Storefront Hitchcock
When I first heard that Jonathan Demme had made a concert film of Robyn Hitchcock playing in a storefront on 14th Street in New York City, I pictured the British troubadour framed like a piece of merchandise, with some sort of amplification system piping his music out onto the street. He’d attract a crowd of passersby, the sort of folks who might never have heard of him otherwise, and by the end of the film they’d be enthralled, roped into his lunatic vision of humanity. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
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In the mid-90s Rhino began reissuing his early albums, and after Demme expressed interest in filming his stream-of-consciousness stage show, Hitchcock landed a deal with Warner Brothers. His first Warners album, Moss Elixir, was a wonderful mix of chiming folk rock, dark acoustic balladry, and quiet menacing punk, and its songs would make up the core of his repertoire in Demme’s Storefront Hitchcock. But the director, who has a reputation for simple and stylish performance films (he’s perfectly captured the brainy fun of the Talking Heads and the quicksilver insights of monologuist Spalding Gray), took it as his mission to distill rather than boost Hitchcock’s peculiar appeal. My notion of what the film would be–and Warners’ probable notions about what it would do for their investment–was merely wishful thinking.
Yet some flowers wilt with too much sunlight, and facing Robyn Hitchcock away from the window might not have been such a bad idea. His songs have always been highly visual–it’s one reason his live act translates so well to the screen–and like the surrealist painters that inspire him, he seems to understand that the principles of mass marketing can only inhibit his art. Maybe that’s why he’s always shooting himself in the foot, making so many records of such varying quality. The major labels of the 90s are geared toward promoting a single “monster” album every two or three years, but in the 22 years since Hitchcock debuted with his first band, the Soft Boys, he’s released 20 albums and innumerable singles and EPs. The Rhino reissues collected a mountain of obscure bonus tracks, and Hitchcock’s recording sessions produce so much material that he often releases two different versions of an album–both Moss Elixir and Storefront Hitchcock have been issued in vinyl versions with different cuts. In all honesty, a fair amount of this stuff is junk, which can discourage all but the most rabid fans from taking a chance on his latest release. But the way I like to think of it, he’s amassing a large and adventurous body of work–from flawed sketches to outright masterpieces–for us to appraise and examine after he’s gone.
