A Fan's Dilemma (2 of 3)

                             

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti

House Arrest

The title “House Arrest” sounds like an allusion to Ariel’s reclusive, home-bound lifestyle circa its 2002 recording. His world revolved around a one-room apartment above an ashram in Crenshaw, South Central LA. The living space was spartan: “I had my bed on the ground, I didn’t have any furniture – just my little Sanyo stereo, two speakers and the 8-track recorder right in front of it. There was a table in the corner and a bunch of garbage bags full of my clothes.” He had to share a bathroom with several other people who lived on the upstairs floor above the ashram. 

Ariel fell into a routine. By day, he worked as an art teacher’s assistant at an elementary school (the same one he’d attended as a kid, in fact). Come four in the afternoon, he’d head home. Contravening the ashram rules he’d signed as a condition of living there  - which among other things strictly forbad strong flavors like garlic and smoking -  Ariel ordered kung po chicken delivery every night and got stoned. Then he slipped on headphones and started recording.  He made music all evening and deep into the night.

Ariel lived there for two years and only left because he got mugged twice right outside the house. “I would've stayed there for longer – that was by far my most productive period. I recorded five albums while I was there. I was working all night, so I don’t even know when I slept. Maybe I slept every other day, I can’t remember. Certainly I was burning the candles at both ends.”

The best part of the day was when the sun came up and Ariel was finally able to take off the headphones and play what he’d recorded through proper speakers. “Getting really stoned and listening to it - trying to pretend like I’d never heard it before.”

Ariel would come up with track sequencings for albums, make CD covers using color-marked Polaroids, get them miniaturized and printed at Kinko’s. But he was still a long way from having an audience.  “I had two or three friends in my life, barely, and even fewer than that knew me as a musician. There was just John Maus. My wife didn’t think of me that way. And I wasn’t playing live to turn people on.” 

His appearance wasn’t super-inviting either in those days:  red clogs with eyeballs painted on them, grey sweats (“the slumlord look”, he calls it), no shirt but just a hoodie zipped down. “A Nazi space monk, a German hippie with a very sick, death obsession,” is how Ariel describes his image, adding – not wholly convincingly - “there’s definitely lots of people that felt that style.”

Asked whether he was making the music just for himself at this point, Ariel nods and says “and just for a sense of purpose in life. I was really infused with the Lord, so to speak.”

The man’s religious love and awe for pop announces itself with the opening track on House Arrest, the rhapsodically melodic “Hardcore Pops Are Fun.”   Somewhere between a hymn and a mission-statement, its lyrics are deceptively off-the-cuff, but lay out the Ariel Pink credo in clearly devotional terms:  “Pop music is free/For you and me….  Pop music is wine, it tastes so divine”. The “hardcore” in the title “Hardcore Pops Are Fun” is Ariel’s playful way of asserting the deadly seriousness of his dedication to pop as craft and vocation: his belief that prettiness and sweetness can be as intense and powerful  as supposedly more challenging and rule-breaking forms of music like noise, industrial, extreme metal. “Whatever I was doing I thought was really heavy, but in a different sense.”  There’s an echo of Lou Reed on “Heroin” in the line “Pop music’s your wife/Have it for life”: pop as addiction, as God-surrogate, as an absolute commitment.

“Interesting Results”, the track that immediately follows, is  “another total manifesto song”, Ariel says.  You could slot it into the tradition of self-reflexive showbiz songs – ABBA’s “Thank You For the Music”, Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”, Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs” – except that it’s far more interesting, taking you inside Ariel’s process. The song freeze-frames the moment just before taking the plunge into creation, hesitant and crinkled with doubt.  “Will I write /A song you love / Today?/There’s no way to tell/And who cares/Well I don’t,” Ariel teases the listener, adding in mock self-deprecation “Thank the Lord that my standards for success are so low”. The chorus swings the other way into ebullient confidence: “Every time / I pick up a pen/ I get / Interesting results/Every time / I sit down and try/I get /Extra-terrestrial results”. The kicker at the end turns it around on Ariel’s – then non-existent – audience: “It may not be much, but let’s see you try.”  Ariel laughs in recollection: “That was me really trying to milk the meta-narrative, for lack of anything to actually write about!”

“Getting High In the Morning”, another stand-out track on House Arrest, could also be construed – at a pinch – as a working-methods-revealed song.  It sounds frazzled, the corrugated riffs and effects-soaked textures resembling a malfunctioning TV set whose color balance is grotesquely out of whack. Ariel compares it to Zappa at his most zany and to ‘International Feel’ on Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, A True Star.  

That late Sixties acid rock vibe resurfaces on “Netherlands.” Here the brittle, painfully bright guitar recalls Jefferson Airplane’s After Bathing At Baxter’s - Ariel’s piercing, high-pitched, edging-into-too-sharp vocal even sounds like Grace Slick. There’s that same sense of perceptions stripped raw, of visionary overload straining the nervous system to breaking point. “It’s got that Moby Grape on a bender vibe,” nods Ariel. “That totally fried thing. The fuzz bass.”

Ariel is a deep scholar of Sixties psychedelia, although his tastes lean less to the Nuggets-y raw ‘n’ basic garage punk end of things and more to the pop-psych: the Byrds, the first Love LP, Electric Prunes, even Strawberry Alarm Clock. “I just love the Sixties”. He likes to say that he “brought the Eighties to the Sixties” – a joke, but one that does convey, if somewhat inscrutably, the sense that something else is going on here than the usual kind of revivalist procedure: something more uncanny. Obsolete technology (the long-discontinued Yamaha 8-track), dead musical languages, disinterred memories, and a lifetime of poring over recordings and assimilating the sonic signatures of their specific Zeitgeists - all converge to conjure songs that suggest parallel pop realities or counterfactual histories, how things could have gone down if…  

Temporal sequence gets scrambled, history goes haywire.  “The People I’m Not”, for instance, is described by Ariel as “a demo from Rocket From the Tombs, but playing a Fleetwood Mac song – there’s some Tango In the Night, ‘tell me sweet little lies’ vibe in there” – in other words, a song from a decade-or-more after the Cleveland proto-punk group ceased to exist.

But it’s always personal with Ariel, never merely “record collection rock”:  clever-but-empty games with taste and references,  sterile crafting of period-precise fakesimiles.  He jokes that his version of psych-rock is really “psychotherapy rock…. I’m always going  back to those earliest memories”. Indeed there’s an unreleased song from the House Arrest / Worn Copy /Doldrums era in which the 8-track is actually his shrink. The machine listens patiently to Ariel unburdening himself, and then in a pitched-down, masculine-medical voice offers soothing advice and support.

Of his lyrics, Ariel says “I have to trick myself… pretend everything’s like a scratch track, write the words down quickly…. And then later, I’m like ‘Nope, Ariel, the lyrics are done’.” Each lyric, he says, “is like a little piece of me preserved against my will” – and the totality of them add up to a warts-and-all psychological self-portrait. “There’s an ongoing narrative under all this stuff. And it’s really like some weird transference therapy thing”. Through his music, Ariel has found the missing link between The Cure and the talking cure.