If these tunes have a thruline beyond “politics,” it’s certainly “death.” In 2004, they were just the latest in a long line of comic operas composed ad infinitum by this country’s artists; call it The Death of the American Dream Part 804: The Bush Years. And that wasn’t the only part Death played in Stockholm’s Year One. The first time I saw them, that summer in Chicago, Dave and Jerry toasted Michael Houser with an onstage shot, then played his “Airplane” as a duo. They’d play it again in Colorado, and that fall work up a full band version of “Postcard.” The project’s roots as a refuge from/tribute to Houser’s demise always swam close beneath the surface.
After the bad guys won that November’s election, it seemed like the band itself might have died. Two years zoomed by without a peep, until death, or at least its looming threat, called them together again.
In late 2006, Wally Ingram, Stockholm’s wildly talented drummer with the novel-length cv, was diagnosed with squamous cell cancer of the throat and neck. Though his prognosis was good, it was still the real-deal Big Casino, with lose-your-hair chemo and everything. An army of friends and supporters rallied on his behalf, including Stockholm Syndrome, which reunited in February 2007 for an emotional pair of benefit shows at the Independent in San Francisco. Wally was declared cancer-free that summer. Stockholm Syndrome, three years after its inception, its future unclear, had finally faced down Death.
In his 2009 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Vic Chesnutt calls “I’ve Flirted With You All My Life,” his “breakup song with death.” And indeed, for a song that speaks directly to the Reaper, confronting him, challenging him, it is in the end a song of triumph. “I was not ready,” Vic repeats. As in, “I was not ready, in my previous suicide attempts, to actually kill myself.” Pointedly, he does not say, “I’ll never be ready,” and in hindsight the song is, if not a deliberate lie, at least an obfuscation of its author’s attitude toward eternity. Listening to the NPR interview now, it sounds like Chesnutt’s trying to convince Gross, and maybe himself as well, of the finality of this “breakup.” But the future lies in the lyrics, which sing of the “sweet relief” with which death teases their author. We know now that Vic had not really moved on, and this makes the song all the more wrenching.
Yet somehow it’s a very happy tune. At times – when the vocal melody of the verse is tailing toward the chorus and Vic’s intoning, “I was not ready” – almost deliriously so. Even the verse about his mother’s battle with cancer, as viscerally plain-spoken as a hate tract, achieves a kind of joy against the background of lilting guitars and quazi-calypso drums. The chorus itself, cribbed from the Carolina traditional, recasts “O Death” not as a plea, but as an homage, in praise of What Lies Beyond. It’s the sort of complex, unimaginably baldfaced emotion Chesnutt had mastered in his songwriting.
Jerry Joseph is no alien to emotional complexity; his songbook, Dylanesque in its stature (over 200 tracks tall and more than 20 years long), wallows in the shadiest corners of the human condition. He’s written about death, yes, and life, drugs, murder, suicide, lust, love, politics, rabbits, drugs, cars, rape, romance, redemption, laughter, joy, loneliness, sex and sex and sex…and, oh yeah, drugs too. When you consider the whole package: his oeuvre, so mysterious in its multifaceted, hook-and-riff soaked, rock-and-roll church gigantitude; his towering stage presence; his voice like the pools of shattered auto glass left behind after a highway fatality; then his invisibility to the broader culture becomes one of life’s great mysteries. He’s a 5000 foot-tall, bright silver talent robot standing in the Grand Canyon, waiting for the news choppers to arrive. But Chesnutt’s reckoning with death in “Flirting” is beyond even Joseph’s considerable skills; because its so personal, yes, but also because it’s so plain.
Maybe that’s why, upon hearing “Flirting” for the first time, Joseph got as emotional as Craig Davis describes. Or maybe its because, in looking for a Vic Chesnutt song to play with Stockholm Syndrome, he’d found a cover that at once perfectly described his band while paying wicked, ironic tribute to its composer.
Stockholm has yet to attack the road with the fervor of 2004, but there is a dedication evident in both the words and actions of the musicians that mark the band as something more than just a side project. Starting with the Wally shows, and continuing through short tours in the winter and fall of ’09, and now again in the winter of ’10, keyboardist Danny Dzuik has been replaced by Gov’t Mule member Danny Louis. A first name and an instrument is about all the two players’ share. Louis has brought a free-wheeling, aggressive crew of textures to the roll, in contrast to the more austere, laid-back Dzuik.
The rest of the band has responded. The self imposed “We’re Not a Jamband” rules seem gone now. The members of Stockholm Syndrome are less concerned with defining themselves than with just being (as Vic might say) very, very capable. McFadden in particular has emerged as one of those rare improvising musicians who won’t allow an appalling level of education and technical skills to get in the way of his soul. They’ve written another batch of songs – no politics, just rock. They’ve recorded an album that may or may not be released this decade. They talk a lot about finding common space in their collective schedules.
And they’ve added the Vic song, the kind of “Don’t Be Denied”-type, band-defining cover that sometimes crystallizes an ensemble’s intention in a way no original can. If they come anywhere close, make it a point to go out and see them.
Hell…it wouldn’t kill you.
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