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Rating: For once, don't just read and close your eyes, working with your imagination. Here, imagine being a doorman working for two consecutive nights from dusk till dawn at the entrance of a building in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. On the second floor, there's a recording studio, the Dessau Studios, and you often see strange characters hanging around. But these three who enter sporadically, shaking off the New York autumn rain, aren't anything special, maybe only the third one is a bit unusual. But you know, being a strange musician isn't just about having piercings everywhere, a snake around your neck, or tattooed knuckles with hate and love. You have to be strange inside, really. Ben Vaughn, this lanky guy like dozens you find among subway passengers, he's truly out of the ordinary. In 1993, he released a completely mono record, and in 1997 he recorded one in his car using the cigarette lighter socket as a power supply. Alex Chilton seems like the older brother with the tuft on his forehead, always carrying two guitar cases with him, but as a young man, he broke through with the Box Tops and launched the Cramps, though unfortunately, he's been chasing the bottle for too long. The third, Alan Vega, damn, this one is really strange, with those sunglasses after dark and the three-quarter cap as if he were a white Michael Jackson de noantri. This guy, together with his old pal Martin Rev in Suicide, has influenced more musicians than Beethoven.
What are these three survivors doing together, buried for two entire consecutive nights in October 1996 in a smoky studio? They improvise. Yeah, just like Miles Davis and others from that crowd used to when they brought along their instruments to record their bebop masterpieces. They create the music, perform it, and record it. Simple, right? Chilton and Vaughn switch between various guitars, bass, drums, and keyboards, while Alan Vega sings. And dominates.
The underlying theme is a kind of rockabilly coming from deep space, nocturnal, dark, muddy, frightening. In "Fat city" it feels like the studio door isn't closed properly; you can even hear the few car horns blaring from the wet street, the bass groove seems steam-powered, Eddy Cochran is still alive and he's an old punch-drunk boxer emitting guttural mmmm provoking the percussion of the drums... thump thump thump and then comes "Fly away", if you've always thought Jeffrey Lee Pierce was the reincarnation of Jim Morrison, then Alan Vega is the reincarnation of both, pleading for five and a half minutes "no more tears, no more tears"... Instead "Freedom" is a romantic ballad for cheek to cheek when your corpse, resurrected in the dawn of the living dead, will still be fooled by love... Ben Vaughn strikes pure voodoo on the drums calling for the coming of the "Candy Man", and it's not exactly the cheerful one of Christina Aguilera but a human sacrifice in "Wickerman" style, invoked by the crooner voice of Mister Vega... and again that nocturnal boogie in "Too Late" led by two tlick tlick of piano, with the guitars creating an electrified chainsaw, the echo effect of the voice inducing self-hypnosis "too late... too late... too late, baby"... again "Sister" is a feline blues with the pulses of an anemic heart, who knows if Vega will manage to reach the end without swallowing all the words "... lo.. lo... lov... beb... lov... .o' ma' laif....". I realize that those who don't love the genre might need a breath of that fresh air from the rainy East Side night, while I stay here listening to the lovely piano of "Dream baby revisited" with drums that seem to play from another room.
In the end, I smile thinking about those records built with perfect arrangements, virtuosity spread over a thousand instruments and sounds, with great expense of money and energy, which instead lie collecting dust on my shelf just after being devirginated by the needle.
"Cubist blues" is like an old hustler not very flashy with a long line of loyal customers who always come back. And I wonder if these three trippers are geniuses, or if I'm just missing a few screws. As always, the explanation lies in the middle.
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