Take Five: Trying to get to you
The King ushers in a week of surprises with a Bill Fox interview, a Sylvia Plath-Joe Pernice connection, an '80s slow dance with Jimmy Barnes and Neil Finn, and flirty lumberjacks with Torrey Peters
“Take Five” is posted each Friday, and offers five things I spent some time with over the course of the previous week. No criticism, no in-depth analysis, just a few things I think you might be interested in checking out. When the spirit moves me, I’ll post other things at other times.
1. 'Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley'
While watching the latest (but surely not the last) documentary about Elvis Presley, "Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley, on Netflix, which focuses on his 1968 “comeback” special, I was struck by how young and vital Presley appears. The accepted story is that Presley was washed up at the time, wrung out after years of increasingly inept films. But the timeline is fascinating: a 1953 debut, stardom from ’55 to ’58, two years in the Army, and then seven years of movie fluff. He was 33 years old when the ’68 special was recorded. For reference, Taylor Swift is 35. It was radical for him to sit and perform his earliest hits, despite them being only a decade old in some cases, conducting his own miniature black-leather-clad Eras Tour. The documentary is interesting, but it's a shame Netflix didn't do what it usually does in such situations, which is to also secure the rights to the thing being documented, to allow us to watch him perform with Scotty Moore and Bill Black, to see the grinning kid peek out of the eyes of a superstar in the special itself. It's also a shame Presley's career took the turn it did after the special. He recorded a spirited album in Memphis that seemed to revitalize him, but nothing much of merit came after and the final years of his life were a precipitous slide punctuated by increasingly incoherent live performances. But for one brief moment, the King had returned, oozing charisma (and sweat) and even 50-plus years later, it's a marvel to see.
2. Bill Fox interview in New York magazine
In addition to being a fantastic singer-songwriter, Bill Fox is a bit of a recluse. He doesn't perform much, has released only five albums in the past 30 years (or six in the past 40 if you count his early band, The Mice), and until this month, had never done an interview. It added to the mystique, this wildly talented songsmith who toiled in near obscurity creating lo-fi gems while avoiding the spotlight at all costs. But, on the heels of releasing a new album, Resonance, his first in 13 years, Fox seems to have decided that it would be wise to actually let people know about him and his work. Fox has been written about before, most famously in a lengthy piece in the Believer that focused mainly on the writer's inability to connect with Fox. But a freelancer for New York magazine was able to land the folk-pop interview of a lifetime. Fox still doesn't divulge much — the best quote comes from his friends, M. Ross Perkins, who says “[W]anting to be reclusive, being repulsed by an industry that wants to commodify your art, being repulsed by an industry that’s obsessed with images and how your face looks and what your body looks like. Is anything irrational about being like, ‘I’m good on that’? If anything, it’s a little irrational to be like, ‘Let me gobble that life up.’” It doesn't seem Fox is in danger of being commodified, but if a few more people seek out his music thanks to this blip of press, it was probably worth him briefly letting the world take a peek at his life.
3. Sylvia Plath — Colossus (by way of Joe Pernice)
You never know what might lead you to something. In the case of Sylvia Plath's poetry collection, The Colossus, it was a solo album from singer-songwriter Joe Pernice. I had long wondered about the cover of Pernice's album, Big Tobacco from 2000. It's not particularly attractive, and I assumed it was whipped up quickly and cheaply for this self-released album. Turns out — I haven't confirmed, but I'm sure — that it's an homage to Plath's book. I saw a printing of the book with a cover that's a dead ringer for Pernice’s album — or vice versa, as the case may be. Intrigued, and confident in Pernice’s album-related poetry recommendations, I grabbed a copy. I have read the odd poem here or there, but had never read an entire book from Plath. I was struck by her descriptive language and tightly composed stanzas as she grapples with heady topics and prosaic situations.
No sound but a drunken coot
Lurching home along river bank.
Stars hung water-sunk, so a rank
Of double star-eyes lit
Boughs where those owls sat.
I’ll seek out Ariel next, and in the meantime, I’m always happy for an excuse to listen to Big Tobacco.
4. Neil Finn and Jimmy Barnes — ‘Forever Now’
I cued up Neil Finn's latest video project, the Infinity Sessions, excited to hear something from one of my favorite songwriters. I did, as he debuted the new song "All Lies Are Wrong." As with many Finn compositions, it will need to grow on me. In the meantime, the real gem of the session comes from Aussie legend Jimmy Barnes. I first knew Barnes as the old guy (he was 32, Michael Hutchence was 28) accompanying INXS on their cover of the Easybeats’ “Good Times” from the soundtrack to the 1988 film, “The Lost Boys.” Yes, as covered last week, I had an INXS phase, and this was right in the thick of it. I have since learned more about Barnes thanks to his friendship with Finn and my general interest in Australian music, but hadn’t really spent much time with his work. That made the impact of this new version of “Forever Now,” a power ballad from his early ‘80s band Cold Chisel a bit of a surprise. It’s the sort of song I would skip over on the radio, a bit of lovelorn treacle. But here, with Finn's tasteful piano, a string section backing and Barnes’ well-worn voice absolutely inhabiting the song, it connected and earned a few repeat listens.
5. Torrey Peters — Stag Dance
I’ve had Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby on my “to be read” list for years, but as anyone with such a list knows (and isn’t that all of you?), those lists balloon and it often takes outside stimuli to nudge a title from the list to the nightstand. The nudge(s) came not for Detransition, Baby, but for Peters’s follow up, Stag Dance. A handful of rave reviews coupled with spying it on the library’s new book shelf were enough. I’m glad for the serendipity. It’s one of the best things I’ve read this year. That is particularly the case for the title novella (which is joined by three long short stories to round out the book). The tale of a crew of “timber pirates” who are logging illegally takes a poignant and amusing turn when the boss announced a “stag dance” where any lumberjack can declare himself a “skooch” by donning a triangular patch of burlap on his crotch. Babe Bunyan, the biggest, ugliest jack, decides to do so, and finds himself in competition with the petite, feminine Lisen for the attention of those in the camp. The characters across the stories in the book are queer or questioning or trans, but most importantly, they are people grappling with what it means to be alive in their particular situation. Peters deftly chronicles the emotions and feelings of these journeys, and Stag Dance is the discomforting, funny, touching, and challenging result. With this, Detransition, Baby moves several places up on that “to be read” list.