Blond Harmonies and a Timeless Troubadour

Christopher Paul Stelling

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Caught a couple of promising acts on Saturday, the last day of this year’s CMJ festival, both of them playing at Rockwood Music Hall on the Lower East Side—a marvel of a tiny space put to excellent use. (Drew the sound guy was up the built-in ladder sitting with his legs dangling from the sound booth.)

With his been-around-the-block guitar inscribed with various symbols (“CPS” being the easiest to figure out), his unruly hair in a modified ponytail, and his blue eyes at times almost alarming in their intensity, Christopher Paul Stelling comes across as a kind of neo-Testament prophet. His imagery-rich songs, involving suicide, murder, heaven, hell, ocean depths, bayous, and of course lost love, hearken back to 18^th-century Scottish ballads (“Barbara Allen,” anyone?) even as they tap into the perpetual human condition.

After his gripping concert—disarmingly, in between the Gothic-tinged songs he commented on the quality of his Bloody Mary and, in an oblique comment on his strenuous performance (he uses his booted foot as percussion), informed us that his mother was an aerobics instructor—Chris told me that he'd like to go to Scotland, partly because, he said, they sing there without amplification. “I hope we’re heading toward more sincerity, less production,” he added. (No Auto-Tune for this guy.) Onstage he did occasionally stray from the mic, with no sound diminishment that I could detect.

Check out a video of Chris in action; I haven’t even mentioned his extraordinary finger-picking stylings, by turns muscular, breakneck, and celestial (and at times all three).

Delta Rae

In their first, a cappella song, the North Carolina group Delta Rae also stomped the beat—is this a trend? Composed of the baby-blond siblings Ian (who looks like Woody Harrelson), Eric, and Brittany Hölljes and their childhood friend Elizabeth Hopkins (they were smart to bring in a brunette; it cuts the sunniness factor), the band specializes in close harmonies. While a couple of their original songs were pretty good—such as “Ooh Caroline,” the subject of which they claimed materialized, uninvited, at one of their NYC concerts as they were performing the song—the four really showed their talents in the two covers they did: a revved-up “California Dreamin’” (just as I was thinking that Brittany Hölljes reminded me of Michelle Phillips) and their “model” (as Brittany told us) Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain,” in a thrilling rendition. Though it doesn’t come across quite as well recorded in, we’re told, a bathroom, they did upload that one to YouTube.

Champion of Dogs and Underdogs

Singer-songwriter-pianist-activist Nellie McKay, whose latest CD packs a melodious punch.

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

In a tease for Nellie McKay’s performance tomorrow at the Greene Space, for WNYC’s “Soundcheck,” someone called her new CD, Home Sweet Mobile Home, “whimsical.” Perhaps, I thought—in a Weill-Brechtian way. The shark has pearly teeth, and also, with her sweet, slightly askew smile, does Nellie, who is sharklike only when she’s fighting the good fight, on behalf of animals (“Eatin’ that burger… Eatin’ that torture”), the disenfranchised (“So you’ll find me/Here right beneath the underdog”), and the never-franchised (“Please sir let me lay in the sewer that claimed me”).

Since Nellie played Polly Peachum in a 2006 Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera, the Weill-Brecht influence would not be surprising, but, aside from last year’s Doris Day tribute album, which involved singing (beautifully) about cockeyed optimism and sentimental journeys, Nellie has from the beginning—after all, her first CD was called Get Away from Me—given us clever, sometimes acerbic, always enlightened songs couched in a Tin Pan Alley musical sensibility. (For my interview with Nellie on the Doris Day album, go to Vanity Fair’s website.)

I had assumed the CD title’s mobile-home reference had to do with today’s economy—and it might—but Nellie told an interviewer that her “nana” lived in a trailer and she used to like visiting there, and the cover shows a faux-naïf painting (her own) of a happy, lipsticked cat putting on Nellie’s record in a cozy, rosy setting. The inside packaging contains more animal art, along with photos of a smiling, saronged Nellie (the album includes the lilting “Caribbean Time,” recorded in Jamaica), but in the background are drawings of smokestacks spewing pollution—yet, indeed, rather whimsically!

Such is the despairing/rejoicing world of Nellie McKay, which I hope you will enter if you have not already. My favorite song on the CD is “Bruise on the Sky,” with its poignancy, lovely and inventive harmonies, and typically startling lyrics (“I need your loving eyes/At least your cyanide”).

Nellie will be on “Soundcheck” October 12, and you can check out tour dates and download “Caribbean Time” at her website.

The Return of von Pauli

My favorite Nazi has posted another propaganda video.

Transcriptions from the Universe

Headpress 2.2

Excerpts from a new article I wrote about John Lennon’s diaries, “Transcriptions from the Universe,” have been published in the online edition of the Headpress journal.

Headpress, the independent British publisher that’s bringing out my book Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography, asked me to explain how my Lennon bio, Nowhere Man, which languished unpublished for 18 years, became a bestseller in five countries and three languages. To do that, I published reproductions of key pages from my own diaries from the time I was recreating Lennon’s diaries from memory. (I originally told the story of how I came to temporarily possess Lennon’s diaries in Nowhere Man.)

The complete article is available only in the print edition of the Headpress journal. —RR

First "Beaver Street" Promo Video

My new book, Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography, is scheduled to be published in the UK on October 7 by Headpress. This is the first promotional video and it’s already kicking up a controversy. Play it loud and in full-screen mode for maximum impact. You can also check out the newly launched Headpress media site. And please stay tuned for more breaking news on Beaver Street. —RR

A Latter-Day Doris Day?

Singer Nellie McKay, deceptively light as air, is appearing at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency.

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

I hesitate to use the image for someone who I’m guessing is a pacifist, but Nellie McKay reminds me of a stealth bomber. With her creamy skin, blonde curls, silky voice, and sweet manner, she seems a throwback to … well, Doris Day, to whom she pays tribute in her current show at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency (and also in her CD Normal As Blueberry Pie). Yet McKay has a steely resolve when it comes to such issues as animal rights, the disenfranchised, gentrification, and her own musical integrity. (After a falling-out with Columbia Records, she is on the jazz label Verve.)

At the early show Saturday night, her politics were not much in evidence (she did mention Doris Day’s own animal activism) but her absurdist humor was—she introduced a couple of members of her excellent band (Jay Berliner on guitar, Ben Bynum on drums, Kenny Davis on bass, Glenn Drewes on trumpet, Belinda Whitney on violin) as “the Antichrist” and “the original Anna Karenina” (and that wasn’t Belinda). Wearing a retro black strapless gown with red lining, along with silver pumps with rhinestone bows, she began her set with “Sentimental Journey,” and in a sense that’s what she was taking us on. Along the way—with standards like “Close Your Eyes” and “Mean to Me”—there were overtones of big bands, the 1940s, swing, and Alice Faye, with special dedications to the late Kitty Carlisle Hart, who began playing Feinstein’s in her 90s, and Rue McClanahan, who died last Thursday.

And all of this was beautiful (especially in the swank environment of Feinstein’s)—with such instrumental touches as delicate xylophone on “The Very Thought of You” and violin doubling a vocal line on “Do Do Do.” Still, it was great to have the singer leave her piano and stroll to the center mic with her ukulele for a rendition of Lennon and McCartney’s “A World Without Love” and her own songs “Bodega” (“Adopt a bodega!” she urged), “Caribbean Time,” and “Mother of Pearl.” She introduced the last, on its surface an antifeminist diatribe, by saying, “This is from Miss Day’s little-known album Viva Vajayjay.” And ended it with, “I’m Sarah Palin and I approve this message.” (Hmm, maybe I’m a little wrong about the politics.)

There are perhaps not many performers who could blend the sensibilities of “The Dog Song” (“If you want a companion/Well just go right to the pound”) and “Black Hills of Dakota,” but by following her passions and her own musical style, the exuberant McKay has created a lovely, entertaining, beguiling, and even edifying show (pretty stealthy, Nellie).

“Normal As Blueberry Pie: A Tribute to Doris Day” continues through June 12 at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency in N.Y.C.

Boy II Man

Ben (Michael Douglas) and ex-wife Nancy (Susan Sarandon) on the campus bench where they first met.

Solitary Man
Directed by Brian Koppelman and David Levien
Written by Brian Koppelman
Starring Michael Douglas, Susan Sarandon, Danny DeVito, Jenna Fischer, Jessie Eisenberg, Mary-Louise Parker, and Imogen Poots

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Coming across as a potent combination of Rabbit at Rest and Wonder Boys, Solitary Man explores, among other things, the combustion that can occur when deteriorating, experienced middle age meets beautiful, inexperienced youth. “You can’t cheat death,” his ex-wife, Nancy, tells the 60ish Ben (played by Michael Douglas, appropriately craggy and sexy, who also starred in Wonder Boys). But once his doctor finds a worrisome heart abnormality, Ben does try, by cheating—spectacularly—in both his marriage and his business. A former Forbes cover boy, Ben loses it all by perpetrating a scam in his auto dealership empire (ironically, he’s touted himself as “New York’s honest car dealer”). He’s reduced to asking not only Nancy (the ever lovely Susan Sarandon)—with whom he’s on good terms, perhaps because she’s found her own success in real estate—for the occasional “loan,” but also their daughter (Jenna Fischer, here a homemaker out of The Office), whose lawyer husband is onto Ben’s manipulative tricks.

Ben thinks he’s found a solid way out of his financial predicament, however, and of course it takes the form of a woman: his girlfriend (on whom he also constantly runs around), played icily by Mary-Louise Parker, whose powerful father can get Ben restarted. But first, a favor: she asks Ben to accompany her 18-year-old daughter (Imogen Poots, in a role right out of Gossip Girl) to his alma mater and use his influence there on her behalf; after all, the library’s named after him, a reminder of radically better days. Once they’ve arrived, Ben’s cockiness—he engages in a dangerous conversation about sex with the girl and takes a nerdy sophomore (Jesse Eisenberg) under his broken wing—leads to events that cause his new foundation to crumble.

The movie’s title—it opens with Johnny Cash’s cover of the Neil Diamond song—could be a joke, given Ben’s epic womanizing. But this is a serious film that knows that this man—despite his supportive ex-wife, loving (though reaching her limits) daughter, adoring grandson, and loyal friend (Danny DeVito as a campus café owner)—is alone, because of his actions and, ultimately, because we all are. Looking at mortality, and one man’s understandable but impossible flight from it, in the way it does, Solitary Man could have been depressing. Instead, because it also uncovers the richness and complexity of life, it’s uplifting.