American Music Club

I suspect a very deep restlessness in the young Mark Eitzel. An underground unease that erupted without half measures shortly before 1988, when, before recording “California”, the third album by “his” American Music Club, he moved to one of the seediest areas of San Francisco, populated by drunks, addicts and solitary figures. A place absolutely in tune with what was stirring in the heart of the singer/guitarist from Walnut Creek, half an hour's drive from Oakland.

In those same days Mark began listening to a lot of “depressed” songwriting, focusing above all on the work of Nick Drake, an artist who would go on to haunt him for a long time. A slow, unrelenting descent that he hoped, one day, to convert into redemption. But this twenty-eight-year-old Eitzel is a tightrope walker grappling with his torments and his loneliness. He walks distracted and disillusioned along a rope suspended over the abyss. To his right, the ocean foaming with illusion; to his left, the mountains that seal off the “promised land” of the American Dream in a limbo of the fiercest existential cartilage. A shadowy land, flooded with blinding suns and plastic beauty only on postcards…

Mark Eitzel is essentially a poet, one of the greatest in American rock. His lyrics form a travel diary loaded with symbols and revelations, with desperate alter-egos who never bury their heads beneath the ruins of their own lives, always searching for the word that might turn “monsters” into house pets. Tending to pain, preserving it like something precious, because purity's root lies only within it. Thus, the whole of “California” is a place of the soul forever torn between the radical senselessness of the moment and the shimmering mystery of nostalgia. In between, the wonder that locks a man into the most hidden corner of his soul. Having moved beyond—though not forgotten—the folk-rock of their first two records (“Restless Stranger” and “Engine”), American Music Club (rounded out by Tom Mallon on drums, Dan Pearson on bass and Vudi on guitar) thus create a sound that blends country roots, psychedelic touches, slowcore nightmares, dark “pop” introspection and even the odd punk-blues surge.

“I remember it rained a lot, it was always dark… because we always recorded at night, since we worked during the day. We often drove the Interstate Freeway 5 to get to Los Angeles, where we'd play clubs that weren't always very full. We drank a lot of alcohol, to get the courage to go on stage. I remember the chaos… Once Mark lost his voice and that caused no end of problems. We travelled around in a van. Sometimes we'd wake up at four in the morning and realize Mark was driving through landscapes as dark green as an oak leaf in June. After the shows, backstage felt like a get-together with friends full of problems. But it was all very exciting”

(Daniel Jons Pearson, via email, February 7, 2012)

Deeply private rooms, those of “California”. Unmade beds, fogged-up windows on which someone has traced words in an attempt to resist the flood of time, women who didn't wait for dawn to say goodbye, leaving beside you nothing but their exhausted silhouette, strangers listening to your tipsy chatter, girls with disconsolate faces, oblique and shadowy landscapes, glimpses of crumpled joy, memories like infected wounds, and streets where the sky has completely lost its way. And amid all this, the anti-hero from Walnut Creek, a shy young man who found in music some glimmer of light, a jutting rock to keep from sinking. A jutting rock that probably materialized suddenly in the form of five chords, the very same ones that, at the start of his greatest record, would one day slip straight into the radiant country-pop prairies of “Firefly”. But these were prairies concealing hell on earth.

Dedicated to his mother, who died of cancer, “Firefly” is quintessential Mark Eitzel circa 1988. Words that corrode the heart, while the banjo chuckles slyly and the steel guitar (Bruce Kaphan) slices clean across the horizon, carving out of the sky a nest for the man but not for the poet, still searching for the word that can turn despair into a trickle of rebellion, thus truly managing to “take life by the throat”, to borrow Robert Frost's phrase. The mother who is no more thus becomes a “beautiful girl” to sit with on the front lawn and watch the fireflies as the sun sets behind the hills. But fireflies don't live long, so laughing at them is a little like exorcising the immeasurable tragedy of death: “C'mon beautiful we'll go sit on the front lawn/ We'll watch the fireflies as the sun goes down/ They don't live too long, just a flash and then they're gone/ We'll laugh at them and watch the sun go down”. Laughing at them, then, in order to ask, with a son's tenderness: “Tell me why you don't sleep anymore/ Tell me what you sit up all night waiting for”. And despite everything, she's still so beautiful, she who, when she prays, begins every prayer as if it were a kiss (“Finish the prayer that started as a kiss”), while Mark looks at her and knows that at most she can give him all her good luck (“I'll give you all of my good luck”). Terrifying, as only Beauty can be, because it's balanced between joy and despair, between the possibility of meaning and the inevitable collapse of all meaning. And there's a moment, something like twenty short seconds (between 1'12” and 1'30”), where the steel guitar truly shatters every possible resistance, spreading its firefly-sparks across a desert-abyss… Small, huge shades of feeling. A sudden stab. An epiphany of darkness that already carries within it the essence of any grief.

More aggressive, “Somewhere” is a spiral of electricity that finds in alcohol a way to escape boredom, a way to get out and go somewhere, wherever people are “alive”. The contrast with the previous track is quite stark, with absolutely thrilling guitar passages, like the one between 1:30 and 2:08, where the syncopated distortion and the lyrics (“C'mon let's go out and really drunk tonight/ You can be miss bottomless pit of 1983/ And I can be mr. out like a light/ C'mon we got a lot to lose/ So maybe we can lose it all tonight”), propped up by a pounding rhythm section, frame one of the most liberating and visionary moments of the whole record.

Here the theme of nostalgia is captured from a different angle, that of “distance”, the very essence of such an ambiguous feeling, capable of cradling the soul while at the same time exposing it to a tormented spatio-temporal vertigo. “Somewhere”: a hypothetical non-place containing all our possible escape routes toward a mythical past that continually preserves and reshapes our life. From this non-place, from this harrowing oasis precisely because it's unreachable, unravel the even more “all-consuming” and desolate, mute and unconscious wounds of “Laughingstock”, a chilling (if the word has ever made sense…) short-circuit of the heart questioning itself about the root of unhappiness. “Laughingstock proves that the world is made of rock/ That some grow happily on, but that's hard for some/ You and your friend and all the rest of God's sweet children/ Never weak, always strong/ That's hard for some”: it's all whispered in half-light, head in hands, Vudi picking away like a discreet, understanding friend, Tom distracted and pensive on drums, almost as if his eyes were fixed on a train dragging itself into a smoky horizon. Like when, in a silent dusk, standing before a door besieged by leaves that autumn has annihilated, one wonders where all the time that once simply brushed our face has gone… The whole flesh-and-blood man, all of Mark Eitzel, is in this song. Don't ask him why the unhappiness, because not everything is clear, it can't be… even if there are no clouds visible in the sky (“Isn't everything clear/ No clouds in the sky”). The music stops, fingers snap to keep contact intact with the instant trying to slip away from us.

Silenzio-spleen. “That’s hard for some”…

Loneliness is a conditioned reflex of unhappiness. And yet, this loneliness doesn't necessarily lead to bleak, defeatist introversion. It can, in fact, generate moments of absolute emotional rapture, and it can do so because it's precisely in this constant alternation of flashes of light and darkness that the sublime lyrical intensity of “California” resides. Here, then, is the wonderful “Lonely”, a joyous whirl, with the instruments surprisingly airy and a voice dancing fearlessly with its most merciless ghosts. The lines follow one another vivid and warm, resignation transformed into lyrical drive that dilutes the darkness into a thousand indeterminate glimmers: “If I have to be this lonely/ I may as well be alone”… and so, may as well go back to one's room and wait, falling onto the bed the way snow falls, but without a sound: “So I go back to my room/ To my room by the freeway/ I fall onto my bed like snow…”. But Mark is a tangle of contradictions, and precisely because of that, alive. In “Pale Skinny Girl”, he turns the “wasteland” of a “pale, skinny girl” (who will never manage to see the light, nor even feels the need to) into his own very private torture. From the most inaccessible distances, the first seconds arrive shy and enveloping: “Pale and skinny girl lives in the middle of a mountain/ Long golden hair, someone pull her out”. A slow, austere build, like a vertical ascent toward the stars, up to the electric apotheosis that arrives like a blinding flash, an apotheosis of stardust that undoes the night, handing it back, as compensation, to the hearts of the desperate.

A true psychoanalytic session set to music, “California” oozes melancholy from every pore, almost submerged, almost crushed by its own weight. Even that undertow of crystalline introspection that is “Blue And Grey Shirt” turns, thus, into an intensely painful confession (“I'm just a shy boy sitting in a house”), the bittersweet staging of a man tired of reflecting the sorrow of “tired” things (“I'm tired of being a spokesman/ For every tired thing”).

Marking a moment of detachment from so much affliction, the B-side of the vinyl opens with an unexpected punk-blues jolt, “Bad Liquor”, wild and drunk, awash with revved-up harmonicas and a megaphoned voice, almost an unrepentant act of revenge against the ugliness of the world, a levee that, however, doesn't heal the pain, only amplifies it, echoing it further through the remaining tracks. There's life, in any case, not just the desire to finish yet another drink. So sings Mark at the start of “Now That You're Defeated”: “Well, I thought there was more life than finishing a drink”.

Then comes the bleakest anguish of “Jenny”, a sketch of icy depression worthy of Nick Drake's worst nightmares. Guitar, voice, a most fragile murmur of accordion (Vudi), and pitch darkness beyond which the pink moon has gone out.

The loneliness of a shy girl at a party, the umpteenth stupid party.

The urge to go home. Mark asking her to stay, because home is an “unheard sob”, a non-place lost in a crowd of shadows.

And yet, for a man who pleads “not to go away”, the time has come to “take a new name” and a “new face”, because he doesn't belong to “this place”. Thus, “Western Sky” entirely overturns the leaden implosion of the previous track, opening out beyond the horizon of the moment, because the world as perceived in the moment, the world that gives off no light of its own, is merely a shadow of what has been: “The world's a shadow of what went before/ The world gives off none of its own light”. In the distance, the essence of memory is preserved, in the distance still to be covered, landscapes still to be discovered and handed back to words. Then, clouds charged with electricity: the sky roars like the sea before a storm. The guitars carve through the horizon with metaphysical flashes: “To the left, a beautiful California landscape/ Dead ends in the sky/ And to the right, beautiful mountains rise/ High and dry”. And the landscape seems to liquefy, and with it, the gaze itself. But it's a landscape to be fought against, one against which yet another “futile expression of bitterness” crashes, yet another “crushing sense of uselessness”, all of it whispered with a muted unease, submerged by the inevitable closing in (“Highway 5”).

“California” is a record you will never fully unravel, because first you'd have to unravel yourself, first you'd have to truly reach your own “last harbor” and not merely evoke it from afar, like a faded photograph. After all, not even Mark Eitzel managed to come to terms with himself, lost as he was in these searing, vital contradictions.

“Last Harbor” (once again the ghost of “pink moon“, once again solitude, this time even more annihilating, since it's lived out on the streets of “his” San Francisco, on Christmas Day, in the rain…) is not, then, his true “last harbor”, but just another black hole, another piece of a journey he now claims to have left behind — but only because to recall is also to “renew”.

If you ask him, he'll tell you he has nothing to say about “California”. More or less, his answer will be: “Hey – Sorry – I have nothing to say about this album – Thanks for asking!”.

Go ahead and ask too, but not him. Ask this masterpiece instead… and go back to looking at the world while whispering a farewell.

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26/05/2012