Interview
November 2006
1) The Drones: Gala Mill (ATP/R). I was attracted to this solely because the title of the band’s last album, Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By, echoes two of my favorite band names: When People Were Shorter and Lived Near the Water and And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. How could Gala Mill be anything but great? Sure, dull title, but according to the press release, this Australian four-piece, led by singer-guitarist Gareth Liddiard, recorded on “an isolated 10,000-acre farm” in Tasmania. Eat your heart out, Nick Cave.
None of that—and none of the band’s earlier music—is any preparation for what happens here, from the first moment. “Jezebel” is a long, delirious song that seems to suck all the chaos and horror of the present moment into a single human being, who struggles to contain that world inside himself: a world that seemingly takes the shape of the Belsan school massacre of 2004, which in this noise is all but recreated. Especially on the choruses, when a drone comes up, hovers, waits—and it’s unnerving, waiting for the sound to break—you can’t tell if the singer succeeds or not, or if it would be better if he succeeded or failed. Better for who? You are dragged into this song as if you were a prisoner. The performance is a shocker—and the album, casting off its echoes of Neil Young and Eleventh Dream Day, staking out its own territory in song after song, can hardly recover from it. Not until the final number, a nine-minute reenvisioning of a traditional Australian convicts’ ballad—and after that, you really will know this band by their trail of dead.
2) Broom: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin (Polyvinyl). Okay, but they don’t do “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”—Boris’s favorite song.
3) Clerks II, written and directed by Kevin Smith (The Weinstein Company). Last line of the film: “Today is the first day of the rest of our lives.” Immediately jettisoned by Soul Asylum’s suicidal “Misery.”
4) Grates: Gravity Won’t Get You High (Dew Process). For “Inside Outside”—fast, desperate, cool, absolutely unafraid of how smart it is. “I might live to tell the tale,” says singer Patience, “of how young girls once rode a whale.”
5) Ellen Barkin: “It’s nighttime in the big city . . .” Theme Time Radio Hour with Bob Dylan (XM Radio). Every week, before Dylan as disc jockey begins spinning his discs and telling his tales, Barkin, the woman who so long ago in Diner couldn’t put her husband’s records back in the right order, now stands back and lowers the boom. After her opening line, what by now amounts to a poem in progress unfolds: “A woman walks barefoot, her high heels in a handbag . . . A man gets drunk, he shaves off his moustache . . . A cat knocks over a lamp . . . An off-duty cop parks in front of his ex-wife’s house.” Is he stalking her, or do they still sleep together?
6) Cat Power: Live on KEXP (eMusic exclusives). Four numbers recorded on the air with only guitar and piano, and likely a more complete summation of who this woman is and what she does than can be found anywhere else. It’s all so quiet you don’t know whether to hold your breath or scream.
7) Robert Plant: Nine Lives (Rhino). In 1982 the ex-Led Zeppelin dervish drifted in a sea all his own, a surfer on a wave that never reached shore. That was “Far Post,” then a B-side, nearly impossible to find since. It’s here. You can play it all day long.
8) Bob Dylan: Modern Times (Columbia). Inside the sometimes slack rhythms and the deceptively easy lines, a deep longing. For a trail of dead.
9/10) Peter Stampfel: Karen Dalton, It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best (1969: Koch, 1997) and Holy Modal Rounders, Alleged in Their Own Time (Rounder, 1975). On Gala Mill, the Drones cover “Are You Leaving for the Country,” a song learned from a recording by the ’60s Greenwich Village folk-scene jazz singer Karen Dalton (“My favorite singer in the place,” Bob Dylan says in Chronicles of the Café Wha? in 1961). She had an acrid voice, and she lived an acrid life, caught like a purse-snatcher in Stampfel’s song “Sally in the Alley.” He uses the lyrics to “Sally” to end his notes to the reissue of Dalton’s 1969 album; he recorded it on the Holy Modal Rounders’ Alleged in Their Own Time nearly twenty years before Dalton died. You’ll forget the Drones’ version of “Are You Leaving for the Country”; you may forget Dalton’s (on her just-reissued 1971 album In My Own Time). You won’t forget “Sally”—a nursery rhyme about a junkie.