Lost Joy

by Camden Joy

  An Open Letter to My Sweetheart

  Something occurs to me as regards our spat the other night concerning Souled American. Perhaps I overreacted, I’m sorry. The chair, the watch, the mirror—I promise to replace them, or to pay in full for their repair. When you acclaimed the Spice Girls and attributed my inability to appreciate them mainly to my devotion to integrity-laden market failures “like Souled American,” it was all I could do not also to hurl the refrigerator out the window and down into your tulip garden! It’s not that I am such a judge of integrity or that “authenticity” is all that terrifically crucial to me. Please understand, Marie. I simply like Souled American. I’d like them whether or not Notes Campfire sound-scanned over 55,000 copies in its first week of domestic release, receiving praise in Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Request, Details, Interview, Wired, Magnet, Bikini, Surface. Whether or not this occurred, I could care less, whether Wes Papadakis and Pete Elmazi and Fred Lesniewski and everyone adored them or not, I’d still like them. You know? It’s not snobbishness or elitism. If a band like this were packing 13,000-plus capacity theatres on a lengthy cross-country tour I’d say, “Great, good.” But they’re not. Not that I’d mind if they were. I don’t particularly enjoy obscure acts, I wish I had gads of fellow enthusiasts to spread gossip amongst, I honestly wish my tastes ran with the majority. Do you remember the proverb, “When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers; and when elephants make love, the grass also suffers”? I would love it so much if just once in this elephant industry of music me and the bands I love were not the grass. I want Souled American to be elephants! But instead: no video adds, no BDS trend to speak of. They’re not slated for Letterman, no featured singles picked up this week by AAA stations, no Number One callouts in key markets. They anticipate no full multiformat radio & TV shots, no spins whatsoever. In fact, we’re mostly unsure what they look like now. They haven’t toured America for many years. They don’t have publicity pictures or even publicists or even just people picking up telephones shouting the band’s name down the wire in an ecstatic fury. They don’t have a record company. They don’t have a drummer. They sound sad. I hear they broke up.

  Untitled

  I remember playing Frozen for a good friend in that loud Camaro I used to drive, on the blaring freeway, windows open to the rushing whoosh and gush, and it was as if nothing was coming out of the boombox whatsoever. “Is he singing now?” we’d ask one another, rather like concerned parents checking on a child left alone or farmers listening for rain. “Yeah. No. Huh, not sure.” It’s true, he sounded like he was barely opening his mouth at all.

  What made me so sure this particular friend would like Souled American? A conversation we’d had earlier, in which he’d confessed how embarrassed he’d become to’ve once loved the Violent Femmes. The Violent Femmes, he argued, had started off as something very different then what they’d become. Initially there was nothing else like it—given that many words and that much passion, you’d expect a lot of loud distorted guitars. Instead, all you got was brushes pounding a snare, Brian Ritchie’s bass filling up the vast sonic spaces that were mostly untouched by Gano’s cruddily recorded acoustic guitar. The punk dilemma (how to keep getting louder and louder and louder without getting ridiculous) was suddenly fixed, linked to a quietly edgy folk tradition to which nobody suspected it belonged till then. The Knitters, Camper Van Beethoven, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Nick Cave had supporting roles in this, but it was initially the Femmes teaching us this, in 1983. When I heard Souled American’s Fe in 1988, they seemed to me the next step in my friend’s little stageplay, the path promised but not taken by the now-sad Femmes. Elvis Presley had been replaced in the lineage by the Louvin Brothers and Peter Tosh and this opened up the feeling of a lot more possibilities than we’d really counted on.

  In truth, though, Frozen gave my friend the chills. He couldn’t figure out where to place it in his little theory of punk ascent, unless country standards stretched out in the studio led somehow to Brian Eno’s Another Green World. But this implied a backwardness to time and influences that troubled him.

  Admittedly, I couldn’t have attempted to introduce him to Souled American at a less appropriate time. As I said, we were in the car heading, at long last, to our local Madonna/McDonald’s Theme Park & GO-GO Shopping Complex, that thing of the future that had been threatened for so long it could scare us no longer, the multimedia bazaar of lifestyle cybermarkets and virtual reality interfaces, blah blah blah. Simulacra lactating Madonnas roamed Ronald McDonaldland Court in various states of undress, her semblance of presence generously sampled and duplicated. We were less interested in collecting all the possible autographs (from the many Madonnas, the several animatronic Hamburglers and Grimsters, the oversized puppets of Mayor McCheese and our baby-girl Lourdes) than in tracking down the interactive food-thingeys: the $10.99 transistor-burgers (which, upon being eaten, reward the consumer with a very private rendition of “Justify My Buns”), the lo-fat, low-cut Madonna fries that sensuously seduce the throat, the fish sandwiches sauced (it was said) with the very stuff from Madonna’s underpants.

  But as I’ve indicated, upon our approach we could not even hear Souled American, could not make out even the simplest of Frozen’s awkwardly syncopated deliberations like, “Feels like us two here . . . make a lonely one” or even, “You . . . are on . . . my mind.” We were on the wrong side of the world where such decent sentiments could not reach us, they were meaningless to us in the air of excitement and the excited sound of air, as we neared our long-awaited theme park.

  Reluctant History

  They were booed off the stage in Boulder, “while playing”—according to one musician in attendance—“brilliantly.” They were panned in Los Angeles, accused of being dull, of “wearing Grateful Dead influences the same way nachos wear melted cheese.” They went around the world in 1990 opening for Camper Van Beethoven. Europeans either loved or despised the opening act—Germans adored Souled American but the band was shouted down and hooted so loudly in Austria that David Lowery stormed onstage and ridiculed the audience. “They were always so genuine,” Camper’s David Immergluck enthused, “every night playing a different set. Songs would start differently, end differently. Everything constantly changed.” Other cities showered them with money, prompting one concerned club owner to issue the warning, “COINS CAN KILL! If swallowed, coins can lodge in Souled American’s stomach and cause ulcers, infections, and death!” In Belgium, Souled American finished up their bit of the tour and headed home; Immergluck remembers watching them leave and thinking, Oh no. We’re all alone now. A couple weeks later, Camper broke up in a heated fury; it’s almost as if this break-up decisively severed Souled American’s career arc too, as if there was a kind of karmic symbiosis at work here. The will, the drive, the ambition, the patience required to be a successful band, these things abruptly evaporated. Souled American became a disappearing act, sighted here and there with Carlos the Jackal-like frequency, going off 8,000 miles to conduct a month’s tour a long time ago, a few shows in New York a year before that, reportedly some other gigs. And their sporadic recordings, released almost reluctantly, without announcement.

  The Scientific Community Weighs In

  To the extent that scientists seek to solve all of life’s riddles we will fail; but we must try, do you see? This point, redoubled in force, occurred to me again upon the recent delivery of “the last” Souled American CD, Notes Campfire, which inevitably raises more questions than it answers. In the lab we applied the age-old methodology to unriddle the CD into its constituent parts. We know that Souled American (like most modern musicians) remain big-brained bipeds amongst a class of higher vertebrates with complex cardiovascular requirements but question: Does the band exist, in what form. Question: How long does a record take to record, given that most tracks are subsequently erased. Question: How to define success, the terms. Question: How are songs composed, what is the musical destination/aspiration for this. Question:
Having named “the last” CD after the first song on the first album, are they acknowledging a dead-end of sorts.

  Interview, Part Four

  Q: You never get a sense of how Souled American met, if they were college kids—

  A: I think that’s right.

  Q: They were college kids?

  A: Or art school, perhaps? In Chicago. They were all from places in Illinois, I think. The main thing you can tell is that they must’ve spent years playing together in their bedrooms, you know? The only other band that vaguely reminds me of them is Swell. Do you know them?

  Q: Yeah.

  A: For years they recorded and played together, maybe even lived together in a warehouse in San Francisco. They know each other very well and they know what they’re doing all the time. I never thought of that comparison before. Souled American were the kind of a band that, it didn’t really matter what they did, and how stubborn and recalcitrant they were. For example, although I think it’s fairly conventional for bands to send demos of what they’re going to record to their record companies, they never did stuff like that with Rough Trade. And nobody really cared. Because we thought they were great! We’d just go, “Sure, sure, whatever!” Then we’d get the record and one of us would half-heartedly say to them, “This record’s starts out unbelievably slow. Wouldn’t it be better to put one of the more uptempo songs at least second if not first?” “No, no, no,” they’d say, and then everybody’d back off again and the band would get it done exactly as they wanted it. But I think actually that if you looked at the sales curve of their three records they sold less with each successive release. It’s pretty hard to do that.

  Q: Summing up . . .?

  A: Summing up, I think now one can add that they were really great to the fact that they were also years ahead of their time in anticipating or prefiguring this whole “No Depression” thing, whatever it’s called. Which I’m sure they would despise, at least in its media-hyped form. I can see them shudder.

  Disputed Parade Inspires Poster

  (AP) Times Square was said to be recovering from a marketing spectacular unlike any other in which Chicago rock group Souled American paraded everyday objects before nearly a few attendees to mark the debut of their new CD, Notes Campfire.

  The procession, its actual length still in contention, consisted of things and stuff cloaked in near-invisible ordinariness by Souled American, a band who has as of yet played no major role in cleaning up the Times Square area. A peep show owner on Forty-Second Street left his brightly lit shop open for business, asserting complete ignorance of the occasion.

  Children screamed, perhaps with delight, perhaps in horror. A knowledgeable elderly couple maintained that children often scream in Times Square for no reason whatsoever. “What,” a happy girl was heard to exclaim, when pressed for some response, “what parade?”

  “I think it’s all terrific how something can just happen around here,” Cathy Tulon, an office worker from Levittown, L.I., remarked as she passed by with seven-year-old twin sons. “Perhaps it’s worth it,” Greenpoint native Sandy Sanajaran pointed out. “Maybe not.”

  A lonesome pink balloon drifted into the brown sky, reminding one of bubble gum dropped in the mud.

  “My favorite sort of parade,” observed Washington Heights resident Galvano Hendsberg, struggling for adequate words. “Not too much fuss and bother, easy to miss. I myself didn’t notice a thing.”

  The exultant Souled American claimed the parade to be a “total triumph,” though no attendance figures were forthcoming and no one could be located who recalled it. Even the precise starting and finishing times were in dispute, as too were the day, month, and year of the reputed event.

  The Secret Truth About Frozen and The Drowning Pool Revealed Here for the Very First Time

  One dull night at the video store, acting on an anonymous phone tip, we pressed play on (Souled American’s 1994) Frozen just as the FBI warning appeared on the monitor at the start of the video of (Stuart Rosenberg’s 1976) The Drowning Pool. What this simple act uncovered startled us profoundly—an undeniable series of linkages and references which could only have been crafted with considerable intentionality! The CD, it turns out, was constructed to express the inner heartbreak of private eye Lew Harper, called to Louisiana in the body of Paul Newman by an old flame who reappears in his life suddenly after having abandoned him six years earlier with no explanation. This can be no mere coincidence. Each song comments implicitly on motivation, stage direction, and the varying degrees of Harper’s sorrow, an ache so devastating he can barely stand to acknowledge it. “You/are/my/one side./Why won’t you stay?” sadly shrieks Track 1, just as Joanne Woodward enters in disguise. She bites her lip. “That really was a voluptuous week,” is all she’ll acknowledge, seeking distance in nostalgia. “Sitdown” (Track 2) comes on as Harper drives the Lake Pontchartrain overpass to his motel; the song continues as he swims laps in the river, rubs tar off his feet, kicks Melanie Griffith out of his motel room. “Should I decide to screw my day all night/Sit down and give myself a good talking to?” He dresses, immediately gets arrested. “Grab the paint,” say the cops, shoving him hard against his rental. “Don’t gimme none uh your west coast snob-ass bullshit,” remarks Chief of Police Tony Franciosa, warning Harper away from things he would never do. As Harper departs the police station, “Two of You” (Track 3) abruptly begins—an impossible synchronicity, too impossible not to’ve been consciously, studiously strategized by Souled American: the gentle slippery notes are the cluttered fog in Paul Newman’s head and heart. Track 3 documents his pondering, silent drive, fading when he finally gets Woodward alone. “Hello, Lo,” the CD says for him (Track 4). “Your name it makes me stutter/saying ‘hello.’” Woodward’s talk remains unchartably elusive, unaccountably torn. “The marriage has not worked for some years now,” she tells him cryptically about her present husband. “Hey Lo/I know/you’re not to be questioned. But why’d ya go/and have to/chase away the affection?” Harper is steered over to the grandmother, who appears crazy. “Please,” sings his soul (Track 5), “Tell her I’m gone.” He fights to fathom the riddlesome answers he continues to receive when next he is kidnapped—“Hey man, where you going” (Track 6) runs the band’s soundtrack—and led before the oil baron Kilbourne. Harper’s consideration of Kilbourne’s mixed threats and offers is accompanied by the contemplative puzzle of Track 7, “Better who . . ./than me.”

  These considerable coincidences continue, looped and magnified, as the CD starts anew following Harper’s lines to Gretchen the whore: “I don’t know how people can talk dirty, cold turkey, you know.”

  At the time those of us in the video store discovered these facts we were surprised—they were one of our favorite bands anyways, their soft guitars, soft voices, and soft facts guiding us through a succession of alluringly spookier soundscapes—but our respect for Souled American was now exponentially renewed. Imagine the intensive challenges and studio expense of clocking a CD perfectly against its movie references (and then quite actively suppressing this very information). We were flabbergasted at the insistent privacy of such talents!—however, later investigations uncovered still more astounding delights: that (Souled American’s 1989) Flubber was made to accompany a screening of (Ken Annakin’s 1965) Battle of the Bulge—when you start them simultaneously you watch Henry Fonda earn his theme song “Mar’boro Man” while Robert Ryan is plainly the subject of “Wind to Dry”—but I admit that at present those of us at the video store cannot conclude with any certainty what movies accompany (and decode) Souled American’s remaining four CDs. If you have any reasonable suggestions, please contact us at Radio City Station. Please serious replies only.

  Tell Me. What Do They Sing About?

  Souled American seem to emphasize one theme above all else—the loneliness in the cooling ashes of a relationship. A numb, almost passion-less yearning. The dissolving of self, “the loss”—as Keith Richards described it—“of that sense of incarnation.” Seems to
be about fragmentation caused by absence of some love, in what they sing and how they play. “You know, it doesn’t sound very good,” the daughter of America’s most influential music critic informed me skeptically after I described Souled American’s efforts. “Not at all. I mean, it doesn’t sound good at all.”

  Souled American and Its Discontents

  He looked so nice I rechecked his price as he entered. “I was told $225 gets me the basics.” He nodded, a wiggle of cute brown hair. “Yes ma’am.” “And . . .” “Do you wish to hear about the extras?” “Dear boy, that’s what I’m waiting for.” In truth I was waiting for nothing. He possessed the eyes of a veterinarian, the hands of a pianist, and the dimples and eyebrows of those hunks in the power mower ads. Feeling quite lacy and racy in my slinky formal wear, I kicked off my heels, raised my blouse. The simple sight of my pianist power-mower vet led the tips of my fingers to brush my belly in anticipation. “Okay. The $225 show gets you the interpretive strip, incense and candles inclusive. It goes up from there. $25 more, I’ll observe you in an act of self-gratification, plus $5 I’ll grade you. $50 on top of that is Frustrated Husband, you can observe me in an act of self-gratification while I wear a band denoting our betrothal. Lotions and direct contact”—he cast me an appraising glance—“upwards of $95. For $375 you get all that plus a lecture derived from my dissertation.” I couldn’t prevent my hands from dancing higher on my chest: “What’s the topic?” “Souled American and its Discontents.” I scooted the Giorgio Sant-Angelo skirt down over my satin panties, past my nylons, and shook it free of my feet. “Ooh. Fascinating.” He shrugged humbly. “The intriguing paradox of a band like no other, defiant, defiantly ignored. As naturally inviting as drowning in a bathtub, as romantic as burning up in bed, such is Souled American. The mad hubris, the sinister medicine, the hush as it falls across the pop continent. Choosing this product means you recognize the need to make ecological and social choices.” My hands met my abdomen, kneading and probing and altogether too happy with the social choices they were making. “You take traveler’s checks?” He did and I signed off on the whole package. How to summarize the ensuing pleasures? Two images: my oiled billboard poet-boy declaiming in the candlelight, his face purplish in passion, inflection swaying delightfully: “There’s a band that wants to rock you. There’s a band that wants your money, wants your vote. There’s a band that wants to sex you. Then there’s The Other, namely—Souled American.” My watch pendant glinted merrily from the carpet where I’d vaguely deposited it, my diamond bangled bracelets and priceless hoop earrings having been tossed god knows where, and together we approached The Moment. Second image: my whimpering body wrapped ecstatically in a jacquard woven comforter and lace-trimmed flat sheet as Mr. Man of Mans spoke from the hotel’s daybed, where the sweaty webwork of his musculature was pressed to the pillow shams: “Could anything be more secret than Souled American . . . their sound itself approaches a whisper, the dying signal of a stranded craft, even as their CDs become yet more impossible to find. ‘This is kind of a big deal,’ is how their new CD was announced, by a record store which claims on-line to be the only place in the country still carrying Souled American’s releases: ‘Tell your friends.’” Oh! If I had the money now to do it all again, would I even hesitate? Not for a moment!