The Terrible Wonderful Perfection of Ms. Polly Jean Harvey

You ever witness something so unassailably exactly what it is that it makes any and all arguments about essence/existence seem so, unnecessary? No? Well, PJ Harvey is here to help you do just that.

To paraphrase Tony Montana, if truth be told, “even when she lies she tells the truth.” You had better believe it. Or not. (Photo by Kasia Meow)

In a studio in Hildesheim, Germany, in an idle moment, there appeared some German knock off of a book of David Bowie lyrics. More and likely the studio engineer’s, the book was well-thumbed and drew my interest. It’s one thing to hear/know the songs. Another thing entirely to see them in the way that they first appeared: as written words.

David Bowie was a lodestar for a lot of aesthetic efforts, mostly in what seemed to be his unquenchable interest in aesthetics. His lyrics, bits and pieces of which have become emblematic of so much more than lyrics, on the page, suddenly seemed…no other word for it, laughable.

This, rather than dim my love for the man, increased it on account of the fact that it had become clear that whatever alchemy that had been employed had been potent enough to raise the entire enterprise well above just a song, composed of verses, choruses, and lyrical renderings. It was somehow now, also, more than wordplay and snappy dressing. It was a chef’s delight where anyone can make a cake but no one can make a cake great. Bowie, in all of his strivings, managed to make great cakes.

But I’ve never seen him play live. In any case, live is where the rubber meets the road and it dawned on me that I’d maybe never have gotten as far as I did with Bowie IF I had factored in the live element. I’ve seen bands good on record die ignominious deaths while trying to recreate all of that live. Because, in the end, you can’t correct what’s wrong live when it’s live, like the Red Hot Chili Peppers using Auto-Tune to make a singer of shouter Anthony “How Is He Not Me-Too’d Already?” Kiedis.

Steely and steeled she was the very essence of what Elvis had largely only hinted at: a blessed state of not-giving-a-fuckitude.

And in light of the live element it dawns on me after decades of shows that I have only seen three perfect ones. THREE.

I’ll let that sink in while you consider that I’ve been making music since 1980. So long that I have seen thousands of shows. Moreover I’ve played, in all likelihood, thousands of shows. Shows with Jesus Lizard, The Melvins, Neurosis, Peter Brotzmann, James “Blood” Ulmer, Lydia Lunch, GBH, Anti-Nowhere League, Minor Threat, The Damned, Husker Du, Shellac, King Diamond, Celtic Frost, the Dead Kennedys, Mr. Bungle, Bad Brains, Unsane and on, and wonderfully on.

Perfect shows? Nah. Really revelatory engagements but never any exchanges where there was nothing that was more right than what transpired that night, full-on lightning in a bottle style, in front of gathered onlookers, sometimes not totaling more than 200 people.

But the very first perfect show was also my very first show of some significance and I had forgotten this until recently…maybe in the way we forget our own births. But it was in the MeatPacking District in New York’s Lower West Side, home of leather daddies and all manner of rough trade, and it was at the foot of a stage on which was playing The Plasmatics.

Singer Wendy O. Williams, electrical tape across her nipples, was grist for the perv mill but rose above it all. Not so much with the shotgun she carried, though that helped immeasurably, but by the look in her eyes. Steely and steeled she was the very essence of what Elvis had largely only hinted at: a blessed state of not-giving-a-fuckitude. A deal that had subverted the whole “sexy” girl standard. Her later suicide might have suggested as much but in 1977 when she shot up the stage and those in the front row could feel pieces of the now-shotgunned stage bounce off of their faces, the entire world changed. That’s how perfect that moment and that night was.

The second? Bad Brains, three nights in a row, at CBGBs, 1982. Every time the video shows, or clips of it circulate, inevitably I get “wuz that you?” emails because, of course, that was me. Mohawked me. Sleeve hat me. And if memory serves it was Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and the day after Christmas and each show, while standalone great, when taken in aggregate, managed to be the greatest three plus hour show ever seen.

The stage crackled with possibility, endless and extending into a future of managing to make it even one more day. A notion made even more potent when I see the video and see how many in it are now dead, claimed by time and circumstance.

Beyond that while there’s all of the bad news and worse karma accumulated year after year prior to lead singer HR’s diagnosis of bipolarity, to paraphrase the Bukowski poem about a noted suicide though, they were pretty good that day. Or those days. The stage crackled with possibility, endless and extending into a future of managing to make it even one more day. A notion made even more potent when I see the video and see how many in it are now dead, claimed by time and circumstance.

We were all pretty good that day and there isn’t a day gone by since that day that I don’t hear/feel echoes of all that those nights meant to me.

The third…well it’s much harder to write about this one given my proximity to the actual event occurrence, which was on Friday, October 11 in San Francisco. At The SF Masonic Auditorium. And the one to blame/credit? Ms. Polly Jean Harvey.

“What’s she doing anyway?” Diamanda Galas was a little peeved with the 1995 PJ Harvey, she of the To Bring You My Love record. Something about the red dress at the piano thing had set her off. But her being peeved was the gateway to me choosing to listen.

Beyond that it was also the Steve Albini reference. In the idle way that one has with engineer/producers you ask about those who you have questions about with the expectation that they will serve as a medium to some sort of greater understanding. Of…something. Anything. “Probably the best looking ugly girl I’d ever seen,” he opined before adding the kicker. “But a massively wonderful talent.”

At the To Bring You My Love show though I was impressed. Favorably too. In the meandering crossroads of life, as luck would have it, an association was also struck with her long time bandmate Rob Ellis. I don’t know how/why but I suspect it had something to do with my band at the time. She joined the pantheon of people who I dug, enough to bug Ellis’ over the years, by proxy if, for nothing else, to have her sing with me.

It never happened but I stayed vaguely aware, and interested.

Two nights ago though, in a gifted box seat, a show that I could just as easily missed as seen, I had my entire life changed. PJ Harvey was not just good. She was incandescently — and so much so it almost in equal parts horrified — brilliant. Like water in a cracked glass, the viewing eyes and listening ears of people who have played music, seek exit through shit that you’d just like to imagine you could do better.

A song. A flourish. A move. Anything.

I bemoaned much more keenly never having sung with her yet, but one thing was stunningly clear, and beyond all sane measure: she needs me about as much as she needs a balloonist.

Because while “good” shows are all well and good for the cheap seats, for those in your peerage, there must be something more. This “more” almost killed me.

It’s almost like I used to imagine heaven. As a waiting room of some permanence, pale lime green walls, fluorescent lights and an impending sense of something good whose arrival is anticipated, this live show improved on that by making perfect seem an incomplete conceit.

Even the notes that were almost sharp, or almost flat, were perfect in their almost-ness. The lights. The playing. The stage show. The emotional tone and timbre. All breaking through the veil of disbelief that covers you when you’re looking for the strings.

There were none. It was a high flying act performed by those who could fly and as bereft as it was of contrivance and pose it was as full of presence and, in all of the better senses of the word, real.

Stumbling out of the Masonic post show, I couldn’t get my hands, head or heart around what had just happened but I knew it was good. I bemoaned much more keenly never having sung with her yet, but one thing was stunningly clear, and beyond all sane measure: she needs me about as much as she needs a balloonist.

Which won’t at all stop me from wanting it but it also goes well toward making me not care so much if I get it. Yeah. It was that kind of wonderful. And having been alive to see it, I believe I could quite comfortably drop dead now. Complete in the knowledge that the Demiurge is among us.

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“What’s with you and all the Damage Girls?” Steve Von Till asked me one night when I told him that Jarboe would be singing on An Evil Heat. “They’re the only ones I can even SEE,” I told him and so it is and remains.

Get your tickets now. And don’t say you weren’t warned.

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