Okkervil River may very well be the best band in America right now. They put out a fantastic new record every couple years, have produced at least half a dozen songs that any band in the world would sell their right arms to have created, consistently write some of the most fascinating and complex lyrics out there, and (as I wrote yesterday) they also put on a killer show.
Up until last night, I had two concerts that really stood out in my mind as my favorites (They Might be Giants at Bumbershoot long, long ago and Carissa’s Weird on Valentine’s Day 2002). The Okkervil River show on Tuesday night at the Middle East now has to go on the list. First of all, there’s great story about getting a free ticket mentioned yesterday. Second, the place was jam-packed and full of people who all seemed to be pretty huge fans. And third, the electricity of the crowd created a pretty amazing positive feedback with the band, who were about as amped up for the show as any band I’ve ever seen.
I wish I still had my camera because I could almost tell the whole story of the night with a series of pictures of Will Sheff. One – he comes out with a goofy smile, looking almost shy, in a nice white shirt and tie. Two – the sweat builds on his face and in a particularly explosive peak of a song, he loosens the tie. Three – the tie comes off, his hair is drenched, he leans over his guitar, comes back up and lets loose a piercing “I’d call, some black midnight, fuck up his new life where they don’t know what he did.” Four – deep in the middle of a cataclysmic rendition of “So Come Back, I’m Waiting” he stares out with the eyes of a madman. Five – out for an encore, dripping from the heat and the emotion, down to a t-shirt, looking like a man who has seen the light after years in the darkness.
In short, it was an amazing experience, and one I am truly glad to have been a part of. I’m also glad I waited until after seeing these shows to finally write about The Stage Names. I liked the record from the first listen, but couldn’t help but be a little disappointed when it didn’t shake my soul like Black Sheep Boy and Down the River of Golden Dreams did. But these songs a few months to delve their way into my subconscious, and seeing them performed live has given me a new appreciation.
In particular, the absolutely gorgeous “A Girl in Port” – which I wouldn’t have picked as one of my favorites from this album, much less from their whole catalogue – may very well have been my favorite song of the night. Hearing it in that moment brought this song – a portrait of difficult sex and complicated love shared by a sailor and the women in various ports – into perfect clarity. I could almost see these women, their confusion and troubles, and feel their pain.
This also helped me to understand a basic truth about this record. While Black Sheep Boy was a self-contained story, full of barely-contained rage and almost smothering pathologies, this is about letting loose and a sense of release. The unifying element of The Stage Names is less style, tone, or emotional resonance, but is far more about attitude.
Black Sheep Boy was a novel, a descent into madness, deliberately melodramatic and full of characters who stretched the limits of reason. The Stage Names, however, is much more a book of short stories, radically different in tone but all moving toward the same premise. Indeed, the apparent ease with which they roll out songs that shift from rambunctious to elegant without a hitch is simply unparalleled.
In a number of interviews, Sheff has commented that he wanted to convey a sense of arrogance, but my ear can’t pick it up. Perhaps what he intended as the arrogance of a rockstar was obscured by the fact that this truly is a band that stands miles above its peers.
Instead of arrogance, what I pick up is the sense of distance embedded in even our most intimate relations. “Plus Ones” makes this clear using the trick of referencing a host of classic number-themed songs and wondering what happened to the one beyond (“No one wants to hear about your 97th tear”). In the hands of another band, this might have quickly gone from cute to cheesy, but Sheff holds it together beautifully by turning it into a metaphor about those who are left behind – the real people who lie beyond the grandiose sentiments of most songs.
It should be no surprise, then, that the record opens with the enigmatically titled “Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe.” In listening, we can’t help but notice how right they are: life really does make a terrible movie. Plots are not well-crafted, mysteries are often never resolved, relationships are endlessly complex, and any attempt to cram them into a short explanation will strip them of any real meaning.
And yet…movies exist for a reason. Life isn’t a movie, but maybe…
And so I can’t help but feel that there is something real about the imagined reality of a movie, a book, a song. Precisely because it is invented, it is free to represent underlying themes that we rarely take the time to see in our everyday lives.
And that is what became so clear to me at the show. The reason why Okkervil River strike me so deeply is their almost unbearable empathy. For a band whose (arguably) two best songs both delve deeply into the soul of a murderer, this should not be surprising. But almost paradoxically, it’s often easier to write a song that searches deep into the soul of someone radically different. It’s far more difficult to perform the same task for those we consider normal.
They hide their point within some of the finest rock and roll they’ve yet produced (from the explosive finale of “Unless It’s Kicks” to the fifties almost doo-wop beat of “A Hand to Take Hold of the Scene” to the “hoo-hoo”s of “Our Live is Not a Movie or Maybe”) but it is there nonetheless, ready for consumption as you dig deeper and deeper. In the hallmark of a classic record, there is just as much there ready to be discovered the 20th time through as there was at first.
This all comes together in the closing track: “John Allyn Smith Sails” – a brilliant and powerful unification of every strand in the first eight songs. The song is a paean to the last seconds of the life of poet John Berryman (whose given name was John Allyn Smith). We are given to imagine his thoughts as he jumped off a bridge, was it a moment of perfect understanding, a great mistake, an unfortunate necessity? We cannot know for sure, and this itself is the song’s great triumph. To some questions there can be no clear resolution, no answer.
The point is not to learn the true meaning of life, or to find a satisfactory explanation for existence. It is not even about the comparatively simpler cathartic goal coming to terms with the irresolvable fact of suffering. We learn what we can, we recognize that all understanding is fractured and imperfect, and we embrace our capacity for empathy. And beyond that lies true madness – or perhaps true salvation.
As we contemplate this, a new guitar chord emerges, one that is etched deep into my memory. For me, “Sloop John B” will always be a Kingston Trio song. That it was later re-imagined by the Beach Boys and given new purpose on one of the most famous albums in rock history only makes it more firmly entrenched in the American cultural landscape.
And so, nothing could feel more right but to hear that chord as the songs bleed together with Berryman’s final thoughts:
Well, I hear my father fall
And I hear my mother call
And I hear the others all whisper, “Come home”
I’m sorry to go
I loved you all so
But this is the worst trip I’ve ever been on
What other band could be so self-assured to close their record with a rousing chorus of Sloop John B, the boat trip reinvented as a tortured life and dream of suicide?
None, and that is what makes this band so special. In the end, The Stage Names is probably not (quite) as good as their last couple records, but it would be silly to have expected to it be. And if it can’t be better, it is its own unique creation, and a significant contribution to our musical world.
If you don’t already own it, you should. And if you get a chance to see them live, make the effort. You won’t be disappointed.
Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe – live from the Bowery Ballroom, October 14, 2006
A Girl in Port
John Allyn Smith Sails
And, an older track that I talked about in one of my first posts, and which still gives me shivers every time I hear it