U.S. Maple - Obey Your Concert

Continuing on with an entry from a few days or so ago regarding a soundtrack piece by Riz Ortolani, it seems I’m still on a “vacation” from listening to anything remotely electronic at the moment, and more so — as you’ll find out in this entry — anything that follows any sort of rigid metering.

If you’re not aware of them, this entry is about a track by the legendary avant garde “rock band” called U.S. Maple out of Chicago, who had a good run of five albums since their inception in 1995 until they dissolved in 2007. They were connected somewhat to the bustle of activity that was coming out from the Windy City that hit its stride in the early to mid 1990s, centring around well-known labels like Touch & Go and Drag City as well as other local labels on the more noisier, art-driven end of the spectrum like Skin Graft.

I won’t venture too far in attempting to describe — yet alone analyze — the music of U.S. Maple as it’s a subject that’s already well covered in the numerous music features, album reviews and even university thesis papers that one can easily find online to delve deeper into the band if they wish. Many writers and journalists tend to wrestle with how to describe the band, often using phrases like “deconstructing rock music” and other vague illusions to the band’s purpose with their music but with U.S. Maple, despite coming across as loose with no set audible structure to ears of most unsuspecting listeners, is actually a band that quite meticulously constructs their music — going as far as seeing “singer” Al Johnson creating elaborate vocal charts on how each word in a song is to be phrased, which gets a bit of coverage in their 2000 biography film that covers the recording process of the Acre Thrills album. You’ll find a trailer for that documentary further down, which contains segments of interviews (if not entertaining soundbites) from a number of peripheral characters to the band, including recording engineer Steve Albini.

My first encounter with the band was coming across their 1999 release Talker shortly after its release, which was their third album and was produced by Michael Gira from Swans. Upon first listen I found it interesting, especially the opening track “Bumps and Guys” which feels like an abstract construction with a series of scribbled anti-climaxes, but I hadn’t really gotten the full picture of what this band was just yet. Some short time after listening to this album, a good friend of mine (as well as an in-demand recording engineer) out of Vancouver said he had went to see the indie band Pavement when they played in Vancouver at the turn of the millenium with U.S. Maple opening the tour. According to my friend, as he was watching U.S. Maple‘s opening set — which was often met with “boos” and things being thrown on stage — he had overheard two people nearby him, one chastising the other for making fun of the band because this one friend assumed the band were mentally retarded (note: they’re not) and it wasn’t “correct” to make fun of mentally challenged people. The strange enigma of this band then deepened for me.

Then in 2001, when the band was touring their fourth album called Acre Thrills, the band were set to make an appearance in Vancouver at a venue slash speakeasy slash late night watering hole called The Sugar Refinery — which like most things in Vancouver these days is now long gone. Ok — so here was a chance to check out this mysterious band that I’d been hearing strange things about, as well getting into this Talker album. It was one of the best small-club shows I’d ever seen — one of those ones where you say to yourself, “What the fuck did I just see?”

With it being over twenty years ago now, probably the actual events that I experienced at the show have been exagerated and abstracted in my mind. I remember one of the guitarists (Todd Rittman) wearing a bullfighters outfit, sharing the stage with then drummer Alan Vita as wekk as the strange, intimidating figure of singer Al Johnson wearing a flat cap, Dickies work trousers and a terry towel bathrobe which was shortened in length by what looked like a rusty pair of scissors. He was chewing gum, looking bored with his hands in his pockets as he took the stage. The other guitarist, Mark Shippy — wearing a baby blue tuxedo likely lifted out of a second hand store — positioned himself and his amplifier in the back of the room so both guitars had this extreme surround sound effect. Looking back to the stage, Johnson had placed next to the bass drum of the drum kit an almost full bottle of Southern Comfort liqueur. Rittman’s guitar had two output jacks, with the two lowest strings being bass guitar strings going into a bass amplifier and the remainder of the other strings, standard guitar strings, going into a another guitar amplifier. Interesting!

They then busted into the opener from Talker, “Bumps and Guys”, and I was absolutely shocked to hear that that track — which would sound like a complete mess to your average listener — sounded almost exactly like it did on the album, with all the scratches, weird errand notes and more all seemingly in the right places like the recording. It was then I realised that this band of weirdos were pretty top shelf musicians, and very mesmerising to watch. After each song it seemed the packed venue erupted in loud shouting and cheering — much like one might find at a ZZ Top concert (a band I know that oddly has some heavily influence on U.S. Maple, believe it or not).

After taking in that show I then obviously went on to visit the expanse of their discography at the time, which I will summarize as briefly as possible here. The first album, Long Hair In Three Stages (1995), would seem to most like a more conventional noise rock album hinting of what was to come, complete with a couple of actual music videos for select tracks (such as “Stuck” further down). Following that came Sang Phat Editor (1997) — complete with its dayglo camouflage cover — totally blowing out any sense of metered rhythm into wire-y, jumbled abstraction with song titles like “Songs That Have No Making Out”. Then two years later came Talker — which I was already familiar with — perhaps bringing in more moody atmosphere and emphasing U.S. Maple‘s mastery of creepy, surreal Lynchian tension.

Their 2001 album Acre Thrills I didn’t really attach myself to as much at the time, but over the years it’s now the album I listen to most. The band pulls out a bit the almost atonal abstraction of the preceding two albums into something that wrings out a bit more melody, metre (well, just a bit) and hinting a bit more at their abstruse “classic rock” influences. It’s a fun listen — one that I’ve done in the past couple of days again for the umpteenth time. The best way I can describe it is like being on a summer trip to some deep south US state like Georgia, Tennessee or Alabama, ingesting shitloads of drugs and liquor and going to things like badly organised barbeques, tail-gate parties and seedy bars at the edge of town and just fumbling your way through the entire experience.

One track that always comes to mind is the clever yet clumsily titled “Obey Your Concert”, which begins with a rolling, tom-driven riff overlaid with spoken word before breaking out into an implied classic rock/blues passage in which Al Johnson — in his unique wheezing vocal delivery — coughs out some of my favourite lyrics from the band which make me have a chuckle everytime:

And your house, it’s got wasps
Go to Jim, attack him
Like he’s some sort of killer fudge

Following that album came their final record, Purple On Time, which oddly I haven’t listened to that much — perhaps I’m just more than satisfied with the albums from them that I’m totally familiar with. But with writing this perhaps I’ll give it another listen.

With Soft Riot working in a mainly electronic scene, where much of the music is written on machines in this modern age where absolute precision is totally achievable — and with some artists an aspect that can be obsessed over, often over the line into over-perfection and banality — U.S. Maple works in a almost a maleable, elastic timeline where feeling, familiarity with an instrument, and intuition drive their compositions and live performances. This is something that I love coming back to after hearing far too much electronic music in a condensed period. Given that, I wouldn’t say that U.S. Maple are consistently a “favourite band of all time” for me, but there’s random periods — usually separated by massive blocks of time and then lasting heavily for any give number of days — that they are my favourite band EVER for that period of time, if that makes any sense.

There’s a track on the first Soft Riot LP, No Longer Stranger, called “I Wanna Lay Down NXT 2 U” which takes on a more U.S. Maple approach to rhythm, back when Soft Riot was a lot still just a weirdo little project to mess around with.

Despite calls to get the band back together, members of the band went onto other projects, most notably Todd Rittman who continues on sporadically with the band Dead Rider — whom I saw in London within the last decade — which carries on U.S. Maple‘s experimentalism but incorporating more technology into their formula: synths, electronics and a broader range of popular music.

And closing this entry out, singer Al Johnson has had his share of acting credits, with his most notable role being a small part as an eccentric record collector — one apparently into Captain Beefheart (apt, considering Johnson’s band) — in the 2000 indie film High Fidelity starring John Cusack and Jack Black (see clip below). Also back in the 2000s I had stumbled across a strange internet web series called Milwaukee — which I can’t find anything online about it anymore strangely enough — which was a dark, surreal series which if I remember had a vibe similar to David Lynch‘s Inland Empire, which starred Al Johnson — most notably wandering around like a weirdo creep in a supermarket, similar to Freddie Jones‘s oddball cameo in another Lynch film, Wild At Heart.