The misgivings and ruminations of a middle-aged poet: Chuck Cleaver and the Ass Ponys finally hit their stride

Chuck Cleaver has been sick for a few days and me ringing his phone wakes him. "It’s alright, I had to get up anyway," he whispers through a groggy voice. "I’ve got some kind of stomach virus thing I’ve had for a few days…I was just trying to catch up on my sleep, I haven’t been able to sleep for a couple of nights." My offer to leave him be is turned aside. "Nah, I’ll be fine," he murmurs. As it turns out the down time seems to have set Cleaver’s mind ablaze with all sorts of musings. "You get a lot of time to think when you’ve got shit coming out one end and vomit coming out of the other," he laughs. Cleaver shakes his drowsiness and quickly becomes an uncapped fire hydrant of entertaining and intriguing conversation. His voice squeals and cracks, much as it does in song, and the talk is not unlike the odd muse that serves his lyrical approach. Talking with Cleaver it doesn’t take long to realize that if you’ve ever heard Cleaver sing his songs, you have already had a conversation with the man.

To some that are familiar with Cleaver’s work the very idea that his songs can so fullt present the man probably conjures up some pretty weird imagery. After all, this is the guy who has sung with lucidity about everything from third nipples, road-kill, old ladies living in houses full of trinkets to, on his band the Ass Ponys latest slab of kinky brilliance Lohio, John Carradine and fast food. Not exactly your prototype for pop songs, and certainly not, as far as these things go, the typical lines of conversation. But these sorts of strange thoughts are an essential part of Cleaver and the Ass Ponys make-up. They are, in fact, entirely who he and they are as artists. And these musings, as Cleaver knows all to well, are quite the strange makings of a rock and roll band.

"My muse, for all intents and purposes, is a strange one. Not to me it isn’t, but to others it really is, and I know that. So we seem to always be one of those love/hate type band things or something," Cleaver says. "We never just get a response of "ehhh", you know? It’s either ‘Jesus, these guys are terrible’, or ‘these guys are the best thing since Eddie Money’…or something."

Cleaver has been dealing with this sort of response to the Ponys music for so long that he’s almost accepted it as inevitable. "To a certain extent you get used to it. You hope that it will change, but, you know…" Cleaver pauses, "I think I do that (hope) on too many fronts. So it’s like, you hope that people will finally accept the (band) name, you hope that the distribution gets better, you hope that it’ll sell better than the last one…and it never does." Cleaver lets slip a vexed chuckle.

Vexed is Cleaver’s word, not mine. It’s the word he used in an e-mail to describe the response the record was receiving at the time of its June release and, like an antagonizingly memorable Ass Ponys chorus, the damn word won’t leave the edges of my brain.

Vex. "This one seems to be vexing folks a bit," Cleaver wrote. "People need to be vexed," I replied. And I can think of nothing better than the unbridled intelligence of the Ass Ponys doing the vexing these days. I can only imagine the vexing Lohio would do to the slack-assed hipsters of today’s mainstream pop scene. Maybe that’s what people need (although Cleaver and other artists tend to hope it’s what people want – they do, after all, want to sell some of these records they make). Maybe some top-flight vexation would shake a little of the collective dust off of this soulless ass-end of pop music that dominates the scene these days. Vex ‘em!

Sure, these are the uncertain and unnatural expectations of oblivious rock snobbery being spewn about on my part, but the truth is that I fucking believe in records like the Ponys’ slick Electric Rock Music (’94), the mortifying reality check of Some Stupid with a Flare Gun (’99), and especially the dusty Americana of the new Lohio. That said, you could probably add ‘unreasonable’ to the above list of "uns" too if you were asking the conventional wise men, but I lean on the Ponys here because Lohio is a damn fine record. Itt doesn’t settle for the simple or obvious. It’s a swell slice of strange and focused rockroll that deserves the audience that it seeks. Certainly there are those that will seek it out - but I’m bitching because it’s high fucking time for this sort of fertile rockroll to move beyond the distant dark horizons. It’s time to start taking serious whacks at this pathetic, lethargic resigned notion of American pop music. Shit, I’ll go so far as to say that the people need this Ass Ponys record! He won’t say it straight up, but you get the feeling that even the hyper-cynical Cleaver feels it too, it’s that good of a record.

"I really like it," he says of Lohio. "It’s exactly what we wanted to do. It’s the closest we’ve ever come to making the record we set out to make." On record though, when the Ass Ponys are in peak form, when Bill Alletzhauser’s guitar is stabbing – carving away at Cleaver’s melody, when Randy Cheek and Dave Morrison rhythmically kit and kaboodle the songs along at a drunk farmers pace, and when Cleaver’s voice does its weap and yelp, it certainly sounds as though they’re pre-destined to these things. Which isn’t to say the Ponys operate from some grand, mystical vision - quite the opposite.

"It’s always a little vague with us," Cleaver says humbly, "I don’t know that we ever know what we’re "planning" on doing when we make a record. We liked Some Stupid but we wanted to make something just a little more immediate, or there, or something. A record where it sounds like everything is in the same room. And I think we did that. Some Stupid was…I liked it but, and I still like it, there’s nothing wrong with it but there was something a little too fixed up about it or something. I think we did a better job with this one."

Point taken, and Cleaver is right in his assessments. However, for any of Cleaver’s slight misgivings he has to know that Some Stupid with a Flare Gun led him to this path, whether it was consciously or not. The music on Lohio just does not happen on its own, it feeds off of the fantastic (phantasmic) pop of Flare Gun. Songs like "Kitten", "Fighter Pilot", "Between the Trees"...all point the Ponys toward this path of immediacy that Cleaver seemingly feels so at home with.

Lohio’s cinematic opener "Last Night it Snowed" draws the direct line that bridges the Stupid and Lohio. It is a huge, Spector-ian song, filled with the most musical ambition the Ponys have displayed to date, and it’s the nose on Lohio’s face. Big, bulbous, and shiny beautiful. "Last Night" looks back at the moments of Flare Gun with affection and state’s its relation to the former record before bidding it farewell. The pomp of its precision becoming the rain of which it speaks: "a blanket white / at least it was when it came down last night / the morning brings the rain / the blanket’s washed away / now everything returns to grey".

With that one line the Ponys warm the chills of uncertain mid-life struggles. The song revels in life’s reaching the halfway point to its undeniable finality that permeated Flare Gun. And the Ass Ponys start to warm toward the idea of having more of a "past" in their lives than any foreseeable future.

"It’s weird that we start out the record (Lohio) with this, sort of, the most built up song we’ve ever done," Cleaver concedes. "And I think that was kind of on purpose. It’s like ‘okay, here’s the gloss, now get over it’, we have other things to do. The idea was to try within a real short period to go from nothing to everything with that song. It’s really cool and fun to make that sort of thing, but at the time I was like geez, ok, let’s just do it with this song, not on everything."

So they do it that way and then move along – like they’ve been trying to move along all of their lives, and suddenly, with "Last Night’s" crescendo, they are able too. A moment of clarity. It’s that simple, or at least the Ass Ponys make it sound that simple, and that’s the way things happen in life.

Ultimately "Last Night" drifts off - melting away like the snow it implicates – revealing a striking record filled with looks back; the reminiscences of an eternal hot summer of youth (in fact, at least five songs mention heat, sun, or summer directly). Lohio finds Cleaver moving beyond the mortality study of Flare Gun and taking stock of the past before moving through the queer mid-life prism and on to the second half of life.

Ruminations like these (my own and the Ass Ponys) seem utterly out of place these days. We’re living in a time when façade facilitates most perceptions of reality and nobody wants to deal with being reminded of the struggles of life’s voyages by a wise-cracking-to-hide-the-pain fortysomething artist from a small Ohio town or a mid-30’s hack writer from the northern half of the same state. I know it, Cleaver knows it, Alletzhauser, Morrison, and Cheek fucking know it too. For some reason, we all keep moving on. The death march of a bunch of ridiculous dreamers who know better, but can’t help themselves. At least it’s a march in pretty good company.

The fact of the matter is that Chuck Cleaver doesn’t look like any of the boys from ‘Nsync. Not that he ain’t a handsome chap, but he doesn’t have any of the required modern-day sheen. He isn’t all surfaces - and hollow inside. Hell, for that matter, Cleaver probably doesn’t even look like the guy you want moving in next fucking door. But he and the Ponys have something going for them, warts and all, to turn a tired phrase, they’re real. And ‘real’ (as much as the very idea of "reality" has been co-opted by the wider culture and turned into muddled shit) is something that our entire American escapism-gone-amuck-in-youth-shit-culture has lost gauge of.

So, hopeless is as hopeless does, and Cleaver and the boys had better either get their asses to the gym and hunker down for a trip to the stylist or they’re quite simply doomed. Trapped in the station (somewhere falling off of the left end of the dial) that they constantly finds themselves befuddled in. The Ass Ponys may fire off some of the smartest pop tunes going (crazed and curmudgeonly motherfuckers that they are), and they may frame their sort of Americana rockroll music cinema in spectacular fashion, but that ain’t gonna score them a minute with good ‘ol Carson Daly. No siree it isn’t.

Shit, you can sing as perceptively as hell about marital struggles, fears of death, dealing with becoming an old fart, kids, lives, loves, hates, and all in between, but you damn sure ain’t goin nowhere with that shit these days – that is, unless you have the right choreographer and a good set of group dance moves.

Yet, the Ass Ponys don’t worry about this sort of thing.

"I don’t think there are ever really "void periods"," Cleaver observes of the current cultural/musical climate. "There is always good stuff out there. It just seems to be whether the better stuff is to the forefront or not. Because certainly the forefront right now is really weak… maybe as weak as it has been in quite awhile. You had to figure that the whole (early 90’s) alterna thing wouldn’t last forever. Certainly it was one of the healthiest times in ages for something decent, because no matter how you felt about Nirvana, at least it was listenable, there was something going on there."

So they’re not fashion plates or trendsetters to even the minutest degree. And the Ass Ponys aren’t going around bitching about the seismic shift to style over substance either - even though substance is the out-of-favor game that the Ponys currently rule. So they don’t "play the game" as it may have to be played right now. None of which matters in the long haul. What does matter is that as off-kilter as Cleaver can be when he presents himself, as much of an oddity that the Ponys seem to be to many people, it is in the things that Cleaver sees and the way that he seew them, it’s the things that he feels and the way he presents those feelings so honestly in his songs that the Ass Ponys, and Lohio in particular, excel.

"This record (Lohio) is the is the ‘thing’ so to speak. This is the one," Cleaver exclaims. "It’s not just because it’s new, but it’s because we got it…we finally got it."

Nailed it in fact. From the opening boom of "Last Night it Snowed" right on through the distant apathetic ache of "Nothing Starts Today" the Ponys hit their stride crossing every base along the way.

"It’s almost like one of those things where you end up saying ‘now what do we do?’" Cleaver says of Lohio. "Now it’s like we’re going to have to make some sort of other thing, make some hideous noise thing – and we’re thinking that - because this is the record that we wanted all of the other records to be. We’ve finally done what we wanted to do, what it took us six records to do, and where do you go from there?"

Six records that have all been worth every inch in the length of growth. Six records that built a career, if you choose to call it that, that, even though Cleaver admits he "kind of has a hard time" listening to the bands first couple of records, is a body of work that Cleaver is proud of.

"For better or for worse we kind of grew up in front of people, at least in the band sense. I mean, hell, the Ass Ponys were always old, but as a band we had this growth to go through," says Cleaver. "And at that time, Mr. Superlove was the best that we could do, just like Electric Rock Music was at that time, and Some Stupid, and so on. It’s a process, as a band."

Old, weary, enigmatic, and writing unusual and beautiful songs that dissect humanity like some twisted modern rock and roll Phillip K. Dick (come to think of it, sharing the strange name problem with said sci-fi writer too) – that is the Cleaver process you’ll hear over the course of the Ponys recorded history.

A friend of mine, Cassie, was over the other night. In the midst of the beers and the booze and the fun and frolic I tossed Lohio into the stereo and let it play – giving no real thought to the thing. Sometime around the seventh cut, "Fire in the Hole", Cassie (who is only 25 years old) says, "Is this those Ass Donkey guys? Or Pony Ass’s, or whatever they are that you are always talking about?" "Why yes, why do you ask?" I answer, thinking that she deserves a gold star just for recognizing the sound. "Well, because I hear these guys and I just don’t get them. I don’t get what they’re doing, what they’re saying, what the hell they’re trying to do," she says in whispered confusion. "You’re what? Twenty-five years old now?" I condescend. She: "Um, yeah…" Me: "You will…someday I swear to you dear Cassie, you will."

Now you have to understand that all of this isn’t to say that you have to be of a certain age or stature in life to dig what the Ass Ponys do. Because even if it was just the damn music you were after, the Ponys are a flight of stairs ahead of so many other supposed alternative rock type bands that you could waste a lifetime trying to do better. However there is always the paradoxical Cleaver muse to deal with. And like it or not it is an inquiring and mature one. It is the muse of those who not only think about life and the many assorted implications of daily living, but it is a muse that probably thinks too much about such things. It is Cleaver’s nature, which in turn is the way of the Ass Ponys. Cleaver just happens to be a guy who turned a corner nearing forty years old and saw the uncertain future shrinking beneath the past, fading into the rear view mirror – and then, the wily bastard, he started singing about it. It’s scary shit, knowing that you may have gone beyond life’s halfway point, and we’re all destined to reach that point ourselves someday. So I guess we should all be thankful that Cleaver got there first, because over the course of the last two Ass Ponys records he’s been trying to find his way in a pretty remarkable fashion, and he’s leaving a trail of crumbs for those who are willing to follow.

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