Mark Kozelek is an often brutally confessional songwriter who spent the early ’90s fronting Red House Painters. The combination of his plaintive disposition, forlorn delivery, and affinity for stripped-down folk-rock arrangements all seemed reminiscent of another aggressively miserable fellow who’d recently emerged from San Francisco — Mark Eitzel of American Music Club. In time, though, Kozelek revealed himself to be less of a grating martyr-by-design than Eitzel, and Red House Painters proved more willing than AMC to cushion their singer’s emotional blows with soft-focus melodies. Kozelek’s gloomy world may have been just as hermetically dismal as Eitzel’s, but it was a lot more inviting, in part because RHP made a humorous habit of unmockingly covering incongruous tunes like Kiss’s “Shock Me” (on the 1994 4AD Shock Me EP) and Wings’ “Silly Love Songs” (on the 1996 Supreme/Island album Songs for a Blue Guitar).
Following the release of Blue Guitar, it appeared that the Red House Painters chapter of the Kozelek story had come to a premature end. For several years, nothing. Then, last year, Kozelek resurfaced as the bassist for the fictional band Stillwater in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, and with his first solo CD, the seven-song mini album Rock ’N’ Roll Singer (Badman). The disc includes three typically melancholy Kozelek originals (“Find me in streets searching for something/Something that I somehow lost,” he intones sorrowfully over fingerpicked acoustic guitar in “Find Me, Ruben Olivares”), as well as a John Denver song (“Around and Around”) that dovetailed nicely with another of his projects: producing the compilation Take Me Home: A Tribute to John Denver (Badman, 2000). But the highlights on Rock ’N’ Roll Singer are the three tracks credited to “Young, Young & Scott” — better known as the songwriters who piloted the first incarnation of the Australian hard-rock band AC/DC to the verge of international stardom before singer Bon Scott’s death left brothers Angus and Malcolm Young to soldier on with singer Brian Johnson.
Rock ’N’ Roll Singer signaled only the beginning of Kozelek’s immersion in the “Young, Young & Scott” songbook, and of his re-emergence. Earlier this month, Sub Pop released Old Ramon, the RHP album that had been shelved since 1998, when Island folded the Supreme label. And a version of the band (with drummer Anthony Koutsos, bassist Jerry Vessel, and guitarist Phil Carney) are planning a tour that will come to the Middle East on June 18.
Old Ramon finds Kozelek indulging in the kind of spacious, slow-moving epics that have characterized RHP in the past. “The River” is an 11-1/2-minute Neil Youngish guitar workout punctuated by noisy climaxes and wistful refrains. “Cruiser” moodily recounts the scattered details of a lost romantic weekend over the course of eight and a half minutes of undulating jazzy chordings, and you can almost taste the bittersweet regret in Kozelek’s voice as he quietly concedes, “Your perfection can’t be mine.” He can slip in a line like “Her mom died off when she was young” (“Cruiser”) so matter-of-factly that it only gradually sucks the air out of the open spaces between verses. And though he can be brutally direct, the first track on Old Ramon, “Wop-a-din-din,” is worded subtly enough that it isn’t until the third verse that you realize the singer is detailing his affection for his cat.
Subtlety has never been of much use to AC/DC. And that’s part of what makes Kozelek’s reinterpretations of their early work so affecting on his full-length solo debut, What’s Next to the Moon (Badman). The disc has all three AC/DC cuts from Rock ’N’ Roll Singer, plus seven more. Many of the chord progressions and almost all the vocal melodies have been rewritten, and most of the tunes are deep, deep cuts. (“You Ain’t Got a Hold on Me” is a track from 1976’s High Voltage that didn’t make it onto their American debut; and the title track, from 1978’s Power Age, is obscure enough that a KCRW DJ reportedly and understandably mistook it for a Leonard Cohen song.) Stripped of all bombast (only the bass/drums/electric-guitar version of “Rock ’N’ Roll Singer” on the EP features anything more than skeletal pick-and-strum guitar accompaniment), “You Ain’t Got a Hold on Me” sounds more like Nick Drake than AC/DC, and “I’m the kind of guy who keeps my mouth shut/Doesn’t make a difference to me/So don’t bother me when I’m up/And leave me in misery” (“Riff Raff”) is right up Kozelek’s alley.
Most striking is the ease with which Kozelek reveals the pathos in more familiar Highway to Hell tunes like “Walk All Over You,” which comes off more creepy than cruel, and “Love Hungry Man” and “If You Want Blood,” both of which discover an almost over-sensitive heart beating beneath the macho bluster Scott once projected. There’s an element of humor inherent in Kozelek’s covering AC/DC, but the album is no joke. In fact, these may be some of the most revealing songs he’s ever sung.
