Little Big Band: by Christian Logan Wright
Visibility is O to 2 miles at the top of the Empire State Building, but the Throwing Muses stare silently out of the windowpanes for a long time. Kristin Hersh's voice creeps up from the emptiness of the shipgray concrete observatory, simultaneously begging and scolding. Another voice bounces off it, then collides with the banging of hands against a heating duct and the slapping of a palm against a thigh, making an unfamiliar song, appealing in its awkward struggle. You're drawn to it like you might be to a child lying bloody in the street after having been struck down. It's innocent and hideous and it's happened by accident, the song and the dead child. As abruptly as it began, the song ends and Kristin Hersh, Tanya Donelly, Leslie Langston and David Narcizo all smile straight smiles, laugh little laughs, and fall silent again, looking out. Visibility is O to 2, but the Throwing Muses can see things.
"This is the mission we have to get done," says singer/songwriter Kristin. "Life gets done behind it." Life is secondary because the vision is blinding and the mission began so early on. Kristin and guitarist Tanya have been playing together since they were 14 years old, living in Newport, Rhode Island. Not the aristocratic Newport of Henry James or the Von Bulows, but the working class Newport of poor fishermen, broken families and inbred hostility. Kristin still lives there, has her own family now: a 2 1/2yearold son she had when she was 19 and the boy's father, who is not her husband. Kristin and Tanya have lived in communes, been kicked out of the Brownies for bad attitudes and embezzling cookie funds, tried to be grownups before their time, attempted to hold things together and watched them fall apart, been best friends, taught themselves to play guitar, started the first American rock band to be signed to the eclectic English independent 4AD, and been to college. Now they're stepsisters, they've got a boy drummer (with whom they went to high school in Newport where he was studentcouncil president, really popular) and a groovy San Franciscan bass player who's threequarters American Indian and three years older than they are. They're 22; they're me and they're you.
Difference is now they've got a major label, a fourth LP called _Hunkpapa_ which is a marked departure from the tortured abrasive spillover of previous albums, and $180anight rooms overlooking Central Park at the Mayflower hotel in Manhattan. A great fuss has been made (especially in the UK, where they routinely land on the cover of music magazines) not only over the Throwing Muses but over the fact that they've been to college, that they're utterly unique, and that they're utterly pretentious. They play what's called college rock, but - except for Leslie - none of them ever finished college, and the only thing that makes them look like rockers is their outdated black leather jackets. You can walk right by them in the lobby of their hotel as if they don't even exist. "The music is bigger than we are," Kristin is fond of saying. And it's a good thing because they are quite small. Small in form and small in demeanor if not small in outlook.
Throwing Muses walk like ducklings along Central Park West, sometimes single file. They take tiny steps and cast their eyes down. It's gray out, as gray as it once was within the confines of Kristin's mind. She's written twisted lyrics about fellatio, eating disorders, cutting yourself, the claustrophobia of tranquillity, the terror of tomorrow, of thinking in a simpleton's world, and for a while thought she was on her way to the loony bin. But she says, "I'm not crazy anymore."
Was she ever, really, or was it that old stream of consciousness attack we were reprimanded for in Fiction Workshop when we abused drugs and smoked too much? Or was it simply that unnamed period between adolescence and adulthood when you can't decide what you are, or even if you deserve to be. "I used to be real sick," she says. "My self image was like this tiny green thing swimming around in a huge shell and the shell was what I called the body. The body's eyes were so far away from where I was that it was like looking through tunnels and whoever I saw would pass by there." Maybe it was just keen self awareness flirting with paranoia that created disease (dis-ease) exacerbated by her study of Archetypal Psychology in college and her consequent study of self, spiritual and physical. When you're young and you look in the mirror, someone - something - different appears every day. And that thing may not be very pretty; you close your eyes at night and you can't separate the ghoul's face from your own. But which is scarier? You write a poem or a story or a song to work that out.
Kristin started working it out three years ago on a record of dense textures, guitar splatter, and belljar lyrics. The fragmented sound of _Throwing Muses_, a college girl's dining hall conversation set to antagonistic electric screeching, was painful, self loathing, manlovehating. In contrast, _Hunkpapa_ has levity, happiness seeping into the darkness. "It's very scary to be stripped bare over and over again," Kristin says. "But then there's the strength of turning that achiness into something that's so celebratory and sharing that with a lot of people. On this album there's a lot of sex. Like, 'Is sex ultimately empowering or embittering to women? Is it something you store up to give away, or something that will strengthen you?' And those are the questions that we're always asking."
Throwing Muses gather around a table at a cavernous eatery on Broadway where the waitresses wear roller skates. They agree they'd like to see one fall over on her way to the bar. They giggle, act goofy, maybe a bit selfconscious because they're a rock'n'roll band. Steam from a big basket of vegetables rises up, clouding Kristin's very pretty china doll face, making it glisten. She speaks softly of her 2 1/2 yearold son's Southern Baptist grandparents who were alarmed when they visited last weekend and he toddled out of the living room saying, "I'm just going for a beer." Wonder then what the Southern Baptist grandparents think when Kristin's up onstage, deftly playing guitar, eyes rolling back, letting her voice come up like bile, crying that nobody knows her pain. Offstage, she sits up straight, wears black trousers and a turtleneck with a yellow cardigan. She carries a small purse.
Kristin's appalled by the current "women in rock" category (what, pray, were Janis, Joni, Siouxsie and Ricki?) and suggests instead "brunettes in rock." Dave and Tanya wonder how Tracy Chapman can now comfortably and in good conscience ride in the back of a limousine. Distinctions can be meaningless, even destructive; when Kristin speaks of a song, she speaks of the whole song the music and the lyric though journalists fancy she's skipping woefully down a leafcovered path in a little girl's big garden. "As if I just write poetry," she laughs. "Like I have this band just so I can spout my poetry. I think of a song as whatever line and whatever guitar part. That's what I live for the instrument. But people can't equate the two things. They have to think of me carrying little bits of paper around and spouting wisdom on them. Which is not the case at all." In her purse, she has a wallet with a picture of Dylan (her kid) and Andy (her counterpart), no credit cards (they've all been ripped off), a plastic bristled hairbrush, a pale pink lipstick and a couple of barrettes. No paper and no pen.
Waiting for the elevator inside the Empire State Building, the Muses recall some of their fan mail. Dave gets a lot; the operative words are "cute," "hot" and "sweet." On the collar of his Newport Fire Department jacket he wears a Guns N' Roses pin. He kinda digs that band (though the Muses's collective favorite band is the Pixies, with whom they've shared tours and management and acclaim), but at the end of the day would have to say he doesn't like them even though they're better than those "nuclear war bands, like too much junk food." He says that the Throwing Muses' last LP, _House Tornado_, was supposed to be their major label debut, but Sire was confused by it, didn't know how to promote it. "_Hunkpapa_ is much easier. I'm proud of it just as I've been proud of everything we've ever done. My drum parts used to be pretty manic, now they're much more seductive. I feel like I'm learning how to speak my language. The songs are easier to get into, they're not as alienating."
Tanya wanders off to the candy machine to get a pack of gum. The elevator comes; she's having trouble with the machine, so she gets left behind.
Throwing Muses are lying on a big bed in Kristin and Leslie's room at the Mayflower, making fun of Edie Brickell who's whining her repetitive whine on MTV. Edie says, "Choke me in the shallow water before I get too deep." Leslie says, "I wouldn't worry about getting too deep." Edie says, "Choke me in the shallow..." Tanya says, "Choke her now!"
Kristin pulls a green apple out of nowhere, eats it while staring absently at the screen. Tanya's lying on the bed, rolling around. Sometimes she feels like she's 12, gets accused of flirting though she doesn't think she knows how to flirt. She's got kind of a soft breathy Marilyn voice and soft wispy Marilyn hair and a tight black top and red lipstick. She's wearing a VW medallion on a chain round her neck that her boyfriend found on the roof of a building in Boston where she lives now. "See," she says, "It still has road scum."
Dave has a Rick Astley impression, but he won't do it. It's not time. "It's a goal of mine," he says. "You'll see it someday."
Leslie's a little bored. She's got a fiance in Boston and maybe she'd rather be there. She was married once before, but he was into that dinner-on-the-table thing, didn't really get that her life was playing the bass, giving a lot of balance and strength to an inexperienced young band. She's got the benefit of music theory and has played in a lot of bands. But she has fantasies about Prince, that he wanted to marry her. She once waited outside his hotel, pacing, hoping he'd come out because then her life would be set.
Kristin's gone quiet. She's trusting the music that's bigger than she is. It's a funny thing, trust, a thing you outgrow like feetpajamas then spend your adulthood relearning. "Music is the most that I can give," she says. "It's the most I can do and it's utterly separate from me. Because it comes from such depths, it speaks of my humanity not my personality. It's as if I hear songs, I don't make them up. As soon as it goes down, it takes on a life of its own. I can learn from it, I learn from it every time I sing it. I feel lucky that I heard it in the first place." A little cosmic, but she can laugh about it, she can feel sorry for people who take despondence too seriously, she can fixate on what she calls childness, the innocence and the capacity to learn that we all have, that we don't have to lose. She can be dissatisfied with the size of her feet. "Humanity is something we all share," she says in the throes of musing.
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