I read in Smithsonian magazine that the Andromeda galaxy is on a 60-miles-per-second collision course with the Milky Way. Okay, so it won’t be much of a collision, and our sun’s luminosity will make Earth uninhabitable before the galactic transformation, which is billions of years off. Still, it got me thinking on our need to one day leave this precious rock, which in turn called to mind one of my favorite songs since humans first made sounds, “Countdown” by Rush. Released as the closing song on Signals in 1982, it’s a tribute to NASA’s creation of the space shuttle Columbia. The song’s mating of words to subject to music is perfection itself, capturing both the heroic nature of flight and the grandeur of a space launch.
No other treatment could achieve the power, immediacy, scope, and scale of the thoughts and physical realities embodied in “Countdown.” It’s one of the great accomplishments of music and sound. You won’t find it on Chronicles, the only compendium of Rush’s conceptual clips so far, quite possibly because the song is so complete without the visuals. But you can watch and listen to it right here.
9 March 2014
The Posies headlined a 4-band marathon at Neumos Crystal Ball Reading Room on January 10, the second night in a weeklong celebration of the club, which opened as Moe’s Mo’Roc’N Café in 1994 and managed to start a life as Neumos (“New Moe’s”) in 2003. Could there be a more fitting band for a Seattle club with grunge roots and a pun for a name than the first and most deserving of the Northwest’s rock acts to get swept up in the major record-label rush of the ’90s?
As it happened, last year marked 20 years since the release of the third Posies album, Frosting on the Beater, which spawned the band’s biggest hit, “Dream All Day” (No. 4 on Billboard‘s Modern Rock charts). So the Neumos celebration seemed an auspicious opportunity for frontmen Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer to revisit the LP—start to finish—with the album’s original rhythm section of drummer Mike Musburger and bassist Dave Fox.
And it was a great show. Every song has stood the test of time. Many of them have held their own as concert standouts across most of The Posies’ career: “Solar Sister,” “Definite Door,” “Lights Out,” “Burn & Shine,” “Coming Right Along.” Auer and Stringfellow, now in their 40s, remain in firm possession of fine and very different voices. Auer’s is softer and sweeter; Stringfellow’s is more piercing and more powerful. They still know how to charge a room with their guitars, and Musburger and Fox showed themselves as good or better on their instruments than they were in the day. Together the foursome whipped up a happy hurricane of sound, by turns melodic, angular, gentle, and fierce.
Solid songwriting, pop chops, and dovetailing voices are important ingredients in The Posies’ concoctions. But the catalysts that put the power in their pop are amps notched to 11 and rhythms pounded out by drums that will trample the whole works underfoot at the slightest misstep. The Posies make music on the edge, and they walk it every time they take the stage.
Auer and Stringfellow have active musical careers outside of The Posies, both together and alone: Auer solo and in his duo with Tiz Aramini, Dynamo Royale (record due this year); Stringfellow solo and with the otherwise Norwegian punk-pop outfit The Disciplines; and both as latter-day members of Big Star from 1993 until founder Alex Chilton’s death in 2010. But it was in their songs for The Posies that their individual musical identities first found expression and definition. And in The Posies, at least, their biggest themes have been overcoming self doubt, finding one’s identity, and making one’s way in the world. Those themes power Frosting through and through, from “Definite Door” (stolid loner without a net) and “Coming Right Along” (can’t see the thriving forest for the bleak midwinter trees) to “When Mute Tongues Can Speak” (family’s where you find it) and “Earlier Than Expected” (on the travails of growing up too fast).
There’s a darkness that finds healthy expression in Posies tunes. I say “healthy” because it’s honestly expressed, not affected, and because the guys work so hard to put their darkness in context—to keep it from dominating and likewise to avoid coming off as disingenuously cheerful. As Stringfellow once sang, with all the fury in his body, “There’s an upside—there has to be an upside!” He hadn’t found it, but he left not a shred of doubt that he would. It’s the harmonious commingling of light and dark, genuinely upbeat and genuinely serious, that most appeals to me in Posies music. Even if their words aren’t always as earnest as I’d have them, the music always is—and both words and music are always honest. Truth in advertising, more than what you came for, whole in many meaningful respects, ever striving for more beauty, more adventure, more fun, more range, more directness, more ways of expressing the lives and concerns of the men behind the microphones.
In a live setting, of course, that means Auer—a stunning guitarist by any measure—indulges his taste for noise more than he does on record, scrambling solos and leaning hard into dissonance and abrasive feedback. In this and other ways, Posies shows are rougher at the edges than I’m looking for. And yet I nevertheless crave the energy that’s unique to their concerts! If that means suffering through tortured strings and heavy spitting (a signature byproduct of Stringfellow’s rock ‘n’ roll overdrive), then so be it.
Musburger, decked out in pork pie hat, striped pants, and a Who shirt, performed with a combination of force and precision that just about stole the show. Keith Moon would have been proud. At one point, Auer turned to him between songs and said, simply but with a pointedness that reflected fresh astonishment, “You’re good.”
For about 10 years, The Posies’ bass and drum chairs have been filled by Matt Harris and Darius Minwalla, musicians as solid as any Auer and Stringfellow have shared stages with. But great as they are, this show confirmed for me that Musburger and Fox are the rhythm section for this band, reinforcing the group’s twin strains of classic rock (Musburger) and classic pop (Fox).
The band played six additional songs after the album, four of which post-dated the Musburger-Fox lineup; it was a treat to hear new pop from old Posies. The new cuts, from 2012’s excellent Blood/Candy, included “So Caroline,” the power-pop-meets-vaudeville “Licenses to Hide” (with the Seattle singer-songwriter Shelby Earle stepping up for the song’s second vocal), “She’s Coming Down Again!” (a gritty novella masquerading as a song), and “Glitter Prize,” one of several Posies songs to address depression with candor.
I would love to have heard a few outtakes from Frosting, especially “Fall Song” and “Looking Lost.” The former is an ode to nostalgia (the order of the day for this show) and one of the great blissfully despondent love songs. The latter is a great example of forceful mid-tempo sludge serving a lyric; too often in in the ’90s it was the other way around: grunge called the shots. Versions of both songs appear on 1998’s Success, but those lack the fire of the Musburger-Fox performances of six years prior.
Not to take issue with anything they did play. The other two songs brought us back to the band’s 1990 DGC Records debut, Dear 23: a run through Auer’s jazzy, McCartney-esque “Mrs. Green” (one of several extended wind-ups) and Stringfellow’s show-closing “Any Other Way,” in which a collision of irony and dejection produces a brief and luscious cacophony. At the end of the proverbial day, no less than at the close of this evening of music, it’s that vocabulary of directness and immediacy that makes rock music so exhilarating and so rejuvenating. The Posies have their own special dialect, and it carries well.
For $10, you can watch and listen to The Posies’ recent Neumos performance using the Lively app for mobile devices. They’re also offering—for free—a set by Ken & Jon at the Lively studios. There’s more info (but no music) at the Lively website.
9 February 2014
He did listen patiently to my enthusiasm for D.H. Lawrence, remarking simply, ‘The shape of a poem by Lawrence is the shape of the words on the page; the shape of a poem by Yeats is the shape of the instrument on which the poem is played.’ I saw instantly what he meant, and asked him if he thought form so important. ‘Poetry rhymes all along the lines, not only at the ends,’ he pointed out. Talking about poetry with Vernon was just that: it wasn’t saying how bad so-and-so’s book was, or comparing royalty rates, or swapping gossip about famous drunks or love-affairs. He brought an immediate dignity to the subject, or rather he made it dignified simply by assuming it could never be anything else.
—Philip Larkin, in Vernon Watkins 1906-1967 (Faber and Faber, 1970), edited by Leslie Norris
22 December 2013
