Rating:
Genre:
Rock
Release Date: 09/11/2007
Looking for the heart in the center of any
Joe Henry recording since 2001's
Scar is a labyrinthine exercise that ultimately leads to befuddlement, bemusement, and sometimes, outright frustration. Perhaps that is because it's on display at every moment. So big, so bruised, and papered with tattered words, phrases, and sad but true jokes that echo from a thousand haunted fire escapes and empty rooms where the walls are two-toned from furniture being moved out of them. It doesn't remotely resemble that red pillowed thing most musical romantics would consider when seeking something uniform and readily on display in a small, shiny, or even shattered case.
Civilians has as many stories attached as any record
Henry's written, but they're so finely crafted now that the singer almost disappears in their flickering appearances on the wall of the mind of the listener. It could be anyone in them, but you know them; that's what you do know. You have no real idea who the songwriter is, which means he's done his job perfectly. The first clues are on the cover and the inside sleeve, but that comes in a minute.
First there's the practical stuff: the band on this date is essentially the same one that
Henry and
Loudon Wainwright used on
Wainwright's
Strange Weirdos album (that
Henry collaborated on and acted and co-produced) that ended up, in its own skewed way, becoming the best
soundtrack of 2007 for the film
Knocked Up. The recruited are
Bill Frisell,
Patrick Warren,
David Piltch,
Greg Leisz and
Jay Bellerose (other than
Warren, the rest were a quartet who toured in support of
Frisell's
Good Dog, Happy Man album).
Wainwright is here on backing vocals, and there are guests including
Van Dyke Parks and
Chris Hickey.
The Section, a string quartet, appears on
"Our Song." On the surface, this record is the other side of 2003's wonderfully surreal
Tiny Voices, and a world away from 2001's hunted
Scar where
Ornette Coleman made his presence felt, known, and in his way informed with his spirit all the songs on the album, though he only really appeared on one. The fragmented, cibachrome soundscapes on
Tiny Voices have been replaced by a band playing it (mostly) straight. They lay down
Henry's tunes with the kind of subtlety, an underlying net that is required when walking this far out on the observational ledge, but since these are in the first person that's a sleight of hand dodge. The horns and other aspects of the
Tiny Voices and
Scar mosaics are completely absent, put in a closet for now in favor of something more seemingly organic. That said, those longing for a return to the more "rootsy" sounds of far earlier
Henry records aren't getting that either. What this band plays can't be called
rock or
jazz or
folk or
pop or anything at all that falls inside the lines; it's music. And that's quite a thing. The mostly relaxed, snaky noise this group does make, accessible as it is, is every bit as lush and warm as its predecessors only in reverse. It's every bit the warm yet torn coat one needs to wear while standing alone in a cold wind without the sunshine for reassurance.
And then there are the songs. They have many wise-acre wisdoms to impart, direct experiences from the front of walking the streets and alleys in the neighborhood that we all live in these days, known as Tension Heights. There is a repeat performance here of sorts,
Henry recorded his own version of
"You Can't Fail Me Now," the finest moment from
Wainwright's
Strange Weirdos. The difference is subtle but there:
Henry's version feels more like a declaration; not of fear exactly, but hoping for an escape from the feeling, whereas
Wainwright's was one of romantic surrender and desperate acceptance. Then there's
"Parker's Mood," the most beautiful song on an album full of them. Named for one of
Charles "Yardbird" Parker's most famous tunes (yeah,
Henry's got cojones), it's either the story of a spirit falling out of a body or of leaving its legacy, there are clues here as to the evening of the saxophonist's demise as a result of hard, fast living, but there are also truths that what was left when he died was bigger than he ever imagined. Somehow in the last moment, perhaps we know that; perhaps not. The song is a mystery wrapped in acoustic guitars, standup bass, drums and that spectral Weissenborn guitar of
Leisz's. The military dirge
waltz that commences
"Scare Me to Death," with
Frisell's electric guitar,
Leisz's mandolin and the snare, bass drum, and tambourine offers
Henry just enough to sing a kind of
blues that comes after waking one morning, looking across the kitchen table, and admitting every fault in the face of true intimacy.
Frisell's uncanny ability to underline every line with exactly the right note brings the fear home. One wishes this stage of the game never arrived, but perhaps it was here all along.
"Our Song" follows it. It's one of the greatest political songs written in the last 30 years and it doesn't feel like one. If one recognizes the people and places in the song, with
Bellerose's rim shot snare softly keeping time with swirling, elegiac strings, a simply chorded piano, and that beautiful, big, woody double bass, all singing with one another behind
Henry, who knows that
Willie Mays was the 21st century's
Walt Whitman -- or perhaps
Edwin Denby -- was the embodiment of everything we once believed about this strange place we live in. According to
Henry's protagonist who prophesies on the back side of the mountain: "Though it started badly and it's ending wrong/This was my country/This frightful and this angry land/But it's my right if the worst of it might/Still make me a better man..." The bottom line in these songs is simple: in dark times we still need to believe in something, even if it's in the goodness of our own last breath. God makes numerous appearances here, but mostly as one of the gang who is as guilty as all the rest but has more cards up his sleeve.
Speaking of sleeves, the one on
Civilians is quite something. It is illustrated with photographs by
John Cohen, musicologist, historian, unheralded chronicler of the lost American soul, and banjo picker for the
New Lost City Ramblers. There are two things that are very telling: the first is on the back cover: it's one of the artist
Red Grooms hustling across Third Avenue in New York with a canvas -- blank on the side we can see -- in a wheelbarrow. Nearly smack dab in the middle of the booklet is another of the artist
Bob Thompson teetering above his peers at
Grooms' Delancey Street Museum (his studio), beholding a blazing light fixture. It most likely occurred at the staging of one of
Grooms' great "happenings" (while
Andy Warhol was still doing shop windows). These gatherings were great theater, and exhibits where art was alive and breathing, not observed. They were participatory events; acknowledgements of America's great tragic and comedic history inside a beat studio.
Grooms loved
vaudeville, the
Keystone Cops, the circus and carnivals, and they all had a place at his studio gatherings. He was also a born Southerner who emigrated to New York.
Henry is a born Southerner, and he has more in common with
Grooms' expansive and welcoming vision of what it was that allowed us to poke fun at ourselves in order to blunt the edge of death and hatred. It's also a look at what is with a sly, well-hidden tear inside the laughter. He owes
Grooms and
Robert Frank and a whole slew of others, and he's acknowledging that here, and in this art; which is the kind we can get inside of and move around in, and try it on like a beautiful old suit from the vintage store. Nostalgia only has the place of being a mirror in both
Henry's -- and
Grooms -- work.
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