Mark Eitzel, American music’s poet laureate of the alcoholic undertow, has never gotten his props. During his time with his band American Music Club he put out a number of great albums, each one more besotted than the last, and managed to write what I consider the best song (by far!) of the nineties, “Johnny Mathis’ Feet.”
So what if he brutalized me in comments following a review I wrote of a show at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C. What really hurt was his saying, “If I’m as down as you say I am – then what gives you the right to kick me?” I wasn’t kicking you, Mark, I love you man—I was just unhappy that you were moving in the direction of stripped down torch songs, which have never been my cup of meat.
Ah, but that’s bourbon under the bridge. I will always consider Eitzel a genius, what with his way of both bumming you out and making you laugh with his songs about himself and his burned-out friends. He can turn a phrase and has a surgeon’s eye for just where to put the scalpel in, and these gifts are, I think, on best display on 1991’s Everclear. It led Rolling Stone magazine to declare Eitzel the Songwriter of the Year in 1991, but didn’t up his band’s exposure any; as Eitzel sadly noted later, “The next show there were about 20 people in the audience. And they were army guys and they thought American Music Club were some righteous American freedom-fighting, cool ass Springsteen-influenced Guns N’ Roses kind of guys. And we did not rock.”
And we did not rock. Sad words, those. And inaccurate to boot, because on Everclear American Music Club does intermittently rock, in a way that brings to mind another great underrated indie band, Lambchop. Take “Crabwalk,” a herky-jerky revel that opens with the great lines, “He reels around the nightclub/Like the hubcaps off of a car/That just crashed into a sign that said/‘This way to the nightclub’” and proceeds to compare said nightclub, due to alcoholic lack of equilibrium, to the rolling deck of a ship at sea. There’s also some stuff about fishing for tires and staring down jukeboxes, if they float your boat.
“Rise” also rocks, but in a more traditional manner; Eitzel summarily compares his lover to a “store that only sells guns and knives” but includes soaring choruses that will have you thinking U2 or something. “Ex-Girlfriend” is one of the more depressing rock tunes you’ll ever hear; Eitzel keeps telling a despondent friend “Your ex-girlfriend tells me you spent all yesterday crying,” before laying down a basic human truth: “bad habits,” he sings, “make our decisions for us/You should try to remember/All you’re holding is a handful of dust.”
“Sick of Food” is a moving song sung from the point of view of a man with AIDS, and it proceeds with a grace that is a wonder to behold. “I’m sick of drink,” sings Eitzel, “So why am I so thirsty/I must have been born on the planet Mercury.” And as the song nears its end Eitzel commences shouting, “So what’ll I do with my time?/Now I wake up, and I don’t have any gravity!/ Now I wake up still walking in my sleep!/ Now I wake up, feel the world drawing away from me!” as band guitarist Vudi soars and soars on his axe.
Companion piece “The Dead Part of You” is a fast-paced lament for a friend who is coming to pieces, and it comes complete with a great guitar solo and the bile-heavy opening lines, “The price of your soul is worth less than the cab fare/That gets you home from the living end.” “There’s so little of you left,” sings Eitzel as the guitars sprint to the end of the song, only to be followed by the banjo of Dan Pearson and the beautiful “Royal Café.” Another up-tempo tune, it finds Eitzel in an uncharacteristically upbeat mood: he sings “We had a little party/Somewhere outside of Memphis” and, “I can see them all standing around the bar/With big crowns of gold on their heads” before repeating, “Are you ready to go?” over and over, “to the Royal Café?”
The over-the-top lugubrious “Jesus’ Hands” begins with Eitzel establishing his alcoholic bona fides (“I got a thirst that would make the ocean proud”) before getting down to the business of cracks forming in dams and people slipping through Jesus’ hands. “Well, I like to hang out,” he sings, “but I can tell you’re not a drinking crowd. Then he sings, “For a loser, no one can touch her,” and not even Dylan ever spilled more vitriol.
“Miracle on 8th Street” is a moody and evocative tune that opens with Eitzel singing, “Come on, let’s waste another thousand years/Sitting around your kitchen table/We’ll turn the brandy into beer/Later they’ll say, what a miracle.” After this miracle in reverse, he gets down to brass tacks: “You say I never listen to you/Well you’re right about that/But I thought that I love you/More than that.” I can recall hundreds of occasions just like this one from my twenties, when the night seemed one enormous room and everyone was drunk.
“Why Won’t You Stay?” is a slinky, R&B-tinged number undercut by Eitzel’s grandiloquent moping. “Why do you do this to me,” he sings to his sleeping companion, “Showing me all I’m good for/Is to watch you sleep/Lifeless as an angel.” He pleads and he pleads, asking the question that men and women have been asking since the beginning of time, before tucking in a lovely line, to wit: “In memory of a little girl/Who was far too much in love with the world/And who really didn’t wanna stick around/For the end.” Are those lovely words or what?
As for “The Confidential Agent,” all I know is it’s mid-tempo and the only song on the LP I’m not completely smitten with. Eitzel swiped the title from a Graham Greene thriller, and plays the part of a mysterious figure at sea. It’s far from a total loss; there is something to be said for the song’s melody, which is lovely, and for the way he ends it, alone, a man at sea: “Shore far away off the port side/Shore far away off the bow/Shore far away off the starboard side/Shore far away from now.”
The biblically inspired “What the Pillar of Salt Held Up” is a quiet and lovely tune, just Eitzel and an acoustic guitar. A song of regret and remorse for what might have been, Eitzel opens with a wide lens view: “The take-off makes no sound/It’s high and far away/Your blue sky by the moon/It takes my breath away” before getting around to addressing his lover. “Why do you choose/Why do you choose to throw/Away into the undertow/A happiness like we’ll never know.” This is Eitzel, America’s very own Morrissey, befuddled by someone who has chosen unhappiness just as he has chosen unhappiness, and when it comes to alcoholism and the arts I’m with Jack Kerouac, who once said, “I’m just a human being with a lot of shit on my heart.”
Having buried myself alive in booze, I know where Eitzel is coming from. Alcohol is a magic trick that, performed too often, ceases to work, except as an uncanny form of teleportation, which used to take me from one place to another place with no idea how I got there. Eitzel has mined plenty of fine tunes from his lurching crabwalk through the lush life; “Hello Amsterdam” with its Abba references is hilarious, as is the funky “The President’s Test for Physical Fitness,” and when it comes to profundity and laughs, there’s no topping “Johnny Mathis’ Feet.”
But Eitzel seems determined on specializing in self-immolation, and that’s his right. Like I said at the end of my live review, I just hope he puts a band as good as American Music Club together to serve as his Viking Death Ship. More importantly, I hope he lives. He’s a genius, after all, and there isn’t much good in a dead genius.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
