Here it is time for me to write again and unfortunately I’ve been sick as a dog with a horrible flu, the most uncomfortable one I’ve ever experienced and a nasty affliction I wouldn’t wish on a soul, well maybe a certain soul or two perhaps but they’d have to be pretty evil for me to want them to feel like this. Even worse, this illness completely made me miss two shows I was really looking forward to and of course planned on writing about, one was the curious Alternative/Country act from Illinois called The Handsome Family at Bottom Of The Hill and the other, which I’ve had tickets to for a month now but sadly relinquished them to a very elated bartender from downstairs because I heard him playing them all day long in my feverish throes and just had a feeling he might be wishing for a pair of tickets to see Sleater-Kinney magically appear to him if he were to keep on playing them and wishing really hard, so I stumbled down in stocking feet and gave them to him and I was right! He was hoping for such an event to transpire. I returned to my bed for more fever-induced dreams, chills, headaches and whining for my mother. And it is still not over, and I started writing my column rather hurriedly because I somehow had lost a day in there. It’s not Wednesday at all, still Tuesday for the rest of the world, the healthy world. Now I have to bring the garbage back in that I worked so hard in my weakened state to put out, Wednesday being garbage day on my street, and the day to start thinking about something else to write about besides the shows I missed. What fine timing miserable illness can have. So I did what countless other ill people, shut ins and agoraphobics do, I turned to the internet to find points of interest worthy of bringing up or writing about. One of my favorite shut ins, the great Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, housebound by Lupus, didn’t have the internet to turn to so she instead made clothing for her prize exotic chickens to wear. She wrote a lot of letters about her birds as well.
As I started gathering information on The Handsome Family I started finding a lot of references to Flannery O’Connor, which always quickens my pulse as she is one of my very favorite writers, and when a contemporary musical artist prompts a music critic to draw a literary likeness or comparison to exemplify what this music does, then we’ve got a generally exciting artistic development that defies categorization by simple musical terms. The Handsome Family do indeed defy categorization. They reluctantly have been tagged “alt/country” which seems a bit like a John Doe tag on an unidentified corpse at the morgue, a major simplification or mistake, and this unique duo know that every corpse has a story to it, one of great beauty or darkness or simplicity or pain or violence or sadness or absurdity or passion. Some may have lived countless exquisitely plaintive moments of clarity or madness—stories from the darker side of the human experience, or the unfettered perception of a child. The Handsome Family find great raw beauty in this darkness of the lives of simple folks and their varied tragedies, triumphs, sins and psychosis and are creating a body of work that stands as some of the most revealed stark and brilliant examples of american songwriting as any I’ve ever heard. I think the “alt” should be removed and replaced by “true” because these songs draw upon a huge range of emotions often explored in more detail by country western music than most other genres, and one can definitely see stylistic similarities or nods to classic Country/Western songs from the likes of Hank Williams or Johnny Cash. Also detectable are folkish sorts of Woody Guthrie-isms and a bit of grassroots appallachian lilt that brings to mind material from the Hillbilly Music collection that was popular three or four years back. The handsome family’s music has respectfully earned it’s place under the ever widening umbrella of Country music, but if that’s the same place where Shania Twain, Garth Brooks and The Dixie Chicks rest on their mountains of money, it’s the same planet but completelydifferent worlds.
When I listen to the Handsome family I really begin to wonder about the world these narrative tales of death and sadness and murder and rage and dying neighbors and a milkman who falls in love with the moon, come from. I know that Brett and Rennie Sparks the two band members have lived in chicago for the past 12 years and recently relocated to New Mexico, but that somehow doesn’t bring me any closer to the strange lands these stories originate in, detailed by wildlife, specific plants and trees, bodies of water, bugs and worms and snakes, wind and snow and moonlight the color of milk–all things indigenous to somewhere, many different places I’d guess, all from the mind of Rennie Sparks. There is one song from their third album, Through The Trees, that takes place entirely in chicago called “The Woman Downstairs” about a woman who starves herself to death while her boyfriend eats hotdogs and weeps with rats on the fire escape. The lyrics reference lake michigan, Ashland Avenue and the subway train with the line “In a thrift store chair I drank cases of beer and dreamed of lying down on the el tracks.” Then the song gently moves to its conclusion with an image of anorexic futility and corrupt authority with. “The woman downstairs lost all her hair and wore a beret in the laundryroom. I borrowed her soap and bought her a Coke, but she left it on a dryer. She died in June weighing 82. Her boyfriend went back to New York. The cops wandered through her dusty rooms. One of them stole her TV.” It’s so cold and sad and chilling, as plaintive and haunting as the pained yodel of Hank Williams, as Country as Country gets.
The Handsome Family create and record most all of their music in their living room on a macintosh G-3 utilizing a drum machine often or various found-object percussion instruments and guitar, bass, autoharp, mandolin, melodica, church choirs, pipe organs and other sounds from the depths of their trusty noisemakers. Live they use a mini disc player for backing tracks and Brett plays guitar and Rennie plays bass, autoharp and melodica. In popular rock I’ve noted a definite trend over the past three years being the emergence of the duo as essentially enough members to create and perform as a full sounding entity. The Handsome Family are yet another shining example of this.
They maintain their own website which I found truly inclusive and fascinating and it can be found at http://handsomefamily.home.mindspring.com/. The site has photos, all their songs lyrics, their bio, and all of their available merchandise for sale including an actual collection of short stories by Rennie Sparks called Evil. Their site led me to several interviews mostly with Rennie, and they are quite often hysterically funny and abstract. She talks about dressing her cat up in clothes (shades of Flannery again) claiming it to be dressed up as sherlock homes at the time of the interview, and some of her personal theories about fame and body size, “You have to be really tiny to be a big star in america, look at Shanaia Twain, she’s so tiny, if I saw her I’d go give her a dollar for being so tiny. But I’m huge so we went directly to Europe to tour, where you don’t have to be as tiny.” Her banter is genuinely funny and I bet she can keep a small group in stitches, yet the contrasting flipside to this quality are lyrics like this from possibly my favorite Handsome Family song, “Drunk By Noon.” “Sometimes I flap my arms like a hummingbird just to remind myself I’ll never fly. Sometimes I burn my arms with cigarettes just to pretend I won’t scream when I die…If my life was as long as the moon’s, I’d still be jealous of the sun. If my life lasted only one day, I’d still be drunk by noon.”
I really wish the flu hadn’t kept me from seeing them live but I have a feeling there will be many more chances to see them in the future. And although I was too ill to do much of anything, I did think about dressing my cat up in clothes, and coincidentally his name is Handsome.