In th h M in
Isthe fall of 1988 I fattened a backpack with books and went off on one of ose stereotypical rail-pass rambles through Europe and North Africa. Nobody ad a BlackBerry back then, which meant that three months of living off the TV grid—sleeping on a bale of hay in a Moroccan olive grove, clubbing Madrid at four in the morning, stumbling around the rocks of the Aran lands—left me clueless about what had been going on in American music. I was Rip Van Winkle with a nose ring (or I would’ve been, had I ever overcome my dread of needles). When I got home that Christmas, I slid into a car with my friend
Jeremy and he picked out a cassette from the glove compartment. “Just listen to this,” he said. It was a rainy night. As we drove around Los Angeles in the winter drizzle, I heard a spooky, unaccompanied female voice floating around the car like an Appalachian ghost. “Can’t you feel the rock dust in your lungs?” she sang. “It’ll cut down a miner when he is still young.”
The voice belonged to Margo Timmins from Cowboy Junkies, and it would be an understatement to say that it haunted me. Right away I became droolingly obsessed with The Trinity Session and the lo-fi, DIY mythology that surrounded it. Jeremy said that the album had been recorded in the sanctuary of a Toronto church. The band had used a single microphone. Every track—from Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” to Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane”—sounded like a stoned whisper. The neo-country catatonia of The Trinity Session captured something about the last gasp of the Reagan years and the sleepy, drifting essence of the slacker era that was about to dawn, and it had plenty of personal significance for the Cowboy Junkies themselves: They would spend the next 20 years trying to live up to the flukey, firefly-in-a-Mason-jar magnificence of the moment.
So okay, yeah, I know that the Junkies went on to produce some fine work—“A Common Disaster” is one of the great songs of the ’90s—but I still think they should have followed up Trinity by pawning their instruments and moving to a communal farm in the wilds of Saskatchewan. That’s because
I subscribe to the J.D. Salinger Principle of Shooting Your Wad. Meaning: In a media-saturated ADD era, the wisest course of action for any artist is to put out one or two things that blow everyone away, and then bolt. Scram. Grow a beard.
Become a hermit. Die, if necessary. Whatever. Just stop working.
The way I see it, ceaseless productivity equals diminished expectations. Fogies love to bemoan the demise of “artist development” in the music business, but I don’t think most bands are cut out for a Rolling Stones–style career track. (The Stones sure aren’t.) I prefer the performer who works him or herself into a kind
of full-moon fugue state for one perfect album—or song—and then face-plants. That’s why I love Lauryn Hill: She lit so many fuses on 1998’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill that she left nothing behind but a trail of hot ash. It’s why I love Vashti Bunyan’s rediscovered Just Another Diamond Day, which, as far as I can tell, was recorded by elves in a sylvan glen one day in 1970 before the fair maiden Bunyan was whisked back to Middle-earth. It’s why I love the hit-and-run 1990 debut by the La’s, and Slint’s Spiderland, and Colossal Youth by Young Marble Giants. After wad-shooting documents as engrossing and strange as these, what else needs to be said? I’m relieved and grateful that we never had to witness Syd Barrett’s midcareer excursions into power-balladry, and since we’re being frank, do you really need the last two Strokes albums?
Yes, comrades, I too pay my dues at the Radiohead International Brotherhood Lodge, but slogging through their body of work can get so damn exhausting. Being in love with a band on the Hall of Fame career track is like maintaining a long-term relationship with that eccentric brooder you met in college, and as we all know from Dr. Phil, marriage takes work. If you’re hitched to Radiohead, that means you’re committed to doing the dishes, changing the diapers, and spending quality time with Hail to the Thief—forever! If you’re married to Elvis Costello, well, I understand. Elvis and I have been in couples therapy since Mighty Like a Rose. And if you happened to shack up with Ryan Adams, shoot me an e-mail—I know a good lawyer uptown.
Really, aren’t there times when you hear that your favorite band has a new album coming out, and the prospect of listening to it seems about as enticing as mapping out your tax return? Steady relationships and meticulous receipt-saving might be the hallmarks of a responsible citizenry, but they ain’t what music’s about. Pop music is about giving in to abandon, to the
drunken swan dive off the slippery lip of the stage. It’s about flings. Ask Cowboy Junkies, who recently went back to that whispery church in Toronto to record Trinity Revisited, a song-by-song mash note (with guest appearances by the likes of Vic Chesnutt and, uh, Ryan Adams) to the very album that became their blessing and their burden back in ’ 88. Listening to it is like finding a phone number that someone once scrawled on your cocktail napkin after a one-night stand in Barcelona. Which might mean that Cowboy Junkies have been trapped in a glob of cultural amber since 1988, but I, for one, think that’s exactly where they belong.
Jeff Gordinier is the editor-at-large of Details and the author of X Saves the World (Viking). He, too, wants to stop after one book, but isn’t sure his agent will let him.
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