Lost Joy

by Camden Joy

  Or maybe that’s not Zevon’s point at all. Maybe the point is the abruptness of the song’s shift—that a paean to a brave athlete can become, within a measure or two of music, a horror story. Every moment of life presents some opportunity to wreck—you miscalculate a shift in traffic or forget to pull out before coming. Somehow we find ourselves outside relationships, without love. Sometimes it’s not even a choice, just an unfair confluence, bad luck. Let’s say you uncharacteristically lose your temper—but it’s when the paparazzi are around; perhaps a lethal shot discharges from the pistol you were promised was unloaded. This was Mancini’s fate—in executing his job’s responsibilities he merely traveled one punch too far and spattered blood all over his formerly playful nickname. Now he’s hailed on the street as the guy who killed that Korean. Now Melvin Toff never tells me what he’s feeling. Zevon’s lumbering voice in “Boom Boom Mancini” says it all, his affect flattening as the batteries in his heart audibly peter out. Hearing this, I cannot help but admit how, given a second chance, we’d kill Jimmy Garcia all over again without even hesitating.

  THIRTY-SEVEN POSTERS ABOUT SOULED AMERICAN

  Publisher’s Note: These posters appeared throughout the summer of 1997. A collective was formed, similar to the CMJoy Gang. Contributors focused upon a single unheralded act, the Chicago band named Souled American. The posters measured from 2 feet to 4 feet in height, and were designed by Mark Lerner of Rag & Bone Shop. Those that follow were authored by Camden Joy.

  Our First Encounter

  We would go quite often, usually once a month but sometimes more, sometimes once a week or more, to see a guitarist named Kevin Trainor, who had a band called the Surreal McCoys and was in the Special Guests.

  Trainor was coolness itself, with an easy charisma to the way he played. In his hands a guitar seemed very simple. He was handsome, funny, intelligent. He sang in an old style with a deep powerful voice.

  One night, Sunday night, early 1989, we went to the Rodeo Bar to see Trainor play with the Special Guests (who now called themselves “5 Chinese Brothers”). The Rodeo Bar had free peanuts (we called them “dinner”), no cover, and relatively cheap beer.

  We were carrying instruments, having come straight from a rehearsal. We tried to time our arrival to avoid any opening acts but were unsuccessful in this.

  What do I remember? I remember a tall slim guy with mirror shades playing an acoustic guitar with a pick-up through an amplifier—it sounded like mine! This tall guy was singing from his heart, in a choked drawl. We were skeptical snots, eager to insult anything, and even before we found seats we had exchanged looks of ridicule. We all had things to criticize—the bassist is ruining the songs, playing all over them! The drummer isn’t even facing his kit! The songs are all too slow! That singer’s not enunciating!

  Before we could say a thing, however, the music made itself felt. It was truly unparalleled that all of us would be in immediate agreement on the beauty of another band’s sound, but there it was. Our songwriter found something to like, the cradling care with which these fellows carried each composition, a certain inarguable resemblance to the disjointed images and antique feel of his favorite Dylan bootlegs; our bassist saw a way of steering the sound, punching through the song, that he’d perhaps never imagined; our guitarist grew enraptured with the tender embellishments which their electric guitarist submitted for our consideration every few chord changes. I can’t imagine why our drummer liked it, unless he looked forward to the day when he would be restricted to an occasional tom hit, a lazy bass kick, a drag of the stick across the cymbal, a percussive surrender.

  I remember the ostensible leader of 5 Chinese Brothers rushing over to us to apologize for this band, he didn’t expect them to go on much longer, he couldn’t wait for them to get off. We looked at him in astonishment and asked who these guys were.

  “Souled American,” he said, with uncharacteristic ill-will. “From Chicago. They have a record out.”

  “Sold American,” we repeated thoughtfully.

  “Souled,” he corrected us. “Souled! S-O-U-L-E-D!” He was angry that they were going way over their allotted time slot. He imagined the people who had come for 5 Chinese Brothers would start leaving soon, most had to work early tomorrow and had to get to bed soon, and in a free establishment with no door you needed to hang on to whoever came in if you aimed to get rebooked there.

  His concerns grew inaudible to us. We were somewhere else at the moment. You see, mostly we watched bands for their musicianship or for their originality; either we loved their songs or their unique feel. It was rare—Christ, more than rare: I’d say because of the way we hated jazz that it was unprecedented—for us to stumble across a band whose songs fit our formal, content-heavy requirements, while at the same time their arrangements drew, it seemed, from some completely different atmosphere; a band, in short, we could respect as both familiar and strange.

  We tried to incorporate them into our sound. It wasn’t easy. We broke up soon after.

  Diminishing Returns

  They pursue a career like the forlorn ex from one of their early songs pursues his gone love: in complete secrecy. “I’ve often walked down your street. It’s paved; no one knows.” No one notices him in the song, of course, not just because a paved road carries no footprints but because his pursuit has so utterly wrecked his spirit as to desubstantiate him, expunge his corporeality. The band’s pursuit of the musical marketplace has fared no better, turning them—album by album—into spooks and phantoms. Dropping more and more chord changes out of their songs, increasingly blurring their main instrumentation via intentional studio miscalibrations, they have now obscured their history, their sources, their very songs so completely that there is no reason people hearing them now would suspect they were once a reggae covers band that drifted into playing uptempo country-western and bluegrass songs. They’ve left no footprints anywhere.

  Interview, Part One

  A:—you mean right this minute? Oh, I’m just puttering around, watering my plants, like an old veteran of the music industry. Souled American, hmm . . . That does seem awfully long ago, a very distant thing, I think, a very obscure one.

  Q: But there was a time they were higher-profile . . .

  A: Really? To me, they’re a band that for a while there, I thought, were just about the best band in the world. But it seemed like Rough Trade would put these records out and they’d sell maybe 3,000 copies. There’d be almost no feedback, you know? There were a few bands I knew who liked them, and a few critics. But that was about it, really.

  Q: Why was it that they didn’t break through to higher levels?

  A: I think Souled American would probably say it was because Rough Trade didn’t promote them well enough. And it’s certainly true that we weren’t high-powered in that regard. But it’s also true that the band defeated any effort to promote them that went beyond us just trying to tell people, “Listen to this! It’s great!”

  Q: How so?

  A: For a start, they were absolutely insistent on doing everything their own way. That’s not a bad thing in itself. You’ve probably heard the story behind that song on the first record that goes, “I know what the band wants. I know what the band needs.” Those are supposedly words spoken to Souled American by the A&R person from Slash Records who was trying to sign them. “I know what the band wants! I know what the band needs!”

  Q: No, I didn’t know that.

  A: And they absolutely weren’t going to have that. Only they could know what they wanted. I remember sitting at an adjacent table to them at the Rodeo Bar while they were being interviewed and Chris saying, “Hey, the great thing about being on Rough Trade is that we can do whatever we want.” I reckon that they could—but I’m not sure that that’s always a good thing for a band. And I think their determination to do things their own way—while being very admirable and leading to really great records for the people who were able to get into them—made it a lot harder for other people, who might’ve go
t into them, to get into them.

  Q: So sabotage lay in their hearts, as they studied their career possibilities?

  A: They were very concerned about artwork, for example, and it not being very revealing. Not that they wanted it to be secret—I just think they hated things being crass and obvious. Those guys were so determinedly awkward, it seems to me there was a sense in which the only worthwhile success for them would be one which they had tried, in every possible way, to screw up.

  Travels With Lowery

  As they drove, they were debating their song arrangements, trying to decide on a band name; yet once the cassette of Souled American began to play, the conversation died. They continued to follow the highway, descending into a valley of villages which seemed strategically placed as if to protect the road from the encroachment of the woods. A few hawks appeared above, circling intently, and with that the temperature plummeted dramatically. Faced with this, the day simply quit. The houses they passed soon resembled ski-slope cottages, benign and unsophisticated. Through the passenger window came the taste of fireplaces being lit, the alluring bite of hickory, a scent of longing, a gentle anonymity to which people all around them succumbed. The band kept on, traveling deeper into the countryside. Twilight made its way up the tree limbs, bringing haze and confusion. The particulars of their surroundings drifted away, indistinct. Now it was night. Still no one spoke.

  At last Lowery pointed at the cassette player. “Now this,” he barked, “is great,” and others murmured in agreement. Souled American. The tape was purchased from a bargain bin in Baton Rouge. The beats fell hard, accented awkwardly, as if these were bluegrass standards played by a reggae covers band, which apparently was true. The words came in croaks, barely arriving.

  “If we’re not careful,” warned Lowery, “this is what I’ll want our new stuff to sound like. Like unreleased B-side outtakes from Exile on Main Street or something.”

  Pete the bassist cleared his throat. “How many, do you think, this stuff sold?”

  Lowery shrugged. “Three thousand, maybe. Tops.”

  At the next cigarette break, Pete quietly slipped a different cassette into the tape player, a Tom Petty album, a bestseller.

  It wasn’t merely that Pete was afraid to waste his time with something less than huge. There were engineering concerns. So much of why songs get on the radio is the way they are miked and mixed along specific industry standards, standards which Souled American avowedly flouted. From his particular vantage, as a longtime studio musician, Pete perhaps depended on these standards more than the others.

  As for whether Lowery sold out by suppressing his Souled American tastes in favor of a Tom Pettier sound, this seems incorrect. It ignores the Souled American influences integrated by Lowery into compositions such as “Kerosene Hat,” and how that band’s sound affected Lowery’s production decisions with Sparklehorse and FSK. But more than that, it fails to take into account his oft-stated weariness at being consistently ghettoized as “collegey.” Partially at Pete’s urging, Lowery grew eager to jump milieus, to embark on a broadly resonant dialogue with a great number of folks, to register some lasting impact on mainstream culture, to have a true measurable effect, to establish a career at this, to accomplish something which would be so widely available that you could wave at it for many generations and identify it, proudly, as your contribution. Who can fault the health and handsomeness of such ambitions? Who can doubt he succeeded? The ubiquitous presence of his band’s songs in subsequent movie soundtracks, their videos on MTV, their celebrated tie-in with Taco Bell—people know Cracker (the band name they ultimately chose) in a way they never knew Camper. Which can happen, apparently, as long as you don’t pursue the Souled American model too far.

  She Broke My Heart

  Souled American’s song “She Broke My Heart” means a great deal to me. At the time it was introduced to me, I was in love with two women. Please; I do not say this easily, for I am not employing “loved” lightly, but mean it at its least respectable (and most undeniable). I was engaged to one of these two women and cheating—in total secrecy—with the other. But I could have happily married either (although I see now neither marriage would’ve ultimately succeeded). I suppose it sounds like some ego trip to love two women at the same time but mostly it teaches you to value resplendent agonies. Hatching within you is the cruel heavenly wisdom that you are trapped and you will not get what you want (no matter your prayers) because in fact you need both women forever and can’t—for long—have both women. Perhaps I just thought I loved the two women when really I just loved the hurting against hope. I always was a sucker for the smell of dynamite. Yet again my least-disciplined passions had backed me into a prisoner’s dilemma which could not be puzzled out—still, who can refuse the beautiful nonsense of crashing a car or turning to drugs? Certainly not the singer of “She Broke My Heart.” Certainly not me, and this was like that. There was no way I could emerge from this intact—how exhilarating! I was high from internal bleeding, stoned on the deliciousness of a truly self-destructive feat, mad and unstoppable. I would examine the wreckage of old people on gurneys and in hospital beds and grow intoxicated thinking how very soon I would be like them, bitter, spent, forgotten. This is what “She Broke My Heart” says too, you know, and why it’s lovely. I played the song for both my loves in different rooms, different cities, just weeks apart, and both of them sobbed with me at what he was singing. They both understood. Still there were constantly cross-continent weeping sessions on payphones, there were whispering midnight calls while someone slept nearby, there were secret missives and incessant surprises and alibis, there were lies and lies, the lies never stopped coming, along with gifts which needed constant explanations, and there was more love than I’d ever suspected capable of giving, gigantic and happy, in part because I knew what was wrong would soon devour me and then leave me feeling as hollowed out as that song. And I haven’t recovered, but by now am dubious that I ever will.

  Typical Problem, Example One

  Yesterday, as I looked for their releases at a used CD store, the nice guy behind the counter offered to help. He began by asking me what category of music Souled American made. An easy enough question. He waited several minutes for me to answer while I looked at him, dumbstruck. Dumbfounded. Dum-dum. He grew alarmed. “Is it your heart?” he asked me at last. “Should I call a doctor?” I waved him off and, eventually, he walked away, which left me there still pondering. What category of music? Do words exist which can describe this stuff of theirs, how their songs are missing their crucial parts, the sleeves with too little information, how they invert the manners of techno via its dub predecessor “folk-trance” as they break syntax, lyrically and musically? Lefty Frizzell via Pere Ubu? Lee Perry by way of Meat Puppets by way of Eno by way of Ry Cooder? The twine linking pop music to Souled American (I wanted to announce) is like what connects the monarch butterfly to the everyday housebat.

  Everything Souled American Means Is up to You

  “Re-elect,” advised the cover of their fourth release. This was elaborated inside the jacket: “Re-elect Sonny.” The band name was hidden, stamped on the inner sleeve in pale ink easily erased. Song credits and member names were not given. Sonny? Typically, the title was presented to us, never once explained, rich with possible interpretations. You wanted to think “Sonny” was something an old-timer once called out to one of them; but it could’ve been a dog’s name, for all we were given. Perhaps it’s because the CD is certainly not “sunny,” so therefore must be “sonny.” When did it come out? Who was in the band? What do they think they’re doing? What to make of a band which covers one of their own rarities, in the process erasing what few words the original version had and playing it shoddily at a grating half-tempo, and then choose the song not only as their fourth album’s opening cut (and the album’s sole original) but its title song as well?

  It was a long time awaiting this particular album (two and a half years with no word from them!) and then no one
in America was even able to purchase it—it arrived as a British Rough Trade import, after Rough Trade U.S. went belly-up. In the meantime, the world shifted from vinyl to CD, Kris Kross and Milli Vanilli came and went, Janet Jackson was signed for the most lucrative contract in the history of recording, three died while watching AC/DC at the Salt Palace. It was the album where they dropped their first band member (their drummer); in typical fashion, they never bothered to replace him. Now, it is said, their guitarist has quit as well. Watch—they won’t replace him either. They will continue playing until all the members have quit, and even then it will be disputable whether they’re really gone, how long they lingered, whether they ever existed, as with that interminable hesitance during our first dream of the evening when we question whether we’re still awake.

  Album by album they’d deviated further from anything resembling pop music until—by Sonny—it began to sound more like a series of supernatural aires conjured by the poet Poe as he lay dying in a strange city in the middle of the last century, debauched and battered, sprawled—as they say—in a ditch beside a tavern only a week before his wedding date.

  Sonny the unobtainable, all we have left from then, is a structure of owls, mice, woodstoves, mysterious visitors, and winds across cemeteries, it is a drunken ghost story of an album. It’s a very slow, non-traditional album of traditional covers, most of them unfamiliar to a general audience. Then there’s the aforementioned title song “Sonny,” in which Souled American gives the Souled American treatment to a Souled American original, covering their Flubber outtake “Marleyphine Hank.” Odd hums and mechanical squeaks run under some of the songs, none of them originals, many of which feel painstakingly reassembled out of mismatched musical fragments. As it opens with the instrumental their bassist co-wrote, it closes, quite organically, with a song written by the bassist’s mother. In this way each listening travels back in time, ending earlier than where it began; a generation earlier, to clock it precisely. The “Sonny” then . . . is themselves?