faith, unknown pleasures, and one imaginary girl: Mary Timony in concert
Dec 19 '03
The Bottom Line I don't recommend Concert Reviews: at least, not mine. But I was too entranced not to write this.
If we rely on logic, I suppose there’s two reasons why you could want to hear about the Mary Timony concert I saw Wednesday night. First of all, you might be a fan of the type of music she and bassist Jeff Goddard were playing. Do you like the stark gloom of the Faith/ Pornography-era Cure and their drum machines, the weird but disciplined guitar howl of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, the fierce if muddy monolith that was Black Sabbath’s debut? Then you should definitely bookmark www.marytimony.com and check back to see if her notional February tour materializes. Or, secondly, do you simply like Mary Timony: for Helium’s dissonant multi-guitar blur, or for the mediaevalized indie-rock of her solo career? Then of course you’d be curious to see how her songs transfer to other settings.
Neither of these, however, has much to do with why I found her concert so revelatory, or why I’m telling you about it. Maybe that won't be clear until the last paragraphs: honestly, I'm explaining my happiness to me. But I'll try to make it resonate a little: ride along, if you like.
T.T. the Bear’s Place, a bar in Cambridge, is a modest location for a concert. Maybe forty people were in front of the stage watching her, although perhaps other people in the pool room or the bar were paying attention. My friend Adam and I were standing close enough to the stage that when I exclaimed between songs “She’s a really good guitar player!”, Mary smiled and tossed her hair, quite possibly because she heard me. She’s very pretty, with a wide mouth and flowing hair and narrow but expressive eyes; but she’s very pretty like my wife is very pretty, rather than the unreal diverged-breeding-pool way that Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alicia Silverstone and Elisabeth Rohm are pretty (but can only create fertile offspring with their fellow mutants). Timony was dressed in a stylish black-with-touches-of-red scheme that she’d clearly picked to look good, but still, she was wearing T-shirt and jeans, as was bassist Goddard. Nobody introduced them, nor did they introduce themselves.
Instead, Timony turned the drum-machine on, and Goddard played rattling sheets of bass guitar, and Timony looked down and played her guitar, wandering over to her microphone when it was time to sing. She’s not much of a singer in concert, I guess: when I call her voice “flat” on record, I mean emotionally, but in a live setting I also mean “flat” as in wobbling slightly off-pitch. She articulates her lyrics well on record, but sorta mumbles them live (or at least so it seems when the mike’s done with them). Her guitar-playing, on the other hand, is fascinating. She’s not brilliant in a Hendrix/ Van Halen/ Malmsteen way, shredding through rapid patterns as casually as I might snap my fingers; instead we got to watch her focusing intently and moving with care, making sure she placed her fingers on just these strings in just this position, then this position, now this one. She’s not _slow_, mind you, but her gift is that no other guitarist would decide to play the notes and chords she does, in the order and pacing she does, and her choices work.
She and Goddard also monitored the sounds they were making, and moved around: switching to a new drum machine program, using one hand to adjust a knob while the other generated sound, using mechanical feedback as a tool, altering one form of hideous noise into another as the first stopped suiting them. They smiled and nodded at each other, paused between a couple of songs to trade notes, bent down to examine their pedals if need be. Happy technicians at work: a vibe that remained during the four songs when Timony played her Yamaha. I’m a bad keyboardist who’s way out of practice, and three of those four songs I swear I could master if I had sheet music and practiced an hour a day for a week. But the songs are great: her 4-note ostinato on “Dr. Cat”, say, is as simple and catchy in its dark way as “Louie Louie”’s guitar chords are in their bouncy one. Plus, hey, it’s a synthesizer, and by doing her work in advance, she could (for example) press one key and release a bright and kaleidoscopic arpeggio across more than an octave.
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Right now you might imagine something like the Brendan Benson concert I saw last year. He’s a pop/rock guy, but he bent grimly, focused on his music, and ignored the audience. Mary Timony, though, doesn’t exactly ignore the audience: she looked up after a few songs and thanked us for coming through the night’s horrible rain to be there, and it felt like real thanks. She introduced a couple of songs in brief-but-chatty ways. She smiled a lot, and laughed or rolled her eyes a few times. When Brendan didn’t look at us during his songs, I felt very strongly that he didn’t want to be there, that he just wanted to release his record and be done with it. That’s fine, I don’t blame him for a moment. He writes wonderful songs; no one has any right to expect him to do theater, too. But the result was that watching him felt like an imposition, if not a cheap act of vampirism. Mary Timony, I think, spent 97% of the concert playing her music and enjoying it.
But Solex, a weird Dutch record-shop owner who deserves to have the same fans Beck does, also seemed to have fun in concert. She too bent down and moved around and toyed with her programmed samples and futzed with pedals. And I enjoyed seeing her, but in a mild way. Solex’s songs weren’t changed by being played live: they had a rock-guitar pull that her albums miss, but their nature and feel were the same. Whereas Timony and Goddard were transferring her songs into an entire new genre: look, they implied, you can buy the Golden Dove and Mountains and Magic City and hear’em a zillion times if you want those sounds. Here’s some new sounds we’ve found.
The transformations they worked on their own songs weren’t all of it. “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” was dragged from its status as a hooky metal classic back into the murk of its band’s origins. Its vigorous faux-Satanic chorus was deleted entirely, putting the emphasis on the thoughtful parts of the lyrics and the bonecrushing blur of the song’s main riff (as well as that early-Cure drum machine).
The other cover was a song I don’t think anyone else in the audience recognized, or should have: “In Canada”, by a local Berklee College piano student named B.J. Snowden. I only know this song because a music-theory teacher of mine had us study it six years ago, in the same weird course where we studied Paula Adbul’s “Will You Marry Me?” on another day. The Abdul song is much more bizarre and inspired than you probably realize – but not at Snowden’s level. Berklee students are all great musicians, and you can hear “In Canada” with that in mind and kind of realize this, the way my Mom’s composer friend Al Friedrichsen could write “the Hog-Call Concerto” (a violin takes the “Sooo-eee! Pig pig pig pig pig pig pig pig pig” cadence) on his days off. But if you’re not cued in, “In Canada” sounds like the work of an overexcitable 8-year-old non-prodigy, gushing over our blissful northern candyland while playing a piece three years beyond her. It’s incredibly happy and fun – until, you might think, it’s covered on minor-key wall-of-bass with organ stabs and difficult, obtuse lead guitar. But even then, the sheer joy of it peeked through, raising its head and blinking, made heroic by the journey.
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It’s the journey, too, that made Mary Timony’s concert heroic to me. In the abstract, it’s not much of an accomplishment to stand around and play and not put on a show. All sorts of bad opening acts do this. In the abstract, watching Timony in concert is like randomly checking out the band run by the girl you had a crush on in junior-year physics – only, I saw the band run by the girl I had a crush on in junior-year physics, and they were objectively dazzling, the best progressive-carnival-jazz-metal band I've never imagined. They (Profusion) had been together for just three years, with a self-released album that I haven’t raved about here because it’s already unavailable, but they knew enough to play to the audience. They knew enough to recognize that they should remake “I Will Survive” and “White Rabbit”, not “In Canada”. They knew enough to mention, when playing a new song, that yo, here's a new song. They knew that Angie should be wearing a skimpy black leotard, and she knew enough to move in it like a star.
Mary Timony’s been playing in public for fifteen years; she’s made six albums that I’ve heard, and every single one has been better, to my ears, than the one before. She’s on Matador Records, she’s made videos that MTV has played, she’s been interviewed in magazines I used to read. She's fallen from MTV's grace, she's had two bands break up. In concert, then, she should know her audience has expectations. Maybe she could duck the audience, like Brendan Benson; maybe she could fear the audience, like Kurt Cobain; maybe she could bait and annoy the audience, like Dog Fashion Disco, whom I’ll tell you about some other time.
Or, of course, she could play to it. I love it when Dan Bern or Dar Williams tell funny stories between songs; I love how Laurie Anderson’s concerts are nothing _but_ a brand-new bunch of stories with improvised accompaniment. I love it when They Might Be Giants narrate Dan Hickey’s awesome drum solo like a voice-mail message (“to hear this menu in Spanish, press 2” – Latin drumming – “for Gene Krupa, press 3” – flawless imitation of jazz’s greatest drummer – “for Animal from the Muppets, press 4” – happy aggro bashing, etc.). At the very least, after fifteen years, you’d expect Timony to settle down and play the songs the way we expect to hear them.
And instead, in blissful unawareness, she wanders around, tinkers, watches her hands, and reinvents her entire musical style completely, just because she wants to. It’s fine if a musician thinks rock should be All About The Music: we call it “idealism”, and it’s a common ailment, easily cured by patience and placebos. But I have no idea how a musician of Timony’s stature could still believe rock really _is_ all about music. She's a miracle: a grown woman who lives a preposterous falsehood that has every right to be a truth. I felt like telling you about it. Thanks for reading, and goodnight.
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Member: Brian Block
Location: Greensboro, NC
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Let's give a big Earth welcome to Everett Block, born 10-26-08. Daddy shall return shortly.
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