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 Night Moves
Will the Shins’ new Wincing the Night Away change your life? It just might.
By Mikael Wood
Plenty of hip young rock bands can brag about having movie stars in their audience, but fewer are able to claim movie characters as fans. That’s what the Shins can say, though: When Natalie Portman’s Sam meets Zach Braff’s Andrew in a doctor’s waiting room in 2004’s Garden State, she puts her headphones on his head and announces that a tune by the Portland-based quartet will change his life. And so it does: In no time, Andrew has ditched his retiring, sensitive-guy attitude and taken to running through airports in order to kiss beautiful women. As it happens, Garden State changed more than Braff’s character’s life; it also turned the Shins into one of the most popular indie-rock groups in America. We called front man James Mercer shortly before the release of the band’s third album, Wincing the Night Away, and asked him about the warmth of Hollywood’s embrace.
Was the exposure Garden State gave your band immediately apparent? Was it something you could notice in real time? We certainly noticed that we had a bigger audience. When Garden State came out and became a hit, we saw our record sales increase, and we got invitations to go to colleges and play at their end-of-the-year festivals — things that hadn’t happened before. It changed our whole level.
Did it transform the composition of your audience? Something like that opens a door to listeners who don’t spend a lot of time on the Internet or shop at independent record stores, the typical ways indie-rock bands find new fans. Well, we’ve always had a very eclectic mix of people; there are just more of them now. But I suppose there definitely must be new sorts of fans. Maybe they listen to alternative radio but not to podcasts or to college radio — people who aren’t avid indie-rock concertgoers.
Is that a gratifying development? I certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. There are those times when good music is appealing to a broad spectrum of personalities. But the idea that we have a broader audience hasn’t changed the way that I write songs. It’s more about people finding a way to learn not only about the Shins but also about the fact that there is this whole other section of the music industry that is thriving. And all it requires is a little bit of attention and curiosity, and you can discover this pop music that’s maybe not quite as slick or as glossed-over as the mainstream stuff.
Wincing the Night Away is surprisingly un-slick. I half expected you guys to capitalize on the Garden State renown and do a really straightforward alt-rock record. But you didn’t; the new stuff is kind of spooky and weird. My intentions, I guess, were to just sort of fully flesh out the songs that I had put together. “Sleeping Lessons,” for instance, is probably one of the stranger songs on the record. The main riff could be a bass line from an old rock-and-roll song, but because of the dissonant note that it hits, it has this modern feel. So I turned it into this keyboard sound and then started trying to figure out what to do with it. And it just led itself down that path, which is the way I always write. Not much of it is really intentional.
Sometimes an accessible song with an off-kilter touch is more compelling than … Something totally crazy? I think so too. Wilco is one of those bands that seem to do that pretty well, where the basic structure of the song is familiar in some way, but then they do crazy production ideas and it’s really effective. I love the Beatles and the masters of pop writing, but I also love the fact that a band like the Beatles was so willing to experiment and do these things that were maybe more cerebrally entertaining.
Is making those two sides mesh something you can improve at with experience? I think so. I think I’ve certainly gotten more intuitive about the whole process. It’s strange, though, because you look at the careers of so many pop artists, and they just seem to dwindle so quickly; 20 years into it, they’re doing such mundane, boring stuff. I suppose they ride such a wave of luxury and of all their wishes coming true that maybe it just makes them lazy. I don’t know — I hope it never happens to me.
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 U2
U218 Singles
(Island)
With such an extensive history under its belt, U2 has plenty of material to cram into an 18-track collection (including two new songs). So they’ve chosen to focus on what made them big: Bono’s fervent vocals; the Edge’s radiant, reverberant guitars; and the rock-steady rhythm section of bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. Most of the larger-than-life tunes that made the group a household name are here. They can be rousing (“Pride [in the Name of Love]”), romantic (“New Year’s Day”), melancholy (“With or Without You”), frantic (“Vertigo”), and introspective (“Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of”). And their edgy new collaboration with Green Day, a cover of the Skids’ “The Saints Are Coming,” is an excellent addition that brings together two like-minded politically if sonically different entities. U218 Singles works best for new or casual longtime listeners who want a good representation of the group’s biggest hits. You can’t fault a majority of the songs here. That said, it seems like a definitive double-disc compilation is what really needs to come next. — Bryan Reesman
 America
Here & Now
(Burgundy Records)
America has come a long way. Even during the peak of the band’s early 1970s chart success — with songs like “A Horse with No Name” and “Ventura Highway” — the group was dismissed as little more than a competent Eagles rip-off, relying on a peaceful and easy formula of pleasant harmonies and mellow musical vibes. Yet, 30 years later, America has improbably become a cool band, swept up in a growing trend of hipster musicians and fans reconsidering once-reviled soft-rock acts. How else to explain the lineup of contributors for the band’s latest LP, a roster of talent that includes modern-, alt-, and indie-rock notables like Ryan Adams, Ben Kweller, and members of Nada Surf and My Morning Jacket, as well as producers like Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne) and James Iha (Smashing Pumpkins). While the guest list is impressive, it does little to improve the quality of this double-disc set — one CD of new studio material and another of live versions of their biggest hits. Original members Dewey Bunnell and Gerry Beckley are still in good voice, but they add little to the material here, which includes unremarkable covers of Nada Surf’s “Always Love” and My Morning Jacket’s “Golden.” Although it’s occasionally interesting to hear the music generations mingle — as with “Ride On,” the band’s duet with Adams and Kweller — Here and Now proves a far more interesting idea on paper than in practice. — Bob Bozorgmehr
 Lee Hazlewood
Cake or Death
(Ever Records)
As a producer, songwriter, and musical guru, Lee Hazlewood is one of the few people who can legitimately claim to be both a popular hit-maker and a cult icon. In the 1950s, his studio inventions gave an otherworldly quality to early rock and roll; in the ’60s, he played Svengali to a young Nancy Sinatra, siring a succession of chart hits. After releasing a string of moody albums as a solo artist, he moved to Scandinavia in the ’70s, fading from sight. Following two decades of self-imposed exile, he reemerged in the mid-’90s at the insistence of a new generation of alternative-rock musicians and fans who’d discovered his odd but affecting catalog. Hazlewood’s unlikely comeback has been slowed as he’s battled cancer for the past few years, but he did manage to finish what he calls his final album. Taking its title from an Eddie Izzard stand-up bit, Cake or Death features a batch of newly penned Hazlewood compositions and revamped versions of some of his classics (“These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” “Some Velvet Morning”). Produced by Hazlewood and recorded in Stockholm, Paris, Nashville, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, the disc is a mixture of high camp, low comedy, and genuinely moving moments, like the album-closing “T.O.M. (The Old Man).” If it does prove to be his swan song, the album is a fine valediction for one of pop music’s most imaginative and irascible figures. — B.B.
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MISTER SINISTER
You might not recognize Michael Emerson’s name, but there is a good chance you’re a little bit scared of him. By Bryan Reesman
While the seemingly mild-mannered Michael Emerson has spent his life working in the theater, first in the South and then on Broadway, he has recently become widely recognized through his sinister film and television roles. The man with the unnerving stare won an Emmy for his portrayal of the alleged serial killer William Hinks on The Practice in 2001; then he landed a pivotal role as one of Jigsaw’s pawns in the original Saw and nabbed a humorous villain part in The Legend of Zorro. But his portrayal of Ben Linus (a.k.a. Henry Gale), the creepy leader of the Others on the hit ABC series Lost, has made Emerson a household face, if not a household name. We caught up with TV’s most unlikely bad guy.
When people stop you on the street, what are their reactions? People are funny. They have mixed-up feelings about me and the character. They like to make a great show of fear or terror, but it’s sort of mixed up with a case of the giggles. They just don’t know what their reaction is. They discover that they have been delighted to be frightened by me all this time, and now suddenly they have to decide whether it’s the character or the actor that they’re confronted with.
You’re very good at playing very sinister characters, but you bring this humanity to them that occasionally elicits sympathy. That’s all the pleasure of playing a villain. I tend not to think of them in terms of villains. I just try to tune in to what they’re trying to accomplish. Even with William Hinks, there’s nothing playable in the evil or the amorality of the character. What’s playable are things like, what does he take pride in? To be precise was very important to William Hinks. That came out in all his testimony. He forgets that he is being very precise in the dismemberment of other humans. He just appreciates his sort of craftsmanship. So if you find the positive mind-set of the character, that is disturbing to the audience and also fun to play. But I think it’s really strange that I’ve ended up playing such sinister characters for the screen, because I’m not remotely sinister myself, and in the world of the theater, which is where I’ve spent most of my career, I never play anything like that. I play lots of goofy characters. I do a lot of the classics. It’s just funny — the perception people have of you and the ways they’ll position you.
You often play people who are not who they appear to be. I guess the people who cast me for the camera are playing the tension between what I look like and what they’re suggesting I’m capable of doing. I have kind of a harmless look, I guess …
Not anymore! I guess that’s true. These big, rough-looking guys will stop me on the street and say, “Oh man, you are scaring me.” I’m thinking, What’s wrong with this picture? Guys who could eat me for breakfast are afraid of my character on the screen. People want there to be something out there that they can be afraid of, but it’s contained and it’s fictional.
Do you think somebody who is small but psychologically intimidating is just as scary as someone who is big, brawny, and stupid? Yeah. Maybe that’s a kind of archetypal fear in American culture, because we’ve always put such premium on deeds rather than words, on physical strength, being stoic, being the hero, being the cowboy, so we worry about the little guys who talk too much. America has a deep mistrust of being verbal, so we kind of like our villains to be verbal. It reinforces prejudice that we already hold.
You recently were in a movie called Jumping Off Bridges, in which you played a man who’d lost his wife to suicide and his daughter in a car accident. It was one I couldn’t refuse. A young woman [Kat Candler] I had taught Shakespeare to years ago in Jacksonville, Florida, [became] quite a good screenwriter and director in her own right. She lives in Austin, Texas. She sent the script to my agent. I thought it was so spare and grown-up that it would be really a nice thing to do. I liked the idea that we had completed some kind of circle. It was really different for me to play such a mild, everyday kind of character.
We’ve been left with a cliff-hanger on Lost. Are there any secrets you can reveal? What I should say is that I probably know only slightly more than you do. I only know what I see in the script, so I’m maybe two or three scripts ahead of you. But the drama in the operating room is ongoing, and I think I can also tell you that while Ben is incapacitated, a power struggle will begin to happen within the Others community. There’s a new character coming along that may be as scary as Ben. As if Juliet weren’t scary enough …
Will I be kidnapped by the Others after this interview? No, no. We still don’t know where the Others fall on the scale of good and bad. In the season two finale, Ben said that they were the good guys. Although he’s a bit of an actor, I don’t think he’s a liar, so I think he believes that.
If they’re the good guys, they have a funny way of showing it. Well, we don’t know what their master agenda is, do we? The Others seem to be living in extraordinary circumstances. They seem to be a people at war with a formidable enemy, but we don’t know who that enemy is yet. They seem to have a mission, and maybe all these things they’re doing are important. Maybe they’re trying to save mankind somehow, and we just don’t know how they’re doing it.
You’ve joked that you don’t get pursued by paparazzi. Has that changed? I don’t really get paparazzi. I’ve noticed the last couple of weeks that I get stopped on the street more by viewers, but I don’t have cameramen around. I never see those people. I keep kind of a low profile.
Do you think they’re afraid of you? I hope they are! [Laughs]
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The Mogul in a Dress
Tyler Perry outsmarted movie studios with a series of low-budget films that were big at the box office. Now he’s taking on television.
By Ken Parish Perkins
There’s a love fest happening with Madea, the trash-talking, fists-flying grandma the size of a city bus. Millions have flocked to the stage plays and big-screen life lessons masquerading as urban family adventures. So many gladly plopped down $23.95 for the 272-page journal of Madea wit, wisdom, and wisecracks that Don’t Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings: Madea’s Uninhibited Commentaries on Love and Life easily raced to the New York Times best-seller list for hardcover nonfiction.
Of course, she is really a he. Tyler Perry, in a wig, dress, and stockings — and with a walk that resembles a six-foot-five linebacker navigating high heels — is writer, performer, and Madea architect. He’s a self-professed “womanologist,” whose insight and inspiration come from the hours he spent in women’s clothing stores and beauty shops, dragged there as a little boy by a mother hoping to keep him out of harm’s way.
What has made Perry’s exploits extraordinary isn’t necessarily how he’s managed to turn what’s essentially a gimmick (big man in a dress — how original is that?) into a lucrative franchise — though that’s impressive, too — but how he’s done it by deliberately sidestepping the usual paths. His stage plays, usually about faith and redemption and tinged with gospel and soul music, weren’t ever meant for Broadway but for the so-called chitlin’ circuit, an off-the-beaten-path network of theaters that cater to black, faith-based audiences yearning to whoop and holler. He used the enormous success of the stage plays to leverage a sweet deal with Lionsgate to get Madea on film and in theaters.
Diary of a Mad Black Woman earned more than $50 million and Madea’s Family Reunion nearly $70 million. Since they only cost about $5 million to make, his films are a bargain to Lionsgate, which will distribute Why Did I Get Married and A Jazz Man’s Blues after it puts Daddy’s Little Girls into theaters on Valentine’s Day.
Perry’s latest feat of Houdini magic, though, could turn out to be his craftiest yet.
Situation comedies made for television usually come from the same stock in trade: Network buys sitcom it likes from a studio, finds a decent time slot, promotes it like mad, and then, with fingers crossed, hopes the forces of nature all converge for a big, sloppy hit.
Perry didn’t want to go that way.
He saw a different route in syndication, which is to go for the morning and early evening airtimes that local and independent stations fill with reruns of network shows like Friends and Everybody Loves Raymond.
First-run shows in syndication are almost always talk shows, like Oprah and The Ellen DeGeneres Show, or judge shows. Not since Harry and the Hendersons, about a Bigfoot-like creature, has a show had even modest success in first-run syndication. Harry aired for three seasons in the early 1990s, when there was considerably less competition on television.
But don’t bet against Perry. House of Payne, a traditional multicamera series about a firefighter who moves back into his parents’ home with his two kids after his drug-addicted wife accidentally burns down his house, aired in about 10 cities last spring — as a kind of test — when Perry enticed local stations to run the program by not charging them a licensing fee.
He cut a deal with stations to instead promote the show on air and through local print campaigns, with the goal of securing first an audience, then advertisers, and then a certified slot sometime this year.
A number of stations jumped on it — who wouldn’t when “free” is part of the deal? — and House of Payne was able to garner enough viewers to get cable channels intrigued. Some Fox stations, along with TBS, will air the series on a national rollout this summer. TBS makes sense, considering the proximity: TBS also is in Atlanta, where this month Perry is opening a 60,000-square-foot studio to house his films and television series.
Perry’s work ethic credo is simple: “I don’t take no,” he says. “I think, How can I do this?”
His drive, as did his affinity for what’s on women’s minds, came by osmosis: His father was abusive verbally and physically, and Perry always felt the need to measure up. His need to control his surroundings is just as potent, which explains why he’s more likely to go his own way than to take the bad end of a lopsided deal.
“Giving it to a network would mean giving up a lot of the creative control,” Perry says of House of Payne. “Just like with the films, I just didn’t want to do that. It’s turned out to be the best thing I’ve done.”
Perry will have his hands full. He’s producing, writing, and directing the series, but he doesn’t star in it — which means it’s unlikely you’ll see Madea, even in a cameo role.
“I’ve been trying to find ways to get out of the clothing, not in it,” Perry says. “The costume is not the most comfortable getup. Plus, those shoes kill my feet.”
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 Hard Rock Treasures
(MPI Home Video)
The so-called Indiana Jones of Rock ’n’ Roll, Don Bernstine, certainly has a job that isn’t bad. He gets to visit rock stars in their homes, on their tour buses, and in the studio to track down, and then nicely coax them out of, valuable pieces of rock-and-roll history to display in any one of the Hard Rock Cafes around the globe. Whether he’s clutching the red ax that Tony Iommi used on the first four Black Sabbath albums, doing shots with Vinnie Paul and the late “Dimebag” Darrell of Pantera, or competing with Hollywood celebs like Téa Leoni for auctioned memorabilia, the man has a good time.
A longtime music-industry veteran, Bernstine is a knowledgeable, if laid-back, tour guide who unearths musical archaeology not only in the form of prized relics (instruments, stage costumes, handwritten lyrics, album cover props, even the car from Metallica’s “I Disappear” video) but also as little-known tales from the past, such as how a gold drum kit once owned by Aerosmith’s Joey Kramer now rests at the bottom of the ocean floor. Hard Rock Treasures serves equally as a fun travelogue, a hip history lesson (including numerous archival clips), and an off-the-cuff collection of interviews. We get to infiltrate the homes of people like AC/DC’s Brian Johnson and Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen; sit in the studio with Jimmy Page; and meet the first-ever Hard Rock waitress in London, who’s still gainfully employed there and recalls when Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend first donated guitars. Bonus materials include extended interviews with members of Judas Priest, Pantera, and Slayer, plus a tour of the extensive Hard Rock vaults.
Although this is a somewhat self-congratulatory piece of propaganda for the Hard Rock chain, it’ll still leave music freaks wondering how they can sign up for a cool gig like this. Rock on, Don. — B.R.
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