American Music Club – California

 

American Music Club – California

By

Jesse E. Mullen

 

Innovating within the folk-rock genre can be tough. With stylistic cues and traditional instrumentation set in stone, it is nearly impossible to do something that hasn’t been done before. That is, unless you are Mark Eitzel and American Music Club.

The San Francisco group formed in 1982 and quickly established themselves as a creative force. Their sound combined the acoustic guitars and spectral warmth of folk rock with the coldness and glacial pace of UK post-punk and gothic rock. In 1985, they released a debut album widely considered to be the first slowcore release.

Entitled The Restless Stranger, it was unlike anything heard before. Songs like “Room Above The Club” dealt with desolation in a chugging Feelies style, while “Away Down My Street” fused lyrics about claustrophobia with dreamy guitars and cavernous drums. But a good deal of credit must also be given to singer/songwriter Mark Eitzel.

His crooning baritone had more in common with British post-punk vocalists than the raspier tone of typical folk singers. The name of the group also defied expectations. By calling themselves American Music Club, the band were no doubt poking fun at the classification of “Americana” which was becoming popular at the time.

In 1987, AMC followed it up with an even better album entitled Engine. Lead guitarist Mark Pankler – who goes by the mononym Vudi – was starting to establish himself as a versatile player, merging gothic gloom with Neil Young style rock. Eitzel was also beginning to sharpen his focus as a lyricist.

Engine is notable as having the first of Eizel’s many drinking songs. “Outside This Bar” is a jangling ode to being overserved. Eitzel vaguely compares the bartender to a drug dealer. It is somewhat ironically one of the most upbeat songs on the album. But it would prove pivotal in AMC’s development.

American Music Club quickly followed Engine with 1988’s California. The cover featured a grainy snapshot of a beach front in front of a dark green background. It’s an iconic looking cover, but does the music match the stark beauty?

Things get off to a promising start with the languid folk rock of “Firefly.” A three-chord acoustic melody and lively pedal steel introduce the track before Eitzel’s voice enters. The lyrics evoke the end of a summer day, spent “watching fireflies as the sun goes down.”

Once the chorus hits, we realize Eitzel is singing of love, and that the lyrics about the short lifespan of fireflies reflect his anxiety about his relationship potentially ending. It’s an apt metaphor, and it showed that Eitzel was further able to bring more straightforward meaning to his lyrics successfully.

The track was also the first appearance of Bruce Kaphan. Kaphan played the aforementioned pedal steel lick, including a gorgeous solo during the bridge. But it would not be his last appearance. Kaphan would continue to work with American Music Club and Mark Eitzel throughout the 90s.

Things go into full powerpop mode on “Somewhere.” Bright guitars chime and jangle. Drums crash and skitter along. It’s the most openly rocking thing American Music Club had done to that point. Eitzel sings about going out and getting “really drunk tonight.” Even if the words are a bit of a cliché, his passionate shout of the chorus sells them convincingly.

The sound of Neil Young and Crazy Horse is most explicitly referenced on “Pale Skinny Girl.” Vudi churns out swirling textures and “Cortez The Killer”-esque minor chords. Eitzel sounds thoroughly haunted as drums crash around him, his croon raised to a near-tenor range.

The lyrics – while sparse – paint a chilling picture. They cryptically describe a girl who lives in the mountains, is “frozen with terror like an animal,” and “never sees daylight.” It could be a metaphor for isolating oneself through substance abuse, or it could simply be a chilling tale of reclusiveness.

And what’s an American Music Club album without a full-on alcohol rant? We already had the fun side of drinking in “Somewhere,” but “Bad Liquor” is something else entirely. Eitzel shouts about his dependence on alcohol over a rockabilly-meets-The Doors groove. While Allmusic characterized it as a drunken rant, that is part of the charm of it.

Eitzel understood the damage alcohol was doing to him, as well as his relationships. Yet he couldn’t shake his need for it. This internal conflict informs both Eitzel’s delivery and his lyrics. And because of the conflict, the song succeeds.

Eitzel further establishes himself as a master of desolation on “Lonely.” A mid-tempo shuffle, it almost sounds as upbeat as opener “Firefly.” But lyrically, the song describes a night in with a man who doesn’t want him. He tells Eitzel to shut up when he tries to speak.

In the chorus, Eitzel concludes he would be better served to be alone than be lonely with someone else. The contrast of the brisk, almost breezy – by AMC standards – instrumentation with the dark lyrics show what Eitzel would do on later albums, including the bands major label debut Mercury in 1993.

The AIDS crisis hit San Francisco particularly hard in the 80s. After the White Night riots in 1979, the gay community had to contend with a new virus that was killing them, and a CDC that did very little to stop it. As Eitzel was a member of this community – he came out in 1985 – he experienced this loss firsthand.

The song “Blue and Grey Shirt” deals with his grief. The lyrics describe Eitzel waiting for his partner to come by, forgetting that he is now deceased. The allusion in the title is to a shirt Eitzel cryptically associates with his late love. It’s a devastating song lyrically, but an equally interesting one musically.

It starts out as slowcore meets Comes A Time-era Neil Young before shifting into finger-picked acoustic territory with spacey ambiance. Some of this is thanks to Eitzel’s fingerpicking, but credit must again be given to Bruce Kaphan’s pedal steel. Kaphan starts out playing traditionally, adding mournful color to the minor key chords of the verse.

But as the chords in the chorus become less traditional, so does Kaphan’s playing. He wraps lines around Eitzel’s picking, rather than just playing underneath it. Together they sound like two guitars playing off of each other, rather than one guitar and a pedal steel.

American Music Club were never folk rock in the purest sense. But on California they made the album where they were most closely aligned with the genre. They put their own spin on it, combining so-called Americana and British post-punk influences. In the end however, the only thing American Music Club sounded like was themselves.

Frontier/1988