SOUNDTRACK: dvsn-Tiny Desk Concert #806 (November 19, 2018).
I love when an artist appears on a Tiny Desk and the blurb is going crazy with excitement and yet I have never heard of them. When I saw the name dvsn I assumed it was a techno band. But I couldn’t have been more wrong:
With a four-piece band and three pristine backup vocalists for support, singer Daniel Daley flexed his falsetto pipes and a shiny gold grill, running through a sampler of fan-favorites about breaking up, making up and trying to move on. The short-and-sweet set is an example of the kind of audible acrobatics you don’t often hear at contemporary R&B shows anymore. … Though it’s easy to mistake dvsn as simply the stage moniker of Daley, the act is really a Toronto-based duo comprised of the singer and Grammy Award-winning producer Nineteen85, the (almost) secret weapon behind the boards.
The band has only released two albums, so they’re not especially long-lived, but clearly they have fan-favorites. And they’ve been playing live for a number of years”
When dvsn visited NPR for this Tiny Desk concert, it reminded me of the first time I saw them two years ago in New York City. They decided to wash the desk in vibrant blue, purple and orange lighting, brought in by dvsn’s team to make the space feel like a concert hall. And while the audience at NPR was almost as densely packed as that NYC venue, it felt much like my live introduction to the group — grandiose in presentation, but at the same time, deliberately intimate in delivery.
They play three songs, “Too Deep” “Body Smile” and “Mood.” Daniel Daley has an amazing falsetto–hitting crazy high notes almost randomly. And thee lights are certainly a cool effect. But these three songs are indistinguishable from countless cheesy-sounding R&B songs.
Of the three, “Body Smile” has the least amount of cheese–his voice sounds good and real and not smoove.
My favorite part of the Concert is actually after he says thank you and walks off because the band jams for an extra minute and they are great. The guitarist plays a sick solo and then the band plays a gentle little jam to close out the show.
[READ: January 29, 2017] “Happyland”
This story behind this story is pretty fascinating. Essentially he was inspired by the life of the American Girls creator Pleasant Rowland. Although as he puts it in the introduction to the eventually-published book in 2013 (he wrote it in 2003), “I didn’t mean to write anything remotely controversial. A former doll and children’s book mogul started buying up property in a small town and the town got mad. Wouldn’t this make a good novel, people kept asking me?”
He had friends who lived in the town that Pleasant was buying property in and told them not to send him any information about the story. He didn’t want to write the story of Pleasant, he wanted to take that idea and write the story of Happy Masters a woman with a similar career but clearly a very different woman altogether. He says, “To this day I know nothing of the real [doll mogul] that I didn’t learn over the phone, from lawyers.”
The original publisher, fearing imaginary unthreatened lawsuits, dropped the book. As for the mogul herself she had no intention to sue.
He says for a long time he didn’t like the book anymore, but now he does. He says it’s fun and nasty. He was tempted to updated it from its 2004 anti-George Bush tone, but decided against it. He thanks Harper’s for publishing this book in somewhat truncated form. Harper’s ran it over four months, and that’s where I read it.
The book has now been published as a book (well, in 2013) and I’m curious to read the whole thing to see what is different. But Lennon has many other books out and I feel compelled to read them first.
Happy Masters is a wonderfully complex character. She had a terrible childhood, but came through it and grew stronger. Then she built a fortune on the things she lacked.
She was orphaned at 6 and raised by her bitter alcoholic aunt and her abusive cousins (they were really unspeakably nasty to her). Both cousins died horribly (which gave Happy nothing but pleasure) but her aunt was still kicking. Aunt Missy had nothing and she was bitterly jealous of all that Happy had built. They met at the funeral of one of the cousins and Aunt Missy wondered how Happy could let her live the crappy way she did. Happy’s mild response: I owe you nothing.
Happy had married James Masters, a scion of a rich diamond mining family. It was his fortune that enabled her to create her own. She was founder, CEO, and creative mastermind of Happy Girls, Inc.
After the funeral she drove to Equinox NY, south of Syracuse, population 410. She meandered along the roads, saw the town hall, the houses and even the small college campus and she decided that she needed to live there. She bought a house for sale and began to create her empire in Equinox.
She was inspired to create Happy Girls when she was 27. As a child she never had dolls. She never had much of anything. When she was 27, already married she saw a shabby antiques store and saw a doll. It was old and had been shattered and messily reassembled. It was a Kestner doll. The owner said it wasn’t worth anything. She brought it home and fixed the doll up–completely. She had never been so fully absorbed in something. Over the next two years it became her passion to fix up broken dolls.
Finally James said, why not make your own dolls. Start your own company.
It took a while to catch on. “What mother, after all, would buy her child a hundred-dollar doll?” Happy Girls were unbreakable plastic but otherwise copies of classic designs in period clothes. They didn’t sell until Happy thought of a new angle–stories, historically accurate stories to go with each doll. And that was the hook she needed.
Then Happy had the idea to take over Equinox. She first bought out the old hardware store. She gave the owner a huge sum and then somewhat gleefully fired the bitter old lady who worked there (This whole scene is great). When that old woman killed herself sometime later, people all assumed that Happy was resemble (the suicide note suggested as much) but Happy was not even in town when it happened. Nevertheless, people didn’t forget.
As she went around town inquiring and offering tons of cash, people were at first excited by the money and then they grew suspicious. Dave Dryer the owner of the town bar outright refused to sell to her.
He had a pretty good thing. His was the lowly bar in a college town. And the college was women only. Not a bad way to work for a single guy. Even if by now he was too old for any of them
The girls in the college were of a type. They were fairly wealthy, pretty liberal and pretty open to sexual experimentation. There was a lot of lesbianism on campus–although how much was long-lasting was unclear. The story focuses on a group of four friends. Janet Ping was 20. She had a white redheaded mother and Chinese father. She was shy and didn’t want to talk about her heritage
Her friends were Sara (goth) Rain (hippie) and April who dressed like construction worker and was sort of Janet’s girlfriend. They were annoyed to come back to college and find that Happy had bought up do much of the property. It’s so corporate they complained. All except for Janet. Because Happy Masters was her hero, her icon, the lifelong object of her lustful imagination.
Some other characters of note are the college librarian Ruth Spinks who is curmudgeonly but not a stereotype. Nevertheless she hates Happy and everything she represents.
There’s Archie Olds, perennial mayor of the town and a contented mayor because nothing every happens. He gets a stipend, grows his apple trees and lets everything go as it is supposed to. Obviously he’s not happy that Happy is making waves,
There is also Reeve Tennyson, the college President. He plays a somewhat minor role (I like to imagine he is fleshed out in the final book). But his backstory is pretty great. He went from Ivy League to nowhere because of some really dumb things he said. He also happened to have met Happy once before (when he was President of his Ivy League school).
The townsfolk didn’t much like what Happy was doing (at least when they were drunk and riled up). And they planned to do something about it–although their attempt at frightening her way merely wound up ingratiating her to them even more than they could have imagined,
But soon Happy starts winning over the girls at the college because she offers them jobs in her new places, including the new bistro (which had really good food). Even Janet gets a job (swoon) working right with Happy as her personal secretary (double swoon). This does not make her group of friends happy by any means.
The girls on campus really want to bring in Sally Streit a nationwide expert on lesbian issues. There isn’t enough money in the budget and when Reeve gets wind of what she does in her show–it’s pretty graphic–he balks at the idea of endorsing such a thing at the school. But when Happy gets word if it, she immediately ensures that Sally can come to the school. She has several irons in the fire.
A lot of this has to do with her newest letter to her fan club. She has invited people to move to Equinox to live in Happy’s new town.
The more that Happy tries to make the town “better” or at least in her image of better the more certain townsfolk object. Many people happily take her money and leave, but still more dig in their heels. There are all kinds of threats and at least one fire. There is blackmail–financial and sexual. And there’s a one citizen who has gone completely over the deep end.
But what’s best about this story is the writing. It is so compelling. The story flows quickly and easily with cliffhangers at all the right moments. The townspeople feel real and believable. It’s easy to say that this situation is a bit over the top and yet it is (loosely) based on a real event.
I really enjoyed this story and as with many stories that I enjoy the only thing that could make it better would be if it was longer. So I guess I might just have to see what those excised parts actually have to add to the sorry.
I Just Read About That... 
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