Folk-Grunge: Mascis, Vile, and Young
Guitar rock for a milder buzz
Folk-grunge, is that even a thing? I think it is.
It all came to me on a meditation retreat in my kitchen, when I was streaming some of my favorite guitarists while steaming some Brussels sprouts. Brussels sprouts were not the main course, though they could be if I joined Team Vegan full-time.
Brussels sprouts are named after the city in Belgium, in or near where these small but tasty cabbage-baby bundles were first domesticated. The website of word-scout Prof. Paul Brians of Washington State University refers to the incorrect "brussel sprout" in his book Common Errors of English Usage. He says that "Brussels sprout" is the correct usage, but I'm raising my hand here, Prof. Brians! Is "sprout" meant to be both singular and plural? Because only insolent children and picky eaters would eat one "Brussels sprout." I think it should be Brussels sprouts, because four to six, depending on size, would be an appropriate portion as a vegetable side dish for almost anything. (I was keeping my eye on the monkfish tails roasting in the oven.)
The Associated Press Style Book has no opinion, except that the city of Brussels stands alone as a dateline.
I was catching up on my guitar music with Kurt Vile, formerly of War on Drugs, one of my favorite 21st century guitar-expansive groups, and J. Mascis, the guitar player who made his name with the intelligent 1990s grunge of Dinosaur Jr. If you think I am going to sit here and define "grunge," you're woefully mistaken. In 1964, Supreme Court Justice "Harry" Potter Stewart said of pornography, "I know it when I see it." Likewise, grunge: You know it when you hear it, and what you are listening to, in its original form, is Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Neil Young and Crazy Horse in some guises, and half a dozen other groups that turned the amps up to 11 and created a sonic blast on guitar, bass, and drums, that resonates to this day. That is stare decisis, the legal doctrine all recently appointed and confirmed Supreme Court justices have lied about when asked under oath whether they would overturn Roe v. Wade.
I wish that Kurt Vile did not take the stage name Kurt Vile, unless his parents, John and Judy Vile, were paying tribute to the composer Kurt Weill. With musical partner Bertholt Brecht, they changed the course of musical theater with works such as The Three Penny Opera, which, if I were still writing for early 1970s Creem, a style to which this essay attempts to be an homage in some way, I would call "punk rock theater." Songs from Brecht-Weill musicals found homes in rock and roll: their 1927 show "Little Mahogany" gave us the Doors' "Alabama Song," aka "Whisky Bar." Bobby Darin's definitive rock/pop "Mack the Knife" came from Three Penny Opera.
As it turns out, Kurt Vile is not a stage name. According to the imperfect but handy Mr. Wikipedia (to which I occasionally donate a few dollars), Kurt Samuel Vile, now 44, was born in 1980, one of 10 children of Charles and Donna Vile, from suburban Philadelphia. So there's a lesson here, about not making fun of people's names. I'm sorry, Kurt and the Vile family. Kurt began playing music on the banjo, which is a folk instrument, and he admired grunge proponents/adjacents Pavement, Dinosaur Jr., and and Neil Young, who with Crazy Horse developed the prototype 1980 folk-grunge album, Rust Never Sleeps.
The name Kurt Vile sounds like the cousin of Sid Vicious, and Kurt is anything but vile or vicious. He's droll and funny and an excellent guitar player, and he's so quirky that he insists his latest album, Back to Moon Beach (2023), is an EP. Extended play discs are short records, usually four songs or so, almost always under 30 minutes. Back to Moon Beach has nine songs and is 52 minutes long, which would be classified as an album anywhere on the planet.
Vile's approach is that of the amiable stoner with the ability to sound unconscious when he sings, while his fingers on the fret go on adventurous journeys. He tells stories like a counselor around a campfire, with the campers enjoying the rough with plenty of bong water and maybe some toasted marshmallows. Somebody's toasted. I'm not being accusatory here, maybe he's just smoking Prince Albert in a can, in a pipe. But the image I see when he's singing is a TV, flickering but unattended to, Kurt on a thrift shop sofa, lots of smoke in the air, just saying what comes to mind while his smart fingers carry the unspooling subliminal state of consciousness in nifty guitar solos. This is true whether he is performing a tune that has a title like an old folk song, "Cool Water," or lamenting the fact that he never got to meet Tom Petty. The title (Vile's caps and lower case) is "Tom Petty's gone (but tell him I asked for him)." This is a weird song construct from the get-go, because the singer has to be addressing another dead person who is somehow still in touch with Tom Petty. It turns the idea of "Tom Petty" into a 19th century legend, like "John Henry." It's hero worship for the age of legal cannabis.
Perhaps I can afford to be blasé, because I personally did meet Tom Petty, under quite professional circumstances, and it was not a life-changing experience, just a nice interview gig with a musician I liked who accomplished a lot. Vile also invokes folk-song tropes in "Like a wounded bird trying to fly," in which he sings: "My daddy was a railroad man." For that "authentic" folk song feel.
There's a neat version of "Must Be Santa," which makes for a pleasant emotional distance when hearing it for the first time close to Easter. This is a song that sticks in your head. Written by Hal Moore and Bill Fredericks, it was released as a single in November 1960, by Mitch Miller. The most popular album artist of his era, Miller released nearly two dozen "Sing Along with Mitch" LPs between 1958 and 1962. In covering "Must Be Santa," Vile joins Raffi, Bob Dylan, Bryan Adams, and multiple others in exploring the wonderful world of Christmas music. I'm sure Dylan's deliriously fast accordion-on-fire version is the best track on his 2009 album Christmas in the Heart. Dylan's arrangement was inspired by the Texas nowa fala polka band Brave Combo. Vile offers quite the earworm, though, sounding like he fell asleep by the chimney before Santa arrived; those tuned in to his distinctive trippiness might have a mellow journey.
Funniest song? The typically deadpan "Passenger Side," in which an anxious Kurt is not in the driver's seat. The opening line of the second verse, "Roll another number for the road," is the title of one of Neil Young's primo stoner tunes, from the 1975 masterpiece Tonight's the Night, which might have marked the end of folk music as we knew it in the 1960s. Young, of course, invented folk-grunge as an intentional gambit on the 1995 album Mirror Ball, with Pearl Jam. With singer Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam is the gargantuan grunge combination. With Pearl Jam as his backing band, and Young as lead singer, Mirror Ball is a proper folk-grunge statement.
The funniest line is "It's gonna make me spill my beer/If you don't learn how to steer...I don't like riding on the passenger side."
But the punch line is that Vile didn't write this song. Folk-grunge co-founding guru Jeff Tweedy, from Wilco, did. It appears on the 10th track of Wilco's 1995 debut album, "A.M." Vile's version is folk-grunge in quintessence.
This morning Tweedy posted a song on his Substack,
Starship Casual, called "Country Mile," which he said had not yet found a place in his repertory. It's In other Tweedy news, he went to a Chicago Cubs game yesterday and the camera showed him on the Jumbotron as a celebrity in the crowd. What he suggested about it was that not being recognized as a bona fide rock star among the social elite of hometown Belleville, Ill., is still a motivator for him. That's a very grunge grudge. In fact, grunge is driven by grudge. If Kurt Cobain had grown up well-adjusted instead of bullied and felt an outsider in Aberdeen, Wash., Nirvana might have never happened.What Do We Do Now is the latest release (Feb. 2, 2024) by J. Mascis, guitarist, singer, primary songwriter and chief of staff of alt-rock/grunge era band Dinosaur Jr. That band (originally Dinosaur) from Amherst, Mass. (near which Wilco has an annual festival) began in 1984, became Dinosaur Jr. in 1987. It stood as an influence on the just forming Nirvana and the rest of the Seattle scene so often identified as grunge ground zero.
The internet says that Mascis was so influential that Kurt Cobain twice asked him to join Nirvana. Also, Dinosaur Jr. member Lou Barlow later had a band called Folk Implosion. Which wasn't a folk band, of course, but it was a little leaner than DinJr.
The opening song, "Can't Believe We're Here," is anthemic in its verses, catchy and memorable. It may be about bafflement about survival, or just bafflement. The title evokes Neil Young at any point in the last 50 years: "Had a dream we're at the ocean/It came out so we could see/I've been laughing but I'm lonesome/Out of luck, ran out of steam." It's sort of the theme of this album, and perhaps embodies folk-grunge as an entity: Down, but not out. Soft-spoken, or sung, but with resourceful guitar skills to do the real talking, so lively and connected that it's like a double shot of espresso taken to adrenalize the buzz. Â
That song about the ocean dream reminds me of Neil Young's song on Mirror Ball (1995), "I'm the Ocean." That seven minutes of musical ecstacy was one of the peak experiences of Young in the 1990s, a performance you could repeat twice, so that you get the buzz of a 21-minute version that Crazy Horse might have pulled out of the back of its jeans. Below is the Neil Young and Pearl Jam version.
"I'm the Ocean" is the opening song, and is done in a very different way, on Young's late-2023 album, Before + After. The 13-song album (Young's 45th studio recording) is filled with songs from Young's near 60 year catalog, going back to "Mr. Soul," "Burned" and "On the Way Home" by Buffalo Springfield in the 1960s; "Mother Earth," from Ragged Glory (1990); and lesser known songs such as "Home Fires," (1974, but released 2020 on an archives album), "A Dream That Can Last" from Sleep With Angels (1994).
What makes this different? It was recorded live but without an audience, and no separation between each track: one flows into the next without interruption. Young plays a lot of harmonica; Bob Rice, the only other musician I've seen mentioned, plays some piano and pump organ. "Mr. Soul" sounds a little naked without band accompaniment, as does "I'm the Ocean." But what do you expect? Unnamed co-conspirator in the creation of grunge, Neil Young is a folk singer who can make some incomparable noisy rock and roll. This is folk-grunge.
Thanks to the inspirational
for elevating from paid to Founding Member.