Magnetic Fields
Too Much Fun!
By Josh Goldfein
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Mostly, though, Merritt’s lilting melodies plunder the disposable good cheer of Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building; the sweeping, romantic chamber pop of Petula Clark or Burt Bacharach; even Jimmy Van Heusen’s flighty songs for Frank Sinatra. But his production values, while elegant, are inexorably dinky: a tin-pot Prince, he synthesizes most of the music himself, with occasional intrusions from bandmates Claudia Gonson (piano, drums), John Woo (banjo, guitar), and Sam Davol (cello). Merritt’s stage persona is half the show: with his Eeyore eyes and omnipresent cigarette, he’s a boho inversion of Rudy Vallee in The Palm Beach Story, crooning under Claudette Colbert’s window. Vallee was the wrong man because he was too naive, but you can’t live with Merritt for the opposite reason: he’s the man who knows too much.
Sharper than Mack the Knife, Merritt has a savage lyrical gift without peer in his generation. His great theme is not simply love but the failure of love: his love, his lover’s love, love that never happened, love that has tried and failed. Wicked, wanton, and witty, like the bastard offspring of Cole Porter and Dorothy Parker, Merritt is a classicist–he’s probably responsible for half of all songs written about the moon in this decade. He’s got a rep as an ironist, but he’s often shatteringly direct, and he’s more brazenly of his moment than Parker or Porter dared to be.
Peter Stampfel is the humorist of the pair. Stampfel collects bottle caps, soda pop trivia, and “old-timey music,” and his sugary taste applies equally to all three categories. He defines that last one pretty broadly: it encompasses a lot of Merritt’s suave sources as well as diverse troves like Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, the Grand Ole Opry, Spike Jones’s cartoony craziness, and James Bond sound tracks. Stampfel’s singing is the polar opposite of Merritt’s dour basso profundo; his good-natured yelping can make the grotesque seem charming, but his voice is so distinctive that it becomes impossible to separate his curatorial persona from the music he celebrates. His “Bad Boy” reinvents a girl-group tune he stumbled across, itself apparently adapted from “Stagger Lee”: “He knows illegal people / He does illegal things / But he doesn’t sound illegal when he plays guitar and sings / He’s a bad boy / But I don’t care.” Stampfel plays it for empathy, but the gleeful way he sings the word “illegal” also makes it clear how delighted he is to have come upon this odd nugget of Americana.
His humor is best when it’s directed at characters he could actually be. “I’m Dead (But I Don’t Know It)” is a passable rocker about a 52-year old rocker. “I have nothing left to say / But I say it anyway / Thirty years upon a stage / And I hear the people say / Why won’t he go away?” he begins, concluding, “Each record that I’m making / Is like a record that I’ve made / Just not as good.” Rock’s not his style, so he uses it to inoculate himself from criticism, and it’s just cute enough to work. He’s more comfortable in western regalia: “Big Hat, No Cattle” riffs on the colorful Texan insult “all hat and no cattle.” It’s a useful phrase for Angelenos like Newman, and he works out all the phallic permutations (“Big boat, no paddle…Big snake, no rattle”), much in the vein of his gentler disciple, dog-faced comedian Lyle Lovett.
