Odds and Ends 008

8/ from his lips (from Silver)

No member of the Wrens is dispensable, and Kevin Whelan is Charles’ Bissell’s dream foil, a McCartney-high bassist with John Lennon’s scream and a boundless, sometimes deliciously bitchy charisma. He’s slowed down and faded a little by The Meadowlands, which most who love it remember for Charles, but in addition to the captivating stratosphere-ascensi​ons of “Happy” and “Hopeless” he also provides the memorable, mournful, bizarrely hopeful breakdown that closes the record (“BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA​BE YA KNOW SOMETHIN’ – SOMETHIN’ RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII​IIIGHT!”), a drunk lark he smilingly recreates in concert performances even if he’s blown out his voice halfway through the show. Far coyer about his own set of personal failures, for all we know Kevin might’ve been even worse off than Charles around the time the Wrens’ completed their impossibly good trilogy of albums, but on the first two he’s the manic Puck, an ebullient little devil cartwheeling through the crannies of Charles’ painstakingly piled details, and his greatest songs gleam with a totally competitive sense of craftsmanship and melody: “Built in Girls”, “Rest Your Head”, “Darlin’ Darlin’”, “Napiers”, “Learned in Space”, “Safe and Comfortable”. Yet just as Paul McCartney’s penchant for whimsy left him prone to levels of failure Lennon always seemed to coolly sail above even when neither figure seemed less than equal, Kevin’s less-focused lyrics can’t help but fail to make an impression comparable to that of Charles’ finest. Take “Happy” and “She Sends Kisses” – as flawlessly, blissfully executed builds to cathartic bursts of glorious noise, they’re neck and neck, but take away the music and you’re left with a passionately-intoned​ sequence of tropes and a dazzlingly poetic yet still wholly plainspoken slice of short-story writing. So while a majority of Wrens songs ford frontiers of excellence few others dare to tread, Charles’ best work rests a higher plane of greater altitude. Still, Kev has his moments of undeniable transcendence, like this suicide in song from the first album, made when Bissell was still working out the kinks of how best to express himself. Essentially an honorary Pixies track, albeit one Black Francis would’ve made good on his threats to have written, the band pummels away at a superhuman set of major chords as Kevin shrieks about God while plummeting from the top of his high-rise workplace, in a vocal that’s one of the most ravenous and remarkable in the entire rock ‘n’ roll realm.

9/ thirteen grand (from The Meadowlands)

The George of the Wrens writers, Greg Whelan’s great fluke sports a sentimental midtempo shuffle for which Charles’ aching “Don’t Be Shy”, buried at the bottom of the great lost Overnight Success cassette, would make a perfectly sufficient substitute. But though the improved clarity and celestial clang of each guitar figure is partial improvement, what vaunts this tune into the top ten is Greg’s decision to sum up the entire scope of the Wrens’ (and everybody’s) inner conflicts with a single immaculate line: “is this real at all?”, intoned with effortlessly mixed senses of fatigue and wonder for four notes floating heavenward.

10/ indie 500 (from Secaucus)

The Wrens were as adept at rocking out as anything else, so this explosion of middle-finger snark isn’t necessarily without canonical compare. But it’s on here for two irrefutable attributes – lyrics that not only address a sense of competition with more generally successful, less aesthetically successful bands (bands far better than Creed, who broke big with the same million-dollar contract the Wrens turned down), and a frantic piano part, played by Kevin, that you’ll never want to stop hearing after the song is over. Plus they sweep all of alternia away with a single perfect pun: “you sound like the Pavement you rode in on.”

There is some sad synergy to finding out on the same day about Jonathan Frid and Levon Helm leaving the planet. What was great about Levon was that he was never larger than life. When people say that Lucinda Williams or Steve Earle or whoever are affecting some peculiar southerness, that only means that they wanna be Levon. And we could talk about Dark Shadows all night. Goth ground zero: I was there. It was made for sex-deprived moms who needed an insta-vampire in their bedroom, but perverse as it is, Dark Shadows shaped a whole bunch of pre-teen weirdos like me.

I only saw the Band play one time, during their post-Robbie reincarnation opening for what would turn out to be the last Grateful Dead shows ever at Soldiers Field in Chicago 1995. The Band were desultory, playing the same set both nights. Jerry Garcia rose from his feeble coffin and became Barnabas Collins for one magic shining moment on Saturday afternoon when he sang “Visions of Johanna”, shaking his fist in the air at unjust gods. Then he ****ing died.

But I did meet Levon one time. When I lived in Nashville during the early 80s, I was making one of my occasional forays down Broadway to explore Ernest Tubb’s Record Shop and the like with one of my few friends who was willing to tag along.  We ducked into a bar in the late afternoon of our adventure, and over in the corner were three guys, Levon and two men I didn’t recognize, the Two Dudes. In retrospect, Levon had run through his major label opportunities to capitalize on the Band’s semi-success, and I have no idea what he was doing there. So boldly, innocently, naively, I walked over and introduced myself.

The Two Dudes ignored me, but Levon said “Where you from?” I told him “Mobile, Alabama” and he said “Well sit on down then.” Commenced a conversation that eludes me: I suspect I froze up, and it’s possible that Levon was playing with me or trying to avoid some topic that the Two Dudes wanted to discuss with him. But we mish-mashed our overlapping experiences (mostly bars we’d visited, I did my best not to fawn over his music) and the thing I want to say the most is that Levon Helms wasn’t some 70s rock icon, then or now. He was just this guy who had been here and there, and he knew how to tell it good. Bless his heart, bless his soul.