by Alex Ross
After the second concert, which happened the following afternoon, the Lawrences left for Joplin. In travel mode, they go their separate ways, not worrying if the others are on schedule. In the vastness of the Dallas—Fort Worth Airport, I noticed that Nuttall had wandered off. “Where’s Geoff?” I asked. “We never ask that question,” the others replied. It was well after midnight when we reached Joplin. It’s a midsize town in the southwestern corner of the state, not far from the country-and-western playground of Branson. Shiffman caught sight of a poster for Shoji Tabuchi, a Liberace-style fiddler who plays in Branson. The poster read, “Shoji: Need We Say More?” “This is great!” the violinist said, jumping up and down in a fit of ironic glee. “We should have this kind of marketing. ‘The St. Lawrence String Quartet: Need We Say More?’”
Joplin offered a recapitulation of themes already developed in El Paso. This series was also called Pro Musica, and it, too, had a decisive personality at the center. Cynthia Schwab, a Manhattan native, has been working to create a musical oasis in Joplin for twenty years. “The three things in life that mean the most to me are God, hockey, and music,” she said. In her garage, a New York Rangers banner hung next to a poster for the Leipzig Chamber Orchestra. Schwab had approached the St. Lawrence with a surprising proposal: for the twentieth anniversary of her series, she wanted the group to play an all-contemporary program.
The Joplin concert took place in a fine old church at the center of town. The star attraction was the Third Quartet of R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian avant-garde composer who has specialized in dismantling the standard concert experience and bringing music into the wider environment. The Schafer quartet has long been one of the St. Lawrence’s favorites. It begins with the cellist playing alone onstage, somewhat despondently. One by one, the others enter—from behind the stage and from the back of the hall. War erupts between the violins, with savage accusations traded back and forth. In the second movement, all hell breaks loose: the Lawrences reprise their yelling act, screaming gibberish in tandem with fast-moving dissonant lines. It’s a spellbinding spectacle, and it is also a hilarious send-up of the emotional infantilism of certain ultramodern composers. Then, in the final movement, the mood turns solemn, as the quartet plays a prayerful unison melody in ghostly quarter tones. At the end, the music disappears over the horizon of audibility, leaving a mystical silence.
The citizens of Joplin had a mixed reaction to this astonishing piece. A third of them didn’t buy it, and they expressed their dismay by leaving at intermission, trudging in stony silence to the church parking lot. There were approving yelps, however, from a group of younger people in the back rows. They turned out to be music students, some of whom had worked with the Lawrences in their quartet-training program at Stanford, and they had driven three hours from Kansas City to see their mentors play. Four of them belonged to a quartet called the Yurodivy, which is Russian for “holy fool.” The leader of the Yurodivys was Francisco Herrera, a large fellow in a purple sash. “Did you hear the intonation in the third movement?” he asked. “Incredible. There’s no kitsch in their playing. They absolutely believe in what they’re doing.”
At the inevitable postconcert dinner, Cynthia Schwab made it clear that the Yurodivy crew could not be accommodated. The mood turned glum. Nuttall, in particular, looked crestfallen. He poked at his dessert unenthusiastically. “I’m sorry your young friends weren’t able to come,” Schwab eventually said, after conversation glided to a halt. “I had to get you over here, and I have responsibilities to my board members.” Nuttall shook his head and replied, “You should be bringing more young people like them to your concerts. They are the audience of the future.”
It was now close to midnight, and the Lawrences had to catch a 7:00 flight the next morning. They piled into their rented Dodge Caravan and drove off. From this tour, each of them had earned, after expenses, a low four-figure sum that wouldn’t have covered the hotel bill for Maurizio Pollini’s piano. As I headed to my motel room, I thought of the Yurodivys, driving back to Kansas City in the dark, and of Cynthia Schwab’s reception, and of the many ways in which classical music entangles itself in a web of money and status. And I realized that the four musicians of the St. Lawrence deserve fame not simply for the quality of their music-making but for the joy they take in the act of connection.
13
EDGES OF POP
KIKI AND HERB, CECIL TAYLOR AND SONIC YOUTH, SINATRA, KURT COBAIN
KIKI AND HERB, 2003
It is said of many show-business legends that they lose touch with the ordinary world and become cartoons of their former selves. Kiki DuRane, a sixty-something lounge singer who tours ad nauseam with a doleful accompanist named Herb, has gone in the opposite direction; she is a fictional creation who has acquired the grit of the real. Kiki and Herb are the invention of the writer-performer Justin Bond and the pianist Kenny Mellman, who have long been fixtures at downtown New York venues like Flamingo East, PS 122, and Fez. They have refined their act into an Off-Broadway show, Kiki & Herb: Coup de Théâtre, which recently opened at the Cherry Lane. It is a slashingly funny, psychically unsettling entertainment—part cabaret, part rock and roll, part Victorian melodrama—to which the category of camp does not apply. Camp implies knowingness and detachment; Bond’s Kiki is anarchic and atavistic, in the grip of forces beyond her control. She is almost militant in her decrepitude. Reminiscing airily about her old friend Grace Kelly, barking obscenely at childhood foes, drifting into a sullen stupor, snapping back to life with yawps of vicious glee, Kiki is a beacon of insanity in a world that may finally be coming around to her point of view.
The conceit of the show is that Kiki, a self-described “boozy chan-teusie,” is aiming to attract new listeners by singing contemporary hits. “It is both thrilling and humbling that so many young people have, as it were, ‘tuned in to our sound,’” she says, with the overenunciation of the early-evening alcoholic. Thus begins a scorched-earth advance across decades of pop music, from Bob Merrill’s “Make Yourself Comfortable” to Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You out of My Head.” Kiki’s flailing stabs at modern trends call to mind such classic miscalculations as Mae West’s renditions of Beatles songs and Ethel Merman’s disco album, but the genius of Kiki is that her entire career seems to consist of bungled crossover projects: a bossa-nova album (Kiki and Herb: Don’t Blame It on Kiki and Herb, 1964), a spoken-word record (Kiki and Herb: Whitey on the Moon, 1972), a belated disco effort (Kiki and Herb: One Last Chance to Blow, 1983). The songstress hurls herself at this material with such dire enthusiasm that she takes full possession of it. Lately, she has taken an interest in rap, which she calls “the folk music of today.” In past shows, she has sung Wu-Tang Clan and Snoop Doggy Dogg, adding jazz vocalise to such lyrics as “All my niggaz and my bitches / Throw your motherfuckin’ hands in the air!” This time, she takes on Eminem, whose self-pitying hysteria suits her beautifully.
Between the songs come autobiographical vignettes. Bond has mapped out the life of Kiki in loving detail, and each show adds a few new twists to the familiar downward spiral. The singer was born during the Great Depression, overshadowed by tragedy from the start. “A lot of people jumped out of windows when the stock market collapsed in 1929,” she recalls, “but not all of them died. My father was such a man.” She was given the diagnosis of “retard” and placed in a children’s institution in western Pennsylvania. There she met Herb, a foundling of indeterminate origin. When Herb fell victim to a predatory delinquent named Danny, Kiki was there to comfort him, and a great friendship was born. (The Danny episode inspires one of the show’s set pieces, a dramatic monologue built around the song “I’m Ugly and I Don’t Know Why,” by an obscure band called Butt Trumpet, with adornments from the inspirational Christian poem “Footprints.”) The duo’s musical career developed only in fits and starts. There was a prolonged interruption when Kiki had to serve a jail sentence for the attempted murder of her first husband, an abusive boxer named Ruby. “I wasn’t t
rying to kill him,” Kiki explains, “only trying to get his attention.”
Throughout the evening, the chanteuse looks back ruefully to the year 1967, when her life turned momentarily posh. A flashback sequence re-creates the scene: Kiki and Herb are playing at the Grand Casino, in Monte Carlo, at the invitation of Princess Grace. They are making what should have been their triumphant comeback album, Kiki and Herb: It’s Not Unusual. Kiki has Aristotle Onassis as a lover, Maria Callas as a rival. Fortune has raised her up, but now a terrible tragedy lays her low. During a Mediterranean cruise, she leaves her seven-year-old daughter, Coco, alone on deck while she goes below to satisfy her carnal needs. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she says, head cast down, “where the hell can a kid go on the deck of a boat?” At this juncture, the performance begins to waver between black comedy and something like genuine pathos. Kiki’s failures as a singer pale next to her failures as a mother. The watery death of Coco haunts her. She has lost touch with her two other children, who claim not to know her, even though she sends them all her press clippings. She takes refuge in another glass of Canadian Club and ginger ale—the piano is equipped with a drink holder—and the drink begins to take its toll. She digresses, and digresses again—“Where was I, ladeezh n genlmn?”—and then stops, staring fixedly at nothing.
Just when it seems that the comic spirit of the evening has been swallowed up in melancholy, the original, rampaging Kiki returns, her extreme jazz vocals now fueled by rage at herself and the world. She turns for solace to her fans, who have always stood by her side, albeit in dwindling numbers. What the world needs, she says, is more love, for “without love … there is only rape.”
Kiki & Herb is a comedy, at least on the surface, but the performers are serious people who smuggle into their act a fair degree of theatrical and musical sophistication. Bond, who is forty, is a native of Hagerstown, Maryland. He studied classical acting in London, but he developed a distaste for that aspect of theater which involved working with directors. He moved to San Francisco in 1988 and threw himself into street theater, avant-garde noise, and conceptual cabaret. One night, while trying to think of an innovative birthday present for a friend, he drew age marks on his face and assumed the Kiki persona. He is resigned to being labeled a “drag queen,” although, after meeting him offstage, you want to find a mellower label for his particular brand of gender vagueness. Bond is simply a svelte person who looks stylish in women’s clothes, especially swinging-sixties outfits, like the ones Faye Dunaway wore in The Thomas Crown Affair.
Mellman, who is thirty-four, has the innocent face, diffident air, and slightly bewildered expression of someone who has spent long hours at the piano since childhood. He studied composition at the University of California at Berkeley, but became disenchanted with the music department when he was told that Erik Satie’s seldom heard Socrate was too boring to warrant a performance. He switched to San Francisco State to study poetry, and sought a new medium for his musical curiosity. He found it when he met Bond, and began accompanying the singer in such hard-to-reconstruct nightclub evenings as Dixie McCall’s Patterns for Living. Kiki made her public debut one night in 1993, when, at the end of a Gay Pride weekend, Bond and Mellman felt too exhausted to do their usual program. “You’re Herb, I’m Kiki,” Bond said, before they went onstage, and a fading star was born.
The early Kiki and Herb shows were distinctly messier than the one at the Cherry Lane. They were fueled by the energy and anger of AIDS activism—the in-your-face tactics of ACT UP and Queer Nation. Bond and Mellman used to heighten the naturalism of the show by drinking copiously onstage. When I first saw them, in the late nineties, Kiki would climb on top of cafe tables and order the customers to lick her legs. If you tried to move your drink out of the way, she might grab it out of your hand. Another night, she threw a tray of steak knives, fortunately causing no harm. When Bond was asked to perform at Madonna’s birthday party, he got into a scuffle with the R&B artist D’Angelo. Kiki and Herb emerged as much from the spit-spewing, scenery-chewing mentality of punk rock as from the cabaret tradition. It’s not much of a contradiction, when you consider how many of the original New York punk rockers came out of the avant-garde art scene, the gay underground, and other bohemias.
In the end, Kiki & Herb is more political than its premise suggests. We should have expected no less from a woman who alleges to have been engaged to the radical black presidential candidate Dick Gregory. The politics surfaces not just in Kiki’s commentary on current affairs—summing up George W. Bush’s approach to homeland security, she advises, “Whatever you do, don’t go out and don’t stay in”—but also in her obsession with the figure of the abandoned, abused, or socially outcast child. The stories return relentlessly to this theme—a young gay boy raped by his classmates, a girl cast aside by her mother and placed in an institution. Of course, whenever Kiki is beginning to break your heart with these tales, she has to blurt out something stunningly grotesque. “If you weren’t abused as a child,” she declares, “you must have been an ugly kid.” The unshockable downtown crowd never fails to gasp at that one.
Only an academic paper in gender studies could do justice to the complexities of Kikiness. (In fact, an NYU graduate student has written a thesis on the subject.) The show also makes interesting points about music—about how songs are sung and about what they mean. This is where poor Herb comes to the fore. Kenny Mellman’s job is to make sense on the piano of his partner’s daft repertoire, and those who feel that modern pop songs have too much technology and too little music will enjoy his Luddite solutions. Rachmaninovian bass octaves give symphonic heft to a song like Radiohead’s “Exit Music (for a Film).” To suggest the saturated textures of hip-hop production, he attacks the instrument in a dissonant frenzy, substituting cluster chords for synthetic beats. He gets a big, bellowing sound out of the piano. Herb, as Kiki portrays him, is a damaged child seeking refuge in music, and the piano is the vehicle of his revenge.
The high points of the show are the medleys, which are carefully constructed simulations of music losing its mind. One song morphs into the next before you really notice what’s going on. In Kiki and Herb’s beloved Christmas medleys, “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” becomes the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin”; “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” becomes Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” The showstopper in the current show begins with “Whitey on the Moon,” Gil Scott-Heron’s protest song about moon landings and racial injustice. After a minute or two, Scott-Heron’s spoken-word anthem has mutated into latter-day rap—Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” with its inspiring chorus, “You better lose yourself in the music, the moment / you own it, you better never let it go.” A second later, Kiki shrieks, “And you may ask yourself, ‘What is that beautiful house?”’ and we are in the middle of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” The transitions are seamless because Mellman translates all the songs into his own peculiar musical voice, which might be described as John Cage cocktail lounge.
When I asked Mellman about the Eminem medley, he said that he had spent a weekend working on it and that the theme of it was appropriation. Kiki singing Eminem is ridiculous; but no less ridiculous than Eminem, a white kid, mimicking black culture, or Talking Heads incorporating African beats into their SoHo art rock. Every singer, even Gil Scott-Heron, is pretending in one way or another—putting on drag—and Kiki does the service of bulldozing all the façades of authenticity. There’s something liberating about the way the songs break free of categories and come together in a midnight carnival. The music becomes as androgynous as the performer: it is always changing shape and identity. This is probably why fellow musicians find Kiki and Herb so compelling. Everyone from Lou Reed to the Pet Shop Boys has attended their shows. Among the rock memorabilia that Bond has accumulated is Edie Sedgwick’s leopard-skin pillbox hat; he wears it while singing Bob Dylan’s “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.”
Bond and Mellman are in the curious position of being celebrities’ celebrities—famous
to the famous but little known outside the downtown scene. For years, they have contemplated taking their act out of lounges and into legitimate theaters; with some trepidation, they are now doing it. If they find wider fame, it will be richly deserved, but their longtime fans don’t want them to wander too far from their punk-drag roots, when they scared the daylights out of unsuspecting customers. Once, during a show in San Francisco, Bond went to an open window and began shouting to people on the street outside: “Just don’t get too comfortable out there!”
SONIC YOUTH AND CECIL TAYLOR, 1998
Picture music as a map, and musical genres as continents—classical music as Europe, jazz as America, rock as Asia. Each genre has its distinct culture of playing and listening. Between the genres are the cold oceans of taste, which can be cruel to musicians who try to cross over. There are always brave souls willing to make the attempt: Aretha Franklin sings “Nessun dorma” at the Grammys; Paul McCartney writes a symphony; violinists perform on British TV in punk regalia or lingerie. Such exploits get the kind of giddy attention that used to greet early aeronautical feats like Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight and the maiden voyage of the Hindenburg.