by Camden Joy
who has time to hear all that new stuff
eventually: enough is enough
and the guy writing this is no better than me
he’s eager to dominate you, can’t you see?
Who has time to listen to things not buzz-bin
I mastered the masthead, locked out dissensions
ignoring them in my big interpretation
refusing to grant them the smallest attention
But I did not kill them
or commit this sin
no mere music critic killed Souled American
Typical Problem, Example Two
I had trouble entering Burger King because the humidity had dampened the padding on the electronic door. Pushing inside, I found myself off-balance, reeling. The customers turned to watch (drawn by the sound of the sliding door’s resistant POP) as suddenly my Walkman slid from my grasp. Instinctively, my right foot went out, as if to land a hackeysack. I caught the Walkman too low, on the laces. Net result: I booted it across to the server station where it exploded against the counter, batteries, transistorized insides, cassette tape ricocheting off in opposite directions. Customer’s jaws dropped, mouths full of half-chewed Whoppers. My headphones were still on my ears. I felt like a carwreck rendered in tofu, like a nude clown. Burger King’s servers scampered to help. I couldn’t speak. “Is this yours?” one of them inquired softly, having recovered the cassette tape from beneath the condiment dispensary. “Is this yours?” She squinted to read the label: “Souled American?” The customers stared at me like a hundred thousand hypnotized seals. I wrestled with speech.
B-Flat Diminished
Imagine a band shrinking as it grows, rather than expanding; shrinking in terms of ambition, output, melodies, band members, production aesthetic. Imagine their first album is as outgoing as they get, at which point they isolate one of these songs and dive deep into it. The second record is comprised primarily of elaboration on this one song. Their third record is comprised of elaboration of some song on album No. 2, and so on. How long can this go on? Six albums into it, Souled American seem closeted and unapologetic, beautiful and lost, hermetic, gone. In typical fashion, their title for this new album—Notes Campfire—was also the title of the first song on their very first CD. It seems appropriate that this be the comeback moment, or the final moment, one or the other, that this is a career reeling in on itself, circling close, mouth gaping for le fin.
Think of the Ways You Normally Hear About a Record
You’re sitting there with your wife on the sofa after an argument. The radio is playing music broadcast from a local college. You hear a song you like. You shush your wife each time she tries to speak so that you can hear the DJ identify it. Trouble is, the DJ has played about a thousand songs in a row and you can’t keep track of which song is being named. Later that night, you’re drunk. Your wife has gone to bed. MTV is playing. The same song returns, sporting a sexy video. You scrawl yourself a note, “Check this out.” The next day you are walking to a friend’s apartment—a girl and a friend but not your girlfriend (after all you’re married)—well, okay, in truth you’re walking to the dangerous Lower East Side apartment of your youthful and impressionable trophy mistress . . . and you pass a large four-color poster on Second Avenue advertising the song as a hit. That evening you go see a movie with your trophy mistress. The song is in the soundtrack. You and she stroll over to a club and the sound system is playing the song while a band sets up. Next it’s leaking from the Walkman of a nearby passenger, as you and your trophy mistress take the subway back to her dangerous apartment. “Maybe this is our song,” you joke. She nods solemnly, taking you at your word. On your way back home afterwards, full of shame, you stop at the flower store to buy your wife a ravishing assortment of exotic lilies. The song is playing over a radio behind the counter, broadcast from a local college. Next thing you know, like a blush of conscience, you encounter the song everywhere you look, it’s written-up in newspapers, there are magazine campaigns, big cardboard pronouncements in record stores, and a mailbox circular which offers it to you as one of 13 free CDs with “absolutely no obligation whatsoever” to join the CD club. You wonder how to tell your wife.
And that poor woman you call “the trophy mistress”? She’s about to become very angry. But it’ll take a few days. For now she’s crying and, seeking comfort, she eats soft boiled eggs and watches reruns and pulls down a cassette a college friend made for her long ago. The cassette is labeled by hand and bears a title that resonates as some tender in-joke between herself and her friend. It’s a recording of songs nobody else seems to know, secret songs, songs you never hear anywhere, not in movies or flower stores or clubs, not on MTV or college radio or nearby Walkmans. It’s a tape of a band called Souled American.
Interview, Part Three
Q: I guess in a way explaining ourselves to anyone is compromising.
A: Sure, and Souled American didn’t really ever enjoy talking to the press.
I think they wanted people to realize that they were brilliant and made brilliant music, without having to actually talk to anyone about it or anything. I don’t think they minded touring, though.
Q: I’m sure they liked playing together. They did it so well.
A: Yeah. And they really were that kind of a band. You got the feeling that what they did onstage probably wasn’t any different from how they played in their living rooms, except that onstage Chris would have to face an audience. Joey would bounce around, Jamey would sit there and Scott would basically stand still, mostly on one foot, facing backwards.
Q: Specifics . . .?
A: I recall a show in Austin, South by Southwest in 1988. March 1988. It was them and Scrawl and 2 Nice Girls. Souled American didn’t like it because they had to go on first. I think they had both a very sure sense of their own worth and a great distrust of the machinery that creates media popularity. Perhaps it stemmed from knowing that they were really good but that they couldn’t actually do some of the kinds of things that would have to do if they were going to become successful. Maybe that’s what it was.
Adducci vs. Grigoroff
Yes, Adducci: for his unique bass technique and his uncommon dominance, yes; but even more Grigoroff, for his astonishing abilities as a singer, even greater than Adducci’s musical talents. That Chris Grigoroff sings songs slowed to one-third their normal speed and captivatingly inhabits each pause with a tension born of genuine sorrow is enough, to my mind, to nominate him for the heavyweight crown. He fuses laconic cowboy phrasing with a torch singer’s bursting heart. He’s mastered that choked bluegrass beauty of sounding like he’s at the top of his range no matter how low the melody, like he’s lost his breath no matter how brief the note, like he can do nothing but work the lonely side of every lyric.
When we get a song like “Born (Free)” on the new CD it dazzles us. Such an unusual commitment of voice! Over four minutes (we never notice its length) of captivation when all the entire song basically says is, “No love, no love at all. No love in my house, no kiss. No love on my street, it’s all dark. No love at all. And I don’t understand.” If you listen to it with your eyes shut, you will see close-ups of great black blocks of veined marble, a grand piano in a fire, a watch being checked and rechecked, a very high ceiling, a lonely candle in a jar. This song eats happiness as completely as anything you see on Fox’s America’s Scariest Acts of Random Violence yet you can’t stop programming the stereo to replay it twenty thousand consecutive times.
Party Talk
To make conversation at a party, I asked a young man for the most terrifying experience of his life. Perhaps I expected a joke in return. He gave me a panicked look and replied, hardly pausing, “There were two.” He had nearly died while spelunking, after falling into a subterranean pit so immense it took many days for him to escape; and a tornado had carried him off when he was twelve years old to an Indian reservation, where he’d been chased and beaten with pipes to within an inch of his life. I might’ve d
isbelieved these stories but that he detailed them showing so little expression, with no perspective, in a voice whose level flatness seemed to say these things had never been considered tellable before now. A woman overhearing us chimed in with a hiking expedition in Colorado which met with a freak blizzard and ended in empty canteens, lost backpacks, irreversible frostbite, hallucinations, a dramatic helicopter canyon rescue. Soon everybody was contributing. A sort of contest came to the fore. No one really enjoyed it. The fun, the party, had skittered off as some primitive ritual emerged in its stead, an exchange of hunting stories, war stories. We seemed collectively hypnotized in our efforts to convey how near we came to being killed by the outdoors.
The telling of party stories reminded me of a band named Souled American. As our stories mounted, we grew quiet in the conviction that what we think of as “life” was deceptive. In truth the scattered instants when we slipped through cracks, abandoned to our own devices, these were our few moments of life, and the rest—going to work, running errands, tending family, oiling the weighty machinery of self—were reassuring lies. In ridding our routine of chance and risk, we’d believed we were clarifying our needs, becoming solid citizens—but in fact we had excluded ourselves from our lives. And this then is Souled American. They come at songs from the side, recreating lost moments and saying little, risking not just the failure of an arrangement but the failure of an aesthetic, an outlook, a principle. It sounds odd to say songs can make you feel this much but when you’re within their songs, your basic assumptions confront you as being mostly fraudulent, you don’t know where to go, where they’re heading, you can’t figure out how you got here or how to leave.
Or perhaps, it was the things unsaid in those stories that were most troubling, which haunt me to this day. The storytellers quickly realized that the impact of their experiences was best communicated by describing too little. In dropping their voices and reversing their theatrical impulse to dramatize, getting out of the way of their own feelings, they communicated to us a purer experience. Which is something Souled American learned long ago.
Souled American and Our Sixteenth President
I wanted a picture of Souled American but could not find a way to get in touch with the band. The manager’s girlfriend sent me, at last, the only photo she could find—three members on a junky sofa smiling uncomfortably, seated beside someone in an Abe Lincoln mask. Rumor had it that the drummer—always an astonishingly restrained presence, visible during the shows drumming with most of his body turned from his kit—the drummer was no longer in the group. A band of rumors clad in mist. Now, apparently, Abe Lincoln was in the band? It seemed plausible.
One True Sound
A friend and I were at a funeral, unable to believe they were burying this person. “He was better than us,” I reminded my friend, who was pale and shocked and made no reply. “Better in every goddamn way,” I pointed out. My friend numbly nodded. “We’re shits,” he whispered at last. We walked to our car, just some thing parked in ugly daylight with its windows glued together. My friend indicated the tapes littered about the front and back seats and said, with true concern, “Your cassettes will melt.” “I fucking care,” I snapped. We locked the doors, put on our seatbelts . . . but couldn’t fathom driving away. We sat, the interior a bathyscaph, the upholstery like taffy, looking through the gravel-pocked windshield at our uncomprehending friends. They staggered off to separate cars, drenched in the mock clarity of light, the grief like a sink-stopper in their chests. We opened the glove compartment and smoked Angolan opium, the rich smell suggesting some magnificent devastation, a burning barge, a fire in a schoolyard. Hours perhaps passed. My friend said he had to hear some Uncle Tupelo, some Jayhawks, some Gastr del Sol. Our words were joke bugs frozen in ice cubes. I clung to the car as it clung to the asphalt which clung to a planet falling through space. My friend started poking through my cassettes. I could not turn so swiftly as to catch my life slipping away, but I could confirm this in the horizon’s absence, the way the sky sought to travel at a careful distance, separate from me. Our hearts were pits prying off their peachskins. My friend could find none of the tapes to which he felt like listening. “How about Palace?” he pleaded. “You got any Palace here?” He was a big fan. “Fucking Palace,” I sneered. “Fucking emperor’s new clothes, one fucking ‘too cool for school’ unfriendly mean individual. Can’t fucking write, can’t sing, can’t play for shit. Fucking adored by every-fucking-one.” My friend looked at me, his eyes drawn terribly. He resembled those characters in horror movies in the instant before they get dismembered, staring at something the camera avoids showing us. “In truth,” I admitted mildly, “I possess no Palace. So we’re gonna listen instead to Souled American.”
The Soul of Today’s American
Souled American has been on an anti-memory campaign, but don’t ask what I mean by this, I really can’t remember. How could I? We live mostly in TERRIBLE DISORIENTATION. I share their LOW REGARD for consciousness, their WAR ON MEMORY. Right NOW you are barely listening. Right NOW YOU are barely remembering. Your eyes SCAN these words looking to be anchored by bits of YUMMY GOSSIP and CELEBRITY BREAD, a fingernail-full of WORLD-FAMOUS HAIR, a footnote to HISTORY. Things are escaping your attention even as your eyes register these words, THINGS ARE GONE before you notice. Souled American arrived and for a BRIEF second were acclaimed as some sort of answer, the NECESSARY RESPONSE, the INJECTION of our past coupled with a VISION of our future. But just as they had supplanted hundreds of others for their BRIEF notice, so were they too EVENTUALLY ECLIPSED, as is inevitably dictated not just by our ravenous pop economy but by HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS ITSELF, things will be weeded out, DISREGARDED, WORTHY people IGNORED, because to take it all in, to give it the necessary attention and accord it respect, will SACRIFICE OUR SANITY. The career of Souled American continues as if TO HAUNT US on behalf of these cast-off encounters. It is only our damnable arrogance which DARES congratulate this behavior of ours, this selective memory, by terming it “CIVILIZED”—nothing civilized to it, just FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT for the buzz of POWER, the buzz of SENSATION, the numbing buzz of DRUGS. Instead: Forget all, and be BORN ANEW!
Souled American: The Music and the Man
Listening to their newer releases, the way they’ve mixed the heart out of every song, it sounds as if they’ve died, their lifetimes passed, as if the people, the instruments had all expired. There is almost nothing of this world, nothing flesh, no reality, little bass, virtually zero percussion, just a few words, sung always with difficulty. It’s dub devouring itself. There is increasingly only that shimmer of spirit hinting at what once inhabited the space, a thing at last freed of bones and bodies, audible in ringing guitars, lonesome fingerpicks, a bass drum infrequently kicked. It is frustration with this direction which probably accounts for the departure of their drummer, and now their guitarist. Only two members remain. “Oh, you still here?” the songs from their last few CDs all seem to ask, as if startled to find a listenership, any listenership, whatsoever. They behave as if they have all the paranoia in the world, as if an audience is the last thing they’d trust (though I doubt they trust the industry either). They seem to need you and me less and less. It is a rock and roll retreat unlike any other, absent of sleazy manipulations or disingenuous denunciations of today’s music. Nor (obviously) has it become an instance of a band suddenly discovering its audience to be dwindling, fearing for its relevance, and futilely harrassing record companies to spark things anew, in a pathetic eagerness to crack today’s radio formulas with requisite signals of penance. Some more genuine pursuit has them captivated, and apparently if it doesn’t lead to breakeven sales, that’s fine. It doesn’t feel like they’re terribly concerned or contemplating any sort of comeback. They’ve decamped; now they’re quietly dispersing into the woods.
My Life As a Child
I grew up in Radio City Station. Souled American were my neighbors. My father and mother (a teacher and social worker, respectively) were ardent in their
admiration for Thomas Eagleton, a man who’d dramatically lost a bid for the Vice-Presidency and then promptly disappeared. Which is to say that they were conscientious citizens, failed liberals, and they wore like a badge of honor the news that a long-haired, torn-jeaned rock and roll band was squatting in the abandoned two-story brick dwelling across the street.
In those cherished days, Radio City Station was pure promise, a place of resplendent refineries. From laboratory chimneys billowed the shimmering steams of award-winning chemistry experiments. Great deeds underway! The petty distinctions between “nature” and “city” had been summarily abolished in our city of the future! Dogs were free to fight other dogs for cigarettes, gulls nested in stoplights, squirrels came covered in graffiti. Trees sprouted power lines. The leaves, crackling like transistors, bathed our evenings in the glow of iridescent dye. Marvelous birds thrummed overhead, hydraulic innards clanking. We learned to eat concrete and drink electricity, and to speak of our loved ones as automobiles.
Souled American, they played astonishing music at astonishing hours, which horrified most everybody but delighted my parents. Their spooky notes rang through the neighborhood, a noise not unlike that which would one day be voiced by superstition itself, echoing off smokestacks and storage tanks, like porch songs adapted to our playgrounds of razor-wire.
We’d wave whenever we caught sight of them and they’d wave back. They’d be eating their meals together huddled over the sink, maybe blowing drugsmoke out their bathroom window. Like everybody else, Souled American washed their clothes in the effluent of the sewage treatment plant and on Sundays snuck into the incinerator to bake bread behind the guards’ backs . . .
No wait; sorry. That was Soul Asylum. Those were my neighbors, Soul Asylum. I’m sorry. Souled American . . . hmm, nope. I don’t know any Souled American.
The Movie, Forgetful and Brittle
The movie, forgetful and brittle, continued to break. The customers booed. The projectionist again apologized. The manager kept refusing refunds, pleading for patience. Still the antique movie broke and where it broke continuity dissolved and younger movies leapt up onto the screen, seeing their chance and seizing it. A band named Souled American provided live accompaniment, watching the screen bewildered, making up soundtracks which would smooth out these disparate contradictions, this junglefight of filmstrips, this congealed lump of wrong stories, these mismatched flickerings, interrupted lives. An old man in a dreaded house. A coalminer addicted to the killing black lure of the underground. A chicken tells a grasshopper, “You’re mine.” As they play, sense abandons the theater screen. Only their music continues to contain any resonance of meaning. The band slows the longer they play, defeated and tired, unable still to tie the stories together. We wonder how long this can go on.