Casual Business 03: Uncles

Rock writ­ers like to dig up Greil Marcus’s four word sum­mary of Harry Smith’s Anthol­ogy of Amer­i­can Folk Music. It’s a phrase that some­how con­jurs an image of our coun­try as mother to a mys­ti­cal cul­ture of poets and bal­ladeers who mas­quer­ade by day as farm­ers and coal min­ers. Accord­ing to Mar­cus, it’s “the old, weird Amer­ica” that Smith some­how cap­tured in his now famous anthol­ogy, and it’s this same spirit that’s been used to describe fig­ures from Bob Dylan to David Berman. Travis men­tions this below as part of the “great tra­di­tion of heady North Amer­i­can song­writ­ers.” But some­how I’ve always felt that this con­tin­uum was some­thing built by crit­ics in some des­per­ate attempt to make enough bizarre cross-generational con­nec­tions that they might have some­thing to say for how­ever many pages they needed to say it. Bob Dylan and David Berman are cer­tainly old and weird, but I’m not sure they fully embrace the idea of an old, weird Amer­ica. It’s a won­der­ful phrase, and sits as an untouch­ably con­cise sum­ma­tion of the Harry Smith Anthol­ogy, but for all prac­ti­cal pur­poses, it should stop there. What Uncles offer instead is a “new, weird Amer­ica”–one that they some­how see, and that the rest of us don’t. It’s so easy to fetishize life as it once was, but Uncles see strange­ness in the medi­oc­rity of the present. When you walk through New York city, what do you notice? Maybe you turn a bit to catch a glimpse at a stun­ningly beau­ti­ful woman (there are plenty in our fine city), maybe you stop and look up at a his­toric build­ing (there are plenty of those too), maybe you go out of your way to walk through Cen­tral Park in mid-Spring. Or, maybe you’re one of those “artsy” types, who takes pic­tures of home­less dudes, crum­bling infra­struc­ture, and bleak win­ter land­scapes. Will Schwartz and Danny Bate­man are inter­ested in the place between these two extremes: the over­weight but oth­er­wise pleasant-looking Latino mother, sit­ting on her front stoop knit­ting; end­less blocks of store­fronts with fad­ing but oth­er­wise oper­a­tional neon signs, and the abun­dance of com­mon­place scenes that are con­stantly being enacted in New York’s five bor­roughs. To most of us they’re non­de­script, unin­ter­est­ing, and nei­ther so pleas­ant they’re cov­eted nor so dis­com­fit­ing they’re fas­ci­nat­ing. It’s the accu­rate por­trayal of life as its actu­ally lived, and to achieve this is a rare gift indeed.

We’ve yet to host a Casual Busi­ness ses­sion with a band we didn’t like both per­son­ally and musi­cally, but rarely do we get along with peo­ple as well as we did with Uncles. Top­ics ranged from music (duh) to shock porn (?!) and every­thing in between. If you’re inter­ested in hear­ing and see­ing a bit more from the ses­sion, our friends over at Break­Thru Radio cut an hour-long show with Uncles before we let our hair down and set Casual Busi­ness to tape. You can lis­ten to the full BTR ses­sion here and watch the abridged video edi­tion here. If you’re still han­k­ing for more Uncles, you can read the 7-inch review that started it all right here.

As usual, we’ve invited engi­neer and dude extra­or­dinare Travis Har­ri­son to give us his thoughts on the session:

Will Schwartz and Danny Bate­man, a sym­bi­otic pair of singer/lyricists not exceed­ing their early twen­ties, brought the expres­sive rhythm sec­tion of Tom White (upright bass) and Dun­can Berry (drums) to my stu­dio for a beery Sep­tem­ber week­night ses­sion that hatched these gems. These two songs serve as an excel­lent intro­duc­tion to Schwartz and Bateman’s rare approach to mak­ing songs. Both “Clar­inets” (writ­ten and sung by Schwartz) and “Green Apple Skoal” (writ­ten and sung by Bate­man) require an active lis­ten­er­ship and a will­ing­ness to com­mit, par­tic­i­pate, and fol­low along with their streams of unstill lan­guage. Beneath it all, haunt­ing chords and beau­ti­ful melodies unfold in some unex­pected surprises.

Uncles makes music that will inspire the neu­rons in your cere­bel­lum to cut a rug and set your heart of hearts aflut­ter, but don’t expect escapism and disco balls. This is music carved from a great tra­di­tion of heady North Amer­i­can song­writ­ers, pre­sum­ably begin­ning with Bob Dylan and con­tin­u­ing with Leonard Cohen and David Berman, who build tem­ples of exquis­itely carved poetry atop folk for­ma­tions. The words are the focus here. It takes a lot of guts to make music like this, to lay it out there, to offer your con­tri­bu­tions to this vital stream. Open your mind and your heart to your new Uncles.

Recorded by Travis Har­ri­son at Seri­ous Busi­ness Music, NYC on Sep­tem­ber 10, 2010

Dan Bate­man: gui­tar, key­board, lead vocals
Will Schwartz: gui­tar, key­board, lead vocals
Dun­can Berry: drums
Thomas White: upright bass

[[[Down­load the 7-inch]]]

CLARINETS
Hand painted adver­tise­ments on the sides of lowrises
were once like chapels to men,
their cre­ators moved on
and left them to live.
and then time spit up apart­ments with court­yard gar­dens
like they were all just sun­flower seeds.
in baked-chicken-kitchens,
we shut­tered our blinds
and cut coupons from magazines

And the lowrises sweat steam into the night
from the base­ment karaoke
ris­ing out from the heat pipes
the same way dirt promises bones to pick clean

And we’d get down on our knees and point our fin­gers on up high
and curse every con­stel­la­tion piss­ing down from the night sky
the stars would notice us with­out really see­ing us
they could kinda feel us (look­ing at their back­sides)
the way you can when you’re get­ting checked out

The swingset is like a pen­du­lum,
aw it’s ter­ror when the chain goes slack.
You taste blood in your mouth,
and feel the asphalt hit your back.
And all the world’s heal­ing
is just super­sti­tion
There’s no one who can make the pain stop.
You just have to wait it out and suck it up,
Wipe the dust off.

And every morn­ing is the morn­ing after some­thing,
each day at school you see the rem­nants of Adult Edu­ca­tion,
from the night before.
The curse­words on the desks
the emp­ties on the bas­ket­ball court.

One day you’ll kick aside the debris
and toss your clar­inet into a pile of leaves
it’s like the deeper you plant it
the longer you carry it with you.

GREEN APPLE SKOAL
‪the bro­ken boy scaled up the bridge his hands scraped and peel­ing like lit­tle paint chips at the zoo in the ele­phant house he sang f scott key to your daugh­ter as he reached for the tail you laughed at the bruises he left on your hips when he fucked you on the couch where your friends would all sit bare backs stick­ing to the leather‬
he said come with me just for an hour so my father’s a tai­lor in ramapo and you’d pic­ture him at your funeral irish catholics use open cas­kets to be spite­ful
‪He told you had Mid­west­ern jowls,‬
‪that ache under rain and trucker’s palms.‬
‪He’d took you over to Hard­ees, he loved the Tater-Tots,‬
‪and the wait­ress’ thighs‬
‪He invited her out to his 18 wheeler‬
‪She clocked out at 4 put her cig­a­rettes in‬
‪her stained off-white bra he fum­bled with over the dash­board‬
‪he said have you ever dri­ven stick before and he fin­gered the gearshift and laughed and coughed, the seat­back smelled of green apple‬ skoal‪, he put a 20 in her front pocket and drove her to school