MyVil

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Clockwork Pinata


A Clockwork Piñata
The Mollys' Only a Story
by Don Allred
August 16 - 22, 2000 Issue 33

Once upon a time in the west

The Mollys
Only a Story
Apolkalips Now
Buy

Go right in, they've stopped charging cover: "Tha ball-oons, are all falling
a-wa-ay, you can see them slipping down in the corners like the day." That's
Nancy McCallion, commencing Only a Story, the new Mollys album. "They're
pulling up the dance floor in the ha-ah-all"—her "small" voice always gets in
the keyhole. "You think you've found your Elvis, then you watch him choke and
fall." Sure enough, here comes another Molly, Kevin Schramm, bound to fall
like a King Kong Presley, limping and wheezing (right past her!) like an
accordionist shouldn't. Sometimes he pauses, still grinding away, moments piling up.
Then he lurches on.

I know: he's just making sure we really get "Don't Come On Strong and
Run"—Mollys don't coddle no Good Intentions. Tucson's Mollys ARE
Arizpanicstential Celtic Country Polka —which, for the past decade, has usually added up to "Rock'n'Roll by Other Means." 
So I'm bumfuzzled by this opening song, which gets funnier, more Mollyfried, but settles into/for a heretofore uncharacteristically "oh well" kind of groove.
 I keep waiting for it to take off, like "Kathleen" on 1995's This Is My Round: "I seen the girl you're living with, a-climbing up the hill, she had a pack upon her back a-picking through the rocks, and she and your old milking goat were dragging a big box." Not exactly Anna Nicole Smith in your
DeLorean, Pappy, but close enough for these quarters.
 Don't mistake Mollyspeople for low-expectations-having, though. If so, they wouldn't be coming so far just to start all over—and over again, like Kathleen. Her kind ride righteous orecarts to the last exit and start walkin'. No hosses in these westerns—plenty drumming down the street, though---often driven by co-lead throat Catherine Zavala, oi!-ing and oy-ing all the way from London, where she and McCallion long ago did behold the Pogues and Los Lobos on the same bill---(CZ also flexing x shivering vocal timbers-timbres especially on the very live limited edition 1996 Wanking Out West, http://www.mollys.com only)---with chief scribe McC. tin-whistling daylight through yer bullet holes. Why? Well, as 1997's Moon Over the Interstate puts it, "I want to polka, but nobody polkas alone."
The polka connection is key here, no matter the moment's rhythm, and songs can just keep breathing like an accordion, even when it's not playing.

Looking for a new partner? You might find a new dance—or find yourself
drastically realigning an old one. 1995's Hat Trick ska-pogos an impossibly bright
"Ode to Joy" riff 'til it's Ludwigging "All Around My Hat," willing a husband's
desertion toward Golden Opportunity: She used to know some other men?! On
Moon..., a more cautious soul looks harder before leaping through a
sand-surfing-with-Vikings pipeline, into "And I won't settle for anything less, till I see
what your love has, do-oh-oh-ne." In the new "Don't Want to Outlive That Man Too
Long," McCallion takes Western Swing through scary places it rarely admits to going.
She uses the bad stuff (now including that occasional "Oh well" sense) as a motorvator to whip up the good stuff. So maybe any new glint of jade is just age's cornplasters sticking better to midthirtysomethings who've always
portrayed Cool Old Broads so well.

Into the headphones: "Only a Story" herself. Tango-istically inclined. Plenty
atmosphere: dim blue cold dry digital AZ a.c. Sure, Schramm's accordion's here
(leaves falling on cue), Dan Sorenson's skull-wrinkling (now skulking) bass.
Gary Mackender's tapping and scraping a snare. He co-wrote this song with McCallion,
they're the main two you hear. A woman is listing the steps of seduction.
She's a tour guide, a hunter, a living display. "It's only a story," she keeps
singing so you know that she knows it—you know that the more that she knows it,
the more she knows it just can't be true.
Everything stops but the drum. But eventually she resumes. "For you were my
thing, and I followed that thing, night and day." She's counting
silently—through the guy, the ideal, the process, the story they made up together, handed
each other. "Let's go at this thing one last time."
Her eyes close, but I'm wise. Because here's where I can always draw a breath
and say, "Yeah, I see your jewels, Honey—tick tick tick." Anything
this clocklike is all too easy to watch, from whatever distance. But meanwhile the rhythm
continues to wear through her waiting, like it wears through mine, like it could
wear through all creation, to time to think once again: more likely the
beat's only the winding-down, tenacious, telltale heart of Story. Yet somehow, tonight, in the
middle line of the chorus ("Sleep, little darling, s-l-e-e-e-e-p") McCallion begins to wail
that last word, whereupon I suddenly remember another chorus, from Moon...:
"D-a-a-a-n-c-e with me Johnny, for so in love am I," sailing repeatedly out  of ever-shifting, unbidden, inescapable, murder scene, courtroom spectacle, chopping the ripple of  dreams, memories, afterimages (including mysteries, but never far enough from the evening news, and personal re-runs of a "Tramp Steamer," sailing to exciting prospects in America, where one's daughter exits her car in the dark, keys held like a weapon, the better to make it to the front door, sometimes.)
Trying to touch something—maybe one more last round will push through to everything, anything else, and be done with it.

So Only a Story's title cut winds up sounding even more like it did as I
left: fearless, dissolving. Yeah, she got me. Now I keep listening for the witch
from track seven in every song, and I hear—more than before. Even in the one I
thought I understood (and still love) best.
Mariachi horns turn around to greet us calmly. "I swallowed the poison, I got
on the airplane"; "My Manda" (sung and co-written by Catherine Zavala) is in progress. A "mule" is carrying cocaine into the United States from Colombia, so "the son of my son can rise from the dust in the streets." She's tough, angry, set—in the plan, in the scenes of her life—always adding up to this
present. She sees the cities below her, the clouds alongside; she feels the rubber tear, the cocaine burn; she bears down. Everything is contained, and contains her. She continues flying on, past any expected Tragi-Glorious Climax. The horns just give a final nod, and that's it.

Pushing notes through noses, nooses, earwax, whatever's in the way: I 
think of the Mollys (now minus Zavala and Mackender, plus new electric
folk-blues-rock guitarist-vocalist Danny Krieger and drummer Marx Loeb, since Story's release)as still tromping along, stealing that sign from
Lonely Street, crunching past an
old man with no small talk: "But now we're a country of ser-vi-ces, ain't
noo-body serr-vicin' meeee." Who nevertheless, like most Mollyspeople, has "had" a
few friends: "And one of them, Jo-Leene . . . " Sing along now! " . . . and
then the young man said come on with me. . . " (Uh, sir? Oh, sure thing,
kiddo—after you.)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Mollys play the Rodeo Bar August 20.
(comments on the Mollys' Trouble incl. in this round-up of '03 releases: https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2004/03/even-more-guest-mentalism-from-don.html)(subsequent McCallion and Zavala albums---none with each other, alas, but all still worthy of all these "mixed-button Accordion-Americans," according to my 2004 comments, kicking off Mollys-related coverage in  The Freelance Mentalists archives:
McCallion, Take A Picture of Mehttps://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2011/01/hand-down-your-head-tom-doobie-main.html  McCallion, Go To Ground: https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2021/01/nscene-in-submeme-country-etc-ballot.html  Zavala/Minute2Minute, Postcards From El Bossa: https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2017/01/from-lifes-other-side-2016-releases.html)

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