|
Future tense
Sunshine and noir
with Stephin Merritt, Claudia Gonson, and Chris Ewen of Future Bible
Heroes.
IT WAS AN
instance of mordant irony that a world-class cynic like Stephin Merritt would appreciate. Open on a supernaturally gorgeous day, the skies over San Francisco were blue, the weather was unseasonably warm, and the air was growing superheated with a city's anger as bombing began in Iraq and protesters clogged the streets with news racks, and there I was, frantically trying to drive across Market Street to get to work and the phone, to call across the country, to the East Coast, to the singer-songwriter and to his fellow Future Bible Heroes, Claudia Gonson and Chris Ewen. Larger problems were brewing, my target seemed minor, but I had a feeling that as late as I was, I was going to be facing a wrath of biblical proportions.
Luckily, Merritt was engrossed in darker pursuits than simply ripping my head off with sheer, dry scorn and depositing it on a platter. He was standing in line, talking on his cell phone civilly, sort of, and preparing to cloak any new wartime anxieties in the noirs of Nicolas Ray at the Museum of Modern Art's Gramercy Theatre in NYC. Born to Be Bad, They Live by Night, and On Dangerous Ground were on the bill, and Merritt was subdued, taciturn, and ready to get lost in the joys of pulp, which he summed up as "cute boys in great clothing, Gloria Graham, beautiful cinematography, nifty jazz scores." "I'm taking the day off from recording the new Magnetic Fields album," he said, always a bit more than a beat behind my last statement. He's just slow enough with the comeback to make you doubt he heard you – and to question your own question – and barbed enough in his eventual response to double any doubt. "I can't really work while we're invading Iraq."
Merritt was obviously born too late, too bad of temper, and too ready with a wicked, witty turn of phrase to live in this terrible, Technicolor world, where things are less clearly black and white than they are flickering like a strobe light between extremes, and doublespeak is a fact of life; where "patriots" openly refer to anyone associated with the Iraq government as "terrorists"; and where a photo of a dead Iraqi soldier on the front page of the New York Times is considered solid photojournalism but showing dead American G.I.s on al-Jazeera is a violation of the Geneva Convention. Merritt, a combative former copy editor at Spin, should have been cast alongside Bogart's bitter, disillusioned screenwriter in In a Lonely Place, and they could have cracked wise together while their worlds fell to pieces. In the same sense, Ray's dark films were the perfect chaser to that bleak, beautiful day, and despite my initial impression of the effervescent, twinkling electropop of Future Bible Heroes, the apocalyptic moment seemed like a perfect fit for the band, who'll bring their sweet and dour selves to Bimbo's 365 Club on April 11.
Eternal Youth (Instinct), the band's last studio album and the subject of the recent remix fest The Lonely Robot (Instinct), is a case in point. Couched in ghostly, pointillist synth sounds crafted by Ewen, Gonson sings Merritt's lyrics on songs such as "Find an Open Window," which wittily indulges suicide fantasies and recipes for disaster: "Find an open window / Then without a sound / Climb through and just let go / Fall to the ground / Take peaches and poison / Mix them in a bowl / Separate the golem from the soul." She's almost inaudible – submerged beneath boiling electronics that echo like smudgy vibes or bass-heavy depth charges – breathing, "There will be no river that we can't cross / No mountain we can't climb / I'll make all the same mistakes / And you'll forgive me / But I won't love you next time" on "No River," a drowned, inverted variation of "River Deep – Mountain High." Youth seems especially bittersweet and cast in a sinister light as Gonson raps about the lifestyles of the impossibly glam and predatory surrounded by bouncy, upbeat beats on "I'm a Vampire" or sings the praises of alien beauty to faux exotica backing on "From Some Dying Star." Maybe it's time – when the future seems ominous, unrecognizable, and even inhuman – to look to anyone calling him- or herself a Future Bible Hero, even as a joke.
Truth hurts
That's the ultimate irony of the band, Merritt said, because for them, the future has always been stretched hard like taffy or the truth – so far they've come together to put out a recording every three or four years. "We talk about the record we're about to make, but that's it. We don't have long-term plans," he muttered before adding, "It's hard to make long-term plans. Every time you make a plan, someone blows up World Trade Center."
It sounds like the man who's been praised for his relentless admixture of songwriting talent and smart-alecky cynicism actually dares to care, about something, anything. "I was writing lyrics after Sept. 11, and there's death in every song," Merritt confessed. "There's a lot of death on that record; it's pretty clear where that inspiration came from."
Gonson is more forthcoming about Eternal Youth's morbid fascination with death and its haunted, baldly retro quality. "Obviously Sept. 11 affected a lot of people. Stephin actually saw it happen from his rooftop," she said on the phone from New York, conjuring an image of the singer-songwriter cradling his beloved Chihuahua, Irving, watching in horror as planes fly into the WTC. "It definitely affected his mood and the way he wrote the lyrics. I'm sure of it. It had such an effect on him."
But even before then, the wildly acclaimed songwriter was only too happy to hand over the reigns to Ewen. Officially the band divided up their tasks, with Ewen writing the music and doing much of the initial recording, Merritt penning the lyrics – in contrast to his "usual king role in the Magnetic Fields," as he puts it, in which he does everything – and Gonson singing all of the songs, unlike on the first FBH album, which included vocals by Merritt.
"Stephin is writing for someone else, composing songs for backing tracks," said Gonson, who has worked with Merritt for decades in the Magnetic Fields. "So I think Stephin feels license to think theatrically, especially since Chris's backing tracks are based on electronic instruments. There is a kind of dialogue going on between the way Chris's backing tracks sound and the kinds of stories and freedom that it gives Stephin to want to come up with slightly more surreal and fantastical plotlines for his songs, rather than his more personal or mundane plotlines of the everyday. The reason he can write about aliens and robots and vampires and virgins is because the backing tracks sound surreal and provocative."
Big and brassy
Legend has it Future Bible Heroes all met on a miniature golf course. The reality – Ewen, a former member of the '80s band Figures on a Beach, offers – is he met Gonson on a course, and Ewen and Merritt were drawn together by their appreciation of exotica by masters like Martin Denny, members of the electronic vanguard such as Enoch Light, and musical masterminds such as Lindsey Buckingham. After Figures on a Beach broke up, Ewen started writing instrumentals in his home studio. Merritt suggested putting words to the songs, and Ewen took him up on it and asked him to collaborate. The resulting album's worth of material became Memories of Love (Slow River, 1997).
Eternal Youth started out as an album written for Gonson, Ewen said, speaking from Boston. "She set some rules in the beginning," he added. "She didn't want any big and brassy arrangements, and she likes to sing in an unaffected way. And for the most part, we tended to go along with her on those things, and then there are songs like 'I'm a Vampire,' which is very perky electropop, something she didn't want to do, with big diva lyrics and a rap in the center of the song – everything she didn't want."
That sense of perverse, against-the-grain playfulness led Ewen to write happy, perky music that in turn inspired Merritt to come up with lyrics that undercut or counterpoint the tone, as with "Smash the Beauty Machine." They all would tinker with the tracks, chopping them up or editing them or tweaking the tempo before and after the final vocals were done – sometimes without the others' knowledge, Ewen said.
One thing they all know – on Future Bible Heroes' first, short outing to the West Coast, every song will get a makeover and be rearranged for ukulele, guitar, piano, exotic percussion, and the odd archaic electronic instrument such as the stylophone, a tone generator Merritt plays using a metal pad and a stylus or pen. They learned their lesson after doing initial shows on the East Coast with a vehicle full of delicate old analog synths, including a Prophet Five and old Oberheims. "It's been very, very good in the sense that I feel like when we play a show we're actually playing a show as opposed to being a synthesizer exhibition onstage," Ewen said.
Meanwhile, Merritt enjoys simply concentrating on lyrics and vocal melodies – a change of pace from the Magnetic Fields and its half-done album. "I just want to be a songwriter really," said Merritt, who is also working on the musical Songs from Venus and an adaptation of the Chinese opera The Orphan of Chao. "Who cares about making records?"
"My contribution to Future Bible Heroes consists of sitting around in
bars, at this point," he added balefully. "Hopefully that
will be my contribution to Magnetic Fields if I can find someone
to take over. I hope Phil Spector doesn't go to jail."
Future Bible Heroes perform April 11, 9 p.m., Bimbo's
365 Club, 1025 Columbus, S.F. $15. (415) 474-0365.
|
|
