James Gang, Death Cab for Cutie, and Personal Disposition in Music

I feel pretty awful admitting enjoying Death Cab. A concert of theirs, however, was pretty spectacular, and as a pop band serving as a vehicle for primarily one songwriter, they do a job of keeping that genre in the pop spotlight. They are total pricks though, as a fellow upstairs is apt to say, and realizing that you'd never want to share a cab with the folks you're listening to is pretty disappointing.

I guess what keeps me listening is ultimately that very terrible attitude they have. The same friend of mine from upstairs once sat around our kitchen table, telling me about James Gang's Yer' Album, which includes a track called Stone Rap. Stone Rap, if you haven't heard it, is pretty much the band just fucking with the producer on a nonsense track. It's a wonderful display of studio fun and camaraderie aimed at making the producer's day pretty terrible. The sleeve noise bit makes me laugh no matter the situation.

What makes Stone Rap, however, is that it's a more engrossing bit of dickery than anything Death Cab will ever do. You are in on the joke when you hear Stone Rap. When Chris Walla and Ben Gibbard tell inside joke on stage and the girls all laugh and the older folks in the boxes next to you go to get another beer, you're wishing you were back in the apartment hearing that damn sleeve noise gag for the fifteenth time.

Death Cab seems to find most of its appeal in wide generalizations: the use of the second person, the descriptions of metropolis, a detailed but still entirely vague sense of emotional longing permeating every song they create. Any sense of relatability comes from the buckshot, not any pinpoint accuracy. Death Cab is the sawed off shotgun of singer-songwriter vehicles, enough members in enough side projects to bring in people from different genres, diverse enough sadness to draw in a crowd, even enough instrumental variation to pull off debates over individual songs as opposed to albums. Certainly, they are not a bad band, they are just an engineered band, and you have to credit that to Gibbard and I suppose everyone else in the group.

James Gang, though. Man. I can't listen to the guys all the time. They're terrific, but they're situational. It's a damn shame. I'll laugh when I hear Stone Rap, but I'll be back to the vinyl stack in the apartment before it's over. I would trade every song in the Death Cab catalog for Funk #48 however.

Another example of personal disposition affecting music: Jackson Browne. There is the beautiful Cocaine, a Rev. Gary Davis cover with added lyrics, that is deeply personal and comic. I have never once pounded on Browne's door asking for cocaine like Greg Ladanyi did, but the pitiful sound of Browne's voice makes you feel like it's happening. When I was younger, my father and I sat in his Toyota, and we'd listen to it over and over, with him pointing out every verse over and over, the most obvious little bits he found intimate and touching. I don't think this is ever possible with a Death Cab song, with any buckshot song. When I hear Death Cab I think of realizing I was about to be broken up with by my girlfriend at the time of the concert we went to together, but there is no particular song. It's just Death Cab memories. Jackson Browne though, or Stone Rap, they are just moments that last outside of time. Things that never involved anyone but the folks there at that moment, but in that intimacy they found a timelessness.

So back to Chris Walla joking on stage. Why is it not funny when he does it? Because Walla's a prick, and it's showmanship. Jackson Browne was a junkie, almost. Joe Walsh could be polished into a beautiful musician, but he wouldn't let that producer take away that bit of soul. Walla's just a prick. So's Gibbard.

I digress, however. I do enjoy Death Cab. I just don't see their music as being capable of holding the air still when it's played, or a touchstone to come back to. It's just buckshot, but buckshot certainly does hit you.