The Sundowners - Goat Songs (hear “Tonight I Will Be Fine”)
This is a collaboration of sorts between Will Oldham, Bill Callahan, and Edith Frost from the middle nineties. I guess each of them was featured on one single/EP or something? Anyway, it’s pretty classic lo-fi stuff, with a ridiculously messed over cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Tonight I Will Be Fine” - it sounds like some lost hippie jam session that Dave-o recorded through his effects pedal cause it sounded rad.
This one is out of print, for some reason, while the other two can be found for sale at Drag City Records’s Sea Note distributary.
I found audio of my first Dead show on archive.org. It’s great to hear it, because my primary memories of the show were:
a) being kept even more awake than I already was by someone in a tent five feet away from mine, playing the Pogues’ “Christmas in New York” over and over again at Two O’clock in the morning.
b) at Niagara Falls the next day, playing with a fountain which made a single unbroken inch-thick arc of water. I found I could cut the flow with my hands and watch little water cylinders follow their intended path. That was pure joy, making little rhythmic patterns.
The music was good, too. I had this song, “He’s Gone”, stuck in my head for the rest of the trip, and listening back, it is still my favorite.
I never before realized how similar Will Oldham’s singing is to Jerry Garcia’s.
And here is Richard Brautigan’s “I Cannot Answer You Tonight in Small Portions”.
I cannot answer you tonight in small portions. Torn apart by stormy loves gate, I float like a phantom facedown in a well where the cold dark water reflects vague half-built stars and trades all our affection, touching, sleeping together for tribunal distance standing like a drowned train just beyond a pile of Eskimo skeletons.
Well, this album induces melancholy in me in so many ways.
I have to admit that I envy Will Oldham, travelling to Iceland and recording deep records with Bjork’s sound engineer. Having good friends who go to fairly great lengths to help him realize such an individual, peculiar album. Making so many records in his career that frankly I never knew where to start - this is the first of his albums that I’ve really listened to. I don’t understand why I envy him and not Bill Callahan, say, or Tom Ze, people whose music I have a longstanding connection to.
Then there’s the lyrics. Putting aside his subject matter for a bit, just reading the lyric sheet makes my head hurt. It’s like reading Hegel - each word relates to its immediate neighbors in a clear way, but as you move to the phrase, sentence, and verse the sense gradually dissipates until you have to start all over again at a different phrase. It actually makes more sense when just listening, because it almost turns into a list of related words, which create meaning without clearly representing it, a sort of Cubism. I suppose it’s poetic, but at bottom the poet has to guarantee his readers that he has discovered the most simple way to express an idea so insightful that simplicity is redefined.
The content expressed by the lyrics is just heartbreaking. Will Oldham seems to see love and mutual destruction as coextensive. Even “Lay and Love”, which mostly works as a straightforward but very careful and complete love song, has the line
From what I know you’re terrified, you have mistrust running through you, your smile is hiding something hurtful, it makes me lay here and love you
I often think about Leo Strauss’s “Persecution and the Art of Writing” when considering obscure song lyrics, that contradiction and nonsense are ways of encoding heterodox ideas. I may as well also think of R.D.Laing suggesting that the insane are making their best effort at a compromise of contradictory necessities. Here the opacity of the surface just seems to reinforce the darkness inside. If you watch the video for Cold & Wet, you can see a layer of distressed gauze impregnated with christmas lights laid over the top of the opaque darkness of the song - very creepy.
Oldham’s voice, too, is heavy. It sounds as if he’s asleep and begging the rest of the music to stop making noise and come to bed.
