They Don’t Make a Cure For That (Maria McKee, Joe’s Pub)

I don’t think I like Maria McKee  for the same reason everyone else does.

The singer/songwriter has deservedly earned an intense, devoted following.  Why?  Front and center, there’s that voice, spot-on and able to belt everything thrown at it out of the park.  It’s a clean, round sound, but not the diarrheic smoothness of those American I-dullards; there’s more gut and heart than diaphragm.  And her songwriting so naturally complements her singing that it recalls something I once heard John Sayles ascribe to Slim Pickens: “These words fit my mouth.”

She also effortlessly straddles genres.  After establishing herself with the Los Angeles-based “cowpunk” outfit Lone Justice, her solo CD You Gotta Sin to Get Saved infused her rootsy tendencies with a broad dose of soul, mixing originals with (two!) Van Morrison covers and a custom-written Jayhawks song.  Though it swung for the fences a bit too often, it was smart enough to be sad, and delivered a classic: the twisted, abused-wife anthem “I Forgive You.”  A little bit country, a little bit rock-n-roll, equally comfortable with spare folk and fully-orchestrated R&B, she provides something for everyone without making albums that sound like pandering pu pu platters.

But why do I like McKee?  Bitch is crazy.

She cracked her bat on 1996’s Life is Sweet, going from heartbreak to head-break, letting her croon croak and crumble.  A positively psychotic alt-rock no-excuses venture into introspection, Sweet relieved McKee of the traditional music she’d been hiding behind and let her engage in schizoid inner dialogues while fuzzy guitars fought with string arrangements.  Coming a year after Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill, it escapes being a bandwagon confessional simply because it is genuine, demanding and odd:  Little Maria was cutting up and down, not side-to-side; this wasn’t a play for attention.

I love that record, and it needs the love.  There’s something about self-destruction in an artist that inspires allegiance; some of it is surely the power of the suicide scribe, the intimate connection of last words, the feeling that every note is absolutely necessary.

Life is Sweet opens – OPENS – with a song called “Scarlover” during which she sings:

It begins again and again there’s nothing we can say
My brain has derailed my hands are benailed
You fall across my body like a death shroud
Your wound was plain like mine no ragged edges well defined
We grew to war like a bloom reaching toward the light
It felt so brutal so transdermal so alive felt so alive felt so alive
Hear the sound the sick sound of us clicking feel the skin between us thicker, thickening
As the first cut relieves believe me I’m a scarlover too and I’m full of scars like you

Then there’s “Absolutely Barking Stars” (“I’ve tried to trap her in my head, but she knows where the light comes in,” “The bitch is quick, I’ve tried to trip her up.  She’s full of tricks and blends so sticky in my blood.”); “I’m Not Listening,” where she’s wailing against her own music; and so on, until finally, the title track – about being unwanted, out of place, unhappy – melts into a joyous outburst prohibitively called “Afterlife.”

Sweet doesn’t come off as indulgent so much as desperate, and McKee’s words are saved from the stuff of bad teen poetry because she has the talent and instrument with which to articulate her feelings.  Whenever she does step back into a pretty, simple song, it’s as  disturbing as Marcia Cross’ smile.

It shouldn’t have shocked anyone that after Sweet – released on McKee/Lone Justice’s longtime label, Geffen – McKee didn’t put out a thing for years.  I always pictured her in an attic, somewhere, chewing away at a straitjacket.  When she did resurface, it was to do passionate but straightforward takes on roots music during the Oh Brother Where Art Thou bluegrass bump (She contributed a take on “Wayfaring Stranger” to the Songcatcher soundtrack).

So 2003’s High Dive came as a complete surprise.  In the seven-year stretch between CDs, McKee apparently fought with Geffen for creative freedom, left to start her own label, got married.  The resultant work reeked of too much time in development, suffered from overattention.  The song “Life is Sweet” was again included (as it was on a subsequent live recording, making three albums in a row featuring the tune).  On the Sweet CD, it was a simple, quiet, girl-n-guitar strummer, one that didn’t even hit all six strings.  Here, it was smothered by layers of unnecessary instrumentation, buried by bullshit Broadway bombast. 

Though not the most artistically successful album, at least Dive wasn’t some watered-down failure.  It showed that McKee hadn’t pushed aside her eccentricities, that she was going to continue being Maria McKee as long as this world would have her.  The CD’s final track, “Worry Birds,” is a big dark wow, beginning “And if you die...” and countering its wordly contemplation of inadequacy and uselessness with purposeful urgency.

And that, I think, is what makes McKee so special:  In this time of digital OCD, of disastrous professionalism, it’s important to remember that flaws are far more interesting than perfection.

Her new album, Peddlin’ Dreams is, with a couple exceptions, a gorgeous piece of work.  Better, cleaner, more immediate than High Dive, and more even-keeled and accessible than Life is Sweet, it’s a triumph of artistic maturity and, to some extent, sanity.

Which means it’s a little less attractive to those of us who like our Maria not on the edge, but over it.

It’s unfair to demand musical martyrs, but I can’t say that I wasn’t just a little saddened when McKee was allowed to simply wander on stage instead of, say, being wheeled in on some Lecteresque restraintmobile. 

I was already a little disappointed in the venue; I’d never been in Joe’s Pub, before, but it was clear that the place was designed to discourage Crazy at all costs.  The bulk of the floor was jammed tight with tables, busy-looking waitstaff claiming the narrow aisles as theirs.  A raised bar ran across the back of the room, and there was only enough space there for a crowd to gather three or four deep.  It’s bad enough having to remain on your ass through a show – sitting is just so VH1 – but the swank “pub” (which, thank goodness, poorly polices its two-drink minimum) also served dinner throughout.

At one point, McKee looked down at a table and said, “Ooo... Whatcha eatin’?”  But no one seemed to worry about having Little Miss “Scarlover” in such proximity to sharp utensils.  Sigh.

She took the stage in a wrinkled black skirt that would do any good Goth girl proud, and with her thick hair and fair, puffy features took turns looking Bad Seed and hippie earth mother.  But McKee was even-keeled and controllably daft; marriage might be the perfect thing for her.  “It took me forty years to find the right band, and forty years to find the right man,” she said.  Her spouse, bassist/guitarist Jim Akin, and two others now back her in what she called her “hus-band.” 

She’s obviously comfortable with the arrangement, though the arrangements are rather basic; only guitarist Jerry Andrews brought anything to the show, adding playful fills and solos.  The bass and drums were as dull as any bar band’s – and badly, bluntly amped (which might have been the result of the acoustic foam jutting out behind the performers).  But the lazy orchestrations, heavy on the downbeat, did McKee’s songs no favors.

It’s a good thing, then, that the songs are so strong.  The set list drew almost exclusively from her last two albums.  The High Dive material, freed from the endless overdubbing – it was so nice to hear her sing the title track without hearing a horn underscore the line “I’m blowing my trumpet” – sounded much better than it did on record.  And the stuff of Dreams was impressive indeed. 

What’s interesting about most of the songs on Peddlin’ Dreams is their overwhelming reluctance to exist.  “Turn Away” might well be the prettiest thing you hear this year, a beautiful, defeated plea for a lover’s return that resists the easy resolution of a climax.  She begins by biting her tongue (“Damn the words, I’ve said too much again.  You think I would’ve learned by now.”), then reaches a point where she stops strumming and quietly taps her guitar.  You’re not sure she’s going to bother going on. 

She makes sure hope is checked at every turn, offering world-weary advice:  Back on Life is Sweet she sang, “Everybody gets to be somebody, sometime... Maybe tomorrow.”  Now, in “People in the Way” she “used to dream pretty, now I dream I’m alive” and implores mothers to “tell your kids every day they’re just people in the way;”  on the title track, she opens, “You’re gonna get plucked you little bird... You’re gonna get shucked you starry-eyed little shrimp,” and warns, “Don’t look at the girl with gold in her cheeks, she’s an oasis of places that you’ll never see.”  The sunny-sounding “The Horse Life” drips with regret of innocence lost, recounting a premature roll in the hay.  “A pocket full of eels,” it bounces, “So easy with our sin.”

Again, it’s McKee’s talent and honesty that saves this from being a self-serving, bitter bore.  The music and her voice are so able they provide constant reproach to the self-doubt that would otherwise consume the album.  They’re not enough to redeem the two dreadful songs written by husband Akin, though, and her identity is so proven that you wish the album didn’t start with the Joni Mitchell-like “Season of the Fair” or finish with a pair of covers (Neil Young’s “Barstool Blues,” which she performed solo, last night, and the ‘60s nugget “(You Don’t Know) How Glad I am”).

Appropriately enough, she ended her main set with “Everyone’s Got a Story,” a rousing ditty about... how awful it is to perform music.  It’s “just the thing to bring me down.”  She sings that she’s “dull with thoughts of suicide,” that “I’ve never felt so lonely, I’ve never felt so doomed,” and asks, “What am I doing, spinning my wheels, to end up playing a dump like this?”  But, of course, McKee turned it into some sort of inevitable celebration:  She sings because she must.  “Someone’s got to get on stage,” she concluded, and as she reminded herself of that, her band filed out, leaving her alone up there to enjoy and dread the moment.

It’s that desperate necessity that – despite the venue, despite the pedestrian band, despite McKee’s cold (she sprayed her throat between most every song, but sounded fine) – made the show worthwhile.  There was nothing casual about her performance.  The only song she performed from Life is Sweet was its title track (which one crowd member claimed to have driven 400 miles to hear).  It was just the singer and her acoustic guitar, and it was transcendent.  Life is sweet, bittersweet.  She might not be mad enough to end it all, anymore, but she’s just crazy enough to keep going.

Tour dates are here.  Most of the remaining scheduled dates are in Europe, but she told the sold out house last night that she’d be back “real soon.”

She uses the word “panache” in two different songs on this CD, which drives me a bit buggy...  My Memory is a Cesspool of Useless Info Dept.:  “Life is Sweet” was featured on Melrose Place; it underscored the scene were hooker Sydney entertained her first trick. 

Since we’re talkin’ crazy talk here on this day when Jack White got married in the Amazon and Penn Jillette named his newborn “Moxie Crimefighter:”  The new Entertainment Weekly (in an issue that, crazily enough, has a lengthy feature on Manos: The Hands of Fate) mentions that two nitwits are trying to make an English language, Mexico-set movie based on a newly-found treatment by Federico Fellini.  Is there a dumber idea than a Fellini film without Fellini? 

Crazy?  We’re all stocked up, here.  I just passed on a one-shot screening – practically in my backyard – of an undistributed flick by one of cinema’s contemporary masters.  Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Café Lumière is showing as part of the Voice’s Best of 2004 series at BAM, but... hpuck that hsit.  I practically nodded off to the glow of the reviews.  Dennis Lim describes Hou’s tribute to Ozzzzzzzu as muted rapture, and J. Hoberman mentions meals that unfold in real time... someone pass the Sparks.  When Hoberman actually calls a movie slow, you know you’re in for it.

I’ll try and catch it in the uncomfortable seats at Anthology, but won’t be surprised if I come back with a handful of alternate titles.  Along the lines of So, You Want to be a Narcoleptic! or Do Not Operate Heavy Machinery. 

Maybe:  Oops.  Left the Camera Running.

Or Manos, Hands of Fate.

tags: maria mckee  

links: digg this    del.icio.us    reddit