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Bryan Harvey and the New South Gothic

Yesterday, while giving you some personal thoughts about my loose connection to the Harvey family and what they meant to so many people, I tossed in a reference to "New South Gothic," the subgenre that some critics have used to label the House of Freaks' music. For those of you who are unfamiliar with his music (or perhaps know him only from Gutterball or other side projects), I wanted to provide some more links to their discography--especially a great site that gives liner notes by Bryan for many of the songs in their catalog--and also a photo gallery of shots by Oz Geier, but also to flesh out and explain what I think the NSG label means, and how it applies to House of Freaks and particularly Bryan's lyrics.

First of all, I confess that I've modified the more generic phrase "Southern Gothic," first to distinguish it from the literary reference to mid-century works by authors like Faulkner and O'Connor, and secondly to emphasize the ambivalence that "old"  southerners more generally may have lacked towards their heritage and mythology. There is a duality to the new presentation, to include the changing mores of the South since WWII that traditional Southern Gothic writers probably couldn't have perceived. JD Wilkes of Th' Legendary Shack Shakers tries to spell it out:

"It's different than Gothic. It's Flannery O'Connor and Harper Lee and Faulkner and all that. It's sort of the dark, seamy underbelly of the South, but there's a mystical quality too. It's not like the Jerry Springer, nasty, dysfunctional South that the media likes to paint the picture of. This is more of a Gothic, grandiose version of the grotesqueness of the South. It's all the cross-cultural dynamics of race and class and religion and all those things that cause trouble, but the beauty they reveal in art and life. So it's very much based in reality, whereas Gothic literature is a medieval fantasy. Southern Gothic is the reality around us down here in these parts. It's like the sideshow and the circus and all that. It's entertaining but there's something sick about it at the same time. It's where we're from, so it's what comes natural. We're trying to tell big stories, trying to portray something bigger than ourselves and more epic than ourselves."

Perhaps the most famous or well-heard example of NSG would be Fables of the Reconstruction, REM's third album. Songs like Driver 8, Can't Get There from Here, Wendell Gee and Good Advices share a sense of place and a storytelling lyricism divorced from typical boy-meets-girl pop pap. There are other examples:  Cat Power is often cited by other bands as a NSG influence, explained here by Verbena frontman Scott Bondy:

"She's from a storytelling tradition," he said. "There's just serious darkness, like, if you're brought up in the '40s or '50s in the South, your dad could go to work at the mill or on the farm and come home losing an arm. Those kind of stakes — there's just something so much more respectable about that way of life. I don't know, there's like a sense of honor, or whatever, like in a David Lynchian kind of way. There's also like a really large underside of the iceberg — the darkness of it."

Exploring that darkness in his songs, Bondy has created a timeless rock sound, a sound that he believes has a universal appeal. He said he turns to like-minded artists — such as Lynch, the Coen Brothers and the White Stripes — for inspiration. "Anything...that paints a portrait of [the] America that doesn't exist anymore...," he said. "It's almost like those things are timeless. They're telling stories that you don't know when they're set.

So that should give you a reasonable idea of what I'm talking about when I refer to House of Freaks as part of the New South Gothic. Probably the best unified example of the style in their catalog is the 2nd album, Tantilla. Themes of race, religion, hard labor and family abound, tied together by a spare but mostly thundering arrangement by producer John Leckie. (In the liner notes I linked to, Harvey declares the production result a disappointment, but as someone who grew to love the album without the benefit of that knowledge, I'm unswayed in keeping it as my favorite of theirs).

The two tracks that I think best express the duality in NSG themes are White Folks' Blood and Family Tree. Harvey is explicit about the dark side of the Southern legacy:

I was really getting into that suthern thang around this time. Being in L.A. made me acutely aware that I was from the south. My southern accent became even more pronounced. I was really trying to dig into all those things that make a person from the south what he is...you know, the lost cause, racial guilt and that sort of stuff. I think these lyrics are pretty good. I was particularly disturbed by an old photo from the 30's of a dead black man who had been lynched. He was tied to a tree, with his hands tied behind his back and had been tortured with a blow torch. I still can't get images like these out of my head. It makes me hate humanity sometimes, and confirms my feelings that we live in a godless world.

Here are the lyrics:

What mysteries flow through these white folks' blood?
What secrets do they hide within?
What sickbed words pass across their lips?
And what passions lie beneath their skin?
Are their fortunes made in their pool halls?
And their lives played out like children's games?
Under the summer sun with a knife and a gun
A festered wound never heals
On the back porch, in the pawn shops

Dusting off their fathers' guns
Words like worms crawl through their brains
Sermons fly from the preacher's mouth
But the auction block still remains
Gagged and tied to a tree trunk
After a fox hunt chase with dogs and chains
In a field of white in the broad daylight
The earth is black, black with blood
They were friends and they were brothers

Life goes on across the railroad tracks
A flood of tears has come and gone
Autumn comes, white folks settle down
And the preacher quotes from Luke and John
And there is peace and plenty in the country
And the way we are, we will remain
The world keeps spinning round and around
Just keep spinning around and around and around
Everything is still the same

Life goes on like before, on the streets, on the porches
In our homes, in our towns, what we see all around us.
Life goes on like before, while we sit by the doorway
All around, all our lives, all we do, no surprises

The irony of course is a white person hypothesizing on what exists inside the heads of white people, to behave as they do in the lyrics. That detachment persists for much of the song, suddenly shifting with the line that continues to give me chills each time I hear it: "and the way we are, we will remain." For anyone who has lived in Richmond at least, that line should ring harshly true. What HL Mencken once called a "happy dullness of intellect" seems to pervade Richmond--the sense that things are as they are, that tradition and familiarity trump progress and change, and that another 40 years of the same sounds pretty good, all in all. "All we do, no surprises." The shift from third- to first-person in midsong exemplifies the approach to NSG sentiment: the past is the past, and no one feels personally responsible for its horrors--but the baggage has made it for the train trip to the present, and here Harvey is keenly aware that they are his bags to pick up.

In Family Tree, however, there emerges a softer side--a sentimentality for the comfort of the very same familiarity and tradition that's viewed with suspicion in White Folks' Blood. As primarily expressed by Bryan, this more gentle view comes out in strong themes of ancestry and family connectedness. Sun Gone Down, another track from Tantilla, is obliquely about the death of Harvey's father, but in Family Tree the connections are explicit:

A wind is rising outside
the houses are trembling
the trees are shivering

out in the fields where we walked
the roots that support us
have built a fortress

well they grow with the breeze like a family tree
whose seeds were planted here
well they rise up tall in my memory
they do

Who were they, where are they now?
Just faces and photographs
letters and lithographs
drunkards and fathers they were
preachers and soldiers
upon their shoulders

well we grow with the breeze with a family tree
whose seeds were planted here
well they rise up tall in my memory
they do

their houses are crumbling
the wells dried up long ago
water stops flowing
this tree will always grow

the wind is rising outside
the branches are swaying
children are playing
between the earth and the sky
between we're the pages
they live through the ages

             well they grow with the breeze like a family tree
             whose seeds were planted here
             well they rise up tall in my memory
             they do...they grow with the family tree

Apart from admitting there might be a drunkard or two sitting in the Harvey family tree, there is a strong benevolence towards the past in this lyric. Note that as with White Folks' Blood, the view backwards is relatively detached-- a look through old letters and pictures, crumbling houses and dried up wells. But here, rather than being cowed by the sense of continuity and linkage, it's a source of strength and food for the future.

Clearly, these are not themes you'd find on a Britney Spears record, which is perhaps why House of Freaks never had more than one weak hit single. But that sophistication of thought and personal transparency that Bryan lent to his songs are much of why House of Freaks is still well regarded critically, and why a suprising cadre of Freak followers still exist today, coming out of the woodwork to offer tributes and express sorrow at the passing of an unknown legend (as Neil Young might say).

--TJ

Bryan Harvey, Family Slain in Richmond

[I originally started this entry by detailing the coverage of this case, which has spread about the blogosphere and crime "enthusiasts" alike the last two days, but I lost a fair bit of work and had to restart...]

Here is the original Richmond Times Dispatch story from yesterday. The mean facts are that Bryan Harvey, 49, his wife Kathryn, 39, and his daughters Stella (9) and Ruby (4) were all bound and killed and their house in South Richmond set afire on New Year's Day. If you follow the sidebar trail from today's story on the evening vigil for the Harveys, you can find a string of stories on how active and important they were to the Richmond community, and how many people seemed to know and love them.

But rather than reiterate those stories  as I originally intended, I will tell you why I'm mentioning this sad but regional story (that's not even the region where I live anymore).  I lived in Richmond for 10 years during the 90s, and while I was not friends with the Harveys, I did know Bryan to an extent and was very familiar with his work. My son and his daughter are the same age, and were slated to attend the same school in the same class had we not moved the prior spring. My wife knew Kathryn in about the same fashion, through her store World of Mirth and as someone of mutual friends. We had other friends who knew them well, who had played with Bryan or worked with Kathryn, or who live just two blocks from the home in which they were slain, coming home on New Year's to find their neighborhood taped off.  So we were a part of the wide web of people whose lives had been favorably touched by the Harveys, and tonight Mrs. Joe and I feel a real sense of personal loss despite our mostly tangential acquaintance with them.

As you would discover if you read the sidebar articles at the T-D, they were simply sweet people,  and that would make their murders tragic enough. But their presence left singularly tangible, wonderful legacies that one can so rarely qualify. Bryan's band House of Freaks (with percussionist Johnny Hott) was my favorite Richmond band ever and among the best live shows I've seen in my lifetime. I own nearly everything they put out, including some vinyl. I played them and pimped them in my various radio gigs in Williamsburg and Richmond, and played them for friends to convert them.

As a Yankee transplant, Harvey's eminently Southern lyrics were a fascination to me, and they rang true (as this Southerner accords in his review of the HoF catalog). Some called it the New South Gothic, a rock style steeped in Southern cultural mythology that sometimes mocked the myths, sometimes lionized and sought comfort in them. I sympathized with that conflict of interest between modern sensibility, and the peaceful traditions that supported the imperfect ways of the past. There was also a tribal, almost Native American element to much of the earlier music, and as a percussionist I couldn't help but be drawn to a two-piece, guitar and drums band. They always made so much more sound than larger outfits, as if guided by the hand of Phil Spector. But it was Bryan's lyrical tapestry that drew me back again and again. With a hopeful modesty that has been proven unnecessary, he eulogized himself on Cakewalk with the song "Remember Me Well":

When I lay down my head
bound for heaven or hell
after all's said and done
please remember me well

You can dance on my grave
you can ring out the bells
you can drink to my health
but remember me well

Never fear, Bryan and Kathryn.

Update 1/4, 230p--
Welcome to those of you from sites where my sad nostalgia has been linked. I'm flattered that people from different sources were moved enough by my remembrances to cite them in their own writing. In turn, if you haven't come from one of those sites, let me direct you to them:

Blue Merle offers a rundown on who is following the story around the blogosphere, and shares the hunger for information and answers that many of us seem to be harboring.

Buttermilk and Molasses' John Sarvay (someone who I'm pretty sure I've met before, and who was heavily involved in the indie publishing scene while I lived there) notes the curious attachment to the Harveys among people who only vaguely knew them, such as myself.

Aliza Sherman knew Bryan perhaps better than many of us, given her admission of a near-romance that they shared long ago, and offers some touching thoughts about his gentle nature.  She also has a good set of links to news and blog articles about the murders.

F.T. Rea's SLANTblog also carries us back to the 80's, when Grace Street's music scene was king, and hints at Bryan's trepidations about doing what The Man wanted in order to become famous. He also reports on the vigil held last night at the Unitarian Church.

Steve Huff's Dark Side speculates at length on possible motives and implications, but cautions against getting carried away with what you read as 'truth' on the Net.

Don Harrison, former Catharsis writer (another of the indie publishing people, and someone who reviewed my old Richmond band Hassan Chop!) shares his remembrances of Bryan that go way back, and the sycophantic fandom it seems many of us had for him and House of Freaks--that we all tried to hide so we could have a normal, non-embarassing conversation with him.

Finally, if you knew the Harveys a lot, a little, or even not at all, there is a page up to memorialize the family and update people on the events to come celebrating their lives.

 

--TJ