Strange fruit
Heart of the Geraldine Fibbers' darkness
by Sydney Pokorny
Despair rocks on, whether it's in the form of Prodigy/Nine Inch Nails-style
techno angst, the multiplatinum abjection of Marilyn Manson, or, farther down
the charts, the navelgazing whine of indie faves like Smog. But few artists
have the gift for transforming pain and angst into catharsis and redemption
like the Geraldine Fibbers, a noisy five-piece country-influenced band from LA
who'll headline upstairs at the Middle East a week from Saturday.
In a previous incarnation fronting Ethyl Meatplow, Fibbers singer/songwriter
Carla Bozulich screeched, shouted, and shrieked over a dancy techno background,
mostly to shock effect. With the Fibbers she has found a powerful voice capable
of generating more than mere controversy. It's a voice cut by deep rivers of
sadness, one rich and resonant enough to bring to mind poet Frank O'Hara's
description of Billie Holiday: "She whispered a song along the
keyboard . . . and everyone and I stopped breathing," O'Hara
wrote in 1959.
Billie's voice -- even in her later years, when it was frayed by dope and
booze -- mirrored her life. Embattled, defiant, troubled, and unafraid to be
so, she sang honestly of disappointments laced with anger and bitterness. Her
voice conveyed sadness and empowerment. Different as the Fibbers' mix of
country, noise, and pop is from Holiday's jazz, Bozulich can conjure the
scratchy, dissipated, dripping-with-sadness spirit of Holiday's voice. On
Butch (Virgin), the Fibbers' second album, her vocals run the gamut from
punk caterwaul to country crooning, but it's all tied together by her gritty
emotions, which capture both the beauty and the brutality of everyday life. She
can make you feel the sorrows that have etched her voice without uttering an
intelligible word.
When a linear narrative does emerge, the story almost invariably comes with a
not-so-happy ending. "Trashman in Furs," one of the more gently melodic tunes
on Butch, turns out to be a mournful communion with a friend dying of
AIDS. Elsewhere Bozulich offers more songs about the streetwalkers, jilted
lovers, junkies, and drifters who populated the band's 1995 debut, Lost
Somewhere Between the Earth and My Home (Virgin). It is tempting to look
for parallels between Bozulich's own life and the scenarios she depicts: she's
a former heroin addict who has been clean for 10 years. But she's also an
inventive storyteller whose songs are vignettes inhabited by fictional
characters she has the sensitivity to portray. There are dark and dirty secrets
to be exhumed in these metaphor-laced stories: "I Killed the Cuckoo" crests
with her snarling "With your pussy lite feather flight lonely/Hour later I
killed the cuckoo/The clock is dead once and for all/Till the next time I run
with you/Doesn't her smile smack of starvation/Her legs outstretched toward her
salvation." And "Toybox" is an uptempo punk shocker, punctuated by
bloodcurdling daddy-bashing screams, about a seemingly incestuous
relationship.
The Fibbers have often covered country tunes by male singers, from George
Jones ("The Grand Tour," "If the Drinkin Don't Kill Me") to Willie Nelson
("Hands on the Wheel"). Indeed, Bozulich's deep, dry, dusty voice has been
confused with a man's. She plays with that gender-bending effect: on
Butch's title track her voice dips down into a deep resonating spoken
burr la Barry White and then rises up into a dreamy, girlish falsetto
over the course of a single sentence ("All you're left with is chaos and a
dirty face"). As the band have grown, however, Sonic Youth-style dissonance and
improv-tinged interludes have come to overshadow the country roots that
flavored Lost Somewhere Between the Earth and My Home. (Instead of a
country cover, Butch features a version of the krautrock group Can's
"You Doo Right.") The group's newest recruit, guitarist Nels Cline, litters
"Butch" -- a jazzy ballad about love, loss, and the trail of eyeliner on a
tear-stained face -- with searing noise squalls bolstered by the fevered bowing
of now departed violinist Jessy Greene.
Against this serrated backdrop, Bozulich screams, coos, and purrs in a
disarmingly tender fashion. The rocky noise creates a striking contrast for
lyrics ripe with florid, sensual metaphors. And yet the country darkness that
inspires Bozulich still gathers in the distance. "Look at all the peaches
waving from the shore," she sings on "Swim Back to Me" -- "Another taste of
honey to kill or to ignore." Not far from the kind of strange fruit Billie
Holiday might have wrapped her transcendent voice around.
The Geraldine Fibbers headline upstairs at the Middle East next Saturday,
August 30; call 864-EAST.