Since the jug-of-vodka incident, Bazan has kept a pretty low profile, doing a couple of modest solo tours and releasing an EP of raw-sounding songs on Barsuk. Pedro the Lion was a reliable paycheck—most of its albums sold in the neighborhood of 50,000 copies, and the group toured regularly, drawing 400 to 600 people a night. His most recent tour couldn’t have been more different: Bazan doesn’t have a road band put together yet for his solo stuff, but he couldn’t afford to wait for Curse Your Branches to come out. So he found another way to keep in touch with his most devoted fans, booking 60 solo shows in houses and other noncommercial spaces. He played intimate acoustic sets to maybe 40 people each night, at $20 a ticket, and took questions between songs—some of them, unsurprisingly, about the tough spiritual questions his new material raises.
Despite his outspokenness on those questions, he was invited back to Cornerstone for the first time this year.
“I know David has a long history of being a seeker and trying to navigate through his faith. Cornerstone is open to that,” says John Herrin, the festival’s director. “We welcome plenty of musicians who may not identify themselves as Christians but are artists with an ongoing connection to faith…. We’re glad to have him back. We don’t give up on people; we don’t give up on the kids here who are seeking, trying to figure out what they don’t believe and what they do. This festival was built on patience.”
At Cornerstone, where I catch up with him behind the fair-food midway, Bazan laughs when I suggest that he’s there trying to save the Christians. “I am. I am really invested, because I came up in it and I love a lot of evangelical Christians—I care what happens with the movement,” he says. “The last 30 years of it have been hijacked; the boomer evangelicals, they were seduced in the most embarrassing and scandalous way into a social, political and economical posture that is the antithesis of Jesus’ teaching.”
With Curse Your Branches and in his recent shows, he’s inverting the usual call to witness: “You might be the only Christian they ever meet.” He’s the doubter’s witness, and he might be the only agnostic these Christian kids ever really listen to.
When I talk to some of those kids in the merch tent the day after Bazan’s set, many of them seem to be trying to spin the new songs, straining to categorize them as Christian so they can justify continuing to listen to them. One fan says it’s good that Bazan is singing about the perils of sin, “particularly sexual sin.” Another interprets the songs as a witness of addiction, the testimony of the stumbling man.
Cultural critic and progressive Christian author David Dark, who since 2003 has become one of Bazan’s closest friends, claims that Bazan’s skepticism and anger are in-line with biblical tradition. “I doubt this is what your average Cornerstone attendee means, but when David is addressing his idea of his God, the one that he fears exists but refuses to believe in, when he is telling God, ‘If this is the situation with us and you, then fuck you—the people who love you, I hope they see you for who you are,’ when he’s doing that, he is at his most biblical. If we are referring to the deep strains of complaint and prayers and tirades against conceptions of God in the Bible—yes, then in that way he’s in your Christian tradition. But I disagree that he’s an advocate for the biblical.”
When I tell Bazan that there are kids at Cornerstone resisting the clear message of his songs, he’s surprised. “That someone could listen to what I was saying and think that I was saying it apologetically—like, in a way that characterizes [doubt] as the wrong posture—bums me out, but that’s pretty high-concept given how I’m presenting this stuff. So I have to hand it to someone who can keep on spinning what is so clearly something else.” He pauses for a long moment, then adds, “I don’t want to be that misunderstood.”
During the two days I follow Bazan and his fans around the Cornerstone campus, though, it becomes clear that he isn’t really misunderstood at all. Everyone knows what he’s singing about—what’s happening is that his listeners are taking great pains to sidestep the obvious. “Well, his songs have always been controversial,” one says, but when asked to pinpoint the source of the controversy suggests it’s because he swears—nothing about not believing in hell or not taking the Bible as God’s word. Bazan’s agnosticism is the elephant in the merch tent.
Fans rhapsodize about Bazan’s work: they love his honesty, they love how they can relate to him, how he’s not proselytizing, how he’s speaking truth—but they don’t tend to delve into what exactly that truth might be. Brice Evans, a 24-year-old from Harrisburg, Illinois, who came to Cornerstone specifically to see Bazan’s set, dances artfully around it. “He’s showing a side of Christianity that no other band shows,” Evans says. “He’s trying to get a message across that’s more than that.”
It’s hard to say if anybody is conscious of the irony: the “side of Christianity” Bazan sings about is disenfranchisement from it.
“I think with Curse Your Branches David expands the space of the talk-about-able,” says Dark. “It’s not confessional in the sense that he’s down on himself and trying to confess something to God in hopes of being forgiven. I think that’s what crowds are trying to make of him, but they’re going to have a tougher time when they get the record.”
Bazan is known for his dialogues with fans, and during his set he’s affable, taking questions from the crowd. Tonight’s audience, openly anxious and awed, keeps it light at first: “Would you rather be a werewolf or a vampire?” Then he opens with the new album’s lead track, “Hard to Be,” a sobering song with an especially hard-hitting second verse:
Wait just a minute
You expect me to believe
That all this misbehaving
Grew from one enchanted tree?
And helpless to fight it
We should all be satisfied
With this magical explanation
For why the living die
And why it’s hard to be
Hard to be, hard to be
A decent human being?
By the time he finishes those lines I can see half a dozen people crying; a woman near me is trembling and sobbing. Others have their heads in their hands. Many look stunned, but no one leaves. When the song ends, the applause is thunderous.
After Bazan plays a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” reinstating the sacrilegious verses left out of the best-known versions, someone shouts, “How’s your soul?” Bazan looks up from tuning his guitar and says, “My soul? Oh, it’s fine.” This elicits an “Amen, brother!” from the back of the tent.
Following Bazan’s set, a throng of fans—kids, young women with babies on their hips, a handful of youth pastors—queues up around the side of the stage to talk to him. Some kids want hugs and ask geeked-out questions, but just as many attempt to feel him out in a sly way. “I really wished you had played ‘Lullaby,’” says one kid, naming a very early Pedro the Lion song that’s probably the most worshipful in Bazan’s catalog. A few gently bait him, referring to Scripture the way gang members throw signs, eager for a response that will reveal where Bazan is really at.
During discussions like this Bazan doesn’t usually get into the subtle barometric fluctuations in his relationship with Jesus, but that still leaves room for plenty of post-show theological talk. “This process feels necessary and natural for these people,” he says. “They’re in a precarious situation—maybe I am, too. To maintain their particular posture, they have to figure out: Do they need to get distance from me, or is it just safe enough to listen to? I empathize as people are trying to gauge, ‘Is this guy an atheist? Because I heard he was.’”
Bazan has chosen sides, but old ideas linger. “Some time ago, we were discussing [the Pedro the Lion song] ‘Foregone Conclusions,’” Dark says. “I told him I was impressed with the lines ‘You were too busy steering conversation toward the Lord / To hear the voice of the Spirit / Begging you to shut the fuck up / You thought it must be the devil / Trying to make you go astray / Besides it could not have been the Lo
rd / Because you don’t believe He talks that way.’ I thought, what a liberating word for people who’ve been shoved around by all manner of brainwash. But also, Dave’s doing something even more subtle, as many interpret the unforgivable sin to be blasphemy against the Holy Spirit—confusing the voice of God for the voice of the devil—so there’s a whole ‘nother level of theological devastation going on in the song.
“When I brought it up, he laughed and told me he still worries about going to hell for that one. He knows that it’s horribly funny that he feels that way, but he won’t lie by saying he’s entirely over it. He’s both 100 percent sincere and 100 percent ironically detached. He’s haunted even as he pushes forward, saying what he feels even though he half fears doing so will be cosmically costly for him.”
After a long few years in the wilderness, Bazan seems happy—though he’s still parsing out his beliefs, he’s visibly relieved to be out and open about where he’s not at. “It’s more comfortable for me to be agnostic,” he says. “There’s less internal tension by far—that’s even with me duking it out with my perception of who God is on a pretty regular basis, and having a lot of uncertainty on that level. For now, just being is enough. Whether things happen naturally, completely outside an author, or whether the dynamics of earth and people are that way because God created them—or however you want to credit it—if you look around and pay attention and observe, there is enough right here to know how to act, to know how to live, to be at peace with one another.
“Because I grew up believing in hell and reckoning, there is a voice in me that says, ‘That might not cut it with the man upstairs,’ but I think that that has to be enough. For me it is enough.”
FLIRTING WITH RELIGION: RICKIE LEE JONES
Chicago Reader, March 2007
Contemporary praise pop may posit Jesus as a personal savior, but much of the language it uses is a sort of salvation jargon that hardly speaks to the uninitiated—and it tends to frame worship as something done at a remove, with we sinners here on Earth and God distant in Heaven. The songs on Rickie Lee Jones’ new Sermon on Exposition Boulevard (New West), on the other hand, have all the hallmarks of love songs—the lust and the longing, the desperation and solitude, the new love raising its defiant head, the wounded heart healed. But these love songs are about something far less tangible than romance: they’re songs of faith. It’s as if Jones has divorced the secular world and her rebound boyfriend is Jesus Christ.
Jones improvised the bulk of the lyrics for the album’s 13 songs while the tape was rolling. She riffed on The Words, a book published by her friend Lee Cantelon that removes the words of Jesus from their biblical context and arranges them by topic—a kind of Cliffs Notes to the New Testament. The record starts easy enough, with the sleepy jangle of “Nobody Knows My Name,” over which Jones—her voice still the sinewy, reedy cry muscled into insistent girl-soul that we recognize from back in ‘79—sings of a God present in things both elemental and man-made, an everywhere-at-once spirit, moving freely, unknown and unrecognized. It’s a lament of faith in a faithless world, but it also establishes a theme that recurs throughout Sermon: that Jesus and belief in Jesus have been co-opted and codified by The Religious Right, who set rigid parameters for who can worship and how. They narrowly define what a relationship with God can look like: Jesus is in the church, on the cross, on the side of the good and the righteous. Jones returns to us the gnostic Jesus, the people’s savior, who’s down with everyone and everything, not just the pious spittin’ heavy hosannas between the pews.
Most of Sermon is in first person, but the songs aren’t personal testaments of belief per se. On the second track, “Gethsemane,” she sings a sort of internal monologue, imagining Jesus’ foxhole-pleading with his father as he awaits his fate. The first few times I heard it, I thought it was baby-please-take-me-back post-breakup desperation: “You wake up one morning and you’re by yourself / You’re on your own,” Jones sings, and later, “All I want is your hand.” Christ’s willing obedience to God’s plan is the very model of faith, but Jones cleaves it with a tender lick of humanity. Her portrait of Jesus is much more casual than the one you get from cracking a hymnal.
The most remarkable thing about the record isn’t Jones’ recasting of Jesus but the way she transmits her own faith: it’s a soft sell, relying on the beauty and aliveness of her message rather than heavy-handed threats of fire and brimstone. Underneath the metaphors and the transmuted bits of the Gospel of Luke that pass for a chorus is the true light of the record, Jones’ own eureka moment, a tiny thing laid carefully in each song. You get the sense that therein lies her hope for the world—a hope not of universal conversion but of peace and salvation for all. It’d sound insufferably New Agey and annoying if Rickie weren’t our West Coast, California-cooled Patti, who fell hard for jazz instead of rock ‘n’ roll and preferred her own diary-poems to Rimbaud’s. Both ecstatic and world-weary, she sings of the “soft-shoed devil” in “Circle in the Sand” as though they’re well acquainted, like the devil might be a local bad boy she knows from back in her wild-girl days.
Last Saturday night, when Jones came through town, her wild-girl days seemed far behind her. She blew in from the blizzard and walked up the theater aisle directly onto the stage, her scarf and coat still on, a to-go coffee cup in her hand. She pulled out the piano bench, dropped her outside clothes in a pile on the floor, pushed up her shirtsleeves, and sat down to get to work. She was wearing lace-up shoes, a sweatshirt, no makeup, and cargo pants with a bunch of stuff in the pockets—she looked like this was just a stop she had to make on her way to Petco for some litter. But then, in the quick silence between the end of a song and the start of the applause, someone yelled “Rickie!” She looked up from under her long blond tangles and flashed a huge, knowing smile, and in that moment she was all rock star.
For the first few songs of the set it was just Jones at the piano. She gave some forgotten cuts the once-over, seeming purposeful and confident and comfortable with her dominion over the music and the crowd. After “The Last Chance Texaco,” she was joined by her six-piece backing band, most of which appears on Sermon—and which included Cantelon himself, doing backup incantations. They ambled through almost the entire album, their churning, fuzzed-out tangle recalling the Velvet Underground rather than the sometimes adult-contemporary sound of the studio recording. Jones strapped on an electric guitar and occasionally did double duty as a shaman: Her voice shrank and expanded, at one extreme tiny enough to be mistaken for a child’s, at the other clarion and full. She let loose whispers, holy howls, and even a swampy Waits-ian growl on “Tried to Be a Man.”
The songs meandered and circled back on themselves, picking up and shedding new instrumental layers as they went and almost never doing the same thing twice—sometimes they threatened to get away from the band entirely. But Jones was the real show. She nearly yelled the words to “It Hurts,” giving voice to the loneliness of the A.D. world—”It hurts / To be here / When you’re gone.” The song could be a love letter from Mary Magdalene to an absent Jesus or a prayer from a disappointed disciple. “My only precious thing I had / Has been broken.” But as electric guitar arced and receded and furious strumming and choral ahhhs welled up around Jones, as she squeezed her eyes shut and bent in half, pulling the mic down with her, as her agony turned to ecstasy and her accusing wail turned triumphant, it became clear what we were hearing—it was a redemption song.
WHY MICHAEL JACKSON’S PAST MIGHT BE GARY, INDIANA’S ONLY FUTURE
Village Voice, July 2009
The first thing I noticed was that Michael Jackson was gone. Downtown Gary, Indiana’s main drag hosted a wide-scale mural project in 2002, fantastic possible futures for the city’s boarded-up buildings painted directly onto the boards, with an MJ adorning the old record store, symbolically turning his back on Gary, three digits of his bejeweled glove-hand blotted out with graffiti, as if he were giving his birthplace the finger. It was an odd touch of realism amid the
mis-scaled office scenes of ferns and giant computers; Michael had been painted with care and detail. Now, much of downtown has been re-boarded, and he has disappeared again.
I’d been driving from downstate all day, with news reports of his death getting more and more detailed as time passed. Shortly after arriving home, a friend texted what I was already thinking: “We should go to Gary.” Hitting one of Chicago’s impromptu MJ-tribute nights didn’t seem right—Thriller had taught me what it meant to have music be your whole life, to be a devoted fan; Thriller was the first album that was all mine, not my parents’—and so, a vigil seemed more appropriate than a dance party. Gary is where it began, and it was only 33 miles from my house. The toll booths on I-90 West pumped Off the Wall in every lane.
The Jackson family home is about a mile off an unlit freeway exit. You pass the bank, the only one in town. When I did a travel piece on Gary a few years ago for the Chicago Reader, people were quick to brag about how things were looking up: They had a bank again, after several years without one. Its gleam stands in sharp contrast to a downtown filled with stately, half-burned buildings with saplings growing from rooftops and terraces. A fire took much of the area in a single night in 1997: what survived still stands. Boarded-up stores are emblazoned with fancy, loping mid-century fonts; there are signs for chains that haven’t existed for decades. It’s strange, impossible, and beautiful, the Pompeii of the Midwest, a rotting monument to industrialization, an apocalypse fueled by plant-closings, white flight and arson.
The Jacksons left Gary in 1968, right before the Steel City began its freefall: Between 1960 and 2000, the city’s population was nearly halved. Their house shows no mark of its former occupants’ success, save for the renamed streets—it sits at the corner of Jackson Street and Jackson Family Boulevard. It’s incredible to imagine that a family of 11 once lived in the tiny two-bedroom bungalow. There is no garage. Maybe there was, once. Maybe they just practiced in the yard, though dancing in the grass is hard. Maybe there’s a basement we don’t know about.
The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic Page 12