I’m a bit calmer now I’ve had my American Music Club inspired rant…
This is what I intended to post before I got all righteous. It’s a great live recording from the Hideout Inn, Chicago on December 6th 2002. It’s a superior audience recording, I think. Check out that setlist kids…AMC gems rub up against tasty morsels from his criminally underrated solo repertoire. When I downloaded this a few years back, I expected it to be a solo gig, but he’s accompanied by a small, sympathetic band. The material does benefit from that, too.
I really love his voice. He ain’t Pavarotti or Celine Dion…his voice can fail, go off pitch or crack mid song. On ‘Western Sky’ from the ‘Songs of Love’ live CD (fortunately still available. Buy it immediately), he chokes back tears whilst singing. In other words, his voice is real. Not pitch perfect or classically trained, but real. A voice which conveys emotions perfectly. I could not give a shit if he misses a note or two, it’s the delivery that matters and when Eitzel sings about being at the end of his tether, or full of longing or regret, you believe him. What’s the alternative? Some hermetically sealed, autotuned, ProTooled, over rehearsed, bland, multi octaved, over-melismatic ‘performance’ where empty words, written without passion, clang against generic, laboratory tested Muzak? Not for me, thanks. I’ll take the middle aged, balding guy with the weird guitar who’s lived every note of his music.
Right. Explain this to me. Why, in the name of all that is holy, are ‘California’ and ‘United Kingdom’ by American Music Club not available on CD? Let me get this straight…I can walk into one of the four Record Shops still open in the UK and buy the entire James Blunt* back catalogue, but two of the finest records of the 80s languish in some kind of vinyl purgatory? You have GOT to be kidding….
Well, here’s the thing. Keen students of BPFE will notice the link to AMCs mainman Mark Eitzel’s blog over on the right hand side of the page. I was delighted to see he was writing and added him to the blogroll without really paying too much attention to the content of his posts. A few days ago I read them.
Bloody hell.
If you thought his lyrics were good (which of course, they are) then his prose is absolutely stellar. He writes about often inconsequential things, but with such an eye for detail and with such eloquence that he draws you in so deeply, you’ll struggle to re-surface. You probably won’t want to either.But the saddest thing is that (as he details in one of his posts) he has to write and record to keep food on the table. Now of course, the vast percentage of writers and musicians have to do that, but none of them are as good as Mark Eitzel. Go on, name three writers that can construct a complete world and fill it full of emotion in three minutes or less, that still HAVE to work to live? You can’t can you?
It’s a dark place that Eitzel inhabits. Love is unrequited, damaging or in the past in most of his work. People mention Bukowski a lot in connection with him – a lazy comparison but still valid. The worldview is similar and the cinematographer’s eye is common to both, but ol’ Chuck couldn’t come up with heartbreaking melodies over beautiful, idiosyncratic music.
Whenever I hear AMC, something weird happens to me…after a while, all I can think about is Eitzel, alone, in a bedsit (above a bar, natch) drunk on really cheap scotch. And my overpowering desire is to take him to a nice, sunlit park and buy him a really big sandwich. I really need to change my therapist….
(A live version of 'Here they Come Down ' from 'United Kingdom')
But back to the music…it comes as no surprise that I am not the first person to fawn over him as he won The Rolling Stone songwriter of the year award for 1991. That is what they call damming by faint praise. I’d really urge you to listen to his music if you haven’t already and buy whatever’s available. It’s pretty much all essential and needs re-issuing. Rykodisc where are you? ‘California’ is an amazing piece of work and ‘United Kingdom’ aint too far behind. Satisfaction is guaranteed. I was going to put up an Eitzel solo gig, but when I saw how little AMC stuff was around, I thought I’d better do the decent thing and post this stuff. The ME live show will be up in a week or two, so don’t fret.
I could gush embarrassingly for hours, so I’ll stop now. Suffice to say Mark Eitzel is one of America’s foremost writers of Popular Music and the purse keepers of the Music Industry are doing him a terrible disservice.
