Jonathan Lethem Amps It Up

Inside every celebrated Brooklyn novelist is a songwriter struggling to break free. At least, it seems that way. Paul Auster has written songs with the band One Ring Zero, which has backed up his daughter Sophie’s performances of them. Rick Moody plays in the quirky art-folk outfit the Wingdale Community Singers. Now, Jonathan Lethem, author of “Motherless Brooklyn” and “The Fortress of Solitude,” has a new musical side project.

“You Are All My People,” which comes out today on Bloodshot Records, is the first album by I’m Not Jim, a collaboration featuring the vocals and guitar of Walter Salas-Humara, more widely known as the front man of the Silos, a highly literate and slyly humorous rock act that also happens to be a favorite of Mr. Lethem. The writer penned most of the lyrics for the unusual assortment of songs and spoken-word interludes that appear on the new record, but he doesn’t actually sing or otherwise perform — unlike some of his peers.

“Rick [Moody] is a musician; he can play,” Mr. Lethem, sitting at a table in a coffee shop around the corner from his Boerum Hill home, said recently. “I’m at pains to make it clear that I’m not pretending to be that.”

It also took several years for Messrs. Salas-Humara and Lethem to get their heads together. They first met around 2004 or 2005 when the writer happened upon a Silos gig at a bar in New Orleans. A longtime fan of the band, Mr. Lethem decided to introduce himself and later mailed Mr. Salas-Humara copies of his books, by way of thanks. The guitarist became an instant enthusiast.

“‘Fortress of Solitude’ just blew me away,” Mr. Salas-Humara said, speaking by phone from Austin, Texas. “It was just such a cool combination of coming-of-age story and fantasy stuff. The prose is just so beautiful.”

The men, who will appear together Thursday for a free performance at Housing Works Bookstore and Café in SoHo, gradually began talking about working together.

“I thought I’d throw him a few lyrics and if he liked them enough he’d turn them into a Silos song,” Mr. Lethem said.

But his collaborator had something else in mind. “I wanted the whole thing stringed together with a single narrator, like a one-man show,” Mr. Salas-Humara said. “But Jonathan wasn’t into that. He thought it would be too easy to target.”

The album does have narration, delivered in a suspenseful, after-hours radio voice by Mr. Salas-Humara. Likewise, the individual songs are held together by some running themes.

“There’s something on [the album's] mind, something to do with cars that won’t start and women who run away in airplanes,” Mr. Lethem said. For his part, the novelist wasn’t interested in crafting a more explicit structure. “I get to do that in my regular work,” he said. “I wanted to find a way to work in a more termite-like sense. We just let ourselves fool around with our notions and sensibilities until something amused us.”

The songs came together over two days spent at Mr. Lethem’s house in Maine. Mr. Salas-Humara was knocked out by how quickly his partner typed up lyrics.

“He’s a genius. I’ve never seen anything like it,” the guitarist, who composed music on the spot and recorded vocals into his laptop, said. The demos were later worked over by the remix team the Elegant Two, who gave the pieces a deliberately lo-fi electronic feel that makes the music sound like a nocturnal transmission over an abandoned boom box.

“We tried to come up with this deadpan, existential, Steven Wright sort of person,” Mr. Salas-Humara said. “I don’t know if that’s really how it feels.”

Songs like “Towtruck” advance a gin-soaked philosophical view of the world with an edge of damaged romantic heroism. “And if you get the car stuck / You can call my tow truck,” Mr. Salas-Humara sings. It could be a declaration of love, although it also strangely evokes Bob Dylan’s “From a Buick 6,” in which the singer needs a dump truck to unload his head and a steam shovel to keep away the dead. The automotive theme continues on “Meter Running in a Crashed Cab,” a litany of feckless occasions set to a syncopated funk strut redolent of the Meters. “Drink ‘Till I’m Sober” is mostly self-explanatory, as Mr. Salas-Humara promises to commit all kinds of felonies and misdemeanors — “I’m gonna torch the family farm / I’m gonna chew on my right arm” — over the grungy psychedelia of squalling and squelching guitars.

“It was by far the most productive writing experience I ever had,” Mr. Salas-Humara said. “We’d write three or four songs in a couple of hours, then go for a long walk. Have lunch. Come back and write three or four more songs. At night, we’d just watch the Mets.”

Jon Langford Saves the Wales

Onstage recently in the back room of Schuba’s Tavern in his adoptive hometown of Chicago, the singer Jon Langford introduced a song he called the Welsh National Anthem. His band, one of many fronted by the multifaceted guitarist and songwriter, was called Skull Orchard, and played an often rollicking repertoire of songs about Wales. That’s where Mr. Langford grew up, and it’s where he returns — in spirit, at least — when he convenes the group.

In Mr. Langford’s imagination, Wales has been waiting for its true and destined king to return and take his rightful place in history. That man is Tom Jones. After Mr. Langford finished his exclamatory spiel, the band punched into a loud, woozy waltz. Yes, it was “Delilah,” which Mr. Jones made a hit in 1968. As the crowd joined in on every lurching “why, why, why” refrain, a devilish grin swept across the singer’s face. Sometimes you can go home again.

This week, Mr. Langford won’t be the only wandering Welshman with a gig in New York. Tomorrow he headlines at the Knitting Factory with Skull Orchard and the 52 voices of the Toronto-based Burlington Welsh Male Chorus. The group is led by Julian Murray, an old college friend and one of the dozens of musicians who were briefly part of the Mekons, the quasi-legendary punk-era band Mr. Langford co-founded in 1976 while attending university in Leeds. The pair became reacquainted a few years ago when Mr. Langford was in Toronto producing a record, and a one-off summit at a Chicago Celtic music festival led to occasional collaborations.

“I’m cheating,” Mr. Langford said. “It looks like I’m flying people around the country. They’re actually in New York performing with [the Welsh opera singer] Bryn Terfel and they had a day off.” Ah, another Welshman. “I do have an auntie who stalks him. She leaves notes for him at all the great opera houses.”

Mr. Langford’s collection of songs, some of which are inspired by traditional ballads and hymns, began coming together about 10 years ago when he recorded his first solo album, “Skull Orchard.” One day it occurred to him that everything he wrote at the time seemed to be about life in South Wales.

“It was a bit like when you see a frog in a frying pan,” he said. “You don’t really recognize it until it starts heating up.”

Some of the material is dryly comic in tone. In one song, Mr. Langford describes a seaside village where nothing interesting has happened since 1954, when John Huston came to film “Moby Dick.”

“Huston heard there was good fox hunting there,” he said.

The movie, which cast the local populace as extras, now serves as an unintentional documentary. “When you look at the film, the faces of those people are just fantastic. We went through there once with the Mekons and nothing seemed to have happened.”

Newport, where Mr. Langford was born and raised in the mid-1950s, was cosmopolitan by comparison. The shipping industry dictated a local culture that was strongly alcohol-themed, with the kind of thriving nightlife that appeals to men of the sea. But it also made Newport into an international crossroads.

“There were people from Asia, India, people from Mauritius, Seychelles. Big Soviet tankers coming in. Reggae culture,” Mr. Langford said. “There wasn’t racism. The black kids were like the cool kids.”

The idyllic recollection contrasts sharply with other stories Mr. Langford has explored. He also sings about the 1966 Aberfan mining disaster, which killed 144 people when a giant pile of rock extracted from the mine slid down a mountain and obliterated a school, leaving only a few survivors.

“I went to school 20 miles away,” Mr. Langford said. As a child, he went with a friend to visit the memorial site. “It was amazing. The earth was black with coal. We looked at all those graves, hoping that there wouldn’t be one with our actual birthdates. But the dates were pretty close. I was 8 or 9, and it was just unthinkable. It wasn’t like it was somewhere remote and far away — all those little crosses on the hill.”

The gravity of such a tale becomes even more powerful with a chorus, which also gives Mr. Langford occasion to expand his musical range beyond the honky-tonk variations of his rowdy working band, the Waco Brothers.

“We’ll get to do a lot of hymns and patriotic songs,” he said. “There’s one called ‘We Are Still Here.’ You can’t understand a word of it, but it’s very powerful. It’s about how pissed off the Welsh are about the Romans. Still. It’s like they’re saying, ‘We are still here, but where are you?’ The Welsh really know how to harbor a grudge.”

Berne, Baby, Berne

New York jazz in the 1990s spawned some monstrously good working bands, outfits so keenly focused that they could trigger the transcendental glimmer of highly skilled players in burning improvisatory flux. Depending on your taste, those bands could have been Joshua Redman’s quartet with pianist Brad Mehldau, John Zorn’s all-star Masada, the David S. Ware Quartet, or Bloodcount – formed by alto saxophonist Tim Berne in 1992.

RED BLOODED: Alto saxophonist Tim Berne has revived Bloodcount.

Bloodcount, which featured Jim Black, drums, Michael Formanek, bass, and Chris Speed on tenor, was a percolating laboratory for Mr. Berne’s complex and detailed compositions. It wasn’t unusual for a Bloodcount piece to last a half-hour. If the notion implied high-minded severity, that was never the case in practice. Even at its gnarliest, the music conveyed a sense of adventure and risk, rewarding the attentive with intriguing structures, surprising depths of soulfulness, and spirited interactions between the players, whose roles might revolve like a Calder mobile. Besides, there were Mr. Berne’s titles, which brimmed with his peculiar wit: “Sense and Sinsemilla,” “Yes, Dear,” “Scrap Metal.”

“I always find that people like my bands a lot more after I stop doing it,” Mr. Berne said. “But if something becomes successful, I move on and see if I can work something else out. Once it gets to the point that no one is complaining, I get nervous.” That explains why he broke up Bloodcount in 1999. After what he cautiously estimated as a “billion” gigs, Mr. Berne said he could no longer compose for the band’s instrumentaton. Now, almost a decade later, he began hearing some different music for the same group. Bloodcount marked its return to the stage this year with an ongoing series of clubdates, during which
the six-foot-four Mr. Berne likes to play in his stockinged feet, avant-casual. “You can reinvent an old band by writing new stuff and starting fresh,” he explained. “I didn’t want to do it as a retrospective.”

For that, fans can check out “Seconds.” The new CD/DVD release, on Mr. Berne’s Screwgun label, features two discs of vintage Bloodcount live recordings and a 1994 concert video from Paris, shot by Susanna Schonberg, that reflects the energies of the performance in a restless montage of extreme close-ups and offstage passages. But the music Bloodcount has now begun to play sounds much different than that, Mr. Berne promised, chatting recently from his home in Park Slope, where he has lived since the 1980s. (“The downtown scene?” he said, as if cocking an eyebrow.
“I’m a Brooklyn guy.”) “My writing changed a lot when I started writing for keyboards,” he said, referring to an ongoing affiliation with the pianist and electronic composer Craig Taborn, who plays in Mr. Berne’s trio Hard Cell and alongside him in a quartet with guitarist David Torn. “There’s certain rhythmic stuff, certain harmonies. I guess rhythmically more than anything, and the counterpoint is stranger.”

Mr. Berne was a late-bloomer musically. He didn’t pick up a horn until he was 19 or 20, excited by the countless gigs he attended
at bustling mid-1970s haunts like Studio Rivbea and Slug’s. One day he sprained his ankle, and purchased a $200 alto saxophone to help him kill time. His astute taste in mentors proved exceptionally fortunate. Mr. Berne’s favorite musician was Julius Hemphill, the visionary saxophonist and composer (“Dogon, A.D.,” “Long Tongues”) who proved open to taking on a completely green student. “I started making music because I saw him doing it,” Mr. Berne said. “I was pretty naïve for quite a long time. I started as a bandleader by default. It’s a good thing I learned how to do it early on, and I learned how to put out records. I just had to learn music.”

Now 53, the saxophonist honed his chops and had a contract with Columbia Records in 1986, even though he was working a much different line than the label’s loudly touted jazz star, Wynton Marsalis. The deal only lasted for two albums, but Mr. Berne became fast friends with its graphic designer, Steven Byram, and began a long artistic partnership. (Mr. Byram creates all of the amusingly abstract design for the saxophonist’s CDs, which upend the dry and amateurish norm for avant-garde jazz packaging).

“I just want to own the stuff, I don’t know if it makes any difference,” Mr. Berne said. He’s been marketing his own discs since 1996, with 19 titles available on his website – www.screwgunrecords.com. During a short spell a few years ago, he became ambitious about running an indie label, but burned out on the effort involved. Lately, he’s tried to take advantage of MP3 technology. “Today I sold six downloads!” he said, with an air of mock pride. More common, he lamented, was learning how easily his performances could be acquired elsewhere. “It’s hard to sell stuff because everyone gets it for free. I was talking to a friend in Europe after we did some shows in Barcelona and Budapest and he had already listened to the gig, 24 hours after we played it.”

As for the recharged Bloodcount, Mr. Berne advised to expect the unexpected. His recent European tour with Mr. Torn, whose music is dense and boiling, yielded precisely the response that he thrives on. “About 20 percent of the audience was shocked,” he said. “We weren’t preaching to the choir. Some like you, and some don’t, and you get a kind of tension. That first year or two with a band is really different than the rest of the time. Nobody knows the music – including me.”

Perhaps the only thing for certain is that Mr. Berne’s new pieces will stretch out at their leisure. There’s a good reason he prefers extended compositions, he said.

“I never liked to talk.”

R.E.M.: Semi-Automatic for the People

Every year, striving rock acts and feisty independent record labels, indefatigable fans and drink-cadging critics, converge on this Texas college town for the South by Southwest music festival. The event has mushroomed into a showcase for a gazillion variations on the next big thing, becoming such a media magnet that your average semi-obscure bar band may clock five or six gigs – on any given day.

So it was in Austin, of course, that Dark Meat – a 17-piece Mardi Gras party of a stomping, free-rock ensemble – celebrated its recent singing to Vice Records, with a chaotic blow-out. The outfit shared a bill with a half-dozen other groups from Athens, Georgia, all representative of that other Southern college burg’s unique place in rock history: The original “scene” town, which 30 years ago spawned a funky little dance combo called the B-52s, and shortly thereafter a flurry of quirky, DIY-minded bands with names like Love Tractor, Pylon, Oh-OK, and R.E.M, was as vital as ever. The scene, as such, has shifted from buzz city to buzz city. Minneapolis, Seattle, Chicago, Omaha, and, right now, Brooklyn, among others, have enjoyed their seasons as focal points for the  zeitgeist. But the contemporary concept of geography as a kind of indie-rock destiny began in Athens.

SXSW was as strong a reminder of this. Even as Dark Meat (enthusiastic, a bit gimmicky) was winding down its set, the members of R.E.M. were getting ready for a gig a few block away. As an opening act, they had tabbed another young band from Athens, the excellent Dead Confederate, which mysteriously melds Pink Floyd dreaminess with Lynyrd Skynyrd blooziness.

It’s unlikely R.E.M. would call it a comeback, but someone obviously felt a need to reassert their willingness to rock, and to do so in the same amiably scruffy, beer-sodden environs that first launched them to critical and, eventually, commercial prominence in the 1980s. Much as their old neighbors the B-52s, R.E.M. has a new album to promote, and Austin proved an ideal platform to signal the band’s return to foursquare, guitar-based rock. “Accelerate,” which is released April 1, finds R.E.M. sounding like R.E.M. again. Or, at least, sounding like the R.E.M. of its late-1980s breakout period, when albums like “Life’s Rich Pageant” and “Green” took the quartet out of the college bars and into the arenas.

The band’s show at Stubb’s Barbecue, as heard on a streaming feed from the National Public Radio website (npr.org), conveys a certain wisdom that groups of R.E.M.’s vintage can bank on. There’s no need to reinvent a trademark sound. Just stick with what always worked. “Accelerate” is the first studio album from vocalist Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck and bassist Mike Mills since 2004’s dismal “Around the Sun.” And it’s the first R.E.M. album since original drummer Bill Berry left the group in 1997 that isn’t tricked out with keyboards, electronic noodling, and artificially sweetened popcraft that seemed to abdicate the beat that Mr. Berry took with him.

Not surprisingly, the band’s record sales have been in a tailspin since its heady days of early ‘90s glory – when songs like “Losing My Religion” and “Man on the Moon” secured global mass-market affection, yet refined the band’s idiosyncrasies into compassionate art. Watching R.E.M. meander towards nostalgia-dom the past few years called to mind something recently said by Thurston Moore, guitarist for Sonic Youth, the New York art-rock act whose more pointedly outré career has paralleled the Georgia group’s. Mr. Moore suggested that his band broken up years ago, and then reunited, they might ensure a bigger payday and be more popular than ever. In retrospect, it’s easy to imagine R.E.M. calling it quits on New Year’s Eve 1999, which once was rumored to happen, deciding that without Mr. Berry, they really were “a three-legged dog,” as Mr. Stipe has quipped, and should seek new horizons.

That didn’t happen, though for many fans and critics it might as well have. Sitting by while peers like Bono saves the world and Radiohead reinvents the wheel can’t feel too good. So
the urgency of “Accelerate,” and of R.E.M.’s strident and jangle-happy Austin showcase, feels genuine. It’s just too bad the songs aren’t better. Mr. Stipe, who once kept listeners scratching their heads to decipher lyrics that felt like surrealist poetry, has long since adopted a declamatory style that too often underscores how banal his lines are. New tracks like “Living Well Is the Best Revenge” and “Horse To Water” suggest the singer has never met a cliché he didn’t purloin, even if the beautifully aggressive mesh of Mr. Buck’s guitar with the rhythm section captures the youthful buoyancy of prime R.E.M. “Supernatural Superserious,” the album’s first single, is even more regrettable, as Mr. Stipe sings about “the humiliation of the teenage nation.” Huh? Save it for Hannah Montana.

The bumper-sticker sentiments aren’t new to R.E.M., and in some cases, the band’s impassioned punch combines with Mr. Stipe’s fiery testimony in ways that you don’t want to resist, especially when Mr. Mills lends his choirboy’s counter-tenor to echo the main vocal lines. As R.E.M. efforts go, “Accelerate” is the band’s best work this decade, but once you peel back the layers of guitar, it’s not nearly as emotionally affecting as the disquieting murmurs of 1999’s underrated “Up,” whose ambient pop tinkering dressed up heartfelt ambiguities in the wake of Mr. Berry’s departure. At his best, Mr. Stipe negotiates uneasy truces between the particular and the universal (“That’s me in the corner/That’s me in the spotlight”), and narrates what it feels like to be caught between them. “Accelerate” tries so eagerly to deliver on its promise that it zooms right past what makes R.E.M. really great.

Visions of Joanna

Material originally published in vastly different contexts in Time Out Chicago and Stomp & Stammer.

I don’t know freak-folk from a funky chicken, but I can tell you that Joanna Newsom is an original: a one-of-a-kind wondermint whose far-strung stringed jingling is epic and arty in a way that skirts the usual idea of “epic” and “arty.” Which is to say, how do you fabricate a mini-opus like Ys (Drag City), her new album, fill it with allegorical star-swept illuminations, furry creatures whose hearts thump as big as the moon, and some of the most nakedly rapturous and soulfully turbulent singing since, seriously, Astral Weeks, and not come off a tad… overdone? I’m not going to mention, just now, that Newsom plays harp – the ornate, whopping Celtic kind, so evocative of angels in 1930s Hollywood musicals and new age frim-frammery -  or that she hired the justifiably legendary Van Dyke Parks, the greatest living quirky genius arranger, to help score her songs, with their umpteen verses, and their marvelous turns of tongue, and their nearly archaic embrace of language as a forgotten kingdom. As such, Ys (Eeees!) seems to have less to do with contemporary pop as it does with, say, Chaucer, or the Farmer’s Almanac. Or just, you know, the brimming viaducts of your own pellucid dreams. All done up with a 30-piece orchestra.

I caught Joanna waiting in line at a Northern California supermarket, and when I checked back a few minutes later, as she motored home, she gave a pretty generous illustration of how she could seemingly indulge some crazily ambitious creative urges without becoming self-indulgent – which is why the rich and arousing beauty of Ys, as sweeping and demanding as it is, makes me think of Van Morrison at first blush and not, oh, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

And so we began…

Joanna Newsom: I’m throwing a big surprise birthday party for my parents tomorrow, and got it into my mind I needed certain things, but for some reason it was ten times busier than usual at the grocery store. I was standing in that line, looking at my cell phone. Damn it, damn it!

Ha ha. So… do you still live in Nevada City?

Yeah.

What’s it like there? You’re close to Reno?

It’s not terribly close. It’s still like an hour from the border. It’s near the California side of Lake Tahoe, right up in the foothills before the mountains. We live near all the ski resorts in Northern California, right at the base of all that. Just a really small town. For some reason it’s a real creative haven.

Like a California hippie town?

I think what happened is there was an exodus from the Bay Area. Some people went to Marin County, in the mid-’70s, when a lot of the artistic community got disillusioned with what was happening in San Francisco. It got dark. A lot of things got dark there. And a lot of the people who were creative started going all sorts of places. This is one kind of outpost. A lot of writers, and composers and poets came here, and bought a bunch of property. You could buy property really cheaply back then. So there’s a lot of people with 100-acre, 200- acre plots of land.

Your parents were part of that?

They came later. They came in ’80s. They were both physicians. In some ways they are super-close connected with that stuff, especially my mom. She’s very radical, a very political person, very into protesting and organizing and having a lot of causes. But, in other ways, they were removed from all that. They joked that they missed the ’60s, because they were in medical school the whole time. So they only got to do the not-so-fun things… [Joanna trills!]: Oh Hiiii! [Then back] I just got home and my aunt and uncle are here. It’s complete madness. We have 90 relatives coming in and it’s at my house.

I thought it was interesting to see that the fabled minimalist composer Terry Riley was one of your neighbors.

He’s a neighbor in the sense that everyone is a neighbor here because the town is so small. We didn’t live next door to each other. I don’t live up there. I grew up across the river.

Years later, you ended up at Mills College in Berkeley. Which is the kind of place Terry Riley would teach, if he hasn’t taught there.

Going to Mills was definitely a decision influenced by Terry Riley. A lot of what I did musically for awhile took place within a framework that was partially defined by what I saw him doing. I wanted to write music and make music, because that was what I loved doing most of all. But just about the only person I knew of who did that as their job was Terry Riley. The fact that he had connections to Mills was one of the motivating factors for me to go there.

Have you ever had his hot sauce?

[Exuberant] No. [Laughs]

He makes a killer hot sauce. It’s just great stuff.

[Laughs]. That’s pretty awesome. No, I’ve never had it.

Well, if you get a chance … So, you kind of grew up and gravitated to Mills. Is that where you got most of your training?

It’s where I got a lot of one particular kind of training. That was the first time I approached writing music from a formal perspective. I’d been writing music my whole life, but I thought of what I was doing as composing. Because of the simple distinction that I wasn’t signing, so they couldn’t be songs. I really formalized it in my own mind when I went to Mills and attempted to be more experimental. Experimental for me is so much less experimental than anybody else at that school. Oh, my lightbulb just went out! My last remaining lightbulb in my kitchen just burned out.

That’s very rock star.

Yeah! Ha ha! I just feel bad, because this is ostensibly the center of the action for tomorrow’s party. But I’m a complete wreck. I’ve been traveling non-stop since I bought my house. Some rooms are empty and some rooms are cluttered beyond like, beyond neatening, and all my bulbs are burned out, and cheery aunts and uncles are just rolling in, and being like, “Where can I store this ham?” and “Here’s some harvest-themed centerpieces for your table!” I’m like, what tables? It will be very interesting. I’m going to need lightbulbs that work in the house by tomorrow.

You need candles.

That was one of the things I was getting at the store was candles. I thought, “You must have candles.” Candles alone do not a party make. My house must have light in it. It’s an outdoor party. We bought tiki torches and we rented big propane heaters and tables. It’s a full-on event, and I know people are going to be interested in coming in and seeing my house. It’s going to be the ultimate embarrassment in front of my whole family if I don’t even have a lightbulb that works [laughs].

You have a lot of friends there?

I know everybody. A lot of my really good friends did something similar to me. They went away to go to school or to travel, and have elected to come back. It’s really exciting.

Did you gravitate to harp at college?

I’ve played harp for 16 years! Certainly, when I was at Mills, it came to my attention that I was one of the only people remaining in the school who wrote music on their instrument. Very few people even played instruments anymore. Most people wrote on laptops. Very few people even wrote music involving pitches that the human ear can recognize. Most of it was beyond dissonant. Just noise music. That was the conversation that was going on.
Your record is amazing, but it’s definitely not something you can absorb in even a few listens. It’s a huge piece of work. How did it all come together?

It was the product of a series of instinctive and natural and at the time not very huge-feeling decisions on my part. The first and most simple and probably most formative decision in the whole project was what I wanted to write the songs about. As soon as I knew what I wanted to tackle in the story of the record, I also recognized the requirement that the songs be long. The story would need to be paced in a certain manner. It’s sort of the difference between how certain topics are best-suited for a 100-word blurb, and other topics are best-suited for a 2,000-word essay, and the pacing of your idea will be fundamentally different because of the form you use to discuss it within. I felt it would be vulgar to make them short, and it would be a great disservice to the work I was trying to do. It was an easy decision. It wasn’t intimidating. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. I was finished with two of the songs, and part-way finished with the other three, at that point I realized it was also going to be required of this record that I involve an orchestra – for all kinds of reasons.

What kind of feeling is that when you realize, oh, darn, I’m gonna need an orchestra now? That must have been a fun phone call to make to the record company.

Yeah, it was sort of like that. I was definitely laughing sheepishly. Dan Koretsky, who runs Drag City, was really, really excited from the get-go. It was still really conceptual. We didn’t know how it was going to work. A few months after that, I got a copy of Van Dyke’s record Song Cycle and, upon hearing it, realized that it was the closest thing I had heard up to that point that approximated the mood and gestures that I wanted the orchestra to be armed with. For the first time, I was encountering somebody’s arrangements that resonated with me on this record, and how I wanted it to sound. I had no idea what a big deal Van Dyke Parks is. I’m talking to the record label [does gee-whiz kid's voice]: “Hey! OK! So I wanna ask Van Dyke Parks to do it.” “Ohhhhhhh, OK. Well, we’ll give it a try.” They said they’d ask him but that it would be maybe difficult for him to do it, and prohibitively expensive. But they were willing to try.

Had you heard him before?

No.

Great.

Only Song Cycle. And basically nothing before that.

None of the Beach Boys stuff?

I didn’t know that he had been involved in that. I guess I had heard him before, without knowing it was him. I didn’t know about Smile. I had never heard of that. I remember seeing that name everywhere, but I didn’t realize what had gone into that record. Yeah, so we … It all took place in the course of one roadtrip. At the beginning of that roadtrip my boyfriend gave me a copy of that record and told me, “You need to listen to this.” And I heard it, and fell in love with it, and called Drag City. And by the time the roadtrip ended up in LA, Van Dyke and his wife came to a hotel room that I had, and I rented a harp, and they came and sweetly introduced themselves, and perched on the edge of the bed, and listened to me play my songs. Van Dyke, he was so immediately receptive and expressed such immediate interest, that I immediately felt like it wasn’t going to happen. I was sure nothing would come of it. But true to his word, he was involved from there on out. It was a really long process …

The vocals, which you recorded separately with Steve Albini, are really intense. The emotions.

The whole thing was really, really emotional for me. There’s one song I can’t even listen to my own performance of, I can hear certain places where I was starting to cry and it makes me feel so weird. I still think it’s valuable in terms of honesty and authenticity to have that preserved, even though there’s the hugely formal, lush, bombastic orchestral presence. So it was good to have that division. And when I was finished, I could set it aside. That was months before the album was done, and I went into a different part of my brain, a very critical one. I’m very difficult to work with!

How was Van Dyke to work with?

He was amazing. He was very graceful about recognizing how specific my vision for the record was. And he humored me in that doggedness, despite the fact that I was seldom able to articulate myself in a technical way. So not only was I really stuck on the album sounding a certain way and feeling a certain way, but I didn’t even have the vocabulary to give him any sort of shorthand. It really is a bunch of trial and error. I gave him a pile of notes on the lyrics to help him generate his first draft. Occasionally, I might have said something semi-technical, but usually it was kind of out there. Like, I want this line to evoke this image musically, or I want the trumpets to do this sort of movement, low strings or high strings. I also gave him a 30-page manifesto! I thank him eternally for putting up with all of my shit. Just sort of saying, I want the record to feel this way. I want these certain things to not be sacrificed no matter what. Here’s what I want this album to end up sounding like. I would burn CD-Rs of certain things I liked the arrangements of, which he promptly disregarded. He listened to them and he appreciated them, but he also thought it would not be helpful for us to work in that way. And then he started Draft No. 1. He would send things to me usually in the recorded form of a cheesy old synthesizer. Some music program on his computer that hadn’t been updated in 15 years. That was beautiful. He’d send his drafts to me, and I would tear them apart. And they were exquisite! The struggle revolved around making his arrangements do exactly what I needed them to do for these particular songs…and resonate for him and for me as the product of our ideas. I’m really, really bad at giving up any kind of musical control. And he was hugely graceful and patient and full of so many ideas. He was a joy to work with. He didn’t always give in. He would interpret my criticisms in his particular way. We’d get into arguments about certain choices, and he would sometimes win, and in every case that he won the argument I had always been glad that he did. Like, I didn’t want electric guitar or bass on this record and he had Lee Sklar and…

Yeah, I’m looking at some of these names and it’s like the LA session posse. It’s your Steely Dan record.

Hee hee hee hee. My Yacht Rock record! They’re all such incredibly sensitive players and they gave us a lot to work with. When I sat down with Jim O’Rourke (to mix the record), we cut a lot of that stuff out, as they had expected we would. Their goal was to give us raw material to use where we needed it. In the sections we used those instruments, it contributed so much to the record. The arrangements are so complicated sometimes, that I think the record really benefited from the grounding force of bass and guitar substantiating the chord changes. In a weird way it made it sound like a folk record, because it backed up the idea of chord changes.

If someone hadn’t heard the record, how would you describe the story?

It’s hugely autobiographical but, then, it’s a fictional narrative. It was an effort on my part to organize and score and make some sense of and articulate my reaction to a year of my life that was a very hard year. I mean, obviously, there are overt enough references to mortality on the record, it’s clear that’s a huge thing. There was a lot of death that was rough for me, but also other kinds of death. And some really, really good things that happened, too. And all those things in the process of poeticizing them. Ahhh, in the process of organizing them lyrically and musically, these things started to spookily assert this kind of synchronicity and a real shape. Almost like there was a causal relationship between all these things that happened. Each thing that happened created the environment in which the next thing happened. In my mind there was five steps to the story. One thing that was really important to me, and I really made sure this was the case, every lyrical line means something really, really specific to me. There’s no arbitrariness. No saying something because it sounds good. Every single line is an effort to be completely truthful and to say something in a certain way. At the same time, it’s not hugely important to me that anyone else “get” the story.

Well, “hydrocephalitic listlessness” has a different meaning to every person.

But it’s also an image. It’s supposed to be immediately accessible. It’s supposed to mean having a head that’s full of an excess of water. That’s a flower. It’s also an image of decadence and excessiveness and fertility and fecundity and laziness and all these things that have direct parallels to the story, the actual story, but also have a certain value as images.

Do you feel you absorb a lot of things and it just comes out? People are always analyzing Bob Dylan and finding things. Are you inspired by something else, or do you try to write without worrying about other existing ways of writing?

Probably the most honest answer to that is that I obsess over structure but I don’t think about it in the context of anyone else’s work, especially with this project. I don’t even know what to compare it to. The only thing I was influenced by on some level, in storytelling I guess, was <I>The Sound and the Fury<$>, by Faulkner. Only in that there’s one story that book aspires to tell, and the different angles from which the story is told are so incredibly different, and each character except for the final passage, the first three sections involve people doggedly running in circles around particular obsessions. There are psychological hiccups they can’t free themselves from, but the loops and the circles sort of take on this particular shape, and all of these characters together, their different obsessive running – the shape that those things form in relief is sort of the story, you know?

The NY Sun Files: Plastic People of the Universe

Regimes and revolutions come and go, but the Plastic People of the Universe are forever.

Nearly 40 years after its members first switched on their amplifiers in the chilly aftermath of the Soviet invasion that ended the Prague Spring of 1968, the band is back on the road: grizzled, defiant, and rudely effusive with its lurching rhythms, untempered skronk, and philosophical jokes that seem partially lost in translation.

Vratislav Brabenec, the group’s 63-year-old saxophonist, was introducing one of the opening numbers in Czech before a crowded audience of about 150 fans at the Cutting Room in Chelsea on Saturday night — a rare New York appearance by the Plastic People, who will also perform tonight at the Knitting Factory.

Many in attendance were there in conjunction with a symposium at Columbia University, where former Czechoslovakian and Czech Republic president Václav Havel recently began a seven-week residency. So perhaps a translation of Mr. Brabenec’s comments was not entirely necessary. But Eva Turnova, the young, red-haired bass player who joined the group a few years ago, offered hers anyway: “What it means is, we kill a pig and then we eat it in one day.”

Turn that barnyard analogy to any purpose you please, but it does speak to a certain unvarnished folk wisdom. The Plastic People epitomize a whole-hog aesthetic that regards any element as useful, without much concern for tidy trimmings. Their songs have a tilted, out-of-focus feel, thanks to those old village dance rhythms and what can only be described as a curiously lustful melancholia — given the odd collusion of Jifií Kabe’s bittersweet violin and Mr. Brabenec’s frequently squealing saxophone.

The band, which took its name from a Frank Zappa tune, stuck to its classic material for most of the 90-minute show, evoking the American subculture hero’s fuzz-haired eclecticism in songs that, as Ms. Turnova offered later, were not so much explicitly political as merely oddball and artinflected. The Plastic People became revolutionary martyrs in the 1970s because the mere notion of American-influenced rock musicians creating a public spectacle was an inherent threat to Soviet dominance. Or, as the Talking Heads would put it back when these rowdy Czech hippies were still consigned to a kind of public exile: “Electric guitar is a crime against the state.”

At the Cutting Room, the band was mostly absent that weapon. The lead guitarist was sick, and only appeared for a song or two. And because they often sang lyrics as a chorus, the musicians sounded less like subversive rock legends than a wandering gypsy freejazz punk outfit that had missed its bus at the Port Authority and was gigging for free beer and cigarettes. And gloriously so.

There has never been anything trendy or even terribly commercial about the band’s choices. Czech communist rule forced the musicians off the public stage in 1970, and a notorious, aborted 1974 performance in the village of Budovice that attracted thousands of fans ended in police violence and arrests. During the late 1970s, when English punk-rock acts like the Clash preached revolutionary rhetoric that became a gesture of style, two of the Plastic People were living with the consequences of physically rejecting political oppression of free speech. They were in jail, serving out eightmonth terms for a 1976 conviction of public disturbance. That is, they were arrested for rocking.

Despite the arrest and the subsequent governmental ban on performances, the band thrived underground, inspiring the Charter 77 movement that anticipated the Velvet Revolution of 1989, which swept their friend and supporter Mr. Havel into power as the Soviet Union crumbled.

All these years later, the group’s current tour makes it seem as if it has popped out of a time capsule. Indeed, given their crazy-quilt history, the older musicians might feel as though they are now reaping the rewards of their struggle. Tom Stoppard’s new play “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” now at the Royal Court Theatre in London, celebrates the band’s insurgent saga (as did a 2001 documentary about the band). And while the death in 2001 of its founder, Milan Hlavsa, left the outfit with only three original members, its current multi-generational lineup appears fully invigorated.

Astonishingly, on Saturday the music shifted between comic a capella and fluid improvisational jamming in the space of a single song, implying that the band might be equally at home playing the neo-hippie Bonnaroo Festival as it would be at the late, lamented CBGB.

As Mr. Brabenec noted from the stage, the group has been traveling a lot, recently headlining a concert in St. Petersburg. “They were very nice,” he said later, puffing on a Chesterfield outside the venue, where fans young and old hovered for bits of conversation and autographs. “Russian people are very nice people.” Then he added, with a touch of commentary: “Russians and Americans are almost the same people. They know anything about everything.”

Mr. Brabanec looks quite a bit like one of the Fugs — the irreverent leftie rabble-rousers Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Sanders — who were one of the big influences on the Plastic People, and who have joined the group onstage during previous New York appearances. He was happy to be back in town, in part through the agency of Mr. Havel, for whom he offered affection but also criticism. The Velvet Revolution was, maybe, “too much velvet,” he said, suggesting that the hardliners of the old regime got treated too softly when they should have been kicked out of their apartments. But he had little else to complain about.

“I’m still playing,” he told someone in Czech as he finished his cigarette. “Still drinking. Still fucking.”

99 Albums Reviewed!

Bradford Cox channels Young Thurston Moore?

Eventually. Otherwise known as: The Ego Roll.  More or less everything I have reviewed for Time Outs Chicago and New York, Playboy online, and possibly some other venues beginning now and going back a year. Click on the links for the reviews.

Deerhunter Microcastles

Boston Spaceships Brown Submarine

Monareta Picotero

Mogwai The Hawk Is Howling

Calexico Carried To Dust

CSS Donkey

Dirtbombs We Have You Surrounded

Beach House Devotion

Evangelista Hello, Voyager

The Walkmen You & Me

Dennis Wilson Pacific Ocean Blue

Laura Marling Alas I Cannot Swim

Art of Field Recording, Vol. 1

American Music Club The Golden Age

Black Mirror: Reflections in Global Musics

Chairlift Does You Inspire You?

R.E.M. Accelerate

The Melvins Nude With Boots

The Fleet Foxes

Brian Wilson That Lucky Old Son

Stereolab Chemical Chords

Matthew Sweet Sunshine Lies

Andre Williams and the Hellhounds Can You Deal With It?

Witchcraft The Alchemist

Caribou Andorra

Wolf Parade At Mount Zoomer

Mission of Burma Matador Records Reissues

Shelby Lynne Just a Little Lovin’

The Hold Steady Stay Positive

Conor Oberst

Mercury Rev Snowflake Midnight

The Complete Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton

Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro Sounds and Nigerian Blues, 1970-76

Coldplay Viva la Vida

My Morning Jacket Evil Urges

Ryan Adams and the Cardinals Cardinology

Scott Weiland “Happy” in Galoshes

Mavis Staples Live Hope at the Hideout

The NY Sun Files: Gary Panter

Published Sept. 15, 2006.

Gary Panter is explicating a painting that hangs in the attic studio of his Brooklyn home.”There’s a villain from a Japanese TV show,” the artist says, gesturing toward one menacing visage, which floats in a cosmic soup of images. “And that’s, like, a 1950s robot. And that’s a made-up tentacle brain monster.” The canvas, which radiates a sickly green, is also populated with a bikiniclad beach babe, an exaggerated cartoon puppy with its tongue sticking out, and a disembodied skull — among many other symbols, resonant with subconscious anxiety and desire.

“They’re about primal issues,” Mr. Panter admits quite cheerfully. “And the stupid way the sexes see each other. All those horrible clichés. It’s about people standing right next to their wishes and fears.”

Mr. Panter’s vivid obsessions make him one of the stars of “Masters of American Comics,”a two-part exhibition that opens today.The show, which features 14 artists and spans the history of the medium, is so large that it takes two museums to accommodate it.The comic strips of seminal figures from Windsor McKay (“Little Nemo in Slumberland”) and George Herriman (“Krazy Kat”) to Charles M. Schulz (“Peanuts”) are mounted in the Newark Museum. Meanwhile, the emergence of comic books in the 1950s and, later, underground “comix” and the graphic novel, is represented at the Jewish Museum, where Mr. Panter is joined by contemporaries (Chris Ware, R. Crumb) and artists who preceded him (Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, Will Eisner).

“It’s like being knighted,” says Mr. Panter, 55, who may still be best-known for his Emmy Award-winning design for “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse,” the subversive 1980s kids show that has found new life on the Cartoon Network and on DVD. “There’s stuff in the show I have idolized since childhood, so just being in the room with it …” his voice trails off. “Is humbling the right word? I’m exhilarated.”

Mr. Panter’s presence in such an exhibit is a sign of the times.It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when underground comics acquired mainstream legitimacy. Perhaps it was in 1992, when Art Spiegelman, who championed Mr. Panter’s work as the editor of RAW magazine in the early 1980s, won a Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel “Maus.” (Spiegelman, whose work was part of the “Masters” exhibit first organized by the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, pulled it from the New York show, citing personal reasons). Or maybe the arrival of “The Simpsons,” a few years earlier, had something to do with it.That show’s creator, Matt Groening, came out of the same alternative media as his friend Mr. Panter (and joins him October 10 for a conversation at the 92nd Street Y).

Mr. Panter, a Brownsville, Texas, native, proudly dubbed “the king of the ratty line,” didn’t begin to draw seriously until after he’d already been painting for some time.

“What’s behind a lot of cartooning is a frustrated, shy person who wants to make something that shouts for them in the world. In the old days, people cartooned because they needed a job, and they started out at 12. I started after college. I remember, I went to see Jack Kirby, and he said [in doubtful voice], ‘Okay, but why are you starting so late?’”

He was lucky, though, to launch his career in Los Angeles during the mid-1970s. The city’s erupting punk rock scene meshed seamlessly with Mr. Panter’s artistic ambitions. His self-described “jaggedy” style made for some memorable Frank Zappa album covers (remember “Studio Tan”?), and found purchase in a local punk ‘zine called Slash, which invited the artist to contribute a comic strip.Thus,”Jimbo” was born: a post-apocalyptic Everyman who wanders the landscape of an imaginary city called Dal Tokyo.

Original panels from Mr. Panter’s magnum opus, “Jimbo in Purgatory,” fill a wall in the Jewish Museum, their shaggy mayhem and chiaroscuro tones offering a strong contrast to the precise, geometric figures and interior wit of Mr. Ware’s work, which shares the room.

“In my mind, I see him as a young Kevin Bacon,” Mr. Panter says of Jimbo, who strides through the densely allusive panels of “Purgatory” amid dialogue lifted from Dante, Boccacio, the Book of Isaiah, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Two Virgins.”Yul Brynner’s cowboy robot from “Westworld”makes a guest appearance, as does Zappa and a host of other free-associative references — all duly footnoted.

Another room contains a trove of Mr. Crumb’s grumpy, profane, and sexually effusive underground comics, which minted counter-cultural folk heroes like Mr. Natural (“Keep on Truckin’”) and Fritz the Cat. Mr. Crumb’s cracked sense of humor jostles easily with that of Harvey Kurtzman, inventor of “Mad” magazine, whose elbow-in-the-ribs style also had a strong social counterpoint. Panels from his Korean War comic book, “Two Fisted Tales,” relate combat stories with compassion, blunt humor, and even a kind of poetry.

More traditionally, there’s Mr. Kirby, whose cinematic style for the “Fantastic Four” (created with Stan Lee) revolutionized the superhero business and gave Roy Lichtenstein a key source for his paintings. Mr. Eisner, whose “The Spirit” arrived in 1940, a year before Mr. Kirby’s “Captain America,”is also celebrated for introducing adult themes and urban realism to a newspaper comic and anticipating the graphic novels to come.

The exhibit’s deep focus revealingly ties all the artists together, despite their widely divergent styles. But the days of conventional superheroes may now be something more for Hollywood to mine. “There’s a revolution in comics right now,” Mr. Panter said while reflecting on his experiences teaching at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts. “It’s not just Dungeons and Dragons anymore. There’s all kinds of genres now.More than half of my class is interested in doing their own stories.They want to go struggle.”

As for his own inspiration, though he cites the dystopian science fiction of Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, and the discordant sound collages he plays on a motley stack of old boomboxes, Mr. Panter only has to flash back to his Texas childhood — and the looming menace of his own imagination.

“I got scared by some kids in monster masks when I was 4,” he says, with a soft chuckle. “My mother said I never got over it.”