There is this dream of pop music freedom exemplified by Chuck Berry, who held his gifts in much lower estimate than his pocket book, and the dream is this: put your guitar in case and travel the country playing for cash up front and a back up band awaiting: “We’re gonna play Chuck Berry songs”, then take the slings and arrows for out of tunes and out of tempo sets and occasionally hit pay dirt. Cash up front, or did I say that.
Laura Marling, who I am now officially sick of writing about but I won a ticket to see her play in a Church last week and while I don’t REALLY REALLY want to write about it, because it wasn’t a very good concert for one reason, and because I am not sure if I have anything left to say, for another, I figured the gig, a live on tape show for WFUV Radio at St. Ann’s And The Holy Trinity in Brooklyn a week ago, might be worth a closer look. It was a weird set, taped not airing, you’d think they’d have let the conversation segment ramble, apparently WFUV has never heard of editors.
So I started with this image of a kinda time disjunction and in one Chuck Berry is getting in an airplane to the promised land with a guitar by his side and then some 30 years later all this history of stuff which doesn’t interest us at all has happened, and Laura is parking her car somewhere in Brooklyn, wheel propelled across the States. During the dreadful Q and A with program director Rita Houston, who should know better, Marling didn’t come off very well at all, reaching a nadir with, no wait, the nadir was actually when Laura told Rita neither of her parents taught music (in response to Rita’s wrong assertion –Laura’s father owns a recording studio), a near nadir, when Rita responds to a comment about the beauty of the surroundings with a terse “Yes”.
So, there is Laura in town since Sunday and seeming to have gone through a transformation since I saw her gig at Music Hall Of Williamsburg, a set so great it might be the best of the year. This reminds me of going to see David Bowie with my friend Robert Nevin at Roseland, right at the front, killer setlist, Bowie just at the top of his game. Like awesome. Robert said Bowie was one of the best live acts around but I had my doubts. Maybe six months later we went together so catch his 50th birthday party at MSG and it really blew. Laura wasn’t this amazing fall off in quality, but the set was a disappointment.
Wait, if I had never seen her before I would have thought she was great, it was a disappointment in comparison, it upset me on a curve. At MHOW she sauntered onto stage in mules and baggy pants and a leather coat, and she seemed in a real good mood. She tuned up (relatively quickly) and she didn’t miss a song, she got all of all of them. Laura responded with pleasure to the audience interaction and it was just a first rate concert all around.
But somewhere between Sunday and Wednesday, Laura morphed into Julie Andrews in the Sound Of Music without the playfulness. In a hurry to tune because the q&a would be cutting into her playing time, she was quiet distance. Also, it was a hot day and I had a buzzsaw of a fan standing right next to me, and when she spoke, it made her inaudible so if she was being funny I couldn’t hear it.
Musically, there was this sense of great art about the evening and nothing beats to death great art faster than self-consciousness in pop music. It isn’t that Laura was any less great, that four song suite to open the night is always going to knock you flat, but it is almost immediately before and afterwards that soured the event. The way she seemed to slide in from a side door, the long conservative dress, hair pulled back: she looked like a character out of a Jane Austin novel. Maybe I mean a Daphne Demaurier novel. All the sweetness, all the lightness and charm you sometimes feel bubbling beneath the surface, was gone. Austere, she looked austere.
I wondered whether she was Christian. Catholic? Agnostic? And I wondered about the distance from Eversley to London and London to L.A. and L.A. to New York: I wondered here about homesick, if there was a trickle down memory infecting her. Or maybe just propriety be thy judge, right? It is hard to shout and stamp your feet in Church unless you are in a Southern Baptist Church. The Episcopal Church are Protestants though the surroundings aren’t all that poor, neither are they particularly ornate. All our welcome, etc, etc.
I’m guessing the kid was raised Church Of England so St. Ann’s shouldn’t be a million miles away, even if everything else is.
Laura has this team that she makes all decisions with, sometimes it is called HQ. You read about this stuff and I am guessing most stars (Laura is a star in the UK for sure) have something like that. I remember that bloke from 500 Days Of Summer saying that he has this team of folks working o n his career and he is the CEO of, what is his damn name? Anyway, they make team decisions and this was one and so, the Laura of cool, the Humbert Humbert (without the paedophile stuff) of rock and roll has this team of guys and they get together, hey maybe they phone each, we don’t really know, but they are like Octavia and Marc Anthony (no –it isn’t a new Latin supergroup) sitting back and putting little prick needles next to peoples: rock nyc, I think not. WFUV in a Church, hmmm, no money in it, but imagine the vibes. Except we don’t use that word. Vibes has no meaning for us.
Laura woulda given em a dirty look. What does she want with this shit? What can she learn or teach Rita Houston? Bad decision, no parking place, right? Fuck, where can she stick the jam jar. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I know, after the break for the interview, I’ll play “The Rambling Man”, that will get everybody back into.
And it does do exactly that. After an uncomfortable Q and the response “I was what I am” comes in rhyme during the song. So we learnt nothing from the interview and the set itself was oddly dour but we did, I did, learn something. What I learnt was how weird the transition from “Breathe” with its door slammed shut “Don’t follow me, whatever you might see or hear” to “Take me somewhere I don’t know”. It makes you think about the space between the two songs. Like, the way how on vinyl it is a darker black as you change tracks.
Then she was gone.
She tuned her guitar, she turned on her heels. And she walked out to this small brown door, like a green room in a church. I don’t know if she came out for a meet and greet because I left myself as soon as it was over and don’t get me wrong, I would stalk Laura, I really would, but I am too damn lazy. Like, the only way I will ever stalk a rock star again (I used to stalk Debbie Harry when I was 19 but her husband was always with her and Elvis Costello except I didn’t ever know where he was so I just kept an eye out for guys with black rimmed glasses) is if we can agree upon a time and place they will be so I can stalk em with ease. Plus, I’m not gonna stalk somebody if I have to stand up; that ain’t happening. Maybe the theater, I’m planning on seeing that new apocalyptic playabout the Simpsons at Playwrights Horizon. The 230p on Saturday October 5th, so if Laura, or really anybody at a, wants to get themselves stalked perhaps they can meet me there. It would have been my Mom’s 83rd birthday, a fairly apocalyptic woman in her own right, so if Mom would like to haunt me, we can make a party of it.
So, I left and I don’t know what happened to Laura. They were selling vinyl albums just inside the Church, and I bet JC would have had a word or two to say about them, so maybe she took the sheckles and bought herself and her Team Marling dinner at a local pizza joint.
Perhaps Laura’s glad to be last exiting us. She is a little hard to project upon and that’s a pity because it is one of her main duties, to allow me to project my dreams of her feminity back upon her. I mean, if she can be my mirror she will be very rich. But I don’t think she can. Still, on a new song she has a pretty good line of patter, “I have loved so many men who have asking why, asking why I go and change my mind over night. They can’t figure me out, they are in themselves with doubt…” first, the way she sings “they can’t figure me out” sounds just Dylan but next, that’s a concept so easy to project upon.
Men have been writing about such women all their lives. We (the men) are infantile and self loathing but the women are just doing what nature tells em to… trading up. And us, it is kinda pathetic but men don’t obsess over what they have but what they want and so it is this Laura of this song , of this album, all that “They can’t get into my head, they don’t have a hope in hell”, till the very end, “Thank you naiveté, you were my next verse”. That last line? If I was 35 years younger I’d use it as much as I used “Somebody somewhere must have lied to me”. Similar concept, having your naiveté shoved back down your throat.
But wait. The pizza is over and Laura is filling gas into her tank and some guy is giving her the once over twice. Laura is thinking, look this is Brooklyn not Madison, Wisconsin, does he recognize me? Is he flirting? Does he want an autograph? Is he a creep? She is used to the road now. When she left her home for London, it wasn’t really nothing. Like going to boarding school but here in the States, all those TV sets and states of confusion, and all these gigs and the same words, the same connecting, the same moments, the same strings on the same guitars being pulled and tuned. She gets back in her car and heads West.
What’s wrong with Laura tonight? Maybe it’s my imagination or maybe it is hard to raise the levity level in a Church and especially on 9-11. Rita, who is a little on the strange side, says it is apt but it really isn’t. Laura was an 11 year old at home in Eversley when it happened. It would have been four o’clock in the afternoon and she would have been coming back from school. With her friends because she was popular, an all girl school (I made that up, another question she won’t be asking because she’s too busy telling Rita that she hadn’t noticed a Dylan quote in a song), all gray socks and knee bruises. How do I know she was popular at Grammer School? Because she was lousy at Grammer school. How do I know that? Because she dropped out at 16. Too pretty to be friendless, the assumption is that the opposite is true. Plus three elder sisters? You are either extroverted or nonexistent. She wasn’t nonexistent.
When she got home her parents would have been watching the news, and she’d have been rushing to her bedroom to call her friends, to talk about boys? Maybe, getting there at 11… . To chat, to fight with her big sisters, to write poetry in her books like a young Emily Bronte, twas grief enough to think mankind, all hollow servile insincere, to read, or watch TV, off to cable because everyshow is being interrupted but these two twin towers and Laura’s life will never be the same again as in every time she leaves the country on her summer hols she’ll be treated like a terrorist.
Of course in England it wouldn’t be as clear cut as in Brooklyn, there would have words, rumblings, that the arrogant Yanks got what they deserved for bashing around the Arab world for decades on end. “The Great Satan”. That would make a good name for a Marling song. But Marling is apolitical, so maybe within a week she’ll have forgotten about it, forgotten about terrorism till London copped it in a hangover switch back to the 1970s and the IRA.
After the revolution brother, Baronet Marling would have taken his children deep into the Alps where they could be safe with the sound of music ringing in their ears. Then back at St. Ann’s And The Holy Trinity and there she really does look like, I mean look at the picture here, she does look like a Von Trapp, she looks like a swan with that long neck and she looks like a vision of a better, more perfect world, and we, the great unwashed stalkers, we all feel a little scrubbier, a little more unkempt and American and we are being humored not kidded with.
The performance airs on WFUV radio September 30th.
“Adieu, adieu, to ya and ya and ya”.
Grade: B-
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