Ex-Throwing Muse Hersh and family have act, will travel
By Chris Parker
For the last half-dozen years or so, life in Kristin Hersh’s household
has resembled that of the Partridge Family. Like the 70s sitcom, Hersh’s musical
career finds her frequently packing her kids into the tour bus for months at
a time.
“I just got home from the 50 Foot Wave tour. We had one day off to pack the
kids and then we left on a solo acoustic tour,” she says from her in-laws’ home
on the Jersey Shore, a brief respite on the East Cost. “They feel practically
part of a cult at this point. They have this idea that there are us and other
people. My eight-year-old keeps asking ‘Are we different? Who’s normal, us or
other people?'”
Certainly, the singer/guitarist’s life has changed dramatically since leaving the Throwing Muses — her first band — and staking out a solo career. The only way to be successful, as any musician will attest, is touring, touring, touring. Then a little more touring. With three children, there was only one way Hersh could do that: Take them along.
So for years the kids have grown up with the musician’s “Is this Cleveland? Then it must be Wednesday” lifestyle, though Hersh cooks in the bus, and home-schools the children, trying to create structure within the rock & roll world she’s chosen.
“It can be hard sometimes. They feel like all they see is the inside of a car. The inside of a dressing room. The inside of a hotel room. It can be true, but they also have people they call uncles and aunts and friends all over the planet,” Hersh says. “They know so many people who are like-minded individuals of different colors, genders, shapes, sizes, religions, persuasions — they don’t judge people by anything but their character because they’ve learned nothing else works. They won’t even use gender as a descriptive term. It took me my whole life to learn that was true.”
For 14 years, beginning in 1983, Hersh led the college rock trio, Throwing Muses, establishing a catalog of pop-rock whose web-like intricacy and angularity belied an energetic punk undertone. Hersh herself possesses one of alt-rock’s most dynamic voices, capable of going from heart-tugging vulnerability to fiery passion at a moment’s notice. When the Muses broke up in 1996, it was not because of creative differences, but because of the difficult finances of supporting a band. It broke Hersh’s heart.
“I guess for most people when they’re in their 30s they begin to need more than passion, they also need health insurance, and, you know, food, but that didn’t really happen to me. I would’ve kept sleeping on floors. I just kind of got left behind, but at the same time as a solo artist I can afford food,” Hersh jokes.
Indeed, across her six solo albums, Hersh has developed quite a following for her introspective acoustic pop. True to her muse, it’s still full of a certain emotional violence and pain, but it’s delivered in a softer tone. Even Hersh, who initially chafed at the idea of playing this “wussy” music, has come around.
“That’s changed, and I now appreciate the pencil sketch song rather than the loud, bright colored painting that a band is. I learned there are people who don’t see it as a decibel-to-dollar equation and can appreciate the song more on the quiet, line-drawing scale. I love that acoustic guitar is muscles and air and emotion, rather than a volume pedal,” Hersh says.
But that hasn’t slackened her thirst to rock out. Last year she debuted her new side project, 50 Foot Wave, a trio featuring Throwing Muses’ bassist Bernard Georges. Unlike Throwing Muses, the Wave is all about power.
“50 Foot Wave is just about release, and it’s fun. There’s a strength and solidity there that we didn’t have in Throwing Muses because of our complexity. That made us fragile, though in a nice way. 50 Foot is more about blitzkrieg, which frees up my solo acoustic material to be whatever it wants, with fluid timing and spaciousness. I can bring that fragility back and feel okay about it now that my noise is out of my system,” Hersh explains.
For Hersh, the songs have a life of their own and, like Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, demand to be heard. In the past, she’s described it as if she’s channeling the song, so intensely does she immerse herself in the process.
“It’s not the allure [of writing], it’s the necessity. You know whatever is most necessary is most attractive. Not only that water is beautiful when you’re dying of thirst, but the other way around, when something needs you, it’s more attractive to you,” Hersh explains.
This is the entire genesis of 50 Foot Wave — Hersh had songs that didn’t fit any of her previous bands, so she had to create a new one.
“I had some faster, louder, harder, ultra-Muses songs, if you will. So Bernard Georges and I went out and found a drummer who plays as if he’s pushing his drum kit down the stairs,” Hersh laughs, speaking of skinsman Dan Ahlers.
Hersh sees the band as satisfying her need for loud rock & roll, and as such acting as a palate cleanser for her next solo album.
“It seems to me when I have a band, the acoustic stuff gets very quiet and atmospheric, and then when I don’t have a band the solo material starts to get loud like a band. With 50 Foot Wave as a foil,” Hersh says, “this next acoustic album should be total silence.”
Meanwhile, Hersh will continue to play the role of June Cleaver even if the script calls for Shirley Jones.
“Some people remember it as being from a straight-laced, stereotypical impression of those 60s sitcoms, but watch it and see how much like us it is,” Hersh says she told her concerned son. “Ward and June are pals, and the kids are kind of making their own rules. Their lives aren’t easy, they just eat their vegetables is all.”
Ben Weaver’s stark songwriting summons the greats
By Timothy C. Davis
Oregon-born and Minnesota-raised songwriter Ben Weaver is a linebacker-sized lad of only 25, and already he’s released four albums: El Camino Blues, Living in the Ground, Hollerin’ at a Woodpecker, and the latest installment, Stories Under Nails. The first record was recorded in one day. The second was done in five hours. The third was recorded almost as quickly in a secluded mountain cabin, with only the local flora and fauna for company. Stories Under Nails he decided to polish a bit more: two days for recording, and one more to mix it all down.
Yes, Ben Weaver works fast. But to hear him tell it, there’s a simple reason for that: he remembers…hell, knows what he’s trying to say, and when you know what you feel, all that extra time just muddles everything up.
“I just like recording like that,” he says. “Part of it is financial considerations and the like, but the other part of it is that it gives a great ambience to the work. You’re excited to get it out, and I think it comes out a little purer that way. You have to start to wonder if you can’t get it out in that amount of time whether or not you should fucking be in there in the first place.”
After spending a few months on a sailboat with a retired federal judge (a longtime literature and music fan, he had nonetheless dropped out of college after a year), Weaver began writing the songs that would become El Camino Blues. He convinced “dark folk” icon Greg Brown to sing on the record, and soon was touring and doing support for folks like Brown, Alejandro Escovedo, Fred Eaglesmith, and Dave Van Ronk. Ronk, in fact, was to be the inspiration behind Weaver’s record label, Fugawee Bird (pronounced foo-GAH-wee), which has released all his records.
“I did a brief tour with Dave Van Ronk before he died, and he used to do this joke about the “Fugawee Bird” when we’d be driving through the middle of nowhere, like the farm country in Iowa. He’d say ‘Ah, I hear a cry in the distance! The rare Fugawee bird!’ …Where the fuck are we?¨ So I thought that’d be as good a name as any.”
Long-term, blanket-style touring gave Weaver even more grist for his songwriting, which he says evolved out of an equal mix of physical landscape, literature and music, and his own view of life at the time.
“On my second album there were probably more road-related songs, things I’d seen,” he explains. “But I think now everything gets (filtered) through me — everything comes through my head first. (The songs) don’t have to be about someone, necessarily. They just have to make some sort of emotional sense.
“I really liked Leonard Cohen when I was younger, partly for that reason. The way he put real poetry to music. I’ve always liked that sort of thing. And also the “Grit Lit” authors like Larry Brown, and Raymond Carver, and Charles Bukowski. People that got it down straight, if you will.”
The late author Brown was a huge champion of Weaver’s work, and even took him on an extended book tour, exposing Weaver’s music to a whole new grouping of potential listeners. “Ben Weaver is the most exciting young songwriter I’ve come across,” Brown wrote. “An American original whose voice and guitar are matched only by the power of his words. His songs are an incredible, haunting gift of music.” The feeling was mutual.
“I met Larry through a friend of mine in Montana named Rick Bass,” Weaver says. “We exchanged a number of letters with each other, and he launched the idea of doing the book tour with him. He’d done something similar with Alejandro Escovedo in the past, a sort of reading/music thing. I think it helped him break the monotony a little bit. Plus, he was a huge, huge music fan.”
All that touring has helped Weaver get closer to where he wants to be: Successful. Not successful in the appearing-on-VH1 sense, however. One look at Weaver and you’re pretty sure he could give a whit (or another word that rhymes with that one) about magazine covers and the trappings of popular stardom. Hell, his music wouldn’t allow it anyway. It’s too rough-hewn, too risky, too personal to ever really connect on such a grand level. He’s looking at success on his terms: making the music he likes, making a modest living, maybe buying a house. All the rest is gravy.
Which is not to say he doesn’t like attention. He proudly displays on his website the numerous awards and accolades bestowed upon him from the Americana-hungry English press, who have fawned over the songwriter since the very beginning. He has two ideas why this might be the case: One, that audiences over there are perhaps willing to listen a little bit more. Secondly, because even though St. Paul, Minnesota’s about as far as you can get from Swinging London, he feels confident that he speaks their language.
“I first started touring overseas after Hollerin’ at a Woodpecker,” Weaver says. “It’s just easy to tour the UK…all the press and everything else is in one place, and you can tour and hit all the hotspots on one swing. Plus, I think the majority of editors and writers like to read, and my music, if it has one thing, probably has some sort of literary quality. At least I hope it does. And so maybe they latch onto that.”
None of which explains the popularity of someone like Kylie Minogue, but I’d tend to agree with Big Ben. You go for Minogue’s songs because you like her ass. You turn to Ben Weaver’s because you like getting your ass kicked.
Ben Weaver opens for Kristin Hersh at the Visulite Saturday.
This article appears in Feb 2-8, 2005.
