By: Nancy Jane Meyer
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"Only the Tear Filled Eye Does Not Close"
"Happy families are all alike," Tolstoy wrote, and subsequently a vain and despairing woman hurls herself in front of a train when society, family and love fail her. Much has been made of the literary allusions in the Handsome Family Songbook, in which a sense of uneasy collision between the natural world and the industrial exists: somnolent fields ripped apart by furious trains, resulting in gaping wounds and doom and revelations and destruction. Through the Handsome Family lens, humans watch animals, we step on fireants' homes, knock bird nests out of trees in glee, and beat snakes to death with sticks as retribution for death taking a loved one; on a grander scale, buoyed by hubris, we use technology to invade and destroy and strip malls to rape and pillage and desecrate, conditions foreseen by Hawthorne and Melville, whom Rennie Sparks quotes on the Handsome Family website, citing a favorite passage from Moby Dick.
It occurred to me during the show at the 400 Bar on Sunday night that like Tolstoy, the lyrics of Rennie Sparks seek to render a universal experience not in mere abstraction, which in song can be numbing like a psychological anesthetic, but through actualized images which represent the fundamental disparate patterns of human existence: the wings of missing planes, broken down tractors, oceans boiling into flame, screaming buzzards circling overhead, a 24 hour store haunted by ghosts, a woman who has just lost her job drives her car into a lake, murdering her two children because she doesn't want them to be poor. So much fallen, broken, paradise lost, Armageddon nips at our heels like the hounds of hell.
"Our songs are so fucking morose," said Brett Sparks, as he crouched behind a low amp on the stage, peering at me through half-rimmed professorial specs in the empty, after show glare. I had asked him if the Handsome Family ever played weddings, and would he please play mine. 'We've done that before," he said, seriously considering the offer, "I don't know. You'd have to consider your family, your grandparents. Old people would be confused, they wouldn't be able to dance. And your husband-to-be. Has he even heard 'Bottomless Hole'?"
The set-list for the show featured "Hole" from the new album, Singing Bones as well as clear audience favorites from Twilight like "Passenger Pigeons", "Peace in the Valley" and "I Know You are There." A shouted request for "Snow White Diner," the sonorous lead track from Twilight elicited a refusal from Brett, who replied, "It's too hard. But you folks love that snow shit up here, don't you?!" Sparks insisted in our after show conversation that Twilight had changed their lives, enabling them to quit their day jobs due to the number of records sold, but that they never played the first track anymore because it was written on a Casio keyboard, and that he couldn't play it well enough on guitar. One of the few practical limitations of this band, compared to the myriad ways they transcend other musical acts with none of the vision, eclecticism and grasp of poetry they possess.
It would be impossible to faithfully recreate the Handsome's witty banter without electronics, but the Sparks' playful back'n'forth is an integral part of every Family experience, with interjections during songs as well as in between. "Every night you make a different pattern out of your Rolling Rock bottles," Rennie teased her husband, who then looked down at the four or five empties in front of him. "It's Feng Shui, baby," he bellowed back, while strumming the opening chords to "Arlene," perhaps their grimmest exploration of the human psyche, in which the singer drags off the red-haired object of his affection, an unsuspecting diner waitress, to a cave which becomes forever "their wedding bed." And just prior to the song, Rennie observed, "You've become the Jimmy Page of this band," making reference to his grizzled, hardened thumbnail. And true to form, Brett launched into a warped, dissonant guitar solo in the middle of "Arlene," contorting his face into faux-orgasmic guitar-dude grimaces.
"Arlene, you never let me hold your hand," sang Brett, while Rennie, long dark hair floating over blue satin and black lace sleeves, nodded to the beat as she accompanied him on bass. Part of the fun of the Handsome Family shows, as a friend of mine observed, is watching Brett try to get the drum machine to work right while Rennie chides him for his technological ineptness-but Sunday night, in his debut Minneapolis performance, brother Darrell Sparks brought the human element to the rhythm section, rounding out the country-influenced melodies with shuffle and swing. He added lilting harmonies as well, but wisely stayed out of the way during the occasional Family rants:
"God gave me fucked-up fingernails for a reason," Brett said, justifying his musical self-indulgence, while Rennie rolled her eyes, and launched into a story about how they had gone to a Burger King in Black River Falls and eaten some sort of foul BBQ sandwich: "I feel I have diphtheria now," said Brett, while Rennie explained to the audience that people in Black River Falls have customarily committed suicide by drowning themselves in barrels. She then pointed at the TV in the back of the bar, and exclaimed randomly, "Seinfeld is on, if anyone needs another option to this show."
Fittingly, the barrel suicide discussion was capped off with "Down in the Ground" from Through the Trees, followed by "Sleepy" and "White Haven" from the new release, the latter a creepy song with "twisted black mountains" where "wolves howled in madness/never I ventured beyond the stone towers"--I half-expected to see Gollum slink up to the stage and entreat Rennie to give him "the precious." At another point in the show, she made reference to the TV again, where there was an evangelist named van Impe who, according to her, would like to see Hebrews like Jerry Seinfeld and herself rounded up and beheaded in preparation for Armageddon.
It is this infusion of humor into the grim, foreboding darkness, 'life's listless dream" that attracts the kind of attentive audience witnessed on Sunday night, as if talking during the songs were a kind of sacrilege, like interrupting a high priest during a consecration ceremony. Folks, in Minneapolis at least, for the most part, seem to get the fact that shutting the fuck up when the lyrics are meaningful and the song is subtly well-crafted provides an optimum musical experience. This was not the case at the recent Handsome Family show in New York at the Bowery, where reportedly people talked continually and casually throughout the performance.
I asked Sparks how Minneapolis audiences were different for them, given his wife's suggestion that they pack up the 400 Bar audience into their truck and feed us saltines all the way to Des Moines, their next stop. "They have all been good shows," he said, "With the exception of once, when we opened for Wilco at First Avenue, and some fat cigar-chomping yuppie in the balcony started yelling, 'Pick it up!' during our set. We love playing the Midwest, and Chicago is still home, but the two shows there this time were weird, a weird vibe. There's a Family stalker, and he was there, drunk, just yelling shit during the show." I asked him about the rest of the tour to promote Singing Bones, and he replied, "A couple places are going to get dropped in the future. Birmingham, Alabama, and Memphis…we just don't draw enough there. Not like in England, or even Chicago."
Sparks noted that the Handsome Family sometimes plays in 2000 seat venues in the U.K., quite in contrast with the U.S. There were perhaps one hundred or so in the audience at the 400 Bar.
On a personal note, two of my closest friends, Craig Grossman and Laura Spitzcak, met at the Handsome show last year at the Turf Club, and have been essentially together ever since. Rennie was kind enough to dedicate "A Beautiful Thing" to them, a song that emerged after Sparks proposed to her. Wedding bells? Don't expect the Handsomes to play "My Endless Love" at your reception. Not a good tune to hear right before the end of the world, with the seven horsemen from the Book of Revelations barreling down, and you stand at the edge of a "hideous forest"--even if you are about to marry the "darkest of beauties/with her basket of cherries/the wind at her black skirts/like the hands of the wild, dark wood."
Several Handsome Family songs are available for download in RealAudio format from http://carrottoprecords.com/artists/handsome/index.html
Their official website is http://www.handsomefamily.com
Location Info:
400 Bar
Artist Info: The Handsome Family
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