can be a comedy. That’s fantastic.’ It just broadened my horizons, and it set me free.”

This freedom to revel in small details is on display in Smoking, a witty, biting satire with insight and soul. Based on the novel by Christopher Buckley, the film follows Nick Naylor—head lobbyist for Big Tobacco—and his journeys across America as he spins on behalf of his industry while still trying to be a role model for his 12-year-old son. Supported by a wonderful cast that includes Maria Bello, William H. Macy, Robert Duvall, Adam Brody, Rob Lowe and Sam Elliott, Aaron Eckhart perfectly captures Naylor’s unique combination of cleverness, confidence, moral slickness and persistent likeability.

Inspired by a question a reporter asks Naylor in Buckley’s novel (“What does your son think of what you do?”), Reitman added a more human dimension to the story by emphasizing the lobbyist’s relationship with his son. “Beyond the dancing [of Naylor’s actual answer], it’s an important question,” the director explains. “I thought that’s one that Nick probably wouldn’t have a real answer to, and that kind of formed the plot of the movie. I wanted him to deal with that question as a human being. I think you gain and lose friends, and you can even sometimes gain and lose your family, but your own children, I have to imagine you fight to death for their admiration. It also struck upon the important political idea that—beyond the importance of personal responsibility—we have to be responsible for our children, and parenting is the real key to having people make smart decisions.”

Advice from Reitman’s dad proved instrumental in his decision to become a director. Despite his early interest in film, Jason entered a pre-med program in college. “I went to college and got scared out of wanting to make movies,” he explains. “I thought, ‘I’ll only live in my father’s shadow; I’ll never have any true success of my own.’ People meet you and you’re the son of a famous filmmaker, and they think that you’re arrogant, uneducated and you have a drug problem.” But one winter break, his father intervened. He told Jason that when he was 19 years old, he’d discovered foot-long submarine sandwiches and asked his father for money to start a sandwich shop. “And my grandfather said, ‘You know, there’s probably a lot of money in that, but there’s not enough magic in it for you.’ And my father went to college and started a film club. So my father took me out to dinner at some cheap diner, and he told me [this] story and said, ‘Jason, you know, being a doctor is an incredibly noble profession, and I would be very proud of you if you became a doctor. But I just don’t think there’s enough magic in it for you.’” With that, Jason Reitman returned to Los Angeles, begged his way into the USC School of English and began making short films.

Ambition vs. altruism; call it a tie

He had that glow of success, touched perhaps by the shame of that success. How we feel when we are much feted and wonder if there is room for our darker nature in this bright acclamation.

Alma suffers from too much success. The latest volume in her saga is years overdue and nothing is forthcoming—that is until she becomes obsessed with the story of Isabel, the mysterious Doña who chaperoned 22 boys across the Atlantic. The boys are orphans selected as carriers of the smallpox vaccine, to form a pustular Jacob’s Ladder from Spain to the Americas. They’re a cargo meant to rescue the human race.

Saving the World alternates between Alma’s life and Isabel’s vastly different one—a world that features a rabidly ambitious doctor, a horde of boys climbing the rigging, and a heroine who often chooses excitement over altruism. Amid a climax of wild improbabilities, Alma remains maddeningly self-referential. Late in the novel she recollects an Emily Dickinson poem memorized in seventh grade—“After great pain, a formal feeling comes…”

There are indeed moments of great feeling in this novel, but we somehow view them from a distance.

“A toilet bowl full of blood.” That’s what Alejandro Escovedo says he saw after he vomited in his hotel room in Tempe, Ariz., on April 26, 2003. That’s when he knew the Hepatitis C he’d been running from for seven years had finally caught up with him.

He went ahead and did the show that night anyway. It was By the Hand of the Father, a theater piece about Mexican-American fathers—Escovedo’s and dozens of others—featuring slides, monologues by actors and actresses and Escovedo’s original songs performed with his band. But as soon as the show was done, the singer/guitarist collapsed and was rushed to St. Luke’s Hospital.

“When I got to the hospital,” he remembers, “they found I had varices of the esophagus, cirrhosis of the liver and tumors in my abdomen, and they were all bleeding at once. The doctors gave me a blood transfusion and then started talking about a liver transplant or shunts that bypass the liver. This nurse asked me, ‘Why are you here?’ I said, ‘I have hepatitis C, and I’m bleeding internally.’ She whispered conspiratorially, ‘Oh, I have it, too. You know how I deal with it? I drink my urine every morning.’ Then another nurse came in and told me I didn’t have long to live.”

It’s now three years later, and Escovedo is still with us. But he’s not the same; you never come out of a long hospital stay the same person you were when you went in. “I died a little today,” he sings on the song of the same name from The Boxing Mirror, his first studio album in four years. The lovely guitar arpeggio unfurls slowly, as if reluctant to delve into such territory, and there’s a similar hesitation in Escovedo’s wavering tenor as he continues, “I put up a fight and carved a simple hello.” It’s as if we’re back at St. Luke’s Hospital and the news is sinking in. Brian Standefer’s cello enters with the dark undertow of that reality, and the singer adds, “You can hold to the light / So no one will know / We died a little today.”

The song echoes the sound of those early-morning hours, when most of the city is asleep, but you’re still awake, confronting the questions everyone avoids when there are daylight or neon-light distractions. It’s a sound Escovedo had to invent in the early ’90s to fit songs such as “Pissed Off 2 A.M.,” “Broken Bottle” and “As I Fall.” It’s the anguished epiphany of every stop-and-go, yes-and-no, early-morning dilemma. But never had Escovedo had an early morning like April 27, 2003.

“You know how people talk about near-death experiences and how it changes your life so profoundly?” he says of “I Died a Little Today.” “Even Buddhists talk about how everyone should have one. I left a lot of things behind, who I thought I was. I always had this thing about pride, and that’s not necessarily a great thing to possess. I’m still working on it, but I think I have a lot less.”

What makes the new album so impressive is that Escovedo never makes the glib claim that letting go is easy or clean. His doctors finally convinced him he had to stop drinking and smoking if he wanted to live, but he never pretends he doesn’t miss those pleasures. In the song “Arizona,” he sings, “Have another drink on me; I’ve been empty since Arizona.” You can hear alcohol’s allure in John Cale’s bubbling synth figure and in Standefer’s snaking cello line, and you can hear the struggle with temptation in Escovedo’s vocal.

Arizona is not only where he almost died; it’s also where he met his fourth wife, Kim Christoff, while he was still married to his third. “One kiss just led to another,” he sings in the same song, “one kiss just fades into lover.” In other words, some temptations are hard to resist.

For Escovedo, music is a temptation he’s indulging again after a period of abstinence. When he left St. Luke’s, he spent a month in Arizona, walking the desert, wondering if he was going to live, pondering what kind of life might remain ahead of him. When he was strong enough, he, his wife and daughter returned to their home in Wimberley, Texas, in the hills south of Austin. There he was swallowing so much medicine that he barely had the strength to walk around, much less play music.

“Interferon and Ribo?avin f— with your head so much,” he says, “that I was depressed and fatigued and behaving erratically. I wasn’t a very nice person during that year. After a while, the medicine was making me sicker than the disease was. I couldn’t sleep for months because my skin was burning up. I had no red blood cells and no white cells and it was eating away at my bone marrow. I almost needed another blood transfusion.

“Regardless of how sick I got, though, I have to admit that the drugs gave me time; they cleaned out the virus, allowed my liver to regenerate itself and got me to the point where I could switch to a more holistic approach. But it was hell to pay. I didn’t pick up a guitar for almost a year.

“It was like I was suddenly cut loose from the capsule. I wasn’t sure who I was. If I wasn’t a musician, who was I? If I wasn’t traveling in a van, who was I? If I wasn’t staying up all night after the gig, drinking with the guys, who was I? I had to rethink everything, and the only way I could make sense of it was to start writing songs again. The first song I wrote was ‘Arizona.’”

Escovedo’s story is interesting not because he got sick and almost died. That’s the most common story in the world; it’s a story that’s going to happen to all of us sooner or later. Escovedo is interesting because he has a rare gift for turning this universal experience into songs that clarify the feelings behind the facts.

Even before he collapsed in Tempe, his music was haunted by mortality. Many of his early songs tried to make sense of the 1991 suicide of his estranged second wife. Many of his mid-period songs tried to make sense of the hitless songwriter’s life, where so much is said and so little is heard, a career summed up by the album title, More Miles Than Money. And now his newest songs deal with the fact that death knocked on the door once and could always knock again.

The power of these songs comes not so much from the lyrics as from the music. Escovedo’s words set the scene, name the characters and provide the premise, but the real drama is in the sound. It’s the sound of punk rock’s electric and percussive instruments pushing forward while the acoustic instruments of Mexican folk music and classical chamber music pull back; it’s the stabbing notes of fretboards and drum skins set against the sustaining notes of violins, cellos and steel guitars. Ground up between these opposing forces are the lead vocals, a curious blend of Tex-Mex melodrama and hipster-bohemian skepticism, a deadpan description of early morning’s existential crisis.

Since 1970 or so, it has been difficult to create a genuinely new sound within the guitar-rock format; Escovedo is one of the few to pull it off. The style he created for his six solo studio records, from 1992’s Gravity to this year’s The Boxing Mirror, is so different from anything else in rock ’n’ roll that the industry hasn’t known what to do with it. And though it never sold many records, this sound may end up as one of the most influential inventions of the ’90s. After all, who in the 1930s would have said that Robert Johnson would become one of the decade’s most influential artists? Who would have said it of Woody Guthrie in the 1940s? Or of Professor Longhair in the 1950s? Or of The Velvet Underground in the 1960s? Or of Townes Van Zandt in the 1970s?

It took Escovedo a long time to come up with that sound. By the time he turned 24, he still hadn’t picked up a guitar; he was still a fan rather than a player. It was 1975, and he was living in the Palo Alto Hotel, a transient flophouse full of penniless bohemians and former mental patients in San Francisco’s Polk District. Some of the residents were so zonked out on their meds that they couldn’t even calculate the right height for a successful suicide jump. “A third story jump ain’t high enough,” he later sang. “It’s just a mess on Market Street … The neighbors spend their days washing their socks and staring out the windows in a Thorazine haze.”

That song, “Sacramento & Polk,” first appeared on Escovedo’s 1999 album, Bourbonitis Blues, but he re-cut it for the new album, just for the chance to do it with producer John Cale. After all, Cale’s 1974 album, Fear, was something Escovedo listened to every day at the Palo Alto Hotel. Cale thickens the arrangement with distorted guitar, sawing cello and thundering drums ’til you can actually hear the “Thorazine haze.”

Escovedo co-founded primitive punk band, The Nuns, in San Francisco. He moved to New York and joined the Judy Nylon Band and the heady milieu of the downtown punk scene. Then he joined Rank & File, a new band led by Chip and Tony Kinman who were pioneering a fusion of punk and country music. When Rank & File moved to Austin, Escovedo was back in his native state and surrounded by reminders of the border culture he thought he’d left behind.

“I was like the George Harrison of Rank & File,” he says with a laugh. “I was completely overshadowed by Chip and Tony, because they were so good. But I wrote songs anyway, because I knew there was something I needed to say. I started to write when I was past 30, so I wasn’t interested in writing about teenage things. My favorite film teacher in college had told us that the best stories are usually family stories, so I started writing about my family.”

To get these new songs out to the world, Alejandro quit Rank & File, phoned his brother Javier in Los Angeles and told him, “Come out to Austin; we’re forming a new band called the True Believers.” It was 1982, and by 1983 the band was opening for Los Lobos in Austin. When Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo added his accordion to the True Believers’ set that night, a bond was forged, and the two groups would tour together off-and-on for the next four years.

“Los Lobos made me get serious about music,” Escovedo confesses. “They were really good at their instruments and they were open to all kinds of music. We were both blending Chicano roots and rock ’n’ roll, but my rock is so different than Los Lobos’. They’re coming from The Band and Creedence, while I’m coming from the Stones and Stooges and all that aggression and angst. And their Chicano roots are different, too. You can tell Los Lobos apart from the Texas bands, because we have that Tejano-blues aspect, that San Antonio sound of Doug Sahm, Augie Meyers and Flaco Jimenez.

“Back then it was important to declare that rock ‘n’ roll was our music, too. My parents listened to Mexican records, but they also listened to Frank Sinatra. We listened to The Rolling Stones and Marvin Gaye growing up. When you heard bands like Love, the Sir Douglas Quintet, Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs and ? & the Mysterians, you were hearing Mexican-Americans playing rock ’n’ roll. After we met Los Lobos, Javier and I could hear the Chicano influence that had crept into our voices and our guitar lines without our ever being conscious we had put it in there.”

In 1984, Alejandro began inviting Jon Dee Graham, a guitar hero from Austin punk band The Skunks, to sit in with the True Believers. Graham sat in so often that he gradually became the third guitarist without anyone ever saying anything. Graham is not Mexican-American (he’s Cherokee and Scottish among other things), but he grew up near the Rio Grande and absorbed the Tex-Mex culture.

“As a kid I was constantly surrounded by cumbias and rancheros,” Graham explains, “and when you listen to wailing rancheros, they have such a high emotional content they can overwhelm you. Moving away from punk was a natural evolution that was going to happen anyway. There were only two ways to go. You either slip back into what you already know and become a caricature of yourself or you push forward and follow the music wherever it wants to go. Where it wanted to go was a combination of rock ’n’ roll and that border music we had all grown up on.”

A small-budget album, True Believers, was released in 1986, and a big-budget follow-up was finished and scheduled for release in 1987. That album had the potential to lift the band from local heroes to national prominence, to make them the Los Lobos of Texas. But the True Believers were dropped during a shake-up at EMI Records and the second album went unreleased until 1994. Javier hit the road with Will Sexton; Graham moved to L.A. to play guitar for John Doe, and Alejandro hunkered down in Austin to ponder his next move.

“All my influences up to that point had come out of the Stooges/Velvets/Mott [the Hoople] camp,” he remembers, “but my new songs didn’t sound anything like that. A lot of that had to do with where I was living. In Austin, I would go out and hear Townes Van Zandt, Butch Hancock and Billy Joe Shaver and they came out of a different camp—Bob Dylan, Howlin’ Wolf and Jimmie Rodgers.

“They were the best teachers in the world. In punk rock, it was all about the industrial drive, but this was more delicate, more human. When you live in Texas and go to a barbecue, there’s going to be a guitar and it’s going to be passed around. If you call yourself a songwriter, you’d better be ready to sing a song. In learning to play on an acoustic guitar, I learned to ask the question, ‘Can the song survive if all the amplifiers disappear?’

“During the 1980s, we drove between Austin and Los Angeles all the time, and that trip probably influenced my songs more than anything. It’s ‘mi tierra’; it’s where my people came from. I heard the vastness and the emptiness of that landscape in Dylan’s stuff, in Townes’ stuff, in Butch’s stuff. By returning to Mexican folk music, we were closing the circle like Dylan did with his mountain ballads.”

What, he asked himself, was the sound of a landscape so vacant and ruthless? How could he get that sound into his songs? Part of the answer was pushing the Believers’ mix of acoustic and electric guitars to further extremes, so the quiet parts were even quieter, even more lyrical, and the loud parts were even louder, even rawer. And part of the answer was strings. One thing Mexican folk music and New York art-rock had in common was strings.

“The Velvet Underground got me interested in strings,” he says. “Lou Reed’s Street Hassle was the most profound influence, but I also loved John Cale’s early albums and Neil Young’s “A Man Needs a Maid.” I started listening to Nick Drake, [and composers Béla] Bartók and [Erik] Satie. When strings are used well in rock, they can be as aggressive as guitars and as ugly as feedback and yet sound so beautiful. They sound different from the usual guitar records, and they’re very supportive of words.

“And words are important to me. That’s one reason I didn’t join the typical Latin dance band. I wanted people to pay attention to my songs. The storytelling, guitar-oriented songs of rock ’n’ roll fit right in with the Mexican corrido tradition, which I was exposed to by my father and his friends and relatives. My parents would have barbecue parties and after they’d had enough beers, they’d break out guitars. My aunt would start singing and they would all start crying.”

The Alejandro Escovedo Orchestra was founded in 1990, the leader says, to “create a Southwestern version of Brian Eno’s Another Green World.” To capture that atmospheric texture, Escovedo invited violinists, cellists, trumpeters, saxophonists and steel guitarists to the weekly gigs in Austin. Soon, it really was an orchestra, a rock ’n’ roll big band, the roots-punk equivalent of Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound.”

For most of the ’90s, the Orchestra would play the final Sunday night of the SXSW Music Conference with 15 to 20 musicians onstage. Many critics (including me) consider those shows some of the most thrilling concerts they’ve ever witnessed. But the tapes have gone unreleased. Part of the problem was technical; it’s difficult to capture so many players with so little rehearsal in tune and in tempo. Part of the problem was economic; without major-label support, you can’t record such a large ensemble or tour with it.

Instead, the orchestra’s sound was distilled by producer Stephen Bruton to a small combo for Escovedo’s ?rst solo album, 1992’s Gravity. Instead of orchestral rock, this was chamber rock, especially on the four cuts that featured cellist John Hagen. One song described the voice of a departing lover as the sound of “Five Hearts Breaking.” That was the sound of Escovedo’s own voice, too, as he sang of those early-morning hours when “the party’s over and we won’t go; no one to laugh at our jokes anymore,” when the good liquor is gone and there’s nothing left to do but “pour me a drink from a broken bottle and fill my glass with the dirty water; what I’ve lost is gone and what I’ve gained has no name.”

One thing he’d lost was his second wife, Bobbie Levie, who committed suicide in 1991 shortly after they separated. Her ghost haunts the album, most obviously on “She Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” “Broken Bottle” and “Gravity/Falling Down Again.” The latter captures the vertigo when the flooring of every assumption you’ve ever had is pulled out from under your feet. The song boasted the grating guitar, droning strings and unflinching vocal of its model, Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle.” Later, in his live shows, Escovedo would yoke “Gravity” and “Street Hassle” together in a malignantly brilliant 12-minute medley.

Escovedo and Bruton collaborated on the 1993 follow-up, Thirteen Years, which extended the themes and sound of Gravity with a more prominent use of strings and Mexican motifs. The elusive reviews convinced big indie label Rykodisc to sign Escovedo and sink some money into his 1996 album, With These Hands, and the 1997 album, The Pawn Shop Years, by his hard-rock side project Buick MacKane. It seemed Escovedo was again poised for a breakthrough.

It didn’t happen. None of these albums sold 30,000 copies; other artists weren’t recording the songs, and the singer slogged his way across the country, from small club to small club with a guitar case full of press clippings and unpaid bills.

“The road is very seductive,” he concedes. “When you’ve been doing it a long time and you’re not making much money, what becomes the attraction? It’s when a stranger tells you how great you are. That becomes the medicine that you take to deal with all the pain. Eventually there’s a point when the perks of this occupation become more important than the occupation itself.

“You go to the gig and after the gig you stay at the bar drinking all night and singing for the help; that becomes more important than ‘How do we work on this verse and make it better?’ A lot of musicians on the road are running away; ultimately they’re running away from themselves. You enter this never-never world where you’re always young, because it’s a young-man’s game. Then one day you realize that all you’re doing is selling beer.”

When the tour for With These Hands got to Canada, Escovedo’s bandmates noticed he was turning colors human skin wasn’t meant to be. The doctors told him he had Hepatitis C and he’d have to stop drinking. He did for a while.

“I tried to deal with it as best as I could,” he says. “I didn’t have the money to go to St. Louis to see the doctor who cured Naomi Judd. As I lifted myself out of it, I thought it was OK to have a glass of wine—everything in moderation. But before I knew it, I was drinking a lot again. Then one day in a Louisiana hotel room, I could hardly get out of bed to go to the next gig. The maids were looking at me like I was pathetic, and I realized how far away I had gotten from what I set out to do.”

Even so, he continued to make impressive records. The spectacular live album, More Miles Than Money: 1994-96, was released in 1998. A collection of tracks from scattered recording sessions, Bourbonitis Blues, came out in 1999. By the Hand of the Father—the mixed-blessing soundtrack from the theater production—emerged in 2002, just a year after Escovedo’s finest moment, the Chris Stamey-produced A Man Under the Influence. And then, on April 26, 2003, he collapsed in Tempe.

Like most musicians, he had no health insurance. So his manager Heinz Geissler and Larry Miller of Or Music asked a few musicians if they’d record tracks for a fund-raising album to be called Por Vida: A Tribute to the Songs of Alejandro Escovedo. The response was so overwhelming that plans for a single-disc, 12-song album mushroomed into a two-disc, 32-track package with contributions from Steve Earle, Ian Hunter, The Jayhawks, John Cale, Son Volt, Los Lonely Boys, The Cowboy Junkies and many more.

“I was still messed up on the medicine,” Escovedo recounts, “and Heinz would play the tracks for me as they came in and I would just sob like a baby. I was especially moved by Cale’s version of ‘She Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’ and Hunter’s version of ‘One More Time.’ The reason I do what I do is because of their music. I had started out trying to sound like them, and now they gave me back my songs, making them sound like they should have sounded. That’s when I realized I had to fight this thing and get back to music.”

On March 21, 2004, at the end of SXSW, Escovedo stepped on the stage of the Continental Club for his first public performance since Tempe. Dressed in buttoned-up black shirt and tan suede jacket, he moved gingerly and his face bore new creases. “It’s just time and it’s gone, but that’s the way it goes,” he sang on the first song, as if shrugging off his lost year.

Facing a packed house of Austin fans and music critics, he sang, “Everybody says they love me, but I don’t know why,” on the fourth song, and halfway through that number he seemed to shake off the rust and doubts. He looked over at Jon Dee Graham; their guitar riffs locked up and took off. Brian Standefer underlined those riffs on cello, and Hector Muñoz, Escovedo’s drummer since the last days of the True Believers, gave everything a firm shove forward. You could almost hear the people on the nightclub’s packed floor finally let go of their bated breath. There would be another chapter of the Alejandro Escovedo story after all.

To ease himself back into touring, he formed the Alejandro Escovedo String Quintet with Standefer, second cellist Matt Fish, violinist Susan Voelz and acoustic guitarist David Polkingham. When they visited the Rams Head Tavern in Annapolis, Md., recently, the ?ve musicians—dressed all in black—sat in a semi-circle of wooden chairs and played old songs and new ones with a hushed intimacy that coaxed previously hidden nuances from the former. In the lobby, they were selling their two-CD, 14-song, web-only release, Room of Songs.

But, now, with The Boxing Mirror hitting record stores, Escovedo has reconvened his rock ’n’ roll band, the one that made the record—Graham, Standefer, Muñoz, Voelz and bassist Mark Andes. It’ll be back on the road that provided him with so many pleasures and temptations in the past. The challenge will be to choose the healthy pleasures and forsake the others. Escovedo is optimistic, but he’s also aware of the dangers. “Speak to me softly, and tell me you love me,” he sings on “Break This Time,” the new album’s galloping, Stones-y rocker. “We’ll join together inside the refrain,” he exults; then he adds the necessary warning, “But I just might break this time.”

“It’s like being in love,” he says of his career at this point; “you never know what the experience is going to be like, but you just throw yourself in there. It’s like surfing; every wave is different, and sometimes you get spit out at the end. I feel like I’ve been through a lot in the last few years and I’ve been spit out and I’m glad to still be standing.”