Let the Bells Ring

By Emmett Booth

If I ever meet someone, anyone, whose instinctive response to the question, "What kind of music do you like?" is "Nick Cave", I will marry them. Hopefully, Mr. Cave can play the part of the priest, as he does so well on record.

This will be so for several reasons. One, the boring one, is that I fiercely adore Nick Cave. I will probably insist on playing his music at my wedding regardless of which lovely, hopefully patient soul I'm marrying. It will be "Red Right Hand" as the guests file in, to unsettle them and make them think they made a mistake on the road, and have ended up at some horrifying cult ceremony. I would be tempted to bribe the organist to play either "Do You Love Me?" or "There She Goes, My Beautiful World", for sheer humor, but my nerve would probably fail me. Instead, "O'Malley's Bar", because it takes such a ghastly long time (14:28) and my dearest will probably need it to compose herself, and remind herself of the many good reasons she's marrying this overeager fan. From the minute she begins her walk until the second we hit the dancefloor, I'll surrender control. But once we're at the dancefloor, I will play "Nick the Stripper," and do everything it tells me to. Anybody who stays through that will be the type to cheer for "No Pussy Blues," and after I've driven them away with "Where the Wild Roses Grow", the two of us will mosh alone to "Bring it On." She will either be laughing with utter delight by this point, sealing our marital bliss for eternity, or she'll divorce me on the spot, a situation for which I can easily conjure up a Cave playlist twice as long. Either way, I win.

The second reason is that anyone who thinks of themselves as a serious Nick Cave fan has already earned my respect and a little bit of my heart. The man's discography is fucking impenetrable, full of multiple bizarre bands and waves in and out of quality and consciousness, with no clear masterpiece or even a centerpiece. Easy entry points are few and far between, and those rare Cave songs that have touched on the wider public include a fantastic but non-representative duet with Kylie Minogue ("Where the Wild Roses Grow"), a cluttery and weird "standard" done with more clarity but less ravaged power by Johnny Cash ("Mercy Seat"), and the scariest, most tornadic thing ever to touch mortal ground ("Tupelo"). And he's Australian, which makes the whole thing even weirder and less approachable. All of which Cave, with his smirk and now his mustache, knows and enjoys. Damn the man.

But being a devoted Nick Cave fan is also impressive because of his bizarre half-presence in music criticism and popular media. You won't find a knowledgeable music critic on Earth who won't profess respect for Cave, even if they don't listen to him for all the reasons I just described. Yet his name will often vanish from pages for years at a time, as if he's finally retired to some monastery rather than continuing to make great records worthy of discussion. When his name does reappear, he's (rightfully) deified and gossiped about as if he's an unavoidable celebrity we're all intimately familiar with. This strange existence, revered, half-forgotten and increasingly productive all at once, makes it difficult to find one's way into Cave's dark, hilarious corner of the world.
So if you have, well done! The chapel's over there, by the sinister-looking barn and the poster of Jesus setting a trainyard on fire.

The third reason has to do with the specific question that would prompt the perfect knee-bending answer. That question again is: "What kind of music do you like?" Much as I love talking about music (who knew?), I don't like being asked that particular question. I know I'm supposed to answer with a few names, carefully chosen to either spark or end conversation, depending on the situation. But that wording always gets me thinking about types of music, genres and scenes and eras, and that kind of answer is either too geeky for most contexts or isn't up to the job of conveying my musical taste. So I'm always on the hunt for the perfect artist to answer that question with, one whose work represents and explains what I like in music, whether it's sound or style.
By now, I can roll out a few of these--Beck, Blur, Brainiac, Boredoms. But the truest answer, the marriage-cementing answer, and evidently the only answer of mine that doesn't begin with a 'B', is Nick Cave.

Why is that? Even given his thirty years to tinker, Cave's musical range is astonishing, yet he's managed to summon a cohesive (complicated, fascinating) persona and style out of it. I like this, whenever I can find it.

That identity, broadly speaking, is about viewing the classic themes of rock music as subjects to be studied, distorted, exaggerated, and blown to slavering pieces. Sex can be a weapon, a refuge of last resort, a bloody-minded obsession, and a trivial afterthought. Death is feared hysterically and met bravely, understood and then cheerfully ignored. Unsurprisingly, Cave sings many songs about self-definition, but they never drag or whine; aware of potential egotism, Cave plays it up rather than avoid it. It's meta, but not cringeworthy, because Cave is not asking for our sympathy nor attempting to sing from our shoes. Instead, he's stepping out just enough to stretch the elastic of his characters while still being them. He's aware of the listener, but only in the sense that one is occasionally aware of God. And speaking of God: to borrow from Disco Inferno, Cave makes me want to believe, though I don't know what in. Jesus, Satan, and Lazarus are treated as mysterious forces, omnipotent healers/butchers, or simply characters useful to telling a good story. He hacks at religious figures with the same warped narrative ax he uses on his mortal narrators; Cave is unmistakeably a preacher, but a fundamentally humanist one.

Of course, sometimes he just plays all the tropes straight. This isn't to say that the above are affectations--they're equally valid angles on issues granted one or (begrudgingly) two sides by most other rock musicians. So when Cave runs close to tradition, it's earth-shaking. Straightforward love songs and lust-filled stomps, no longer tired conceits, sound lonely amidst all of Cave's weirdness, and all their power comes rushing back.

Will Oldham does all this, as do Isaac Brock and arguably Prince. I love them all, almost as much as I love Nick Cave.

Lyrically, Cave is a gem on a long, rich thread. He has influences (Cash, Leonard Cohen), peers (Tom Waits, Mark E. Smith), and students (Brock, Stephen Merritt), but none can match his weight, his humor, his dizzying emotional range. Cave has made me mock, guiltless, the victims of serial killers, and weep over strands of rough, sandy prose that would simply pass right through me if delivered by anybody else. Partly, it's that unshakeable voice, spending so much of its time in that hypnotizing half-laugh, half-growl sing-speak that when he actually opens up and sings, it sticks in my gut for days afterward. But mostly it's because, no matter which character Cave ends up playing in a given song (and it's often unclear), he puts you into the eyes and sweat of every drunkard, every unhinged Lothario, every farmer with a secret to keep. And he does it so easily because, as he's often proven directly, he's more actor than singer.

Musically, of course, he's a chaotic grab bag, nailing the blues and cutthroat rockabilly, putting a warped, diseased face on folk, kicking endless amounts of ass, soothing ears (fragment by fragment), and writing damn hummable melodies when he feels like it. Again, he's Australian; I'm sure Australian musicians have cliches and avenues to follow or flagrantly avoid like American and British musicians do, but I don't know what they are, and so everything sounds fresh and novel in Cave's hands. Of course, it isn't just Cave's hands at work. The Birthday Party, his free-wailing din of a post-punk outfit, still sounds more cutting and wild than almost all of their peers. And the Bad Seeds, his loyal, motely crew for the last 26 years? Nothing less than the greatest backing band of all time, handling every turn with grace, be it a skeletal stomp, a hyper-distorted crunch, or a delicate, nearly invisible touch. Few musicians could coordinate on music so much more dependent on repetition and timbre than traditional songwriting chops; the Seeds make it seem like the only way to play. One of my fondest dreams is to start a Bad Seeds cover band (we will, of course, be called the Decent Seeds), and we would play at my wedding, except that that would cause several obvious problems.

That kind of approach to music, even the specific sounds Cave has come up with, can be found elsewhere, in jaw-dropping (and equally overlooked) works by Tindersticks, Scott Walker, Clinic, and Bark Psychosis, among many others. But...they're all awesome, and they all pale in comparison. Cave just sounds like the original document, like a force waiting under the planetary crust for centuries to explode and immediately absorb the characteristics of the era it finds itself in, like Stephen King's It, or the titular protagonist of Cave's own Dig, Lazarus, Dig! It would seem odd to use an adjective like "timeless" to describe a decidedly non-populist sound, but in this case, it applies.

I bring up time, and so the fourth, final, and as I grow older and my own mustache, most crucial reason. Nick Cave, once a young, impeccably dressed, out-of-time Satanic dandy, has grown old with grace better than any other musician of the pop era. Cave's identity was never inextricably linked to youth, so the possibility of artistic survival was always relatively strong. But he's impressed beyond all hopeful expectations. He was on the crest of 40 when he released the final Bad Seeds album of the 20th century, The Boatman's Call, a far softer and lovelier album than its predecessors. Throw in the cumulative weight of two decades of heroin abuse, and he seemed doomed for retirement or purgatory. Cave rejected the former, choosing to sober up and get married instead, and continued to willfully use the latter for lyrical inspiration. The first Bad Seeds albums of the 21st century, No More Shall We Part and Nocturama, were widely panned, but part of that was the assumption that Cave had fallen like logic dictated. In retrospect, those records ain't bad, and when they fail, it's out of simple inconsistency rather than any overarching problem.

And then, several unusual things happened: anchoring Bad Seeds guitarist Blixa Bargeld left the band, and their next album was released as a double, featuring prominently in Bargeld's place...a choir, appearing on nearly every track. It's difficult to imagine a table set more openly for disaster, and one of the most tragic kinds of musical disaster: an old musician, a legendary career behind him, reaches feebly and desperately down an ill-chosen side road for revitalization, goes too far with it, and has to watch his beloved crew fall apart around him. It's a classic story, and as such, Cave has probably told it a couple of times, with strangeness and vigor. But he didn't live it.

Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus is my favorite Nick Cave record, all the more so because it could easily have been the worst. Cave only seems like an amusing but limited character-artist on first approach. He throws himself wildly into his personas, but he's still one human being, and that human being is a goddamned professional, and is very, very good at his job. AB/LOO (a very Cave-looking acronym, if I've ever seen one) is Cave transcending expectations to do the best job he's ever done. It starts with a brilliant idea: a double album composed of two totally distinguishable records, each capable of standing on their own, each worthy of its own fitting title. To put it simply and mostly-accurately, Abattoir Blues is the loud one, all lectern-bluster and slabs of guitar and drum, while The Lyre of Orpheus is the quiet one, focusing on acoustic melodies and love songs filled with detail. But this isn't a gimmick, and the records belong together. They bring out, into clear, separated focus, the musical (and perhaps personal) identity of Nick Cave. He is a very loud man, and also an almost inaudibly quiet one, and he understands the pure primal force of the electric guitar, and how very unnecessary its presence can be. These are not contradictions, because for all his self-invested tales, Nick Cave is a person, and by 2004, a very mature one. Part of being a mature person is understanding that opposites are not always at war, that one person naturally can contain both of two extremes, and that--most importantly of all--one extreme need not be the shameful exception to the other's assumed rule. Abattoir Blues is not the definitive Nick Cave, and The Lyre of Orpheus is not an indulgence of the occasional folky tangle. Both sides of this one, this one, album, make up this man, and for all his outward oddness, he is human, and that can mean absolutely anything and everything.

I'm happy enough when a favorite musician manages to keep their head above water as they age (Stephen Malkmus), or falls back on a simpler, steadier but still enjoyable sound (Sonic Youth). Sadly, neither is common. It's 2009, almost the future, and your first band started in 1978, and touring is harder, and home stops being an obligation and becomes something to long for, and the adventure has died away, and you can't write new songs anymore, and you start up in a flurry and make a big record that sounds gilded, and you panic because this can't be the last page of your legacy, and when, exactly, did you start worrying about your legacy?

And I can't blame anybody, because as an outsider looking in, being a musician seems like an astonishingly difficult, frustrating, and draining job, and being a musician for decades seems unimaginable. But then, hell, I'm 19, and I can make glib jokes about getting married to hilariously inappropriate songs because it all seems so distant. Following any career for twenty, thirty, fifty years is beyond my comprehension. And even if I never get married, or come up with a steady job, there's one thing I'll never stop doing, and all I can do is hope I age well. I hope I don't get sick too often, or injured, or embarrassed. I hope I don't feel trapped, or like I've wasted my life. I hope I treat younger people with respect and even more, with curiosity, to find out about a growing world that will one day leave me behind. I hope I don't become too morbid, stagnant, or afraid. I hope I love being 50, and not just a little less than being 40, but for being 50, and all that I am and can still do and can do better than ever before.

I hope I age as well as Nick Cave has. But if I don't, it's because few can: he's still fiery and gripping, and as multi-faceted as everyone else, and only finer with each year distant from the scruffy, limitless young man in the "Mercy Seat" video. Even if I don't end up marrying because of him, I'll never give up what he's given me. And after Dig, Lazarus, Dig! and his badass side project Grinderman, I know he's got more to give. It's there in the last and best words to the last and best song on The Lyre of Orpheus:

Hey little train! We're jumping on
The train that goes to the kingdom
We're happy, Ma, we're havin' fun
And the train ain't even left the station