Make Mine Mansuetude!
The new record by BUNUEL was murder to make. Almost literally.
Trigger Warning: for those readers who absolutely HATE when I write about music, you might want to skip this week.
You ever start driving a story and then midway through, after surveying the audience in attendance, you realize that there’s no way you can comfortably finish the story?
You can’t go forward with it since it will inevitably crash into an ending that your listeners are temperamentally ill-suited to hear. You can’t stop it since that will reveal that you think as much. And you damned sure can’t go back as that’s toothpaste that won’t fit back in that tube.
At this point a quick prayer might be helpful, a request for divine intervention in the shape or form of a sudden interruption. Barring that the options are scant. For YOU.
For me? I’m forever telling stories like these and unless the repercussions are legal, there’s only one way to go when here and it’s, as my Italian friends are fond of saying: siempre indiretto. Full fucking speed ahead.
“The heroin had made me so sleepy…” I said to an audience of middle-aged winetasters at a winery where I’d been invited to do a “comedy” show. “…[T]hat about the only thing that made sense was to crawl under my desk and do a few rails of meth. Off the floor.” They “laughed” and “laughed” as the story wended its way along.
What I heard was this, “are these lyrical confessions to things that are going to make me feel bad for making music with you?”
When did the laughter stop (because you know it was bound to)?
Right when they realized that while I was funny, I really wasn’t joking. So the stories about arson, drugs, violent assaults and outré sexcapades weren’t so much structured for comedic impact as they were a form of confession. Totally hilarious. For me. Maybe, and based on not ever being invited back to any venue where I’ve ever done stand up before, not so much for them.
In any case for me, making music is like being invited back, again, and again. And again.
Which is why it’s also so fitting that the birth of BUNUEL, came at the instigation of a man who, when I first set eyes on him, I wanted to kill him. Pierpaolo Capovilla, bass player extraordinaire, talked through an entire set of a show I was playing with someone else. In striking distance from the stage.
Unclear to me why I didn’t engage in my traditional audience adjustment in the face of his chatter but it later brought me into the BUNUEL fold and while Capovilla didn’t make it through to the newest record Mansuetude, the template had been established. At least insofar as the channeling of murderous rage into music goes.
And finding a musical compatriot like guitarist Xabier Iriondo was special too.
“Your lyrics…” he once started to ask, his intent clear. Or at least I thought it was. What I heard was this, “are these lyrical confessions to things that are going to make me feel bad for making music with you?”
I believe I laughed. Like I laughed at the winery crowd. Because at least he had the perspicacity to understand that the words on the page maybe, very possibly, were not just words on a page but were instead drawn from a wellspring of dark that he was wanting to get his head around. Legally at the very least.
Which made me think of Little Red Riding Hood and the queries for the Grandma-disguised wolf. What big teeth you have Grandma indeed. I mean what dark lyrics I had and yeah, they were much better to eat you with. Though, if truth be told, I’d be the last to know.
“[W]ell it’s because you were crazy,” [she said]
“Yeah. Crazy like a crab,” I said. “Or a fox. Or whatever.”
You see insight is at a premium and while we imagine insight is 20/20, that can’t always be the case. An ex, one of the ones I might have raged against in a previous bout of lyric writing, got my head right around this. The conversation, predictable at first, ended up where these things usually tend to: why’d we ever break up anyway?
I didn’t ask it. But it was suggested and she was in, both feet first, “well it’s because you were crazy.”
As a punchline “crazy” doesn’t come close to telling the truth about anything and more often than not is used as a compliment a lot of times these days. So I scoffed.
“Yeah. Crazy like a crab,” I said. “Or a fox. Or whatever.”
Then seeing I wasn’t getting it she set about laying it down. Bullet point by bullet point.
Sleeping with loaded guns? Check. Threatening the Manson Family? Check. Unscientific science experiments with chemicals leading to passing out in front of a Beavis and Butthead Moron-a-thon for six hours? Check, check, check.
Moreover when these are the roads most traveled the fellow travelers you meet up with are bound to be bullet points as well. Figuratively. Literally. Karl, who was a cutter, but with a twist: he exclusively cut his cock. With a scalpel. Right before he OD’d his way, four times in a row, to a much desired suicide.
Or Mr. 187 (187: the police code for murder) whose recent death is the only reason I even feel comfortable mentioning it now.
Or the drug traffickers, pimps, collections thugs, arsonists, car thieves and murderers. About the only big bad wolves I didn’t invite in were sex criminals because them I cannot abide.
She was right. Who, in their right mind, would sign on to any of that and expect the outcome that eventually came out of all of that?
No one and so when asked about the lyrics and the underpinning reality of wherever those words came from, in response I just looked at Xabier and smiled. I mean what could be said that hadn’t already?
So in doing press for BUNUEL’s fourth record, when asked about the lyrical oeuvre, I just try to get by with that same sort of smile. Whether it works or not is not my interest. Like the Demiurge who turns eternal ideas into the sense world, I’m just digging on the unexpurgated horror dictated to me by those for whom this is just…daily business.
Xabier nodded. And then along with Franz and Andrea created a seed bed for all of this psychopathology that now fits neatly and not-so-quietly on cassettes, CDs, vinyl and digital. Where you can enjoy it quite comfortably without fear of reprisal.
Which is more than I can say for myself. I mean with what big ears all of these Grandmas have…I’ll be lucky to make it to the end of the story. And yet…here we are.
“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.
