Music Writing by Carson Arnold
Music Writing by Carson Arnold
NICO AND THE MARBLE INDEX FAMILY
In the last article I said Sinatra was on Columbia records...Am I blooming idiot? Pawing through a Salvation Army a day later, I picked up In The Wee Small Hours-- his only sad-sacked-catasrophe of tears I hadn't yet owned, and, my jolly friend...on CAPITOL!! Though the thing must've been used as a substitute for a dinner plate, I stood there retracing my blush errors, imagining the whole town heckling, "Oh, you think you're a music writer, do you, sonny?" But I could care less, I really could. So I left. With Sinatra. But forgot one thing.
...A mouth made for a frown, the kiss of Nico was something hideously strange. Gloom princess. SSHH, we whisper, don't wake the living. Sure, for a lad like me, a ravishing sex symbol; a hot icon; draped over the graze of her eyebrows, I suppose it's all in those blonde bangs unraveled lies the idle, but beating heart. Yet her moody sterile, so un-cool, but indeed 'twas this-- the sultry mop-- that beckoned her songs open. It's said she looked like a crusty hell during the early eighties trail-- noted-- haggard and washed, looking ages older than any mate seeking her out for a quiet gamble. Yet even in the most mortician of a photo, those eyes, some haunted reverie still sailed the breast of tone, you can see this. As though she sang as a witness to a far more inexplicable edge to humanity than we, the listeners, had ever known, we abandon ourselves almost always. To a young mind, this could perverse it, or even infuriate it away. I myself was exposed to the pictorial image of Nico at a near infantile age within certain fooled films, and can recall many a troubled phase figurin' who this person was and why she was doing it and for what reason I needed to know. I've thought twice in taping Nico for selected people: those fragile minds: imagining 'em sitting, brooding alone, suddenly "Janitor Of Lunacy" broils on, who's this, ma? and bam...out the window they plunge. I'll hear about it a week later. The family secretly holds me responsible. So does the town...But we all love Nico, and weep slow, she's dead and buried up everywhere now- soundtracks and the whole wax grip! Every few months there's a mass resurgence. Once in a record store, a woman holding Nico's hey-dey albums asked me very perplexed which out of the four was most appropriate to host a subtle dinner party. Though a German accent, she replied she was not familiar with Nico, and confessed only knowing "These Days" off shiny movie themes and closing credits. I had to laugh, "Well, that's gonna be quite a dinner, eh!! I suppose Chelsea Girls is your best bet. Though Desertshore's my favorite...Beware." And there'll be someone tellin' ya he and his pal caught her live during the late demonic harmonium years upside the lavender stage, where he soon after dipped into her dressing-room and returned paralyzed, never the same again. A sorta "Dracula" we like to refer her as-- though, her visitors were later disappointed for she was unable to fulfill the post-Velveteen fables of fantasy overdrive. There's always this satyr everywhere. I can't stand it. Gimme Moe Tucker instead-- she disbanded and worked at Wal-Mart! (but has failed to get back to me for an interview when asked about such an era. I opened up Mojo yesterday and found her mechanically answering what songs she sings in the shower...ah well). Only a week ago I had vowed to never write about Nico for such reasons stated-- too many people done it, who cares, ya think I should?-- and a day later, discovered myself undergoing a serene investigation behind the hazy cloak of The Marble Index album (not her best, I wouldn't die if it never existed, yet, she seems to rapport this of the world, and thus the magic lobes). There isn't much to credit, though. After rummaging through the discarded trunk of 60's harmonies, my vision of her is as true as it ever was before: femme fatal; foxy but shallow, stoned-out, screwed through, in the end, sad but bold. I dunno, intuition points there's plenty of these types hustling'; Nico was just fortunate in possessing a microphone at the right place and time upon flake. Though, in all fairness, my other half wishes to acknowledge her voice as pure embroidery, like Billie Holiday carefully choosing each note; dressing, and undressing it. Her one line, you are beautiful/and you are alone, a quiet, whirling siren. YET, every time I reach to grasp some common avail outta Nico, I land in the pitfalls of morbidity, and retreat to find sense in a foul room with Marble Index on endless repeat, the Weather Channel on mute, and a vamp dial-tone against my eardrum. And 'tis here, in this anchored Neptune, where she pertains and drowns. Lacking the mimic of the songwriter, but weathered of being mimicked...Dig deep into your pocket, you might find her eyes slowly blinking still.
Maybe you need to take drugs to hear it correctly. I wouldn't know. I will say, however, the fifty-second "Prelude" is easily the BEST score on the Index. It's short, no one sings! and focuses the terrific essence of the other long minutes forthcoming. I remember it well; the Gurdjieff o' piano sway aloft, snakecharmer trickles. Here, it is fresh and invigorating, the other nine tracks is like Maria Callas being tortured in the dungeons of wrath. Jesus. 'Ol Jac Holzman, Elektra's chief, insists he hasn't listened to the album in years, while Frazier Mohawk (the grand producer) adds his turmoil with once formally accepting it, more reliant to the oddity now-- "a certain heroin vibe," he dribbled, "that I once found difficult." Today, Frazier, still cutting albums in the out-cuffs of Toronto, speaks almost like an old stoner, sieged by an informative business angle of "oke-doke" bounce after a long conversation of gremlin emptiness. Probably one of the most ouija duets in rock barney, together in three days, both her and John Cale recorded the whole tambourine of an echo up along some Laurel Canyon 10x20 forgotten studio, cradled by a German machine that apparently altered pitch without changing the pace of time, notoriously. This would come in use as engineer John Haeny and Frazier spent the after-hours constructing the sheets of "junky improvised" (as Frazier recalls it) sound and lyric into a chamber, of what would be, apocalyptic flights. There's no stories, though. Just a budget of five grand, if that. In and out. Nico and her trump words somewhere 'neath crumpled scraps of paper. What you might imagine. What you might want. Barely any reception, a loft party at Andy Warhol's maybe. Drugs, always. Frazier vividly recalls a bed at his flat, holding a capacity of fifteen people near a fire, where in one incident, Nico barged in with a gun and held one girl hostage in attempt to arouse a few men-- the same story appears elsewhere in various Elektra books...Blah-blah-blah. Why did I come?
He adds, "Once, she came by the house. Wanted to take me off to make a funny movie. She said, (deep German accent) 'Oh, you've got to come, there's gonna be lots of heroin.' I said, well, no. Thanks for the offer, though." If participated in such a smack-in, rumor flies it's unlikely he never would've flown off with vocalshine Essra Mohawk, nor later produced her sparkling Primordial Lovers album (supposedly the invitation was relatively in the same week). Tragic. Many people would be unhappy; significantly a girl I know who would be incapable of playing Essra's "I Am The Breeze" frequently on her piano. Who knows, instead she might be reduced to be belch out: "DAS LIED DER DEUTCHEN" on some street organ ontop of whatever earth remained. This here would automatically mean I would've never have talked to Frazier-- for-- I exchanged his number directly from Essra-- and when receiving it-- Essra told me she had miraculously just talked about that 'ol Marble Index album with Jackson Browne days earlier-- Jackson, one of Nico's lover/companions running-on-empty...Who can tell how long this spiral could extend, and who knew how much of any of it blared an ounce of meat. You find that with the listeners...believers....sshh.
John Cale's avant-testimony with Nico has far brighter tentacles on Desertshore.
In the Index , it's like opening up a guitar case revealing a few leftover strings strewn at the bottom. Desertshore, it's as though you've climbed inside, shut the lid, and dug. Outside the pyramid, it is seclusive, reckless, beautiful; scaling the salt plateau in search of water and de ja vu mysticism. You begin to see, though, the lonely dunes of Shore within the elf of "No One Is There", where Cale shivers three violins as a Mohave sonata with Nico's untraceable voice. Each syllable, a soft beast: In the morning of my winter and my eyes are still asleep-- every phrase spoken is a dark feather, almost opening lines of beyond-decent poetry. I can somewhat envision Nico in those tender, pitch moments outta the eye of the needle scrawling alive tiny lyrics of illusions and hopes-- here and there-- patches of nonesuch words, built up, BUILT UP, until suddenly, a thick binding of notes, shouts, whispers, and cries devours...Cale pauses: AND NO SOUND HAS THEM...her voice doubles, triples, floats, perishes. A few minutes later, maybe hours, Cale sags his bow to scratch the glands beyond the violin's bridge 'neath a rainshower of delay and startling sorcery. This works, in all shades. I feel as though we're walking past a strange home with whirling flashlights spinning around and out and calling forth. It rains but doesn't wet. Her harmonium is sticky; every time it thunders, my head gets chucked miles out to sea. Amidst as tree-frogs, weird, eerie violins rise, singing, close to the frozen borderline in a sad ballet rhythm of tongue. Chelsea Girls and all that hotel-stain seems ages ago now, so are you, and I. Damn, I was sure "Evening Of Light" began like Hebrew harp melodies, but I remember "Ari's Song"-- to her son-- a maternal periscope outward: sail away/sail away little boy. Is she deranged, on drugs? Probably. I could switch it off, but she looks too fetching for the wind on the back cover-- on top of a hill swaying. Voluptuous. I'm reminded she died falling off a bicycle. (How horrible.) Just then, out of that blue silence, SINCE THE FIRST OF YOU AND ME...She's without John now; alone, a soaring voice, almost a queer nursery rhyme in churn-- "Nibelungen"-- it cures a swollen tissue inside her. Unlike, the Velvet Underground days, she ain't waitin' no more. German; so freaky, so curious. You can hear the splish-splash of her mouth between words. She's human, like you! Dazed, the album's over. Silence returns. Look 'round? Get-up. Once again...
This, the chicken-bucket phase, and his warped story within "The Gift", were Cale's best years as a methodical producer. After that, he wasn't playing, but was instead a presence. I was glad to hear, when I did, thirty years too late, that Cale had left the Underground while the night was still moon enough-- anymore of it would be like being trapped in some steamed lobster. Nico never returned after The End, and Cale, too-- his royal ax-- seemed lost in the impartial. Though perpetually dower, even Nico's vocals within Desertshore began to present a trapped-in-a-dungeon sound of Germanic plague that was both exhilarating and painful to lodge; ambient still in her last slides within Hanging Gardens in '88-- a strange oracle of electronia dream with her voice weaving by-and-by like no yesterday. Anyway-- Wham! it's Eno and Fripp after that; goblins of the sonic apron. Yet every time I hear Cale I can't help but remember a man I know around my area-- a retired violist-- recalling Cale seated next to him forty years ago in the Wales orchestra.
"Yeah, he sat there-- an amazing player-- and we'd all go out and fool around, you know. And then one day he just never showed up. I guess he was last heard to be searching for a cave 'in the of key of B'. His mother, you know, was very upset."
Naturally, this circles my head whenever listening to him-- somewhat of a fugitive still running on, yet, an example of abandoning the ladder in quest of dirt virtue. Where had these marbles indeed rolled from? Mere rebellion, what? It'd be interesting to ask him if it was worth it...somebody should. His masked work on this record, however, underlays a frosted urn of visual and daunting sounds besieged-- the two-- off one another, like naked notes left out of some great opera never performed. Thirty-five years climbing, it is relevant to add perhaps a good deal of the music on the Index is practically experimental bullshit. Depending the angle, I normally might agree. Yet, Nico sang pulling the reins of the moon and could only be levitated by Cale's exile offerings of classicism and the unexplored terrestrial-- the sun. She swans the gravity, he, the orbit, the matrimony would only survive this way, your ear to mine.
For the last week I've been trying to contact Danny Fields. He was Elektra's bouncer then, or something. I keep getting hung up by someone. I'm also trying to land an interview with rapper Boots Riley but his management slacks me off. Ah, winning the financial supervision of albums long dead and buried has never been too rewarding. Look elsewhere. According to the few of many who made it almost a perverse ritual to bandit along side Nico's sad, lonely, and obscure tour through the early eighties, it can be described as an atmospheric delay of fascination and the overall gruesome. These venues were a drainpipe of alienation, roasted in the murk of clubs shadowed beneath whatever odor had crawled out to rent this cracked-porcelain figure-- painted like centuries-- perform with one harmonium wailing and wailing into the vampire night...or so it seemed. Romantic to the third ear but excruciating to whomever was involved. I must wonder what the audience was thinking during such a spectacle-- what they were seeing-- a model? a singer? a woman? a visage to a far land? What? Frankly, I can only imagine it all somewhat illustrated. Not that it mattered to her, but were these ghostly songs she whooshed pounding the harmonium for twenty odd mass minutes any good, any decent? Or was it prevalent to a rhythm lost in damp years with the Velvet Underground that was the main attraction? (I wonder what the possibilities would be if the same narration spent on Nico's myth had been crucial to recognizing say, street musicians, for one). Anyway, results outta this fox-hunt leave me disappointed. She's dead, Cale's moved on, and everybody who either groomed or attended has long since carted by... "You wanna know what? Oh, you'll have to ask him. You wanna know what? You'll have to ask her"...Honestly, I don't care for what I've just written, and like anything, recommend the album foremost...or just a suitable thrift-shop above all. IT'S A GOOD OLD ALBUM! PLENTY WEIRD, PLENTY NICE! There's my blurb. By and large, it's quite possible the whole junction was a complete avant-fever; no ideal roast; leaving the album to dramatize much of our reflections and portrayals...perhaps disturbed forever. And The Marble Index, once again, what a puzzle, proves to be as unbearable and angelic as ever before.
Her photo back in that Salvation Army caught my eye, that's all.
--Carson Arnold - August 12, 2003
copyright 2003 Carson Arnold
H(ear) is an online music column consisting of interviews and articles written by Carson Arnold. As an independent writer and musician living in the woods of Vermont with his family, Carson widely encourages one to submit their art, writing or any interesting piece of material that you would like to share. H(ear) is accepting both promos and demos for review or any other valuable music-related subjects. If you wish to make a comment or would like to receive H(ear) weekly by email please contact Carson at [email protected]
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