One More Great Songwriter

 

A couple weeks ago, I posted a list from Paste magazine on the 100 greatest living songwriters.  It name-checked the obvious choices, had some interesting surprises and a few turkeys.  IMHO, it also had one glaring omission.  He’s hardly unknown – in fact, he’s the type of songwriter that other writers admire and has had more than his share of critical success (for example, his website features reviews by obscure publications like the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly).  He’s also had a respectable if not lucrative career, with half a dozen or so studio albums released over the last 14 years.  But his most recent album - a 50 song behemoth – is a whole different animal, and it puts him in a league with only a handful of other songwriters at the peak of their creative powers.  I’ve had this thing occupying three of the six slots in my car’s CD changer since May, and every time I think I’m ready to cycle at least one these CDs out in favor of something else I discover one more gem I overlooked, or gain new appreciation for a song I loved from the beginning.  It’s powerful, moving, literate, raunchy, thought-provoking, funny and fun, and you can’t even buy it in stores or at Rhapsody.  To say it’s worth checking out is an understatement; it’s one of the most eclectic and challenging CDs you’re likely to find.  I’d go so far as to say it’s essential.  This mystery CD and songwriter is….

50-VC Doberman, from Robbie Fulks.  Yeah I know, I’ve written about RF a few times now, but after this post I’m going to retire his name for a while, because I do listen to other stuff and it’s time to move on.  But 50 VC Doberman is such a rich, bewildering musical universe that I have to say something about it and hopefully inspire a few YR reader downloads (it’s only available here at his site).  Listening to 50 VC off and on for six months leads to some realizations about the Fulks songwriting style.  First, he likes to frustrate his listener’s expectations.  Ambiguous and/or unlikable characters are par for the course, and songs sometimes start in one place and end somewhere completely unexpected. Second – and don’t stop reading after you see this – but he is one of the most literary songwriters around.  One song on 50 VC is explicitly based on a novel (The Violent Bear it Away) by Flannery O’Connor.  Another is inspired by John Cheever (this is also my least favorite of the 50 and, frankly, doesn’t remind me of Cheever– Updike maybe).  And yet another – a disturbing tale about a lynching, from the point of view of a member of the lynch mob who slowly recognizes the barbarity of what’s taking place - could have been written by Faulkner.  If that sounds too much like the English lit class you hated in college, don’t fret – the lyrics are set to an incredibly diverse array of musical styles, from Carolina flatpickin’, power pop, 70s R&B, salsa, heavy metal  and, in one case, a weird hybrid of gypsy swing and folk from some unidentified place in Eastern Europe.  Oh, and covers of original songs from the Carter Family and Jackson Five.

There’s no way I could do justice to the whole CD (and of course, in an album of 50 songs there’s going to be a few stinkers – but I’d say at least 40 are top notch).  A brief description of the first three songs can give you at least some sense of what the whole thing is like.

First out of the box is “Angela,” a twisted love ballad that RF describes as so: “A young man sets out on an impulsive drive from his home in the metropolitan New York area to Chicago to kidnap his ex-girlfriend from her now-boyfriend, preferably with her consent; and a minor pop classic comes kicking and screaming (or maybe pulsing and keening) into our fallen world.”  It could be a pop classic, too, since this is one of the most hummable, sweet songs sung by a stalker you can imagine – with a great strumming guitar setting the rhythm and the protagonist soulfully crooning about his cross country journey

Ohio was a void, and the toll road cracked and wet
I took it on with truckstop coffee and a pop science cassette
No atoms were destroyed in the cosmic making-of
They are waiting just to rejoin: your lips, my love.   

But then the happy beat changes and you get to the creepy part

Is he in there with you?
Kindly exit at the sound of the horn

Come on Angela
You know you want to
Your job’s a bore
Your guy’s a whore
And time’s on your brain
Listen to me, Angela
I’m calling from the bar next door
Where all these fine alcoholics say
I’ve got no chance with you
Drop it all and run with me
I know it’s the last thing you need
But you know you want to
You know you want to

Lyrics notwithstanding, “Angela” is a radio-ready pop tune, but the next song is far more experimental.  “Arthur Koestler’s Eyes” is an impressionistic swirl of images, evidently filtered through the eyes of one of the literary and philosophical geniuses of the 20^th century – Arthur Koestler – who was also credibly accused of at least one instance of rape.  The chorus captures the way that brilliance sits next to predation (literally targeting his victim) in the mind of the same man:

Arthur Koestler’s eyes
And they'd sound in your soul like a bell had spoken
One trained on the skies
And one fixed on the X in your forehead, she had     

(By the way, this may seem like a pattern, but these are the only two songs about stalking etc on the album).

From the intellectual heights of Arthur Koestler, ”Bad on Both Sides” literally moves to the other side of the tracks, to a collection of small-town, down and outers.  The song is straight-ahead, guitar driven rock, and RF sings in a snarling but sympathetic way about someone remembering a long ago summer love, who feels stuck in his hometown.  With lyrics like these, you know you’re not in Arthur Koestler’s Manhattan anymore.

Laugh all you like, a Wal-Mart checkout's not a bad spot to watch the world pass by
Fat skinny crippled and lame, and look, here comes an old flame with shadows underneath her eyes
I hear the husband he shot bounced back, and as for Jeffrey, we’ll find out in five to ten
Meanwhile, I watch her walk slow across that lot...thinking about me...thinking about him

On the slave side of a steel fence
You'd say he's the worse one off, but I’m not convinced
Because when you’re down to remembering
One golden hour's still one fine thing

And there’s 47 songs to go.

This may sound unbearably grim, but fear not, there’s plenty of lighter fare.  In his early days, RF was in fact labeled a “novelty” songwriter, who wrote mostly comical country music (and wasn’t taken that seriously as a result).  There are some great examples of that on 50 VC, like “Check Out the Career!” a light-hearted but defiantly independent take on his own lack of commercial success; or “Common Law Cabin”; or “The World’s Full of Pretty Girls (And Pretty Girls are Full of Themselves Too).”  And there are some incredibly heartfelt ballads too like “Goodbye Virginia,” “Guess I Got it Wrong,” “You Can’t Go Back,” and “That’s Where I’m From,” which in a better world would be a mega-million hit for Tim McGraw or Carrie Underwood.  And lots of other weird, fun, challenging stuff - just one more example of RF’s unique take on things.  In 2006, the planet Pluto was downgraded by astronomers from a planet to a “dwarf planet,” and RF wrote a song to commemorate the occasion. “Pluto” is a sympathetic song of support sung to the planet Pluto by the planet Neptune, as they pass each other in orbit.  Here are the lyrics in full:

Lonely you a minor planet
Minor me a lonely man
Spinning in celestial orbit
Brother Trans-Neptunian
Dwarf they label you
Me, I beg to disagree
King of the Kuiper Belt
Sphere of noble mystery

Late you came unto us
Borne on a solar wind
Charon, a moon your equal
Nix and Hydra, distant twins
Since the second grade
Nine is the number I recall
Without you, my friend
Our solar system feels small

So sad to see you go
I won’t forget you, Pluto

Named to deify you
Sure to be misunderstood
Mass enough to spherify you
Not to clear the neighborhood
In all the Milky Way
Is there nowhere you belong?
Drifting in empty space
Lost and lonely as a song

(Spoken)
Maybe you never were one of us. "Eccentric," they said, "too far out...just an old chunk of rock and ice." Well, I guess it’s time to give you a number and send you on your way. Oh, but some of us will never forget...

So sad to see you go
I won’t forget you, Pluto

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard another song like that in more than 30 years of listening, but then I could say that about a lot of RF’s stuff.  50 VC Doberman is the work of a fierce intelligence, digging deeply into  America’s musical, literary and songwriting traditions.  It’s not always easy to listen to, but it’s worth the effort.  And contra Paste, there aren’t 100 people alive today who have written better songs than Robbie Fulks – I’d say 10 at the most, and maybe less than five.

Comments

[S H]

I realize that this conversation is ancient by internet standards, but all the more reason to chime in. 50 VC Doberman remains a must-have for RF fans and for fans of music that tells a story! Buy it and listen! Tell me if I'm wrong. You won't because it is good music!
Robbie like to entertain you and he likes to entertain himself as well. He likes it when his musical sense makes you come away smiling. But he also likes it when his sharp wit makes you wince once in a while.
Like the article above says, this release is essential!

[Larry Kaufmann]

Thanks SH! Yes, this is definitely an essential release, it's amazingly eclectic and shows the range of RF's talent. Nice to see that he's received more attention the last couple years with Upland Stories, which is good but more 'serious' and frankly depressing than RF's overall work - and definitely unlike an RF live show which, as you say, is always a hell of a lot of fun.