This is a edited version of a piece written by Jillian Burt.
Jillian Burt was a music journalist in Australia when the Laughing Clowns formed. She now has a company in Sydney, Editions Ballard, which manufactures books that link to music and video through mobile phones. She saw the band at the ATP Cookatoo Island shows. Her site is : http://editionsballard.wordpress.com
THE RETURN OF THE LAUGHING CLOWNS
All Tomorrow’s Parties was an era brought into a new time. Seeing the Boys Next Door and the Go Betweens and the Laughing Clowns on the same bill was remarkable in the early 1980‘s. But the festival showed that what these musicians are creating now is exponentially more remarkable. When Michael Almereyda explained his motivation for filming an adaptation of Hamlet in 2000 he quoted Emily Dickinson’s response to Shakespeare’s writing: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off I know this is poetry.” This electrifying sense is what I always feel at performances by any of Nick Cave ’s bands and the Laughing Clowns, then and now.....
I loved the Laughing Clowns on first sight twenty five years ago. Their instrumental complexity was familiar to me, from growing up listening to jazz, and their drummer Jeffrey Wegener has always provided for me the equivalent of the sharp liner notes that were printed on jazz record sleeves. But what Ed Kuepper’s songs and musical arrangements introduced me to, that has deepened slowly over the years, is an appreciation of the heart-lifting qualities of soul music. The sexy groove of the brass arrangements is exhilarating but the Laughing Clowns have a vast dynamic and emotional range and what was most moving for me was the sweetness in their quieter moments. This prepared me, when many years later I heard Al Green preach at his church in Memphis and Aaron Neville singing with a church choir in a tent at the New Orleans Jazz Festival, to grasp how music delivers transcendence in modest, everyday situations.
I revered Duke Ellington and the saxophonist Wayne Shorter. When I was a teenage journalist Wayne Shorter was the first person I ever conducted a long radio interview with. He was touring Australia with Weather Report. It was a great late line-up of the band with Joe Zawinul on piano, Peter Erskine on drums and the explosively soulful Jaco Pastorious on bass. It was thrilling to see a jazz band walk onto a concert hall stage lined to the rafters with stacks of speaker boxes. A heavy metal band might have emerged from the wings. Or Parliament might have walked onstage, plugged in their instruments, and stirred up some incendiary funk. Later the same night I saw Weather Report play an acoustic set at a small jazz club and what they played had a profound, painfully tender beauty.
A few weeks ago Music Editor Ben Ratliff was taking questions from readers of the New York Times. He was asked which of the musicians he’s interviewed he found the most opaque or confounding. “Would be Ornette Coleman and Wayne Shorter, who are ninjas of the opaque,” he replied. “But I think there’s a reason we like them opaque: around the fifth time you read what they have to say - about harmony or memory or life and death or what happens when we name things - you see that underneath the oracular statements are some strong and simple ideas and a lot of humour.” It’s with that spirit I approached the Laughing Clowns. There were long stretches where I saw them perform every week. They struck me as something highly original. In speaking with Jeffrey and Ed it became clear that there was little overlap between the jazz I was familiar with and what they listened to. I had practically no frame of reference for anything from popular music. It was obvious they were drawing from a wide range of inspirations but there was something about them that was entirely themselves. They inspired trust. I was less interested in trying to reduce them to something familiar than waiting for what was entirely new about them to become familiar on its own terms.
Although the Laughing Clowns have been dormant Ed and Jeffrey have been performing together for many years, recently as a duo touring Europe with the Bad Seeds. Experience and maturity suits them, they’re radiant and relaxed. I was reminded of something Duke Ellington said to someone who remarked of his band: “They’re all so relaxed! How can they look so casual and play such moving music?” “They’re free, that’s why,“ he replied. “A natural man is a free man. If they were tense they would only pour out noise. Because they’re relaxed, they play music. It comes from inside them. How could jazz be otherwise?“.
It’s technically beyond me to explain what Jeffrey’s doing with his drumming. He has the power to knock you off your feet but there are many quieter moments that are spellbinding. There‘s a lot going on, his style is complex, but there‘s clarity. The usual metaphors we apply to drummers don‘t seem to apply to him. He‘s not a backbone or an anchor, there‘s something more organic about his role in creating the sound, he‘s more like a central nervous system.
What I sense in Ed and Jeffrey are qualities I admired in both Duke Ellington and Wayne Shorter: they’re still points in a shifting universe. They’re agents of change but have great composure. Rock writers tend to interpret music as literal autobiography and musical style as an extension of personality, so their brains overheat trying to link the powerful electric force of Ed’s guitar with his calm demeanour. But viewing the music symbolically, as poetry rather than prose, that coolness is the whole point, energy contained and directed rather than an erratic force. There’s a dazzling drama to some of Laughing Clowns songs, the trapdoors and false endings within “Collapseboard“, for instance, but also the peacefulness of “Eternally Yours“.
I turn to jazz critics, particularly Gary Giddins, for a deeper technical appreciation of the music I value. But when I’m trying to quantify why a piece of music seems so important I place it alongside art that seems equally important. I find the evenness of Ed’s singing and the calm intensity of his guitar playing reassuring in the same way I find Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field reassuring, being able to summon the majestic dread provoked by being surrounded by an elemental force but being safe within it. Walter de Maria arranged 400 stainless steel rods in a grid array one mile by one kilometre in the high desert of New Mexico in 1977, to summon lightning strikes and watch them play off one another. People are encouraged to walk around within the grid. We‘ve diminished ourselves by not usually being willing to be awed. “Electricity, which makes us forget the ancient fear of night, has become too familiar,” the Dalai Lama told Jean Claude Carriere.
Another New York Times reader asked Ben Ratliff: What music is good? What musicians should I be listening to? “Besides the obvious question in this question − who’s really good out there − you’re also asking me who will be remembered, who will be heard widely among musicians, who will be written about and studied and what people will understand as ‘innovation’ in 50 years. I gotta tell you, Kris, I don’t measure jazz musicians by innovation. I measure them by how much they are their greatest selves. Sometimes an idea that’s basically ancient can be the freshest, most explosive thing, if it’s played with real presence and authority. Or an idea that mixes the ancient with the contemporary: even better”.
With Nick’s success in particular there’s been a growing interest in the creation myth of punk rock era. All Tomorrow’s Parties showed that it was a social history: the cumulative effect of so many different bands and people that created a whole world. Names of clubs, city landmarks, anecdotes about escapades, and trying to place a society by noting the credits on record sleeves won’t bring that world to life. But Robert Forster’s song “Darlinghurst Nights“ on the final Go-Betweens record does. He captures the yearning at the heart of this time, that all of the big ideas and grand sonic experiments were trying to fill up an emptiness. The rich, soul stirring experiences of life always seemed to be somewhere else. They’d have to be willed into existence through music.
I’m gonna change my appearance every day....
I’m gonna write a movie and then I’m going to star in a play....
And then I’m going to go to ....Caracas.... ....
‘cause you know I’m just going to have to get away. ....
“Darlinghurst Nights”. The Go Betweens.
The song reminds me of standing under the Coca Cola sign in Kings Cross looking at the traffic going up and down the ski-slope of William Street , feeling a little as if I were floating, and wondering just what was out there in the world. The song is a poignant portrait of a group of people at a particular time. It fades out on a brass arrangement, hazy and magical, that reminds me of the Laughing Clowns, who were part of the world of Robert’s song.
I started yearning to see the Laughing Clowns again when I heard that song, remembering that there was something enchanted about them. There were always silk-screened posters of old-fashioned white-faced clowns pasted up on the walls of boarded-up buildings around Darlinghurst as if they were summoning people to roll up for a circus. And there was always a sense of occasion in going to see them, no matter how dingy the club was. A set of multi-coloured light bulbs was strung up across the front of the stage, and the band had a theme song. If I’d known anything about mythology at the time I might have been able to quantify that sense of magic. Maybe a circus is where we “face the irrational savage beast within” as Joseph Campbell suggested we need to do if we‘re to live without fear. People putting their heads between the jaws of lions, doing death defying feats on high wires, and clowns, taking the role of their ancestors, the court jesters, being the only ones who can tell the truth about life and not lose their heads. There’s a vague sense, in the lyrics to the Laughing Clowns theme song, that this might be the case. It’s a hopeful song. .. ..
The reborn Laughing Clowns have limitless opportunities. It would be fascinating to hear them re-record their old repertoire as standards, reinvented and moved through time as Ed has done with standards on his solo records. On Cockatoo Island he said to the large, enthralled crowd, we’re an arthouse ensemble and you’re asking us to turn it up? But that’s the unique character of the Laughing Clowns. They have strong, dependable songs that can reel you in and hold you, at any volume, and skilled musicians who can, especially with the ease and intuitive understanding between Ed and Jeffrey, take those songs anywhere in performance. Unlike jazz bands who can fail to reproduce the magic between the musicians without an audience and the dynamic of a concert, the Laughing Clowns will be able to record new songs that are equally and differently alive in the studio.