Mercury Rev

Never quite a genre in its own right, psychedelia established itself, from its very first beginnings (let's say around the mid-Sixties), as a genuine modus operandi for probing, through the musical medium, the deepest recesses of the human psyche. Since then, its echo has been felt pretty much everywhere, even in places where you'd least expect to find it (just think, for instance, of the most extreme variants of metal!). Following in the footsteps of the glorious pioneers of a sound that, true to its very name, has as its primary goal the “revealing of the psyche”, rock music fans have been able to enjoy, over time, performances by honest craftsmen, stale imitators and, thank goodness, also great, truly great innovators or, at any rate, extraordinary and highly original interpreters of a sensibility that, back in the day, began turning itself into sound.

Here, we'll take a trip to Buffalo in the late Eighties (we're in New York State, one of the most populous in the US), a decade in which the psychedelic revival experienced one of its most creative seasons, starting with that Paisley Underground movement which, especially in the Los Angeles area, wanted to turn back the clock, but with real personality, because, let's not forget, punk had certainly not passed through the minds and hearts of rockers in vain, and so it wasn't a case of mere imitation, but of creative emulation. Buffalo, however, is far, very far from the City of Angels: we're in fact on the opposite coast, the eastern one, more than four thousand kilometres away. Well, at the local university, specifically in the Department of Media Study, since 1976 classes had been taught by none other than Tony Conrad, who, violin in hand, had contributed to the birth of minimalism by playing drone music in LaMonte Young's Theater of Eternal Music (aka Dream Syndicate) (where he shared space, both physical and mental, with a certain John Cale), but who also nurtured a deep passion for experimental cinema, which led him to devise the so-called “flicker films”, essentially “flickering” reels resembling strobe light, not unlike those the Velvet Underground projected, driven by the intuition of Andy Warhol, during their performances as part of the epoch-making Exploding Plastic Inevitable, essentially the first multimedia show in the history of rock.

Conrad's experimental approach to the medium of film (much like that of Paul Sharits, another major name in “structural cinema”, whose motto could be summed up as “form over content”) ended up infecting, right there in the lecture halls of the University at Buffalo, the then barely twenty-something Sean Thomas Mackowiak (Grasshopper to his friends), who quickly decided to put theory into practice, starting to shoot odd short films, for whose soundtracks – being himself a keen electric guitar player – he enlisted the help of his friend, guitarist and course-mate (in avant-garde film techniques, to be precise) Jonathan Donahue. Grasshopper (as we'll call him from now on), after discovering that the two shared the same musical passions (Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, Kinks, Psychedelic Furs), had for some time already been supplying him with other interesting material, in short all that stuff which Conrad, who was theoretically only supposed to talk about media and related subjects, kept singing the praises of during his lectures: John Cage, Edgard Varèse, Erik Satie, Henry Cowell, and so on.

When Grasshopper and Donahue brought singer David Baker and flautist Suzanne Thorpe into their project, things began to take a much more interesting turn, because at that point the four of them weren't just playing to create music to run in sync with Grasshopper's strange films, but above all for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and so the running time of their creations began to stretch out, coming close, as happened during some performances in various Buffalo art galleries, to twenty minutes of what was already, even then, a deafening and thrilling sonic tour de force. "We ended up making more and more noise. One time we commandeered a mobile DJ rig and, playing through it, ended up blowing out the speakers. Basically, we were trying to make as much noise as possible. But we also loved the more delicate stuff. We thought: 'Wouldn't it be great to have the raw, heavy energy of hardcore and, at the same time, try to make someone cry?'"

In the context of what Suzanne Thorpe would call "an experimental orchestra making live soundtracks," the flautist herself amounted to a kind of heresy, because, with such a frail-voiced instrument, where did she think she was going? But Thorpe simply went her own way: "I remember I didn't even question whether I should switch instruments. If I have to play within this particular rock paradigm, I told myself, then I have to work out a way to play it. I had no reference model, and in many ways it was pure improvisation."

There in Buffalo, "the experimental orchestra making live soundtracks" seemed like a genuine UFO, because that Rust Belt city of just over three hundred thousand people, hemmed in between the northern Appalachians and the Great Lakes, and which had once had a thriving heavy industry before being partly depopulated by the crisis brought on by offshoring, Buffalo, in short, carried a deep sense of isolation, which naturally had a strong impact especially on its more sensitive residents, like Grasshopper and co., for whom, to make matters worse, there was also no local scene worthy of the name and no college radio, not to mention the impossibility of picking up, at night, the FM stations that usually played the more interesting music.

Those who would go down in history as Mercury Rev, debuting with the masterpiece "Yerself Is Steam", were in short the result of a layering process of cinematic instincts, extremist tensions (noise as a means of releasing the soul's deepest tensions, as the Red Crayola had taught before them), art-damaged vertigo and unexpected melodic blooms, all translated into a delirious, otherworldly sonic magma in which melody and chaos chase and overtake each other, a reminder that psychedelia is a torch for venturing into the luminous darkness of our inner selves, where nothing is clearly distinct, but everything flows in an endless hall of mirrors.

Meanwhile, Donahue had come into contact with the Flaming Lips, first as a roadie and then as second guitarist. With Wayne Coyne's band he would record 1989's "In A Priest Driven Ambulance", produced by sound engineer Dave Fridmann, whom Donahue himself had put in touch with the Lips and who, perhaps to repay the favor to his friend from Buffalo, offered to record Mercury Rev's music, folding the whole thing into his university thesis project and giving them free use of the recording studio, as long as they showed up when no one else was around.

In the end, most of "Yerself Is Steam" was recorded at a State University of New York studio in Fredonia, between midnight and eight in the morning, which also explains the dreamlike, suspended atmosphere that hangs over the record. It took about three years, though, to finish it all, because, despite Fridmann's generosity, the band couldn't always make it to the studio during that window, and on several occasions had to dig into their own pockets to pay for recording time — only there wasn't much money, so when there was some, they'd rush in for an hour of recording, and when there wasn't, nothing doing.

Fridmann, who was only supposed to handle production, ended up getting drawn into the project as bassist. As for the rest, anarchy often reigned in the studio. Grasshopper remembers it well: "We'd often end up swapping instruments. I'd play drums, Jimy (Chambers, the drummer, ed.) or Suzanne would play bass. (...) We'd adopted Brian Eno's approach, that the studio is itself an instrument to be used in making our songs." What came out of it resembles, in a Joycean sense, a "stream of consciousness," to borrow Donahue's own term — he has always maintained that its power comes above all from Baker's vocal performance, a man with "a timeless voice who doesn't operate in the same space-time continuum you and I do," someone who "isn't a singer, didn't grow up doing vocal exercises and never played in a cover band," whose "otherworldliness" left an indelible mark on "Yerself Is Steam".

The "stream of consciousness" recorded by that first, unstable lineup of Mercury Rev (eventually joined by drummer Jimy Chambers) also owes much to the thoroughly unorthodox method by which Donahue tried to instill in his bandmates a sense of the structure and emotional temperature of tracks that weren't really songs at all, but sonic tapestries, perhaps waking dreams. Composed for the most part around just two chords — E and A — the non-songs of "Yerself Is Steam" were discussed, improvised, rehearsed and recorded on the basis of "big Stockhausen-like diagrams," much as an avant-garde composer might have drawn them up, and thus closely resembling images of rainstorms, or giant, boiling cauldrons. "It was the only way I knew to build the arc of an eleven-minute song."

As if that weren't enough, during the mixing of the record, all six members of the band crowded behind the mixing desk, each one convinced that "his own fader was the right one," so, Donahue continues, "when a guitar solo pops out of the mix or David's voice suddenly becomes audible, it means that, back then, someone took the initiative." In short, "much of the record was actually mixed by default."

Through ups and downs, then, between sonic peaks and plunges into the ineffable, "Yerself Is Steam" (a title born as a poetic mondegreen of the phrase "your self-esteem") made it to port, pressed onto 35mm magnetic film, because that's how Grasshopper wanted it — a lover of experimental cinema, he maintained that doing so made the sound warmer. At Mint Films, the London-based Jungle Records subsidiary that had offered to put the record out after several American labels, including Sst and Homestead, had turned it down, no one objected, and so the album hit record store shelves on May 14, 1991, wrapped in an evocative cover created by Jon Mooneyham, a longtime friend of the Flaming Lips.

The first part of the record, titled "Rocket", opens with "Chasing A Bee" (which could easily hold its own in any hypothetical ranking of the greatest opening tracks ever), a song in which the dual soul of "Yerself Is Steam" emerges forcefully, leaving the listener in a state of mystical dissolution. What starts out as pastoral-toned folk is suddenly torn open by a lysergic surge in which the guitars seem determined at all costs to reach the vault of the sky, while David Baker staggers around his own voice, essentially using his imagery to build a borderland between outer reality and his own interior world, reminding us that his "primitive words" correspond to his "primitive heart" — all while he clings to the tiny leg of a bee, fluttering within the ecstasy of the sun, to remind us that we ourselves are steam ("Remember that yerself is steam"). The poetic charge of this first section of the song is undeniable, and it's reinforced by the accompanying video of the same name, directed by Jim Spring and Jens Jurgensen and shot in a now-abandoned infectious disease hospital on North Brother Island, near New York (it was there that Mary Mallon, known as "Typhoid Mary", was confined in the early twentieth century, said by the accounts of the time to have infected countless people with typhoid fever). What one takes away from listening to "Chasing A Bee" is that man and nature are essentially one and the same thing. The "being steam" of the former corresponds to his spiritual essence, to his belonging to that primal breath that is "physis".

The climactic moment of "Chasing A Bee" arrives just past the three-minute mark, when the guitars flare up into electric fury, dragging their own anguished wonder along behind them — it's exactly like finding yourself chasing "a bee inside a jar," an image that conveys the idea of drifting that is, ultimately, an eternal remaining trapped within oneself. In the splendor of these emotional conflicts, Thorpe's flute, with its delicate four-note descending riff, appears as the only foothold to cling to, the last spark of consciousness besieged by the menacing hordes of the soul's dark night.

A manifesto of their psychedelic art, "Chasing A Bee" is a masterpiece of sonic weaving in which the Apollonian and the Dionysian chase each other relentlessly, colliding and dissolving into one another. In its reliance on the liberating power of noise, the band also shows it has fully absorbed and digested the lessons of masters ranging from the Red Crayola of "Parable Land" to the most extreme My Bloody Valentine (I'm thinking above all of the live version of "You Made Me Realise", devastated by the so-called "Holocaust Section"), passing through the essential Sonic Youth, especially the ones heard on "I Love Her All The Time" or "Expressway To Yr. Skull".

Bombed out lovers, gallant red flocks

Of mellow seducers find eager seekers

Deep deef down, beautiful lines

From above and we’re all a-glow

Raise her head and things get warm

Hold on to it's leg before it flies away

Sunlit walks, I feel no harm

My primitive words match my primitive heart

It's not as easy as it may seem

Remember that yourself is steam

And of course it don’t mind chasing a bee inside a jar

And of course it don’t mind chasing a bee inside a jar

Propelled by a garage-punk riff that sounds like it was recorded in a wind tunnel, "Syringe Mouth" is one of the record's relatively more linear moments, even though its twists and turns are riddled with distortion, feedback and vocal fragments slowed down, layered or altered according to the dictates of the glorious acid-rock tradition, whose echo also resurfaces in the lyrics, where we're evidently still dealing with the aftershocks of a hallucinogenic trip: the bee-man arrives "dripping" and "glistening from the hive", but is "half as tall and twice as bright". He can be seen "burning from both ends" and there are "false colors" in his eyes. His soul is "obscene", but that's no problem because, when his "syringe-shaped mouth is wide open", he ends up going mad, and so it's possible to sink into his mouth.

A delightful love ballad in noise-pop form, on the other hand, is "Coney Island Cyclone", woven through with vivid images of desire: "If we could find a space/ Where we could both stretch out/ Roll like Coney Island cyclones/ And I won't chicken out/ No, I won't chicken out".

Cut from an entirely different cloth is "Blue And Black", a shamanic meditation induced by the brutality of Buffalo winters, set against the desire for the vivid colors of spring or for someone able to "mend the tears" of the soul ("So cold outside/ I need pink/ I need green/ I need someone/ Who sews up seam"). Sustained by an insistent yet hushed guitar strumming and enriched by a dreamy piano melody, as well as by the free swirling of resonant distances teeming with mechanical crackles, this track evokes both the more abstract scores of Pere Ubu (the ones in which the voice of the big man David Thomas reveals the most unsettlingly poetic side of the Cleveland band) and an austere, metaphysical take on desert-rock. It's all made even more enigmatic by Baker's deep voice, which here brings to mind a giant watching, from his celestial cave, all the creatures at the mercy of the glacial cold. (It's worth recalling how Chris Roberts described Baker to readers of "Melody Maker": "A kind of Tom Waits as Captain Pugwash"!)*.

Astral depths resound menacingly during the first fifty seconds of "Sweet Oddysee Of A Cancer Cell T' Th' Center Of Yer Heart", with which Mercury Rev return to the epic conflict between dissolution and concretion, offering up a mini-symphony whose constant oscillations between accumulated tension and cataclysmic explosions reveal the fil rouge linking psychedelia to post-rock. If anything, the lyrics of "Sweet Oddysee Of A Cancer Cell T' Th' Center Of Yer Heart", despite their brevity, are among the most hermetic on the record. There's mention of "a stream of ice", where "the sky has planted seeds". There's a crossing with "a treasure of grass dust" and a wind that "starts to move", while it's announced that "the earth will have a flood" and that those girls who "never sleep" are destined to die.

For its part, the solemn vision of "Frittering", introduced by the gentle strumming of a twelve-string, might bring to mind a particularly melancholy Neil Young lost in a hall of mirrors. The music of "Frittering" progressively gains electric substance, weaving the fabric of an unreal trance, until it flows into a long finale in which the guitar distortions mimic the incandescence of constellations devoured by the brightest darkness... the music of "Frittering" marks out its own time, keeping time with itself, while Baker draws from the well of memory the recollection of a love now over, resorting to just a few but telling images that turn the woman he loved into a glacier, first eroded and then swept away by the Reno river. And so, for the man now prey to loneliness, all that's left is the impossibility of "getting so high" as to "sink to the bottom" of his own "room".

With "Frittering" we enter the second and final part of the album, titled "Harmony".

I've seen you eat away

Slow as a glacier makes its way down to the Rhine

I’ve seen you chisel away

Slow as a glacier makes its way down to the Rhine

And you wonder why I leave so soon

How I get so high sink to the bottom of your room

I’ve seen you fritter away

Slow as a glacier makes its way down to the Rhine

I’ve seen you whittle away

Slow as a glacier makes its way down to the spine

And you wonder why I leave so soon

How I get so high sink to the bottom of your room

I wonder why I stay

Slow as a glacier makes its way down to the Rhine

I've seen you eat away

Slow as a glacier makes its way down to the Rhine

Preceded by the brief, woozy interlude of “Continuous Trucks And Thunder Under A Mother’s Smile”, the thirteen-plus minutes of “Very Sleepy Rivers” are thematically centered on a man from Buffalo whom everyone knew as a good guy, only to discover, at a certain point, that he was actually something very close to a serial killer. Musically, the closing statement of “Yerself Is Steam” is a lysergic dirge shot through with an otherworldly unease, driven by the sinister ticking of the rhythm section, against which the guitars' ecstatic improvisations and Baker's in-human voice stand out (alongside the usual David Thomas, one can now also detect traces of the convulsive ravings of the Nick Cave of “From Her To Eternity”).

“Very Sleepy Rivers” sounds like a “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” left to echo ad infinitum across a bleak, deserted wasteland. Or like the stream of consciousness of an unstable mind, forever teetering between disintegration and reassembly, between dream and reality. Then again, who knows: given that Donahue himself described “Yerself Is Steam” as a “stream of consciousness”, and considering the title, with its allusion to “very sleepy rivers”, and the lyrics, so rich in images that seem to bleed into one another, marked by an insistent use of sound patterning and by glossolalia, or at least by words that aren't entirely intelligible, it's not out of the question that James Joyce loomed somewhere in the background of their inspiration — not so much the Joyce of “Ulysses”, but the one of “Finnegans Wake”, the untranslatable “book of the night” which, as it happens, opens with a word that evokes the unbroken flow of a river: riverrun.

Beyond these speculations, all we know for certain is what Baker himself revealed in an interview given, around the mid-Nineties, to the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles… namely, that a serial killer can be compared to a river, which is usually very calm, drowsy, but when its waters break their banks, catastrophe follows. The same catastrophe that, in the lyrics of “Very Sleepy Rivers”, is symbolized by the disorientation that grips the serial killer after luring and killing a young girl.

I sensed a new scent, so innocent and bent

I sense a new scent that’s innocent and spent

I feel good, not so good

Very sleepy rivers – a very sleepy place

Very sleepy rivers – a very sleepy place

Milk silver and sulk, fish in warm clear liquid

I feel so wet, I feel kinda misguided

Very sleepy river – a very sleepy place

Very sleepy river – a very sleepy place (kinda thing)

Very sleepy river, very sleepy river (it’s just a thing)

Very sleepy river (just a thing) – a very sleepy thing, thing, thing

A very sleepy place – very sleepy (a very sleepy river)

A very sleepy river – a place, a place

A verbal trashing, a verbal trashing

A verbal trashing, a verbal trashing

A verbal trashing, milk silver and sulk

Nothing quivers, a very sleepy river, a river

Burn, burn, burn, (…) space

Words tumble from me, a very sleepy river

Words tumble from me, a very sleepy river

A very sleepy river, a very sleepy place

Stop all that twitching, I’m alright

A twisted thing, a laughing, disregard, disregard

Very sleepy rivers remind me of falling down

Very (…), the water’s wet and I want my daddy

Released during one of the most legendary years in rock history, "Yerself Is Steam" established itself right away as one of the greatest masterpieces of psychedelia.

Note

* Captain Pugwash is a fictional pirate who appears in a comic strip as well as in British children's books and TV shows. He was created by John Ryan in 1950.

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17/11/2024