There's a pathogen floating in our cultural DNA that we caught sometime around the Beatles' performance on "The Ed Sullivan Show." It grew into its current permutation when the Fab Four played their legendary concert at Shea Stadium and was incurable by Woodstock. The '70s rash of double-live releases certainly proved it- the live performance of a rock band was now an Event, capital 'e.' Steve Waksman touched on this in his contribution to the book Listen Again, attempting to explain the appeal of Grand Funk Railroad to '70s audiences. He argues that after the more idealistically substantial gamechangers started lighting their guitars on fire and getting arrested in the bloody streets of New Haven, the arena rock show became a happening, while the generations-old attitude of music as nightclub entertainment retreated to urban 'scenes.' To be perfectly honest, I'm goddamn sick of the pretense of live performances that aspire to be 'events,' as though they can be created in any other way other than chaos. Lights going down, walk-on music, pre-fogging the stage, and afterward, the pseudo-spiritual communion of the encore, where upon we beg the performers, "O, Artist, grant us a three song reprise," and they return, showering us with The Hit, as though our claps were louder, were more deserving than Portland's.
On a downright pleasant Tuesday night at the Ballard neighborhood's Tractor Tavern, myself and a few buddies caught wandering American traditionalists The Handsome Family, with Illinoisan opener Daniel Knox. Now, I wasn't stumbling blindly; I knew of the Family because of these guys, who'd all moved here at one point or another from Michigan. These hardscrabble fucks hate just about anything that's hip, preferring Mr. Bungle to Animal Collective and eagerly scouring YouTube for new uploads of vintage videos of Italian horror soundtrack mavens Goblin. The Handsome Family, however, gets these guys absolutely geeky, so they must be something special. Spirits are high that night; I turn up at a bar down the block to meet them and they're sitting at a table behind guitarist/singer Brett Sparks, who's paying for a take-out meal. We sit, commiserate about our jobs and rap about what we've been listening to lately. After a drink or two, the stories start coming out; Terry woke up this morning to find the trashcan full of his roommate's hair. Matt recounts the time, tripping in Flint, he and his friends were being tailed by a group of young Mexican kids, for some offense, real or imagined, before they jumped into their getaway car, having to use their feet out the sides of the doors to push it back, as the car couldn't reverse.
Stories like this get traded back and forth over the course of the evening and even with Sparks himself, as he and Terry talk later at the Tractor about a strange Ann Arbor show a few years back, where everyone was seated in a poorly heated theater. Sparks, originally from Texas, is painfully mild-mannered, milling about on the floor as Knox sits at a keyboard set on piano, attacking the keys with a restrained intensity. Rennie Sparks- bassist, lyricist, and spouse- is manning the merch table near the Tractor's entrance. This accessibility-bordering-on-folksiness is refreshing and combined with the stories we all seem to be sharing that night, makes the performances feel like a group of old friends and fellow travelers spending their Tuesday night as though 9 AM would never come the next morning.
Knox, whom sat at stage center with drummer Jason Toth behind him, played deadpan, tightly-written songs that Terry vividly likened to "Zach Galifianakis buttfucking Randy Newman." Knox sang in a knowingly-ponderous voice about the attempted murder of neighborhood pets and upon announcing he would try out a new song, he played stark chords and began to lyrically detail the door handle trail blazed by an influenza virus that made him sick enough to check into the "ha-ha-ha-hospital." Knox is definitely not for everyone; a young woman planted at the end of the bar crowed to a friend, "I can't believe I paid $15 for this," as a heavy-lidded Knox played both piano and kazoo. The juxtaposition of Knox's demented Tin Pan Alley and the Tractor's backdrop of '30s-era car at his stage left somehow made everything funnier.
My buds were excited that The Handsome Family would be playing with Toth on drums and a second guitarist, whom we'd seen earlier grabbing food with Brett. On record, the Sparks are rather sparse, rarely deviating from the formula of Rennie's bass, Brett's guitar and his mellifluous, yet booming vocals. Rennie is the lyricist, Brett the composer, together crafting songs that sound positively eternal. The Handsome Family always seems to be advertised as something of a Gothic Country band- something that conjures images of Grave Digger-esque hot rods and psychobilly bad girls but this is not the case with the Sparks, for whom the term Gothic is nominative of the Southern Gothic literature of Faulkner or the latter-day, rusted chicken wire country explorations of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan.
Although, where Waits can often sound cartoonish, Brett Sparks sounds reverent and wholly convincing as the characters he sings through, such as on "Bottomless Hole," where the titular crevice is symbolic of one lowly man's insatiable desires or on "So Much Wine," which they called their "Christmas song." After what sounds like a knock-down drag-out argument on Christmas morning, Sparks' character drives away, leaving his woman but hasn't the heart; he turns the car around and finds her drunk, passed out on the floor. Devotion plays a role in many of these songs and upon introducing cuts off their new Honey Moon, they were invariably "love songs." Though it may be the one talking point mentioned in all press coverage of the band, this really is a married duo who seem to love and respect one another just as much as the onscreen couple in Walk the Line; Brett flubs a line, Rennie glares, he starts the tune over, wanting to get her words right. "This is the answer to that old interview question," he says,"What's it like being in a band with your spouse?"
The Handsome Family finished up the Seattle date, the first of their West Coast tour, with "I Know You Are There," a gentle swing of a country gospel tune that could very well refer to the Lord but more than likely is about the kind of love those two must share. Sparks sings in a tone not unlike those old devotional records cut by folks like Elvis or Marty Robbins which can sound so schmaltzy with decades, hipper haircuts, and modernity providing such a distance from that kind of sentiment but in that small room with a bunch of like-minded folks, slow-dancing lovers, and two incredibly likable musicians, it was powerfully affirming.
After the show, outside, I plan my next move, trying to decide whether to settle up or to just get home and go to bed already. I choose the latter and make my way inside to say my goodbyes to the boys from Flint. They're hanging at the bar with Brett, hands full of merchandise bought from Rennie, herself. "Dude," says Terry, "I've listened to your records so much, they're like old friends I never get tired of." This performance revealed no sort of generational godhead to us, nor will any of us find it momentous enough to tattoo "7/14/09" on ourselves. Yet we saw old friends and listened to music that felt much the same; not entirely bad for a Tuesday night.
by Chris Middleman
[Photos: Daniel Cavazos]