Craig Thorn, Mark Kozelek, and the Red House Painters

If you’re browsing a music shop, or for that matter a music magazine, it doesn’t take long to learn the first law of art: the world is full to the brim with failed geniuses. The right combination of talent and drive is rare enough. But with mass media, the talent doesn’t matter much anymore; whether you’re hawking “pop” albums or reviewing “indie” albums, it’s often the image, not the music, that is being sold. This brings us to the second law of art: the world is equally full of the successfully talentless. The amount of pure luck and coincidence involved in commercial success makes it virtually impossible to predict, much less understand.

The musical situation thus becomes painful for everyone involved. Record companies turn down the best albums, because they’re too risky. Reviewers, DJs, and the dwindling owners of great record shops exhaust themselves looking for something obscure enough to seem cool, but good enough to justify. Consumers of music — people who want to experience perhaps 60 minutes of timeless human joy on which no price can be placed, other than €18.99 at HMV — are lost in the supermarket. We are told to buy an album because it’s played at Starbucks, or because the single opens that TV show that we like, or because the magazine owned by the conglomerate that recorded, marketed, and distributed it thinks it’s a masterpiece.

This is why we have friends. In an offhand remark in the acknowledgements of his book Mystery Train — a book good enough to read the acknowledgements — Greil Marcus wrote this line: “As much as anything, rock ‘n’ roll has been the best means to friendship that I know.” I always misremember this line as stating something like the equation “music = friendship.” While Marcus doesn’t quite say this, I feel I should attribute the idea to him. Friendship might indeed arise from sharing the music, but in my life it often led me to the music in the first place.

I met Craig Thorn eleven years ago this autumn, when I moved to Boston from Texas to attend boarding school. He ran my dormitory, where he made epic barbecue and brilliant jokes, as well as the English department, where he taught a class on junk (of all kinds) in American literature. Our first conversation was about music; this was how he learned about each of the 38 guys to whom he had to be a father each year. In that conversation, I revealed my interest in an English band called Catherine Wheel, one of the great underrated rock combos of the nineties. If this earned me a modicum of his respect, the ensuing dialogue earned Craig my undying admiration, tinged with a kind of terror; he promptly named five other more obscure (but technically related) bands that I might enjoy if I liked Catherine Wheel. Basically, he was Pandora, in the days before the internet.

Craig’s boundless musical knowledge and record collection were intimidating to encounter for the first time, but I quickly realized that they were made to share. He ran a student magazine — Backtracks — in which he wrote lengthy, almost philosophical music criticism; he was a manager and legendary DJ for the school radio station. It was impossible to meet him and not find your horizons expanded. While this might have started with something as simple as borrowing a CD, the real horizons in question were not musical, but human. More than simply a means to friendship, music held the possibility for Craig of an encounter with the whole world, a catalogue of experience wider than his own. Music was a means to, and a definition of, family and community. Both were his reason for living.

Such a man does not have a favourite band. Nonetheless, in the late nineties, Craig was a missionary of the Red House Painters. He wrote about them, it seemed, at every possible opportunity, in school publications as well as major magazines. I have none of these articles anymore, but I remember a blizzard of eloquence that convinced me to knock on his door one day and borrow everything they had ever recorded. I saw Songs for a Blue Guitar on sale in 1998 in Chicago, at a record store that no longer exists, and bought it immediately. Gradually I collected every disc, somewhat because I liked the music, but mainly because of Craig.

The Red House Painters formed in 1989, the same year that the Pixies came to take the kids. They made a decade’s worth of albums in San Francisco, after which the lead singer and driving force, Mark Kozelek, went amicably solo. Their quiet and introspective music was never quite in step with the times, which were more defined by loud introspection; the poor reviews said that the Red House Painters were about despair, while the good ones said they were about nostalgia. Success on a massive commercial scale eluded them, partly because Mark Kozelek is that kind of genius who finds self-promotion painful, and partly because he insisted on making the music that was necessary for him. If others see him as a failed genius, it is not how Kozelek sees himself; on the contrary, his album was in stores when he was 25, and he felt like a rock star. In 1999 a two disc Retrospective was released; regardless of sales, this doesn’t happen to just anyone.
The first label to press a Red House Painters album was the formidable 4AD, which released Down Colorful Hill (1992) on the strength of some reverb-soaked demo tapes. It was followed with two self-titled albums, better known by their brooding cover images, Rollercoaster (May 1993) and Bridge (October 1993). The stunning Ocean Beach was released in 1995, and then abruptly — in the face of a small but obsessive fan base, excellent critical reception, and growing popularity in Europe — the label opted not to release Songs for a Blue Guitar, and dropped the band.

For those DJs, reviewers, buyers, and label owners who are prospecting for gold, it’s usually a pretty good sign when a label drops a band over an album. As Robbie Robertson said of The Band, “Music should never be harmless.” A fight over a recording signals that something actually different has just appeared, and that someone in power is scared; Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a classic example, but the final two Red House Painters albums each did time in legal purgatory. Supreme Records, an Island subsidiary, snapped up Songs for a Blue Guitar and released it in 1996; the follow-up Old Ramon was scheduled for 1998, but was withheld by Island during the merger wars of the late 1990s, and wasn’t released until 2001 on SubPop, after Kozelek bought it back. These struggles also ended the band, and the next four releases were of Kozelek playing alone.

Songs for a Blue Guitar was the first true synthesis of Kozelek’s many influences and moods. The opener seems to fit the pattern of the back catalogue, with a singer-songwriter formula and emotive, autobiographical lyrics. The second song, one of two title songs, is the same but different, featuring the only female backing vocal in the whole Kozelek discography. Nothing in that discography could possibly prepare you for the third song, “Make Like Paper,” which is rumoured to be one of the two songs on the disc which ended the relationship with 4AD. It is 12 minutes of fierce backbeat and Crazy Horse guitar distortion. It features a 5 minute guitar solo after the first chorus, a solo so rich and daring it suggests Hendrix, Robert Johnson, and Mahler. After the Gibson screams and is possibly in flames, Kozelek goes on singing as though nothing out of the ordinary has just occurred. It is out of the ordinary on a folk label. It might as well be hip-hop.
This is one of many moments on the album that explodes preconceptions. There are covers of songs by Yes (“Long Distance Runaround”), the Cars (“All Mixed Up”) and Paul McCartney (“Silly Love Songs”). An aptly titled, trifling piece of work, this last piece is totally resurrected in the retelling; this time, the five-minute display of absurd guitar virtuosity is at the beginning of the song. The expressive rage and unadulterated beauty offered here properly earns the opening line, “you’d think that people would have had enough of silly love songs,” and when we hear the chorus that McCartney made insipid — “I love you” — we actually believe the Red House Painters. Mark Kozelek brings real artistry to his covers; his solo album from 2001, What’s Next to the Moon, consists entirely of Bon Scott-era AC/DC songs, which are tender and unrecognizable, and his most recent project with Sun Kil Moon — a kind of Red House Painters 2.0 — is the album Tiny Cities, composed of twelve Modest Mouse songs transposed into Kozelek’s reflective and minimalist style. As these seemingly insane career moves suggest, Mark Kozelek is remarkably adept at avoiding irony, even when singing songs that seem to need them. On Old Ramon, he pulls off a love song to his cat.

In 2003, Kozelek and his drummer Anthony Koutsos reformed as Sun Kil Moon, releasing first Ghosts of the Great Highway and then Tiny Cities in 2005. Ghosts continues the best traditions of the Red House Painters, but with the illusion of a new band; it was Kozelek’s most successful album to date, if someone is counting by sales. It is a lush and unified album, telling stories about famous boxers who died young; obsessed with death, the album celebrates life. The old fascinations with memory and geography are firmly in place, but the singer has become a bard, and moved well beyond simple autobiography and despair. This is no more failed genius by any measure; this is a man doing what he loves as though it were second nature.

Sun Kil Moon sounds for all the world like Kozelek has “grown up.” Somewhere between the first time I heard them and now, as I’ve moved around the world carrying the albums with me, so have I. Kozelek’s joys, sorrows, landscapes, and women have accompanied me. As always happens with great music, the sounds and words are now bound up with my own memories. I’ve done my best to pass this music on to friends so that they can carry this reflection of the world, and perhaps a piece of me. I’ve tried to make friends with the music, and music with the friends.

I also continue to listen to Kozelek’s work to carry a piece of Craig, who passed on down the great highway on 12 June 2006, at the age of 47. He left behind such a cacophonous legacy of sounds in the hands and minds of those who knew him that it hardly would be accurate to say that he is gone. The lives of those that knew him — and their CD collections — are the Retrospective that confirms his place. In his case, music finally did become the friendship, since the music is all I can encounter down the old pathways where he was. Even though the song is not about him, I have never listened to “Make Like Paper” without thinking of the first autumn that I met Craig, or the last summer that I saw him.

Leaves are turning brown
All over the ground
Leaves make like paper
Make like paper sound

[5-minute guitar solo]

Way back, back then
I considered you my best friend
But the last time I saw you
I knew I’d never see you again.

Nick Johnson
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