by Christopher J. Lee
Despite his taciturn demeanor, Bill Callahan has always been a jokester. Not quite a prankster, which would involve antics with other people. His humor is more furtive and self-deprecating, like his early “hit” (if you can call it that) “I Am Star Wars!” from his third album, Julius Caesar (another joke… who names a dirty, lo-fi LP Julius Caesar?) Knock Knock, the 1999 album he wrote after his breakup with Chan Marshall (a.k.a. Cat Power), has a lightning storm and a feral cat on its cover (get it?). On Dongs of Sevotion (ahem) released a year later, there’s his classic, “Dress Sexy at My Funeral,” in which he gives detailed advance instructions to his widow about what to do upon his death (“And when it comes your turn to speak before the crowd/Tell them about the time we did it/On the beach with fireworks above us.”) The one and only time I saw him perform at Local 506 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, he wore a seersucker suit like a smooth Southern lawyer in a novel by John Grisham, who was a resident of Chapel Hill at the time.
There’s a joke, too, in the title of Callahan’s new EP, The Holy Grail: Bill Callahan’s “Smog” Dec. 10, 2001 Peel Session. Callahan implies, prima facie, that this small recording is among the rarest of black-market bootlegs, finally issued, and perhaps the most significant release of his career. It is not. Yet, there is a moveable truth to the title’s proposition. At some indeterminate moment between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, Callahan went from being a reclusive, lo-fi Jandek acolyte to becoming a more refined, more dimly lit disciple of ‘60s-era Johnny Cash. Smog, Callahan’s initial cryptic moniker, continued after 2001 for a few more LPs up until A River Ain’t Too Much to Love from 2005. From 2007 on, Callahan would henceforth record under his own name starting with Woke on a Whaleheart. These release dates, however, don’t quite square with the stylistic shifts involved. In short, the name in the subtitle of this new EP, Bill Callahan’s “Smog,” gets at this murkier chronology and unspoken transition from one stage persona to another.
The four songs on The Holy Grail consist of two covers and two originals. Like a set of passport photos you might get at CVS, this EP has four portraits with the same face, though each of them tells a different story. Like passport photos, these songs also take you on a journey: to the past on some tracks, the present circa 2001 on others, but equally, as inferred, Callahan’s near future. The first track is a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Beautiful Child” off their LP Tusk. It is not an obvious musical reference for Callahan, and the resulting version is one darkened by his characteristic pathos. While Stevie Nicks imbues the song with a golden-hued tinge of young love lost, Callahan drains it of easy nostalgia, if not emotional color, resulting in a bleaker account that tonally resembles the type of missing child you used to see on the back of milk cartons.
The BBC’s Peel Sessions, helmed by John Peel until his passing in 2004, were famous for this kind of unusual, seemingly off-the-cuff studio takes. The Fall made the most appearances on the program with 24 total, if that gives an indication of the committed taste of Peel. Though nothing like Mark E. Smith, Callahan fits right in, and he ventures further into his own work on the next two tracks. The first is an extended version of “Cold Discovery” from Dongs of Sevotion. It is slowed down and rendered more elemental than the album version, which has a subtle jauntiness to it, even when Callahan creepily relays, “Oh, I can hold a woman down on a hardwood floor/This is my cold discovery.” This Peel Session version is recognizable in the manner of a distant cousin, with a sulky violin by Jessica Billey and restrained percussion by Jim White enhancing its sound. Mike Saenz fills in on guitar. The jauntiness is compellingly replaced by building menace. This version is superior to the album recording.
The third track is “Dirty Pants” from 2001’s Rain on Lens. The BBC version is unsurprisingly looser. Looping with dread, the album take is tightly wound and disturbing (“Then I walk out to your house and let myself in/Back you into the corner and I multiply.”) It is a good example of how Callahan tested the limits of his songwriting by cutting things down to a bare minimum. In contrast, the Peel Session track is slower, and due to clearer vocals, a slightly more sympathetic portrait of the unnamed protagonist comes through, who resembles a transient character out of a Faulkner or McCarthy novel (“No shirt and broken tooth, barefoot and beaming.”) There is not much warmth in Callahan’s world and what can be detected is fleeting.
The Holy Grail ends with a brief cover of “Jesus” by the Velvet Underground, lasting barely two minutes. The original version from The Velvet Underground is almost twice as long. Callahan’s take feels slighter as a result, even quietly aborted halfway through. He doesn’t take it to a new place. That said, it is also a revealing reference point, if a less surprising one than Stevie Nicks. It conforms to the at-times Biblical worldview that informs Callahan’s music. As a coda to the dubious anti-heroes in “Cold Discovery” and “Dirty Pants,” the figure of Jesus may represent a temporary reprieve, a cleansing, even redemption.
Taken together, The Holy Grail: Bill Callahan’s “Smog” Dec. 10, 2001 Peel Session is a modest effort that nonetheless has much to say about both Callahan’s evolution and his consistency. This EP doesn’t rewrite history exactly, but it is revelatory about the contingent steps taken by him as an artist, more apparent in retrospect, thus amounting to a kind of Rosebud explaining the move from one chapter to the next. It diverges sharply from his other live recording released last year, Resuscitate!, in which he is backed by a bigger band and retains an audience, resulting in an LP of greater expressiveness and lusher sound. Not to say that it is necessarily better.
A final thought: the timing of The Holy Grail in December 2001 may stir background thoughts of 9/11 and the dark, uncertain period that characterized the months that followed. This event is not directly referenced on this EP – Rain on Lens was, in fact, released a week after 9/11 – but Callahan’s tone throughout is apt for that grim and precarious time. The feeling of lost innocence in “Beautiful Child” hits differently against this backdrop. It sounds like an obliquely made zeitgeist gesture. No joke there.