Interluded

Bessie Smith singing, oh how she's singing, "Careless Love Blues."

Grunge Binge #2: Taught Slackers

Stills from the music video for "The Crooked Place" by Glass Eye (circa 1989).

Start with the image, and the simple goal of capturing the essence of "grunge" or whatever. The indefinable aesthetic essence of a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Find the video, which smacks as exemplary of this running definition's core. The video being "The Crooked Place" by Glass Eye. Welcome to Austin, Texas in the late 1980s.

"The crooked places may be made straight but the heart longs for the crooked place," sings Kathy McCarty donning a priest's collar. While singing this phrase her mouth transforms from stolid and effete to this sinister, beautiful smile, and then cut to the fairgrounds of some slacker carnival while these staccato guitar chords punctuate the chaos and cigarette smoking beauty of it all. Ah grunge.

And if this video feels familiar, perhaps that's because the Austin milieu from which this band and video came, is intrinsically tied to one of the town's most prominent cultural figures, filmmaker Richard Linklater. See, McCarty, along with other members of the band, appeared in Linklater's epic, free-ranging indie masterpiece Slacker. And that's McCarty singing a solo acoustic cover of the Daniel Johnston song "Living Life" at the end credits of Linklater's exemplar film Before Sunrise. Point being, this Glass Eye video, which I urge you to watch, is like the grunge holy grail, gravelly and emotionional (both the song and the video), dirty and disheveled and sleazy and full of motion, then haltings, then motion. Watch it:


PS. For a little bit of a "where is she now," you can read Kathy McCarty's personal history of her time and place (she's still making music) in the Austin scene. She wrote her account in this article from 2005 for the Austin Chronicle. Notably:

Long ago, I was in a local all-girl band called the Buffalo Gals, and we were sorta famous. I was the dorky one. Then I was in Glass Eye, here in town, and we were quite popular. That band was together for 10 years, and we won lots of awards and drew huge crowds. We made albums and the critics loved us. We were on MTV.

Like many a critics' darling, we never hit the Big Time. Big labels considered us "Impossible to Market," and perhaps that was true – if you're a slimy piece of shit label yes-man with crispy ashes for a soul. Or something. Either way, after 10 years of superhuman striving, we got all worn out with being fucked around, and broke up. It was sad. OK, I was devastated.

Wake Up Your Windows!

It's Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and a good reason to dredge up this rare New Year's Eve performance by Jeff Mangum, the man behind the band Neutral Milk Hotel. Mangum was an obscure late 90s indie rock figure whose last proper album, the brilliant In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, came out in 1998. But his songs don't seem to tire, particularly the one being performed in this video, "Engine," which can't be found on either of his albums but stands as one of his best songs, though honestly, they're all so good:


PS. Check out the incredible saw playing. Damn a well executed saw performance can make a good song great! Black Heart Procession kills on stage when the saw gets involved.

You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory

If you thought you were hot on this heat wave weekend, watch this video and turn the heat up higher. Witness Ronnie Spector (60s pop star and former wife of crazy Phil Spector) seriously rocking out and feeling it, hard, on this superb cover of a Thunders song. This performance is from 1997 at Coney Island High. That's Joey Ramone on the right, belting it in the chorus. Something about the piercing, drowsy, vibrato in Ronnie's voice crushes me. She owns this song.

Movements, Rapid Eye

"E-Bow the Letter," by R.E.M. From the Album New Adventures in Hi Fi released September 10, 1996

R.E.M.'s New Adventures in Hi Fi marked a smooth, assured tonal shift for the band. And "E-Bow the Letter" is both a remarkable song and video. The lyrics are impressionistic Michael Stipe at his best, delivering his trademark word spillages, images, mixed metaphors. "Aluminum, tastes like fear / Adrenaline pulls us near..." sung by Stipe in the chorus while Patti Smith drawls gravelly, consolingly, longingly in the background, "I'll take you over, Baby." Her voice is either the song's neurotic-emotional love object, or the narrator's other, stronger, more wicked self. Taken that way, the song becomes a conflation of the tremulous masculine with the snarling feminine. This is no quaint love duet. The interplays here transcend normal romance. And the video shows cityscapes, parking lots, the band practicing before walls of little white lights, Stipe writing lyrics left-handedly, Smith on a train, Smith at the station.



It's almost as if she's traveling to Stipe, but you sense she'll never get there. And if she does there will be no embrace, maybe something like an awkward handshake. Or maybe she'll just curl up in a chair while he keeps on writing, only to realize that he is writing about her in the chair and when he looks up she (part of himself, in a sense) isn't there and never was, she's still at the train station, standing, waiting while people walk past, singing, "I'll take you over, Baby.... I'll take you over, Baby..."

Watch it:



P.S. Here is a great 2004 interview with Michael Stipe, conducted by photographer Wolfgang Tillmans for BUTT. Stipe discusses his ambiguous sexuality, among other things. Also, Stipe has a site for his photographs. Check out this one of him called "frightening experiment in north carolina."

Grunge Binge: "Girlfriend" by Eric's Trip

Because everything looks better in Super 8, or at least it did in the grunge era, ah the 1990s, ah if only I had better music taste back then I would have been into the Canadian indie-alterna-grunge-lo-fi rockers Eric's Trip. I did catch on a few years later, but am only truly ingratiated now more then 10 years after their breakup. Though it should be noted that singer/bassist Julie Doiron's latest solo album is a kind of reunion for the band, so, well. This video for "Girlfriend"(1994) exudes some quality grunge aesthetic, particularly the shot (above, top left) of a skeleton driving a 1980s era Honda Civic. How great is that image?! Or the somber pale girl smoking in the forest (above, bottom right),obscured by branches and the shadows of the branches. The band, named after a Sonic Youth song, taps the indie rock vein cut wide open by Pavement and Sebadoh. Melody calms their static crunch and Julie Doiron—oh my dear Julie Doiron still working and performing and breaking my heart to this day—her ethereal yet dissonant vocals soften the corners. Or maybe her vocals smudge the corners, with pink? Whatever, the video rocks. Grunge children of the 90s, shake your sleepy heads, your comeuppance is here.

Watch this:



PS. To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what the label "Grunge" actually connotes, but I'm thinking: alternative, slackers, indie rockers... you know. Right? Why not throw out a few more labels define the label. But I'm thinking it's a blanket term for white, non-mainstream rock-aligned music listeners of the 1990s. For now, let's say it's a running definition.