Put Your Tongue to the Rail: The Philly Comp for Catholic Children
Songs of the Jim Carroll Band
Review by Cassie Carter, Ph.D.
CatholicBoy.com 2000
Jim Carroll is such an interesting cultural figure that it’s not easy to think about his work without being lured to distraction by the legendary biography behind it. Such was the case when The Jim Carroll Band burst onto the scene in 1980 with its debut LP Catholic Boy, and the unlikely hit “People Who Died.” Reporters swarmed like flies after the lanky New York poet, hoping to get the deep dish on a story ripe with the smell of rock mythology.
Carroll’s teenage autobiography, The Basketball Diaries (1978), was already a cult classic among the hip crowd when Catholic Boy appeared, and his escapades with Patti Smith, Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Robert Mapplethorpe, the Rolling Stones, and a legion of other lights in the celebrity sky have been a source of fascination for two decades since.
There’s no question that Carroll’s got an interesting story. But it’s also how Carroll writes about his life,and the overall quality of his art, that has captivated us all these years. Now a new retrospective of Carroll’sCarroll’s musical work, Put Your Tongue to the Rail: The Philly Comp for Catholic Children (Genus, 1999) provides further proof this captivation is well warranted.
In the subscription of hearts
In the strangled teeth of work
In the judgment of each word
In the end, pretend you hear me
–Jim Carroll, “In the Gears”
“Wake up, Mr. Carroll. It’s later than you think.”
–Catholic school teacher, The Basketball Diaries film
Put Your Tongue to the Rail is not merely a “tribute” compilation, but a two-disc, full-fledged retrospective of 25 Jim Carroll Band songs, performed entirely by artists from Philadelphia. The project does not worship the Carroll legend, but rather it spotlights the lyrical and musical strength of The Jim Carroll Band. With the unifying vision of Carroll’s lyrics as its center, it also effectively showcases the diverse talents of the Philadelphia music scene. In managing these two tasks, PYTttR establishes beyond doubt the power and universality of Jim’s songs, lifting his lyrical work out of its original settings and transmuting it through new forms to give the Carroll canon new relevance for the twenty-first century.
I have followed the development of Put Your Tongue to the Rail since its inception in September 1996 as a multi-band “tribute concert.” Given that the flyer for the show featured Sharon Tate’s gravestone, I thought I should contact the man behind the scenes, Mike Villers, to ask him if he was . . . well, serious. It turns out he certainly was–Villers, a longtime fan of the Jim Carroll Band, confesses, “I heard Catholic Boy when it first came out, while I was growing up in Iowa. It just worked for me on every level. It fucking rocked first of all–really fierce, one end to the other. And lyrically, it just felt like where I was in my own life, lost and spiritually hungry but furious and insulted by even the idea that I might need redemption . . . I still go on jags every year where it stays in the player for a couple of weeks. It still feels great, a great sing-along record.”
Explaining his reasons for doing the tribute concert and album, Villers says, “There were a bunch of tribute shows around Philly that summer, Skynyrd, Abba, Motorhead . . . but most of them were kinda jokes . . . and I thought it would be cool to do a show that took itself a little more seriously and showed respect for the history. I also just happened to be in the middle of one of those jags at the time, so. . . .” Once Villers connected his passion for Catholic Boy with his immersion in the Philadelphia music scene, the project that began as “just a tribute night where a bunch of bands would get together and play all the songs from Catholic Boy” stretched into a three-year odyssey culminating in a double-CD that covers almost the entire Jim Carroll Band catalogue.
Villers rounded up the performers, presided over the recording sessions, and even put his own tongue to the rail, fronting Stomaboy with Marrow, the two-band onslaught responsible for PYTttR’s fiery version of “City Drops Into the Night.” Forget about “People Who Died”–real Jim fans know “City Drops” is THE Jim Carroll song, and it’s presented here in appropriately epic proportion as big, loud, long, hard STADIUM rock. If there is one song in Carroll’s oeuvre that encapsulates his legendary story, it is “City Drops,” and Stomaboy pairs up with Marrow to take it captive, transforming it into a working-class rock anthem while completely respecting and retaining the integrity of the original. It’s a performance that embodies the spirit of the entire compilation, as PYTttR is first and foremost about the listener’s experiences of the songs–with the view here coming from the cheap seats in the arena’s upper deck.
It’s obvious from the collection as a whole that Villers has lived intimately with these songs for years, but his blood-dripping vocals on “City Drops” say more than I can begin to outline about the passion and intensity driving this project. The dude has earned the right to do this song, and he does it better than I could have ever imagined anyone besides Jim Carroll.
“The message is that there isn’t a message. All I do is turn on the light or open the door. They have to walk through it on their own.”
–Jim Carroll, 1981 interview
“JC called, he’s not impressed
And it’s snip-snip to the American Express”
–Adam Brodsky, adapting Carroll’s “No More Luxuries”
And speaking of songs no one but Jim Carroll is allowed to do, Villers knew when he started PYTttR, that only Jim Carroll could do “People Who Died.” His solution? If no one can sing it, then everyone sings it: “No one person could legitimately recreate Jim’s experience of losing all those friends; it would have been bogus to even try,” he explains. “But all of us have experiences of losing people, so having the gang vocals was the obvious way to translate it from the personal to the universal.”
Accordingly, Bootleg Thorazine Nightmare yanks the song out of its specific context in Jim Carroll lore and transplants it to the present. It is no longer about Jim Carroll’s friends who died but about the friends we have all lost, the friends we lose every day. The song is now celebrating our continuing existence, our survival, while acknowledging the friends whose lives were cut short.
Not surprisingly, this cover could be a major dividing factor among JC fans, who may think it should have shown more respect for Jim’s most famous song. Don’t forget, though, that upon its original release, the song tended to be classified as a “novelty,” a la Monty Python and Weird Al Yankovic. Indeed, it’s hard to grasp this litany of dead friends, all of whom are real people, rattled off in the original like a grocery list. But the beauty of the original is precisely in its refusal to offer a pre-digested emotional response for the listener. If we laugh it’s simply because we don’t know how else to react to a list of young people cut off before their time.
Bootleg Thorazine Nightmare’s cover pushes this refusal even further. This “People Who Died” aims for playground set lists, plunging into the dominion of “Ring Around the Rosy,” to which generations of children have danced and sung, oblivious to the horrors of its Black Plague origin. “A hundred years from now it’ll be one of those kids’ cautionary tales,” Villers says, “in the spirit of a twisted Grimm’s Fairy Tale, or Edward Gorey’s ‘The Gashlycrumb Tinies,’ which kills off a mess of children by all manner of gruesome means in neat alphabetical order.”
Ashes, ashes, all fall down seven stories.
Another controversial track, and one of the compilation’s most brilliant, is Bottom’s homocore-cabaret cover of “Catholic Boy.” Villers has said he was as much casting director as producer on this project–that a big part of the job was putting Jim’s lyrics into the mouths of the right characters–and this cover is the best example of Mike’s often inspired “casting.” If any Jim Carroll song is “macho,” it’s “Catholic Boy.” Built over a classic repetitive blues-rock riff, the song is Carroll’s b-b-b-baaad version of “Bad to the Bone”: “I make angels dance and drop to their knees / When I enter a church the feet of statues bleed / I understand the fate of all my enemies / Just like Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. . .” Keeping that in mind, picture this: Jimi Mooney, the vocalist on PYTttR’s “Catholic Boy,” appearing at the original Jim Carroll Tribute Night in 1996–wearing a Catholic schoolgirl’s pinafore with a gold lamÈ G-string beneath, Stomaboy providing the backing on a revved-up pure punk take of the song’s original arrangement. Now flash-forward to Bottom’s “Catholic Boy,” which is absolutely, without question, the most original and innovative cover on the album. It completely metamorphoses the music and the meaning of the song, transforming it to a Vaudevillian, cabaret-style queer anthem complete with honky-tonk piano, flight-of-the-bumble bee guitar, circus snaredrum, laughing clarinet and a Charles Ivesian xylophone. It converts the cockiness of the original to good purpose, throwing queerness in the face of the Pope. While listening to it, remember to picture Mooney in his Catholic girl pinafore and G-string–only add the top hat, cane, and fishnets.
It is BEAUTIFUL.
Considering the transformative muscle of a homocore cover of “Catholic Boy,” I can barely begin to describe the power of the female-led covers that come close to dominating the compilation. Think about it. If Jim Carroll mythology is controlled by a male experience and voice, what happens when girls take over? It is amazing to consider how Carroll’s words come unmoored from the specificity of his biography and open up to larger, even universal meaning by simply inserting a female voice into the lead. Overall, my favorite songs on PYTttR are the ones sung by women, and in Mike Villers’ Philly the girls are tuff enuff to get fully half the turf.
There’s a three-way tie for my number one favorite song on the comp–and it’s between three female-led songs. Jen Hess’s “I Want the Angel” is absolutely stunning, with Hess’s rusty, soul-bare vocal underscored by gentle classical guitars and the most gorgeous cello imaginable. The stark vulnerability of her performance beautifully captures the longing all of us feel dreaming of that ever-elusive ideal love, while the song’s ironic lyrical twists of non-ideal imagery resonate deliciously and with even more depth. If I had to choose only one performance from PYTttR as a potential career-career-making hit, this is it.
Thankfully, there are more–Mia Johnson’s “Plain Division” is permanently stuck in my head; I have been singing it in NYC subways and humming it while at work ever since I first heard it. Its fresh arrangement and overall “feel” remind me of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” and of Rubber Soul in general. It’s the pop hit Jim Carroll never had. I didn’t see the beautiful interchanges of imagery, the subtleties of emotion and desire, in the original. But they’re brilliantly exposed in the cover, in the delicate mix of luscious vocal, wood guitar, banjo, Middle Eastern percussion, and flute.
Yet another female-led cover, Poppy’s “Dance the Night Away” mines a more isolated emotional terrain. “Dance ” is one of the most intimate, personal songs Jim Carroll has ever done. It is “City Drops ” without the resurrection, transformation, and victory. It expresses the artist’s experience struggling through the pain that leads to the resurrection we hear about in “City Drops.” Poppy’s Kate Heim expresses all of this with intensity and passion, and it is far from a “cover.” I don’t know what experiences the band brought to this song, but I do know they captured my experience of listening to the original. I can never know what Jim Carroll experienced to lead him through writing this song, but when I listen to Poppy’s cover of “Dance the Night Away,” it is like listening to my own imagination.
I have already mentioned three of my all-time favorite Jim Carroll Band songs: “I Want the Angel,” “Dance the Night Away,” and “City Drops Into the Night.” My fourth favorite is “I Write Your Name.” While I am not a fan of guitar rock, The Last Match’s cover of “I Write Your Name” is everything I could have asked for. Its emotional rawness captures the essence of the song, which is of an individual fighting tooth-and-nail between jealously, love, hate, desire, and revenge. The only way I can describe the cover is to ask you to imagine a morph between a torn page and a severed limb, maybe with a few shredded musical instruments in the mix. Or, as Villers puts it, “it’s DUI on the thin line between love and hate.”
Such rawness is shared by a number of the tracks recorded early on in the project, including “Nothing Is True” by Mae Pang and “Three Sisters” by Thorazine. Of everything on PYTttR, these two best capture the post-punk ethos of “People Who Died” and, more generally, of Catholic Boy and The Jim Carroll Band circa 1980. As an added benefit, both songs have female singers. Mae Pang celebrates the nihilism of “Nothing Is True” with an exuberance that only a high-range female voice could punctuate better than Jim himself. Even better, Thorazine roars through “Three Sisters”–but only once. Period.
“She says RAZOR, when she goes down on you . . .”
In the punk vein, a number of songs are interesting in the ways they translate 1980s styles into the present and because of the unexpected ways in which they draw connections with the original contexts of the songs.
“It’s Too Late” is worthy of note here because its lyrics describe Jim’s view of his life and position in the 1980s, against the legacy of the 60s and 70s, and more specifically his own personal 60s/70s legacy (The Basketball Diaries / Forced Entries). Having survived his own 1970s wannabe-isms, “It’s Too Late”Late” found Jim himself resurrected in the 80s as an artist needing only self-validation sans “that need to go out and find somebody to love.” The song is an expression of individual will and survival in opposition to punk and post-punk era nihilism.
In the original version of “It’s Too Late,” the message is very clear: the harrowing adventures/ordeals of his biography now behind him, Jim Carroll no longer wanted to live fast and die young, or be any kind of corpse. The optimism of Jim’s version is not all there is to the song, however. Like so much of his work, this song is double-edged–and a dark current bubbles beneath the ebullience. Psyclone Rangers’ cover slices through the hopefulness of the original with surgical precision to the nihilistic entrails, reveling in the song’s venomous indictment of lazy artists, spiritually weak posers, and emotional vampires.
Other intriguing 1980s translations include “Hold Back the Dream” by The Subverts, “Black Romance” by Rockula, and “Voices” by The 440s. The Subverts’ maniacally paced cover of “Hold Back the Dream” conjures Wall of Voodoo’s Stan Ridgeway on a meth binge, and exposes the paranoid chaos lurking behind the dirge of the original. Meanwhile, three covers dutifully take us into the X Zone.
Rockula’s “Black Romance” recreates the historic rock marriage of X and The Doors: Geeta Dalal and Wayne Hamilton righteously and riotously intone John Doe and Exene’sExene’s discordant harmonies over Manzarek-inflected farfisa fingerings. The Wild Gift sound emerges again on The 440’s “Voices,” taking full advantage of the lyrics’ portrayal of a series of borderline psychos to play on X’s own borderline psychopathology. Here the West Coast reference is especially apt, as the original version of “Voices” appeared in the LA-set movie Turf Turf and received airplay there as the single from the JCB’s last record, 1983’s I Write Your Name. It’s one of PYTttR’s small miracles that the 440’s manage to translate the original, which is so dated, so utterly Big-Pop-80s, and so strangled in skinny ties, into the present.
But perhaps the biggest and best X sound comes from the teaming of Maria Nicgorski with Ty Cobb, covering “Low Rider.” If any other Jim Carroll song deserves an LA soundstaging, “Low Rider” is it–it’s one of only two California-native songs in the Carroll canon (the other one, “Love Crimes,” didn’t make it onto the comp). But while Maria and the Ty Cobb boys do effectively exploit the X sound, the work is far beyond a Xerox make over, smartly forgoing the big-rock posturing possibilities inherent in the original in favor of a laid back southwestern groove. And though lyrical edits do more damage than good, the cover is still among the most exciting performances on the album. Just 19 at the time of this recording, Maria Nicorski, who cut her punk baby teeth doing CBGB gigs with Trip 66 at the age of 13(!), sings with the brooding power of a woman years older.
In the end what these 80’s-style covers do most effectively is resist the urge to adopt the originals directly, but instead translate them into parallel 80’s styles, ripping the songs out of their original frames but leaving them in the original gallery. Maybe you had to be there to love the Big 80’s, but there was some great stuff in that decade, and we hear plenty of references to it on PYTttR. As for the songs of the Jim Carroll Band, it is a wonderful thing to see these gems in different settings that show off their sparkle.
Then again, some of the songs are just timeless rock ‘n’ roll, and a simple dusting-off is all that’s needed. There are four close-to-the-original covers on PYTttR that are sure to please Jim Carroll Band die-hards and newcomers alike. On “Differing Touch,” Marah gives its alt.country all to one of the lesser-known JCB songs and some of the most addictive Jim Carroll lyrics. Discovered by Steve Earl, the critically-acclaimed band is set to release its second disc in March.
“Crow,” as interpreted by the well-aged Del Pez, authentically captures the Chelsea streetscape of the original, along with the passion for Patti Smith any true fan of hers must feel. And PYTttR makes sure Patti gets her props elsewhere–the inside cover art invokes her “I have no guilt” line, which is woven into a crucial lyrical point of “City Drops” as well.
And speaking of authenticity, Sensitive Pricks easily slide “Wicked Gravity” into the groove Keith Richards must have been hanging in when he first heard the JCB and personally signed them to Rolling Stones Records. The Pricks could, and should, back Jim Carroll himself should he ever decide to go back out on the rock ‘n’ roll road. Finally, The Keepsakes rage through the riffs of “Jealous Twin” with twin guitars steaming, savoring and spotlighting Carroll’s luscious turns of phrase and rich free-association imagery. In all, these four performances are the best close covers a Jim Carroll Band fan could hope for.
“Dry Dreams” as done by DeControl is almost a close cover except for the high-octane, low-octave vocal and the metaloid, blazing guitar work. It falls in with a batch of songs on PYTttR that stand out as unique and particularly fresh re-interpretations Carroll fans might not expect, although once we’ve heard them, it’s hard to imagine why we didn’t see them coming. Who would have predicted Iota’s countrified version of “Day and Night” (think Stevie Nicks snorting a freeze-dried Dolly Parton)? And why didn’t anyone until EDO think to do a super-sonic bebop, gang vocal version of “Freddy’s Store”? One other track in particular seeks to reset Carroll’s intense imagery in an especially apt new aural mindscape–prepare to dreamily float back to 1950 or so as Dawn Morpurgo and New Ghost wade into the pure-Beat-coffee-shop-jazz-shop-jazz-backed reading of “Lorraine.”
Finally, while the epic length (100 minutes) of PYTttR may seem daunting, there is good reason to stay for the whole movie, to the end–disc two’s final three tracks are major standouts. Brother JT compresses “Rooms” into a haunting nugget of obsessive isolation and agoraphobic bliss with minimal instrumentation and bedroom production, while also boldly connecting the song to its rock ‘n’ roll lineage through an unmistakable Beach Boys refrain. Brother JT is just one alter ego of John Turlesky, leader of the Philly rock and roll treasure The Original Sins–a band whose debut release was once listed in Rolling Stone’s 200 best records of all time. Villers calls Turlesky the undisputed master of acid drenched garage/psychedelia, legendary as Philadelphia’s own Roky Erikson: “When he agreed to do the song, I just sent him a tape of the original with a note saying ‘I think you can put your smiley smile on this.'”
You may think it can’t get any better, but wait until you hear the Eastern European twist on “Still Life” offered up by Burn Witch Burn. BWB is the latest project of former Dead Milkmen frontman Rodney Anonymous. The acoustic sextet’s interpretation of “Still Life” simmers with bazouki, mandolin, brisk percussion, and understated vocals (co-lead-singer Vienna cast in the role of Nico slumming in Budapest), amplifying the song’s apocalyptic anxiety. A fitting conclusion . . . but don’t rush to the CD changer just yet, because one of the most delightful surprises of the compilation is a hidden “bonus” track at the end.
“The dead meat drips . . .”
Whether or not you were a Jim fan at the start of this comp, by the time you finish disc two you will stagger away, drained, feeling you’ve just witnessed the creation of a new cultural history. PYTttR is a parade of mind-blowing talent from Philadelphia that also offers a new look at Jim Carroll, whose work has been so greatly overshadowed by his own legend. The remarkable performances on this project, with their variety of stylistic interpretations, provide the opportunity to look at Carroll’s songs apart from the mythology surrounding the artist. PYTttR allows us to see, perhaps for the first time, the power of the songs and their significance beyond the individual who created them. And that significance is tremendous.
For more information about Put Your Tongue to the Rail, visit Genus Records at www.genusrecords.com (defunct)