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The Knitters
The Modern Sounds of… the Knitters [Zoë/Rounder]
Live at The Paradise
Boston MA, 2005

There are a few things you should know about the Knitters: they formed in 1982 as a side-project to the members’ primary bands (X and the Blasters) with the intention of playing only benefit shows. They released their first album, Poor Little Critter in the Road, in 1985; this year they finally released the follow-up, The Modern Sounds of the Knitters. The band is made up of three-quarters of X (namely, guitarist/singer John Doe, singer Exene Cervenka, and percussionist DJ Bonebrake), guitarist Dave Alvin (formerly of the Blasters, now solo), and stand-up bassist Jonny Ray Bartel (of Los Angeles group the Red Devils).

Watching The Decline of Western Civilization, Penelope Spheeris’ documentary of the nascent LA punk scene, recently, I was struck by the sheer aggressiveness of the scene that spawned them. And X gave back as good as they got, encapsulating the paranoia and decay of LA life with songs as narratively concise as Raymond Carver short stories.

The Knitters, on the other hand, put a different spin on similar themes. Even if some critics place the band firmly in the long shadow of X’s legend, I don’t think that’s something that concerns them overmuch. If anything, the joyful noise of the Knitters —an energizing mix of traditional ballads, rockabilly and bluegrass classics (they’d fit CBGB’s titular credo more than most bands who’ve actually played there, X included), and re-worked versions of X songs— refuses to trade in nostalgia. They don’t dwell in the past, nor do they peer especially far into the future. They’re firmly, blissfully rooted in the now. [cont’d]

Critter must have seemed decidedly anomalous back in 1985, even with a pedigree of bands who’d always stood out in the rather hegemonic LA musical landscape. Wedding rootsy, traditional influences (be it blues, rockabilly, bluegrass, or country) to the raw, blunt, stubbornly a-historical sound of punk was something new then. In the intervening years such plundering of the past has become practically de rigeur for bands finding their footing, but the Knitters —along with their peers the Gun Club, Alvin’s the Blasters, Los Lobos, Lone Justice, Rank and File, and (of course) X— were pioneers of alt.country, to coin the accepted but rather odious phrase.

OK, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way: none of this explains what makes the Knitters special. It’s an elusive combination of charisma, chemistry, and wit; what formed as a pick-up band, a casual aside to more pressing projects has slowly but surely come into its own. As Doe notes in the press release for Modern Sounds, “The Knitters, like their music, don’t do anything hasty.” But they docareful. and in the intervening years since their deliciously sloppy debut they’ve certainly struck the perfect balance between spit n’polish and spontaneity.

Live, they bring new meaning to the term “loose knit.” I mean it as high praise when I say that they’re the world’s greatest roadhouse pick-up band, but they kinda are. Somewhat more slapdash than David Johansen’s preservation project the Harry Smiths, any instinct towards building a new canon or dusting off slightly stale classics (Steppenwolf’s hell-raisin’ standard “Born to Be Wild” comes to mind) is out the window when the band get onstage and tear through their set with reckless, marvelously casual abandon, making each song wholly their own. It’s a glorious sight, vibrant and vital. Every time I’ve seen the Knitters they’ve torn the roof off the place with their sheer, restless exuberance —its gale-force is undeniable.

At the Paradise they kicked up their glorious, nervy skiffle for a good hour and a half, their energy never waning for a second.

The element of reclamation is central to the Knitters’ agenda, not that they would be so formal as to call it an “agenda” per se. breathing new life into fond but mostly forgotten songs. Or even some not-so-forgotten ones —as always, they played some beloved X favorites, done as countrified rave-ups. “In This House That I Call Home” gets sped-up, losing some of the mournful, creeping paranoia of the original along the way but gaining a sexy swagger. I was desperately hoping for “The Have-Nots” (possibly my favorite X song) but was contented to get “Burning House of Love” (sung with heartfelt ache by two singers who’ve certainly been there) and “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” (a very prescient song, considering the current state of world affairs). They give us “Poor Little Critter”, of course —it’s the band’s thesis statement, and by now a classic in its own right. Like “The Have-Nots”, it’s about finding oblivion in the bottle and waking up to a new day (whether you like it or not). “Skin Deep Town”, an X song first heard on Live at the Sunset Strip, becomes, in the Knitters’ capable hands, a scathing critique of Hollywood’s legendary self-absorption, couched in a riotous hootenanny. The plaintive sound of Jimmy Driftwood’s haunted folk lament “Long Chain On” (made famous by Odetta) presages the mournful country-tinged sound of X songs like “Burning House of Love.” And then there are songs like Flat and Scruggs’ wry “Give Me Flowers When I’m Living” and the Doe’s own “Try Anymore (Why Don’t We Even)” that harken back to a simpler time, when men were men and women were women and they solved their problems with a whole lotta drinkin’ and arguin’.

Pretty much every song features the patented call-and-response vocals from John and Exene. The interplay between them is, as always, one of the great joys in modern music. There’s such richness to their interaction: sometimes they harmonize perfectly; other times they taunt and tempt. But they’re never anything short of perfectly attuned to one another. They know just how far they can push one another —it’s an intimate, powerful dynamic, and an electrifying one. The love they have for this music is clearly palpable. It’s a deceptively simple thing, this heart-on-sleeve quality they have. But it’s rare enough in these days when every band being so goddamn cooler-than-thou that it’s important. And, even better: they make rollicking, unselfconsciously fun music. That’s worth a hell of a lot.

While there wasn’t a mosh pit at this show (as there was when I saw the band at San Francisco’s far more spacious Great American Music Hall), couples were square-dancing with abandon up on the balcony. Just another sign of how far things have come since they started playing shows back in 1982. “From moshing to square-dancing: the true story of the Knitters.”

It’s a fine tall tale.

Lisa Crystal Carver
AS220
Providence RI

Lisa Crystal Carver is a fearless cultural adventurer, an endlessly optimistic raconteur who’s always followed her own idiosyncratic path —ever since the fateful day she first took the stage at age seventeen as leader of the infamous anarcho-performance troupe Suckdog. From there it was one adventure after another, some more harrowing than others but all grist for Carver’s incisive, easy wit and droll, conversational tone. Her new memoir Drugs Are Nice [Soft Skull, 2005] chronicles her early years, starting with the day her drug-running, grifter father told her he’d killed a man and ending with her working her way back to her own version of normalcy.

The “reading” at AS220 is anything but normal, but that’s hardly a surprise. Lisa’s co-conspirators for the day (her friends Rachel and Erik) are stuck in traffic, so we play Lisa’s version of Truth or Dare until they show. The Doctor is in, and she’s asking questions we may not be all that comfortable answering. Embarrassing, embarrassed confessions have a way of tumbling out when Lisa’s in the room. Even better if the answer is unsettling or awkward or just plain icky —because our foibles, our flaws are what make us human. They can even be beautiful if looked at through the right lens.

In this way, Lisa’s interest is humanist and brilliantly democratic. “See?” she seems to be saying. “We’re all the same under the skin, equal. We’re all freaks in our own special ways.” She doesn’t sit in judgment. Rather, she helps us illuminate all the dark spaces we’re afraid to look at. And shealways shares her own stories first, with the same unflinching candor that she expects in turn. And that’s what makes her so refreshing. She’s like your psychotherapist and agony aunt all rolled into one ebullient package; the Cookie Mueller for our apathetic, post-irony generation. And she doesn’t have time for all that bullshit Gen-X pose. She’s not post-modern or post-anything. She doesn’t subscribe to any philosophy other than her own. In her warts-and-all confessional zine Rollerderby and again inDrugs Are Nice, she seems at home everywhere —even if, sometimes, her fearlessness is feigned and she’s really just making it all up as she goes along. She’s her own muse, wildly optimistic even at the worst of times.

After all the confessions are blurted out, the rest of Lisa’s troupe finally arrives. They end up acting out scenes from Drugs Are Nice. Lisa acts as MC. There’s copious amounts of ketchup blood and bad fake French and death by potato peeler and a date with GG. Erik, who’s playing GG with unerring accuracy, right down to the leather jacket and jockstrap ensemble, won’t sit in the puddle of ketchup leftover on stage from the death-by-peeling incident. “GG wasn’t afraid of any damn ketchup!” someone from the audience yells out. Chagrined, Erik sits in the goddamn ketchup. Rachel plays Lisa. She and GG half-heartedly make out, until he gets annoyed and cuts open her white flapper dress. Afterwards GG goes to heaven and comes back with angel wings and a halo. We all have a moment of silence for poor old GG, before chaos erupts again.

There’s never a dull moment when Lisa’s around.

Afterwards I buy a copy of Drugs Are Nice from Lisa. I tell her how much I miss Rollerderby. “So do I,” she says, a bit wistfully. Suddenly an old friend tackles her in a big hug and, not wanting to interrupt, I turn to leave. Rachel and Erik and Co. are having a smoke out in the chilly Providence air. “You guys get hazard pay for this?” I ask. “Nah,” Rachel says. “In real life I’m a biologist. So, I love getting to act out once in awhile.”

We all have Lisa to thank for that.

Celebration/The Double
AS220
January 6, 2006

This double bill by Baltimore-based trio Celebration and Brooklyn-based foursome the Double promised a lot and thankfully, delivered. Although, frankly, I wasn’t sure anything could top seeing the Double play a blistering, frenzied, and focused set on a sweltering summer night on a cramped and crowded sunken ship moored in New York harbor, but this show came tantalizingly close.

The pairing offered a study in contrasts between two bands with certain aesthetic sensibilities and influences in common, but a marked divergence in their use of tone and texture. Not that this is a bad thing —far from it. Too often I go to shows and all the bands on the bill have a certain monochromatic style palette in common. In which case: next stop=Dullsville.

Celebration’s Katrina Ford is a powerhouse. Before the start of their set she wandered aimlessly through the thin crowd, nervously alighting on stage. Then drummer David Bergander and multi-instrumentalist Sean Antanaitis (who’s also Ford’s husband and collaborator with her in previous bands Jaks, Lovelife, and Birdland) launched into the first song and —bam!— Ford sprang to life, howling and cooing and shrieking into the mike, a whirling dervish of boundless energy and restless movement.

In fact, the whole band is about frenetic energy. Largely thanks to Antanaitis’ organ fills and fevered guitar, Celebration’s overall sound is loose-limbed, rollicking, and eerily carnival-esque. (Imagine Fourwaycross chopped up Tzara-style with “From Her To Eternity” and Coil’s “Ubu Noir.”) With the addition of Ford’s sensuous, rich vocals, it becomes irrepressibly sexy, sensual, playful. It’s deceptively simple, this music, but the seemingly inexhaustible energy of the players and vibrancy of their playing gives the music a full-bodied, irresistible pull. This is one group that makes the most of its minimal means, creating something lush and heady that never once lets up in intensity.

Setting one’s textural focus so narrowly can get a little samey after awhile. Thankfully the band’s short set was well-calibrated to build in intensity, culminating in “War,” an anti-Bush paean that ended the set with a real sense of emotional (not to mention percussive) catharsis.

Although Ford vented some serious spleen in “War,” the music itself swung and swaggered with sexy insistence, sounding subversively kicky and freewheeling, like a long-lost post-punk Busby Berkeley number. As Ford’s howls grew increasingly fervent (“got more guns than any-bod-yyyy!”), she punctuated the ramped-up, almost feverishly sped-up finale of the song with some aggressive percussion of her own (in addition to Bergander’s dogged backbeat). (The tambourine ain’t just for the Archies anymore.)

After the bold, brassy strut of Celebration’s raucous set, the Double came off as introverts in comparison—detailed, exacting, their music reflective and downtempo. But that’s not the whole story. While they are a very detail-oriented band, expert at layering sounds and playing them off one another (they utilize negative space as expertly as the positive), they’re hardly dour. They’re wry romanticists, too post-modern (post-post-modern?) to buy into all that letters-and-sodas bullshit, making music that —while hardly dryly ironic— is subtly wary. An Escher-esque sense of imbalance and foreboding informs songs like “Standing on a Levee” and “Firecrackers in Sawdust”; the near-constant sense of disorientation underscored by ringing keyboard trills and distortion skittering back and forth. Their influences may be hard to pin down —echoes of dub here, some Jean-Jacques Perrey synth-cheese there, some Joy Division (more “Decades” than “Love Will Tear Us Apart”), Eno, United States of America and of course the Smiths— but with music so texturally variegated such trainspottery is almost beside the point.

Live, much of this textural detail was lost by necessity. The band seemed a little sloppy and even a bit muted compared to when I saw them over the summer. Tour fatigue? Possibly. But they gained momentum and surety as their set built towards songs off their recent Loose in the Air —the jittery, melancholy “Hot Air” crackled with longing and languor, while the echo-laden, feedback-drenched “Up All Night” brought us all back to the dance floor.

Celebration’s debut is out now on Beggars/4AD. ¶ The Double’s Loose In The Air is out on Matador. Or you could visit their their website. (Nice use of Flash, by the way).