He’d later say that he wrote an album’s worth of material on the drive from Prosperity to Chicago, sitting behind the wheel of his Dodge van, staring into the middle distance. But at some point in their cohabitation, things went south Callahan drove north. Marshall, to hear her tell it, had given up music for good, despite having a string of sublime and unsettling records under her own belt. Callahan was fresh off the Jim O’Rourke-produced Red Apple Falls, an expansive breakthrough in his catalog. The two of them were shacked up in an eight-room farmhouse next to a used-car lot, surrounded by green fields and old machines gone to rust the rent was $425 a month.
Knock knock skin#
These imagistic verses felt like fragments of something essential and enduring, splinters of the Old Weird America that had burrowed under Callahan’s skin and burst into strange, spindly blossoms.Ĭallahan had come to Prosperity in 1997 to live with Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power.
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Often, an object or a turn of phrase would keep turning up across the course of a record, like a bad penny.
Knock knock full#
He sang of blood-red birds, a headstone on a wharf, a widow’s ghost driving a horse cart full of apples. In “ To Be of Use,” he admitted in a sad, honeyed voice, “Most of my fantasies are of/Making someone else come.” As masculine myths of young adulthood go, it was the oldest story in the book: the class clown with a curdled heart, just waiting to be made whole.Ĭallahan’s lyrics gradually grew from post-adolescent expressions of garden-variety self-loathing into something far more unusual and often more ominous, in the sense that they seemed wrapped around actual omens-magic phrases throbbing with eerie portent. “I’m gonna be drunk, so drunk at your wedding,” he taunted in one song in another, he sighed, “Maybe you should have a drink/I don’t know why you ever stopped anyway.” He could channel real ugliness, speaking the language of ne’er-do-wells and abusers, but the tenderness in his music could be as unexpected as the bile. On albums like 1995’s Wild Love and the following year’s The Doctor Came at Dawn, the guitar tone became cleaner, the stereo field more uncluttered, the words darker and more biting. But over time, the outline of an actual songwriter started poking through the haze of busted stompboxes, pause-button edits, and Dadaistic pranks. When Callahan played guitar, he might have been attempting to decipher hidden messages from moldy John Lee Hooker records.
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In the beginning, Smog’s music fit the moniker: gray, formless, acrid.
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Not exactly an outsider but definitely not an insider, he occupied a liminal space-making out-of-the-way sounds in out-of-the-way places, forever trailing rock music’s dominant strains the way a decommissioned highway shadows a six-lane interstate.Ĭallahan had grown up with a transistor radio pressed to his ear at night, listening first to soft-rock AM stations and then the hardcore punk he discovered at the far left of the dial, and it showed: His taste for low volumes had been tempered by the former, and his fondness for scabrous textures forged in the fires of the latter. Beginning in the late ’80s, he had put out a handful of self-released tapes on his own Disaster Records, named after one of his zines by 1992 he’d graduated to Drag City, a fledgling Chicago label cultivating a roster of acts like Pavement, Royal Trux, and Silver Jews-bands that took the willful ethos of American underground rock and flipped it into stubborn high art, scruffy and proudly nonconforming. Everybody loves a good joke, and have we got a treat for you! Here’s a list of clean and funny jokes for you to share with your kids or with your co-workers.By this point in his career, Callahan had built a tidy little reputation as Smog.