Song Project #3
Rob Crow, the restlessly inventive leader of Heavy Vegetable, has led or co-led an absurd variety of musical projects in the last dozen years. Thingy, Optiganally Yours, and Pinback are just the most prominent ones. I have fifteen cds featuring his music, and my collection isn't close to complete. Unlike many hyper-prolific songwriters -- Robert Pollard, say -- Crow's music has many different styles. Heavy Vegetable was his first band of importance, and they sounded like nobody else.
Crow has an oddly geeky songwriting personality. He has a few obsessions he repeatedly returns to, most notably Star Wars, and his fan-geekery seems more sincere than ironic. Sometimes his songwriting is charmingly mundane: "You'll never guess what happened to me. I got fired again. It's so fucking hard to find a job when you don't drive. I don't even fucking know how. My rent is way overdue." Sometimes it's honest: "Looking dumb is exactly what I'm doing right now, but I've got this illusion that I want to keep my integrity." Sometimes it's contemplative: "It doesn't help to admit that I get sad. But I get sad." Often it's just incoherent: "Lemon sells despite itself. And kicking all the tires. Lemon smells. Citrus smells. Put my dogs up, I'm tired. Get it on. Rise." I get the sense that words, for Crow, are just a skeleton to hang a song on. His titles reinforce that impression. Some Rob Crow song titles: "Listen to This Song, Kill Pigs, and Try To Sue Me", "Krishna on the Ledge", "Who Takes My Recyclables?", "Stop Touching Me", "Destroy All Music" (a great song), and "The Long Song at the End of the Record".
Frisbie was the second Heavy Vegetable album; it was also unfortunately their last proper album: they dissolved and re-formed (more or less) as Thingy. After Heavy Vegetable's somewhat scattered debut, Frisbie was startlingly focused, especially for an album with twenty-eight songs; it doesn't flag at any point, and ends with its best song. Frisbie was one of the high points of 1995, and has held up for me since as one of the best couple dozen albums of the 1990s, despite its aggressively original style: originality is often a virtue of the moment, and doesn't always wear well over time.
"Going Steady with the Limes" was the last song on Frisbie. After a twenty-second intro that prefigures the coda, the next forty seconds demonstrate Heavy Vegetable's basic sound: short, choppy riffs strung together in a seeming unwillingness to stay in one place for more than a couple bars. The melodic progessions are common to much post-Gang of Four art-punk; it's the fecund profusion of musical phrases that marks Heavy Vegetable. "Going Steady with the Limes" is in this respect somewhat restrained; some Heavy Vegetable songs have passages that jerk from phrase to phrase every bar or even every couple of notes. (They are not an easy band to dance to.) Most of their songs clock in between a minute and a minute and a half, but they have as much structure as songs twice as long despite not playing any faster.
Heavy Vegetable had another mode, though: slow, brooding, and spooky. Those songs were just as short, but stayed in the same place longer. At the 1:10 point of "Going Steady with the Limes" -- about when most of their songs would be ending -- it shifts gears, laying down a slow steady 3/4 beat, the first two beats emphasized by the drums and guitar, punctuated by a double-time guitar run that alternates between seven and nine notes, the second one adding two notes and a rest to the beginning of the run (and those three beats interrupt the steady rhythm, too). The drummer throws in an increasing variety of fills over these runs. Two vocal lines join the mix: Elea Tenuta and Travis Nelson singing one of Heavy Vegetable's broody melodies, precisely following the basic rhythm laid down by the drums and guitar (one two pause, one two pause, one two pause, one two three four five pause, one two pause, one two three four five pause), while Crow sings along with the double-time guitar. They are throwing together the two basic building blocks of their songs, and the effect is otherworldly. They do this for four and a half minutes -- one of the most coda-weighted songs I've ever heard, right up there with "Hey Jude" -- and so far as I'm concerned they could keep doing this for half of forever.
That coda is one of the great pop music achievements of the 1990s. "Going Steady with the Limes" has a permanent spot in my favorite ten songs of the 1990s -- close to the top, usually -- and I've used it to end more mixes than any other song of the last twenty years.