WE'LL SWEEP OUT THE ASHES IN THE MORNING
Li'l Pilgrims Progress Through The Prograss, And The Earth's Sweet Volcanic Cone

By Don Allred

Nickel Creek's self-titled Sugar Hill debut in 2000 was a keening,
blue-green-grass world of Kentucky-to-Southern-Cali, transplanted suburban Calvinist karma. Prodigies next to prodigals: "My greatest fear will be that you will crash and burn, and I won't feel your fire, I'm hung up on that wire."
Their wires include those on the mandolin, banjo and bouzouki of Chris Thile, then 19 (he's the tallest, and most excitable-sounding); the fiddle of Sara Watkins, at 18; the guitar of her brother Sean, then 23; and the little-but-wiry
vocals of all, who have performed and recorded together for donkey's years. 1993's Little Cowpoke, their first album,features the traditional(and Hollywood)
Western stylings of Chris, age 12; Sara, 11; and Sean, 15. (Be sure to
request "I'm an Old Cowhand," when they come to town.) 13-year-old Chris' first
solo album, 1994's Leading Off, stayed relatively close to tradition, but he got
more adventurous, on 1997's Stealing Second. 2000's *Nickel Creek went gold,
which is unusual for bluegrass, but so is its music. Not so much the classical
or jazz elements: those are fairly typical of progressive bluegrass. Yet
already, the Nickels had a strikingly lived-in point of view: songs like "A
Lighthouse's Tale" were early glimpses of the world's beauty and wreckage, between
the sea and the mountains, home and the freeway. They also sounded like they
were ready to hit the road, Jack.
There was one potential problem area, traveling with them.
"Look at my girlfriend, isn't she pretty?" Chris asked shakily,
clutching his mandolin and staring down into its "face" for CMT's cameras, in late
2001. "I don't WANNA boyfriend!" Sarah laughed, while stamping her foot, and
sounding like she meant this answer to a nosey reporter, in the same mini-doc.
(Shawn, the oldest, had no comment on the subject, that I recall.) Nickel Creek
were determined to focus all their energies on the music! Its nervous edge
was soothed and smoothed out, just a bit, by producer/mist-mama/burbgrass star
Allison Krauss, who brought some of her own discreetly renowned sound to the
Nickels' latent noise. The blend was distinctive, which may well be why, by '02,
*Nickel Creek ended up in Billboard's Top Twenty.
Later in 2002, on *This Side, they covered Pavement's "Spit On A
Stranger": "You're a bittah, stran-g-a-a-h, I could thpit on a stran-gah, " lisped
Chris, in a lofty, bratty way, a parody of self-righteousness. Perhaps it's a
self-parody, or some kind of allusion to his earlier,
Bible-study-to-Tolkien-shelf-to-practice-room perspective? Also striking was his own "Brand New
Sidewalk": "You might not have meant to, but it's done now, you can't take it out.
Is that what this is about? It's done now, you can't take it back. You cry
about what fortune leant you without a plan of attack." They were adapting to the
adult world, gathering and giving out some clues and cues, to certain
ch-ch-changes, but meanwhile, *This Side became hard to listen to. Its subtle
experiments needed some shine, not just polish, and certainly no more of *Nickel Creek's mood stabilizers. Speculative song-shapes' soliloquies and hairline
fractures tended to settle slow-w-w-ly into the dust of dissolving tempi. Maybe
muted drama and delayed impact are all Allison knows how to do. Maybe that's all
they wanted from her. Maybe she and the Nickels brought out each others'
insecurities, when faced with the need for change. Maybe they all should have
consulted Dr. Joyce Brothers. (Maybe contact with *This Side's underside drove
Citizen K. to "Whiskey Lullaby" ? Seriously. Also, the New Morbidity stage/trend
of country's ongoing Life During Wartime was about to waft her Applachoid,
post-dead-baby-ballad way, and maybe the Nickels had already met the New Unease.)
In 2005, their new *Why Should The Fire Die? sports more versatile (but not showy) producers, Eric Valentine and Tony Berg. Also, Nickel Creek
guitarist Sean Watkins, whose solo projects have included jazz musicians, sometimes
brings a Bill Frisell-ian, disappearing crackle to the glamorous darkness.
The Nickels are on the dime now: they sound like they're all dressed in
black, while easing back into the kind of places they once could enter and
leave only via the stage door, when underage. "When in Rome" doesn't fiddle
around. Except in the musical sense, as Sara's sweet, snake-charmer strings chime
around Chris's calls: " Hey, those books you gave us look good on the shelves at
home, and they'll burn warm in the fireplace teacher (no commas in the singing or on the lyrics page!) when in Rome. Grab a blanket,sister, we'll make smoke signals, bring in some new blood, it feels like we're alone." There's also a doctor who comes to town but stays at home, dead men (in the video, sooty WWI soldiers look at the camera, while Chris lies on his back, eyes closed, playing his mandolin and twitching like a cockroach), and a guy with a cold. But that's all in the family, when you do like the Romans do. I think this song has
to do with implied ironic references to touring musicians as cruising tourists, and to Churchly admonitions to "be in the world, not of it." Gang Of Four's "At Home He's A Tourist" also comes to mind.
But there are also plenty of seemingly more direct-to-midnight
confessions, and some boasting, about what bad li'l pilgrims they are. "I helped her
live, and made her want to die!" That's Chris, of course, but each Nickel
contributes to the songwriting, and they take turns singing lead. Sara's got a couple
about seeming the wimpy little sister to potential boyfriends, but one of 'em
goes off and gets married and then can't get Sara out of his mind! The only
consistently disappointing track (especially after her own writing) is Sara's
wispy version of Dylan's "Tomorrow Is A Long Time." (But it's a wispy song,
except when Elvis did it.) Brief instrumentals provide refreshment, while adding
momentum. And the Nickels stomp so hard, so often, that I didn't realize, 'til
reading the credits, after listening to the whole album, that only one track
features drums. And "Doubting Thomas" is a confession so mature it's
inspiring, especially since it leads to the breakthrough of the title song, in which
love and doubt aren't just risked, and lived with, but embraced. If you can grow
up to that point, then indeed, why should (and how could) the fire die?

¶ 10/30/2005 2 comments

For Whom The Drells Toll
A Child's Introduction To A Garden of Wishes And Dishes Upon Big Star
By Don Allred
(The child of reading something in this book, then listening to these CDs
again, wandering to and on and from this computer: not a straight-up review
overall, but a lot of notes, observations, opinions)

Big Star: The Short Life, Painful Death, and Unexpected Resurrection Of The
Kings Of Power Pop
by Ron Jovanovic (A Cappella Books/Chicago Review Press, 333 pages, $15.95)

In Space
Big Star (Ryko)

"The tune itself was an up-tempo rocker, which gave the album an
abrasive start, but the song soon twisted to show its melodic qualities and then took
off to somewhere else completely." That's Rob Jovanovic reporting (he's not a
critic), and however accurately he does or doesn't diagnose "Feel," he's
close to nailing "Feel" 's parents, the misfit Anglophiliac Memphians who named
themselves Big Star, after a chain-chain-chain of grocery stores. In Big Star:
The Short Life, Painful Death And Unexpected Resurrestion Of The Kings Of Pop,
R.J. indicates that they knew their name would rise again, possibly to hang
around their necks like their pointy trademark neon sculpture, which already
looks like a real quick chalk mark around a body.
So what the heck, they named their first album #1 Record. It was more
or less "released" in 1972. On Stax, like their second album, neither of
which was exactly the Stax-ish (Bell Records-labelled) soul-pop of Big Star
frontman Alex Chilton's former group, the Box Tops. (AKA the Funky Monkees, cos
live, in my hearing, they sounded like what they mostly were, a teenbleat cover
band, spazzilizing in hits of the session rat-only Box Tops. Even main
double-shifter Chilton was pro forma-ing his own gravelly,
bluejean-jacketed-soulpunk studio pipes; his preferred range was higher, for better and worse.) #1
Record mainly existed as promotional copies, but (thus?) got great reviews. As did
# 1's even better follow-ups, '74's Radio City and '75's Third/Sister Lovers,
the latter of which couldn't find a legit release until '78, and both of
which pushed Big Star's music and luck further and further. Yet even early on,
their also-funny-named "power pop" was melodic and rough, polished and sweaty,
melodic and twisted. They all continued to radiate in the ears of critsters,
fansters, and musos.
They set the bar too high for most of what gets called power pop.
(Unsurprisingly, considering that generic pee-pee usually boils down to the kind
of creeps who fixate on a [particularly drippy] transitional phase, which then
becomes arrested development at best. Accordingly, their own fansters luv to
whine about "Why isn't there more of their good stuff?" One-hit wonders are
all over the map, get over it. But that would be a contradiction in terms.)
In an afterglow that became an afterlife, they continued to fall, into
truer, bluer Big Stars, making more and more underground/grassroots sense: some
even called them "the Beatles upside down." (As Edd Hurt points out, this notion might have gotten folk-processed from Robert Christgau's 70s Consumer Guide notes on Big Star: "The harmonies sound like the lead sheets are upside down and backwards." But later in the 70s, I heard it from a couple of people, who didn't know each each other, or at least I hope not, considering other things they said. I've always pictured Big Star sprouting from an upside down Used bin in the sky, waiting for the next breeze to take their lusty dust for a cruise.)
Upside down in an operational sense as well, because they had found fresh
possibilities in their native Memphis, and themselves, via the perspective of the
Beatles, yes, but also (as Jovanovic points out) of the Kinks, the Zombies,
even the Beach Boys and Led Zeppelin. (Way before Big Star's local studio
consultant Terry Manning engineered Led Zep III, which also has certain
beyond-folk-rock, modes 'n' nodes in common with Big Star, Zepreneurs launched
another para-Star: even though it was an important introductory single and/or
Featured Track, moving from groovy late night FM to nervy Top 40 Morning Drive,
compulsating "Whole Lotta Love" just couldn't be satisfied with any direction
homerun but that of a purposefully self-Led ((Zik Zak Wohnderah)), as equally
possessed Capt. Beefheart would put it. He and Zep had great live acts, and
he even had tour support like they had more of, but Big Star had little act,
tour, or support, in their original setup.)
Meanwhile, back in dream-(and otherwise-)infested Memphis, Big Star
tunneled through a meta-boilism of mutant-soul-stewpotheaded, Amerophile
records, the black vinyl hobo pyramids of kicks-starved, UK art school dropouts, and
found a space to see things from, not just fall into (although that could also
be cool.)
Jovanovic makes it pungently clear that Big Star were late-adolescents,
precariously balanced, but often (almost) equally determined to swing all
moods and rock all bottoms. Yet another Beatley aspect was that they had their own
mix of George Martin, in the person of Ardent Studios co-founder John Fry,
who had had his own mix of Big Star, in the persons of his own teen gang of
brainac techno-autodidacts (One of whom later founded Federal Express.) He passed
the fever along to Big Star, teaching them how to engineer sound, teaching
them from the waves up. So they in turn could become mad monks of the studio,
locked away in the anti-roots cellar, and all of 'em could take it as far as they
could go. (So Big Star's nuclear cluster wasn't just Alex Chilton Lennon and
Chris Bell McCartney lording it over the other two, it was more of a sweaty,
somewhat richochet-prone group head.)
The music can not only sway and jump like a gland funk railroad,
sometimes it flickers, even while chuffing in place, which is enough to keep it from
sounding very much, to me, like somewhat comparable (element-wise) joyrides
of, say, Buffalo Springfield, who they namecheck in R.J.'s book. (Maybe like
some solo stuff Neil Young would do, but not yet.) Even between croons and nice
beats, it can switch and twitch enough to cough up an anti-groove (groove), a
reaction against what's usually expected and required of Suthun boys, and what
we expect and require and show and peddle of ourselves, typically enough, in
and for some quarters.
Thinking here of Radio City, especially, where "Life is White" 's
post-blues blues claims the dumb post- part for toasties, offered as toothpicks of
white noise that (I guess this part is a harmonica) can seem white as bare
wood appearing in the bandsaw of the Home Improvement daddy, flashing back to his
pre-TV incarnation as bachelor cokefiend jailbird: he demonstrates how to
smoothly peel the bark, as chips, pine needles, blood and white powder fly in
every direction, their shadows crossing over his L.L. Bean plaid shirt, and
spots appear on his khaki Dockers, and his studio light life whites on out, into
the black, or at least the next track, which has its own life to do.) And
each album has its own set of curves. To "Break on thoo!" as the Doors would say,
but Freedom Rock can become more stylized than evah, which might be why Edd
Hurt refers to Radio City as "mannerist."
Not to get too (much more) owlish about it: fairly often, even on the
early tracks, they turn gawky self-consciousness into speedy self-awareness, so
the music seems to comment on itself, but dynamically. "Don't lie to me!" they
squawk, over a heavy beat, which, in this context, sounds (deliberately, I
think!) like a child-man stamping his big foot. Although they could also button
their collars, to face down the gorgeous perfidy of "September Gurls," which
became a hit only when covered by the Bangles, many years later. Many more
years later, their futility-anthem, "In The Street," covered by Cheap Trick, was
adopted as theme song for That 70s Show, and re-named "That 70s Song." (Big
Star's own original rendition of "September Gurls" ended up on That 70s'
semi-soundtrack, possibly because the producers were such fans, and also didn't want
to pay more for the Bangles' version.)
Pt. 2 is below:

¶ 10/12/2005 0 comments