CURSED BLOOD Richard Buckner (Pt. 1)
Aug 02, 2011
All the singer-songwriter wanted to do was record an album. He didn't realize he would soon be stepping into... the Twilight Zone.
BY JOHN SCHACHT
Musicians often refer to their records as children, and lament how arduous bringing them into the world can sometimes be. But if that makes some of the difficult ones breeches and others cesareans, Richard Buckner's latest comes straight out of Rosemary's Baby territory.
The road Buckner traveled to release Our Blood (Merge), his eighth full-length, was traumatic and, from all appearances, under a wicked hex. Through the making of a now-in-legal-limbo soundtrack, two LP-destroying home-studio malfunctions, a stolen laptop (with the remaining Our Blood files on it) and, among other bizarre sidelights, a Law & Order-meets-Kafka episode involving a headless corpse, only Buckner's dogged belief in his muse kept him from folding his hand in the five freaky years after 2006's Meadow.
"I'd call Merge - ‘Hey, you guys ready? The record's almost done,' then I'd call them back -- 'you're not going to believe this...,'" Buckner says before loosing a rich, cathartic laugh. "I actually wrote them an email: ‘Look, I don't know how big your company is now with your Grammy-orbiting budget, but I need you to send your exorcism squad up here to upstate New York and do something about my life.'"
The problems were legion, but the results don't reflect it. The nine songs on Our Blood have all the comforting contradictions of a Buckner record: The percussive strums and plucked lattice-work; keyboards casting shadows or candle-flames; raging E-bow howls, steel-guitar laments and embracing vibes; impressionist imagery gathered into stark truths; and, of course, that voice, the husky whispered slur or yearning bellow smearing one stanza into the next, twinning implication and empathy with every phrase.
With the exception of Buddy Cage's pedal steel on three tracks and some brief maracas-shaking from Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley, the rest of Our Blood - or this partially resuscitated but mostly redone fourth version, anyway - features just Buckner. What full-band diversity a la Meadow or 1998's brilliant Since this final version may lack, it makes up for in the intimacy and directness that so suits the songs' insinuations and confessions.
Despite a fractious history and dark themes, Our Blood is a much warmer document than Buckner's last do-it-alone record, 2002's dense and wintry Impasse. That album had its own fucked-up legacy. What was eventually released was recorded in a basement during a Vancouver winter white-out and amidst the implosion of Buckner's second marriage -- and only after an earlier version was scrapped (along with all his savings) after flown-in musicians were hired to put the expensive studio-made music to expensive analog tape.
After finally finishing Impasse, Buckner vowed never to go that solo route again. But when Our Blood sessions began vanishing into the digital ether and the criminal underworld, "lo and behold, your bank account says you will," he says with a rueful chuckle. Once again, he had to overcome by enduring. But at a still-youthful-looking 46, Buckner knows his own process well enough to realize it typically includes fate-provided hurdles - and if it doesn't, he'll manufacture some to avoid being on autopilot. That might include anything from rearranging everything in his home studio to playing only an upside-down strung tenor guitar or a four-string cuatro.
"The handicaps work on getting my wheel out of the ditch - you know, you write a song, strum the guitar, here's my Eagles easy-play chord book-chords, my usual Bonanza-style surf-guitar playing," he says. "I feel most comfortable when I don't know what's going on and I don't understand it. That's when the good accidents happen."
His creative impasse with Impasse, for instance, resulted in 2000's The Hill. After dumping his first sessions, he stumbled on a cassette in his glove compartment. On it were some sketches based on Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology that he'd recorded years earlier while staying in a Death Valley hotel accompanied by only that book, a four-track and a guitar.
"It served as a creative distraction to get myself back on track; kind of a re-boot," he says.
As for all the post-Meadow weirdness, that actually began on a high note. Buckner forsook the studio timeout he usually takes to re-juice his songwriting batteries to begin enthusiastically penning music for Dream Boy, a film based on Jim Grimsley's novel and directed by James Bolton (The Graffiti Artist). He was so jazzed about the project that he finished most of the score before filming even began, based just on the script and his own vision. Buckner would typically improvise off of two minutes of pre-planned melody, creating what he calls "sound smears." The soundtrack took a year-and-a-half to complete, and it was often these that Bolton used in the film.
"It enabled me to go back into the studio not tired of the way I usually do things," Buckner says, "but actually like a beginner again - thinking about music, being stricter with melodies and tempos and themes, stuff like that. I don't know if I want to say it made me a better musician or home-studio person, it just made me think about things differently. And that's something that I always want to have happen."
What he most certainly did not want to happen was what occurred afterward.
To be continued.
Tomorrow, in part two of the interview, Buckner talks about equipment failure, and equipment theft; about being interrogated by the police regardling a headless torso and a presumed mob hit; and about getting "cock-blocked by producers pointing lawyer-shaped guns at my loins." Don't worry, dear readers; things eventually get better for our hero.
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