Album Review: "It's Messy, Vol. 1," Harvey Gold

            The rock crit­ic Robert Christgau was, and remains, a skep­tic of art rock, which was one of the things I took slight issue with as one of his teen read­ers in the 1970s. But his dis­cern­ment in this area also meant that when he came across an art rock band he enjoyed, atten­tion to it would be well-rewarded.

            One of such bands was an out­fit called Tin Huey, out of Akron, where Christgau traveled in 1978 to report on what he believed to be an incip­i­ent post-punk “scene.” From con­ver­sa­tions I sub­sequently had with some of the Ohio musi­cians men­tioned in Bob’s April 1978 Village Voice piece, these lone­some and strug­gling bands thought the idea that they con­sti­tuted a “scene” or any­thing like it was ludicrous. But, you know, this is where crit­ics come in. And for some of the bands that held it togeth­er, the piece con­sti­tuted very good pub­li­city indeed.

            I’d already heard of Pere Ubu when the piece ran, and I found Bob’s descrip­tion of Tin Huey par­tic­u­larly scin­til­lat­ing. It’s worth quot­ing at length: “Tin Huey’s music is also impure, but in a dif­fer­ent way. With influ­ences like Robert Wyatt, Ornette Coleman, Henry Cow, and Faust (the group, not the hero), they’re Akron’s eso­ter­ics, and like Liam Sternberg, who insists that no New Wave can break in 4/4, they value tech­nique. This is not the kind of band I usu­ally like. But where most groups use dif­fi­cult keys and meters to get closer to Atlantis, or tran­sub­stan­ti­ation, Tin Huey seemed to be seek­ing the etern­al secret of the whoopee cush­ion. What they did was Good Music partly because it was Very Funny, and it looked as zany as it soun­ded. This was a band whose remark­able young sax­o­phon­ist, Ralph Carney, was­n’t above play­ing a duck call or using his head as a per­cus­sion device, a band whose Robert Wyatt cov­er was the Monkees’ ‘I’m a Believer. Newcomer Chris Butler added R&B ground­ing on three dif­fer­ent instru­ments, con­trib­uted sev­er­al of the best songs, and brought along a Waitress. And they stopped for breath about as often as the Ramones, not count­ing two blown fuses.”

            As a post-adolescent who was in fact as besot­ted with Art Bears and Wyatt as he was with The Ramones, I was more than ready when Warner Records put out Tin Huey’s 1979 debut album Contents Dislodged During Shipment, which Bob praised as “art rock that rocks.” The LP kicked off with the Akron crew’s afore­men­tioned gloss on Wyatt’s rearrange­ment of the Neil Diamond/Monkees clas­sic “I’m A Believer.” Already this was my kind of Rock Modernism. The ori­gin­als that fol­lowed were a unique blend of quirk and hook, with lyr­ics that toggled between skewed social com­ment­ary (Butler’s working-class hero anthem “Hump Day”), Dada accom­pani­ment for cal­li­ope music (“Puppet Wipes”) and smirky but ulti­mately good-natured japes that don’t play as well as they did then (“Chinese Circus,” “Pink Berets;” num­bers that pos­sibly inspired Christgau’s obser­va­tion “ if their humor is col­legi­ate, I’m a sophomore”).

            As it happened, if what I was told by the band’s one-time man­ager David Sonnenberg was truly true, my Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™ and I were part of a very happy very few: we were two out of, um, 1,200 indi­vidu­als in the United States who bought and enjoyed that record. (Sonnenberg, with whom Ron and I were work­ing on a couple of script treat­ments, waved this stat­ist­ic in front of our faces as a way of mock­ing us. He was like that.) When I met and befriended Paul Wexler, who pro­duced the album, he too expressed dis­ap­point­ment that it laid such an egg in the mar­ket. Talk about a cult band.

            But the Hueys per­severed. Chris Butler his pop pay dirt with The Waitresses (whose saga ulti­mately resolved as some­thing of a tra­gi­com­edy) and he and his band­mates recon­vened sporad­ic­ally over the years to release new and archiv­al stuff, and even play out. In 2003 they played at the Lower East Side new music ven­ue Tonic, an amaz­ing show at which I got far too drunk. (I would do the same in 2006 at the Hatfield and the North show at Bowery Poetry Club; in both cases the end res­ult was me slob­ber­ing to some band mem­ber or oth­er “Youse guy­sh are show great” after the set.)

            In recent years Butler has put out some truly epic stuff — I wrote about his ter­rif­ic Easy Life here a few years back — and also recon­vened, in the combo Half Cleveland, with Harvey Gold, Tin Huey’s multi-instrumentalist and sing­er, who com­posed or co-composed sev­er­al of the band’s crunchi­er tunes. (The last cut on Contents, “New York’s Finest Dining Experience,” fea­tures the geni­us chor­us chant “Everybody knows that money talks and talk­ing sucks.”) One of the not­able fea­tures of Huey was that all of its front­line were song­writers, and solid-to-great ones, with indi­vidu­al styles that were com­pan­ion­able but not homogeneous.

            Gold has a solo album out, It’s Messy, Vol. 1, and in these days of isol­a­tion and con­fu­sion I reck­on it might be one of those things that has gone under the radar of even the most cul­tiv­ated music lovers.

            From its title on, It’s Messy is some­thing of a Lion In Winter work. On the open­ing track, “Your Side of the Room,” Gold sings “No more les­sons to be learned/just mis­takes to recog­nize.” But the bounce of the tune, the com­fort food of the chords, provides con­tra­punt­al uplift. Like a few oth­er tracks here, this one reminds us that before Canterbury and Pink Floyd and all, The Beatles were actu­ally the first art-rock bands.

            Gold has a lot of influ­ences, and one, I sus­pect, has to be the James Gang, the roots-rock-cum-power trio that came out of, where else, Kent, Ohio, next door to Akron. But It’s Messy isn’t eclect­ic in a show-offy way; Gold is doing what he knows, and he knows a lot. It’s cer­tainly a cal­cu­lated risk to re-conceive the Beatles’ “I’ve Just Seen A Face” as some­thing like a dirge, but Gold is such a smart arranger that he utterly pulls it off, his dour Everyman voice mak­ing the pro­spect of not being able to for­get that face an unusu­ally ambi­val­ent one. (Lest you get the impres­sion that this is an entirely down­beat work, I should add that the record brims with humor, albeit largely of the sar­don­ic variety.) 

            His band­mates here, over the course of twelve tracks, include Huey play­ers includ­ing Butler, Michael Aylward, the great drum­mer Stuart Austin, and on a single song, the geni­us reeds play­er Ralph Carney, who died in 2017, very tra­gic­ally and way too soon. (In the years after Contents, Carney worked with Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Jonathan Richman, the B‑52s and many, many oth­er luminar­ies, includ­ing the Black Keys, whose drum­mer Patrick Carney was his nephew.)

            “A bra­cing dose of art rock,” is a phrase my old band­mates and I used to toss around for laughs, but it’s a val­id cat­egory. It’s Messy Vol. 1 is in part just that thing, but also quite a bit more. You can pur­chase it here.