ASS, GRASS AND GAS Brightblack Morning Light
Nov 15, 2008
Or 'If You Like Pina Coladas'... Everyone one rides for free with Brightblack Morning Light.
BY DAVID DOWNS
"We got booked to do a split EP with Bonnie Prince Billy [Will Oldham]and during that process I got beat up by the San Jose Police Department and put in jail on Valentine's Day," says Nathan "Nabob" Shineywater from Matador Records band Brightblack Morning Light.
"It was the first protests against the war and that song came out of that experience years later ... "
Shineywater's talking about the epic cut "Oppressions Each" off new album Motion to Rejoin, while heading East currently somewhere outside Louisiana just after the election. Johnny Cash blares out of the AM radio.
"We were all sitting in jail on Sunday morning on Valentine's Day bleeding. I had blood all over me. And there were two people coming down off meth sitting next to me. Big, 600-pound dudes clenching their bodies. And there was blood on the floor and blood on the wall. Other people's blood. I had open wounds. I don't think I've contracted anything through it, but when they put me in the cop car there was already blood in it from something else. I was like, 'God, this is crazy.'"
Now six years after that beating, America has relapsed into the drugged out, liberal, consciousness-expanding '60s complete with a Kennedy-like president and ascendant hippy jams dominating boomboxes across the land. But the thirty-two year-old guitarist, vocalist for the champion hippy folk duo remains suspect. Nabob and pianist/vocalist Rachael "Rabob" Hughes are crashing around the country in a tour van through February, and are observing a nation in convulsive flux.
"If we say it's up to the people, we have to see how awake the people are, man. We've yet to determine that. Out here, people are kind of smirky and smiley. And the old creepy Republican people, you can kind of tell that they don't really belong in that mindframe," he says.
"I want to see more people on their lunch breaks smoking joints out the backside of businesses these days. Let's get everyone partying across the nation. We're a young nation and we've to learn how to truly party."
Nabob and Rabob's personal Air-Conditioned Nightmare-esque journey is occasioned by Motion to Rejoin, their second LP on Matador. Released in the Fall of 2008 to rave reviews and a historic new Democratic majority, Motion combines the soulfulness of southern gospel with the drug-addled murk and blues of an after-party at Steely Dan's house. Fender Rhodes electric piano coos over trap kit. Electric guitar and horns wane in and out. The album runs at what feels like six beats per minute and the entire approach plugs a symbolic daisy into the smoking gun barrel of contemporary music. It's as though gangster rap, alternative's rise, electronic music never happened; the question is, "How?"
Nabob was born in Alabama in 1976, he says, the only child of "an outlaw and a nurse". He graduated from church choirs to coke parties, searching for whatever doped-out, mothercountry maniac culture he could find in the congenitally confederate 'Bama. By late adulthood, he had befriended folk-punk polymath Bonnie Prince Billy before moving to Humboldt County, California to study furniture-making; of all things.
Nabob told Billy to play Humboldt, and one day Billy asked Nabob to do just that -- join him on a tour of the region. Shineywater was back East at the time and broke though, so he had to steal his way West, pilfering fuel from every town he hit when the needle pointed to"E". Again, How?
"You put on a certain kind of hat and you pick a gas station that's easy to get on the freeway from, you know? And you pick a pump that's far from the cashier window and, you know, you look regular. Stand around. Put the thing back on the thing. Get back in in the truck. Crank it up -- I don't like to go out causally. I usually like to floor it, but, you know that was a long time ago."
Back out West, the story goes he enlisted pianist Rachael Hughes, another Alabama native he knew from jam sessions down South. She was working for AmeriCorps on endangered salmon restoration, yet skipped the fish for tour dates with Billy and Nabob. The tour lep to that 02 slplit EP, an '04 LP Ala.Cali.Tucky and another split EP in '04.
In 2005, Slint invited then-named "Brightblack" to play boutique UK festival All Tomorrow's Parties. Reps from Matador swooned, and asked them to record. But Nabob blanked the esteemed label of Interpol and Sonic Youth.
"We didn't send them nothing for months," he laughs, in a raspy, cannabinol drawl. "I have no idea how we got it together." Eventually, the two became Brightblack Morning Light on their self-titled debut in 2006, recorded near Idyllwild, CA.- a seemingly effortless yet timeless gem in an otherwise dark year.
For their 2008 follow-up, the pair decamped to a mesa in New Mexico and lived in an adobe pueblo. They home-recorded on power from a solar panel when wattage permitted. Over the languorous months, the pair would slowly lay down one track to a four-track, dump it into ProTools the next day, dump it back onto four-track the day after, and play with the horn blowers and other musicians that showed up. If it was too cloudy to record, they hiked.
Most surprisingly, Nabob maintains the duo's relationship is and was platonic. They play brilliantly together and they're lucky to have that connection, he says. It's hard, though.
"It shows mental domination. Because how many women do you know are willing to go live on the beach in a tent by themselves and work a full-time job? And pick up to go make a record? Rachael is the real deal, man. I think some of these high maintenance chicks need to know that like, uhhh, you know --- we were all shitting behind bushes a few hundred years ago."
BML's strange trip continues through February before a possible sabbatical in Joshua Tree National Forest. Which naturally begs the question, 'what does a BML tour rider even look like? Ketamine? Ayajuasca?' Nabob laughs.
"Truthfully we haven't had our rider honored once since we've been on tour. And we only put 'pina coladas' on there."
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