No knock against Keb' Mo'- a fine blues roots artist- but if his
Slow Down album pulls down a blues Grammy on Wednesday which by
all reasonable sensibilities belongs to Guy Davis, how many Grammy
voters will ponder the surreal poetry of his cover of Robert
Johnson's 1937 classic "Love In Vain"... "The blue light was my
blues/the red light was my mind"?
On the other hand, the sometimes surrealistic flights of lyric spewed
by Woodstock's eclectically inventive songwriter Paul McMahon, which
can gush like a lava flow guided only by the force of their own
impetus, can also avail themselves to their aut hor's explanations of
logical progression. For example, McMahon, who has instigated the
first local appearance of "the anti-folk hero of Avenue A" (known
loopingly in sub-circles as "Lach") to share his billing at Joshua's
this
(Friday?),
can provide a map to loose-legged tunes like
"Wa-Ma-Chi," which grows its lines like worms coming out of the head
of those trick matches you can get at a novelty shop.
Sung solo, the tune might appear on first take to be a strung-together
construct of rhyming nonsense but McMahon's new sound and strategy,
which employs the buoying influence of harmonized and quite feminine
backing vocals from Julia Nichols and Diane Penz, adds substance and
conviction to a stream-of-consciousness aesthetic as free-falling as a
rain storm.
"I wanted to work with other people; I was feeling lonely up there,"
McMahon deadpans modestly, adding notions of reaching for a younger
audience after 25 years of mostly solo work. "There's also a change
in the way I've been seeing myself in terms of what a
singer-songwriter is in relation to the rest of the world."
McMahon came to music in childhood and, at 20, was singing blues in
the days of Black Power until, without referencing Norman Mailer's
famous '50's essay "The White Negro", he observes "I was persuaded
that it was immoral for a white person to play the blues. I always
had sort of identified myself as black, so I stepped back from that
and gave up music altogether for 7 years to do conceptual art."
With his visual career going well at 27 in 1980, McMahon reached
another pivot which coincided with the cresting of the punk backlash
movement and "Saturn's Return" (which may be an astrological reference
or a forgotten punk band) that must be seen in the context of the
times. Punk was in large part a reaction to a dramatic and
historically underappreciated corporate decision to derail
countercultural music and redesign the FM airwaves. Never much of a
commercial success, the rebellious zest of Punk n onetheless had
far-reaching impact beyond the effect of blase replacements (like
disco, etc.) with which the mega-music movers stuffed the market.
Even with psychic results like making audiences "uptight" considered
as "valid artistic goals" (as Robert Palmer points out in his Rock
& Roll: An Unruly History), the idea of music as an art which
stirs things up lent legitimacy to often inept musical effort,
especially in the eyes of youth. The alternative to "making it" in
"pop" was, in Palmer's words; "Be a n innovator, march to the beat of
your own drum, go against the grain of the times, make your statement,
sit back and starve and hope you become a legend before you die of old
age (or malnutrition). This is the way of 'art.' From a pop point of
view, art means nothing."
This is the core rationale at the myriad stages of McMahon's
career(s). A straight-faced humorist whose series of Woodstock bumper
stickers has given us all a chuckle, joke book author and tv satirist,
inventor of mousekatoys and other gadgets, improm ptu "Rock and Roll
Therapist" turning audience neurosis into instant songs; it's a bit
difficult to know when, if ever, to take him "seriously." The line is
drawn in sand that he continuously dances upon barefoot but, in just
following his song production, there are dead-serious messages to be
found- even if he can't force the twinkle out of them.
He started writing "artsy punk" tunes, releasing singles and a vinyl
lp; "When 99% of the people like one thing, I want the other thing.
I've always been very contrary; it's part of my nature," he explains.
"So, when people were doing loud, industrial, satanic music, I did a
180 and started doing cutesy little songs to make people laugh, in the
vein of Jonathan Richman."
In this period there were incongruous red polka-dots everywhere around
McMahon- all because of his anger at tides and circumstance; "When I
quit making art, all my friends (on the Village art scene) became
overnight stars," he recalls. "I lived with an artist and assisted
her but I hadn't been active and hadn't been showing. Then, in 1985,
I realized that if you just do one thing and keep doing it over and
over, it's absolutely guaranteed to make you successful. So, I
thought I'd just make polka-dot paintings and, sooner or later,
they'd be hugely successful and I'd have my revenge." But this
determination inevitably clashed with an inner nature which recognized
that there can be no stagnation in artistic identity and other forms
of art pushed their way onto his canvas. "I've always done
everything just absolutely wrong for my career but it's been
interesting, if not very profitable," he notes.
Dealing with issues of recovery and becoming "more introspective,"
McMahon spent a few years turning out songs "diametrically opposite"
to his ditties- "songs that make you cry." There was a stretch of
"uncontrolled paranoia," and fear of leaving his abode; family
dynamics, therapy, "polarity massages and becoming aware of my subtle
body and spiritual bliss and healing" which led to his period at the
Wittenberg Center and ordainment as an interfaith minister. His music
became more spiritually oriented, prophetic, Dylansque and
surrealistic; reflecting dreamlike imagery.
Then, surprise, another change in direction. Asked to describe what
he calls what he's writing now, McMahon replies on the beat "Hit
songs...like Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks...only moodier." And, sure
enough, some of the newer stuff, like "You Might Be a Fox," features
popish chords and sensibilities which he's been taking to "The Fort"
with the fresh formation.
Before teaming with Nichols and Penz (who adds a moody violin to his
"Los Derperados" ballad), McMahon started playing duo with Shansi Ruhe
at lower Manhattan spots like the Sidewalk Cafe and edging into the
Anti-folk scene created in the 1980's by Lach, whose Rivington Street
after-hours club, the Fort, (named after Alira Kurosawa's film
The Hidden Fortress) migrated to other locations after being
closed by the police in '89. Artists like Michelle Shocked, Beck,
Richard Lloyd, Ani DiFranco, Brenda Kahn, the Novellas and the late
Jeff Buckley spread their wings at Fort shows. Even Bob Dylan hatted
in for a set.
Most recently it's been "the Fort at the Sidewalk Cafe" and
anti-folk's chief host and guru, Lach, is kicking off a new CD tour
with the Joshua's gig. A national release on Fortified Records,
produced by Richard Barone and featuring such Woodstock-fam iliar
artists as Deni Bonet, the album is named Blang after the first
chord
on its opening track and ranges from flat-out punk to solo acoustic,
as he'll be doing at the gig.
Lach comments that since he's been using a friend's Phoenicia cabin
for getaways, he's wanted to play in nearby Woodstock and bring in a
first-hand sense of anti-folk.
"I started (the anti-folk movement) in the 1980's as a rebellion
against an old West Village folk scene that had gone stale after the
Dylan, Ochs, Paxton days," Lach declared, reminding us of the origins
of punk itself and Paul McMahon's blessedly inh erent contrariety.
"It was sort of a hybrid of the energy of the '70's English punk scene
with the American West Village kind of sound and it came out sounding
'anti-folk.' It's a singer-songwriter punk-folk kind of aesthetic."
Without polka-dots.
-Gary Alexander
Art & The Anti-Folk Impulse