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Wayne Coyne’s Coffee Recipe and Philosophy (Arthur, 2004)

Come On In My Kitchen

This issue’s chef: Wayne Coyne of Flaming Lips

Originally published in Arthur No. 12 (Sept. 2004)

Wayne Coyne’s Coffee Recipe and Philosophy

To begin with, I have not willingly become a “coffee snob.” It was not something I ever aspired to. Christ, we used to drink coffee at Denny’s…and we liked it!!! But it’s not simply a matter of flavor. The process of preparing it seems to have become significant as well… Like any addiction there is a sense of pride associated with being so enslaved.

1. First: my choice of apparatus is the “french press” that holds about six cup-size cups…about 50 ounces….

2. Use freshly roasted beans, if this can be done. If not, roast some, say, on Monday and use them through, oh maybe, Friday…

3. I like to use a lot of coffee, you know, to get more flavor. But the unfortunate side-effect is absorbing too much caffeine…this is easily fixable by mixing de-caf with regular beans. This, to some coffee snobs, may seem like poor judgement…they will claim de-caf’s flavor is inferior. But this argument is only valid in a purists’ agenda-type debate, kind of like trying to hear the difference between analog and digital. If you know what you are doing, it’s imperceptible; in other words the regular and the de-caf taste virtually the same. Anyway, like I said, I like to use a lot of coffee. So in a “french press” that holds about five or six cups, use about a cup’s worth of coffee.

4. Grind these beans as fine as they can be ground, making it appear like black Kool-Aid. Plus you can wash these down the kitchen sink without worrying too much about clogging.

5. Part of what is enjoyable about making coffee is the smell of it. Freshly ground beans are a wonderful pleasure trigger. So try not to have too many other smells competing with it, stuff like bacon…wait till the coffee’s done, then cook it. Nail polish, wet dogs and potent perfumes can collide with the coffees’ aroma creating a horrible combination. Kind of like playing a Belle and Sebastian CD and a Miles Davis CD at the same time—both are great on their own—but together, probably unpleasant.

6. Pour the boiling water over the black powder. DO NOT POUR TOO MUCH, for the beans will expand quite a bit…so pour ‘til about half full. Wait a couple of minutes…shake and wiggle the “french press”…this will gently blend the water and coffee together. DO NOT STIR. Once it has settled pour some more water—do some more wiggling.

7. Use wide-mouthed coffee cups, so the smell can go more easily into the nostrils. Small cups are better, not little espresso cups, but small enough that the coffee stays hot for the duration of the drinking.

8. Use dark brown sugar and thick half and half mixture at your liking.

9. Drink five to ten cups… be close to a bathroom…enjoy life…..

Holly’s Mashed Roots — a recipe from Holly Golightly (Arthur, 2004)

Art direction by W.T. Nelson.

Originally published in Arthur No. 8 (Jan. 2004).

Holly’s Mashed Roots

Submitted by Holly Golightly of London, England.

In the winter I like to make this dish whenever I roast poultry or game. I have fed some minor celebrities on it and thrown it at boyfriends. It’s very versatile that way. And very tasty.

Four large carrots and four large parsnips

Large knob of butter

Ground black and red pepper

Peeled, crushed garlic to taste

Peel and cut vegetables in evenly sized discs along the length, place in pan and cover with cold water. Add a pinch of salt. Bring to boil and simmer until soft (about 8-10 minutes) on low heat. Strain off water and chop roughly with a sharp knife. Add butter, pepper and crushed garlic and mash until smooth.

Serve piping hot with roasted poultry or game (stuffed with chestnuts and apricots) and slow roasted potatoes, bread sauce, green beans and port gravy.

Some Kind of Megalomaniac: James Parker on the Dandy Warhols-Brian Jonestown Massacre documentary Dig! (Arthur, 2004)

Some Kind of Megalomaniac

The unfamous also feud, as James Parker finds in Dig!, a feature-length film documenting the decade-long love/hate thing between the leaders of the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. 

Originally published in Arthur No. 12 (Sept. 2004)

Reviewed:

DIG!

(Palm Pictures, released October 1)

Directed by Ondi Timoner

In order to really dig DIG!—an intimate, warmly detailed portrait of the decade-long love/hate thing between Courtney Taylor (of the Dandy Warhols) and Anton Newcombe (of the Brian Jonestown Massacre)—you have to buy into the idea that Newcombe is a genius. It’s important, this, and just about everyone onscreen testifies to it sooner or later: Newcombe is a GENIUS. He pushes the boundaries, burns with a hard, gem-like flame, is monstrous in his talent, must be compared with Manson, God, Hitler and Lou Reed, and so on. It’s the one point on which this otherwise swinging, confident movie insists a little anxiously.

The Dandy Warhols and the BJM were, very briefly, artistic confederates. Fellow retro-ites and stylists, they played together, swapped ideas and—doubtless—pairs of trousers, and their careers advanced in parallel for about two minutes before the Dandys got the major label deal which still eludes the BJM. Thereafter, the two bands were each other’s nemeses. Anton Newcombe became the unrewarded GENIUS raging in obscurity, Courtney Taylor the limelit, slightly guilt-afflicted music-biz hustler. DIG!, narrated by Taylor (because history is written by the winners), covers just about every key point in the relationship, from Newcombe’s innocent rhapsodies about “this really rad band, the Dandy Warhols” to his first anti-Dandy song “Not If You Were the Last Dandy On Earth” (a riposte to the Dandys’ radio hit “Not if You Were the Last Junkie on Earth”) to the moment he sends the band a box of individually wrapped shotgun shells with their names on them.

Success, in our imaginations at least, is just success —static, constant,some sort of white-lit plane, like heaven. Failure on the other hand is many things, a very mulchy and soulful state, and so DIG is inevitably more interested in the disastrous trajectory of the BJM, about whom the first thing you notice is not the blurting and blustering Newcombe—“I play 80 instruments. Yeah! Weird fuckin’ Chinese shit!”— but the amazingly pointless Joel Gion. Gion (hairstyle, cigarettes) is one these extra or ‘trophy’ members that a lot of your more berserk bands seem to have, to signal the sheer anarchic superfluity of their energy—like Bez in Happy Mondays, or almost any of the Butthole Surfers. In Gion’s case he implements the BJM aesthetic by standing at stage-front looking down his nose and half-arsedly wagging a tambourine. A very pure artist, untainted by actual creation, Gion’s main job seems to be keeping his balance after monster ingestion of drugs. On his little Chelsea bootsoles he teeter-totters, sneering. His clothes are black, his hair is classic through-a-hedge-backwards, and on his pear-shaped face is that expression of somnolent haughtiness we associate with Dr Seuss characters; in fact the longer you look at him the more Seussian he gets—remote, effete, insolent, with tassels for hands, and a name like the Fazoon or the Sprong . ‘Do not look long on the infamous Sprong/ The tilt of his chin is wrong wrong wrong’…

Anyway, Gion turns out to be a witty fellow and quite undeluded—the yang of BJM, if such a thing could be said to exist. Newcombe on the other hand has no sense of humor—none. You can’t be a megalomaniac perfectionist and have a sense of humor.

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TRUST AND LOVE: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Sharp Ease (Chris Ziegler, Arthur, 2006)


The Sharp Ease: Dana Barenfeld, Christene Kings, Paloma Parfrey and Aaron Friscia.

Trust and Love

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Sharp Ease

By Chris Ziegler

Photography by Molly Frances

Originally published in Arthur No. 24 (August 2006)

A slightly injured and slightly drunk Sunday afternoon with the Sharp Ease: singer Paloma Parfrey is tipsy with a beer and a bent trumpet and one sprained ankle, still limping after the part in last night’s show when she fell into a hole in the stage. But Sharp Ease write off injuries instantly. Two shows ago, Paloma had scribbled some broken glass all over her arm, and she was completely recovered within hours. That’s the resilience of the Los Angeles native—the same thing that keeps coyotes and deer poking around the edge of Echo Park also keeps the Sharp Ease alive and thriving. Early 45s like “T-Spin” and first album Going Modern (released last year on olFactory Records in cooperation with LA’s landmark all-ages space the Smell) outlined the Sharp Ease sound: Pixies and Slits with sax (by Anika Stephen) and keys (by Paloma’s brother Isaac) and cut-above lyrics by Paloma, who grew up in a commune and graduated into teenage rock ‘n’ roll band the Grown-Ups before she even graduated high school. Newest EP Remain Instant finds Sharp Ease recovering after a line-up shake-up (longtime producer/supporter Rod Cervera played guitar on this one, following original guitarist Sara Musser) for seven of their best new songs about life in still-unheard Los Angeles—the never-seen-on-TV co-ops and galleries and collectives that keep an out-of-breath outsider community breathing, where the Sharp Ease play their shows and sprain their ankles. Paloma and bassist Dana Barenfeld, drummer Christene Kings and new guitarist Aaron Friscia meet for beer and photographs at Paloma’s 1957 Airstream trailer.

Arthur: Paloma, exactly what kind of commune did you grow up in?

Paloma: My parents were both extremely politically active and they decided to join this commune after I was six months old to be able to protest regularly and feed the homeless. It was this thing in East LA—the Catholic Worker. It’s Christian-oriented, but not like hyper-Christian. Their work is to serve the hungry and protest nuclear weapons. So I’ve been protesting since I was six months old.

Christene: Paloma came out of the womb with a NO NUKES sign.

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“It’s Medicinal!: The Hand-Sewn Power Of Little Wings” by Trinie Dalton (Arthur, 2008)

It’s Medicinal!: The Hand-Sewn Power Of Little Wings

by Trinie Dalton

Originally published Jan 16, 2008 on Arthur’s Yahoo blog

Soft Pow’r, the new Little Wings album, wields its quietude like a sword. Lead singer Kyle Field rambles through tunes pondering solitude and longing, but his sad songs have an acidic, transformative edge: gentle guitar lullabies strummed underneath harmonized, twangy vocals that are often compared to Neil Young’s. Current bandmates Lee Baggett, Curtis Knapp, Adam Forkner, and Jona Bechtolt amp up the enterprise in parts; some songs, like “Free Bird,” have a simple country edge, while others, like “Beep About,” are more jazzy and abstract. Field mentions via email that he likes playing loud live, but hadn’t had the desire to record loud music in awhile. He says Soft Pow’r has a “mediciney” feel.

Soft Pow’r is less wizard-inflected than Little Wings’ previous album, Magic Wand: there’s more direct lyrics about the songwriter’s moods, and the musings detail specific people and settings. In the past Field has eschewed blunt narrative messages, mostly declining interviews in favor of writing songs cryptic or whimsical enough to encourage interpretive guessing.

Listening to Magic Wand, I’d suspected that Little Wings were mellow, canyon-dwelling elves who played crystal-powered, ancient machines for their songs featuring whale mountains and a wand who hides inside someone’s robe. Field has described exploring mystical themes through harmonic music as his desire “to study the patterns and relationships between lines, and to think of singing as weaving the sound’s fabric.”

But with Soft Pow’r‘s first line, “Totally lost in the fog, who’s not?” Little Wings launch into several tracks about memory—remembering the past to grasp the present. “Gone Again,” a bluesy tune about someone sitting on a beach, “out of touch,” conjures up a narrator lamenting a missing loved one. The lyric, “I feel a breath but it’s not from my mouth,” in “Warming” evokes an image of a ghost searching for signs of life.

Nature is the buoy keeping characters afloat in Little Wings’ music, providing the free, open space where one discovers feelings long buried. Emotional states in Field’s music have always been conveyed through nature metaphors. Throughout my favorite Soft Pow’r song, “Scuby,” about a boy mysteriously departed, sun slants through windows, pumpkins are carved and candlelit, and tall trees sway in an Autumn tribute heralding a change of season as much as change of friendship. Field feels that describing human conditions through nature’s cues creates timeless songs that remind the listener of mortality. Soft Pow’r offers nature as solace: self-reflecting and medicinal, like the album itself.

Soft Pow’r, just released on Field’s new imprint RAD with upstream support from Marriage Records, links Field’s visual talents with the musical. Field is an exhibiting artist who makes earthy yet ethereal colored pencil and watercolor drawings–he has already designed a skateboard deck for RAD, and his friend Richard Swan has artfully hand-sewn Soft Pow’r promotional patches to sell on RAD’s website. These are no average patches; Swan once mailed me a customized wool sweater covered with Sasquatch patches, including a giant, brown foot with a question mark cut out of it, and a patchwork Bigfoot scene depicting the beast caught by a camera lens. I love men who sew!

Check out RAD: marriagerecs.com/rad/ rad.html

Check out Kyle Field’s drawings: www.kyledraws.com

http://www.littlewingsnow.com/

TRINIE DALTON is an author and frequent contributor to the free transgenerational counterculture bimonthly Arthur Magazine. Her latest books are the illustrated novella A Unicorn Is Born (Rizzoli) and Wide Eyed (Akashic), a collection of short stories.

“Destroying Britney For Profit: Notes On Jann Wenner, Clive Davis And Other Vampires In Decline” by Joe Carducci (Arthur, 2008)

Destroying Britney For Profit: Notes On Jann Wenner, Clive Davis And Other Vampires In Decline

by Joe Carducci

Originally published Mar 5, 2008 on Arthur’s Yahoo blog

It was a bit much to read Rolling Stone’s recent cover story on Britney Spears. It was probably written by Vanessa Grigoriadis, though three others are accused of “additional reporting.” But none of these wrote this sentence:

“She’s the perfect celebrity for America in decline: Like President Bush, she just doesn’t give a f**k, but at least we won’t have to clean up after her mess for the rest of our lives.”

That one’s gotta be by Jan Wenner. (His byline has been Jann Wenner since he went skiing in Gstaad in the early seventies and fell in love with Alpine Teutonic machismo.) But this particular issue’s real offenses were:

1. Wenner Media’s corrupt humility in the Britney piece, where Rolling Stone is counterposed to OK magazine, a Brit competitor just rolling out an American edition. You’d never know that it was Jan himself who brought the fleet street scumbag sensibility up from the Florida-based drugstore tabloids and onto supermarket shelves via his own Us Weekly. “Us!” As if! The PR media began to turn on its celebrity subjects when the movies, TV and music that featured them began to be faked even more cynically in the 1980s. It’s Jan’s cash that keeps those jackals with their digicams running through the streets of Los Angeles after Britney whether she’s coming from or going to rehab, court, or the mall. He debased the People magazine formula and now the Brits are setting up directly to chase him downmarket.

2. The same issue’s piece on Clive Davis wherein Rich Cohen attempts to fob off this pop vampire as the last of the “record men.” It’s right there in the article: He was the first of the suits, not the last of the record men! He made Barry Manilow record “Mandy” which don’t you know made his whole career possible! Who edits this rag?! Clive Davis was last seen trying to break down Kelly Clarkson with the promise of turning her into a Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston! Sounds like an actionable threat to me. Only a true record man would hire Mike Watt to play on a pop session, and Davis opposed it.

Wenner is the perfect mogul for a Media in decline.

According to the new issue of The Atlantic (again a Britney cover), the gossip sites see their heavy traffic “during the corporate lunch hour, from women between the ages of 16 and 34.” What is Britney exploring for her audience? Author David Samuels writes,

“In the dark sewer of misanthropic, gynophobic, and Rabelaisian epithets running through the comments section of celebrity blogs, one can also find gems of authentic emotional connection to celebrity foibles… A good number of readers seem to write in the openly delusional… belief that if their post is sincere or hateful enough, the walls separating their own lives from the lives of celebrities will dissolve, transporting them from the backlit world of their LCD screens to the super-pollinated atmosphere of the media daisy chain.”

Samuels claims the blog-staff at X17, the leading paparazzi agency with a new retail blog, are “USC film-school graduates who prefer to conceal their real names in order to preserve their future viability in the rapidly disintegrating Hollywood system.” Good thinking, kids. I can somehow picture the films you will one day make.

Nowhere in this Britney coverage high and low is any consideration of what she is doing in her roomful of mirrors. She did more than “give it up” in the paparazzi parlance as other stars that subtly position or pose to help them create their shots. She seems to have doubled down on stardom just as it’s dissolving from something once as concrete as George Clooney’s bone structure into something ambient or liquid. Additionally, within the secret world of young women, new rapidly normalizing options like anti-depressants, cosmetic surgery, and period-suppression are whirling into the still unsettled breakthroughs of contraception and abortion. Lindsay Lohan’s sad reprise of Marilyn Monroe’s final photo session before her suicide in a recent issue of New York, and Heath Ledger’s simple drug O.D. seem small compared to the level Britney is operating on. She’s the new media supernaut; I hope she escapes their death watch and lives to tell, or dies in private.

Joe Carducci is the author of Rock and the Pop Narcotic and Enter Naomi: SST, L.A. and All That…. This is his first blog post for Arthur Magazine.

What The Heck Is Arthur Anyway?: A Quick Introduction by Jay Babcock (Arthur, 2007)

What The Heck Is Arthur Anyway?: A Quick Introduction

by Jay Babcock

Originally posted Oct 25, 2007 on Arthur’s Yahoo blog

What the heck is Arthur anyway?

Arthur is a critically acclaimed, transgenerational global counterculture magazine. We’ve been publishing it once every two months since 2002, giving it away free at record shops, used bookstores, coffeehouses, art galleries, movie theaters, shoe stores, hair salons, nightclubs, divebars, libraries, opium dens, juicerias, yoga studios, punk houses, all-ages venues, meditation spaces, ice cream trucks, colleges, food co-ops and other freak hideouts across North America. (If you haven’t seen Arthur before, you can order a hard copy from arthurmag.com. Of course if you need it NOWNOWNOW, you can download our latest issue as a PDF from our website also — but I gotta say the hard copy is really where it’s at — paper is portable, you don’t have to squint at it, the pages are designed to be viewed in a space bigger than most computer monitors anyway, and best of all, you can read magazines in the great outdoors — without using up any energy).

Arthur‘s mission is… um… Well, the main thing is it’s a labor of love. We cover what we want to cover. We write about what we want to write about. Generally speaking, we’re interested in the eternal underground, the edge of the envelope where freedom is freer, that tricky territory where new, progressive modes of art and behavior are tried out, whatever the period, whatever the mode. Kalakuta, Haight-Ashbury, Fort Thunder, Sao Paolo, Bolinas, the Lower Eastside, WhamCity: every interesting scene, or personage, is eligible. In each issue of Arthur, we gather together the best available talent — writers and photographers, artists and connoisseurs, filmmakers and video game designers, political actionists and festival organizers, ground-level poets and high-altitude observers — and let them share with us what they’ve found that is of particular interest, value, use. The idea is to bring stuff to the public’s attention — for free — that isn’t the dreary pop gunk that’s in our faces 24/7.

We’re not doing anything new, really. Just last week, The New Yorker ran a feature on the great learned historian Jacques Barzun, which included this tidbit: “In 1951, Barzun, [Lionel] Trilling, and W. H. Auden started up the Readers’ Subscription Book Club, writing monthly appreciations of books they thought the public would benefit from reading. The club lasted for eleven years, partly on the strength of the recommended books, which ranged from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition and partly on the strength of the editors’ reputations.”

That’s not to suggest that Arthur‘s team of contributors is of that stature, only that we share the same general program of cultural uplift — a desire to be something of more use than the general consumer guide that masquerades as a magazine in these sad, devolving times. In the last few years, Arthur‘s contributors have included Byron Coley & Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, whose regular “Bull Tongue” review column has been absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary underground culture; authors Trinie Dalton, Douglas Rushkoff, Erik Davis, Brian Evenson and Daniel Pinchbeck; veteran journalists Kristine McKenna, Peter Relic, Gabe Soria, Daniel Chamberlin, Dave Reeves, Sorina Diaconescu, John Payne and Eddie Dean; photographers Melanie Pullen, Eden Batki and Susannah Howe; and countless other writers, cartoonists, photographers, poets and –of course– designers.

Has Arthur made a difference? Not as much as we’d like. A magazine’s cultural impact is always going to be hard to measure in quantitative terms. But, that said, it’s been interesting to watch how artists–and ideas–that got their first airing in a national magazine in Arthur‘s pages have subsequently entered the dim edges of the mainstream’s consciousness. Devendra Banhart? Read the first interview he ever gave anywhere in the pages of December 2002’s Arthur No. 2, or check out the cover feature on him in Arthur No. 10–which also featured the first long-form interview anywhere with Joanna Newsom, who herself would be covered in even greater depth in an award-winning piece by Erik Davis in Arthur No. 25. Ohioan blues rawkers The Black Keys, comics genius and magus Alan Moore, quixotic rock sibling duo Fiery Furnaces, drone-metal band Sunn 0))), avant-psych-pop group Animal Collective, M.I.A., West Coast psychedelic roarers Comets on Fire, the uncategorizable Six Organs of Admittance, the good ol’ Howlin’ Rain, comics genius Grant Morrison and woozy psychedelic soul nomads Brightblack Morning Light all received serious, substantial coverage in Arthur a while ago — not because we’re trendspotters or hypesmiths, but because we simply dug what they were doing while everybody else was busy covering…well, something else.

As for why the magazine is named Arthur…well, that would be telling. Have a guess in the Comments section below.


Jay Babcock is editor/owner of Arthur Magazine

“Nothing Left to Lose: What Happens When Music Becomes Worthless?” by Jay Babcock (Arthur, 2007)

Nothing Left to Lose: What Happens When Music Becomes Worthless?

by Jay Babcock

Originally posted Oct 1, 2007 on Yahoo’s Arthur blog

In a few days Radiohead’s new album In Rainbow will be available on a pay-what-you-like basis to anyone who wishes to download it from them. Take it as a acknowledgment of what everybody already knows: in the digital world that the transnational entertainment-communications conglomerates have done so much to summon in the last 25 years, without apparent regard for the long-term consequences, recorded music—music that people used to buy—has become free. For established artists like Radiohead—or Prince, who launched his new album via a CD tacked on the front of a British Sunday newspaper, or his lordship Paul McCartney, who debuted his latest album through Starbucks, or (worst of all) the Eagles, who are releasing their new album exclusively through an anti-union discount store chain that shall remain nameless—this is all fun ‘n’ games. Like most artists, they’ve witnessed the music industry’s legendarily shady accounting practices for years, incredible feats in which record companies stayed in business yet somehow, when it came time to pay the creators, never made a dime. So it’s gotta be a big kick for all of these dudes to be able to thumb their shapely noses at those who have been screwing them for years. They ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more, and they’re telling us all about it.

Well, good for all of these guys (except the Eagles, of course). It’s hard to shed a tear for mega-corporations whose record companies are run by beancounters who are bad at math. And most of us weren’t likely to buy a new Radiohead album anyway, so “free” just means some of us will download it, listen to it and delete it. No loss there for anyone, I guess. Meanwhile, Radiohead will receive tons of applause from not just their loyal fanbase, but also the “information wants to be free” internet booster contingent. They’ll be the subject of every music-related conversation for weeks. And will rake it in at the turnstiles, as they always do, when they perform live. Though their music is now worthless, Radiohead’s value as an income-earning entity has increased. Savvy.

But hold on. What happens to those no-to-low-income artists, many of them doing signficant work, who haven’t established themselves in the pre-burn/download era? Going deeper, what happens to the entire infrastructure of artists, enthusiasts, record labels, live venues, stores and media (TV, radio, print, etc) that made Radiohead’s ability to give away their music possible in the first place? What happens to this ecology, unbalanced and out-of-whack as it already was, when its currency has become almost completely worthless?

The most immediate effect is already apparent: there are fewer and fewer mediated (or, curated) places devoted to music. In America, which has an underdeveloped commons, those places are marketplaces: in other words, record stores. And the really good record stores in this country—the ones owned and operated by knowledgeable enthusiasts, staffed by dayjobbing musicians and music freaks, local clearinghouses of art and information, where meaningful discoveries and lasting connections have historically been made—started disappearing a few years ago and extinction seems to be nearing. What’s going to replace these stores? The schools got rid of significant art appreciation and application long ago. Public libraries, our repositories of cultural knowledge, are criminally underfunded and understaffed. Publicly funded performance venues of all sizes exist all over Scandinavia and other parts of Europe, but good luck finding such spaces in the USA.

These spaces are important, because by containing elements of both chance and quality control, and by being in the real, physical, analog world, they increase the quality and complexity of communication between people. You take those away and you guaran-goddamn-tee a society of atomized, alienated consumers, disconnected cubicle people who gaze at computer screens more than each other’s faces: humans, in other words, in love with machines. Which, I guess, is what “Radiohead” means. Goodbye, art, community and communion: hello, paranoid androids.

Jay Babcock is editor/owner of Arthur Magazine

CITY POET, COUNTRY POET: Mark Frohman on Leonard Cohen and Townes Van Zandt reissues (Arthur, 2007)

City Poet, Country Poet

by Mark Frohman

Originally posted Dec 7, 2007 on Arthur’s Yahoo blog

While most of the country is stumbling over each other, filling shopping bags with the latest accessories to 21st century life, we at Arthur headquarters are leisurely loading up the annual time capsule in an effort to preserve some evidence of civilization’s existence for future generations. The capsule will be launched into orbit from an undisclosed location in the high desert at exactly 11:59 pm on December 31st and is scheduled to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere, should it still exist, in 2095.

Filling the frontal lobe of the Soviet-designed, cigar-shaped capsule (Ebay score circa Y2K), are two of this past year’s standout reissue programs: the first three Leonard Cohen albums (Songs Of Leonard Cohen, Songs From A Room, Songs Of Love And Hate) and the first three Townes Van Zandt records (For The Sake Of The Song, Our Mother The Mountain, Townes Van Zandt–all available from Mississippi’s Fat Possum Records).

It was a good year to be reminded of the power of song. These collections celebrate two of this country’s finest lyrical poets; the fact that one of them is Canadian only adds to our pride. Both men have been loved and loathed, revered and scorned for their moody evocations of wandering desire, sparse and haunting arrangements, and, to some uptight ears, flat and unmusical singing voices.

While similarities between the lives of Cohen and Van Zandt also abound–the old world family money and education, the brooding depression, the mythical lifestyle of earthly excesses (Cohen: women and wine, Van Zandt: wine and women, in that order)–Cohen was city poet to Van Zandt’s country poet. Cohen sings his songs of self from the perspective of an Old Testament Prophet transplanted in Greenwich Village. You don’t listen to his songs, you enter them, through a haze of incense and cigarettes, at 3 a.m., through an unmarked door in whatever bohemian neighborhood you temporarily call home. Van Zandt may have set out for the city but never quite made it there, distracted along the way by his cowboy fantasies, tumultuous romances, and the winding backroads that lead to the isolated cabin in Tennessee where he spent much of the ’70s. As he sings on “I’ll Be Here In The Morning” from both For The Sake Of The Song and Townes Van Zandt, “There’s no prettier sight than looking back at the town you left behind.”

While a finely penned lyric doesn’t seem to be first priority among today’s musical acts, in the late ’60s it must have mattered. Those big 12″ x 12″ lyric sheets were meant to be read and contemplated, preferably by candlelight while huddled around your turntable.

Recorded roughly during the same years (’67-’70) and locations (Los Angeles and Nashville), Cohen’s and Van Zandt’s first three records are each masterpieces of songwriting, modulating from simple love ballads to moral fables to surrealist (some might suggest psychedelic) visions in ways that speak in the particular vernacular of their chosen personas. The songs on these records carve out portraits of what in less cynical times was referred to as the Human Condition. Love, lust, death, demons, and loneliness wage battle among delicate arrangements of mostly acoustic instruments. The voices are deep and grounded, almost unexpressive narrators that belie the turbulent emotions boiling beneath the surface. The production treatment given to these albums is also key to their magical appeal. For both artists, the voice is always front and center, articulated, and clear, but various production anomalies make their albums less of the usual “folk singer” fare and closer to the realm of the more artistically minded “rock” album.

Cohen’s voice tends to embody both a whisper and a growl, inhabiting a rumbling frequency that seems to advance and recede from some dark reverberant tunnel. It is well known that Cohen fought to keep the arrangements minimal and drum-free on these early recordings but as we all know, the devil is in the details. The ghostly appearance of accompaniment by calliope, jew’s harp, strings, spaghetti western guitar, flutes, accordion, a children’s choir, flugel horn, and occasional percussion transport his records beyond genre and make them oddly timeless.

There is a little more variety as well as controversy in the Van Zandt catalog concerning the production that surrounds Townes’ polite East Texas drawl. Unlike Cohen, Van Zandt took a more Laissez-faire approach to the recording studio, thinking that if the songs were good enough they could withstand any producer’s meddling. His first record, For The Sake Of The Song, is almost universally criticized as overproduced, to the point that producer Cowboy Jack Clement has reportedly since apologized. The galloping percussion, droning recorders, wall-of-sound backing vocals, and waltzing harpsichord, all wrapped in a slushy reverb, certainly taint the album with a feeling of Hollywood cowboy kitsch that was probably not what Townes had in mind for 1967. At this distance though, its baroque stylings sound almost avant garde and it’s interesting to hear the energetic arrangements contrast downbeat tracks like “Waitin’ Around To Die.” By the time we get to the third album Townes Van Zandt, his re-recording of this track as well as several others from the first album, has settled into the sparse and pristine production style that would characterize most of the rest of his recordings, but flourishes of sporadic drums and the recurring harpisichord and recorder still sneak in on a few tracks. Our Mother The Mountain was the genre-defying transitional work between the two, and a shamefully underrated monument of late ‘60s musical history, with subtle atmospheric textures and gorgeous string arrangements that elegantly counterpoint Townes’ fever dream lyrics.

If the English language is eventually phased out with future generations in favor of a communication method based entirely on ringtones, the more curious members of this future society will at least be able to ponder the mysterious portraits that adorn the jackets and sleeves of these records. “Gods?,” they’ll wonder at the iconoclastic figures staring back at them. We are fortunate to still know the truth: not gods, but simply men with something to say.


Mark Frohman is Art Director of Arthur Magazine and shares Townes Van Zandt’s hometown of Houston, Texas.

James Parker on “Rise: The Story of Rave Outlaw Disco Donnie” (Arthur, 2004)

What If You Never Come Down?

by James Parker

Originally published in Arthur No. 11 (July 2004)

Reviewed:

Rise: The Story of Rave Outlaw Disco Donnie DVD

(Music Video Distributors)

Directed by Julie Drazen

I remember raving. I remember Ecstasy. I remember chewing on a piece of gum until it broke—until it turned into something else, something weak and viscid, its gummy properties of twang and bounce quite exhausted. Symbolic? I thought so. I remember the mad foam of chemical brotherhood. I remember insisting, deep in some woofing, thumping London club, that two people I had just met stand next to me with their heads touching mine so that I could enjoy the warmth of their nude ears (we all had very short hair). And I did it in San Francisco too, where the loonies are—a man at a ‘smart drinks’ bar, wearing an Anarchic Adjustment t-shirt, told me that in the course of his psychedelic researches he had become invisible for nearly three weeks. 

I know a little bit about it, is what I’m saying, but Julie Drazen’s Rise —a movie about New Orleans rave promoter Disco Donnie—still surprised me, because guess what the kids have done now? They’ve taken raving—the most godless, pharmaceutically programmed, pseudo-spectacular trip there is—and gone and made a religion out of it. And because their minds have been weakened by drugs and flashing lights, they have christened this religion with the anaemic acronym PLUR. PLUR, for Peace Love Unity Respect, which they pronounce as a single syllable to rhyme with “purr.” Oh dear. “Jesus preached PLUR!” declares a girl with awful Ecstatic earnestness, filmed against a colourless background. The bass frequencies of an offscreen rave shimmer around her, and her jaw is lunging about like something trapped. “And he probably smoked bud too!” Her boyfriend is even worse, a drug-electrified fanatic, unable to do anything more than twitch his head in agreement. Rave as spent cultural force? Just say that word PLUR and hear the energy leaking out of you, away from that promisingly plosive beginning—the pop! of newness—into entropy, wasted breath, the heat-death of the universe etc.

Not to bash the kids: they have an absolute right to their foolishness. And if they make it through, if they don’t entirely ransack their life’s ration of serotonin and good luck, who knows, they could end up as wearily wise as me. But there does seem to be some synchrony going on here between the powers of Ecstasy and the credulousness and positivity of the American national character. British ravers, though drugged like shamans, were by and large a pasty-faced, sardonic crew. They kept it—I won’t say real, but realistic. UK rave had its cranks and ideologues of course: one thinks for example of the magnificent shaven-headed Spiral Tribe, illegal party planners and white label artists, speculating on mystical vortices, intoxicated with the number 23, bouncing grimly in churned fields and in the corners of squats. But an essential British narrowness was always part of it. This was part the distinct pleasure of the whole trip: beneath the skin of the most blazingly loved-up raver, his open arms extended zombie-like towards you, you could always discern the sunken shrewd skull-face of the morning after, the colour of an empty milk bottle. The spidery ironist Jarvis Cocker made fun of us all: and you want to call your mother and say /”Mother, I can never come home again/’cos I seem to have left an important part of my brain/ somewhere, somewhere/ in a field, in Hampshire (“Sorted For E’s and Wizz”). In America there was Timothy Leary in his robes. There was twinkling Terence McKenna, that one-man rocket-ship leaving the Ego behind. It was in America that someone actually said to me, muffled deep in an embrace, “I don’t know who you are, but I fucking love you.”

But back to Rise.

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