Album Review: "It's Messy, Vol. 1," Harvey Gold

            The rock critic Robert Christgau was, and remains, a skeptic of art rock, which was one of the things I took slight issue with as one of his teen readers in the 1970s. But his discernment in this area also meant that when he came across an art rock band he enjoyed, attention to it would be well-rewarded.

            One of such bands was an outfit called Tin Huey, out of Akron, where Christgau traveled in 1978 to report on what he believed to be an incipient post-punk “scene.” From conversations I subsequently had with some of the Ohio musicians mentioned in Bob’s April 1978 Village Voice piece, these lonesome and struggling bands thought the idea that they constituted a “scene” or anything like it was ludicrous. But, you know, this is where critics come in. And for some of the bands that held it together, the piece constituted very good publicity indeed.

            I’d already heard of Pere Ubu when the piece ran, and I found Bob’s description of Tin Huey particularly scintillating. It’s worth quoting at length: “Tin Huey's music is also impure, but in a different way. With influences like Robert Wyatt, Ornette Coleman, Henry Cow, and Faust (the group, not the hero), they're Akron's esoterics, and like Liam Sternberg, who insists that no New Wave can break in 4/4, they value technique. This is not the kind of band I usually like. But where most groups use difficult keys and meters to get closer to Atlantis, or transubstantiation, Tin Huey seemed to be seeking the eternal secret of the whoopee cushion. What they did was Good Music partly because it was Very Funny, and it looked as zany as it sounded. This was a band whose remarkable young saxophonist, Ralph Carney, wasn't above playing a duck call or using his head as a percussion device, a band whose Robert Wyatt cover was the Monkees' 'I'm a Believer. Newcomer Chris Butler added R&B grounding on three different instruments, contributed several of the best songs, and brought along a Waitress. And they stopped for breath about as often as the Ramones, not counting two blown fuses.”

            As a post-adolescent who was in fact as besotted with Art Bears and Wyatt as he was with The Ramones, I was more than ready when Warner Records put out Tin Huey’s 1979 debut album Contents Dislodged During Shipment, which Bob praised as “art rock that rocks.” The LP kicked off with the Akron crew’s aforementioned gloss on Wyatt’s rearrangement of the Neil Diamond/Monkees classic “I’m A Believer.” Already this was my kind of Rock Modernism. The originals that followed were a unique blend of quirk and hook, with lyrics that toggled between skewed social commentary (Butler’s working-class hero anthem “Hump Day”), Dada accompaniment for calliope music (“Puppet Wipes”) and smirky but ultimately good-natured japes that don’t play as well as they did then (“Chinese Circus,” “Pink Berets;” numbers that possibly inspired Christgau’s observation “ if their humor is collegiate, I’m a sophomore”).

            As it happened, if what I was told by the band’s one-time manager David Sonnenberg was truly true, my Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™ and I were part of a very happy very few: we were two out of, um, 1,200 individuals in the United States who bought and enjoyed that record. (Sonnenberg, with whom Ron and I were working on a couple of script treatments, waved this statistic in front of our faces as a way of mocking us. He was like that.) When I met and befriended Paul Wexler, who produced the album, he too expressed disappointment that it laid such an egg in the market. Talk about a cult band.

            But the Hueys persevered. Chris Butler his pop pay dirt with The Waitresses (whose saga ultimately resolved as something of a tragicomedy) and he and his bandmates reconvened sporadically over the years to release new and archival stuff, and even play out. In 2003 they played at the Lower East Side new music venue Tonic, an amazing show at which I got far too drunk. (I would do the same in 2006 at the Hatfield and the North show at Bowery Poetry Club; in both cases the end result was me slobbering to some band member or other “Youse guysh are show great” after the set.)

            In recent years Butler has put out some truly epic stuff — I wrote about his terrific Easy Life here a few years back — and also reconvened, in the combo Half Cleveland, with Harvey Gold, Tin Huey’s multi-instrumentalist and singer, who composed or co-composed several of the band’s crunchier tunes. (The last cut on Contents, “New York’s Finest Dining Experience,” features the genius chorus chant “Everybody knows that money talks and talking sucks.”) One of the notable features of Huey was that all of its frontline were songwriters, and solid-to-great ones, with individual styles that were companionable but not homogeneous.

            Gold has a solo album out, It’s Messy, Vol. 1, and in these days of isolation and confusion I reckon it might be one of those things that has gone under the radar of even the most cultivated music lovers.

            From its title on, It’s Messy is something of a Lion In Winter work. On the opening track, “Your Side of the Room,” Gold sings “No more lessons to be learned/just mistakes to recognize.” But the bounce of the tune, the comfort food of the chords, provides contrapuntal uplift. Like a few other tracks here, this one reminds us that before Canterbury and Pink Floyd and all, The Beatles were actually the first art-rock bands.

            Gold has a lot of influences, and one, I suspect, has to be the James Gang, the roots-rock-cum-power trio that came out of, where else, Kent, Ohio, next door to Akron. But It’s Messy isn’t eclectic in a show-offy way; Gold is doing what he knows, and he knows a lot. It’s certainly a calculated risk to re-conceive the Beatles’ “I’ve Just Seen A Face” as something like a dirge, but Gold is such a smart arranger that he utterly pulls it off, his dour Everyman voice making the prospect of not being able to forget that face an unusually ambivalent one. (Lest you get the impression that this is an entirely downbeat work, I should add that the record brims with humor, albeit largely of the sardonic variety.) 

            His bandmates here, over the course of twelve tracks, include Huey players including Butler, Michael Aylward, the great drummer Stuart Austin, and on a single song, the genius reeds player Ralph Carney, who died in 2017, very tragically and way too soon. (In the years after Contents, Carney worked with Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Jonathan Richman, the B-52s and many, many other luminaries, including the Black Keys, whose drummer Patrick Carney was his nephew.)

            “A bracing dose of art rock,” is a phrase my old bandmates and I used to toss around for laughs, but it’s a valid category. It’s Messy Vol. 1 is in part just that thing, but also quite a bit more. You can purchase it here.

Comments

[k evans]

thank you! your review covers SO much territory in a reasonable space & your descriptables are wonderful.

[Titch]

Thanks - this was really interesting. Pere Ubu was the only name I recognised here!