round 1

(4) talking heads, “take me to the river”
SNIPPED
(13) mazzy star, “blue flower”
238-93
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SECOND ROUND

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/3/22.

hannah ensor on talking heads’ “Take Me to The River”

My dad used to really like fly fishing. Canoeing. He would go on trips all over to very good rivers, catch fish, put them back in the river, etc. I went fishing with him a couple of times, he taught me how to cast and that was that. I was very little then. I saw a tweet recently suggesting that there comes a moment in your adult life when you have to pick the 1-2 interests that will dictate the gifts that your family gives you for the rest of your life. Our home, the one I grew up in, is filled with fly-fishing stained-glass windows, picture frames, mugs. They do not help my dad feel seen or understood.

We went to see A River Runs Through It on a family road trip through Colorado. In a theater. At some point, my mom covered my eyes. A River Runs Through It is rated PG, and includes momentary nudity as well as swearing, substance abuse. More concerning is the almost constant racism, which has no impact on the MPAA ratings. Common Sense Media says it’s fine for kids 13+, which makes me wonder what “PG-13” is for if not this. In the summer of 1992, I would have been almost but not yet 6. Can that be right? I remember 1992 well enough. My own child is not yet 2, won’t remember any of this.

My dad is a big Stop Making Sense guy. I’m sure that by the time I was 5-not-yet-6 I would have watched Stop Making Sense with my dad at least once. I did not know that “Take Me to The River” was a cover of an Al Green song, nor had I ever heard any of the album versions of the Talking Heads songs that were in this live performance.

Stop Making Sense was filmed over several concerts in LA in late 1983, 3 years before I was born. “Take Me to The River”—Al Green’s original version—was released in 1974, with the Talking Heads’ album version following 4 years later, on 1978’s More Songs About Buildings and Food.

My first R-rated movie was The Firm, on a family road trip the following summer. I re-watched The Firm recently on a streaming service. It was fine! Traveling with two kids must have been a lot of work. I can imagine putting this child of mine in a seat and facing her toward a screen for ninety minutes, though when I imagine it I’m probably too tired to cover her eyes. The Firm came out in 1993—a cover of John Grisham’s original which had been published 2 years earlier.

I keep asking my dad if he’ll go canoeing with me now that I live in Michigan again. I guess I keep waiting for him to go to the river so I can go to the river, but I’m closer to 40 than to 6 and I can take myself to the river. I do want to go with him, though. Not to be dramatic, but I don’t know that I know how to go to a river without him. Maybe I’d be more successful in my requests if I asked him to watch Stop Making Sense with me instead. I am still exhausting my parents, 35-not-yet-36.

When my now-wife and I were first dating I rented Stop Making Sense to insist she watch it with me. We lived in Tucson, where in my first week I drove to the place that google maps said was a thick blue line and guess what I found, well I’ll tell you. An empty wash! This was the river! No dipping or dropping in the water. Instead of a dip in a river, I got punk bands; bats; emotionally exhausting creative writing workshops; long- and short-haired queers; hot dogs wrapped in bacon and smothered in beans. A trade I’d make again in a heartbeat.

Dog-sitting in that first September in Tucson, I walked a tiny being (maybe 8, 9 pounds) along this dry river wash and imagined us both being taken up by a raptor or a coyote: ragged fur, ready. Other times, it would rain fast, and I would think about sudden water, high and dangerous, quick, carrying everything loose (me, dog) away. The owner of this sweet tiny dog, luckily, was not made aware of my fantasies of becoming prey to the wash.

I will likely watch Stop Making Sense with my child. I have already played her my dad’s copy of Stan Getz’s album with Gerry Mulligan, one of his favorites from his younger life; I have cuddled her while wearing his old backpacking shirt. When I ask her if she’s ready to go to Nana and Papa’s house, she whispers “pah-pah” and makes the sound of a clock.

“Dad taught me how to play guitar,” Eva Cassidy says at the end of her live recording of “Take Me To The River.” At the beginning of Al Green’s recording he says, “I’d like to dedicate this song to Little Junior Parker, a cousin of mine, he's gone on but we'd like to kinda carry on in his name.” The middle of the Stop Making Sense version of “Take Me to The River” is when David Byrne introduces the band: Bernie, Jerry, Ednah, Lynn, Chris, Steve, Alex, and Tina.

My dad and I are the same person, which means we sometimes get annoyed at each other for the things that annoy us about ourselves. You know this story and probably have a similar one of your own. I love my dad and I like him. A lot. And the more work I do on forgiving myself for being human, the more access I have to loving him, liking him, spending time with him joyfully. This is life, it turns out; work that I get to keep doing.

A River Runs Through It is about two siblings, one reserved and one rebellious, the two sons of a minister. This does and does not describe my sister and me.

“Take Me to The River” is the Talking Heads’ only cover. David Byrne didn’t want to get famous for playing someone else’s song. I am currently listening to it on a streaming service (stream) whose name refers to water (its tides) and is known for being slightly better for musicians, royalties-wise, than its primary competitors. If you’ve ever read an article about “Take Me to The River” it’ll mention this: the most royalties that Al Green saw from “Take Me to The River” came from the licensing for the novelty toy, Big Mouth Billy Bass. Al Green was a fan of the Talking Heads version and joked that maybe he’d cover one of their songs next. I once did spreadsheets for a music producer, which made me think: oh shit, I should be a music producer. I won't say any more because I respect confidentiality. 

If you are paying for the most expensive Tidal membership they say that “Up to 10% of your subscription is directed to the artists you listen to the most.” I keep seeing signs with language like this—at the McDonalds by my parents’ house, at Kroger—saying “starting up to $15/hour” which is a similar 21st century rhetorical move; every time, it takes me about three minutes of thinking to figure out that they’re saying there’s no way we’re hiring you at 15.

For all the optical grooves I put in my dad’s copy of the Stop Making Sense CD, I don’t know that I’d listened to Al Green’s original or the Talking Heads’ album version of “Take Me to The River” more than… I don’t know, twice? four times? So I get to encounter More Songs About Buildings and Food as if it’s new. Somewhere around 2 minutes into this version of “Take Me to The River,” some strange idiophonic sounds tinkle in. Is it a cheap-ish (padouk?) xylophone played with the backs of the rattan mallets? It is, actually, a bit more like water dripping this way. David Byrne has said that he was drawn to this song to be the band’s only cover because it “combines teenage lust with baptism.” 

As for superior sound quality, I recently became the steward of some very good wireless headphones that belonged to my dad, great audio, very nice, and when no one could find them I promised I’d get them back. I did eventually find them, but only after nine feet of basement water receded back into the ground.

“I don't know why she treated me so bad / After all the things that we could have had / Love is a notion that I can't forget.” I sing along to this in the car, even when I know with almost absolute certainty that if I am thinking of particular past loves it was me who was the problem, and that all the relationships that needed to end (even if I didn’t think so at the time) ended when they needed to. 

Listened again. Mallets maybe turned the right way. Or maybe at 2 min they’re turned backwards (still yes I think rattan not birch), and at 3 min they’re flipped. Wood mallets? Plastic? Small heads, teeny tiny, maybe meant for glockenspiel not xylophone. This is the kind of thing you can’t google, but you can maybe argue with your dad about. My dad’s got an ear for what I don’t, of course: he’s a fan of Tina Weymouth’s bass work. According to Wikipedia, she plays a hollowbody Hofner 500/2 Club bass. Insert Big Mouth Billy joke here.

I told myself that I’d write this whole essay without quoting any lyrics or talking about percussion. Alas! Here we are. Love is an ocean that you can’t forget. Love is an ocean that you can’t regret. Love is an ocean you can regret. 

Would you like to be a singer? Get that grit in your soft throat. We’ve listened to this half a million times. David Byrne can be very precise and he can be very flowy. It’s happening now; a loose wrist. You really have to practice to get your wrist loose, some time spent in lessons just relaxing physically. Swinging your arms back and forth until they flop. When you are a musician you really have to—well I won’t talk about it here. I’m retired and was never very good despite all the years.

You want to be a musician? Eyeshadow, sweat shorts, pure pleasure, talent, joy, synthesizer calmly, stomping in unison, mirroring. There is some pain inside of hand-drumming of any kind. When you like being weird and making cool things and running in place and music, this is possible. It can be so tiring to be a musician, just the arms alone.

I was born into a world in which incredibly interesting things had already happened.

Many heads had already shaken, sweaty. Many toes tapped. Many gray linens worn. Many rivers dipped into and turned away from.  When I was born my dad loved fly-fishing, had the records he loved, a whole life. Al Green was already a pastor by the time I was born. Word is, at an early screening of Stop Making Sense, the audience was so wrapped up with dancing in the aisles they didn’t realize David Byrne was there, dancing with them.

Time isn’t after us. Time isn’t holding up.

Hannah Ensor is the author of Love Dream with Television (Noemi Press, 2018). They live half a mile from the Huron River.

BLUE FLOWER, TAKEN SERIOUSLY: gabriel palacios on mazzy star

“I don’t really look for the origin of everything,” deflects David Roback, the late cofounder and guitarist of Mazzy Star, when asked by an interviewer about the initial songwriting process, though he might as well be summing up his life in music. Mazzy Star was formed out of the last thrashings of Opal, the storied 80’s dark psychedelic combo from LA, and from those beginnings, amid the “Paisley Underground” scene’s wake, until Roback’s death in 2020, Mazzy Star largely defied conventional industry touring and recording timelines. A decade might pass between projects, though that sound retained its signature: an expression of the dueling musical tendencies represented by Roback’s cosmic Curtis Mayfield guitar and Hope Sandoval’s folk instincts. The delivery, the execution was unrelentingly cool. At a distance. But not insincere.

THE ORIGIN OF EVERYTHING

In 1987, in the midst of a breakthrough tour with Jesus and Mary Chain, Opal co-founder, lead singer and bassist Kendra Smith abruptly quit. Hope Sandoval, known to the band as one half of the folk duo Going Home, was invited by Roback to join so that the band could fulfill the remaining performance obligations. The set lists for this incarnation of Opal were a split of originals, alongside an odd curation of covers: the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” and “Killing Moon,” by Echo and the Bunnymen, made regular appearances, as did “Blue Flower,” originally written and performed by Slapp Happy. which, in comparison to the other tunes, the band fully inhabits, and seems to feel at home inside.  

Which is to say, “Blue Flower,” and the other songs and sounds of Mazzy Star’s eventual 1990 debut She Hangs Brightly didn’t just squirm spontaneously out of the creepy crawly mud of late 80s Los Angeles, they are of a lineage, and there is documentary record of a kind of awkward adolescence.
Rare video evidence, grainy and VHS-transferred, exists on YouTube of this moment: a giggly Bomb Shelter Videos spot, and a few live concert videos. In an extant Rimini, Italy live performance, we first hear Suki Ewer’s guitar churning out the kind of riff that in its simplicity nests into some pre-carved mold in the brain. David Roback’s guitar embellishes the figure, adding a looping counterpoint after the first verse. And that verse: Sandoval’s vocal is swaggering, overreaching, there’s a Jaggeresque inflection and pitchiness. It rocks in ways that Slapp Happy’s sunny OG rendition could never.
Slapp Happy asks “Is this the end?” and follows it up with “Can we still be friends?” which goes unasked in Mazzy Star’s “Blue Flower.” Because of course we can’t.

WORLD MUSIC

You know how you just want to punch Paul Simon’s “world music,” in the face, and also Vampire Weekend’s, yet somehow Peter Gabriel is given a pass? I think it has to do with sincerity. Slapp Happy, a German trio from the 70s, prog-era intellectuals in Faust’s orbit, were conceived as a conceptual faux-naif impression of a pop group, which on paper sounds detestable. It’s not really bad at all. Turns out there is much to lampoon, to punch up at, in the world of pop. “Blue Flower” is an ode to an ice-cold gangster heartbreaker of love, a knight in a satin jacket and a pompadour. Maybe it was inspired by Grease, which came out a year earlier?
“Blue Flower,” the recorded version, appears just one song into Mazzy Star’s 1990 debut, She Hangs Brightly, and in it Hope Sandoval sings, “The sun was sparkling on the shaft of your knife,” a lyric which she did not write, in a tone much closer to demonstrative than anything else you’ll hear her sing for the next 27 years. It might be easier to sing somebody else’s words with conviction. Do you know how that works? If it comes from your mind I will sing it from my gut. What comes from my mind swims here in my head. There’s a sincere sneer in the strident vocal delivery, and a I-IV guitar chugging along that codes unabashedly rock n’ roll. The scenery is a stylized Crybaby-scape of American rock n’ roll culture, and Mazzy Star leans and fades fully into it.

The sun was sparkling on the shaft of your knife

You might be be versed in actual violence, subject to it, vigilant against it, yet still get some goofy charge from the iconography of Italian stilettos. Knives can be cartoon, violence cartoon, gangs cartoon, yet still material, still a feature of your planet. And fair game for jokes and tearjerker balladry. Hope Sandoval is from East LA.
Slapp Happy’s knives feel figurative, like the ones in the display case at the antique mall. It is, after all, a send up of one-sided teenage adoration. It’s a pop song, not a confession, unless you sing it as one.

WHAT I DEEM FUNNY

The thing about confessional art is that there’s no such thing.
Matthew Goldin is a comic, known for his collaborations with another comic, Jay Weingarten. Their comic personas, which are in essence the entire joke, are so unswervingly earnest, so committed to a particular flavor note of boring-guy uninventive humor, that you might wonder what the point of it is. But the laughs are there and they’re real, if you’re interested. I suspect the laughter is what distinguishes their work from what I’ve heard people call anti-humor. You’ll have to have faith that what I deem funny actually is. The comedic spirit that I’m thinking of won’t hold up to intense light. Goldin tweeted this tonight which feels so confessional I wonder if he’ll delete it:

By writing with unremitting affectation and thereby hinting at the chasm that opens up between any utterance and its intended meaning represent the authentic more faithfully than the facile uncanny-valley-talk of cynics who are confident they've said what they mean.”

The manifesto is a manifesto, and thus dares you to take it seriously.

PRIMITIVE

In 2017, Hope Sandoval and her other group, the Warm Inventions, closed their live sets with a glorious Cramps cover, “Primitive,” the lyrics of which feel like a declaration. Sandoval isn’t exactly belting it out to the bleachers, but she is committed once again in the way she commits to “Blue Flower.”

I love and I live / primitive

Gabriel Palacios writes poems, makes weird wine, and is an aspiring electric piano player in Tucson, Arizona. Some of his recent work appears in the Brooklyn Rail, New Sinews, Annulet: A Journal of Poetics, and Denver Quarterly.