“he”/“him” A Canadian Prairie Mennonite from the '70s & '80s, a Preacher’s Kid, slowly recovering from a hemorrhagic stroke. I am not — yet — in a 12-Step Program.
There is a scene early in Point
Of No Return where the assassin initiate, played by Bridget
Fonda, informs her trainer-captor that if he wants her co-operation,
he will have to provide her with a stereo and a library of Nina
Simone CDs. In a movie riddled with curious ineptitudes (a
Hollywood remake of Luc Besson's darkly hilarious La Femme
Nikita being the first and foremost), this flat note is
particularly memorable. Had the filmmakers indulged the conceit any
further, Simone's tortured textures would have completely overpowered
the fizzy confection at work.
Reflexive reach for Simone is certainly
explicable. That woman had a voice that seemed thrown from a titanic
collision of heartbreak and defiance. Her recordings were a tapestry
of hurt and inner fortitude, strung with threads of insight, woven
from a habit of scathing appraisal without and within. And she
possessed a killer wit, but not one so self-protective it ever muted
her frank expression. Who could blame Fonda & Co. for wanting to
pay homage to the glorious Nina Simone, and possibly inject just a
smidgen of such substance into the project at hand?
Caution, however, is called for. Simone
made herself a study of contrasts. Anyone who willingly strikes a
pose beneath Simone's large shadow runs the risk of drawing
unintended contrasts of their own, and standing out as what Simone
was not: a pretender, looking ridiculous. Most tributes to Nina
Simone, however earnest and well-intentioned, contain traces of
vanilla — or Fonda-ness.
No such worries for Meshell
Ndegeocello, who is no small study in contrasts herself. Her many releases chart a vast domain of
heartbreak, defiance and insight all her own. For the past five
years, Ndegeocello has cultivated a particularly fertile field, with
Devil's Halo and the Joe Henry-produced Weather standing
as outstanding sonic and lyrical achievements. Now, with Pour
une âme souveraine, Ndegeocello's
tribute to Nina Simone, she invites a cast of other singers
(including Sinéad
O'Connor, Cody Chesnutt
and Valerie June)
to join her in a shared exploration of what drew Simone to particular
material. The combined strength of character and smarts, teamed to
Ndegeocello's restless depth of perception brings new light, not just
to the current performers, but to the work of Simone as well.
Pour une âme souveraineis the first tribute to Nina Simone I recommend without
reservation.
I really want to give the Monks' Suspended
Animation a passing grade, because, like so many
Canadians who came of age in the early '80s I am a drooling fan of
their truly five-star first albumBad Habits. But honestly: Suspended
Animation hits its marks too rarely for me to recommend it.
As I understand it, in their native
England the Monks never surpassed one-hit wonder status (“Nice
Legs, Shame About The Face”), so John Ford and Richard Hudson
returned to their paying gig in the Strawbs and moved on. Across the
pond in Canada, however, it was another story. Bad Habits attained a
high cult status with its infectious hooks and sly lyrics that kept
the artful balance of ironic observation without falling into easy
parody. When the album went multi-platinum in 1981, management corralled Ford
and Hudson back into the studio for another go as The Monks, exclusive to the
rabid Canadian fans.
Suspended Animation is proof that
sometimes you can only bottle lightning once. With the sole exception
of the album opener, “Don't Want No Reds,” the album's song
titles pretty much give away the game at first pitch. “James
Bondage” “Don't Bother Me — I'm A Christian” and “King Dong”
don't leave much room for the artist to surprise a listener with
ironic insight, never mind clever turns of phrase. As for easy
parody, the Monks often fail here, too, with subject matter that was
never funny to begin with (“Ann Orexia” is a bad idea made worse
by preachy finger-wagging).
There are flashes in the production
that suggest these otherwise accomplished rockers were fishing for something meatier than what they were landing. “Space Fruit”
is a nice reprisal of what “Skylab” first laid down. “Beasts In
Cages” and “Lost In Romance” contain traces of the subtlty we
heard in Bad Habits. But fans of the first album who haven't yet
given this album a spin are best advised to resist the urge, and
re-cue Bad Habits instead. Suspended Animation is for completists
only.
The other morning Beth asked me what I
thought the interaction between spirituality, religion, and
disability was. I was surprised. Most of our dialogs start with,
“Remind me again: am I going
to pick her up at 5:00, or are you?” But E___ at work was asking this question,
so Beth brought it home.
I initially
responded with my knee-jerk, “I don't like 'spirituality.'
Spirituality = emotional state. Big deal.”
She responded that
she disliked “Religion.” “Religion = dogma, piety, stiflement.
Who needs it?”
By evening I had
reconsidered the question. I said that “spirituality” as a
concept didn't make much sense to me, until I read Erik Davis'
meditation on Led Zeppelin's fourth album, which prompted me to
reflect on my lifelong love of Star Trek: The Original Series. Here
are my original thoughts on that, but the summary is: TOS engendered
a longing for something that seemed almost attainable, yet remained
always just short of actual reach. Perhaps spirituality was another
word for that longing, that sense of a platonic ideal making a silent
appeal to our imaginations.
“Religion,” on
the other hand, strikes me as an organized group response to those
urges and feelings. So many pious observations — the Eucharist,
reciting the Lord's Prayer, tithing, prayer and thanksgiving (to cite
the more obvious Christian examples) — have a rhythmic, ritual similarity to
musical exercises that, when explored with sensitivity, turn out to
be the foundation of our musical understanding and expression.
Scales, chords, arpeggios: rearrange them a certain way and you get
Beethoven's “Moonlight Sonata” or Howlin' Wolf's “Chocolate Drop.”
If
you, as the average privileged First World resident, follow some
combination of these two impulses while working in concert with the
disabled, I think what
you enable is the leisure — the space — for the disabled and
their families and communities to attend to their own yearnings and
to articulate their own responses in turn. Stretching the music metaphor, I think what we're after is a concert effect. You learn to play a few new notes, while dropping others. It is all, one hopes (as I
hope in my own such attempts at response) a good thing.
For this 16-year-old Winnipeger, circa
1980, life was chiefly what you heard and saw on the bus. And if you
spent five days a week riding from west end suburbia to the Mennonite school just inside the east end of the city, you saw and
heard a great deal.
Winnipeg had Punks, for starters. No
more than two-dozen of 'em, but they all rode the bus. I admired and
envied their aesthetic. These days every five-year-old boy gets a
mohawk and an earring for his first day of kindergarten, but
back in '80 those choices invited censure and even violence. I never
copped anything bolder than a mullet (as cut by my usually game
mother, in the family kitchen), or wore anything more remarkable than
a skinny tie, or Gorilla work boots, or a few band pins (most of them
Christian) on my reasonably faded jean jacket.
The Winnipeg punks took pride in their
'dos. They wore outlandish gear — army surplus, the better to
endure the cruel winters. And they took pains to scrawl or paint “The
Monks” on their jackets.
Ah, The Monks: far and away the
most accessible punk band on the Canadian Prairies. You could findBad Habits — their one and only album1 — in the
sale bins of every K-Mart and Woolco store in the city. A mere two
dollars got you immediate entrance into this dangerous-looking scene.
So, did I bite?
Nope.
I'd heard punk described as “noise”
and didn't yet have a threshold for anything without a reliable
foundation of at least three chords. And then there was this business
of lyrics. Just looking at the album cover, with its startled nun
caught in the act of removing her habit for a night on the town, and
the song titles (“Drugs In My Pocket”? “No Shame”?! “I
Ain't Getting Any”?!?!) convinced me this was music that a)
I'd have a difficult time squaring with my conscience, and b)
would never fly in my parents house, so I left well enough
alone.
A year or two later I was riding in a
tour bus filled with band and choir classmates. We were coming home
from Kenora, Ontario, and the boys from the volleyball team were
holding down the back seats and playing Bad Habits
on the team boom-box. I seethed — ostensibly for pious reasons, but
truthfully because the music was inescapably fun. And these guffawing
lunks had got to it first.
Thirty
years after that, I'm told that The Monks were a uniquely Canadian
phenom. John Ford
and Richard Hudson,
the Monks' creative duo, originally fronted The Strawbs, a
soppy-stern prog-rock band that had something of a
following in Britain. Ford and Hudson were closely watching the punk
scene, and, on a lark, took to the studio to join in on the fun. Bad
Habits was the result, and “Nice
Legs, Shame About Her Face” rocketed
to the top of the pops. At some point, the penny dropped that these
jokers weren't even remotely punk, certainly not in origin, and they
experienced that uniquely British backlash that occurs when the
public thinks they've been had by a pop band.
Hold on: this is punk?!
None of this was an
issue in Canada, where the album was being sold by the skid-load. Was
the colony getting punk'd by a couple of wise-ass Limeys? Listening
to the album now, I very much doubt it.
Musically, Bad Habits is a far cry from punk: the band members have clear mastery of their
instruments, and the wordplay, regardless of all the “Oys”, is
much too agile. “Nice Legs,” which almost sounds like a lark
recorded in someone's garage, giddyups with a mid-song key change, and lyrically fits the attitude that informs the rest of the songs,
with the incorrigible yob of a narrator receiving his comeuppance at
song's conclusion.
In fact, the lyrics that so worried me actually have an Everyman sort of progression to them. Certainly the various
narrators are keen on indulgence at every front. But theirs is a
rigidly moral universe: the twit lamenting “I Ain't Getting Any”
is clearly too daft to realize just what a revolting figure he cuts,
and “Drugs In My Pocket” is anything but an endorsement of the
lifestyle. You almost get the impression the nun on the cover might find her way back to the confessional.
Then there's
“Johnny B. Rotten,” a dual-play on Chuck Berry's hit and the
then-infamous singer of the Sex Pistols. It's the album opener, and
strikes a super-fine balance between affectionate homage and taking
the piss, while sustaining an infectiously energetic dance-ability.
And as with all the album's songs, its turns of phrase demonstrate a
subtlety of intelligence approaching that of two other über-clever
musicians (ahem): Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of
Steely Dan.
Of course, “Out
Of Work Musician” might not finally tap the tragicomic gravitas
that “What A Shame About Me” draws upon. But that was never the
goal. The goal, I think, was to have as much fun as two smart,
accomplished musicians could have in a particular given moment. They
achieved that with exceptional flare, and that's what won over the
ears of Canadians — including Yours Truly, once he got over
himself.
Thomas D'Arcy
is the fellow responsible for this reminiscence.2 This summer the
Ontario-based singer and his cohort threw together a tribute album
that attempts to preserve all the elements that originally won them
over — which is everything, of course — while riffing off
potential blank spaces. The end result is reverential, to say the
least. And yet there is an unmistakable personal grit that sometimes
polishes what was rough, and at other times texturizes what was
perhaps a tad too smooth and shiny to begin with.3 Regardless of what
you think of it, the price is way right, and well worth the listen —
especially if this is your introduction to D'Arcy — or The Monks,
Canada's favorite British “punk” band.
1 The Monks had a follow-up album —
In Suspension — that
they released two years later, exclusively to Canada. It looked to me
like it, too, went straight to the sale bins. Also, it's terrible. I'm serious — terrible.↩
2 D'Arcy's history of the band and
this album is succinct, and mostly spot-on. But “big in Canada, HUGE in
Ontario”? Dude: if a bus-full of prairie Mennonite farm-boys, who
didn't know Johnny Rotten from Johnny Walker, could bellow along to
“Nice Legs” in the early 80s, I think it's fair to say Ontario's
larger claim is to its predominant population base.↩
3 D'Arcy's overall mix itself is a fabulous improvement on my old '93 CD, which is painfully bright on the ears.↩
During a recent visit, my father
surprised me with a question: “Do you read any of the 'Angry
Mennonites'?”
I asked him if this was a formally
defined group, like Gertrude Stein's “Lost Generation” or Lauren
Bacall's “Rat Pack,” and he admitted the term was amorphous, but
commonly used among his peers. Who were the usual suspects, I
wondered. He came up with the expected list: Miriam Toews, Patrick
Friesen, Di Brandt, Sandra Birdsell — basically the only Mennonites
receiving what passes for prestige treatment in Canadian publishing.
I said they could be difficult to avoid, but I somehow managed.
A bit of a dodge, that. The truth is
I've read enough of all those guys to know I have no interest in the
larger monologue. If
asked about the moral/immoral legacy of the Mennonites and the
psychic burdens their theology and pieties place on the individual, I can fill in the blanks pretty quickly all by myself.
In fact, I have filled in the
blanks.
Last winter as I prepared to attend my grandmother's funeral,
my wife pressed a notebook to me and said, “You should start
writing. Now.”
So I reminisced as
I flew to the prairies. It was pleasant, for the most part, but there
was no escaping the single largest fact in all this: I had physically
removed myself from the environment I grew up in, putting
considerable geographical and spiritual and “Lifestyle” distance
between me and the clan that raised me. You want grievances? Scribner
doesn't make a large enough notebook.
Which probably cuts
to the heart of my father's concern. His question was likely a dodge,
to begin with. The question he probably meant to ask was, “You're
not an angry Mennonite — are you, son?”
As Disney was leading up to the release of its television mini-series of A Wrinkle In Time, an interviewer asked Madeleine L'Engle if the show met her expectations. "Oh yes," she said. "I expected it to be bad, and it is."
ON THE OTHER HAND, Hope Larson's graphic adaptation of the deeply beloved novel, due October 5, looks most promising.
I can't recall which cheeseburger joint
was playing it, but when I first heard John Rich's “Mack Truck” (YouTube) I
thought, “Oh no: Nashville finally discovered Hip-Hop.” Then I
thought, “Good Lord, that sounds as bad as 80s-era Christian Rock.”
Which got me thinking of Hank Hill's jeremiad: “Can't you see
you're not making Christianity better, you're just making rock 'n'
roll worse!” Nashville has been taking the corner-kickers to rock
'n' roll for decades now, so it's finally moved on to Hip-Hop. And
yes, Nashville is making it much, much worse.
It was not always thus, and the Country
Funk 1969-1975 collection is a delightful reminder of more fecund
cross-pollination. It seems the young country singers of the Age of
Aquarius heard a sensibility they could strongly identify with in the
funk records of their day, and thought, “I could do that!” It's a
street-sensibility (“L.A. Memphis Tyler Texas” “Hawg Frawg”),
a Gospel-sensibility (Link Wray's killer “Fire & Brimstone”),
a “Leave me alone, I'm enjoying the Highway to Hell just fine”
sensibility (“Stud Spider”). Add a light touch of twang, and
boy-howdy if it doesn't all work (well ... with the possible
exception of Dennis the Fox's “Piledriver,” which sounds a bit
forced).
The download places offer this collection as “album only” but I wouldn't let that scare you off: I can't think of any other way I'd play these songs. Highly recommended for the last few car-washes of the Fall.
