BS
Bad Seed, Ian Johnston – I adore Nick Cave, so naturally there was no issue in reading this on my first opportunity. The work is generally very good, covering the early years and the Birthday Party years with incredible detail and perspective; while Johnston couldn’t interview Cave for this book, he did interview nearly everybody else in his circle (and quotes Cave extensively from external sources). He’s certainly done his homework.
But the book has plenty of weak areas, in particular the Bad Seeds era from the fourth album onwards, where he falls into the rut of padding out the manuscript by describing the albums song-by-song, and covering the entire plot of And The Ass Saw The Angel; not sure if this is really necessary. Johnston also has a weakness for planting page-long quotes from protagonists into the text; while it’s not horrible to get the words in their original form (a la Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine), it’s also fairly unconventional, and a sign of lazy journalism (believe me – I’ve been there).
The book has plenty of magic moments, including one recounted by music journalist Mat Snow, with whom Cave and Lane stayed for a few weeks at one point (curious, considering Cave’s difficult relationship with journalists – it would, indeed, end in tears, when the ensuing battles took musical form in the brilliant “Scum”:
I remember coming in one night and Mick and Katy Beale and Nick and Anita were sitting around listening to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Neil Young’s After The Gold Rush and Fun House. Anita used to play Fun House all the time.
How cool it would be to sit around with Nick Cave and Anita Lane and listen to After The Gold Rush, one of my favorite albums of all time (I once listened to it 35 times in a row). The book describes how Cave appeared on Die Haut releases. Nice that so many interesting bands were setting out at the same time – couldn’t happen now. Interesting also to note that Jim Thirlwell (of Foetus fame) was friends with Cave both in Australia and in London; he later wrote the song “Sick Man” about their falling out.
There’s discussion of the Immaculate Consumptive project Cave did with Lydia Lunch (with whom he didn’t really get along), Thirlwell and Marc Almond. Some info about that here:
“Well I’m big in New York,” said Lydia.
“Well, so am I,” replied Nick.
“The only place you’re big is in your head, dear, ” she replied.
It would go on like this all the time.
“I have fond memories of Nick and Marc [Almond] proposing a dirty tour of the Far East playing in the slooziest places in Singapore,” Johnston quotes Chris Bohn, who accompanied the Immaculate Consumptive people on the tour.
There’s discussion about how fascinated Cave was with tapes of Elvis Presley’s deteriorating performing condition, as seen in his later performances in Rapid City, South Dakota on June 21st, 1977, when he struggled through “Are You Lonesome Tonight” and “My Way”.
He had become increasingly obsessed with the singer’s final “Las Vegas” years. While rock critics deemed that Elvis was only ever of importance before being drafted into the US army in the late fifties, Cave, who was now embracing ever closer the ethos of mental and physical collapses as an artistic statement, took inspiration from the twilight of his career. Throughout Elvis’ suposed artistic decline, his repertoire consisted manly of “easy listening music” which displayed no innovation whatsoever; but this was not what primarily interested Cave – he believed that Presley on stage, in an advanced state of disintegration, finally presented the truth about himself, and with such passion that his performance was totally uncontrived. “Here’s a man who’s got everything, and he’s getting up on stage only to fall apart. He fucks up ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’ completely. Sweat is forming on his face, his eyes are crazed with drugs and fear, like a trapped animal. He can’t remember anything, so he tells bad jokes in the middle, for which he has forgotten the punch lines. But then he concentrates and manages to sing ‘My Way’. It was a truly inspired performance. That’s what it’s all about if you ask me… What is good is what affects me. There’s no reason why a group should have to get up on stage and be ‘good’, ‘youthful’ or whatever. Why should it be that way?”
Naturally, the early days of his youth are interesting – he must have been a difficult kid to grow up with in rural Australia in the early 1970s. The stubborn youth, getting in trouble, and then being in a band that, through some herculean effort, managed to get all the way from Australia to London (how many sensational Australian bands withered and died without ever being heard outside of their continent?) Interesting early influences from Pere Ubu and The Pop Group (back in the days when Cave could be influenced by someone else; now it would be the other way around). There’s insanity in those early years, when Cave was constantly high on drugs and alcohol, constantly mis-reading his audience (when the Birthday Party audiences whipped themselves into a frenzy that seemed rote to Cave, he became disgusted). Then they got sick of their success and the popularity of “Release The Bats”. It’s amusing how the band despised the goths, and in particular the band Bauhaus. “‘Bauhaus’ bass player asked me if I was into William Burroughs!’ exclaims an indignant Rowland Howard. ‘It was horrible. We couldn’t believe how bad they were.’” Hmmm… doesn’t seem that awful to me. Not as bad as the crazy antics that they got into when they were bored, like blowing up cars! Sounds like a real bunch of confused nuts. “Dead Joe apparently was based on a single chord – have to check that out…
There’s an interesting note that the Kicking Against The Pricks album produced recordings for a lot of songs that never made the cut, such as The Saints’ “No, Your Product”, The Loved Ones’ “Everlovin’ Man”, Johnny Cash’s “Bullrider”, Leadbelly’s “John Henry”, and Harry Belafonte’s “Have You Herd About Jerry?” I’ll have to check those out.
There’s reference to a strange concert that Cave did with Mick Harvey on bass Thomas Wylder on drums and Roland Wolf at the piano, that consisted of 15 minutes of Karen Carpenter songs. Now that must have been crazy!! There’s also a tale of a riot that occurred at a gig that Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds played with Die Haut, Crime And The City Solution, The Swans, The Butthole Surfers and The Fall (!!!!!!) that led to a riot, that included burning tires rolling towards a gas station, the city was on fire.
Lots of tales of excess – of violence, of drug use, of extreme exertion onstage, of being sick and poor and hungry and starving for art. Wow. Then there’s the obsessions with murder and death and poetry and writing and creating… art. While not all of it is interesting, it is interesting to see how Cave, a musician, approached the non-musical form. This comes naturally, though, for a man of so many interests and passions: extremism, the Bible, drugs, sobriety, murder, life, and the human condition.
What is interesting from the book, though, is Johnston’s recountering of some of Cave’s inspirations from the time before he became sober, such as a reference to The Shoemaker, a biography by Flora Rheta Shriber of the tormented weirdly and evil psychotic murderer Joseph Kallinger. There’s also a fascinating plunge into the process of creating the screenplay for Ghosts Of The Civil Dead, the film Cave worked on with director John Hillcoat to create a version of In The Belly Of The Beast, Letters From Prison, an insane account of prison life by intelligent author Jack Henry Abbott, whose release from prison was championed by Norman Mailer – only to have Abbott kill again, this time a promising young writer he picked a fight with.
There was also mention of Cave’s meditation on the life of the supremely evil American mas murderre Carl Panzram, who “embarked on a spree of sodomy and murder across the world that claimed twenty victims”. When a penal reform group campaigned on his behalf for clemency against his death sentence, he said “the only thanks that you and your kind will ever get rom me is that I wish you all had one neck and that I had my hands on it.”
Even at the scaffold he was defiant, admonishing his hamgman with the words, ” Hurry it up, you bastard! I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around.”
No wonder this man felt he had to record a collection of murder ballads!
A final reservation – the book was published in 1995, so it misses nearly 20 years of Nick Cave’s story, including the release of some of his best albums! I wonder if there are any gooder Nick Cave bios out there?
Overall, it’s interesting to read about Cave’s early life, about the people he knew in the early days in Australia, and especially what a sensation The Birthday Party was, especially in London; I had only come across them a decade after they had broken up! It’s also interesting to learn more about Anita Lane, one of the very amazing, sensuous rock ‘n’ roll muses, and very poorly understood.
Unfortunately, one thing that Johnston never really explains properly is how Nick Cave and Mick Harvey could not tolerate each other in The Birthday Party, but worked amicably together in The Bad Seeds when Cave’s leadership was full and apparent. Oh well – maybe no one has figured out that yet (and now Mick’s gone…).
——
By the way, here’s the movie “Dandy”, Cave’s second film appearance (after Wings Of Desire).
In the book there’s references to Heiner Muhlenbrock’s “The City” short film, which documents The Birthday Party in its bickering-est moments. That might be nice to see….