Is it possible that the best lyricist (and one of the best songwriters) in poor, benighted America is a guy most people have never heard of? Mark Eitzel, formerly the unjustly neglected frontman of the unjustly neglected American Music Club, hasn’t been unjustly neglected by the press. In 2008, The Guardian declared him “America’s greatest living lyricist,” and in 1991, Rolling Stone honored him as Songwriter of the Year.
He would have an Academy Award as well, but the people who hand out those golden Oscar Statuettes have an inexplicable prejudice against people who’ve never had anything to do with a motion picture. (Not true: “Blue and Grey Shirt” was used in the 2023 film Fellow Travelers.)
Yet despite the accolades, he labors away in semi-anonymity, singing his confessional songs in that one-in-a-million baritone voice, the Poet Laureate of the Alcoholic Undertow. He’s written more brilliant songs than I can count, including the Best American Song of the Past Fifty Years, “Johnny Mathis’ Feet,” a sweeping and anthemic blockbuster in which Johnny himself takes a look at Eitzel’s songs and tells him where he’s gone wrong:
“And with a wave of his jewel-encrusted hand
Across the glittering Las Vegas scene he said
‘You gotta learn how to disappear in the silk and amphetamine’”
I have my favorite LPs by the crushingly depressed comedian credited with inventing Slowcore, and they include American Music Club’s Everclear (1991), Mercury (1993), and 1994’s pre-AMC-breakup San Francisco. But I also have a sentimental favorite, the 1995 EP “Hello Amsterdam,” which shares two songs with San Francisco but also includes several songs that give it real entertainment appeal.
The title track is upbeat and a pure pleasure. I THINK it’s about a failed AMC gig or gigs in Mokum, and Eitzel is particularly obsessed with how the band’s ABBA covers fell flat. “Hello Amsterdam,” he sings, “You didn’t like my Waterloo/Hello Amsterdam I wish I had something to offer you.” And “Didn’t even like us/When we played Dancing Queen.”
And as the song comes to a close, he throws in some scathing political commentary: “We came from America so you could share in the pride/Guilt, greed, and genocide” before delivering the self-mocking chant “Superstar/Superstar/Superstar.”
“I Just Took My Two Sleeping Pills and Now I’m Like a Bridegroom Standing at the Altar” is a stone classic. That wonderful title tells the story, or part of it anyway, and the song features slow verses and fast and anthemic choruses. You also get a surprising amount of dissonant guitar mayhem, but what you mostly get is a clinical study in self-hatred.
“And every day I meet more people that I’ll forget,” sings Eitzel, “And every day I become more like someone/That you should forget.” Eitzel wants a new life, a life where he’s sober enough to tell you what city he’s calling from, but his new life resides in the dreams that won’t come because those sleeping pills are standing him up like the bride in Gram Parsons’ “$1,000 Wedding.”
The very up-tempo “The President’s Test for Physical Fitness” is a lark that gives Eitzel the opportunity to take his self-loathing into the realms of pure comedy, and comes complete with a hit parade of great lines, starting at the very beginning:
“Once upon a time me and Vudi [an AMC guitarist] met
A major American rock star in a shop
We were immediately jealous of his hair
And his fuel-injected sports cock.”
The chorus (which varies throughout) is a gas—my favorite variation goes:
“How do you pass the President’s Test
I swear one day they’ll build a monument
To the man with the most reasons for his embarrassment.”
And how can you go wrong with a line like “I said, “The only thing that we’re good for/Is being forgotten”? Or the other variation on the chorus that goes,
“How did you pass the President’s Test
Even if I can’t match your ability to compete
At least give me a chance to cheat.”
It’s an anthem for all the 98-pound weaklings in the world, but the 98-pound weakling that is Mark Eitzel scores a lot of points in this exercise in sarcasm as he lambasts the anonymous rock star mentioned at the song’s beginning. Perhaps the funniest is the way he describes the guy’s cock as a “useless surprise.” And he even has him extolling the pleasures of golf!
How much get-up-and-go does this song have? During the fadeout, a guy screams, “16 cylinders!”
American Music Club follows up with a couple of slow ones. “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” proceeds at a crawl, and is all piano and breathy vocals—it’s lovely, but too cocktail lounge for my tastes. This is Slowcore with a vengeance, but here’s the twist—never has Eitzel sounded so…optimistic and spiritual, mystical even:
“How it will astound you
That the glow of your being
Outshines every star
You’ll feel part of every mountain sea and shore
You can hear
From far and near
A word you’ve never, never heard before…”
It’s a revelation, and I find myself listening to it again and again despite the fact that I’m no fan of crawling piano ballads.
“The Thorn in My Side Is Gone” is a slow one, too, but unlike the previous number, it’s anything but stripped down. Fact is, it’s drenched in strings. It’s an alternative version of the song that appears on San Francisco, which I prefer because it’s quieter and the strings are replaced by a cricket song, allowing the spotlight to fall directly on Eitzel, who sings the song in an emotionally devastating hush.
It makes the version on “Hello Amsterdam” sound like melodrama—Eitzel throws everything he has into his vocals, but in combination with the strings, it reeks of overkill.
Solution to dilemma: never listen to the San Francisco version! That way, you’ll never know what you could be getting, which is a good thing because when push comes to shove, the “Hello Amsterdam” version has a lot going for it.
Closer “Elbow Deep” is a fetching experiment—it’s like the guys got together and said, “Let’s see if we can produce an American Music Club song that sounds nothing like American Music Club.”
And they pull it off—what you get is a catchy pop love song, with some fisting (maybe) thrown in: “Now I’m elbow deep in you/I can’t believe the things I do, no.” The song sounds airbrushed; its structure is seductive yet alien, and it features a sonic push, complete with lots of spiffy guitar work that sounds nothing like American Music Club’s guitars.
It works, even if Eitzel’s lyrics aren’t his best, and even if I can’t escape the suspicion that what we have here is an experimental collaboration between Eitzel and a completely other band.
There are all manner of tremendous American lyricists out there working now—John Darnielle of Mountain Goats, Ian Felice of the Felice Brothers, The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, and Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner all come to mind. And there are many, many more.
But Mark Eitzel is special and may just be the best of them—anyone who can toss off the lines “Don’t tell me how to tell the truth/You’re like a store that only sells guns and knives” (from “Rise”) is a genius in my book. Ditto the opening lines of “Crabwalk”:
“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’”
I don’t know how he does it. It’s possible he’s the reincarnation of John Berryman. Maybe he studied magic as a kid. Unfortunately, he failed to learn the only trick that matters—how to disappear into the silk and amphetamine. That’s how you become a star—genius is all too often just not enough.
Just ask Johnny Mathis.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
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