MAKING OUR NEW NORMAL Antietam
May 19, 2011
With the release of Tenth Life, Tara Key and Tim Harris show there are options to fading away or burning out.
BY JOHN SCHACHT
Two of your trio's members have recently slipped past 50. The other one's over 40 and has a toddler. Your band's been around 26 years, and its modest sales seem inexorably linked to the inverse of your records' critical kudos. Your audiences, while never exactly robust, are getting older and smaller. You tour less in an age when touring matters more. Each new face on the hip-new-thing carousel is a reminder that rock & roll is supposed to be the domain of the young.
Most bands with less longevity have bowed out quietly and turned to other pursuits when the signs all point in this direction. So what do you, Antietam, do? You defy common wisdom like you've always done. You release the aptly titled Tenth Life, one of the most ferocious and feral blasts of punk-inspired guitar rock in your esteemed catalog. And with it you prove yet again that great music doesn't give a fuck how old the people making it are.
"One of the really cool things about this band is it's going on beyond when most bands have myriad reasons to break up," says Tara Key, the Les Paul-wielding guitar dynamo of Antietam. "It's gone beyond having nine lives."
Adds Key's husband and Antietam bassist Tim Harris, "Usually, if you've been together 20 years you're playing the hits you had from the first couple of years and revisiting that. There are some other bands around like us now, but not too many where we, at least, think we're doing our most vital material now."
Talking to Blurt over speaker phone together from their Manhattan apartment, Harris and Key embody the animated excitement and nerves musicians of any age feel leading up to a new release. What most impresses Key is the fact that they now have a "second wind" and are not, say, like the Rolling Stones, doing it simply because "you're in a position where you've been rewarded with the money and the support to do it forever if you choose to."
Oddly, given Antietam's punk pedigree, Key has even found inspiration in bands like the Stones, too. She remembers fighting her way up front at a '75 Stones gig in Louisville, getting sprayed with Keith Richards' sweat, and feeling like she'd been passed a metaphorical baton. She even took something fundamental away from Richards' recently released autobiography: If you rock long enough, you find it impossible to separate it from your identity.
"I don't doubt Keith is a lifer and doing it for really soulful reasons," she says. "I don't know that he knows what else to do as well as he does. I feel that way for myself. When I started playing punk rock, it wasn't like I thought, ‘oh, what an interesting career choice.' It was like, ‘finally, this is a way to express myself,' and that's never changed. You get to the point where you do it because it's what you're supposed to be doing."
Of course there's a chasm between the luxuries - figuratively and literally - Richards enjoys and Antietam's hardscrabble efforts to put out their music over the years. Keef's never had to work a day job as a librarian (Key), or hustle freelance editor work (Harris). And slumping CD sales probably haven't put too big a dent in the Stones' bottom line like they have third Antietam member Josh Madell, who when he's not pounding out beats runs the underground music-friendly and all-round awesome Other Music record shop in Manhattan.
Struggle, in other words, is second nature to Antietam. Key and Harris have been playing together since they formed one-half of Louisville's Babylon Dance Band in the early 1980s. Their current band emerged from the ashes of that outfit in 1984, first as a double-bass quartet, during a brief relocation to Hoboken before they moved on to their current home in NYC . They released their eponymous debut in 1984 and followed it with 1986's Music From Elba (the latter began a five-record stay on seminal noise-rock label Homestead Records), then made good on their brief Hoboken stay by enlisting soon-to-be life-long friends Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley of Yo La Tengo to produce Antietam's third album, 1990's Burgoo.
Madell joined in time for 1991's Everywhere Outside, even though he wasn't officially old enough yet to get in half the clubs Antietam played at the time. Before the mid-point of the decade, Key and Harris would release another Antietam record (Rope-a-Dope, arguably their best, in '94) and two solo Key records (Bourbon County in '94 and Ear & Echo in '95), as well as the Babylon Dance Band collection, Four On One in '94.
During that stretch, the band's sound morphed from its college rock-like beginnings (think a dBs-inflected Pylon, or a Southern rock-fringed Feelies) into a controlled maelstrom with Key at its center. Riding waves of fuzz and feedback like a blend of Neil Young and J Mascis, Key's guitar whipsawed through the thick rhythmic torque of Harris and Madell, while her vocals - Exene Cervenka's spring-tight snarl alternating with Kirsten Hersh's nerve-wracked caterwaul or confiding whisper - slipped into the cuts like salt or salve. Despite their increasing ferocity, Antietam songs didn't stray far from sympathetic melodies or near-pop hooks - think Flip Your Wig-era Bob Mould and you're in a similar area code.
Yet Antietam never got close to Young's iconic status or Husker Du's seminal standing, let alone the hipster popularity of like-minded ‘90s indie rock peers (and shredders) like Dinosaur Jr. or Built to Spill. It was puzzling, frankly, and in their review of Rope-a-Dope, CMJ Music Monthly simply asked, "Why the heck isn't Antietam famous yet?"
It didn't help matters that whatever momentum they had dissipated when Antietam didn't release another record until Victory Park in 2004. There were reasons, of course, for the decade-long silence: Homestead put out its last record in 1996, leaving the trio without a label; the fathers of both Key and Harris passed away during that stretch as well. Increasingly, the band was referred to in print in the past tense.
But Antietam's fallow era wasn't devoid of activity. The trio recorded most of a full-length in '97, but scrapped it. Key teamed up with an old friend, Eleventh Dream Day's Rick Rizzo, for the first of their two compelling all-instrumental records, 2000's Dark Edson Tiger, and the pair played All Tomorrow's Parties in 2001. (The second Rizzo/Key collaboration, Double Star, came out this year to near-universal praise.) Work began on the songs that became Victory Park, too. But Key concedes it was a time of professional recalibration, too.
"Through the 90s, it was a sweepstakes of who's going to be on a major label now that Nirvana's on a major label," she says, confessing that she got caught up in the "velocity" of the times. "You think your life is going to change, getting swept up in that and having a couple of meetings with music biz lawyers, which I probably handled more like a hayseed than what they were looking for."
Without a label or its resources, and with the major label brass ring out of reach, taking a step back - "press pause," Key calls it - wound up laying the groundwork for Antietam's... well, sure, why not: Tenth life. Victory Park, recorded in a beach house at the Jersey shore with Tara Jane O'Neil at the controls, streamlined the band's sound, toning down the fuzz for melody without eliminating Antietam's urgency. 2008's Opus Mixtum was a sprawling 26-track, three-LP/double-CD set that tapped into all facets of the Key/Harris/Madell sound, from laid-back, spacey instrumentals and quiet ballads to thundering rockers, high-velocity punk, and Feelies-flavored indie pop.
"What we did was we taught ourselves how to record," Key says of the band's time away from the new-release light. "We bought good mics, we bought gear, we took responsibility for our own sound. So even though there wasn't something aurally manifested from that time, we were working hard to get to the point where we could not have to rely on people giving us money or giving us opportunities and do it for ourselves."
Harris adds that it was "natural for people to think that we didn't exist, but it actually wasn't true at all. We were together, practicing, recording and writing through all that time."
It was, in effect, a return to the band's DIY beginnings in the post-punk Petri dish of Louisville where Antietam first learned to swim upstream. In that flaccid rock era of Frampton, Skynyrd and Boston, punk rock was openly loathed when Key, Harris and some of their peers first embraced it. Harris even recalls a fellow musician getting punched in the face "on purely aesthetic considerations."
"They just wanted to beat you up if you were playing music that was too fast," he chuckles.
That vitriol, though, had a galvanizing effect for Key and Harris, who first formed Babylon Dance Band in 1978. Nor were they alone, which was kind of the point. Group-ostracizing offered at least camaraderie for kids who'd been feeling ostracized all alone. For that reason, punk rock became far more than just a new music genre for many outcasts.
"It was all the freaks in the community on the same raft together," Key says. "It was ‘oh, man, I found a place that welcomes everybody who's not of this typical fabric here.' And that's really intoxicating to find something that special, to finally feel like, ‘yeah, I felt weird my whole life, but out here with all the weirdoes we're making our new normal.'"
It was that sense of no rules-adventure mingled with what-the-fuck-are-doing? fear that fired the imaginations of Antietam and its peers (among them acts like Endtables and Blinders) and influenced a Louisville scene that would shortly birth the likes of Squirrel Bait, Slint, Rodan, Will Oldham and a host of other like-minded outsiders. But those first brave baby steps belonged to Key, Harris and their comrades in an era when musicians put a premium on virtuosity -- something anathema to kids just picking up their first guitars.
"When we did it, it was really like, ‘Oh my god, you're really going to do this instead of go to Law school? You're really not going to go to the graduate school you got into?'" Key says. "I don't mean to glorify it, but it was a pretty big leap of faith especially when you weren't somebody who'd been playing in blues-rock bands for five years. Now, it's almost like you can go to your high school counselor and say, ‘I want to have a punk rock band,' and they'd be, ‘well, that's good, here's some data on how you can network to do this and this.'"
And now in the internet age, with music sales plummeting for everyone, the playing field has leveled to the point where Harris says the "gestalt has come back our way, and we're just trying to do better what we've always been doing."
If there's one advantage the young have, of course, it's time. But if the kind of punk/DIY-influenced rock Antietam makes is typically fueled by youthful exuberance and hormonal angst, this trio finds equally intense fire and urgency in the passing of time. ("You're dealing with a palette of loss," Key reminds.) And like a crafty veteran ballplayer - let's go with Jason Kidd, since it's NBA playoffs-time and he's a badass, too - Antietam may not be able to play the rock & roll release-and-tour game like they once did, but experience and skill has made them sharper than ever.
"The ship sailed for me on worrying about how many records we sell or how much money we make," says a defiant Key. "Frankly, it's not going to change whether I do it or not, as long as I can physically and mentally do it. My main concern now is to take the vast opportunities that are presented with the internet and find a way to target the people I know might like us if they heard us. Nobody is putting a gun to any of our heads to keep doing this; it's just what I do, who I am. Short of having a stroke and forgetting everything I know about myself, that's not going to change."
Harris puts a neat bow on the conversation by citing a line from the song "Numbered Days," the fire-breathing opener from Tenth Life and a perfect capsule of Antietam's mindset: ‘Say goodbye to foolish things, these are numbered days,' which you could take as, ‘oh, I can't rock out anymore, I have to think about these other things,'" he says. "But you could also take it as, ‘it's really important to rock out.' "
Antietam has been proving that for a long time, and seems intent on continuing to do so for the foreseeable future.
[Photo Credit: Dawn Sutter Madell]
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