The Artist in Profile: 24 Years of Nick Cave

Nick Cave - the early years.

Nick Cave - this looks to be circa 1992 or so? I'm completely guessing.

I still can't figure out whether or not his mustache is meant to be ironic - but I have the same problem with my own facial hair experiments, as my girlfriend will tell you.

This article was written for Listen In, the premiere music writing group on Newsvine.

On October 1, I'm going to make a trip up to Toronto to catch Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds as they cross the continent on their Dig!!! Lazarus, Digg!!! tour. Cave has a hallowed place in my musical pantheon - he's up on a high shelf, sharing a sacred space with the likes of Tom Waits and the inimitable Leonard Cohen.

Like theirs, Cave's oeuvre is imperfect - it's marred in places, sometimes for years at a time, by brazen experimentation resulting in damn near unlistenable music. But embedded even in his most audaciously bad albums are gems - even terrible songs sometimes find redemption with a single well-placed turn of phrase that manages to recontextualize everything that had come before. More than anything else, listening to Nick Cave is often an exercise in learning to perceive beauty in places where you never would have thought to look.

Nick Cave is the reason my friends in college never let me pick the music for road trips, and for that reason alone I've wanted for years to express exactly what it is that I hear in his work. Today, I'm going to do my best to communicate just that

Also: this is long. Cave is one of my favorite artists and he's got a career spanning several decades. I have a lot to say about a lot of things, and many of them are personal and hard to express - so if you want to join me in this endeavor, you're more than welcome. But I need you to promise to keep an open mind and indulge me.

Deal?

Nick Cave - Brief Biography

Cave is an Australian musician who got his start in John Peel-promoted Heroin-fueled Post-punk outfit The Birthday Party. They were noisy, rebellious and a commercial flop - so, you know, he came onto the scene with a lot of integrity.

The band broke up and he started a group called The Bad Seeds, which has gone through a lot of various members but who is still his main band today. Additionally, Cave occasionally tours as a "solo" act - featuring only 3 or 4 other Bad Seeds as backup musicians. In 2004, his solo act backup band and he joined up to create an official new band, Grinderman. If it all sounds confusing, there's more - apparently, Grinderman sometimes opens for Cave's solo act (with backup musicians, AKA the members of Grinderman). Now that's funny.

There's a sort of mythology that has grown up around Cave over the years, and like his music it's hard to pin down. On the one hand, it's said that he was once discovered in the subway after going missing, strung out on heroin and writing lyrics in his own blood; on the other hand, he had a well publicized relationship with Australia's sweetheart Kylie Minogue. On the one hand, he's utterly gruff and unapproachable - if not outright hostile - in every interview I've ever read with him (I really liked the reason this guy gave for never wanting to meet him); on the other hand, he can be eloquent (if painfully narcissistic) in his praise for those he respects. He writes like clockwork - 8 hours a day in an office, Sundays off - and yet he's said to have fallen in love with PJ Harvey in the space of the single-take filming of this video. If you watch the video, you'll believe it.

Nick Cave is a walking manifestation of everything interesting in the Old Testament, as even a cursory look at his lyrics reveals - yet he's well-known in certain unlikely circles for his fantastic introduction to the gospel of Mark.

In looking for sources for some of the above claims, I came upon the following quote - so I'll dispense with further citation as to the myths of Cave's past:

...there are times when the truth is necessary and times when myth-making is necessary. When you're talking about rock'n'roll, myth-making is what it's all about. Who wants to know the @!$%#ing truth about Jimi Hendrix? We want to know the myth. We want to know he got on that plane to England with that electric guitar, acne cream and pink hair curlers - that's all he brought.

In the end, he's an individual in the truest sense. He defines his own interests, and he acts to satisfy them. He doesn't give a rat's ass what you think of him, his music or his dance moves - in that regard, he's Punk As @!$%# and you can feel The Birthday Party attitude reverberating even as he croons songs about love and wisteria bushes in his latter work.

The Music

I was going to try to do a comprehensive look at Cave's body of work, but with 14 studio albums plus live discs plus side projects etc etc etc that would frankly be a bit ridiculous. Instead, allow me to speak more generally. If I know me, it'll devolve into long tangents about individual tracks and sort of keep going and going and going...

Early Bad Seeds

Early Nick Cave - say, most tracks from From Her to Eternity and The Firstborn is Dead - is raw, unpolished post-punk noise. Their very first track is a bizarre cover of Cohen's Avalanche, which is an interesting choice that probably goes a long way towards contextualizing Cave's work from the very beginning.

Personally, I have a hard time with older Bad Seeds stuff. I don't much care for it - but even then, there are gems - Tupelo, which opens The Firstborn..., remains an iconic Cave classic. It juxtaposes the birth of Elvis Presley with the Second Coming of Christ, and sets the whole scene during a catastrophic flood that almost destroyed Tupelo years ago. Sound funny? Wait until you hear it, it'll chill you.

Somewhere around his fourth album, Your Funeral...My Trial, Cave started playing around with interesting new concepts - like chord changes, for instance, and if he was feeling really crazy maybe a spot of melody. Personally, I feel that his music becomes listenable around 1988's Tender Prey, with tracks like The Mercy Seat (famously covered by Johnny Cash) and Deanna, probably the "prettiest" song Cave had recorded to date.

The Bad Seeds in the 90s

Then suddenly, in 1990, Cave turned a corner somewhere. He stopped doing noisy intellectual gothic punk and started doing...I dunno, some weird @!$%#. He got a bit mellow. As he put it, "...you can roughly divide his work - the 70s and 80s is Old Testament, the 90s and onwards is New Testament. "

And you hear this shift in 1990's The Good Son and 1992's Henry's Dream. Instead of angry, thunderous rants against God, Fate and Humanity, we get a different sort of darkness - a softer darkness, with blurrier edges but a much more sinister emptiness in the middle. We get things like The Weeping Song, and yeah it can be hard to play that with a straight face but that's kind of the point. We get The Ship Song, and Straight to You, honest-to-god love songs (albeit set against, you know, the futility of temporal existence).

This is the Cave I first got into. Not the one that rages against the very fact of existence - rather, the one who who shakes his head in amusement at the futility of it all. The one who can conjure the darkest horror without raising his voice, who can make you look into your soul and realize that nothing's quite...right...in this world. At his best, Cave can melt your heart with a love song that somehow expresses everything you've ever felt that was good about life - and then undermine the whole thing with a memento mori nestled in the last verse, casting a Lovecraftian pallor over everything you thought was worth a damn.

This is the Cave that put out 1994's Let Love In, probably his best album yet - a fusion of his early energy with his new-found nuance. Check out Do You Love Me? or Red Right Hand for evidence that there is such a thing as a "horror" genre in music.

All of this darkness came to a head with 1996's seminal Murder Ballads, which brought him the fame that he frankly wasn't too interested in. He famously rejected an MTV award for his incredibly popular duet with Kylie Minogue, Where the WIld Roses Grow. It was during this period that he recorded Henry Lee with PJ Harvey, and the stage was set for the next evolution in the saga of Nick Cave.

The Piano Years: 1998-2004

In 1998, Cave's The Boatman's Call blew critics away. Gone was the rage, gone was the fire, gone was the noise - the Boatman called, and Cave sat down at his piano and answered. This album brings us such gorgeous tracks as Into My Arms and Are You The One (That I've Been Waiting For) and Lime Tree Arbor. Listen to these songs - but listen to them in the context of all of the other stuff I've linked above.

Can you hear it? That combination of complete change and yet eternal identity? Somehow, Cave's growls and screams from his earliest work are here in these beautiful love songs, and the completeness of it all is almost overwhelming.

The Boatman's Call was followed by two more albums recorded in a similar vein - both No More Shall We Part and Nocturama are heavy on the piano and light on the rage. Early Cave is no more - but he hasn't faded away or simply changed, he's evolved and you can hear it if you listen. There are some real gems on these discs, which many deride for straying too far from Cave's "true" style (I'm looking at you, Pitchfork!) Check out As I Sat Sadly By Her Side or Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow or the 15 minute continuous orgasm of Babe, I'm On Fire(part 2).

The Present: ...Neo-Gospel?

Cave has never tried to hide the deep connection that exists between his art and The Holy Bible - religiosity was always there, a curio lying conspicuously out of the way on some tracks and the very foundation of others. But it isn't until 2004's The Abattoir Blues, part of a two-disc set also containing The Lyre of Orpheus, that Cave addresses that connection blatantly.

How does he do it? By hiring The London Community Gospel Choir to sing backup on most of the tracks, that's how. "Get ready for love!" Cave melodramatically declares in the opening moments of the disc, and then the floodgates open. We have angels and demons, fire and brimstone falling from heaven against the flimsy, imperfect defenses we erect with our relationships in this life. "There is a war coming," he warns us, but we're never quite sure which side he's on.

If you put a gun to my head and forced me to choose a favorite Nick Cave album, it would be this one. The Abattoir Blues is like some sort of demented concept album where the concept is post-apocalyptic love in the face of divine genocide. Musically, lyrically and thematically I feel that this is the single most complex and satisfying disc Cave has put out - but I reserve the right to change my mind tomorrow.

But seriously - go listen to the title track and visualize the musical landscape - the experience is practically synaesthetic. Put on Nature Boy and experience young love through old eyes. Play Hiding All Away and experience a nuanced take on the pursuit of love. Every track contains echos of Cave in his early insane youth, but tempered with the nuance of his work in the late 90s. It's like each track itself is a war - between old and young, between fire and ice, between the Old Testament and the New. If you listen to these songs charitably, and try to hear it, you will - and it's astonishing.

I want to write with the same enthusiasm about Lyre of Orpheus, Abattoir's sister disc, but it would ring false. I haven't loved that one the same way. Oh, there are gorgeous tracks - if you let O Children past your defenses it'll knock you on your ass and you'll ask for more - but altogether I feel like Lyre is Midsummer Night's Dream to Abattoir's more sombre Hamlet. It's good - but it's not on the same plane.

Grinderman, Lazarus and the Future

2004 also saw the release of Grinderman, the self-titled debut from Cave's side project, and the disc is good. Real good. The No Pussy Blues will leave you wondering if you should laugh or cry, and Go Tell the Women is so overloaded with machismo that it drags its testicles on the floor when it walks. The album would be funny if it didn't play itself totally seriously - and musically, it's wonderful. The sounds are layered, complex - garage rock meets blues, tearing apart everything in front of it.

Which brings us to today. Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!! is Cave's 14th studio album with the Bad Seeds. It's raucous, it's irreverent and it's fun - if you don't believe me, you should check out the title track. It seems like, after everything else he's done, Cave is growing a sense of humor. But it's that fantastic artist's sense of humor that lets him do stuff like this with a straight face and surround it with lots of talent. The orchestrations on Dig are solid and the lyrics are as compelling as ever - it seems to be a concept album about Lazarus being resurrected in 1970's New York and having no @!$%#ing clue as to what to do with his life.

If these latest efforts are any indication, Cave has no plans to slow down or stop evolving. It's like every new album he puts out incorporates every previous album while simultaneously rewriting all of his rules. It's a mark of genius, and I can't wait to hear what's next. I understand that Grinderman is going into the studio for "something completely different" after the Bad Seeds finish this tour.

Conclusion

In about a month, I'll finally get to see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds as they tour in support of this latest album. They probably won't bring the gospel choir and I'm sure they won't bring the youthful destructive fervor - but they'll bring with them 24 years of context.

It's rare that you get to watch an individual artist of such supreme talent grow and evolve over the course of decades. Nobody - not even Cave - expected him to live through the early 80s. The sheer amounts of heroin and speed he was said to be doing should have destroyed him. Miraculously, though, he got through it - and in the process built one of the most impressive bodies of work I've been privileged to explore.

And that's not even talking about his career as a novelist or poet or screenwriter - I simply don't have the time or the space. His is a career that demands a biography, not an essay.

I'm glad I finally sat down and forced myself to write this, but I'm naturally terribly unsatisfied with it. I've done my best to communicate a bit of what's to love about one of my favorite musicians - but ultimately, unless you discover it for yourself, there's nothing I can really say, right? So, if you've gotten this far, thanks - both of you! With any luck this will encourage you to explore this remarkable artist and maybe find a few favorite tracks of your own.

Thanks for reading - please let me know what you thought of the article in the comments below!

This article is © Mykola Bilokonsky, 2008. It was a labor of love - please don't steal from it. If you like anything I've written here, please feel free to use it as long as you link back to me. I'll love you forever. Thanks!

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