I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: HELLBENDER-Hellbender (1993).

Hellbender is a band that Wells Tower was in before he became a professional writer.  He played guitar and sang backing vocals (and wrote some lyrics, but not on this album).  The drummer, Harrison Hayes is now the drummer for Les Savy Fav and the bassist and singer Al Burian is most notable for his zine Burn Collector (for a time he was the most famous former Hellbender, although I’d never heard of him).  They were always pretty small time, although their third album did receive some attention.

This first album is pretty rough–quickly made and cheaply mastered and yet there are good dynamics, cool breaks and a whole lot of punk.  Al Burian’s voice is in shouty punk mode (lyrics are not all decipherable) and although his voice works it’s a bit samey throughout the disc.  The drums don’t always sound great, but there are often cool drum breaks.  And the guitars are quite assured.  Despite the punk attitude, it’s not all flat out speed.

There are some dynamic breaks, like in the second track “Housebroken,” which has some cool moments when the drums highlight an unexpected tempo changed.  “Clocked Out” was the single they released prior to the CD and it has some real production values (and a very funny intro from a local DJ).  The guitar highlights the trebly end in a kind of ska riff which is quite different from the rest; there’s also some discernable bass lines and a cool bass/guitar solo (punk, yes, but branching out a bit).  It’s a great track.

“Two Twenty Two” made it onto a couple of local compilations.  It has a slightly less heavy feel, with some interesting guitar lines.  “Aisle Ten” has verses that end with some really heavy (reminding me of Metallica) riffs that really punctuate the vocals.  “Peeling” has some cool backing vocal chanting (as well as what sounds like an answering machine message) that sets it apart from the other songs.  “Clarence” has a really long instrumental opening (1 minute out of a 2 and a half-minute song) that shows of more of Burian’s bass lines.

“Couch” was the B-side to “Two Twenty Two” and it has better production values as well–and lots more dynamic parts.  The final song, Retread” is a sorta political song, “Do you remember when we were young–revolution seemed like fun.  I thought I could get things done by yelling at the top of my lungs.”  Not mind-blowing lyrically but a good sentiment nonetheless.

The band is very tight–their breaks and starts and stops are right on–many of their songs end suddenly and the band pulls it off very well.  When I first listened to the album, I thought it was kind of pedestrian, but after really listening, I realized this is a very well-formed debut. It’s an interesting addition to any punk fan’s collection and an interesting footnote for any fan of Wells Tower.  You can find a copy of the disc at Metro/Sea.

[READ: September 30, 2011] Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

After talking about Wells Tower for a while and reading all of his uncollected stories and nonfiction, I finally got around to reading his short story collection.  And I think I have an interesting perspective on the book because at least two of the stories were totally reworked from their original release.  Not simply updating a thing or two, but totally revamped.  In my experience, aside from the David Foster Wallace essays that were truncated in their original form, this is the only book I know where the stories inside were totally rewritten for the compilation.

There are nine stories in the collection.  And I have to say as an overview to this book, I can’t get over how much I enjoyed them.  I mean, I knew I liked Tower from what I had read before, but I didn’t expect to enjoy this book quite so much because Tower writes a very manly kind of story.  He usually writes about tough guys and men who have a hard time interacting with their fathers and other situations that are out of my ken.  But Tower upends many conventions in his stories and his prose is tight and succinct and his stories are very quick to read and really enjoyable.

In “The Brown Coast,” Bob Munroe’s father has recently died and, although they weren’t close, he takes it surprisingly hard.  In the span of a month, he alienates his wife and his kicked out, and he loses his job–distracted by his father, he built a staircase unevenly and a man fell down the stairs.  His Uncle Randall tells him to go out to his cabin and recoup there (and also, fix up the shambles that the cabin has become).  Bob is pissed at having to work his Uncle’s house (he suspects the worst from his Uncle and is usually right), but he decides to go up by the water and relax.

The story opens with Bob waking up drunk, asleep on his arms, unable to move.  And soon after, he happens upon his neighbor trying to fix his car and cursing up a storm.  When Bob tells him to call down, the guy gets in his face.  Typically, these things send up a red flag that this is going to be a macho bad-ass type of story that I won’t like.  But it goes in a different direction.   The neighbor turns out to be a veterinarian and a decent guy so when Bob fixes the car they become fast friends.  Bob also quickly learns that although the water off the coast isn’t really very pleasant, the tides bring in all manner of interesting sea creatures.  When Bob starts fishing out these creatures for the gigantic fish tank in the cabin, the story takes on a surreal quality.  I loved the details of the story and the plot points were really interesting.  The ending is sad, but it sidesteps a potentially slapstick conclusion and lands square into poignancy.

“Retreat” was published in McSweeney’s 23.  Then he completely rewrote it and published it again in McSweeney’s 30 (that’s the version here).  It was enjoyable this second/third time as well.  This is a story between two brothers who live very different lives.  But despite the gutting of a moose, the story weaves familiar relationships very well.

“Executors of Important Energies” is another story about a man and his father.  In this one, Burt’s father got remarried when Burt was quite young.  And the woman he married, Lucy,  was just a couple years older than Burt; in fact, Burt was young enough at the time that he had this strange fantasy that when his father was “done” with Lucy, he would let Burt date her.  But that didn’t transpire and now they are long married.  But now his father is losing his mind and Lucy believes that she should bring him to Burt to deal with.  Burt wants nothing to do with it–he is busy trying to sell the Icepresto (a gadget that I didn’t understand).  But he agrees to the visit.

Burt meets them in the park.  His father barely recognizes him and barely recognizes Lucy, but he still remembers how to play chess.  And he is playing a dirty, bearded man when Burt finds them.  They go out for dinner and his father invites the man along with them (much to Burt and Lucy’s chagrin).  This story didn’t resonate with me as much as some of the others, although I did enjoy it.  The chess-playing man turns out to have a major role in the story which surprised me (both that he was in it so much and that he turned out the way he did), and I thought he was used very well.

“Down Through the Valley” is another story about a failed marriage.  In this one the narrator’s wife leaves him for a yoga instructor named Barry.  He came home with their daughter Marie, to find Barry rubbing his wife’s shoulders while she was just wearing a bra; he hit Barry with a piece of hose.   Jane took Marie and moved with Barry to an ashram.  The bulk of the story revolves around Jane asking the narrator to come to the ashram and help Barry–he’s had a terrible accident and is on crutches.  He drives the three hours to help out and winds up bringing Marie and Barry back into town.  It’s an awkward drive home, to say the least.  They stop for coffee on the way home.  As they head back to the car, there’s a scene in the parking lot.  And when Barry jumps into the fray (on his crutches) the narrator has to decide what to do.  In front of his daughter.

“Leopard” was published in the New Yorker, and as far as I can it wasn’t changed at all.  I  enjoyed it more this time.  Interestingly, when I remembered the story as I read it I couldn’t recall why it was called “Leopard.”  I recalled the story itself, a boy getting the mail and hating his stepdad, but the leopard part was lost in my memory.  It makes sense now.

“Door in Your Eye” changes the dynamic of the Tower’s son vs father conflict.  This time it is father vs daughter, and the story comes from the father’s point of view.  The conflict isn’t real conflict–the father has moved in with the daughter because he is in a wheel chair and can’t get around as well as he used to.  He can walk, he just prefers the chair most of the time. The first few pages explore their dynamic, but the second half of the story turns into something else.  The daughter mentions her neighbor, the one whose door gets knocked on by men at all hours of the night, and calls her a “whore.”  her father disapproves of the her calling the woman who but the daughter says it’s not a metaphor, why do you think those men keep stopping by.

One day when the daughter is out, the man sees the usual parade of men going to her door (but he never sees her) when one of them–a man who was not let in, starts trying to light her door on fire (a futile, empty gesture).  The father is worried for the woman, so he trudges his way across the street to talk to her.  I was afraid that this story was going to turn into a typical hooker with a heart of gold story, but Tower totally switches gears midway through and the story goes in a completely unexpected and funny direction.  It was really good.

“Wild America” also changes a lot of what we’ve come to expect from Tower.  First off, the story is about two young girls–true they are from the backwoods of the South and are not exactly cultured, but they are girls at least.  The girls are cousins; they grew up together but now that they are teens they have grown apart (especially since one is much prettier and acts more worldly).  There are crazy inappropriate underage things going on (the cousin–who is 15–is talking about doing it with a guy who is 35, there’s beer and pot) but the story eventually settles down and the two cousins and a very dorky boy (who the less pretty cousin invited over because she was feeling sorry for herself) go out to the woods to smoke a joint.  Things deteriorate from there and when the less pretty cousin sees a man relaxing in the river drinking beers, she decided to prove to her cousin that she is cool and goes to talk to him.

Things I especially liked about this story:  It had all the trappings of a “morality” tale, where the young girl meets a strange man, gets drunk and gets totally abused.  But Tower does not go for clichéd story telling at all.  That’s not really a spoiler, it’s just a confirmation that the story isn’t headed where it seems like it’s going.  Also, Tower usually writes men but these girls were quite believable; true, they were tough girls acting hard, but they were still believable.  And most importantly, the story features the dorky boy getting a can of Cheerwine thrown at him.  Cheerwine is a soda that I had never heard of until I was in Williamsburg, VA and I saw it at the Food Lion.  With a name like that, I immediately had to try it, even if I couldn’t tell what flavor it would be (it ‘s a sort of cherry cola soda).  It was good.  And whenever I thinkabout Williamsburg I think o Cheerwine.  In fact this year, when we went back, I brought a bottle home.  But it just didn’t taste as good in New Jersey as it did in Virginia.

“On the Show” was originally published in Harper’s.  This is another story that was totally rewritten for the book.  Although the main storyline is the same, Tower has fleshed out events that were alluded to in the original.  There’s a boy who something bad has happened to.  In the original story, the detective has come around to ask people questions about what happened.  But in this version we actually meet the boy and we see the events that led up to the bad scene (thankfully he doesn’t show us any details).  We even meet his father and his father’s date.  It creates a parallel narrative.  But even the main story about Jeff Park getting a job at the circus after beating up his stepfather (like in the original) has been altered.  There are fewer details about the circus crew (some of which I missed, although the best scenes stay the same) and the heart of the story is maintained.  It fascinates me how he can take a story that I think is very good, rewrite it into something else and still have a good story.

“Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” is a complete anomaly in this book.  Well, not a complete anomaly, it is still about rough and tumble men, but this story is set (sort of) in the time of Vikings.  The language is all modern (“Call it what it is, motherfucker, Djarf barked.  “You sons of bitches are mutinizng my operation”) but the story is about a group of Vikings of sail to Lindisfarne to pillage and plunder.  Sadly for them, the Vikings had recently plundered and pillaged there so there isn’t much left to do.  But that doesn’t stop them.

However, two of the more seasoned Vikings, Harald and Gnut meet a man named Bruce.  Bruce says he doesn’t have much, and if they kill him, they still won’t get much out of him.  So instead, they go into Bruce’s cottage, where his one-armed daughter Mary fixes up their injured shipmate.

It has a tone of comic surreality–like in The Blues Brothers when the Brothers are in the elevator and all hell is breaking loose outside.  It’s not described as such–there’s very little talk of the plundering–but you can imagine the chaos and slaughter outside while they are just relaxing in domesticity inside.

This story is the most violent of the collection.  True. “The Retreat” has a sequence of moose butchering which isn’t too graphic but isn’t exactly not-graphic either, but there’s a scene in this story in which Djarf performs a “blood eagle” on someone, and that will stay with you for a long time.  Despite that, it’s still an enjoyable story, with the anachronistic language bringing a twisted quality to it.

——

I really enjoyed this collection a lot.  I was delighted with how quickly these stories seemed to fly by.  They were engaging and well written and very evocative.  There’s a couple of scenes where Tower over-describes certain characters–specifically, there are a few “bad” characters, who are over the top.  He also has little flights of aggressive fancy that are amusing but just a wee bit much, especially given Tower’s typical concision in his prose.  But Tower has an excellent way with words, he has a gift for metaphor, and he creates phrasing which are original.  And again, his prose is really great.

I’m looking forward to more by him–fiction or non-fiction.  I only wish he had a website so it would be easy to know what he has written lately (or to know what I’ve missed).