I Love Rock, But I'm Above Rock

In one of my first posts in Lost-In-Tyme, I posted "Songs Hurt Me", the first solo release of Marnie Weber. I had already some resource material (from magazines) but I decided to post my short review of the record, because I thought that an extensive feature on Marnie was beyond the purpose of Lost-In-Tyme. I found out that there are no reviews for this record, just mentions of its existence.
So now it's the time to do it. I've scanned the images, I translated a lengthy article, I even scanned and stiched the cover of the record, because there was no picture of it in the whole web (except the half scan I had posted in LiT and recently in Discogs a scan of some promo photograph which apparently was used for the cover ).
What follows is from a feature on Marnie Weber in the greek magazine "Sound & HiFi" (ΗΧΟΣ & Hi-Fi), July 1990 issue. It was written by Tasos Sakkas and it also contains parts (I assume) from an interview with Marnie. I hope that there was not much lost in translation.
It's summer of 1987 and the Party Boys were recording their 3rd album, titled 'Daddyland'. It was an ideal case of swan song. The end of a story that had started several years back, at the late 70s.Marnie Weber was the bassist of the band. At the same time she had based her whole life on it. She knew that someday this little dream would end, leaving her weak, in the middle of nowhere, but, back then, ten years ago, she wouldn't help but sink deep in this. Music was her life and, in fact she had only left with two choises after Party Boys split: to join another group or to continue as a solo artist.

Although Party Boys had released three albums, only in their last release they did use the studio as a vital factor in their music, and even then, at a low degree.
Marnie has no recording experience and she had rarely did vocals with the band. With no experience in singing and studio recording, there was very little that a bass player could do.
Being in a bad psychological condition, she managed to gather her strength and she started lessons on singing, recording techniques and sound effects in UCLA and, participating in actors classes, she gained self-confidence. This procedure lasted two years, but in the meantime she started her appearances opening for local groups."I was dressing as a young gheisha with a lot of make-up and I was performing all these stolen narrations on stage with playback. Or I was the old woman thinking of the life she had lived and I was becoming young, throwing my rubber mask and ending as a young starlet playing guitar...I had already bought an electric guitar along with cheap keyboards, where slowly I started to control the sounds. I became a strange one-person-band.
Contrary to what may people believe, in America there are no serious grants in art. The huge expenditure for defence in the 80s restrict the allowances in young artists with no advertising potential and usually we have the univercities paticipating in students' cheap projects. This creates a state of anxiety and a continuous struggle to survive, where it's very difficult to live from your art and if you want to be serious about art you have no time for a second occupation.
I was lucky because I had the support of groups as the Red Temple Spirits and Shiva Bourlesque who were asking me to open their shows. I did some shows with the musicians dressed as animals or mythical figures, singing birds and monster heads, until I realised that I could make strange surreal musicals with contemporary music, which were uncommon and amusing. I suppose that this way I overcome many problems, by being an art school graduate and a bass player with some potential. But I was still missing the companionship of Party Boys".
Click to read more...

Before the summer of 1988 Marnie goes to the studio and the result are the two minimal dreamy artifacts of the 'October Country' compilation (July 1988). 'Courtesan' is a slow drift reserving the erotic sense of the Party Boys and some of their prefered bass riffs, so slowed down that you think that this instrumental narration would dissolve. "Shanghai My Heart" uses the far-east abstraction, sonically and poeticaly, ending in a state of zen. Marnie sings in japanese!
"My parents bought me a green classical guitar, when we lived in Taiwan. My father is art historian, specialized in ancient chinese brass utensils. I had not friends to play with them, so I took lessons from a Chinese, speaking very little english. I started with an unusual perspective on music.
Later, when we came back to L.A., I played a little folk at the univercity. Everything was leading me to become an artist. I studied visual arts in UCLA and, about a year before I graduate, I found myself in Party Boys. This changed everything. I realised that I could not be happy making art alone in my room. I was drunk by the enthusiasm and the energy of the band. We were playing in crude hispanic bars every weekend in downtown Los Angeles, where truck drivers and locals mingle with the artists. It was a fascinating time, around 1980-81. I was very seriously into the group. I wanted to be my life. I knew that we would make it our life. I had....
Well the band split, but I'm trying to keep its spirit."

At the summer of '88, Marnie gets in the studio again, with Philip Drucker aka Jackson Del Rey (Savage Republic, 17 Pygmies), adds vocals to 'The Courtesan' and records seven more songs, under the title "Songs Hurt Me". Bruce Licher's Nate Starkan & Son was facing serious distribution and financial problems that time, while Drucker's Resistance records had already closed. Searching for label, the tape arrived to Greece, initially to find closed doors until its vinyl release on Penguin Records. Behind 'Songs Hurt Me' there's a little personal secret, wandering as a shadow over the tracks. Maybe Marnie didn't want it to be known.

I want you 

I need you

Where are you?

A secret is torment, without you

Songs hurt me

When I'm alone

Where are you?

I felt you

I heard you

I knelt there, beside you, together

Why did you sail away

without me?

My love song is sorrow

without you

Songs tear away

what is left of me

Songs bathe the remains of my soul"

(Songs Hurt Me)

"Songs Hurt Me" opens and closes the record. It's the best song I've listened to

 in the 80s and there's only one moment from the past that can be compared to - "I'll Be Your Mirror". Nico had to cry to be so convincing. When Marnie was recording this, it was as if she was "gaining" her emotional redemption .
"When I'm listening to music I feel I'm dissolving, reaching a primitive sensitivity, a kingdom of pure feeling. In this state the senses seem acuted.I matched this with the story of a loved one who was gone. I visualised the situation with a girl left in an island, waiting for the sailor she loved to return. She listens to the music they used to listen, their songs, but all it was left is her own song.That's why I sing the lyrics through a walkie-talkie from the other room. I wanted this distant sound. Songs bathe the remains of my soul, songs can cleanse your soul when you're bad."
The first you notice in Marnie's music is a simple, heavy bass line. It's an obsession from the past, a musical obsession.
She works as a cinema actor and director, refering to her performances, combining sound and image, motion and action. "I want to reach both into regions unknown. I like make things with a different way, even it's a job. Combining sound and image in a performance, I feel I drive each medium beyong its limits. I suppose it's a little game I play with myself, that ends by making the others happy or making them thing."In her performances and collages -with which is occupied professionaly- the recycling of the women's part is always present: the stripper as an old woman, the old woman as young starlet, the young starlet abandoned from love, becoming a stripper.
"I was always creating characters. When I was in the art school I used to make installations in old hotel rooms, I composed the character (almost always female), gave it a name, an occupation, a past. Then I was leaving the spectator free to move in the environment, like a burglar in someone's room. I was leaving the character's diary, with his inner thoughts, exposed. This deprival and exposion is what fascinates me. I like the thrill of the scene for this reason: the hermetic soul of someone who's on view. Exposion is, I think, the common denominator of art and music. But it has to be made correctly and with good aesthetics, or else it becomes self-satisfaction.
This way I'm able to express and reveal more of my secret thoughts and the role of women. Pretending to be someone else, I can be extreme. For example, playing the role of a prostitute, I can examine feelings of self-destruction, deeper and more interesting, because of the extreme position that the prostitute holds, rather than if I was singing about the blues or about how rotten I feel. It couldn't be believed because my life was not bad at all. People eagers to see strong human feelings that are expressed so rarely in real life.
Playing roles I can hide and reveal at the same time. It's also a way to ... wear costumes, something I like, as well as making them. I like very much the elaborate costumes and their changings. I've made a new character, "Rosie Love". She wears a red dress with voile, a black curly wig and a huge heart in her back, so big that looks like feathers. She's a rookie starlet performing a dumb night-club act. She's really innocent but she has some inner wisdom. She's also an unmarried mother, who tries to forget that she has a baby. She plans to be a big star. How do you enter in a state different from what you are and what does that means? I'm thinking much on her character and I'm practicing by often becoming her.
I was surely helped by the acting classes. This whole procedure is a liberation. Acting helps someone to feel free, so does to the audience: it's socialy admitable to be watched revealing myself, because this isn't really me. When they believe you, you are permited to reveal more truth."

In "I'm Above Rock" Sahara Sarah, has a random relation with the show business.

"She needed a job

they gave her a stage

the curtain parted, she sang the song:

I love rock but I'm above rock

I love rock but I'm above rock

your dreams are blind

you eyes are kind 

when your mind has magic

madness can be charming"

"I suppose I still appreciate rock'n'roll as a part of history, but now it could be used only as inspiration or a start. Music must be beyond rock'n'roll. Pop, in the other hand, is so vague term... I like it when it's unusual, when it takes risks at the studio, in structure or lyrics. I hate listening to music whose motive is financial, music badly produced, with no soul. It's against my beliefs. Don't get me wrong, musicians must be financialy rewarded but first they must be artists.
I wish music today to serve the same purpose as in the past. To rise the people spiritually, or to express basic human or animal impulses. Even the repetition of the radio hits has a ceremonial tint. When you've heard a tune so many times, even the moment you don't hear it, it becomes a familiar ceremony.
I believe that if someone looks at the history of art, from the side of its movements, he will come to conclusion that we are in a crisis. I just believe that the modern world has reached the end of "movements". Artists are working alone, as individuals. People like Chris Burden and Mike Keley reached the art where it had not reached before. It's just that financial surviving is hard now."
If it's true that someone cannot impersonate something that hasn't got inside him, then acting is an honest confession, just preserving its privacy. Yes, there's no real actor who does not impersonates himself. Marnie impersonates in "Songs Hurt Me" at least five different personas, not revealing them anywhere else, but only in the secret drawers of her conscience. But she's not just sincere in her confessions or true in her acting: she's shattering in her emotional nakedness. She will never convince me that she's not herself. Tasos Sakkas, July 1990

More about Marnie's (recent) activities can be found in her site. I should mention that her latest project is called Spirit Girls and is an all-girl group with Dani Tull (Polar Bear), Tamara Sussman (Bertha Mason and The Polio Kids), Tanya Haden (Silver Sun Pickups & the Haden Three) and Debbie Spinelli (Rad Waste, 17 Pygmies). Her second album (Woman With Bass) was posted by Mutand Sounds. There is a compilation of her songs (1987-2004) available from her site, as well  as her 1996 album "Cry For Happy", a generous Party Boys compilation and the Spirit Girls album.

Click to slide up