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FROM HERE TO FRATERNITY

American Music Club interview
The Independent, July 2004

“WE’RE re-launching a minor, but well-loved brand,” decides Mark Eitzel. “We’re like. . . Fresca.”
  American Music Club were always one of those bands, like The Go-Betweens or The Replacements, whose fans were moved to crusading fervour. When the San Francisco-based group split in 1995, there were two levels of sadness. One, that this marvellous band had broken up. Two, that almost nobody cared. American Music Club made seven albums. These records were at least astonishing, and were at best raging classics that equalled Leonard Cohen for wit and poetry and The Band for musical invention. Not one of them was anything like a hit. Whatever motivations may be underpinning American Music Club’s decision, nearly 10 years on, to make a new album, and go on tour, it’s safe to surmise that none of the band are thinking of this as a cash-in.
  “I’m not totally broke,” insists Eitzel, cheerfully. “But I can’t go out and buy all the shoes I want to buy. And I do need new shoes.”
  We contemplate his tattered orange sneakers; he really does need new ones.
  “I don’t have a tour manager,” he continues, “or a bus waiting outside the venue, or a hotel. In London, I stay with friends in Wood Green. I get the N29 home after the show.”
  Eitzel is a modest man, but he knows enough about songwriting to know that there are dozens, hundreds, of lesser talents whose hackery has paid for all of the above, and more, and many, many pairs of shoes. As we sit outside a Soho cafe and stir our coffees, I wonder if, on the night bus home, he ever becomes bitter.
  “Bitter?” he hoots. “It drives me crazy. But I blame myself. I blew a lot of opportunities.”
  He regards his shoes, again.
  “I can be bitter, sure. Buy me a few drinks. I’ll be really angry when I’m languishing in my retirement home for the really very poor.”
  People loved those records, though. And they’ll love the new one, “Love Songs For Patriots”, which more than earns its place in AMC’s revered discography. That must be nice, I venture.
  “Well,” he smiles, “that and 50 cents will get you a cup of coffee, you know? But I love it. I’m doing a solo record now, too. I just can’t stop, for some reason. I’m inspired still. I know I’m too old, but I love it. I do.”

IN the nine years since AMC split, Eitzel has maintained a similar career trajectory, making a succession of solo albums which have been reviewed like cures for cancer, and which have sold like inflatable dartboards. Some of these albums have been broadly congruent with AMC’s sound, others have reflected Eitzel’s growing obsession with computers (“I’ve become a Pro-Tools geek,” he admits), and one has been fabulously eccentric – last year’s “The Ugly American”, which saw Eitzel re-recording nine old AMC and solo songs with Greek folk musicians. The American Music Club myth has continued to swell, however. In 2001 there was a tribute album, “Come On Beautiful”, on which eminences including Lambchop, Calexico, and Willard Grant Conspiracy queued to pay homage. AMC have been namechecked in interviews by Elvis Costello, PJ Harvey and Pearl Jam (the latter, during the early 90s height of grunge, took AMC on tour with them, in a well-meaning but ill-advised attempt to introduce Eitzel’s songs to a new audience). The reunion almost feels like it has been willed into occurence by AMC’s unusually determined fans. Eitzel himself seems enthusiastic about it, if somewhat bemused.
  “There had been little reunions here and there,” he recalls. “But it was always Vudi who was the most bitter about the breakup – there was one show where Vudi showed up and sat at the bar all night, and refused to get on stage. About two years ago I went to Los Angeles and spent a couple of weeks with Vudi, waiting for my chance to say, ‘Do you want to try this again?’ Two years after that, Tim, the drummer, called out of the blue from San Francisco and said he had a studio, and we could work for free. We tried something, and it was amazing. The best fun I’d had in ten years.”
  Over the three weeks following my meeting with Eitzel in London, I catch up with the rest of AMC by phone. Their accounts of the years since the split are as wildly varied as their personalities. Vudi, the enigmatic guitarist who has long disdained the prosaic encumbrance of a surname, lives in Los Angeles, where he drives a city bus for money and plays music (“Sort of hillbilly goth”) for love. Tim Mooney has been a recording engineer and jobbing drummer. Bassplayer Dan Pearson got married, moved to Montana, formed a country band called Clodhopper, got divorced, returned to California, and worked as an electrician and house-painter, eventually building his own sun and wind-powered home. Marc Capelle, the multi-instrumentalist who has worked with all AMC’s members without ever before formally joining, has a CV which also includes stints with gospel groups and funeral bands.
  “I knew Danny and Tim and Mark were doing something,” says Vudi. “They would call me and tell me they were doing something, but I was 400 miles away, and not really interested. They’d send me material, though, and the first song they sent, I just thought, ‘This is the best thing Mark has ever written’. It turned out Danny had written it, though, so you’ll probably never hear it.”
  That fortuitous misunderstanding did the trick. All five men report that the sessions which yielded “Love Songs For Patriots” were a breeze, despite Eitzel’s habit of frantically rewriting everything up to the last possible second (“If Mark could continually write the songs while he was singing them,” says Capelle, “he would do that”). The album’s title, like American Music Club’s name, is intended to convey a certain undertow of sarcasm. A couple of songs on “Love Songs For Patriots” boil with political anger; another, a spectacular Dylanesque invective called “Team USA”, was recorded but dropped. Eitzel explains that he thought that might have been overdoing it.
  “I am furious,” he says, “but it’s boring how furious I am. A friend of mine was putting some songs on a TV show recently, and she asked if I could write something about home, and about warm feelings for home. But I picked up this book of photographs from Iraq, from before the war, and found I couldn’t write like that about a country which is destroying another country for no reason at all.”
  Eitzel catches himself mid-rant. In conversation as on stage, he has a tendency to get carried away, become abruptly seized with self-consciousness, and then apologise profusely. I mention this, and he apologises for apologising, as well.
  “There is,” he sighs, “a side of me that I don’t like to admit to, which is that I’m actually kind of insane. I do melt down, I do get really tripped out by things. It’s not comfortable realising that, that you have a big flaw that means you marginalise yourself a lot. I do spend far too much time telling people how stupid I am so they’ll walk away from me. Aw, this is terrible, don’t print all this. . .”
  I wonder if one of the reasons Eitzel is enjoying working behind a collective name again is that it might deflect some of the attention of the armchair psychologists that have tended to plague him.
  “Absolutely. If I ever do another interview where the interviewer asks about psychological problems that I may or may not be having, I’ll go nuts.”
  Not the happiest choice of phrases, in the circumstances.
  “It’s just not welcome. Though I know I kind of ask for it. But I decided a long time ago that I didn’t want my songs to be self-fulfilling prophecies. I didn’t want them to be predictors of a horrible future for myself. So I started writing songs which were predictors of better times ahead. God, this sounds really stupid.”
  One of the best songs on “Love Songs For Patriots” – indeed, one of the best songs Eitzel has ever written – is called “Another Morning”. The choruses reflect on what won’t buy the subject any more time with a woman called Kathleen. I know, and I’m sure Eitzel knows I know, that his friend Kathleen Burns, who had inspired several previous songs, killed herself a few years ago. It may well be a gross dereliction, but given that Eitzel can occasionally look on the verge of tearing up when talking about a song idea that didn’t quite work out like he’d hoped, I can’t bring myself to ask. I also can’t imagine what he could say about it that he hasn’t sung.
 
ALL of American Music Club say that they’d like this reunion to be a long-term thing, with more records and tours, as long as enough money can be found to sustain them. They’ve been commercially disregarded for too long to believe that they’re going to have any hits, but a world which refused to allow American Music Club a living wage could not blame any supreme being who decided to flood the wretched place and start over. When I asked Vudi what it was like, driving his bus to South Central and East Los Angeles, he said “It’s like a Luis Bunuel movie, full of grace, love and derangement.” As a description of a day’s work, this is better than average. It’s also pretty difficult to top as a capsule review of the extraordinary band he plays guitar in.

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