On an Alex Chilton bootleg called Starcrossed, there's a suite of songs recorded at a Manhattan rock club sometime in 1977 or '78. The singer, supported by a small band, is playing oldies to a small crowd -- Porter Waggoner's "The Rubber Room," Dusty Springfield's "The Look of Love," some Everly Brothers, and Carl Perkins. By this point in time, Chilton has been through the industry mill: He's known success as the 16-year-old lead singer for the Box Tops ("The Letter") and failure fronting the Memphis power-pop also-rans Big Star (three acclaimed but unsuccessful albums). He's less than 30 years old and sings as if his career has been a sour joke.
To open this round of postmodern nostalgia, he's chosen "Past, Present and Future," by the Shangri-Las. Released in 1966, the original had missed the Top 40 by a mile; effectively, it spelled the end of the group's brief life on the charts. The vocal trio from Queens, New York, had had hits with "Leader of the Pack," "Remember (Walking in the Sand)," "I Can Never Go Home Anymore," a few others: sweeping, desperately emotional radioscapes in which orchestras, sound effects, and wailing vocals gave grimness and grandeur to stories of teenage trauma and premature death. The Shangri-Las made true pop opera, and they were magnificent.
But "Past, Present and Future" was almost a self-parody. All the familiar elements came back dressed as gimmicks: dolorous narration, a waltz-time interlude, the solipsistic romance of doom. It was only the singing of Mary Weiss that kept kitsch from taking over. Her voice was cracked at the edges, and her hopelessness sounded too thick and unglamorous to register as a pop diva's fatuous showboating. In an act of some bravery, Weiss took an embarrassing lyric, stood dead-center of a musical setting that begged for parody, and made the whole thing mean something -- by, I imagine, never once assuming that either she or her audience was superior to the emotions the record sought to exploit.
Which brings us to the '70s. Alex Chilton's performance of "Past, Present and Future" is, for anyone who has ever enjoyed either the singer or the song, painful. Not because the music is so bad -- though it's not good -- but because of a particularly rancid bit of interaction between Chilton and his audience.
"The past -- " he begins. Several audience members recognize the solemn utterance from years before, and already they're laughing. The Shangri-Las? No way will they be asked to take this seriously.
"The present -- " Chilton drags himself through the song's images of lost innocence and noble heartbreak, doubly absurd in his mouth since they were written for a female. The laughs are more continuous now, little landmines tripped by every tiptoeing lyrical inanity. But stronger than anything audible is a fog of pointlessness that descends upon the performance, as if the song were an outdated gag that, once begun, performer and audience must nonetheless belabor to its thudding punch line. Chilton's voice grinces and squirms with self-consciousness, yet he hangs onto feeling, just barely. Primed for disaster, the performance could still go either way -- forward into transformative drama, or backward into smug, self-consuming irony.
Guess which way it goes? You can pinpoint the moment Chilton gives up trying to force anything on this audience. "Don't try to touch me," he says to the person who, in the song, loves him and wishes to bring him back to life. Someone in the front row finds this hilarious and hoots loudly.
Chilton's heart, I'd guess, shrivels right there. "'Cause that will never ... never happen / That'll never happen again, that's what it'll never do." The final repetition is tossed off with the smirk of a fifth-rate lounge singer in deepest Reno. This is irony at its lowest.
When he reaches the final verse and the song's worst lyric -- "A tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow basket" -- he can't rush it fast enough. The last lines are an embarrassed blur. The punch line thuds, and the miserable performance ends.
Chilton offers, "Old Shangri-Las tune there -- "
"Ouch!" someone merrily shouts. "That one hurt."
"Yeah, really," the singer agrees, sadly.
No one who has heard him sing with the Box Tops or Big Star -- felt the vigor and glee of "Soul Deep" or the empathetic despair of "Holocaust" -- can avoid sensing that Chilton despises himself as he sings "Past, Present and Future" to this wretched room. We know that Chilton believes in pop -- or used to; that he believes in its power to deepen feeling and to redeem the merely ironic. But now -- hard on the breakup of Big Star, long since disillusioned by brief fame, disgusted by lingering failure -- his belief is battered and tenuous. His own desire is insufficient to make this performance work: He needs his listeners to meet him halfway, to likewise want to believe. And they won't do it. Slumped in their chairs, they believe in nothing but their own superiority to whatever might try to reach them from the stage.
Which brings us to 2004. Neko Case, a singer-songwriter from Virginia by way of Tacoma, is one of the brightest comets now flying across the indie-rock sky. While fronting the touted (and boring) alt-pop band the New Pornographers, she has also been making solo albums, and they've been consistently wondrous -- a rollicking, dramatic brand of neotraditionalism, mixing country and folk ingredients in a rock-and-roll pot. Case's newest release, a montage of live performances from Chicago and Toronto called The Tigers Have Spoken (Anti), may not be her best album -- that would be Blacklisted, from 2002 -- but it is her most purely ravishing. There isn't a bad or arbitrary noise on it; Case is backed by a tight but resounding band; and the whole thing is just over a half-hour long -- it leaves you keyed up and wanting more, the way LPs used to.
One of its high points is a headlong rendition of "Train from Kansas City," once upon a time a hit for the Shangri-Las. Plot summary: Singer assures new lover she'll end it with old lover, soon to arrive on the titular train. Another stale scenario ripe for millennial mirth, but Case and her band go at the song as if one of them wrote it last night and knew they'd written the best song ever. The drummer hits the chugging rhythm with such joyous precision it can only come from love, and the guitarist's chimes are right on time. Case's voice, usually a husky, humorous, knowing instrument issuing from somewhere behind her Virginia jawbone, here emerges throaty and determined, full of heart and emotional bravery.
The performance is pure thrill and leaves you ringing. But it would be bogus to say that it lacks irony. Its power doesn't lie in any illusion that the singer is a real woman with a real problem, as if a brief pop tune were a documentary short. Case knows the song's soap-opera conceit comes from another era, and she knows her audience knows; to this extent, the performance cannot help but be ironic, aware of itself. But the singer cheats irony by trusting and holding tight to the song's emotion, not its text.
As in most great pop and rock, the lyrics, admit it, really don't matter much, except insofar as they communicate a generalized sense of conflict and anxiety. That anxiety gives the song its fuel, but the propulsion is in the performance -- and spontaneous performance, when it works, is physical drive shaped and disciplined by technique and artifice. It has nothing to do with the reality with which we come into the performance already familiar, and everything to do with the new, immediate reality the performers are inventing together, at this moment, in the heedless faith that it will be good and that their audience will recognize it as such.
So Neko Case, unlike Alex Chilton with "Past, Present and Future," sings the Shangri-Las as if it never occurred to her that such feelings as their songs contain and catalyze should not be taken seriously. And throughout The Tigers Have Spoken, her audience has no trouble riding right along with her. The response and vitality of these small crowds is summed up halfway through the torch-and-twang ballad "Hex": a piece of loose, jubilant country harmonizing -- a synchronized heartland howl -- arches upward as if into the higher reach of some silo in the sky, the instruments back off for a moment, and a simple cry of "Yeah!" comes from a love-struck boy near the stage. You know how he feels.
Now, in fairness, there have surely been nights when Neko Case gave in to irony, and nights when Alex Chilton fought hard to engage his audience emotionally -- and succeeded. The Shangri-Las song he chose was much tougher to deliver convincingly; he was almost asking to be hooted. Maybe we just got Chilton on a bad night and Case on a good one. Maybe that's why his Shangri-Las cover remains an obscure bootleg and why hers is a downloadable teaser all over the Internet.
But an artist's deployment of irony as a tool for moving an audience -- not as a blanket for artist and audience to hide beneath, safe from feeling and failure -- is one of the many things that determine whether a performer has a good night or a bad night. Racing through "Train from Kansas City," Neko Case uses irony lovingly, zestfully, and with willful intent -- as all young, bold performers with everything before them, failure as well as success, ought to. She uses it not as nostalgia or parody but as a way of asking how the emotional signifiers of the pop past -- those olden, golden days before irony was perceived as a tool at all -- can still be made to work today, when it sometimes seems that irony is the only tool we have.
But made to work as what? As fuel, maybe, for that long ride into the night, which, as pop fans, we're all taking. On the best of nights, an artist and her audience can bring that ride to life, make it something real: can build the train, stoke the train, and ride the train all the way back to Kansas City -- where pop's promised land awaits and where irony is only a part of life, not its past, present, or future.
Devin McKinney is the author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
