From his earliest days with The Birthday Party, Nick Cave has turned traditional blues music on its head to realise an alternative sound that goes beyond genre and into a strange new world of death, discord and deliverance.
On the cover for the single release of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds 1984 song “Tupelo” we see the singer staring off into the middle distance, a resonator acoustic guitar across his lap and a pair of black stars floating above him—embodying the mythic dream of American rock and roll.
For Cave, rock music was the beginning and the ending of his childhood musical inspirations. But among the holy trinity of gospel, blues, and emergent punk rock, it was the true king of popular music, Elvis Presley, who stood tall. Within his own stage persona and brooding image Cave fulfilled some of this maligned promise of the outsider rebel, a reputation which preceded him in the growing legend of the bible-obsessed poet, victim, lover, loner and junkie—embroiled in a self-fulfilling romanticism of doom and decadence. Cave identified with similar iconoclasts such as Iggy Pop, Mark E. Smith, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Shane McGowan, and Johnny Cash who each followed their own crooked line; both praising and overturning musical traditions while making their lives a work of art in their conscious rebellion against societal norms, which for Cave would manifest as non-conformist spirituality.
READ MORE – Darker With The Dawn: Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death
It was a conflation of the revolutionary powers of Jesus and the fandom around Elvis that Cave found a new faith in rock and roll—the prism through which all his future music would be forged: shocking, emancipatory and life-changing. Along with Presley’s own messianic presence, Cave would go full tilt into heroic God-fearing gospel chant of “praise him” in “Get Ready for Love,” a punk-driven, glam rock stomp that offers both the promise and threat of holy power, as infinite as his love, the one demand God makes of us is belief and love, through Cave these are the expressions of religious devotion made various and universal.
While The Bad Seeds came together in the glorious splintering ebb that was post-punk, they remained a defiantly atypical 80s band. At once reaching forwards and back; they embraced vintage tones of twanging guitar strings, scything bottle slides and wild harmonica. Although the screed of “Tupelo” (1985) showed Cave invoking the spirit of the original blues, while also hammering the final nail into its coffin, as the success of white musicians and recognition of adapting the blues completely outstripped their influences. A case in point, the Bad Seeds “Tupelo” exists as both tribute and appropriation of John Lee Hooker’s original song, their track a ghost dance cycling around lost futures.
Though by 1986, The Bad Seeds were working far beyond the strictures of guitar-based music, with Blixa Bargeld’s anti-rock stance and often antagonistic approach to the guitar as instrument, their music ricocheted off at odd angles from the grounding of Cave’s piano chords. With each album they sought to reinvent the idea of a ‘Bad Seeds sound’, striding over Echo and The Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes, and Psychedelic Furs indie-psych end of the Eighties spectrum as it turned towards new wave pop.
Former Birthday Party guitarist, Rowland S. Howard argued that the major flaw of those bands was not to take sufficient artistic risks; being afraid to make a mistake or embarrass themselves and desperate to be liked. He complained that at live gigs the bands just went through the motions—as in their music—people who did everything expected of them in their entertainer-audience dynamic .Instead, Cave found his tribe in the acerbic rough edges of The Pop Group, Gang of Four, and The Fall, weird and wonderful tangents of indefinable music that sought to escape the cliches of their musical roots.
PAPER CROWN
Greil Marcus notes that after a string of bad movies and less time spent in the studio, by the mid-1960s Elvis had “disappeared into an oblivion of security and respectability,” a man lost from himself. Ground down by mass-produced hit-chasing with diminishing returns, the electrical force of the king had short-fused; he now wore his legend as cheap as the plastic glamour of rhinestone suit.
The original Second Coming of Elvis was his 1968 comeback show—a victory lap of his powers reasserted his larger than life presence, from which there could only be a long comedown, struggling to hold on to a relevance long since past. Greil Marcus sees the performance of a victory, but not the winning of it. Elvis cannot transcend himself therefore he must spiral downward. In the 1970s, where others saw a zombie king forced back into life, Cave saw the performances of Elvis as a heroic resistance become slow-burn crucifixion: “a deeply suffering individual going on stage and just doing it anyway. He was literally pressed up against eternity.”
Cave was watching the King’s numbed gyrations with double vision: seeing glimmers of the peak years and the lax-luxe glamour of the jaded and faded comedown, a broken lion chained to the classics of an endless Vegas rerun. There was a lesson here for Cave: American lives had no second acts, only more epic endings. To avoid falling into his own cliché, he had to evolve or die. As his own songs faded into classics, the love songs of “The Ship Song” “Into My Arms” he had to create new music or be crushed under the weight of nostalgia. Elvis cornered himself into becoming the Jesus of rock and roll music. His great fall seemed to cast an arc over the death of a more innocent and optimistic America—without hope the dream dies.
With suitable perversity, Cave’s solo career after the collapse of The Birthday Party began with a single release of Elvis’ “In the Ghetto”, the mawkish anthem drawn from Cave’s favourite era of the King’s career downswing, as if in homage to the damaged hero he wished to become. “In the Ghetto” has the same awkwardness of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” a glancing, drive-by observation masquerading as penetrating social concern. Having grown up in the poorer black neighbourhood of Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis’ “In The Ghetto” would hit on familiar territory of small town struggle for self-destiny; the need for a gun or a car as a means of control or escape.
Elvis’ upbringing also exposed him to more gospel music, and when his father was released from jail the family moved to a nascent housing project in Alabama. The phrase “ghetto” would come to describe the “wrong” side of town, ostracised, undermined and later persecuted, the social-engineering of housing projects left to decline would become a gentrified form of this. The song tells the story of a defeated would-be criminal reduced to poverty, prejudice, and alienation from society. Appearing late in the Elvis canon it’s hard to see “In the Ghetto” as anything but another ballad, albeit one with motions towards social conscience, that nonetheless falls flat collapsing into its prejudice. Cave found that his own tribute to the blues wrestled with an (unresolved) internal tension where the original black American music became absorbed and assimilated into white rock and roll via pastoral country music and hillbilly, with Elvis following soon after.
BIG PRINZ HIP PRIEST
Presley’s success as a first-generation rock and roller came from his ability to merge black music with a white face, or more accurately to bring the soul of the blues to white audiences and to break through to some black audiences that he was not just another hillbilly—he too could be strange, exciting, and scary. Where the blues players were physically and metaphorically restricted, the white rock and rollers were free and welcome to roam. Cave’s own journey was fragmented and iconoclastic, like Elvis, a self-contained ball of energy, there was a need to shape or sculpt himself into something else—he simply needed a stage. “Tupelo” in particular expressed Cave’s attempt at a hyperreal Deep South vernacular, and its clash of warring voices.
The Bad Seeds’ original Bassist Barry Adamson, born and raised of mixed-race parentage in the Moss Side area of Manchester, grew up among systemic racism. He would find aspects of Cave’s “Tupelo” disconcerting: “I felt quite challenged by the viewpoint of black people as demons.” Though he was keen to find a way to exist within Cave’s approach to a “fractured blues world,” Adamson was concerned with the appropriation of a black American vernacular seen through the prism of a white man’s privilege. Cave’s use of “a big black cloud come” perhaps too readily aping the vocal manner of Leadbelly: “Nick listened to blues a lot and all his obsessions seemed to reach a boiling point. And the further he got with his novel, the more closed he became.”
Cave biographer, Mark Mordue argued that Cave made the song his own: “John Lee Hooker in particular gave Cave an atmosphere to explore violence and loss and isolation, the unspoken thing to be on your own, Nick found that space in the blues.” Speaking in a 1994 interview almost ten years after The Firstborn Is Dead, Cave identified as a white middle-class Australian, using the mythology of that culture as the jumping-off point for a renewed Bad Seeds sound. Cave would admit that his open-ended adaptations of blues music sometimes “gnawed at my conscience.” Admitting that he never suggested he shared the same authority or experiences as the blues musicians or even Elvis, he also acknowledged that within the wider ecology of musical influence, the blues could never remain the sole preserve of black musicians from whom it originated.
Cave shared something of Presley’s country background, growing up in close proximity to the infinite landscape around Wangaratta, though in a different climate of racism. Elvis was first labeled the “Hillbilly Cat,” a white negro figure who was “hip” enough to appreciate the bigger picture of American musics. Many white listeners heard a black voice; splintering their understanding of racial loyalties down the middle, but Presley couldn’t entirely escape his impoverished background, and while he began as an everyman truck driver, he might easily have remained the white trash rube, destined to fall between the cracks of popular culture.
SOUTH BY (WILD) SOUTH-WEST
The creation of rock and roll that early Bad Seeds would cling to remains mired in the atmospheres of the Deep South, a torrid damp heat where blood is driven into sweat all suggesting a permanent sense of ruin and decline. It is from here that Cave began to explore the psychopathology of people through landscape, shifting from swamp and lakes and clashing with the more traditional biblical visions of mountains, prairies, and forest, a pure land of hope and plenty subsumed with doubt and temptation. It would be the lifeblood of the Mississippi Delta region, a site of great natural fecundity, that brought Cave towards a crossroads of salvation and ruin, where myth-making battled with the need to survive, evoking ecstatic loves and fraught endings.
In The Mind of the South W. J. Cash wrote, “Even the southern physical world was a kind of cosmic conspiracy against reality in favour of romance.” He depicts the summer sun of August coalescing in the breath of the southerner to become a thunderstorm explosion, “a violent outburst of emotion,” the human being in the natural world turned against itself. On “Tupelo” Cave brought this concept home: the spiritual mystique and the crushing realities of slavery and poverty becoming a fantastical place where the truth is stranger than fiction, this would become a revived gothic aura, cut across by the equally mythic Wild West.
Fittingly, Cave would mine the Australian outback, a burning land of searing heat and desert drought through to scenes of endless rain and flooding as the inverted mirror of an equally borderless landscape sustained by legend that blossomed into a passion for storytelling. For The Bad Seeds’ 1992 album Henry’s Dream Cave goes west, beyond the pale of the civilised world toward an emerging society where laws are bent or broken in the interest of survival and progress, where everyone makes their own way and bends morality to suit their needs. Henry’s Dream is shot through with warped visions from a speeding car blurred along a lost highway—a Gonzoid road movie seeing the cliches of the American West ahead of him foreshadowed by the echo of the Outback in the rearview mirror.
Speaking of his upbringing in the small rural towns of Warracknabeal and later Wangaratta, Cave said, “I wasn’t particularly interested in my own culture in Australia, which was quite normal for Australians at that time because, on some level, we didn’t have our own culture.” Cave-as-Henry rolls on through the songs as The Bad Seeds chant their way down a long road to nowhere. Within the album’s kaleidoscopic vision Cave finds a crisscrossing cast of settlers, preachers, cowboys, sheriffs, hustlers, and outlaws, all fighting for their slice of the American Dream that more often than not turns into a nightmare.
But it was the human friction sparked by an untamable environment that most attracted Cave as a songwriter where his tall tales span the vast and rich landscape from mountain, canyon and plain, where endless vistas outrun the eye. Denis Diderot would argue that poetry should be “barbaric vast & wild,” reflecting the lived fiction of the American West in Cave’s songs. Similar tensions would be reflected in the 1971 Australian film Walkabout, telling the story of two children who are stranded in the outback and are helped home by a young Australian aborigine. Along with the novel from which it was adapted, Walkabout became a seminal artefact in the fractured colonial history of Australia in its ongoing cultural clash and struggle with national identity, trying to come to terms with the racist government policies of the past, an ongoing social disunity it shares in common with the USA.
Cave alludes to Cormac McCarthy’s early novel Child of God (1968) which follows the depraved debaucheries of Lester Ballard, a sexually repressed outcast whose endless road is merely a pilgrimage of the lost. A recurring theme for both McCarthy and Cave is the metaphorical journey—to meet with the gallows, go deeper into the wild, leaving town for the final, last time—overpowering the distance travelled, becoming repetition walking toward some final destination, imagined or impossible, that is really no place at all, whether it be spiritual realisation, death, or somewhere to run to (not simply running away from). In Cave’s songs loners and outcasts bring narrative to the land’s emptiness, America’s dream becomes their own inverted fantasy, though they are often painted as the enemy of community by virtue of their extreme differences. “When I First Came Town” presents the drifter once welcomed by new friends who bought them drinks; now isolated and alone they find their bottle has run dry. Almost a rewrite of Karen Dalton’s version of the traditional song “Katie Cruel” it is the wandering disquiet behind her eyes that must decide her fate. Interviewed for the 2020 documentary, In My Own Time Cave speaks of Dalton as a “fellow traveller,” alluding to a familiar and shared melancholy.
READ – ROCK AND ROLL SAVIOUR – PART II
READ MORE – Darker With The Dawn: Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death
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