All Revved Up

PART 1 - IT'S ALL RELATIVE, GRASSHOPPER
"All th' smokelike streams
That flow into yr dreams
That big blue open sea..."
— "Holes"

What I'm about to get into is hard to nail down on paper, so bear with me.

Still there? Okay.

Certain music evokes an unquantifiable seventh sense; a something-like-nostalgia, an otherness. Such recordings can be identified by the peculiar pain they inspire, a sort of cosmic yearning for a history the individual may or may not have consciously experienced. It's a sublime malady, this timesickness, a pining for moments lost in the weir of years. What I'm talking about is not, as the poet once suggested, tranquil recollection so much as total recall, often inflamed by inner turmoil.

The most obvious example of such music could be Van's Astral Weeks. Other specimens might include Love's "Alone Again Or"; Bob Dylan's "Series Of Dreams"; Television's Marquee Moon; The Plague Monkeys' "Bloomsday"; The Flaming Lips' Clouds Taste Metallic or sundry works by Mary Margaret O'Hara, Miles Davis, Seán Ó Riada, Frank Sinatra, and Ennio Morricone.

These masterpieces don't so much stall the calendar as send you spinning out of time, through myriad black holes ("Dug by little moles") and into four-dimensional space-time, where past, present and future all co-exist. In this relativist's realm, not only is the future preordained; it's already happening. And comfortingly, death is not the end, because somewhere in the wide blue yonder, the pasts of the departed are still out there.

Okay, pilgrims, I'll grant you, these are some lofty claims to be making for mere unchained melodies, but only if you doubt the transcendental possibilities of music. And, to get to the point of departure, the most recent opus to inspire such high-falutin' ramblings — and not just in this scribbler — is Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs.

But you probably knew that already.

When it was released last autumn, the Rev's fourth album was hailed by most interested parties as a modern classic. Word of mouth was rapid but reliable: these zig-zag wanderers, previously most notable for their connections with Spiritualized, The Chemical Brothers' "Private Psychedelic Reel" and the Flaming Lips, had made the album of the year. End-of-year scribes' polls reinforced what many were feeling: something special had crawled out of the Catskills.

So, against such stiff competition as OK Computer, Wu-Tang Forever and Time Out Of Mind, Deserter's Songs sounds like the album best dressed to herald the end of the century. Certainly, when the flute in the middle-eight of "Endlessly" seems to quote a fragment of "Silent Night", it feels — to paraphrase John Waters — like December all over our lives. Cosmic American music, indeed.

Of course, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. A backlash is inevitable, for no album can withstand too much praise before people's bullshit detectors start switch-tripping. So, in anticipation of the protestations of doubting Thomases ("It can't be that good!"), let's celebrate Deserter's Songs once more, have a drink before the war, so to speak. After all, this is the stuff we were dreaming of while making do with all the bogus hocus pocus.

Except it's not an easy artefact to pick apart, and that's its strength — you can't analyse or diagnose or perform autopsies on the damn thing without ruining it for yourself. All you can do is ineloquently admire Mercury Rev's magical acknowledgment of a great American heritage, from Brian Wilson to George Gershwin to Van Dyke Parks via Tom Verlaine; from "After The Gold Rush" to Music From Big Pink by way of contributions from The Band's Garth Hudson and Levon Helm (the album was recorded in the group's hometown of Kingston, upstate New York, six miles from The Band's legendary hidey-hole in Woodstock).

Or you can marvel at the majesty of the arrangements, the carnival of forgotten sounds, the twinkling array of singing saws, violins, flugelhorns, trombones, chamberlin strings, woodwinds, Wurlitzers, Mellotrons, flutes, clavinets and harpsichords, everything bar the calliope and the kitchen sink.

Or you can just be overawed by the record's panoramic CinemaScope, apparent in the hallucinogenic dissolves of "Goddess On A Highway", the shaky hand-held footage of "Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp" or the violent whip-pan from orchestral motif to holocaustal guitar-squall in "The Funny Bird".

You can do all that and still fail to pin down the record's elusive spell, its leafy evocation of what Greil Marcus identified in his liner notes to Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music as "the old weird America", a space-aged Appalachia relocated from the Kill Devil Hills to the Catskills. The first word you hear sung on the record might be "time", but Deserter's Songs is timeless; the only halfway modern recording it resembles is R.E.M.'s Fables Of The Reconstruction — not in sound but intent — a grainy repainting of ancient Americana, Library of Congress recordings, songs of riverbeds, rushes, astral plains, lost cartographers, dog-eared maps and legends. U.S. traditionalism hasn't sounded as potent since the halcyon days of Paisley Undergrounders like Green On Red and The Dream Syndicate. But for all its otherworldly qualities, Deserter's Songs didn't materialise out of the ether so much as an imaginary past, replete with a mythology all its own.

Last August, this writer spent two weeks sitting on a porch in Amherst, Massachusetts, drinking beer at night, reading Levon Helm's biography This Wheel's On Fire, listening to cacophonous crickets and the first two Band albums, wondering when a contemporary combo might pick up on that Big Pink legacy. Doh! Unbeknownst to your correspondent, Mercury Rev had been mining that seam all summer, a mere two hours' drive away. Is it too fanciful to suggest that portents were drifting north-east on the breeze that early fall?

PART 2 - MOLECULAR STRUCTURE
"You had t' choose, a side to lose, an' divide yourself in two,
Th' way you were, long before, you were a walkin' civil war..."
— "Tonight It Shows"

Don't answer that. Instead, ponder this. Converse to the tradition of great works being forged out of the life-and-deathblood of the artist, Deserter's Songs was born of the healing process that followed a near-fatal cycle of band implosions, onstage fights, heavy drinking, hard drugs and the death of guitarist Grasshopper's beloved uncle. Mercury Rev's past is indeed a fraught and troubled one (singer Jonathan Donahue was once banned from an airline for attempting to gouge Grasshopper's eyes out with a spoon). A measure of this is the amount of friends absent from the group's current world tour, ex-members who remain crucial to the understanding of how the band got this far.

I'm talking about people like David Baker, the out-there ex-lead singer whose insane capering dominated the band's first two albums Yerself Is Steam and Boces, not to mention the live shows, where a five-minute song could be stretched into a half-hour psychodrama. Interestingly, when Baker departed, the band finally metamorphosed into an intoxicating musical unit.

Other absentees include Dave Fridmann, the ex-bassist who still co-produces the band's records (and who once spent their advance for the "Carwash Hair" single on a holiday for his mother in Bermuda, without telling anyone), drummer Jimy Chambers, who quit after the last album, and flautist Suzanne Thorpe, who now devotes herself to Forensic Science. Time in Mercury Rev does that to a body.

So then, the past has been well and truly hashed out. Accordingly, singer Jonathan Donahue is a somewhat wary interviewee at first, mindful that we're here to talk music rather than dig up old animosities. Which suits fine: this writer is far more interested in what comes out of Donahue's amp in 1999 than what went into his body in 1996. Even if the two are related.

As you join us in the Chocolate Bar, upstairs from tonight's venue, Dublin's Red Box, we're talking about the gestation of that fabled latest album. Your reporter has just asked the singer if Deserter's Songs was created in as much of a vacuum as it sounds.

"Yeah I suppose it was," he drawls, looking every inch the weathered American rocker, kohl-eyed under shades, fur coated, and sporting impossibly scuffed boots that could've been passed down from Doc Holliday.

"I think most of the vacuum was ourselves, y'know," he considers. "After the last record (1995's See You On The Other Side) we put our heart and soul into it and fell on some tough times emotionally, and so we just sort of went into exile, and were half-driven there (Kingston), I suppose, by forces within the business. We didn't have a record company when we made it, didn't have lawyers or managers or anything. So we almost made it the same way we had made our first album, just like, 'Well, maybe our friends are gonna like this, or whoever gets to hear it, but so be it.'"

Nature is stronger than training. While the band may have been immune from industry forces during the recording process, they couldn't withstand environmental influences.

"It's where I was born and raised, in the mountains," Jonathan points out, "and so I think it was sort of a security factor for me, with things going so wrong in our personal lives. It was home, it was some sort of safe place where we could just try and reconnect with friends and loved ones and stuff, so I think that probably led to a lot of it having a calmer feel. I think we were just trying to save our own friendships, and through that process we began making music. We just tried to laugh and remember the good times and not dwell on all the catastrophes. So for us it was sort of a discovery of laughter again, it's basically that simple. We never went in thinking that we had got the perfect formula and were gonna make a wonderful top ten record of the year. To be honest, we thought we had the opposite. Not necessarily a clunker in terms of our own musical taste, but I think... it's obvious in some points that this record is different from a lot of what's going on, but it doesn't necessarily make it any better than any of the other records."

"And so, we were quite scared, y'know?" he continues. "Everybody else uses drum loops and trip-hop beats and Moog synthesizers, and here we were using flugelhorns and harps and timpani, and you sort of get a little worried, just like, 'Well, this could really fuckin' get raked over the coals'. But it was an honest record. It's what was in our hearts and so we just put it out there. And we'd been through so much that, had the record been killed by the press, there's nothing they could say anymore that could hurt us any worse than what we'd already been hurt — and hurt each other. So there was nowhere to go but up, emotionally."

Does the band feel any more secure now?

"Well, I think we've regained some of the emotions that we had early on, when you sort of first stepped onstage," the singer muses. "I think there's just an anxiety and anticipation of wanting to play live that hadn't been there for a little bit because things were so strained. It was very difficult for a few years to go onstage and have to watch your back, that you're not gonna get punched in the back of the head by someone."

Across the road in a Camden Street hotel, organ grinders Adam Snyder and Justin Russo, together with drummer Jeff Mercel, are relaxing over coffee and sandwiches, waxing rhapsodical about kissing the Blarney Stone, and trying to make sense from the fragments of the previous night's journey from Cork.

"What was that squealing noise last night?" Jeff wonders.

"That was me beating up Grasshopper," the hawkishly handsome Justin explains.

The legendary Mercury Rev attrition, it would seem, has not entirely subsided. All the same, the most grief The Rev have to handle these days is keeping up with a nerve-shreddingly hectic schedule. This observer hasn't seen a rock band so in demand by the local press since the Smashing Pumpkins blew into town last summer.

And now this once volatile lot look set, for their sins — and like Radiohead and R.E.M. before them — to be crowned as the latest great white alchemists of constant sorrow. Somewhere in Corporatoria, accountants might be rubbing their hands and salivating, but back at the Chocolate Bar, Jonathan remains unbothered by all the acclaim.

"It always comes down to the music," he reasons. "Generally every time we go into the studio, there's a fear that drives us to make music, because I don't know how to do anything else. It's not a matter of looking at your bank account or reading music press, it's just an innate fear I have, a paranoia that drives me. We're just a band that's learning and growing and trying to stay alive. I don't anticipate anything on the outside, it's always the inside stuff, it's the people closest to you that hurt you the most."

Inevitable historic parallels suggest themselves when one considers Mercury Rev's bolting to the Catskills to lick their wounds: 30 years earlier The Band found similar solace in the same region, fleeing from the nightmarish war of nerves that was Bob Dylan's 1966 world tour.

"I grew up three and a half miles from Big Pink," Jonathan explains. "It's what I've always known. So it's not (like) we went in and said, 'Let's make our own version of The Basement Tapes', or something. It's simply (that) it's all around you. Obviously we've always been quite close to The Band in terms of inspiration and trying to carry ourselves in a way that they seemed to achieve, and so, yeah, it's part of the blood. The Band has such an aura about it in that region, even though they're not necessarily always creating new music. It's sorta like a family tree and we're just another branch off of the larger trunk."

So inviting Helm and Hudson over was no more remarkable than jamming with the neighbours?

"Well, that's all they were," he maintains. "That's literally what they were. They lived very close and we got in touch just through mutual friends, because it's a small community up in the mountains and everybody knows everybody. And so we had asked Levon and Garth, y'know, 'Would y'all wanna come down and make some music with us?' And they said they'd love to. I mean, we would've worked with Rick (Danko), but Rick was busy in Japan for a time."

Jonathan looks me in the eye at this point, indicating that we both know about Danko's heroin problems and run-ins with the law in Japan, but we're not gonna get into it right now. I hold my tongue and allow him to continue.

"And so, Levon and Garth came down and we had a lotta laughs," he sums up. "Just wonderful people, very down to earth, there's no rock star trip with any of them, no large ego and red carpet that gets rolled out, it's just, 'Levon Helm, pleased to meet you'. And a lot of the types of music that influenced The Band are the same influences that we had; a lot of old blues, old-timey music, entertainment, burlesque, vaudeville, things like that, and so you just start talkin'."

"And with Garth, y'know Garth is such a... I would say he's probably the only genius I've ever met due to his bizarre train of thought. A lot of people just assume that he's a great organ/piano player, but he really has genius, it's so bizarre to work with him. You just haveta put Garth in front of a microphone, you can't really say, 'Okay, here comes the song, Garth!' He sorta rambles on, he talks to himself, it's like three in the morning before you've even gotten to your song because he's just: (adopts gruff Hudson drawl) 'Let me show you the seven deadly licks!' And so you do that, and then someone'll mention a polka, and he loves polkas, he just freaks on 'em, so it's like a three-hour conversation: 'Let me play ya this polka!' And you're like, 'Okay, we get the idea'. And then it's like, 'I got another polka!' It's just like running through a musical encyclopedia, y'know, you're just laughing. They're just wonderful people, I can't say enough about 'em."

As we've already established, Mercury Rev weren't born out of thin air. It's no accident that they should share genetic links with one of the U.S. underground's other most important bands of the decade, The Flaming Lips (Jonathan and Grasshopper spent two years with the Okie flakies — indeed "Goddess On A Highway" dates back to this period), whose 1995 album Clouds Taste Metallic is one of the few that can match Deserter's Songs for skewed scope, ambition and brilliance. The plot thickens even further, however. Both Grasshopper and Thorpe toured with Spiritualized. Mercury Rev are currently covering Galaxie 500's "Tugboat", a homage to the Velvet Underground's guitarist Sterling Morrison, whose funeral Jonathan attended. The Band, The Flaming Lips, Spiritualized... you see a pattern emerging.

"All those bands you spoke of, I've worked with all of them," Jonathan affirms, "and it's just a great love of music and a... a humility in there that says, 'I'm trying my best to absorb everything, but I don't know everything'. I think all of us make great music in our own little way, we're absorbing things. But in my mind it is a very small community of people I respect and admire for what they do, 'cos I know how hard the struggle is."

Considering the imagistic potency of Deserter's Songs, its fusing of the visions of both Hoppers (Edward's melancholia as lensed by John Ford, Dennis's Easy Rider quest for the Real America put through a Beat blender), it's no surprise that the band began by playing music to video images.

"To nature films," Donahue qualifies. "We weren't capable musicians, and so we would videotape a nature show, and just write music while the platypus was going across the screen trying to get to the water on the other side of the creek or something. I think it was a way to just unconsciously divorce ourselves from the idea that, 'We've gotta come up with the perfect hooky chorus here'. Popular music, even if you go back with Gershwin and Cole Porter, people like that, it doesn't always have to be a chorus that beats you over the head, or just one line said over and over, there's an atmosphere to certain songs. Billie Holiday may never even get to a chorus, she may not even confine it to three and a half perfect minutes, but there's an atmosphere there that is the popular standard."

"Bob Dylan (is) a classic example of popular standards that have just been absorbed into the consciousness, and there's a universal sorta message in there, even if not everybody gets it right. Not everybody knows what ol' Bob was thinkin' of when he wrote 'I Shall Be Released', but there's a common thread of humanity or something within certain songs, and we've always tried to capture that. Sometimes we've failed miserably, and other times I think we've succeeded in ways that even surpassed our own expectations, that timeless quality of a song."

"I know we tried very hard to make a record that almost had the feeling that you've heard it a thousand times before you ever bought it. And it doesn't mean like a retro record, just this warm feeling, like 'I've heard this before'. That's where the music came from — little bits of melodies you remember as a five-year-old when your mother would play you some crazy music and it just stuck with you. I can't really remember the songs, but I can remember the feeling I had, it just comes from some place in the back of the mind."

Against better judgment, the present writer can't resist asking Jonathan if he's heard Einstein's one about "the past, the present and the future"...

"...they all exist at the same time," he nods. "And I think in a way, great music is like that. We've always been on a quest to do that. Like I say, sometimes we've failed in horrible ways, and other times I think we've done a good job."

PART 3 - QUANTUM JUMPS
"Bands, those funny little plans
That never work quite right..."
— "Holes"

So, if albums like Deserter's Songs lend themselves to relativity theories, Mercury Rev's live performances are more akin to quantum mechanics, where time is not predetermined, freewill is restored, the atom knoweth not where it shuddereth next. It's about the Now, the fission of the ever-present tense, where the thrill of improvisation renders memory — that pesky mental faculty which insists on logging the passage of time in a piece of recorded music — redundant. In the quantum scheme of things, the note being played in the moment is the only one that ever existed. And sometimes, Jim, you can change the laws of astrophysics. Or at least, cut 'n' paste 'em as the music demands.

And The Rev live are indeed the genuine particles: wayward, unpredictable and inconsistent as hell. When, after a pre-gig tape that includes selections by Tom Waits and Gram Parsons, the six musicians amble onstage in front of a backdrop of the Catskills (you can take the men out of the mountains, but they insist on bringin' them on the road), and approximate that classic Band configuration, with Donahue stage left à la Robbie, one can't but think of Winterland, 1976. And by the time they blast off into the ragged Zuma-like terrain of "The Funny Bird", the Red Box is packed.

The show is far from faultless, although you're tempted to forgive 'em, because in an age where live performance is so often denigrated to the level of a promotional chore rather than an artform in itself, it's always inspiring to watch bands head off the beaten track and into the ditch, even if they do sustain a few lesions along the way. Ultimately though, whether due to the jammed formality of the venue, or the fact that the sound engineer could've boosted the higher frequencies considerably, the band never really seemed to connect.

That said, they're not afraid to take chances. Such as a bewildering cover of Nick Cave's "Into My Arms". Or a final encore of Neil Young's "Cortez The Killer". Or complete electric overhauls of the album material. Behind me, Stuart Bailie reckons that they're maybe throwing the baby out with the bathwater by playing "Endlessly" and "Tonight It Shows" like an elevated bar band ("They should have a guy up there on the riser, playin' the bowed saw, with a spotlight on him!"), and there's undoubtedly a mid-set sag from "Frittering" on. But there are also a good few moments to savour, such as the hymnal "Opus 40", or "Holes", with its bolero-ish Phil Spector rhythm motif, not to mention a fluent Mick Taylor-style solo courtesy of Grasshopper.

But then, as Jonathan had testified earlier: "If you just want to hear the CD played live, why would you pay ten pounds? If all we do is just regurgitate the album note-for-note, it's doing people a great disservice. That's why they keep returning; because there's something there that might be different from the last show, there's a chance, a risk, you don't know what's going to happen, and as a person who's gone to see some rock shows, that's what I love to see."

Noble sentiments. Perhaps a little further down the road, Mercury Rev can fully deliver on them. For now though, we have Deserter's Songs. And that's more than enough.

Deserter's Songs is out now on V2.