| "He's
just looking for men with sin in their eyes—he says, 'So how ya doin'
baby. I'm your rod and staff, and for a ticket you can touch me.... And
after a few tears I become something holy.'"
My beloved writing mentor
was a horror-fiction writing stripper in Portland who opposed both abortion
and capital punishment. He was a tormented ex-Catholic who made his
statement about the importance of formal education by dropping out of school
days before graduation.
Mark Eitzel may be and believe none of these
things, but he's equally naked in jackboots, willing to swing his glistening
thin hips for the hoots of old men, hissing at the cops busting through the
Burnside club's blackened door. And he also kept me alive just when I was
slipping away, everyone around me filled with disease.
"We all want a
patriot's heart," Eitzel sings on American Music Club's recorded ten-year
anniversary reunion, a perfervid rant titled "Patriot's Heart," its third
and most immediately stunning track. "He don't look that good, but he's got
an all-American smile that fills his underwear with dollars." Eitzel traces
the fascist "white worm" of corrupting sentimentalism back to its
Lovecraftian roots, revealing both his knowledge of the crypto-political
rings of fate and the phallo-centric future. He's studied the
in-plain-sight imagery on the last dollar in his pocket earned by bus
station head, made love to brown-eyed best friend freckled farmboys in
polluted fields, and later on tenderly nursed something he once adored into
its imminent, peeling demise.
AIDS had killed off most of what I loved in
the early 90s, and while in psychic hiding a roommate turned me on to
Mercury, one of the most ghost-inhabited records ever recorded. It
was the one good thing about 1993 besides my new lover, its engulfing pathos
staked out by a plethora of heart-stabbing songs, bizarrely produced by
Mitchell Froom. My newfound happiness couldn't compete with its eternal
heartsickness, so for months I was tossed between both extremes. I had
fortunately found a cure for my aching spirit just as I found the perfect
soundtrack for my suicide.
Though I backtracked to much else via the
previous release (a solo live album), it was Mercury's "Johnny
Mathis' Feet," adored enough to be covered by the Divine Comedy amongst many
others, that was the career highpoint, and I didn't think AMC or Eitzel
would ever get near its crippling heights or sensual depths ever
again.
So I was as cynical as anyone whether or not this come back would
work—Eitzel's solo albums since having been 'velvet-lined purgatory' for
me. But then again this opinion is hardly popular—band and critics alike
are ambivalent about Mercury. But for me it's as if the amorphous
mélange of San Francisco had never been recorded; and this is
probably what drummer Tim Mooney, guitarist Vudi, and bassist Don Pearson
probably had more in mind when they became prisoners of the loops and bleeps
of Froom's excess-dungeon in '93.
For more recent Eitzel fans, there
are smooth midtempo tracks like "Only Love Can Set You Free" or "Another
Morning" blissing Love Songs with quaint hope implied by half of the
album's duplicitous title—but for those of us who remember or are aware of
the band's raging inherent political origins in a Reagan-smothered Northern
California, the roiling and wickedly comedic "Patriot" and "Horseshoe Wreath
in Bloom" are what make the album so Ginsberg-raving compelling. I need both
sides of Eitzel, though I admit without the former the latter would render
his work just another lachrymose delight.
The opening "Ladies &
Gentlemen" implores our "hate to fade," and the final "The Devil Needs You"
takes us back to the same endless highway Mercury left us on, as the
American whore-spirit can either continue working the bar out of spite, or
walk out into the day, in spite of demons left behind. We have the
choice.
In body or spirit, these songs preach that slavery is merely an
option.
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