Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds have continued to reimagine rock music and the blues in their own image. This post is the second part of the Rock And Roll Suicide chapter in my book Darker With The Dawn – read Rock And Roll Suicide – Part I.
Finding a new beginning in a new country, Nick Cave’s 1992 song “When I First Came Town” would draw upon his time living in the city of São Paulo: “When I first came to Brazil I was treated as something like a hero. And having lived there for a while the tables turned, particularly in the press.” This is expressed through the musical spirit of Ennio Morricone, with gently soaring strings in the outro of the song. Elsewhere they rise and fall across Henry’s Dream, as the album continues to reveal itself like pages turned across a great novel. Each twisted tale becomes entwined in a lovelorn story of struggle and defeat, subverting the tradition of finding glory out West just as it pays tribute to it: all the brutality of Sam Peckinpah going hand in hand with the romanticism of Sergio Leone.
Cave’s close collaborator, the director John Hillcoat, would find Australia’s relationship to the landscape more complex than it might first appear, tinged with a knowing and wary respect for an earth culture that can never be truly understood, only negotiated with. Hillcoat was keen to point to the origination of the Australian bushranger, arriving well before the cult figures of the American Western movie genre: “The bushrangers were outlaws who went into all the remote areas: outback Australia was a final frontier full of people trying to escape their past, very extreme and harsh and brutal.”
READ MORE – Darker With The Dawn: Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death
The clashes occurred between the outlaw Irish-convict generation, British colonizers, and the indigenous population of Australia who bore a unique relationship to the land, all caught in a triangulated conflict. Warren Ellis would admit that natural spaces would be a major factor in his soundtrack work with Cave, exploring the tensions of people created within those environments. His and Cave’s experimentation in making music would “live and die” in the moment. Sometimes working without footage or the script to hand, they would find a mood that would neatly slot into the final edit. “Gun Thing” from The Proposition soundtrack gives a vision of morning sun and endless riding, searching through the Western genre’s cycles of revenge and redemption, but as in so many of Cave’s songs, there are no real heroes, merely survivors with longer stories to tell. Compared to the innate chauvinism of America’s expansionism and tapping into natural resources of gold and oil, land was a route to riches and a kind of mad freedom. In Australia it was an excuse for moral self-emptying, free from the demands of embedded European cultural history.
As in Walkabout, the untamed emptiness of the glowing sun-scorched dust shows the land in burning technicolor, expresses space and isolation within it, captive to an oppressive heat. This became the moveable canvas to portray spiritual desolation of the colonial trying to make sense of a place where he does not belong and has failed to understand.
The moral centre of The Proposition is found in the character of Captain Stanley, played by Ray Winstone, a faltering, listless man mired in a contradiction between duty and goodness. He sees Australia as another wilderness to be conquered and tamed, his first impression is one of shock where Cave borrows from Dorothy Parker’s razor-sharp quip: “what fresh hell is this?” Stanley stands for an embittered and disillusioned colonialism, not so much rejecting imperialism, but admitting the defeat of fantasy to reality. A whole continent is reduced to “this Godforsaken hole.” He repeats his mantra of quiet resolve to himself: “I will civilise this place.” Interchanging “land” for “place” his little lie manifests as the overbearing metaphor of a deeper chauvinism, pushing against the grain of nature in an attempt to “tame” the native population, projecting monosyllabic civilised values, onto an alien society, seen as having no culture or identity of its own.
Within this tense atmosphere, Stanley lives alongside his wife in the quiet desperation of his squared-off, picket fenced ideal of home. He tries to build the dream of the traditional green English garden, including fake snow to replicate Christmas “back home” compared to the pressed swelter and smothering infinite of the outback. There is the interesting note of the aboriginal servant who tends the family home and takes off his shoes when he leaves the house at the end of his shift, back to the earth.
ANOTHER NEW WORLD
The 1971 film, Wake in Fright tells the story of John Grant, a Sydney city boy who ends up stranded in the wayward outback community of Bundanyabba or “The Yabba.” Alienated from his own country he is the new colonial crash-landed into the still wild places. Described as a “peculiarly Australian kind of hell,” Wake in Fright makes landscape its key character in the raw, red earth of the largely desert continent, suffused with fierce heat and isolation. Ryan Anderson notes how the disorientation of environment, heat, and emptiness, like Kurtz going farther down the river, could turn a person against their true nature.
Cave would describe it as “the best and most terrifying Australian movie in existence”; its influence is profound in how he transmuted aspects of the Australian cliches into the America of his early songs. With his novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, Cave would admit to a profound ignorance of the native flora and fauna of America, admitting that his own Deep South would be shaped by his rough and ready childhood in rural Australia. Cave explained to Mark Mordue that, like “Red Right Hand,” the book’s true spiritual home was in the town of Wangaratta; exploring the formless desperation and tight-knit solidarity of a small farming community.
In 2020, Cave listed Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian (or The Evening Redness in the West) as one of his favourite books. A modern lyrical Western set in the mid-nineteenth century, it sets the stage for Cave’s understanding of a unique and rare time where a civilization was trying to birth itself from a state of near-lawlessness; becoming the wider wastes of America as a living hell. The book’s subtitle uses the creeping horizon to mark the dim blood tide’s rising as a watermark of carnage and mayhem, wreaked all across the frontier land of America, as if the age of unnatural destruction was seeping upward into the skyline, as the earth sank into hell, held captive between the birth and death of the sun.
From the mid-1970s McCarthy put years of research into the book, basing himself in El Paso, Texas, he visited archives, followed traditional trails, and learnt Spanish. In the novel, he trails broken lives diffused into placeless maps to discover the psychopathology of landscape in a nation with no hard lines to its borders, menaced by roving packs of men: Rough Riders, scalp hunters, the Mexican army, Native American tribes, and free-range militias, moving as wave upon wave of “drunken djinn”, crisscrossing vague territories scarred by endless conflict, all held under the sun’s red shadow.
The book’s protagonist “the Kid” is a young man who witnesses and participates in these bloody horrors, standing in the thrall of ‘Judge’ Holden—a huge, hairless albino of cold-blooded calm, relentless violence, and ruthless intellect, who later becomes the Kid’s nemesis. Fighting alongside one another, the Kid learns much from this epic figure who, like a god, always seems to evade death even as it follows in his wake. Naturally, the relationship ends in acrimony as Holden consumes and destroys his followers and anyone who gets in his way. Fated to travel alongside one another the Judge is both the Kid’s keeper and his destroyer; such that the Kid’s life was never his own.
Modocs Scalping and Torturing Prisoners, a wood engraving published in Harper’s Weekly, May 3, 1873.
WE ARE THE DEAD
The Nick Cave podcast, Today’s Lesson, suggests this same submissive-dominant dynamic is explored on Cave’s “Up Jumped the Devil” where the accused man is hounded by malevolent forces. The song’s protagonist, a perpetual ne’er-do-well, is taunted by his own inferiority, such that the Devil keeps him close—always there to trip him up and remind him of his lowly station. Where Satan was bound to hell with chains, the devil leads man astray by temptation and subterfuge, such that some are born forever under his shadow.
Like Blood Meridian’s “The Kid”, Cave’s born loser is a doubly unlucky bastard: his unmarried mother dies alone after giving birth to him. He sees a row of hanging bodies and experiences the horrifying vision of being in their place; the echoes of gallows tree shaken by the devil foreshadows the end of his short life. Such scenarios cast their shadow across McCarthy and Cave’s work. Where McCarthy makes a gradual turn toward neo-Westerns, where the emergent future is always revealing of a slow decline of the old ways, Cave’s outlandish visions of the American West would feed on more surreal material.
When filming Ghosts of the Civil Dead, director and future collaborator John Hillcoat passed on to Cave a copy of Michael Ondaatje’s 1977 book The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (Left-Handed Poems). A hybrid Western well ahead of its time, the book blends prose-poetry, newspaper clippings, archive interviews, and photographs into a blurred portrait of the legendary outlaw. We get impressionistic flashes of a real-life figure overexposed into hyper-legend by film, folk song, and tall tales. We also see glimpses of the polite and precocious teenager who was as beloved as he was notorious, who despite his many close escapes, was dead by the age of twenty-one, claiming to have killed twenty-one people himself “one for every year of my life.” The real number is thought to have been closer to nine, including men, women, and children.
In Ondaatje’s vision, reality is always slightly bent out of shape. As in Blood Meridian, Billy the Kid’s destroyer, Pat Garrett, was at first a close friend. Garrett, noted as having a mean disposition but also being remarkably handsome, despite a crooked smile and crooked face, is the very inverse of Billy, the sweet-natured, cool-blooded, boyish murderer, As with so many of Cave’s songs the opposing characters each suffer from a disproportion of the bad mixed in with the good, and through this strange new creatures are made.
An accidental meeting in Iceland revealed mutual appreciation between Cave and Ondaatje, the author said he particularly enjoyed the Cave-scripted movie The Proposition (2005), itself an extension of the Western revenge genre transposed into the Australian outback. Billy the Kid is less about action than meditative and brooding psychology of men set against one another in empty deserted reaches of scrubland plains, taking on psychic proportions of each man meeting his own nemesis.
Ondaatje’s book contains some horrific visceral imagery of bullet wounds and high-sun fevers. after he is captured and tied to a horse for a six-day march in the blazing desert heat Billy leaves his own body to see his dick grow hyper erect and drive through his skull. Such examples of psychosexual fantasy; brutal and vivid as to bear the weight of fact, must have fired the young Cave’s imagination and inspired many of his own Western-style characters that brought the weird and the eerie of the West home to the limits of madness, his own subgenre of wild gothic.
Similar scenes of extreme violence play out in Cave’s songs across the mid-1990s. This is often the outlaw murderer killing everyone in his path of “Stagger Lee” and the gentle love song guarding against the harshness of the landscape in “Loom of the Land.” These themes would reach forward to the restrained and meditative film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, directed by future Cave collaborator, Andrew Dominik in 2007, with a soundtrack crafted by Cave and Warren Ellis. This film goes the other way from more overt Westerns; using the intimate threat of violence over explicit scenes, action happens in parentheses, off-screen to meet the brooding of Jesse James living beyond his overbearing legend set against the ticking clock of his would-be assassin who he knowingly brings closer to him, adding a layer of inevitability that hints at an allegory of Jesus and Judas.
FRONTIERS WITHOUT END
The promise of the West in the early years of America was its waking dream for a new heaven on earth (that can never be fully realized) established by the new imperialist vision of Manifest Destiny. The wilderness of the country and its native populations demanded the rugged individualism of the outlaw as an agent of necessary chaos to tame and overcome the of the country; working within and beyond the confines of the law and all proportional forms of moral sense. These were men who could get done what needed to be done, no matter the human cost. This figure is embodied in slave bounty hunter character Arnold Ridgeway from Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad, who in his mantra of “the American Imperative” preaches the noble mission “to conquer, build and civilize” while at the same time absorbing the mandate to “lift up, subjugate, exterminate and eliminate” the “lesser races.” Allowing slaves to break away from their masters and erode white control was to admit a flaw in this belief.
This would culminate in the pursuit of a “divine prescription” to overcome the Western territory of the North American continent, involving seizure of Native American lands and the breaking up of the northern half of Mexico to become California, spurred-on as a God-given right to make the nation one whole and for each to take his own share.
The novel Blood Meridian ends with a brief epilogue of men making holes in the ground with a posthole digger ready to build a barbed wire fence across the land. The author and English Literature professor, Aaron Gwyn finds a deeper meaning where this passage predicts the rise of a new Prometheus that will overtake even Judge Holden, who in his Godlike extremes admits to a world created in no image but his own, and where none shall rise above him. Gwyn remarks that with the invention of barbed wire five years before the ending of the novel in 1878 it marks the death of the Wild West as it was known, with cattle fenced-in, the roaming rangers and cowboys no longer needed.
Mexico is defeated and reshaped into California while native Americans are forced onto reservations—the new man is born in the figure of the oil baron, carving up land and swallowing up oil from it, sparking up the dark satire of There Will Be Blood, the new outlaw was the rogue businessman turned oligarch. Gwyn calls it “a kind of technological Entropy at work. Heat Death. An American tragedy, if you ask me.” The antiheroes are absorbed into the new carved-up landscape to become misfits suddenly belonging to a different age.
PLASTIC PASSION
For Cave the great promise of America was really a sour dream; he loved the idea of it, but balked at the reality. Despite playing many early gigs there, he found he hated New York, a city where so many other rock stars would find a new life of urban escapism. Cave did not need to be reborn under the aegis of the American metropolis, the city was merely creative fuel to chew on, burn up, and spit out again. Cave clashed head-to-head with the long-term fallout of the imperialist, consumerist, and self-consuming tradition of America’s rampant capitalism. He would throw a kind of frantic bathos onto the tyre fire in the scathing critique of “Jangling Jack,” Americana exposed in its worst light of plastic fantasy. The Bad Seeds pushed at the limitations of rock and roll banality with the “doot’n-doo-doot’n-dooo” chorus but also pay further homage with the song’s undeniably catchy rhythm.
“Saint Huck” also mocks the “civilization” of the big city with its tainted cash, randy cars, and two-dollar fucks; everything electric and eroticized, slick and shiny—it is all fleeting distraction, reflecting Cave’s growing recalcitrant disposition toward the brave new nation. The Cadillac, an American symbol of freedom and prosperity, shunts its way into “Up Jumped the Devil.” To the childhood of anglophone singers like Cave and David Bowie, their imagined America was coined in the image of key icons such as the big, powerful expensive car, becoming America’s icon of self-image. On Cave’s holy bluesman tribute “Blind Lemon Jefferson” he rejects the car as a symbol of wealth finding value beyond life in music. The charming stranger of “Red Right Hand” promises a car and money to whoever might want it, though doesn’t ever mention the true cost of this transaction. Elsewhere, dirt-poor Euchrid Eucrow is born in the back of a Chevrolet; the immobile family seat that remains stuck and stationary in the Euchrow’s front yard. The car, the vehicle of the future meant to fly and bring us to the moon with its tail fins and chrome, is a grounded vessel, a monument to the ruin of impossible ambition. Contrasted with the claustrophobic fever dream of the South, the widescreen West lent itself to a different kind of hyperbole, an explosion of scale.
The rampaging road trip on the DIG!!!LAZARUSDIG!!! album swaps New York for Los Angeles and San Francisco; the cities become interchangeable aspects of the escapist dream, shuffling the hollow sunshine the city of angels wears its toxic halo, eclipsed by the glare of the sun, stars are mad pale eyes looking on, celestial lights are exiled from the city limits. “Albert Goes West” adopts the venturing spirit of the cowboy to stride out into the land in search of his own myth but becomes another cliché; after crossing “vast indifferent deserts” he overdoses on psychotropic drugs on a dude ranch, immersing himself in the real West gone off-piste tourism. Henry returns to the city a lovesick shadow of himself; while bland Bobby steps into an average faceless dive bar and fades away in its shadowy corners, forgotten with the furniture.
These are fragments of wasted energies thrown into the pursuit of a receding satisfaction: passion, desire, addiction, or even love; their short-term actions wear them out fast, and the dream state remains just that. Where Cave used America to explore freedom and its limitations, it was only to discover the reflection of rock and roll’s rebel power of emotional extremes and wild narratives to alter and remake reality. Cave said, “The songs that I like are the ones that you can’t visualise, that are just cries from the heart—those very straight, direct songs that make rock & roll music so wonderful.” The philosopher Michel de Montaigne said, “To philosophise is to learn how to die”; perhaps by contrast rock music is learning to live naturally and to feel to the fullest extent of our being—existing in spite of death in fleet minutes and pure moments that we can revisit in the songs we know and love.
Cave’s music has long banged its head bloody against the destruction of body and soul, and more recently evolved, where to accommodate loss is to face up to our own mortality. For many years Cave’s music was typecast as being morbid and gloomy, it has since become doubly life-affirming, without veering off into pure sentimentality. While at the same time, Cave remains a keeper of the rock and roll spirit, not only its more limited expressions of music as volume and sonic aggression to force a reaction, but also in his willingness to explore the limits of creative emotional expression.
BORN TO DIE
In the earliest part of his career Cave personified the primal force of youth as doomed deity; fated to age and become truly adult, writhing against its own condition. The power and poise of The Bad Seeds’ songs is sustained by an innate swagger and use of restrained attack, an attitude absorbed into their last-gang-in-town approach. Certainly the early days of the band as musical outlaws working beyond genre limitations, setting them and their music against conventional ideas of morality and good taste. Cave would still praise this outsider element of the artist, particularly within rock and roll and its natural rebelliousness his Cave’s most extreme lyrics adding an extra streak of deviance. So The Bad Seeds remained bound to the electric tension cast between overturning heritage and driving forward towards an independent musical direction. With his most recent albums from 2013’s Push The Sky Away, Cave has shown how there is sometimes greater power and depth of expression in looking into the abyss of pain and deep, wounded love, than there is in simply dancing around the edge of it. In this regard albums such as Skeleton Tree can seem far more frightening and challenging to listen to, not because of inevitable autobiographical traits but because they confront us with a sincere form of beauty in what most terrifies us.
Cave would acknowledge the power and mystery by which music seems to appear before the artist has time to imagine it, with one note played alone generating only “idiot noise”, the switch is flicked when another note played next to it brings about new emotional resonance, with the potential to: “turn into something that could change your life.” Cave said of music, “It got through to me, the only thing to get through to me of all the things that were happening when I was 15. Rock and roll then was real, everything else was unreal.” Speaking about the 2020 Carnage album, Cave observed, “Allowing our music to do its thing, advancing us toward our better selves. At least, it seemed that way. Music can do that. Make you better.”
Even at its most scabrous and wild, music can prove uplifting and regenerative, connecting us to the deeper, more vital part of our natures. Cave acknowledges a creative spirit, unique to each person, “a good and essential force.” Allowing it to guide and take shape helps steer us toward our artistic passions as we apply ourselves: “The more dedication you show to the process, the better the work, and the greater your gift to the world.” Cave would continue to acknowledge Warren Ellis’ contributions as a songwriting partner, noting his “uncynical, unironic view of music” bearing a naturalist approach that frees-up Cave to work more flexibly and openly than he had done so before.
Cave notes that for lots of people rock music seems to fill a “godshaped hole,” a vacuum formed by yearning for something transcendent, what he calls a sacred space—as much as it offers escapism—Cave argues that music can shape our lives. On “Push the Sky Away” Cave at first brushes off this notion, “it’s just rock and roll”, but for all its knowing artifice it carries an authentic force of feeling that cannot be contained, invoking salvation in music: “it gets you right down to your soul.” Giving a voice to the brilliant and terrible sensations of human life, it becomes a medium toward something higher than ourselves, where for every listener rock and roll creates a new reality.
READ MORE – Darker With The Dawn: Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death
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