I can’t remember whether I dreamed it or not. A number of years ago I did sound for Will Oldham* at a club in Houston—that much was not a dream. The bit that I’m hazy about is that when it was time for soundcheck, nobody could find Mr. Oldham. After looking around for a while, somebody found him asleep underneath a desk. I remember seeing him emerge from underneath the desk in some fluorescently lighted room. Or do I? That whole “asleep under the desk” scene could be as much a part of my dreams as that night I found myself in cab with Mick Jagger as my driver**. I know that never happened because I’ve never met Mick Jagger and the odds are slim that he would ever drive a cab. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem that unlikely that Will Oldham would disappear under a desk to sleep, so maybe that really happened and wasn’t just a dream I had later and then conflated with actual events. At any rate, Oldham does seem to keep popping up like that.
I remember watching John Sayles’ Matewan*** on video long after it came out and suddenly seeing somebody who I thought was a young Will Oldham. I stopped the movie, rewound, and replayed the scene. It was indeed a 17 year old Will Oldham, playing a somewhat damaged hillbilly. A hillbilly not unlike the one that he plays on his albums. Or maybe he’s not playing a character. It’s hard to say. Either he really is a weird hillbilly or he has made a career out of playing a character that was invented by John Sayles. My possible experience with the groggy man emerging from under a desk doesn’t really help settle whether Oldham is, in fact, a hillbilly, but there are certainly other things which point in a different direction.
This week, while watching Junebug, Will Oldham popped up again. The appearance is so brief, that it would hardly be worth mentioning had I not also come across an album that came out last year (that I apparently missed) which features Will Oldham. This album is the unlikely pairing of Oldham with Tortoise. I mean, I guess it’s unlikely. They are all Chicago hipsters, just ones with very different styles. While Oldham’s music stays pretty close to the folky/country stuff, Tortoise’s music—as much as it can be said that it tends toward anything—tends toward the funky. This album, The Brave and the Bold, is an album of covers. You’ve got your Elton John, your Springsteen, and your Milton Nascimento. That’s right, Milton Nascimento. As in, Brazilian. As in, Will Oldham sings in Portuguese. And here’s the really surprising part: it’s good. In fact, the whole album is good.
Even though, it’s an album of covers, it’s not the sort of gimmicky cover album where the coverer does his best to ape the coveree. Will Oldham sounds nothing like Bruce Springsteen or Elton John or Devo, so it would be difficult for him to pull off an imitation (though I have no doubt that the Tortoise guys could play anything in any style). Instead, the songs are for the most part complete reinterpretations with the same lyrics and some of the same melodies. But it’s nothing like a Will Oldham album, which have become blander on each successive album (and there are lots of them, so the blandening happens all the faster), the lowpoint being that misguided album of reinterpretations of his own songs, sung by Oldham but played by Nashville studio hotshots. So is Oldham going to go in another direction and finally retire the character that he’s been playing since he was 17?
*I also can’t remember what he was being billed as. It could have been Palace Brothers or Palace or Will Oldham, but it almost certainly pre-dated the Bonnie Prince Billy phase of Oldham’s career.
**And just thinking about this dream, it sort of runs together with the ghostly cab driver played by David Johansen in the movie Scrooged.
***I’ve seen quite a few of his movies. Here is a list of the ones I have NOT seen: Sunshine State, Limbo, City of Hope, Eight Men Out, Baby It’s You, and Liana. Anybody else seen those and want to make a recommendation?
I loved CITY OF HOPE a lot (although it’s definitely a product of the 80′s), liked LIMBO well enough, but SUNSHINE STATE felt pretty recycled to me. Haven’t seen the other Sayles films.
I kind of hated that covers album, but maybe I should give it another try. However, that came out before his latest album, THE LETTING GO, which is somewhat back in his comfort zone though not entirely, and pretty fantastic to my ears. But then again, I disagree that his career is the slippery slope into mediocrity that you paint it as, so your mileage may vary.
It’s not so much that he’s slipping into mediocrity as he’s just repeating himself. It’s like the successful characters on Saturday Night Live–they are funny once or twice, but after a while you start to get tired of them. Same with the the Oldham hillbilly character. I mean, it’s impressive that he’s ridden the thing as long as he has, but how long can he do that? And assuming Sayles created that character, shouldn’t he get more credit?
Speaking of funny, have you guys seen “The Whitest Kids You Know” on Fuse? There’s about seven episodes so far. Tuesday nights are new ones. Repeats all week. Some hilarious stuff. Refreshing and beats the hell out of SNL.
Holy crud. I wrote my piece for next week already and then lost it due to some new fandangle thing blogger is doing these days, attempting to auto save and anyway this thing I wrote fits right into your thing.
The Oldham cover of “wouldn’t it be nice” is pretty nice. I am not really down with Will Oldham though, I must confess. Timing’s off. He’s doing his thing when I couldn’t give a hoot.
We’ve got lots of hilly billy characters in Chicago. I think there is some acting going on and some re-action. It’s a tough grimy brick-laden city and people do hilly billy things around here to get to something else. Some of these hilly billy types really do come from the woods that’s for sure but they’re citified hilly billies.
Some friends of mine live in a house in a tough gang banger ‘hood. They have bonfires on a regular basis. Sometimes it brings the locals out and they sit around the campfire and act normal for a change. It’s a pretty cool house. Used to be home to Neko Case amongst others.
On our way to rehearsal last night, we saw a gangbanger get shot. I’ve never seen that before but it somehow just seemed normal, cold and casual.
Time to start a fire.
The Bonnie Prince Billie show at the Orange Show several years back was completely mind blowing, as was the Palace Brothers show at Emo’s back in the dark ages. During the Orange Show performance, the band went into a revamped version of I See a Darkness that was wholly original and wrenching at the same time. I’m also a big fan of the Oldham records I have.
Funny, I was going to do a post about him myself at some point. A real nice metal-review with a personal ironic twist of self-loathing that would be sure to get up under the kilt of a one Mr. Snipes. Guess I’ll just go back to working on my Air Supply post.
John – are you really taking it that hard? I mean you can dish it out with the best of them.
I don’t see you as a bully. Bullies can’t take a hit.
Anyway just because I put a label on you doesn’t mean I’m putting you down, like I said originally.
Love you brother. Don’t hate you. Love you.
As for Justin’s title, I actually took that as a hit against me not you but who knows what this weird kid is thinking.
I think all our posts going forward (as they say in the working world) should be titled “self-loathing metal review.”
I didn’t take offense to Justin’s title. I figured he was just using the phrase because it sounded so funny.
And you were clearly putting me down, so let’s not bullshit one another. Cloaking your jab in the guise of a compliment is the height of passive aggresion.
It looks like City of Hope isn’t available on DVD yet. I guess I’ll have to wait to see that one.
I lifted Kilian’s line for the title of this post because I couldn’t think of a good title and was too lazy to work up something better, so I went with something absurd. Absurd in the sense that the post has nothing to do with either self-loathing or metal. Absurd entertains me. I guess that makes me weird.
Ah now John, you assume all this stuff and compel me to respond (on Justin’s hijacked post no less). I feel obligated to defend myself when you say I should relax and “if you don’t like me” and what not.
I hate explaining myself so uh uh not gonna do it no more.
Love you,
really.
Don’t stop believing, writing, getting defensive, etc…
:- )
p.s. write me an email or send me that promised metal cd or something
I stand by my comments.