Hooray
For Me!
A Friendly Rant From Captain
Spaulding
(Captain Spaulding Action Figures
Sold Separately)
TOMMY
KEENE . . . HE'S NEATO!
Tommy Keene needs a
website. I'd set one up myself if I thought that I
could design one that would do him justice. I can't,
so singing his praises in this column is the next
best thing.
Keene is the veteran
singer/songwriter/guitarist who makes the best
rock-n-roll you've never heard, but a netsearch using
his name reveals nothing more than a long line of
superlative-laden reviews of his albums in
periodicals that range from the Village Voice
to Addicted To Noise to Rolling Stone to
Meatpacker's Quarterly. Perhaps he actually has
a website out there that avoids easy detection, but I
couldn't find any such sidetrack on which to shunt my
search engine. He needs an internet clearinghouse,
either something official set up by his aunt or
next-door neighbor or manager or else a splashy
interactive cyberpalace filled with the gushy
minutiae only a true fan could supply. I have become
convinced that the measure of a man--or a woman, or a
band--who makes music is found in the quantity and
the quality of websites devoted to him. Tommy Keene
has none. He deserves better.
The meatiest item that
you can find on the web regarding Keene is his
official Matador Records bio, written by Warner
conglomerate flack Rick Gershon. Gershon, who also
wrote the liner notes to Keene's 1993 back catalog
catch-all, The Real Underground, sums up our
doughty subject's predicament in trenchant fashion:
"Ordinarily, we'd love to bury Tommy next to Von
LMO and Little Bob Story in the Forgotten Rock Legend
Hall of Fame, except that he forgot to give up (or go
metal, if there's a difference). Over the past few
years, Tommy Keene has continued to write, record,
and perform dazzling new material. At least we
[Matador, I presume--CS] were dazzled by it; every
fucking big label you can think of has sent Tommy a
rejection letter. This wouldn't be so awful, except
that several of them begin with 'Dear Timmy'."
Life is bad enough for
musicians forced to suck down the indignity cocktail
of a recording label's rejection of their music and
misspelling of their name. But it's worse when even
rock journalists stick it to you. Another Pandemonium
columnist, in a recent Goo Goo Dolls interview, spelled his name "Tommy
Keane". Toss another insulting log on the fire.
It is significant,
though, that said Goo Goo Dolls--newly-minted rock
star swells that they are--asked Keene to guest on
their new album. It brings up a point about Keene far
happier than the facts that people spell his name
wrong and that he has enough "thanks but no
thanks" memos on major-label letterheads to
wallpaper his L.A. living room. The point is that
other musicians love Tommy Keene's music. He has
toured as the guitarist/singer gunslinger-for-hire
with Velvet Crush, Adam Schmitt, and Paul Westerberg
(yes, 'mats fans, that was Tommy Keene shaking Jay
Leno's hand after your hero Paul did "Ain't Got
Me" on The Tonight Show). He was in a
one-off covers band called The Groop at this year's
Poptopia festival in L.A. with Matthew Sweet and
Velvet Crush drummer Ric Menck. Interviews with
numerous musicians farther up the notoriety foodchain
are often spiked with reverent mentions of Keene's
name. Keene is one of a generous 
fistful of artists who have had
Peter Buck guest on their songs who make better music
than does REM. People from bands like Wilco, Shoes,
and Gin Blossoms pitched in on Keene's latest album, Isolation
Party--and I'm guessing that Keene did not have
to twist their arms.
Gershon, Keene's
tongue-in-cheek Boswell, plays up in hilarious
fashion this angle of household names brushing up
against Keene. In the Matador bio, he has Jeff Beck
presenting young Tommy-boy with a Fender Esquire
following a Yardbirds gig in the sixties. A drunk
member of Teenage Fanclub begs Keene to let him carry
his guitar case. And, after touring with Velvet Crush
as the opening act for Oasis in England, he has Noel
Gallagher say of Keene, "Who's the clever fucker
with the Telecaster?...Bollocks, but 'ee's not
half-bad...bastard!"
Perhaps it would have
been easier for Keene to get over the hump of mass
acclaim were he of a different era and nationality.
Make him a rock-n-roller in early-sixties Britain,
and he wouldn't even need to change his name to fit
in with such Brit idols of the day as Marty Wilde,
Johnny Gentle, Georgie Fame, and Billy Fury. Of
course, the Queen's subjects are much more fond of
the word "keen" than are we Yanks; there's
no doubt that if he has come to the attention of
British pop fans (bet on it) then they have already
had a field day in punning his name. It's just more
fodder for that theoretical Tommy Keene website,
kids!
Keene plays the same
tough-but-tender guitar pop as Westerberg and his
former Replacements associates, albeit in a less
ramshackle fashion. Unlike his recent Minneapolitan
employer, however, Keene has not seen fit to turn
down the level on his amps--he rocks, if anything,
harder than he did when he was a callow lad back in
Maryland. Gershon describes Keene's eighties work
with the original Tommy Keene Group as sounding like
Alex Chilton fronting The Jam. It's an apt
description (if, given Paul Weller's ego, an
improbable one) of the band's concise power and
Keene's disillusioned but tuneful love songs. It also
fits Keene's voice, a jaded-whiz-kid baritone that
bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the Memphis
master. Keene certainly, like every other recording
artist worth his or her salt nowadays, knows the
entire Big Star catalog by heart. However, heretical
as it may sound, his version of Chilton's "Hey!
Little Child" surpasses the original. Keene's
other covers (live or recorded) reflect his
preternaturally cool tastes: The Who's
"Tattoo" and "It's Not True" (two
of Townshend's best songs ever); the Rolling Stones'
"When the Whip Comes Down"; Roxy Music's
"All I Want Is You"; the Flamin' Groovies'
"Shake Some Action"; and Mission of Burma's
"Einstein's Day". The distance between
picking good songs to cover and writing your own
worth covering by other people is apparently not that
long a space for Keene.
Perhaps the admiration
of his more celebrated peers isn't just because of
Keene's ever-infectious guitar playing. He also
appears to be that rarest of recording biz phenomena,
the flaming-nice-guy musician. Perhaps two decades'
worth of having the rug pulled out from under your
rock star aspirations sands the abrasiveness off of
your ego; I don't know, but in an interview in the
latest issue of Bucketfull of Brains Keene
said that he was out of copies of his long-deleted
Geffen album Based On Happy Times because he
gave one of his last copies to Westerberg after the
latter's ex-wife took off with his entire record
collection. Hey, that's a selfless act for a real
human being, to say nothing of a rock star.
The Geffen sojourn is
not a happy subject for Keene. After a late-seventies
youth spent in the company of one of the D.C. area's
best New Wave bands, The Razz, Keene made a series of
remarkably mature and solid solo recordings for the
indie Park Avenue and Dolphin labels that were heard
by, oh, about fifteen people. They included signature
songs such as "Places That Are Gone" and
"Back To Zero Now" (the latter is so
pin-your-ears-back cool that it approaches
"September Gurls" or "Couldn't I Just
Tell You" territory). One of those fifteen
people must have worked for megalabel Geffen, though,
because Keene climbed aboard that gravy train as
their Next Big Thing in 1986. Despite the fact that
he already had an album (Songs From the Film)
in the can produced by estimable boardmen T-Bone
Burnett and Don Dixon, Geffen in classic big-label
fashion wanted something that had its finger more on
the pulse of that particular millisecond. This
entailed Geoff Emerick (Beatles, Elvis Costello)
having Keene rerecord all of the album's songs in
some Caribbean studio and then completely messing up
the mix while Keene lounged unaware on the beach.
This was followed by a stint with eighties auteur du
jour Bob Clearmountain for the Run Now EP
which, unfortunately, was recorded after
Clearmountain's trademark boomy clutter had already
had its fifteen minutes of "Hey, Jagger wants me
to remix a Stones album!" fame. Then came Based
On Happy Times, recorded in Memphis' legendary
Ardent Studios with house vets Joe Hardy and John
Hampton and containing the usual pile of magnificent
songs Keene seems to be able to write upon demand. It
wasn't happy times for Geffen, however, who had run
out of patience with the fact that he wasn't
outselling his labelmate Cher and dropped him.
He has spent this
decade recording for Matador (although the
aforementioned early-years comp The Real
Underground appeared on Alias). His releases
include the 1992 EP Sleeping On a Rollercoaster,
1996's full-length Ten Years After, and this
year's thirteen-song gem Isolation Party. All
of them have done nothing but burnish the man's
reputation as a rocker who understands how to marry a
solid song to powerful playing and passionate
singing. However, these are all one-shots; Keene
makes a demo, Matador loves it, and puts it out.
There's no long-term guarantees, but perhaps Keene
has just been around the block too many times to put
much stock in multiple-album deals. I don't worry for
his future on any label cool enough to also feature
acts like the Liquor Giants, Mark Eitzel, Pavement,
Guided By Voices, Silkworm, and Liz Phair. Still, it
would be nice to know that if Keene grows another
bumper crop of songs he's guaranteed to have an
outlet for them.
I had the pleasure of
seeing Keene and his three crackerjack bandmates for
the first time in July at a homey Chicago pub called
Schuba's. It was one of those bittersweet occasions
when you know that you're seeing one of the best
shows you've seen in years and yet there are very few
people sharing it with you. There were no more than a
hundred or so faithful in attendance, yet each is a
witness that Keene & Co. rocked the house so hard
with numbers like "Turning On Blue",
"Battle Lines", and "On the
Runway" that splinters were flying out of the
bar's empaneled walls. It was sweaty, and it was
loud, beautiful rock-n-roll. If Keene plays your town
in the near future, do yourself a favor and blow off
the senior prom, cancel your vacation, get a
babysitter for the kids, or, heck, just abandon them.
Do not miss him live. And hie thee hence to your
local CD purveyor and nab whatever discs happen to be
available from the Keene corpus.
If he can't rule the
known universe, then Tommy Keene should at least have
his own website. Now, that would be one guestbook I'd
happily sign.
CAPTAIN SPAULDING
EPILOGUE
There
is joy in Mudville after all. Our intrepid Pandomaestro Dave Liljengren managed
to track down a Tommy Keene website that is alive and
well. It's called Dave's Tommy Keene Webpage, and it
can be found here in all its multilinked glory.
The proprietor, Dave Douglas, is a real fan who seems
to be in regular contact with Keene. The site also
links to yet another Keene site that appears to be dormant.
Douglas' site, however, is exhaustive and includes
numerous links to reviews of Keene's albums and shows
in various publications.
Douglas' site also
helped me figure out the connection between Keene and
the Goo Goo Dolls, apart from their mutual friendship
with Westerberg. In an online chat saved on the site
Keene reveals bowling as his hobby away from music.
The Goo Goo Dolls, good Buffalo boys that they are,
are avid bowlers who hit the lanes every day even
when they are on tour; singer/songwriter/guitarist
Johnny Rzeznik's father was a champion on Buffalo's
perennially popular morning show Bowling For
Dollars (which the Captain's grandmother in
western New York still watches). Bowling is the true
sport of rock-n-rollers, not golf or softball; it's a
blue-collar activity, it involves drinking and
wearing retro clothing, it strengthens the fingers of
guitarists, and it doesn't involve such anti-rocker
elements as fresh air and sunshine.
The existence of the
Keene website is the good news. The bad news can be
found in the same online chat with Keene. There are
dark hints (mostly fed by worried diehards) that
Keene might call it a day and quit making music if
his cult following stays this small. That would be a
damn shame of the first degree. If you don't feel up
to designing another Tommy Keene website (and the
more, the merrier, as far as websites go), do both
yourself and the artist a favor and buy his CDs. The
guy is a rocker and songwriter of the first rank, and
I do not steer you wrong. - CS
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Spaulding:
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