Throwing Muses, Throwing Muses (4AD, 1986)
Surfer Rosa, the Pixies (4AD, 1988)
How Ghosts Affect Relationships, His Name Is Alive (4AD, 2024)
Stars on E.S.P., His Name Is Alive (4AD, 1996)
Mork & Mindy
My favorite television program when I was young was Mork & Mindy, starring Pam Dawber and Robin Williams. The show, in case you've never seen it (which seems more and more likely) concerns an alien (played by Williams) from the planet Ork who lands in Boulder, Colorado and falls in love with the titular Mindy. They eventually have a middle aged son (played by Jonathan Winters). It, like so many sitcoms of my childhood, was "high concept," in that it wasn't just a bunch of people living in New York City rather required some understanding of the underlying narrative precepts to follow the story. Eventually, the show was cancelled in the middle of a narrative arc regarding an antagonistic alien who wanted to kill Mork, and might have succeeded, though we'll never know because the show was cancelled before the story resolved itself.
Yet, that's only the "content" and, as the namesake of my dog, Walter Benjamin, tells us, the content is the least essential part of anything. Mork is played by the once in a lifetime talent of late 70s Robin Williams who was so funny that Dawber could rarely (if ever) keep her composure as her co-star improvised his lines. Yet the respect went both ways: when the network insisted that Mindy become sexier in subsequent seasons, and Dawber refused, Williams had his co-stars back and supported her refusal to become objectified. In a sense, though these behind the scenes moments didn't explicitly make it before the cameras, the audience could tell the partnership between the two of them, which made the show that much better. This show is almost too good to be true w/r/t my own interests/obsessions: Mindy's father owns and operates a music store, something that seems to become more absent with each passing year: a store where you could buy sheet music, instruments and pop albums. Her father seemed to be perplexed by both his daughter's relationship with a bizarre covert alien as well as the latest Rush album. The final figure in this quartet is Mindy's grandmother, who, in perhaps a too-predictable joke, is far more "hip" to whatever is contemporary than her bald son.
However, none of these characters were my favorite. My favorite character on Mork & Mindy is Exidor. I'm just going to quote the Wikipedia summary for Exidor in full because it's almost too difficult to summarize otherwise:
Exidor (portrayed by Robert Donner) – An odd man (with possible mental illness) who regards himself as a prophet. He often appears wearing a flowing white robe with a brown sash. He recognizes Mork as an alien, but nobody believes him. As the leader of a cult called "The Friends of Venus", of which he was the only member, Exidor regularly engaged in conversations with imaginary members of his cult (such as "Pepe" and "Rocco"), but was the only person who could see them. Although his behavior is usually wild and absurdly eccentric, he is shown to have a strongly caring and compassionate side; he frequently makes noisy and vigorous attempts to cure maladies or correct wrongdoings (which often turn out to be either imaginary or laughably minor), and he always immediately rushes to Mork's aid ("I got here just as soon as I heard, Mork!") when requested, although his well-meaning efforts to assist Mork seldom produce any actual results. Most times, Exidor is found yelling at his imaginary cult. He makes the comment, "Entourages can be the pits!". When the Venusians abandon him, Exidor begins to worship O.J. Simpson when Mork encounters him at the Boulder Police Station. He also had a plan to become "Emperor of the Universe" by becoming a rock star; his musical instrument of choice was the accordion. Exidor appears to be something of a squatter, for on at least two occasions, he is present in homes not his own. One time, Mork visits Exidor at a very nice apartment where he supposedly lived with his imaginary girlfriend and her twin sister. Another time, he is "on vacation" in Mindy's family home, where he apparently believed there was a beach in the living room closet. Exidor eventually gets married, in a "forest" (Mindy's attic). Mindy thought his wife would be imaginary, but she turns out to be a real woman named Ambrosia. Exidor became highly popular with audiences, and prompted wild applause from the studio audience when entering a scene.
The last part of that summary made me feel better because clearly I wasn't alone in identifying with Exidor. Not sure how many of those audience members who made Exidor popular were pre-teen children, but, nevertheless, kudos to them! An "odd man" with "possible mental illness" was my favorite character! I identified with him! and, if we're really going into the deep dark night of the soul, I hoped, as a young child, that someday I too might be a mentally ill homeless man who spoke to invisible cult members!
But I digress. From the perspective of 2024, given the fact that both Robin Williams and Jonathan Winters had long standing struggles with their respective mental health, the idea that there was a network television show with literally crazy people trying to make sense of the world with a beautiful, understanding woman (who would continue to have close relationships with her co-stars even after she left the alien world of Mork & Mindy) at the center was some kind of win for those of us who maybe didn't feel so right in the head growing up. I wanted to write about this because 4AD records just released a box set of the first three His Name Is Alive records, and if there's an alpha to my own realizations about mental illness (Mork & Mindy) then these records, if not necessarily the omega, then certainly a sign post, a respite, in that realization.
I Hate My Way
Starting in the mid-1980s, the venerable British independent label 4AD started signing American bands to their otherwise European-centric artist roster. Throwing Muses was the first band signed, with Muses' tour opener the Pixies to follow in short order. I first discovered Throwing Muses from a mix tape a friend gave to me in high school. The song he put on there is "Hate My Way," an absolutely blistering song about teenage depression that spoke to me in ways at the time that remain within fundamental conceptions of myself as well as my relationship to the world. Kristen Hersh, the lead singer, begins the song listing any number of maladies, addictions and historical catastrophes which could make her "hate" ("I could be in a Holocaust/ and hate Hitler" is one verse that stuck out) concluding: "no, I hate my way," before the band transitions from the lurching crashes of the opening verses to the more aching and melodic rest of the song. There's no proper chorus to the song, instead what emerges is a stream-of-consciousness series of howls expressing the pain, suicidal ideation, loneliness, horniness of being a teenager. Or at least that's what I hear.
What is especially significant about this song and recording is that when I first heard it on the aforementioned mix tape, my friend had clearly sourced it from a second or third generation dub (not uncommon back in the day when home taping was skill in music) and so the song always has a murky haze to it, as Hersh's howl warps and warbles as it was read electro-magnetically. I've made the 21st century replica of this mix tape (which sadly I no longer own) in a streaming playlist. It's wonderful to hear all these songs together, but it's not the same. But I'm not the same either. Maybe I am. I'm still depressed and mentally ill, yelling at my imaginary posse, imagining I'm emperor of the universe with my accordion.
Where Is My Mind?
By the time I discovered 4AD's next American band, the Pixies, they were already semi-famous: their music video "Here Comes Your Man" was on heavy rotation at night on MTV. WFNX, the "alternative" radio station in Boston at the time, played that song and "Monkey Gone to Heaven" pretty regularly. I liked both of those songs. However, by the time I got to college, I heard their first record Surfer Rosa, again on a dubbed cassette along with their first ep Come On Pilgrim as well as most of their follow up LP Doolittle. Surfer Rosa was unavailable in the U.S. at the time, only available as an expensive import CD that cost upward of $20 (an unheard of price to pay for a CD at the time. There was only one album I had spent that much money on...$26 for the first Throwing Muses CD, also an import). I have a distinct memory of falling in love with the album driving route 9 back home from Bard college after my first semester (I was too scared to drive on the highway at this point in my life, giving me plenty of time to listen to the Pixies tape over and over again).
Surfer Rosa has become, I think, the Pixies most well-known album at this point. "Where Is My Mind?" arguably the centerpiece of the album, currently has almost a billion streams on Spotify. Its popularity can be traced back to its appearance in the final scene of the movie Fight Club. Its appearance there, like so much of the film, like the song itself, is fairly misunderstood. Just as the film facilely attempted to depict mental illness and capitalism, a song which repeatedly asks the titular question is a very lazy way of creating a total aesthetic work. If there's a Pixies album that I love with all my heart, it's actually their final record, Tromp Le Monde, an album about education, UFOs, the Jesus and Mary Chain. I saw them live for this final tour: Pere Ubu was the opening act. Dave Thomas played a trombone on stage to "Non Alignment Pact." The Pixies, who were barely speaking to one another at this point, played mostly surf instrumentals. It was one of the best shows I've ever seen. All of the American bands signed to 4AD in the 1980s seem to have one thing in common: mental illness. Throwing Muses explicitly sang about it. The Pixies asked where their minds were. Growing up as a sick American teenager in suburban Boston, I felt as if their maladies were my maladies. I think this form of identification with musicians and bands is unhealthy, but it's also unavoidable. I see how my daughter cathects to Olivia Rodrigo. She's open enough to tell the world she's a nervous wreck, why wouldn't my teenage daughter identify?
"Put Your Finger In Your Eye"
The Throwing Muses and the Pixies might have been able to lyrically embody the mental illness that is the Gen X teenager, but Warren DeFever and His Name Is Alive created the soundtrack for it. Warren DeFever is a guy from Livonia, Michigan who once was in the hardcore band Elvis Hitler. As has been documented over a series of archival releases, while in Elvis Hitler (and much before if the dates on the archival releases are to be believed) he was also experimenting with loops and ambient sounds. All of this would eventually go into His Name Is Alive's material as unsettling backgrounds for the inscrutable lyrics. Chances are we are mad.
What's strange/estranging about His Name is Alive is that they--like the other groups I've mentioned--are tethered to a certain material American culture that none of the other British 4AD groups are. If anything, 4AD was a label that seemed to react against punk and post-punk in England. Treasure by the Cocteau Twins is turning forty years old (today!) and is a perfect example of this aesthetic: it seems both timeless and willfully breaking out of its own time. Dead Can Dance returns to a medieval musical style that seems deeply indebted to a Britishness that has nothing to do with the political and cultural realities of the early 1980s. This Mortal Coil, just to round out the exemplary 4AD groups, is mostly an attempt to make American cosmic music of the early 1970s as alien as possible: decontextualizing something as alien to punk and post-punk music as could be.
A group like His Name Is Alive takes the haunting musical landscape of a 4AD to illuminate something about alienated American teenage culture: an almost reversal of This Moral Coil. On the Dirt Eaters EP HNIA cover "Man on a Silver Mountain" by Richie Blackmore's Rainbow. The original song is perhaps one of the finest examples of what I would call, with an odd but respectful nod to the British isles, "Hobbit rock." There's something deeply druid about the song about a man, a magic man if you will, on a silver mountain. The deeply sung refrain "come and make me holy again" seems like a benediction, a metamorphosis of the long haired hard rocker into something mystical, transcendent. Warren DeFever and HNIA understand this--it's the reason why young people of my and Warren's generation played Dungeons & Dragons--that alongside of the fellowship and collective joy in overcoming monsters real and imagined, a dark magic is ejected into the world as well. The His Name Is Alive cover of "Man on a Silver Mountain" is a ritual, a liturgy a song to an unholy beast who can make the singers holy again. It also was probably recorded in a bedroom in Michigan.
I used to listen to His Name Is Alive's second album Home Is In Your Head a lot when I was tripping on acid. Yes, the confluence between an album entitled Home Is In Your Head and taking acid isn't lost on me. I'm not sure it was a healthy album to listen to while I was tripping. It certainly made me perceive and feel things in a heightened way. It was frightening but, just as nightmares might stay with you and fascinate you with their possible meanings for the rest of your life, that's what listening to Home Is In Your Head did for me. So many songs on this record are questions asked by someone, female, into the void: Are we still married? Are you coming down this weekend? So much uncertainty. Is there anyone on the other side of these questions answering? Has the singer just made up a scenario in which they're married? Awaiting someone coming to visit them this weekend? It can often feel that way when you're in college in vague relationships with people who may or may not come down for the weekend.
By the time His Name Is Alive released Mouth By Mouth in 1993, they were a more scrutable indie-rock group. Even the heavy, mentally ill, funereal vibe of the earlier music was gone. They literally wanted to start over again with the opening lyrics: "Eve and Adam in the garden/ breathe the air and walk around" and guitars crunching all around. Rather than the drifting music in which one song bled into another on Home Is In Your Head or Livonia, Mouth By Mouth has discernible songs that remain separate, apart from one another. One of those songs, "Blue Moon," is a cover, like "Man on the Silver Mountain," but this time southern, porto-indie rock darlings Big Star. Again, just like His Name Is Alive, Big Star were a band from an unlikely part of the country/world who loved a type of music that went against most of the music, to which the band would have been exposed.
They went even further on their next record, Stars On E.S.P. (the title evoking the disposable pop music of another era: Stars on 45 were a studio band from the Netherlands that covered older songs in medley fashion to a disco beat). The record opens with a chorus of voices singing through the filter of an old phonograph the folk standard "Can't Feel at Home," made famous by the Carter Family in the early 1930s. This is a very different "haunting" than the ghosts affecting the relationships of Home Is In Your Head. The history of American popular music is the primary specter of the record. The brief singing of the folk standard at the beginning of the record is followed by "Dub Love Letter," a unique mixture of girl group, indie rock and dub production techniques. The second single from the record, "Bad Luck Girl," is again a mixture of girl group swing (with actual finger snaps) with country twang and a lot of reverb. The apex of this sampling of pop music's history on the album comes with the first single, "Universal Frequencies." It's a brilliant rewrite, rearrangement of the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations," arguably one of the most famous and instantly recognizable singles of all time. The theremin is there, the cavernous bass and snare is there. The difference is that His Name Is Alive isn't singing about the good vibrations emanated from being close to a girl you like but, rather, how the good vibrations are merely one example of the universal frequencies all around you. "The universe is all around" voices echo over and over again. We once launched a record into space filled with recordings our species deemed significant enough to share. Stars On E.S.P. sounds like one band's homage to those universal sounds bouncing back to the earth, delayed and echoed by the space.
I started this essay before the election and am now ending it after the election. It is clear that there will be fewer and fewer options for creative people to show different possibilities for the world. Maybe I'm wrong. When I was growing up in Ronald Regan's America it was a difficult time for creative people and alternate viewpoints as well, yet there were still places you could find it. Public Broadcasting was a space that, at least to my young adult perspective, remained a valuable conduit for creativity and differing perspectives. The show that best represents this ethos in what was otherwise dark times is "Alive From Off Center," which ran on PBS stations from 1985-1992. I watched regularly between 1986-1988. One of my favorite artists and musicians Laurie Anderson (whom I've written about here: https://circlewiththeholeinthemiddle.blogspot.com/2024/06/laurie-anderson-united-states-live.html) hosted the show in 1986 alongside her masculine "clone." However, the segment that has probably stayed with me the longest is the short animated film "Street of Crocodiles" by the Brothers Quay, adapted from one chapter in Bruno Schultz's masterpiece of the same name. His Name Is Alive was not a band when the Brothers Quay made the film, but it evokes the same nocturnal, nightmarish surrealism as His Name Is Alive (it's worth noting that there are a lot of similarities between the aesthetics of 4AD's in-house design team, 23 envelope, and the Brothers Quay--who, not incidentally, got their start designing album covers). Eventually the Brothers Quay would go on to direct two music videos for His Name Is Alive, for the songs "Are We Still Married?" and "Can't Go Wrong Without You." The videos evoke the secret life of toys and objects coming to life in the darkest spaces of the night, much like the disquieting sounds and echoed screams of His Name Is Alive's music does.
The world where such fears could be subsidized and publicly broadcasted seems very distant now. Fear is all that's transmitted most days, with the understanding that we know and can identify the fear (fascism, climate change, fear of the other, fear of losing one's job) rather than an earlier time when fear seemed a shapeless, dark thing. Perhaps its just the result of getting older and understanding the world, but I'm not sure, listening to the new His Name is Alive box set, that I can still give a name to the fear evoked by the sounds contained here. In German, a language the Brothers Quay often evoke, the word for uncanny (perhaps the only way to describe the feeling here) is unheimlich. Much has been made of the word Heim sandwiched in the middle: home as the most unsettling place of all. For His Name Is Alive, it's fitting that the most unheimlich space has been in your head the whole time.
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