Estero Island May 2009

Sunrise Kent County M-6 a

Sunrise Kent County M-6 a
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Blurrrrrrrr

Carnivals of the Grotesque: Nick Cave on Dig, Lazarus Dig!!

by Alex Denney

If sometime during the early eighties, aspying an emaciated Nick Cave prance menacingly about in an oversized nappy (truth!), somebody told you this guy would be institionalised in twenty-odd years’ time, it’d be white cells and black marias that sprang immediately to mind, not sweeping admiration and fondly-remembered duets with Kylie Minogue.

Yet here he sits before us, tailored to within an inch of his life, thoughtful in between sips of tea from under a kempt moustache, allowing himself the odd chuckle at the absurdity of it all.

The Grinderman project Cave struck up last year with Bad Seeds bandmates Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos and Martyn Casey was roundly applauded, and now his fourteenth album with the day job, Dig, Lazarus Dig!!!, is meeting with uniformly glowing reviews – can this formerly heroin-addicted social pariah do no wrong these days?

"With the Grinderman thing, although that’s been largely accepted by people, I know it would be very difficult to ever… _" Cave trails off. "It’s that thing of being young and going on stage and people don’t know who you are, and you got a whole lot of people that just fucking hate you – that’s really exciting._"

At a packed London date last year with Grinderman, Cave could be seen during the encore prowling the stage with one of his heroes, Alan Vega of Suicide, clearly relishing the opportunity to get up people’s noses while a steady trickle of disgruntled audience members deserted the venue. Nowadays, it would seem, confrontation is a rare thing to be cherished.

"_We played in Madison Square Gardens with the White Stripes and there was definitely this polarising thing going on where halfway through the set it felt like it was gonna all go horribly wrong, like everyone was gonna start booing ‘cos they just wanted to see the White Stripes.

"When that happens you just kind of figure ‘fuck you’ and the music just becomes something else, the point of it becomes different. But there was an element we were really digging as well and that felt fucking great, I have to say._"

Dig, Lazarus Dig!!! is an album informed by the Grinderman experience (the first, informal sessions for the record were held with the four-piece line-up); stripped of the pomp and circumstance that characterised Lyre Of Orpheus / Abbatoir Blues, lean and hungry and secretly sorrowful with Warren Ellis’ crackling atmospherics like background radiation after the bomb drops.

It’s also – whisper it – really rather funky.

Cave's unperturbed: "Ahh the Bad Seeds _are funky! Well it depends. The Boatman’s Call wasn’t funky. I think some of the stuff was written on this tiny keyboard with a built-in drumbeat that my kids had. It had this really evil little organ sound to it and I was extremely frustrated with the piano ‘cos everything that I wrote sounded like a fucking ballad, so I started writing on this, I wrote ‘Today’s Lesson’ and ‘Albert Goes West’ I think. Then I took the keyboard into the studio, anything you played on it was just instantly kind of catchy._"

Jim Sclavunos, drummer with the Bad Seeds and Grinderman, elaborates: "We like to try and do something new with every record and sometimes we actually manage to pull it off. There are always people not quite ready to follow with whatever step you’re taking on a particular record and there’s always this tug-of-war with fan expectations. I mean it is a carefully considered record but it’s not like some cynical gesture of novelty for novelty’s sake."

Is there much dialogue about what direction a Bad Seeds album is going to take before going into recording sessions?

Jim: "What tends to happen is that it gets flagged up a while in advance and especially Nick and Warren have a lot of conversations ahead of recording. By the time we get in there it’s been pretty thoroughly considered. It’s probably more what we _don’t want it to be, to be honest. A majestic structure of positivity is built on an ashen plane of negatives (laughs)._"

I ask if Sclavunos thinks Grinderman’s success has cut the band any slack in terms of shifting the goalposts for what’s expected of the next Bad Seeds record, but he seems inclined to think the contrary.

"I think it’s made the weight of expectation and potential accusations that much more dangerous. But with everything that’s potentially negative, you know you take a lemon and you make lemonade. Grinderman opened up a lot of possibilities that would never have been considered before.".

As for Abattoir Blues (hailed in some quarters as the Bad Seeds’ finest hour but in retrospect probably more of a relief coming after 2003’s disappointing Nocturama), Cave speaks of it in monstrous terms, not disparagingly but almost as something that got way out of hand.

"We wanted to get away from the congested sound of that last record," he says. "There was just everything chucked on there, it was like this massive fucking juggernaut. We wanted to do something that was sinewy and less cluttered. _Abattoir Blues is like this giant clogged artery, it’s really heavy, and I wanted this record to feel lighter because a lot of the lyrics are quite weighty on this record.

"I thought if I could put them with music that was more rhythmic and feel-orientated I could get away with these lyrics, and that seems to be the case. People have said it’s a joyful record, that it has a good sense of play about it and I’m pleased about that because I was able to slip in some fairly evil shit_ (laughs)._"

That’s not ‘evil shit’ as in the blood-soaked musings on the nature of good and evil of yore, so much as a fragmented portrait of personal and political apocalypse that’s very much grounded in the here-and-now. ‘Grotesque’ is the word that keeps cropping up in conversation, and the arm-swinging sidewalk shuffle of the title track, a tale of Lazarus come to modern day New York, is a prime example.

"That song reminds me of this painting James Ensor did called ‘Christ’s Entry Into Brussels’_ where Christ is on a donkey entering contemporary Brussels and it’s a very kind of grotesque overview of humanity, that’s what it feels like to me, and the record needs to be seen as a whole in that way.

"To me the record’s all about these threads tying together in some way; it becomes a kind of grotesque tapestry of sorts, there’s all this stuff going on, and once the songs have found a logical trajectory they change so you never know what’s going on with them, they’re digressing all over the place so it becomes this carnival of the grotesque. And there’s all the kind of clamour and upbeat music that goes with a carnival._"

The song also alludes tacitly to the Lazarus of the secular world, legendary escapologist Harry Houdini, inviting all manner of comparisons with Cave the artist and religious skeptic.

"I threw that stuff in because I was reading Larry Sloman’s biography of Houdini, and I actually dedicated that song to him (Sloman). To me there were interesting echoes between those two characters but it doesn’t aid anyone in particular knowing this to know what the song is about."

But with a songwriter for whom the lines between metaphor and religious faith have always been deliberately hazy it seems too interesting a line to drop so readily. What about those lines he cited in his lecture on the love song; Jesus’ teaching that “wherever two or three are gathered in My name, there I am in the midst of them”. Is it not something of a cop-out to describe God as purely a linguistic phenomenon?

"_That we create him you mean? I thought that was really good, the point I took great pains to put forward in that lecture was articulated really nicely. You just saying that’s bringing tears to my eyes, I’m not gonna do it any justice. No-one wants to sit around listening to me waffle on about the nature of God (laughs).

Louis-Ferdinand Celine

"To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!”

"We've no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will think for you, my friend. Don't forget it.”

“The foreground in a picture is always unattractive. . . Art demands that the interest of the canvas should be placed in the far distance, where lies take refuge, those dreams which blossom out of fact and are man's only love.”

Alejandro Covers My World

Ya Gotta get this one, he is the best musician in my repertoire right now. It only gets better with him.

His version of Pale Blue Eyes, if you are familiar through the years, will bring you to tears.

Phillip Ward Link

Please take a look at Phillip Ward's link, posted here, for those of you wha are interested in Sandy Denny's work. The musice resonates through the canyons, in the air of the mountainside, and in the urban burrows of northern England.

http://www.pemward.co.uk/page_1155463279531.html

The Arrogance of Power

The Arrogance of Power
Research in social psychology consistently reveals the corrupting effects of power: disinhibition and a diminished focus on those with less power. Influence distances those with it from those with less influence. At the same time, the ability to understand another's point of view, and to put oneself in the other's place, is one of the most critical factors that affects ability to obtain influence and is a critical skill for everyone, including organizational leaders.
All of this is to make the point that although auto executives flying to Washington on private jets as they beg for government help and financial industry leaders paying out lavish bonuses even as they get government bailout funds is certainly inappropriate, even stupid behavior, it is far from unusual or incomprehensible. The higher you go in an organization, the more those around you are going to tell you that you are right. The higher reaches of organizations--which includes government, too, in case you slept through the past eight years--are largely absent of critical thought. That makes it tough for leaders to understand the point of view of others or, for that matter, to uncover problems or to figure out effective strategies.
There is also evidence, including some wonderful studies by business school professor Don Hambrick at Penn State, that shows the corroding effects of ego. Leaders filled with hubris are more likely to overpay for acquisitions and engage in other risky strategies. Leaders ought to cultivate humility. They certainly need to build cultures in which people can and will disagree with them over substantive decisions. They ought to get out and experience the world as others see it--maybe actually meet customers and shareholders, and they need to talk less and listen more.
But don't hold your breath waiting for any of this to happen. The few leaders who "get it" tend to preside over more effective organizations. The rest cruise along until their arrogance and insensitivity catches up with them.
By Jeffrey Pfeffer February 2, 2009; 11:28 AM ET Category: Economic crisis Share This: Technorati Del.icio.us Digg

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