Princeton's Anglo-Irish-American rock band Rackett is finally available on record, five songs or 17 minutes of music that will be a revelation to anyone who may only have heard this group in the sometimes acoustically challenged arena of live performance. The recording was accomplished at Scamaphone Studios right here in Princeton and the CD, Don't Try This At Home, is on sale at the Princeton Record Exchange for $8.
As you may know by now, Rackett features lyrics by Paul Muldoon, who has been called "dazzling, elusive," "persistently inventive," "the poet's poet of his generation," and "the most significant English language poet since the Second World War." When you think of all the acclaimed poets who have surfaced since the advent of rock and roll, it seems all the more remarkable that Muldoon is the only one (as far as I know) who has taken the plunge by investing his sense of the music with his sense of poetic form, rhyme, and rhythm. I can imagine one other poet bringing it off, if he could have been born again in East London in, say, 1950, with all his gifts intact. There's no doubt that he's one of the spiritual forces behind Rackett, whose music is published by Fled Is That Music, a phrase English majors and poetry lovers will recognize as the closing line of John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale": "Fled is that music/Do I wake or sleep?"
Keats Goes Electric
If Bob Dylan could do it, why not John Keats?
Okay, he's just turned 22, he's got a satchel full of great lyrics, and a tenor voice that would make the angels weep. Let's bring his contemporaries along for the ride. Suppose his Cockney pal, the charming entrepreneur Leigh Hunt, is forming a band and he's already contacted a poet named Percy Bysshe Shelley who has some killer lyrics of his own and a stage presence that blends so beautifully with Keats's that when they're at the mike singing harmony face to face everyone's thinking John and Percy could be John and Paul. Sure, they have to rein Shelley in now and again, he can get histrionic, but Keats balances him out, as Paul did John. You need a female voice for some to-die-for three-part harmonies, so Mary Shelley fills in when she isn't shaking a tambourine or singing back-up on "Ode to Autumn" and lead on "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." Hunt pulls off a stroke of genius by plugging in Lord Byron on lead guitar (bare-chested, shaggy locks flying, Don Juan on his knees teasing hysterical arpeggios that have the groupies screaming for more), and signing up Thomas DeQuincey on celeste, for the dreamy interludes between the heaves of storm. Hunt's a great networker, and a decent drummer, and he's got them a gig in Edinburgh. The house is packed with critics from Blackwoods and the Edinburgh Review, along with their nasty, hissing claque, there to jeer Junkets and his band of Cockney upstarts and London layabouts. The rub is these sneerers have never heard electric music before. When the curtain rises on four fearsome black towers of Stax amps, and the lights hit the band — Shelley and Keats in silver lamé jumpsuits, Mary barefoot in a white gown, Byron dripping wet, fresh from a swim in the Firth of Forth, DeQuincey, his hair on fire in an opium swoon — jaws drop all around, and when they kick into a heavy metal version of Shelley's "West Wind" ("I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed!"), it leaves those dyspeptic naysayers clinging to their seats in the electric gale. But the show stopper is when Keats steps forth and does his power of love rap from Endymion, snapping his fingers on the downbeat or maybe just a breath behind it: "who of men can tell" if "flowers would bloom" and "the earth would have its dower of river, wood, and vale, the meadows runnels, runnels pebble-stones, the seed its harvest, or the lute its tones, tones ravishment, or ravishment its sweet, if human souls did never kiss and greet?" Dim the lights. The day is won.
Was it a vision or a waking dream?
Well, the music didn't flee, it's finally here on Don't Try This At Home, and while Keats may be right that if "Heard melodies are sweet/Unheard melodies are sweeter," anyone who thinks they have heard, really heard, Rackett in person will discover what they only caught a fraction of at the Berlind and Richardson concerts. To appreciate this band you've got to hear the lyrics and music and the vocals all in the right balance, in a superior recording, and while Scamaphone may not be Abbey Road, the sound quality on the new CD is excellent.
Nigel and Paul
The novelty of a Renaissance scholar and a prize-winning poet just named chair of Princeton University's new Creative and Performing Arts Center fronting a rock band is really not the issue any more. They've proven their point. The 3-Car Garage Band label is catchy but it doesn't do justice to the new record. Being from England and Ireland, respectively, Nigel Smith and Paul Muldoon grew up where the notion of a garage with a band in it was not really part of the landscape since the backyards or back gardens of the Old Country seldom had room for even a one-car garage. Rackett rocks plenty, as they proved at Richardson recently, and both Lee Matthew and Paul Grimstad can play seriously filthy guitar, but the essence of the sound on the CD is not garage-raw-and-crude. In spite of references to Metuchen, Metro Park, the Jersey Shore, and the Red Sox and the Yankees, the songs have an Anglo-Irish kick full of easy-flowing allusions to the old sod, ancient Egypt, Goths and Vandals, the catacombs of Rome, and the London Underground.
Paul and Nigel met at Oxford, neither of them new to rock, Paul having written poems (in "Sleeve Notes") riffing on everyone from the Beatles to R.E.M., Nigel having grown up in London playing prog and fusion after starting out with the London Boys Singers who recorded at Olympic Studios, like the Stones and the Yardbirds. It was not until Nigel came to Princeton for good, however, that the two discovered their mutual love of rock and blues. Paul proposed starting a band when Nigel returned from teaching summer school in Santa Fe while filling in on bass with a local Hispanic/Native American group and showed him a picture of the band on stage. Paul sent Nigel a lyric ("Meat and Drink") and asked him to set it to music and they were off. Nigel says the band is "a completion of something in ourselves," speaking of "how rare it is to find a great lyricist (it feels like I've spent 30 years looking for one)."
The Songs
The words and music of the first three songs in Don't Try This At Home are the strongest, for me, because the music is so good and played so well that it could carry even a lesser lyric. Of the five songs, "Pencil" goes through the most elaborate set of changes, living and breathing on Nigel's bass-line, with keyboardist Steven Allen chiming in at intervals as Paul Grimstad, who wrote the music, sings lines loopy and unlikely enough to turn heads even among listeners with an ear for the wild-west free-for-all of rock lyrics that began with Chuck Berry and Little Richard by way of Slim Gailliard, Louis Jordan, Fats Waller, and the poets of rhythm and blues. Of course without the right music you might not get away with rhyming "long travail" with "dunghill of a whale." For all the wit at play in "Pencil," what makes the song is the charm of the chorus, where the charcoal stick of the "neoliths" becomes a pencil in the hair of the girl who "just wrote me off." It all comes down to the old tried and true "my girl ditched me" trope being played out on the dunghill of history.
My current favorite Rackett song, however, is the one bonafide ballad (another in the "my girl ditched me" genre), "Enough of Me," which is sung by Lee Matthew as if he'd lived it and written it himself; it has that special singer/songwriter intimacy. But then, again, there's an adventure in the lyric. As with almost any of Muldoon's runs, it manages to move all over the map without ever losing touch with or being compromised by the lamentful mood of Smith's music. How many lovelorn ballads could manage to thrive on combinations like "the team and teamsters" and "the seam and the seamstress," or "the monk and his maker" and "the beach" and "the breaker?" And how many could take you from the Jersey Shore to Antony and Cleopatra without so much as a bump in the road?
"Old Flames," with music by Nigel, is like the old flame of rock itself, swinging London seen through a glass brightly, looking back to Herne Bay and Hampton Court, and then down into the London Underground and the ever problematic Northern Line "with all its ghost stations/and their ghostly station names" from Angel to Chalk Farm, names that make you think of songs from the period like the Stones' "Play With Fire" with its references to St. John's Wood, Stepney, and Knightsbridge. Still, even as it evokes the best of the British invasion, it has an American country western flavor, thanks in part to the way Lee Matthew sings it.
The other two songs, "Dont Try This At Home" and "Sideman" contain more Muldoonish adventures who else is going to tell you "Just don't reach into the lion's mouth/and run the risk of going south" and in the same chorus rhyme "Pantheon-dome" with "honeycomb"? "Sideman" may be the most immediately accessible song and lyric — it's the first Rackett song I heard — and if it doesn't hold up quite as well as the others, that's probably only because some of the lyric novelty wears thin after more than a few hearings.
Besides Muldoon and Smith, who look like siblings, as do Grimstad and Matthew, for that matter, Don't Try This At Home features Stephen Allen on keyboards and vocals and Jim Linnehan on drums. Check it out at the Princeton Record Exchange, which appears in a Rackett lyric, though not on this album.