"We tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars."
Monday, January 31, 2011
Of Nixon Masks and Tape Machines: Mrs. Henry's Julep Hootenanny Remastered and Remembered
"Unsubtle?" Silber uttering the immortal first words of Julep
Hootenanny.
Julep Hootenanny is the demo tape recorded by Mrs. Henry, probably sometime in early Fall 1990 (exact dates are hard to reckon because most of the bands records were destroyed in a bizarre mid-nineties housecleaning incident). Once praised as "not exactly total garbage" by future MTV grandee, then local New Brunswick radio poobah, Matt Pinfield, Julep Hootenanny has since come to be regarded by certain members of the cognoscenti as a document that, as one critic put it "fills a much needed gap" in the recording history of Mrs Henry. Described by some as a kind of "savage journey to the heart of the American Dream"; it prompted others to declare that "there's nothing in the First Amendment that supports [such] horrible and disgusting projects," Now, at long last a new generation will be able to judge such questions for themselves. Once thought lost to history, recently discovered in an ancient Etruscan shoebox by a crack team of Italian archaeologists digging for treasure in the New Brunswick sewer system, digitally remastered and prosthetically enhanced, Julep Hootenanny redivivus!
"My Wearing a Nixon Mask is Unbelievably Unsubtle"
What you first hear when you fire up Mrs. Henry's Julep Hootenanny is not a guitar or a drum, but an excited voice, saying something quite strange about Nixon masks: "My wearing a Nixon mask is unbelievably unsubtle. It is a pose. And yet, through my contact with other people who are posing, I discover their pose, through my pose. Does that make sense to you, Julian?" This voice will return at the beginning of each song on Julep Hootenanny, acting as a kind of MC, a demented presence shouting over the music, ushering in each song with a feral burst of speechifying, or a wild-eyed piece of spittle-flecked philosophizing. Many have wondered: who is this awful person, and why is he yelling like that? This voice in fact belongs to the band's erstwhile svengali, the future love guru, Robert Silber. He is yelling like that because Mrs. Henry was never just about the music (try as they might). Mrs. Henry was about making a ruckus. The voice of this strange man, hollering at the beginning of each song is a way of signalling that The Ruckus is parked in your driveway at two in the morning, honking its horn--neighbors be damned!--ready to pick you up, do donuts on the mayor's lawn, and peel off for parts unknown.
The Recording of Julep Hootenanny
Another question frequently asked about Julep Hootenanny is, why does it sound like that (i.e. crappy). To which one answer is, it's not crappy it's lo-fi, dude! Surviving members of the band have been pleased (and not a little surprised) to learn that today they can point to some sort of legitimate aesthetic affiliation for their sound, but the truth is that they had little choice in the matter at the time. Lo-fi was all they knew how to do. Russ has gone on to work briefly as a sound engineer in a studio run by a former member of the heavy metal band, Luftwaffe--where on one occasion he even had the opportunity to record "the Eddie Van Halen of the Accordion" (though apparently this didn't go so well)--and since then he has become an acknowledged master of home recording. But at the time when they made the Julep Hootenanny, Mrs. Henry had only a machine that looked something like this
Tape Machine
and none of them really knew how it worked. They took turns grunting at it, pushing its buttons, turning its dials, praying to, cursing at, and weeping before it. At one point a crazed McKenna even attempted to set it afire, hurl it off the backyard deck and brain a groundhog with it before sanity momentarily--and anomalously--prevailed. On another occasion the tape machine, which had been perched on top of a half-empty can of Milwaukee's Best, crashed to the floor, nearly taking months of recording with it. Fortunately its fall was cushioned by a pile of emergency lo mein that Russ kept in reserve behind his drums. Besides the problem of working with any form of technology more complicated than a ham sandwich, other challenges included the fact that the room at Foxwood Drive in which the recording took place was small and acoustically hostile, and that each member of the band had to record his part separately, since they had no idea how to record the whole band at once, (though some naysayers have also suggested that this may have been because the band actually had no idea how to play together all at once). Given these challenges, it is probably fair to call the sound of Julep Hootenanny a heroic achievement in adequacy.
The first song on Julep Hootenanny, The Roots, kicks off the proceedings with a Stones-like riff and some drawling, sweetly melodic slide guitar (as well as some shouting from Silber about the uses of a Nixon-mask in revealing the performative nature of social reality). Fittingly for a song titled, The Roots, the music embodies the band's affinity for what is now called roots music. At the time, when they tried to explain the sound they were going for, the band called their music, "Industrial Country." However a quick google search of this phrase turns up lots of references to the state of economic advancement in various countries around the world, but none to a style of music. But if not all of Mrs. Henry's roots took firm hold in the earth, and, indeed, if little they planted proved right for the climate or the soil of their time, still, the music they made shows their determination to burrow down like groundhogs for the roots of the American musical tree.
As in each of the songs on the Hootenanny, the players are readily identifiable. Koslow sings (sort of) and plays rhythm guitar on a relatively clean sounding Strat; McKenna adds backup vocals and piercing lead lines on a Les Paul played with a slide he fashioned himself from the bloody fang of a Bengal Tiger; Reilly plays the drums with both wit and ferocity--part Fred Astair, part Incredible Hulk--and plunks on the bass like Pablo Casals pirhouetting in ballet slippers while wearing a phony mustache and a wighat.
Mrs. Henry's melancholy first bassist
(It should be noted that at the the time of the recording of Julep Hootenanny the band was without a regular bass player, because their original bass player had fallen into a state of near catatonic boredom and despair on the living room couch, and then left for Scandinavia, where that sort of thing is encouraged, and, indeed, often celebrated. Anyway, the band carried on recording, with Russ playing both bass and drums, although unfortunately he was not able to do this simultaneously in live performance.)
The Roots was written by Reilly, McKenna and Koslow in a true, if somewhat haphazard collaborative effort. Reilly wrote the music and a set of touching lyrics about mental illness. McKenna and Koslow kept the music largely intact, but set about rewriting the lyrics to suit what they considered a more Henryish sensibility. The result is a strange tale of family life, one in which "mother has suspicions about people in her tree," grandma "never lies about her sizes," and "Cousin Graham don't give damn," which is presumably why he is finally to be traded "for some marbles and a shoe." Although possibly the fact that "his teeth are browning by degrees" and he "keeps his pockets full of sand in case he finds his fleas," may also be contributing factors.
The song is upbeat and Stonesy, and it has a truly rocking AC/DCish solo section in the middle. One thing that makes this part really soar is the way in which the solo carries on for an extra chorus beyond what we would expect, Reilly and Koslow giving each other the nod and deciding on one more hectic tobaggon run down the mountain, McKenna flinging himself down after them with no concern for his own personal safety. They then whip out of that last chorus and into the last verse, the one about Cousin Graham not giving a damn, as if they were the James-Younger Gang riding down a train with guns ablaze and dusters trailing in the wind.
Night Train
Silber on the Dictaphone
(artist's conception)
"I'm not just any slobbering drunk! I'm your President, goddamit!" bellows Silber into his dictaphone (the instrument on which all the talking bits of the Hootenanny were recorded) in a plausibly Nixonian expression of the outrage felt by a man of high position arrived among the seething masses, and now to his shock finding himself both unrecognizable to, and indistinguishable from them. In this way, Silber calls our attention to the double meaning of this song's title--Night Train as a kind of journey through the underworld, a place where President and prole ride shoulder by shoulder toward the same mysterious destination, and Night Train as a cheap disfiguring drunk.
With Silber's indignant Presidential cri de coeur, the sharp hooting of McKenna's slide guitar, and the full tilt chugging of Russ's drums, Night Train comes on like the Midnight Special suddenly barreling past from out of nowhere. We jump the train at the crossroads and then we're off on a breakneck ride down rails of song--over moonlit mountain passes and glimmering midnight plains, through tunnels haunted by the souls of blood-drinking railroad men, past the lonesome ghost towns of hobo legend, whistling down all the stations of drunken back-alley gibberish. Koslow reportedly penned the lyrics after ingesting a near-fatal dose of Robbie Robertson interview clips from The Last Waltz and as a result experiencing an influx of dangerously grandiose artistic ambition. Before the police were called in to restrain him, Koslow had not only attempted to make the world's densest spaghetti sauce, but had also taken every classic train song--from "John Henry" and "This Train is Bound for Glory," to "Mystery Train," "Crazy Train," and "Love Train,"--thrown them all in a bag, banged on them furiously with a nine-pound hammer, and then thrown the surviving bits in the blender with some gainer fuel and Old Grandad.
The result is a song that tells the tale of a living man who journeys into and through the underworld--"a man dies and sees light in the tunnel. I've lived and seen the same"--a lonesome traveller who rides through the dark polis of an uneasy dream on a train that is "never coming back." On that journey he encounters the devil (no doubt wearing a Nixon mask), who "shakes his hand" and congratulates him on reaching "the promised land" (but just what is he doing there?) where he witnesses a "band of fallen angels...playing the blues." At the end he recalls the fate of John Henry--who, it was said, would only overcome the steamdrill when "the rocks in the mountain had turned to gold"--and the lonesome traveller sees for himself (or thinks he sees--"looking out the window I thought I saw a glow") this marvelous vision of transformation coming to pass--or perhaps he is really seeing the light of dawn breaking at last on the mountains, having somehow returned alive from his odyssey. But is he now waking or dreaming? Was the "night" through which he journeyed the land of the dead, or was it only the dark secret face of daylight America with its sleep mask on? Or, was it all really just the the bad dream of a wicked bender?
The last of these possibilities is the one so masterfully explored by McKenna in the lyrics he wrote for the breakdown section that occurs before the last verse. With the lightest of touches, McKenna makes us sharply aware of Night Train as a cheap ticket to the land of inebriation, and at the same time he connects that meaning to the song's other layers. The lyrics are worth reading in full:
Poor man lying in the Bowery slums.
He thinks he's singing blues, but he's speaking in tongues.
He's a paper bag prophet and a carpenter's son,
Without a hope or a dime or a reason.
He's got holes in his hands, wine in his flask.
He talks to burning bushes, and also burning trash.
The lord owes him a favor, but he is ashamed to ask
About getting his wine, changed to whiskey!
Taking us out of the mythic landscape that Koslow sketches, McKenna gives us the hobo's gutter level perspective on things (to each their strengths). On Julep Hootenanny it is also McKenna who sings this part, which, in his characteristically perfectionist way, he recorded while snorkelling in a custom built tub of Night Train, "for the sake," as he put it "of authenticity." But for all that he sounds like Shakey Jake, McKenna's lyrics are just as symbolically rich as Koslow's. In fact, Nikos Kazantzakis has cited them as the inspiration for his controversial novel The Last Temptation of Christ (as have the writers of the screenplay for Dude, Where's My Car).
McKenna recording his part for
Night Train
For who can the "poor man" and "carpenter's son" in the Bowery slums be, if not a brother of the Man of Sorrows? Like the speaker at the beginning of the song, who has seen the light normally witnessed only by the dead and lived to tell the tale, he is also a kind of "prophet," one who has the "holes in his hands" to prove it. But as a prophet he seems like a failure. Unable to perceive which things in his world really are signs of the divine, he cannot distinguish burning trash from the burning bush. He tries to sing the blues, but cannot help "speaking in tongues" instead. And when he finally summons the courage to ask the Big Man behind the bar for a favor, it will not be that the bitter cup pass from his lips, but that it be filled up with the good stuff. And so, with McKenna as our guide, our tour group exits the train of railroad myth and we wander down dark alleys in the shadow of the tall buildings of the cities of the plain, where we learn that wherever it is the Night Train is taking us, there are those among us who have already arrived.
Mrs. Henry charges into
the last verse
As important as McKenna's contribution to the lyrics of this song, what Night Train really shows off is his great skill as an arranger. Listen to the contrasting rhythmic and dynamic treatments of alternating verses, a characteristic McKenna gesture, one that he would use again to especially good effect in Mrs. Henry's version of the Dylan song "From a Buick 6." Here the headlong gallop of the opening verse slams through a tunnel and comes out the other side pounding on the backbeat as hard and heavy as John Henry driving steel with his nine-pound hammer. McKenna's slide cuts through the din as if he were Duane Allman brandishing a bourbon-dripping scimitar over his head. Reilly beats the drums like a caveman with a mastodon tusk, while his bass booms like a stampede of mammoths falling off a cliff. Through it all Koslow's guitar rings like silver coins jingling in a poor man's pocket. When McKenna's voice changes tone at the end of the taut, sinisterly ticking breakdown with its deftly interwoven chattering guitars, and he snarls about getting his "wine changed to whiskey," all hell finally breaks loose and the band comes charging down from the hills like the Mongol Horde with blood in their eyes and blades aflame in the fierce noon sun.
Maggie's Farm
Audience reaction to Mrs. Henry's first live
performance of Maggie's Farm
A good example of how Mrs. Henry was able to take other people's songs, especially Dylan's and make them their own. For this one, McKenna drew on his extensive hay baling experience in order to help craft a musical arrangement that would make listeners feel they were on an actual farm, hearing the oinks, the baas, the moos, and the yeehaws, swilling the moonshine and smelling the ordure. Again, the song begins with a fitting outburst from Silber, as he declares with giddy bemusement: "It's like some sort of filth magnet that keeps drawing us back in--the filthiest people in the world." In its original context, this no doubt referred to some scene of excess in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the dictaphone recordings heard on Julep Hootenanny were originally made. Here, the filth magnet is clearly the song itself, as McKenna's guitar begins a taunting schoolyard riff (nah nah nah nah nah, etc.) whose sing-song quality, together with Russ's ascending pickup notes on the bass, act as an invitation, pulling us into the song by our sleeve, and sending us spinning into a whirling vortex of muck. Before we know it we are hip deep in sheep dip and we like it that way.
As Dylan wrote it, Maggie's Farm is a protest song, a song about refusing to toe the line any more, a song about wanting to get off the "farm" of America-the-mad. It is an anthem of refusal, but an anthem for a nation of one: "I try my best to be just like I am, but everybody wants you to be just like them." In contrast, Mrs. Henry's version of the song feels much more communal, and it's worth thinking about just how this feeling is produced. To begin with, of all the songs on Julep Hootenanny, this one has without question Koslow's most committed vocal. But rather than a man desperate to escape from the farm, he sounds like he's actually having a pretty good time there. Judging from the sound of his voice it seems quite likely that he will stick around as long as Maggie will let him. But beyond the engaged vocals, the real key to this song's unusual blend of ferocity and goodwill can once again be traced to the musical arrangement--two aspects of which in particular stand out.
Maggie's Farm: Mrs. Henry's Peasant Wedding Dance
First is Reilly's bass, which, as it bounces jocularly back and forth from the root to the fifth evokes, perhaps, the sound of a bottom heavy Maggie bounding along, shifting her weight from one hefty cheek to the other in joyful holiday movement. Once it kicks in we realize we are at some sort of dance, and that modesty is going out the window. It's unlikely that anyone will be going home in their own clothes. Second, is McKenna's syncopated hoedown figures on the guitar, which conjure an image of cows and chickens, sheep and pigs all in their dancing shoes, stepping lively on a Saturday night to the sound of a greasy fiddle.
Listen to the way McKenna uses his guitar to orchestrate a variety of different feelings of movement for the song, each one an accompaniment for a different invisible step. In the first part of the verse, when Koslow sings "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more," McKenna plays a lightly syncopated part that sounds like pigs and cows, mules and sheep doing the two step in a circle, their steps jaunty but tightly controlled, like his playing.
After Koslow finishes the line, however, the dancers turn outward and happily wave their arms (or legs, hooves and paws) in wide, open movements--listen, now Mckenna's guitar opens up with longer, twangier notes and the chickens begin to flutter and jump. Then comes the breakdown, and, while Koslow sings "I wake up in the morning, hold my hands and pray for rain," McKenna plays loud, hard power chords, crisply starting and stopping while the animals step back in a ring, clap their hooves, and watch each other step forth to strut their stuff one by one.
Mrs. Cow shakes it like a Holy Roller
There goes Mrs. Cow, shaking it. Mrs. Chicken does...the Mashed Potato, and Mr. Pig jumps in and does the robot. Then, as Koslow shouts, "It's a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor," McKenna lets the animals pivot and twirl back into place with a do-si-do as the dance starts rolling round the barn floor once again. And then, with Koslow again singing "No, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more," it's back into the two step with which they all began.
This song is Mrs. Henry's Kermesse and it bursts with filthy drunken peasant glee.
Down Home Girl
The record from which Mrs. Henry took
"Down Home Girl," later discovered under
a litter box.
The final song on Julep Hootenanny is an almost lethally humid version of Alvin Robinson's New Orleans R&B classic, "Down Home Girl." Such a regionally specific song might seem like kind of stretch for a band whose members all hailed from the New Jersey suburbs, not one of whom could tell a chitlin from a grit if his life was at stake. But something about the song seemed right for the band, who had spent countless hours listening to a compilation record on which it was included, imagining themselves in some languorous, steamy and mysterious elsewhere. In fact the record was played until it was on the verge of melting down and burning a hole straight through to China, which it would surely have done, were it not for Russ's quick thinking, when he hid it one night beneath his cats' (Poopenstein and Mr. Longarms') litter box, along with an armful of other records whose repeated playing he felt was beginning to undermine the last timbers of his sanity. But, as it sometimes happens, where authenticity fails, invention blooms. And so, in their reinvention of an R&B classic can be heard the true original genius of The Henry, which lies in their conception of each song as a kind of contraption, a vehicle for moving its hearers from one state of being to another, a weird machine with carefully articulated, though strange looking parts, each performing a precise function--an iron beast at once whimsical and fierce, sinister and festive. And so, where another band might be content to reproduce more or less the arrangement and feeling of a song, playing it straight--and another might experiment by transforming the genre of a song--taking a soul classic and doing it as a country or a punk song, Mrs. Henry always stripped a song down to its gears before building it back up in their own image, and to suit their own purpose.
Mrs. Henry atop her contraption: an early prototype
Koslow's guitar stirs the song to life, like a an old circus bear lunging blindly out of its sleep. Reilly's bass rumbles along the bottom like massive underinflated tires rolling slowly down a country road, while his drums tick along with a kind of precarious dignity--like a threadbare southern gentleman, liquor oozing from his pores, tapping his way down the street with his cane, occasionally carefully taking his hankie from his pocket and delicately patting the beads of sweat from his steaming pate. Koslow sings as if had a head full of julep and a heartfelt conviction of unspoken naughtiness.Wreathing his guitar around Koslow's leering vocals, playing Lester Young to his Billie Holiday, McKenna gives this song its defining character of bizarre, cephalopod-like motion.
McKenna plays the "Down Home Girl" guitar part
Russ once described the sound of McKenna's guitar part on this song as evoking the struggles of a fat man trying unsuccessfully to wrestle his way out of a sagging easy chair. But another way to think of it might be as if it were the sound of a device for mechanized slinking, something with steel tendrils springing loose and tentacles wreathing their way through the air. It sits atop the Henry machine, purloining unattended juleps and making baroque, inscrutable and obscene undulations. Certainly, it is blues from another planet, and in its oscillation between the imponderably extended single line and the snappy imitation of a horn section (dooh-dooh dooh-dooh doot) it manipulates time and space like some kind of dark ancient machine from Mars.
But the song is more than a machine, it is also a kind of float, like something from the Mardi-Gras, built to carry its own brightly feathered tribe. At the prow sits Silber, once again. And he utters a kind of valediction for the Hootenanny. "I did my best to offend everyone. Have I offended everyone?" (shouts of no, yeah, not really, etc.) "Sheesh!" he chuckles, and then the song snaps into gear. This time, however, Silber's is not the only voice we hear. Through the magic of the dictaphone, the song hoists a small band of partygoers aboard its creaking vessel. About midway through the song we hear another friend of the band make a mock-earnest declaration to the dictaphone: "Dictaphone, this is Salmy speaking. I'm going to make a very frank statement. Something is going to go afoul here. I know it; I know it well." Today, of course, this would be a tweet, or facebook status update. But, in its time, speaking into the dictaphone was a lifeline thrown to memory, a way of being able to make a lasting record of an adventure in debauchery.
Koslow: "I want the reddest you've got in the biggest glass you can give me...not one of those dinky things. Give me, like a jug!"
McKenna: "I'm very glad Julian showed up.
Salman: "No one else is glad Julian showed up."
Katie: "I'm just a little nervous."
And with that little snippet of the milieu in which Mrs.Henry once moved, the song rolls on down the street, and the Julep Hootenanny cranks on, deep into the night, carrying its merry band of yahoos forth in song. For, despite being recorded one part at a time, Julep Hootenanny really does sound not only like the work of a band playing together in the same room, but like a band in the largest sense. Just as Greil Marcus declared that the songs of Dylan's Basement Tapes together projected the image in sound of an "Invisible Republic," the songs of Mrs. Henry's Julep Hootenanny together also body forth in sound a kind of imaginary tribe, with their own customs and traditions and attitude toward life--
Mrs. Henry's Imaginary Tribe?
Listening to the Julep Hootenanny, we may conjure an image of the people of the Henry: they are a strange nomadic folk with leaky tents, odd cooking utensils that double as musical instruments, and very little common sense. They have a rather haphazard sense of direction, and a love of all things that bounce, twirl or flap with abandon. They drink a lot of Bourbon and Milwaukee's Best. They break into fierce dances of spontaneous civic feeling that are frequently mistaken by strangers for lunatic gestures of outrage. Let them take their place at last among the great wandering tribes of America's sonic landscape, wild and unrepentant weirdos.
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