THIRTY-SEVEN POSTERS ABOUT SOULED AMERICAN
Publisher’s Note: These posters appeared throughout the summer of 1997. A collective was formed, similar to the CMJoy Gang. Contributors focused upon a single unheralded act, the Chicago band named Souled American. The posters measured from 2 feet to 4 feet in height, and were designed by Mark Lerner of Rag & Bone Shop. Those that follow were authored by Camden Joy.
Our First Encounter
We would go quite often, usually once a month but sometimes more, sometimes once a week or more, to see a guitarist named Kevin Trainor, who had a band called the Surreal McCoys and was in the Special Guests.
Trainor was coolness itself, with an easy charisma to the way he played. In his hands a guitar seemed very simple. He was handsome, funny, intelligent. He sang in an old style with a deep powerful voice.
One night, Sunday night, early 1989, we went to the Rodeo Bar to see Trainor play with the Special Guests (who now called themselves “5 Chinese Brothers”). The Rodeo Bar had free peanuts (we called them “dinner”), no cover, and relatively cheap beer.
We were carrying instruments, having come straight from a rehearsal. We tried to time our arrival to avoid any opening acts but were unsuccessful in this.
What do I remember? I remember a tall slim guy with mirror shades playing an acoustic guitar with a pick-up through an amplifier—it sounded like mine! This tall guy was singing from his heart, in a choked drawl. We were skeptical snots, eager to insult anything, and even before we found seats we had exchanged looks of ridicule. We all had things to criticize—the bassist is ruining the songs, playing all over them! The drummer isn’t even facing his kit! The songs are all too slow! That singer’s not enunciating!
Before we could say a thing, however, the music made itself felt. It was truly unparalleled that all of us would be in immediate agreement on the beauty of another band’s sound, but there it was. Our songwriter found something to like, the cradling care with which these fellows carried each composition, a certain inarguable resemblance to the disjointed images and antique feel of his favorite Dylan bootlegs; our bassist saw a way of steering the sound, punching through the song, that he’d perhaps never imagined; our guitarist grew enraptured with the tender embellishments which their electric guitarist submitted for our consideration every few chord changes. I can’t imagine why our drummer liked it, unless he looked forward to the day when he would be restricted to an occasional tom hit, a lazy bass kick, a drag of the stick across the cymbal, a percussive surrender.
I remember the ostensible leader of 5 Chinese Brothers rushing over to us to apologize for this band, he didn’t expect them to go on much longer, he couldn’t wait for them to get off. We looked at him in astonishment and asked who these guys were.
“Souled American,” he said, with uncharacteristic ill-will. “From Chicago. They have a record out.”
“Sold American,” we repeated thoughtfully.
“Souled,” he corrected us. “Souled! S-O-U-L-E-D!” He was angry that they were going way over their allotted time slot. He imagined the people who had come for 5 Chinese Brothers would start leaving soon, most had to work early tomorrow and had to get to bed soon, and in a free establishment with no door you needed to hang on to whoever came in if you aimed to get rebooked there.
His concerns grew inaudible to us. We were somewhere else at the moment. You see, mostly we watched bands for their musicianship or for their originality; either we loved their songs or their unique feel. It was rare—Christ, more than rare: I’d say because of the way we hated jazz that it was unprecedented—for us to stumble across a band whose songs fit our formal, content-heavy requirements, while at the same time their arrangements drew, it seemed, from some completely different atmosphere; a band, in short, we could respect as both familiar and strange.
We tried to incorporate them into our sound. It wasn’t easy. We broke up soon after.
Diminishing Returns
They pursue a career like the forlorn ex from one of their early songs pursues his gone love: in complete secrecy. “I’ve often walked down your street. It’s paved; no one knows.” No one notices him in the song, of course, not just because a paved road carries no footprints but because his pursuit has so utterly wrecked his spirit as to desubstantiate him, expunge his corporeality. The band’s pursuit of the musical marketplace has fared no better, turning them—album by album—into spooks and phantoms. Dropping more and more chord changes out of their songs, increasingly blurring their main instrumentation via intentional studio miscalibrations, they have now obscured their history, their sources, their very songs so completely that there is no reason people hearing them now would suspect they were once a reggae covers band that drifted into playing uptempo country-western and bluegrass songs. They’ve left no footprints anywhere.
Interview, Part One
A:—you mean right this minute? Oh, I’m just puttering around, watering my plants, like an old veteran of the music industry. Souled American, hmm . . . That does seem awfully long ago, a very distant thing, I think, a very obscure one.
Q: But there was a time they were higher-profile . . .
A: Really? To me, they’re a band that for a while there, I thought, were just about the best band in the world. But it seemed like Rough Trade would put these records out and they’d sell maybe 3,000 copies. There’d be almost no feedback, you know? There were a few bands I knew who liked them, and a few critics. But that was about it, really.
Q: Why was it that they didn’t break through to higher levels?
A: I think Souled American would probably say it was because Rough Trade didn’t promote them well enough. And it’s certainly true that we weren’t high-powered in that regard. But it’s also true that the band defeated any effort to promote them that went beyond us just trying to tell people, “Listen to this! It’s great!”
Q: How so?
A: For a start, they were absolutely insistent on doing everything their own way. That’s not a bad thing in itself. You’ve probably heard the story behind that song on the first record that goes, “I know what the band wants. I know what the band needs.” Those are supposedly words spoken to Souled American by the A&R person from Slash Records who was trying to sign them. “I know what the band wants! I know what the band needs!”
Q: No, I didn’t know that.
A: And they absolutely weren’t going to have that. Only they could know what they wanted. I remember sitting at an adjacent table to them at the Rodeo Bar while they were being interviewed and Chris saying, “Hey, the great thing about being on Rough Trade is that we can do whatever we want.” I reckon that they could—but I’m not sure that that’s always a good thing for a band. And I think their determination to do things their own way—while being very admirable and leading to really great records for the people who were able to get into them—made it a lot harder for other people, who might’ve got into them, to get into them.
Q: So sabotage lay in their hearts, as they studied their career possibilities?
A: They were very concerned about artwork, for example, and it not being very revealing. Not that they wanted it to be secret—I just think they hated things being crass and obvious. Those guys were so determinedly awkward, it seems to me there was a sense in which the only worthwhile success for them would be one which they had tried, in every possible way, to screw up.
Travels With Lowery
As they drove, they were debating their song arrangements, trying to decide on a band name; yet once the cassette of Souled American began to play, the conversation died. They continued to follow the highway, descending into a valley of villages which seemed strategically placed as if to protect the road from the encroachment of the woods. A few hawks appeared above, circling intently, and with that the temperature plummeted dramatically. Faced with this, the day simply quit. The houses they passed soon resembled ski-slope cottages, benign and unsophisticated. Through the passenger window came the taste of fireplaces being lit, the alluring bite of hickory, a scent of longing, a gentle anonymity to which people all around them succumbed. The band kept on, traveling deeper into the countryside. Twilight made its way up the tree limbs, bringing haze and confusion. The particulars of their surroundings drifted away, indistinct. Now it was night. Still no one spoke.
At last Lowery pointed at the cassette player. “Now this,” he barked, “is great,” and others murmured in agreement. Souled American. The tape was purchased from a bargain bin in Baton Rouge. The beats fell hard, accented awkwardly, as if these were bluegrass standards played by a reggae covers band, which apparently was true. The words came in croaks, barely arriving.
“If we’re not careful,” warned Lowery, “this is what I’ll want our new stuff to sound like. Like unreleased B-side outtakes from Exile on Main Street or something.”
Pete the bassist cleared his throat. “How many, do you think, this stuff sold?”
Lowery shrugged. “Three thousand, maybe. Tops.”
At the next cigarette break, Pete quietly slipped a different cassette into the tape player, a Tom Petty album, a bestseller.
It wasn’t merely that Pete was afraid to waste his time with something less than huge. There were engineering concerns. So much of why songs get on the radio is the way they are miked and mixed along specific industry standards, standards which Souled American avowedly flouted. From his particular vantage, as a longtime studio musician, Pete perhaps depended on these standards more than the others.
As for whether Lowery sold out by suppressing his Souled American tastes in favor of a Tom Pettier sound, this seems incorrect. It ignores the Souled American influences integrated by Lowery into compositions such as “Kerosene Hat,” and how that band’s sound affected Lowery’s production decisions with Sparklehorse and FSK. But more than that, it fails to take into account his oft-stated weariness at being consistently ghettoized as “collegey.” Partially at Pete’s urging, Lowery grew eager to jump milieus, to embark on a broadly resonant dialogue with a great number of folks, to register some lasting impact on mainstream culture, to have a true measurable effect, to establish a career at this, to accomplish something which would be so widely available that you could wave at it for many generations and identify it, proudly, as your contribution. Who can fault the health and handsomeness of such ambitions? Who can doubt he succeeded? The ubiquitous presence of his band’s songs in subsequent movie soundtracks, their videos on MTV, their celebrated tie-in with Taco Bell—people know Cracker (the band name they ultimately chose) in a way they never knew Camper. Which can happen, apparently, as long as you don’t pursue the Souled American model too far.
She Broke My Heart
Souled American’s song “She Broke My Heart” means a great deal to me. At the time it was introduced to me, I was in love with two women. Please; I do not say this easily, for I am not employing “loved” lightly, but mean it at its least respectable (and most undeniable). I was engaged to one of these two women and cheating—in total secrecy—with the other. But I could have happily married either (although I see now neither marriage would’ve ultimately succeeded). I suppose it sounds like some ego trip to love two women at the same time but mostly it teaches you to value resplendent agonies. Hatching within you is the cruel heavenly wisdom that you are trapped and you will not get what you want (no matter your prayers) because in fact you need both women forever and can’t—for long—have both women. Perhaps I just thought I loved the two women when really I just loved the hurting against hope. I always was a sucker for the smell of dynamite. Yet again my least-disciplined passions had backed me into a prisoner’s dilemma which could not be puzzled out—still, who can refuse the beautiful nonsense of crashing a car or turning to drugs? Certainly not the singer of “She Broke My Heart.” Certainly not me, and this was like that. There was no way I could emerge from this intact—how exhilarating! I was high from internal bleeding, stoned on the deliciousness of a truly self-destructive feat, mad and unstoppable. I would examine the wreckage of old people on gurneys and in hospital beds and grow intoxicated thinking how very soon I would be like them, bitter, spent, forgotten. This is what “She Broke My Heart” says too, you know, and why it’s lovely. I played the song for both my loves in different rooms, different cities, just weeks apart, and both of them sobbed with me at what he was singing. They both understood. Still there were constantly cross-continent weeping sessions on payphones, there were whispering midnight calls while someone slept nearby, there were secret missives and incessant surprises and alibis, there were lies and lies, the lies never stopped coming, along with gifts which needed constant explanations, and there was more love than I’d ever suspected capable of giving, gigantic and happy, in part because I knew what was wrong would soon devour me and then leave me feeling as hollowed out as that song. And I haven’t recovered, but by now am dubious that I ever will.
Yesterday, as I looked for their releases at a used CD store, the nice guy behind the counter offered to help. He began by asking me what category of music Souled American made. An easy enough question. He waited several minutes for me to answer while I looked at him, dumbstruck. Dumbfounded. Dum-dum. He grew alarmed. “Is it your heart?” he asked me at last. “Should I call a doctor?” I waved him off and, eventually, he walked away, which left me there still pondering. What category of music? Do words exist which can describe this stuff of theirs, how their songs are missing their crucial parts, the sleeves with too little information, how they invert the manners of techno via its dub predecessor “folk-trance” as they break syntax, lyrically and musically? Lefty Frizzell via Pere Ubu? Lee Perry by way of Meat Puppets by way of Eno by way of Ry Cooder? The twine linking pop music to Souled American (I wanted to announce) is like what connects the monarch butterfly to the everyday housebat.
Everything Souled American Means Is up to You
“Re-elect,” advised the cover of their fourth release. This was elaborated inside the jacket: “Re-elect Sonny.” The band name was hidden, stamped on the inner sleeve in pale ink easily erased. Song credits and member names were not given. Sonny? Typically, the title was presented to us, never once explained, rich with possible interpretations. You wanted to think “Sonny” was something an old-timer once called out to one of them; but it could’ve been a dog’s name, for all we were given. Perhaps it’s because the CD is certainly not “sunny,” so therefore must be “sonny.” When did it come out? Who was in the band? What do they think they’re doing? What to make of a band which covers one of their own rarities, in the process erasing what few words the original version had and playing it shoddily at a grating half-tempo, and then choose the song not only as their fourth album’s opening cut (and the album’s sole original) but its title song as well?
It was a long time awaiting this particular album (two and a half years with no word from them!) and then no one in America was even able to purchase it—it arrived as a British Rough Trade import, after Rough Trade U.S. went belly-up. In the meantime, the world shifted from vinyl to CD, Kris Kross and Milli Vanilli came and went, Janet Jackson was signed for the most lucrative contract in the history of recording, three died while watching AC/DC at the Salt Palace. It was the album where they dropped their first band member (their drummer); in typical fashion, they never bothered to replace him. Now, it is said, their guitarist has quit as well. Watch—they won’t replace him either. They will continue playing until all the members have quit, and even then it will be disputable whether they’re really gone, how long they lingered, whether they ever existed, as with that interminable hesitance during our first dream of the evening when we question whether we’re still awake.
Album by album they’d deviated further from anything resembling pop music until—by Sonny—it began to sound more like a series of supernatural aires conjured by the poet Poe as he lay dying in a strange city in the middle of the last century, debauched and battered, sprawled—as they say—in a ditch beside a tavern only a week before his wedding date.
Sonny the unobtainable, all we have left from then, is a structure of owls, mice, woodstoves, mysterious visitors, and winds across cemeteries, it is a drunken ghost story of an album. It’s a very slow, non-traditional album of traditional covers, most of them unfamiliar to a general audience. Then there’s the aforementioned title song “Sonny,” in which Souled American gives the Souled American treatment to a Souled American original, covering their Flubber outtake “Marleyphine Hank.” Odd hums and mechanical squeaks run under some of the songs, none of them originals, many of which feel painstakingly reassembled out of mismatched musical fragments. As it opens with the instrumental their bassist co-wrote, it closes, quite organically, with a song written by the bassist’s mother. In this way each listening travels back in time, ending earlier than where it began; a generation earlier, to clock it precisely. The “Sonny” then . . . is themselves?
Taken along with their first three albums, Sonny was an album that was critical to the success of the No Depression revolution, yet also shows why Souled American could not live with the results.
Chaos, a Theory Called Souled American
Imagine a world without the European Community. Now imagine a world without Souled American. What if I told you that the second was indispensable to the first, that without Souled American there would have been no united federation of free European democracies forming a continental congress? Yes, now that Jimbo the Glickster has leapt the monodimensional fences of standard linear science to prove that without butterflies there wouldn’t be no rainstorms—I speak here of Chaos, our acclaimed-est of theories, that most ab-fab of lab rats, and this notion that forecasts themselves contribute turbulence (pitchfork bifurcations, stable lines breaking in two, then four, then eight; the appearance of chaos itself; and within the chaos, the astonishing geometric regularity): Cause and Effect merrily take turns atop one another’s shoulders in this world swept by disoriented winds of havoc—Henceforth, hey! It is a given that Most What We Do whenever will affect Past and Future equally, that Most What You Read will end your life, that no things make sense (what with the terrible taste most you Johnny Boy linearity adjutants possess, your sick cars pulling out at all hours and payphones ringing with product surveys, your linear kids on the Straight Sidewalk of Squares hurling their hellos and delaying my milkman!) and embracing this escalation of contingencies and post-deterministic prognostications we grow unable to admit or deny that without the 1988 release of Souled American’s Fe: George Bush wins in 1992, Barbara Bush dies suddenly, George Bush remarries Anna Nicole Smith who, thence reknighted as Evita, poisons Bush’s inner organs on national television with a crew of faith healers, employing solely astral projections and implied karmic interrogatories. If everything did not occur Exactly As It Did we wouldn’t happen to be standing right here right now! Right on! If Souled American hadn’t arrived in small-acknowledged Fulda on 15.Oct.92 to play an unassuming nightclub called Kreuz . . . Ist sie den Liebenden leichter? Ah! take flight, precious certainties! We lose our ability to know for sure that Mobutu contracts prostrate cancer, the Bulls win 72 in a season, the Human Genome Project continues apace, life expectancy soars despite Reseda earthquake 17.Jan.94, we can even debate whether I would still arrive at this idea for a poster! And so I pen my pleading Mrs. Missive to you Johnny Boys aiming to convince you this is a band over whom we must chant devotional incantations, alighting incense and shrines alike, hugging monitors to our breasts in an incensed madcap mayhem of machismo, bent of knee in supplication, petitioning them with prayerful entreaties, humbled and roaring, grateful of consequence! Praised Be Thou, O souled A merican, Mayest Surges of Pride Press Thee, denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen—the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity!
Nebraska, Neuopren, and Souled American
Someone just asked me: yeah, what happened to them, to Souled American; and he spoke this recoiling in horror. “I bought a used CD of theirs for $4.00. And it’s terrible. And they used to be so good!”
What could I say? I haven’t heard them in years.
And for me, they come with such complicated associations.
My story begins near the acclaimed Liver Transplant Unit where, in our organ-rich state, we had grown giddy, taking good news for granted; plasma exchanges, immunosuppressants, chemoembolization, decreased organ rejections . . . heck, why not beat up our innards with toxins if those age-old fears of cirrhosis, hepatomas, lymphocytes, and complete liver failure had now been consigned to the past, easily fixed courtesy of the Med School’s retransplantation successes?
And so into the medicine cabinet we strode, linked to the newest in narcos by Boyce Canton, a Year 3 med student who could obtain anything for us. Neuopren’s sweet release brought the oblivion of the cadaver, skin waxy like apples and all. Ketamine’s teetering awe brought the exuberance of the stupid, an incessant blind flight of wonder. Neither alone would enlighten but blended tenderly to make a “Slammer” (souLed AMERican injection) we became slow giants with quick minds, brains dancing in lumbering benumbed bodies, erratic in our brilliance and paused in our appreciation, open enough to comprehend yet closed enough to (somewhat) communicate. A little entrance, a little exit; a little up, a little down. Our gleeful, mocking thoughts escaped, while messy toxins pooled in those readily replaceable livers of ours.
We did slammers in college in Nebraska and found it a good enough state in which to listen to the radio. Which is the only place where I heard Souled American. To me, in this particular condition, they were our very own potentates of glum, falling through each song in a brave, ageless way I’ve never heard since. They seemed infatuated with reproducing the sorts of rhythms one feels on a boat at night, an uneasy slope, a bit of creaking to and fro, a wooziness, the chill ocean black and vast. It was fantastic music, an hypnotic bummer, a giant of cinema, but exactly not the kind you could ever share with anyone who wasn’t into slammers. It had too much of that ‘been-up-all-night-can’t-get-warm’ feeling. It reminded us: we die so fast; fifty, sixty years. Sometimes eighty years. Sometimes just thirty.
And how like us seemed their unsustainable enterprise, our spirits too crawling like low clouds close to the earth, lacking viability, visibility, speed.
“I want to kiss you and never be there,” croaked somebody in a song I heard recently who wasn’t Souled American, in a song that for me pretty much summed up the hide-and-go-seek of those Souled American college years.
So, what happened.
We gave up slammers when Boyce suffered a sudden “neuronic occurrence,” losing use of the more interesting elements of the lobe anterior to his medulla.
I had my hands full with other stuff. I never went back to Souled American.
Notes While Listening to Notes Campfire
the sky blackens suddenly
the trash flies down the street
the clothes dance wildly on the line
a bicycle falls over
the room darkens
the sky rumbles, clouds flash
leaves are flattened to the branch.
Almost as an afterthought
it begins to downpour.
Ten years ago I worked at a record pressing plant in Firebaugh, California (small town, outside Fresno). Some of what we manufactured came by way of San Francisco. Souled American’s Fe—I remember when we received the master plates for that from Rough Trade.
Most of the time we pressed sets of Dick Clark and Casey Kasem doing their top forty shows. We performed this chore almost all week long, every week, over and over. These men had recorded their supposedly spontaneous Sunday radio broadcasts far in advance, perhaps months before. These were the shows that told America’s kids what to buy.
Records were stamped out by an automated press. Black vinyl goop squirted in, finished LPs shot out the side. When we were making Fe, the press expressed some weird maladjustment. Excess goop kept clogging the innards. This actually happened a lot, it wasn’t anything special. You’d open up the press to scrape it clean and it was like performing surgery on an extraterrestrial, this dark cavity globbed-up everywhere with melted rubber, like strolling into a machine that makes licorice-flavored taffy. Sometimes I considered this, how the press after all did make candy for the airwaves.
But mostly I was far too busy working.
The Casey Kasem and Dick Clark operations were very involved packages. These were three-hour radio shows mailed out in four-record sets. We’d sleeve the records, stack the sleeves in these standard jackets, then ship each boxed set priority UPs to one of five hundred radio stations. A lot of things relied on our dependability. Across the country they’d put the needle to these same four LPs at the same time each week. Do they do this still? Doubtful. They use satellites to syndicate things instantaneously nowadays. And now there’s CDs, after all. What I’m describing hearkens back to the dying age of vinyl, when a couple smooth-voiced DJs narrated the contest between the best-selling 45s like some dramatic horserace between recording celebrities.
There was this once when I put some Rough Trade records in a Casey Kasem sleeve, in the American Top Forty jacket, in the box addressed to KVEN in Ventura. Souled American’s Fe was one of those I included. I had fun imagining how this would recalibrate the taste of America’s teenagers, how, come Sunday, they’d get a sampling of that tongue-tied and soft-spoken sound of Souled American, full of radiant shadows that defy explanation, like their first glimpse of the girl they will always wish they’d married.
But then I chickened out and put the right records in their proper sleeves. This was my job, after all, and I needed the money.
Interview, Part Two
A: Somebody in San Francisco was talking recently about raising money through a bunch of benefit shows to get Souled American to come out and play in the Bay Area, because there were so many people there who loved them. But no, Souled American weren’t a laugh-and-share-the-joke kind of thing. I got the feeling they were a very insular group. Whenever I talked to people in Chicago at the time who had links to the music scene, they rarely knew anything about Souled American. There was a specific group of people I think that was very attached to the band and that was it. The band would play regularly at this one place, the Cubby Bear, just down the street from Wrigley Field. I got the sense they were very much apart from other things that were going on. A scene—a microscene, maybe—unto themselves.
Q: So this wasn’t a terribly forthcoming band?
A: No. Stoned, I would say, is the word. They were sorta stubborn and sorta stoners. Basically pretty nice, rather shy people, I think.
Q: Did you see enough of their shows to get a sense of how they differed, show to show?
A: Well, they certainly had different modes. I suspect that it had a lot to do with how much pot they’d been able to smoke before they went onstage. I’m serious. The draggy tempos and such, I think that has a lot to do with that. Sometimes they were incredibly stretched out and yet still . . . perfect, you know? Their timing was still perfect; it was just incredibly draggy.
Q: They were always listening to one another.
A: Right. And then at other times it could be quite uptempo. What makes them unusual is, I think, is . . . it’s funny, there are loads of examples of reggae bands doing covers of country songs, but only Souled American went the other way around. If I remember right, Chris and Joey had been in a reggae covers band (it could have been more than that, it could have been all of them). And once when Souled American played a show in New York which I guess was really . . . it was before the deal was signed, a showcase gig, and I think they played two and a half sets, or two sets with a really long encore. They moved on to playing covers at a certain point and I remember they did a really great chug-along uptempo version of a Bob Marley song—not a classic Bob Marley song, more a pop Bob Marley song. “Could You Be Loved,” I think.
Flubbing It
The 1987-1988 sessions at Chicago Trax yielded Fe, the debut album. Fe was named from band jargon, “fe” being their name for “feel.” It was picked up by Rough Trade U.S., and received rather widespread praise. A legion of fans sprouted up around the country. Unfortunately, as they returned to Chicago Trax in 1989 to record their sophomore work, Souled American had no way of knowing that they would never be this popular again.
Why did it turn out so? It’s high time we floated a few theories. They obviously didn’t “play the game” as regards their look or their set lists or whatever. Their sound, for example, prominently featured rather unusual choices. The drums were never again as loud and voluble as they were on Fe (midway through their discography the drummer departed, and was never replaced), and without drums people won’t tap toes, dance, or (for the most part) hear your songs on the radio; the lyrics grew less frequent as the band experimented with sonic uncertainties and distended tempos, riddling their hallucinatory aural space with echo, amnesia, and regret (an aesthetic not terribly distinguishable from that practiced—to opposite effect—by today’s most popular techno and electronic acts); they never wrote a “big hit” and for a time, in fact, shied away from even performing their own compositions; in short, though with each subsequent outing their brilliance and bravery remained audibly intact, they truthfully never made another record as direct as their first. After the first album, their access points closed up, sealed over with mystery and gunk, a submarine lost at sea. Their sporadic touring slowed to a halt; no one in America recalls seeing them since 1991. Their record company went bankrupt immediately after the release of their poorly distributed third album; their fourth album eventually came out only through the British arm of the label; their fifth and sixth albums were released solely in Europe.
But one must return to the basics: at the height of their notoriety, as they finished up the tracks for their second album, they had a choice to make, they had to decide what to call it, and they went with the name Flubber. It should have been obvious how this would turn out. The name—perhaps they knew this, perhaps they didn’t—was that of a failed toy from the early ’60s.
As the magazine Stay Free just recently reported, Hasbro had developed a product called Flubber, a rubber and mineral oil substance that could bounce like a ball and take imprints, to tie in with the 1963 Walt Disney movie Son of Flubber. After it had been on the market for several months, the company began receiving reports that Flubber was causing a rash. Tests on prisoners subsequently revealed the product could irritate hair follicles. A mass recall of the Flubber product was instituted. “Thousands and thousands of balls were consigned to the city dump. The next day Hasbro execs received a call from the mayor of Providence, who informed them that a black cloud hovered over the dump; the rubber would not burn properly. Merrill Hassenfeld of Hasbro called the Coast Guard for permission to weight the Flubber and dump it at sea. Permission was granted. However, the next day the Coast Guard called to complain that Flubber was floating all over Narragansett Bay. After paying the Coast Guard to sweep the ocean, Hassenfeld took the mess and buried it in his backyard.”
Could this have not been an omen? What a Flubber-like path they came to travel—Souled American, bouncing like a ball, gathering up impressions, a briefly celebrated toy—“product presently unavailable”—persistent, determined . . . but essentially ending up buried in some backyard somewhere.
Il Duce Wore Adidas
Sometimes it seems they are daring to make the worst possible play on words—so many clumsily punning lyrics are layered in with the earnest sentiments as to be a defiant policy of avoidance on its own—consider their very name, you envision them deciding to title themselves after the slogan “Buy American”; throwing that out in a few seconds for its complete opposite, “Sell American”; smoking dope and pasttensing that name soon enough into “Sold American” which they misspell, as a joke, at their first gig, to become “Souled American”; the name is terrible, awkward, unfunny. It’s as if they were invented by us, twelve writers with nothing better to do than make up an obscure group with a stupid name and put up posters celebrating them. Why believe they exist when their first four releases are available nowhere and their subsequent two available in one store in America (415-647-2272)? “Sold American will not be Sold in America”—could this have been the aim all along?
Considering their homophonous loves, it becomes relevant to consider how they came by their individual names. Take the bassist, Joe Adducci. It has been well-documented that the khakis campaign (Castro wore khakis, Khruschev wore khakis) left its mark upon the sarcastic psyche of Southern Europe, but few are aware how—in response—graffiti arose facetiously declaring Mussolini’s endorsement of athletic shoes. “Il Duce Wore Adidas” announced every wall Souled American saw during their first perambulation about the continent. The drummer read the graffiti aloud to the band, snickering, whereupon this rapid fire exchange occurred: “Il didas,” the guitarist freely associated. “Il didas,” the bassist quickly added, “Joe Adducci.” Swiftly, the singer concluded it: “Joe Adducci for Elitists.” From this series of cockamamie sound-alikes evolved the bassist’s “name”—Joe Adducci.
Then there was the Brit yelling at them, “Christ, Bugger Off!” which, after a fashion, led to the singer’s “name” Chris Grigoroff; there was their jargon for the bassist’s style (“like a Scottish Tuba”) which led to the guitarist’s “name” Scott Tuma; and there was the band’s affection on tour for calling out “J’ me in the barnyard!” (as in, pass me a marijuana cigarette, a “joint,” to allow me to endure these crude lodgings) which became, after a few slurrings and stretchings, the “name” for their drummer, Jamey Barnard.
To the Tune of “Who Killed Davey Moore?”
Who killed Souled American
Why, who’d do such a thing?!
Not I, said the music critic, ignoring their CDs again
I had my hands full
serving the smart-aleck patrol
sarcastic! ironic! unfeeling and dull!
policing what’s hip, deciding what’s cool
paid to promote some pretty young sell-out
a “proto-anarcho femme fatale” no doubt
justifying those I hated last week
first I can’t stand the kitchen, now I cheer for the heat
in commentaries oh so wry
it wasn’t me that made them die
Blame distributors, blame managers
industry apparatchiks
recording engineers
Blame the band’s oh so stubborn desire to hide
it’s obvious this was suicide
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.
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 disbelieved 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.”
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.
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.
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!
Fans Wanted:
Chicago-area bnd with six releasd rcrdngs sks a following; infls W Nelson, B Eno, B Marley, Ltl Feat. Cpls OK. Serious inquiry only. No rcists, sxists. You: OTK/d, discreet, finan. secure, generous with papers, spiteful over posited drugging/abducting disappearance/replacement of the great middle-era Neil Young (“Ambulance Blues,” “Revolution Blues,” “Vampire Blues”), must be fond of genetic-transmogrification daydreams in which John Prine is molecularly crossed with John Fahey with Peter Tosh with Pere Ubu with the Grand Ole Opry. Saw you watching Merle Haggard, you carried well-worn copy of East of the River Nile. Wed. night mid-April. Your friends call you Philosopher King Poet. I stand there and watch. I want to say hi but . . . I’d still like to say hi. Hope I hear from you! Write Radio City Station.
