There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #12 – "Sea Monster" by Elephant Revival

In my post about the Eddie Noack song, Psycho, the other day, I went through various other versions of the same tune. One more recent attempt, that committed to recorded life by the husband-and-wife team of author Neil Gaiman and performer Amanda Palmer, rather annoyed me. First, the versions that I have heard (all of them live) were rather lackluster in performance, which disappointed me mainly because I thought the idea of Gaiman – an author and personality whom I admire most highly – striving to croak his way through a country song could at least have been a little fun. 

The end result wasn't fun for me; it was clumsily staged and no two elements from the selection of the song to the pairing of guest musicians with star performers seemed to fit together at any time. I blamed it mostly on a rampant mood of unchecked hipsterism dominating the stage, replete with a group of weirdos delivering some OK singing saw atmosphere that might have worked just fine with this particular song had a little more thought gone into the arrangement and genuine interest in the actual audience bled through the whole affair.

Now, it might sound like I am playing Pick on the Hipster here, and maybe I was to a certain degree. It is, after all, kind of fun and easy to do. But I did state in my original post that I would, as an example, love to find an entry point into the music created by Ms. Palmer, but just haven't been given one yet. I don't want to go through life simply hating certain music without a very good reason; I would rather call a Nickelback a Nickelback, and be done with it. I would point to my forays in facing off with Rolling Stone's Best 50 Songs the past two years as further examples that I am willing to take a chance on music that I normally avoid or just don't encounter in my day to day life. (And there will be a new version of Best 50 Songs coming up in early December, most likely. Watch for it... I have been pleasantly surprised with the past results.) And maybe I went into Gaiman and Palmer's version of Psycho hoping too hard for a decent take on the song to come out of it, after having listened to four good to great versions before it. Still, that hipster vibe of insincerity, unchecked irony, and self-possessed cool just came at me too hard, and I couldn't let it pass with comment.

A slight detour...

Let's skip to archive.org for a moment. One of the things that I love most about this public domain website – aside from the easy access to just about every p.d. film in existence – is their Live Music Archive. There are thousands and thousands of free, accessible concerts available in their archive, many of them recorded openly by visitors to these concerts, and many also coming directly from soundboard recordings (much better quality in general, but I have heard some great ones made right in the crowd). Now, before you get on me about artists' rights and all that, there is one notable point to add about the Live Music Archive: to add any concert to the site, the user and/or the site must have published direct permission from at least one member of a band or the band's management to post said concerts. When one finds a Man or Astro-Man, Robyn Hitchcock, or Camper Van Beethoven performance available for legal download on archive.org, one does it with the knowledge on the artist's page that said performer has approved such posting and further sharing with their audience.

So, you won't find a Radiohead, Wilco, Muse or Red Hot Chili Peppers concert on there; most of the bigger name artists and groups don't allow such easy access. There are, however, some surprises to be found. Some in my list of personal faves do show up in the Live Music Archive, such as Warren Zevon, Cracker, the Drive-By Truckers, Smashing Pumpkins, Ryan Adams, Elliott Smith, and Ween. Mostly though, given the rather socialist notion behind the sharing of all information on the site, it is not surprising that the vast majority of bands to be found there are – ahem – ahem again – jam bands.

That's right... so many jam bands. Hippie jam bands. Stoner jam bands. Hipster jam bands. Psychedelic jam bands. Bluegrass jam brands. Electronica jam bands. Hippie stoner hipster psychedelic bluegrass electronica jam bands. Jam bands from just about every place in the world (but no strawberry jam bands... gotta go to Knott's to score some of that...) At the top is the biggest jam band ever of all time, the Grateful Dead, who have somewhere in the neighborhood of over 11,000 concert recordings ready for either streaming or download on the site. (They have a special page set up on the site.) And then, after the Dead, come all the Dead spinoff groups, many of them containing at least one or two members from the band's past (Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, etc., etc.) After that, you've got Disco Biscuits, the String Cheese Incident, moe., Umphrey's McGee, Yonder Mountain String Band, the Radiators, and eventually Little Feat and Blues Traveler. (Surprisingly, Phish  is not on archive.org officially, and I find that a truly stunning fact.)

As it turns out, while I love 22-minute guitar solos and 12-minute drum solos if either the right guitarist or right drummer are performing them – I would never turn off an Allman Brothers album if given the choice – I am not really a jam band guy. The same way that Seinfeld wasn't an orgy guy; I'd have to go buy jam band clothes, get new jam band friends, and with them came new jam band drugs. Incessant noodling without real purpose except to stretch out an already long concert can often be annoying. I wouldn't mind being at any of these concerts, but that's not really what I listen to normally (with the open admission that some groups I adore, such as Built to Spill, Frank Zappa, Wilco, Cream, and early Pink Floyd – none of them on archive.org, mind you –  are or were really jam bands at heart or started out that way). 

Despite all that, I quite often check out concerts by any group that seems interesting to me, whether they eschew needless jamming or not. I've dipped a toe into the offerings of some of the jam bands I mentioned earlier and even partake of an occasional concert by the Dead, even adding some of the better shows to my own collection. At my collector's core, I have a basic urge to find new music constantly, and the Live Music Archive makes it easy to do at the only cost that I can currently afford: free. (And without annoying commercials like on Spotify or Pandora; I only have the free versions of those apps/sites as well.)

... eventually leads me to...

Elephant Revival. That was the name of the band I encountered on archive.org. A very simple name. The "elephant" part was attractive to me because I love those creatures dearly, and also because of some residual love for the Elephant 6 record label (home of Apples in Stereo and Of Montreal) from way back. "Revival" made me think immediately, of course, of CCR, and there is nothing not to love about that, unless it is a version not involving John Fogerty. The name "Elephant Revival" seems like maybe it is missing a couple of words in the middle, like their real name should be "Elephant Foot Massage Revival" – itself a dangerous proposition – the way that "Monty Python" is not nearly complete without the apostrophe and "s" and the "Flying Circus" part. But still, even the short name "Elephant Revival" intrigued me enough to make me click on the concert first over shows from other bands that had been uploaded that day.

Now, I was guessing that "jam band" would be the eventual outcome of my first listen to Elephant Revival. Past experience had given me a working knowledge of the basic audience on the Live Music Archive, including those who relentlessly tape and post new concerts. The law of averages sees to it that the majority of bands encountered on archive.org are jam bands, and I believe, by and large, that law still stands. And, of course, I always do some research first before digging into anybody's music. Before I even heard a note, I found out that Elephant Revival was a bluegrass/folk contingent, and while I do like bluegrass far more than I usually acknowledge, I still feared the "H" word in all of this. Folk hipsters are over the radio these days, and while I do like some of the sounds I hear, the songs quite often leave me pretty cold. I can find no connection to them. Most of the time, when a pack of Mumfords with crazy facial hair, antique instruments and toothy grins show up knocking on the door to my iTunes, I turn them away roughly 90% of the time.

The first listen to the band floored me. Absolutely floored me. At first, it was the lush instrumentation; the usual suspects as far as mandolin, guitar, and fiddle went, but even if they turned into a jam band, the assured picking told me they could keep up with just about anyone. But this was a hybrid that had bluegrass at its center but seemed informed by nearly every style of music available, including pop, reggae, jazz, and even the occasional electrified solo that rocked the house as assuredly as the sharpest axeman.

And it is of significant note that the first song I heard, Will Carry On, featuring vocals by one Bonnie Paine, who may be changing my listening life as we know it. Her quavering voice on this song seems so odd on that initial encounter, and I was slightly reminded of the first time I heard Katherine Whalen on a Squirrel Nut Zippers record doing her Billie Holiday riffing. (Not a dig, just a note.) But then, a few songs later, Paine lets loose with wailing along the lines of early Grace Slick, and then I understood that Bonnie Paine was capable of so much more. When I finally watched a few live clips, I realized that Paine is also the band's main (and sometimes sole) percussionist as well, thumping a djembe or stomp box while singing the band's introspective lyrics. (She also plays cello and musical saw at times.) She is not the only vocalist though; all five members split duties here and there, and all of them are multi-instrumentalists, easily and eagerly swapping the tools of their trade between songs.

The songs were largely original, but on that first concert listen, there was the remarkable inclusion of Pink Floyd's Have a Cigar, usually a rock monster of a song with heavy guitar licks. In the Elephant Revival version, Paine takes up the role of the sleazy record agent, and the song loses none of its nastiness in being transposed to the folk/bluegrass world. In fact, it seems rather... er... revived from it. And that comparison to Ms. Slick a bit ago? In listening to a second downloaded concert from archive.org, Elephant Revival launched into their own stab at Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, and I realized that I must not be the only one who stumbled into that comparison. And if it wasn't quite as surprising as their cover of Floyd, it was still really great.

But where is the monster stuff?

OK, Elephant Revival is not a band that you would immediately think would have some horror cred, but keep in mind their folk traditionalist roots and you realize that a walk along the dark side is not that far from their repertoire. I would not be surprised to hear them do a murder ballad or two in their career, but for now, they have a couple of interesting songs that nearly cross over to the Halloween path. The Paine-penned track, Raven Song (which they used to open at least one concert taking place on Halloween), takes on the notion of the raven as a presager and messenger of death, carrying loved ones to the great beyond. It's not necessarily dark in concept, though, and is more lovely than anything, but it still fits the mood.

The howling of wolves is also represented in their track, Sing to the Mountain. In the chorus, we are told "Go and sing to the mountain, go and sing to the moon". When " sing to the moon" is offered, other band members – and in live versions, the more than willing audience – howl wildly and without concern for stepping on the lyrics. I guess it is their version of making an impromptu shark fin on top of their heads while Jimmy Buffett sings "You got fins to the left, fins to the right". Despite being a huge shark fan, as you know, I will take the wolf howls over drunken island hoppers in this instance.

But let's get to the track I have chosen to be added to my Countdown to Halloween mixtape for 2017. The song is called Sea Monster, and immediately, it seems like, yes, such a song belongs here. One could easily read the lyrics and see little more than a purposefully vague imagery involving a possible siren of the sea, calling out to sailors to lead them to their doom. That is fine for any song with that title and surely belongs in any Halloween collection. But what if the monster is not what it seems at first?

Let's listen to the song and read its lyrics first before continuing...

Sea Monster by Elephant Revival

(Music and lyrics by Elephant Revival / ℗ 2016 Itz Evolving/Thirty Tigers, Elephant Revival Publishing]

I’m going out over the sea,
I’ve got a boat, I’ve got a dream.
I trim the sails with my own hands

The song Sea Monster can be
purchased on this album.

leave all my thought back on the land.

I’m going out over the sea,
I won’t be back until I’m free.

I hear a voice, a siren’s review,
I hear it calling out of the blue.
A song of a strange unbearable thing,
it grows in the water, it goes unseen.

I’m going out over the sea,
hearing the song I’ve come to see.

What is this monster in the gyre?
All that’s thrown over the side,
And I want to know…

How we live in a world that provides and expires,
How we grow, come to know our hearts desire.

I’m going out over the sea,
All I have heard, all I have seen,
We are all out, out in a dream,
We are a boat, we are the sea.

After all the rise and fall is all that still remains.

At the end of the second verse, there is the line, "A song of a strange unbearable thing, it grows in the water, it goes unseen." In the bridge, the singer has encountered what it takes to be the true beast and asks, "What is this monster in the gyre? All that's thrown over the side..."

Before you groan and think you are being lectured on the horrors of pollution when you thought you were merely delving into a folksy tune about a sea monster, keep in mind that Puff the Magic Dragon has already had his day. Mere child's novelty has given way to a darker turn of mood. I don't suffer gladly those who pretend that mankind has no sway over the destruction of the natural world, and I suspect that Elephant Revival doesn't either. In the introduction to this song on that first concert listen, Paine attempts to set up the song but encounters some slight difficulties in doing so: chiefly, the type of audience members who grouse when bands try to bring something deeper to the stage than the mere strumming of acoustic instruments. Paine said...

"The Sea Monster in some aspects is a collection of plastic bottles and trash that have accumulated in the gyre of the ocean, which is a large thing...(laughs)... not to cause boos or anything before you sing a song... (laughs)... but it is something worth bringing consciousness to."

That "something" is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive man-made "soup" that was discovered in the mid-'80s  in a place known as the North Pacific Gyre. Not the only such vortex in the oceans of the world, just the most prominent in size, the "patch" is largely made up of minute particles but is thought in the public eye to be almost like an island or a creature made of garbage, though it is actually thin enough in most places (and chiefly under the surface of the water) as to be undetectable even from those floating through it, let alone be seen from space. This is not to say that there aren't vast areas where plastic is to be clearly seen. Whatever the imagery the patch invokes, whatever its true visibility, it is almost certainly a monster of our own devising, a Frankenstein's Monster of pollution that could be altered and even stopped if mankind changed its ways drastically.

I was not expecting any of this when I encountered Elephant Revival for the first time. For all my wailing about millennials and annoyance and ironic stances, Sea Monster is a reminder that sometimes even possible hipsters can pass by and leave us something small, sad, and crystalline in its fragility. It's a crushingly lovely song with a hard truth buried deep within it. If the siren that sings to us from the depths of the ocean is merely a call to responsibility for our world, I can live with that. Until then, we have a monster on the loose, and the death of marine life from the increased ingestion of our plastics is a horror that I cannot accept. It's probably a horror more true than anything you would normally encounter on a mere Halloween mixtape, with its usual focus on silly supernatural things.

Elephant Revival. When I get into some spending cash again, I will own all of their available material in one fell swoop. Or one swell shop. Take your pick; I will make them mine. And I will order one Bonnie Paine to go, please...

RTJ