By Richard Skinner.
‘Bands, those funny little plans, that never work quite right.’
— Mercury Rev, “Holes”, Deserter’s Songs (1998)
In the mid 1990s, Jonathan Donahue was at the lowest point in his life. Sales of Mercury Rev’s last album See You on the Other Side (1995) had been terrible, the tour to promote it had been ill attended and gruelling and the band were in huge debt and in disarray. After three albums and years of touring, the group split and went their separate ways. Penniless, Donahue retreated to a cabin in the Catskill Mountains to lick his wounds. It was back to square one. During this time, Donahue began listening again to some of the records he used to listen to as a child, including a collection of spoken word fairy tales set to classical music. Inspired by these pieces, he started to compose simple melodies on the piano.
Meanwhile, in a Jesuit monastery in upstate New York, Mercury Rev co-founder and guitarist, Grasshopper, was in retreat. Immediately after finishing the disastrous tour for See You on the Other Side, Grasshopper ended up there to dry out and clear his head. ‘It was a very clearing experience and it might’ve been a catalyst to paring down the music. After I came out I’d developed this Zen thing of not playing all the time, just playing in the spots,’ Grasshopper has said. Unbeknownst to either of them at the time, these new paths being taken separately by Donahue and Grasshopper would eventually lead to Deserter’s Songs.
Before that, though, something happened to Donahue that was the spark. In 1997, he received a phone call out of the blue from the Chemical Brothers. They were big fans of Mercury Rev and would Donahue like to work with them on a track? Donahue couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He had thought that no one was interested in Mercury Rev and to get that kind of endorsement from such a popular and successful band rekindled something in Donahue that had long been dead. ‘Sure!’ he said. The nine and a half minute track, “Private Psychedelic Reel”, was the result and appeared on the group’s 1997 album, Dig Your Own Hole. It had done the trick and Donahue was up and working again. He got back in touch with Grasshopper and played some early demos to him. Liking what he heard, Grasshopper joined Donahue in the Catskills and the pair began work on the songs that would make up the album.
During this time, at the local hardware store, Donahue kept on seeing two of The Band’s original members, organist Garth Hudson and drummer Levon Helm, both of whom lived in the area. While touring See You On The Other Side, Mercury Rev had begun to work cover versions by The Band into the set. ‘We do love The Band,’ Donahue says, ‘so one day I just went up to them and said, “We’re a band you’ve never heard of and we’ve got some peculiar songs, would you like to come on over and play on them?” They said, “Sure!”.’ In the end, Helm ended up playing drums on “Opus 40” while Hudson contributed alto and tenor sax to “Hudson Line”. ‘On Deserter’s Songs we took a lot of inspiration from their music,’ Donahue admits. ‘You can hear that it’s pretty direct. We like the way they carry themselves as people and the honesty and sincerity that goes into some of their music. That’s the sort of destination you look towards for yourself, just to do it sincerely and not worry about what people think. They were one of the few bands we had a lot in common with.’
Deserter’s Songs opens with the magnificent “Holes”. Strings fade in, a spacey Wurlitzer swirls, and Donahue’s keening falsetto sings, ‘Time, all the long red lines, that take control…’ Then an acoustic guitar and drums kick in. A bowed saw warbles in the background. The stately “Tonight it Shows” follows with its distinct Brian Wilson-esque pizzicato strings and piccolos. The warm melancholic mood is carried on in the woodwind instruments, picked acoustic guitar and female soprano backing vocals of third track “Endlessly”. Listening to the instrumental versions of these first three tracks, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were listening to late Rachmaninov. It’s brave to start any album with a track as slow and otherworldly as “Holes”, but to follow it with, not one, but two equally mid tempo, mainly acoustic, quasi-classical tracks like “Tonight It Shows” and “Endlessly” is a truly audacious statement of intent.
We’re back on more familiar territory with fourth track “Opus 40”. Opening with sampled strings and Hammond organ locked into a loop together, the song is a hazy, psychedelic, epic adventure, beginning with the image of a woman ‘climbing from the suicide machine’. Side One closes with Grasshopper’s contribution to the album, “The Hudson Line”, a simple lullaby about escaping New York City to the Catskills on the railway line that follows the Hudson River, just as Grasshopper had done to make Deserter’s Songs.
Side Two begins with “Goddess on a Hiway” a tune by Donahue that had been lying around since the late ’80s and which Grasshopper had to convince Donahue to resurrect. Good decision. This gorgeous power pop song was the first hugely successful single from the album. Like “Opus 40”, the next track, “The Funny Bird”, is another beautifully psychedelic and enigmatic song: ‘like the way along the coast, I’ve come to love the highs and lows’. I have poured over the lyrics to this song and listened to it hundreds of times and it is still as inscrutable as ever. It’s my personal favourite from the album, a brilliant, intense statement.
The album closes with the celebratory, kick-ass “Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp” and ‘stomp’ is the right word. The song is a marching band doing Mardi Gras. The track is a collaboration with the Chemical Brothers, whom Donahue had invited to return the favour.
Although there are 11 songs listed, there are only actually eight songs on the record. The other three tracks are ‘cinematic’ interludes, not so much songs as scenes from old scratchy, 8mm movies with soundtracks of drones, organs, bowed saws and hammered upright piano. They punctuate the album beautifully. There is a strong cinematic feel to the whole album. Mercury Rev kind of started out as filmmakers before falling into making music. Grasshopper and Donahue first met while attending the State University of New York at Buffalo. Under the tutelage of the famous minimalist composer, Tony Conrad, Grasshopper was making short films and invited Donahue to write and perform music to accompany them. ‘Conrad was working in the Media Studies department then,’ Grasshopper remembers. ‘Although he was supposed to be teaching video he would also talk about film, music and performance art. The man knows everything. He talked a lot about his influences, John Cage, Edgard Varèse, Erik Satie and Henry Cowell, all of which were new to me. I would go out and buy the records and play them to Jonathan.’
The visual aspect is also dominant in the lyrics for Deserter’s Songs. A motif of ‘eyes’ runs through the album. Eyes, the ‘newness’ of seeing, correcting vision or destroying it, all this adds to the child-like wonder of the songs:
‘Angry jealous spies/Got telephones for eyes’ (“Holes”)
‘An th’ darkships of her eyes/Surrender t’ you suddenly’ (“Endlessly”)
‘And slamming her eyes, locking the door/She collapses down upon the ocean floor’ (“Opus 40”)
‘When I see your eyes arrive/They explode like two bugs on glass’ (“Goddess on a Hiway”)
‘Have your eyes all been destroyed?’ (“The Funny Bird”)
The band leaked a few of the tracks to the Chemical Brothers back in the UK, who raved about them to anyone who would listen. They knew that something very special was happening. Eventually, a British record company, V2, got hold of the tapes and agreed to fund the rest of the album. This meant that the band could use producer, original member and bass player Dave Fridmann’s expensive studio and, over a period of two months, all the string parts and wind instruments were recorded. Deserter’s Songs was released on 29th September 1998. No one expected it to do anything but word-of-mouth quickly spread, particularly in the UK, where the album sold well and was eventually named Album of the Year by NME and other music magazines.
A few years after its release. I happened to see an art exhibition called ‘American Gothic’, a collection of paintings made in the 1800s of the vast American landscapes. As I stood looking at those paintings of the snowy peaks, the planes and great rivers of the midwest, I understood for the first time, really, the epic nature that Donahue and co had managed to capture on songs like the widescreen “Goddess on a Hiway”, the cosmic nature of “Holes” or the god’s-eye view of “Opus 40”.
Deserter’s Songs was the album Mercury Rev were always destined to make. The experiences of disappointment and loss brought a softness and maturity to Mercury Rev’s sound. Previously, the band had been a meeting place for Pharoah Sanders, The Allman Brothers and Harry Partch, with added layers of fuzz and feedback, and you can still hear traces of that in “Opus 40” and “The Funny Bird”, but Deserter’s Songs is a wholly different kind of prospect, a whole different level of sophistication and elegance. I can’t think of many other such drastic changes in direction that a band has taken in modern guitar/rock music. Maybe Johnny Cash with his American Recordings series. Maybe. Donahue has said that playing in the early days of Mercury Rev was like being in the middle of a whirlpool, but the waters of Deserter’s Songs are calmer, and deeper. It’s an album made by a band with nothing more to lose. They made it thinking that no one would hear it except themselves. It was supposed to be their valediction. On its surprising success, Donahue says, ‘It had the feeling of rebirth, of going down to the grave for quite a while and lying down there in the darkness and the quiet, and then someone pulls you up and shakes the dirt off you and says “No, you thought you were dead, but you’re not”’.
The album has one last trick up its sleeve. As the last glorious final notes of “Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp” fade out and you think the whole thing is over, some moments pass and then a hidden track begins — snippets of staccato strings, very spiky and strident, and percussion. It sounds like a classical piece written by Edgard Varèse (whose work also reflected the magnitude of the American landscape). It’s a complete surprise. Then, in amongst the intense strings, there is the sound of a man calling, like a sailor on the brow of a ship calling into the sea fog to see if anyone is there, a lone voice in the vastness. It’s an apt closing image to the album — the good ship Mercury Rev and all who sail in her floating off into the unknown.
Thanks to Jason Watkins and Phil Clark for their help with this piece.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Skinner is a novelist, poet and essayist.
