Art beaten badly; commerce suspected

"The one thing I still can’t get," says a surely astonished Clyde Wrenn, "is that here, in L.A., people will line up around blocks to pay like twenty dollars to go into a club to listen to a DJ. But you can’t even drag someone out to pay six bucks to see three or four bands play live. It’s amazing." I assure Wrenn that the last shovel of dirt has been tossed onto live music – hell, rock music itself – in many a town these days. It’s a grimly lost art that only fools and the faithful seem to still adore. My assertion is of no comfort to Wrenn. I know it isn’t because I feel the same emptiness. I dwell in the same rigid fear that this thing that I’ve poured myself, my soul, into every time I set out clickety-clacking the keyboard, is terribly moot. It’s a pretty uneasy sensation that can drive a man to drink.

There really is something beautiful and musical about the sound of a bottle top popping and the silent scream of a million tiny bubbles as they collide into glass. I pour a cold Ballentine, splash an ounce or two of Jim Beam into a shot, and set Wrenn’s The Blue Cliff Record a-spin. It doesn’t take long for the booze and Wrenn’s heart-wrecking tunes to drag me in, and to my knees. "Sawdust in the Mash" absorbs me. It swims in gorgeous and aching dramatics, the kind that Wrenn first displayed so deftly a year and a half ago on his debut EP Long Days Journey Into Night ("named for the Eugene O'Neill play" Wrenn says. And it’s nearly as literate as its inspiration). I feel woozy when the song ends. Breathless. Transported. Believing in what brought me to this altar in the first place. There are so few that care so much…Fuck, talking religious, I must be drunk again.

"Sometimes, when we’d be working on the songs I’d get to a point where I’d just stop and say, ‘is this too fucking dramatic, or what?’" Wrenn laughs responding to a question about the boldly emotive approach his songs and lyrics seem to embrace. "But that’s what I like. It’s the kind of music I’ve always been into. Real feeling, people who have something to write about and deliver it with at least some sort of passion." Wrenn sounds like a guy who’s been onstage for more than just playing his songs. "That was the original plan for me," he admits, "to come out to California and start acting. Along the way I found myself more and more playing music. I’d always played in bands and stuff, so I started to do it more and more after getting here."

Talking religious because, for better or for worse, it is religion. To me it is. It’s breathing, living, loving, and life. When Blue Cliff breaks the cocoon and spreads its wings right around "The Someday Song" it’s wound tight in the midst of the same conflict. Art vs. Commerce, knowing the odds, enduring the struggle, and choosing the importance of art over the self-damning ease of commerce. Feeding the spirit, working from the inside out. Those are the noble reasons that Wrenn found the need to imprint the crossing from "The Someday Song" into the radiant "Falling Away" with a single poetic line that sets its feet in reality and artful urgency at the same time – "I don’t want it to rain on you. I don’t want it to snow on you and I don’t want the wind to blow paper and trash on you." The verse receives full billing on the disc, track 7 to be exact, despite a ghostly production that swamps the words in murky dissonance. Wrenn knows that this set of lines, titled "My Dead Friend", is every bit the song that longer and more celebrated pieces are. He treats it the same. Because it is. Talking religious because, for better or for worse, it is.

Wrenn doesn’t know how to properly categorize his music either (as if that were necessary). He edges around an alt.country acoustic semi-country sort of tag that is as hard to say as it is to believe. The Blue Cliff Record is an acoustic based record that, musically speaking, is akin to a modern country sound, but it is a defiantly vocal record that fertilized deep inside Wrenn and is born of his distinctly fluid vocals. Phrasing, tone, and inflection all stir to a dramatic boil. Wrenn probably recognizes this, but he constantly defers to "the band". So much so that he calls this "the bands record". It’s not simple humility that feeds Wrenn this opinion. The players do as much to define Wrenn’s voice as it does to define the bands sound. It’s the meshing of these gears – Michael Minori’s bass, Chris Kirshbaum’s drums, the violin and slide of Jon Segal, Steve Blackie, Phil Cobb, Christian Gibbs, and someone called Nubella on extra slide, piano, banjo, and vocals – that grind Blue Cliff into an artistic focus.

The songs within are scattered across a wide canvass. Rambling and rolling on "The Promise", enduring exhaustedly on "Muledriver", and spinning a sonic novella in "The Terrible Curse of Reginald Snopes III", Blue Cliff is as heady an example of ambition as you’re likely to hear these days.

If the things you once held dearly no longer seem to matter to others it doesn’t mean you abandon the faith. You shore it up and defiantly lay out the sandbags. There is always reason to remain staid, but there’s ever the more reason to mobilize in the face of evaporation. The wider culture can be stripped to the bones, it can be drained of heart, soul, and it can neuter identities until every single soul desires the same thing at the same point in life to the same end. There will always be those who crave more, better, different. History is littered with the scraps of disposable cultures, yet the art that sprung up from the ages is forever.

I’d guess that Wrenn wonders what it’s all for, what, if anything, it is worth. He didn’t say it in so many words, but he didn’t have to. His view of the wider culture that hovers over us all like so many swollen, dark storm clouds, and his sense of treading water in a rising river as those clouds begin to break and spill all over is a shared one. Shared by many who feel the death squeeze of commerce in the face of a populous more pleased with opinions being made for them rather than having to go through all of the trouble of formulating them themselves. Whatever the market says.

So you can only hope that the Clyde Wrenn’s of the world (particularly this Clyde Wrenn) can carve out enough airspace in this milieu to keep breathing – and making the music that really seems to matter anymore.

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