Stupendous Punk

[15 Years of Alice B. Talkless]

Civilization herself could be considered a conspiracy. A conspiracy to recall our history, to keep us from making the same mistakes. All of civilization could, in this way, be considered a giant guilt-trip. From this weight, this burden of too great remembrance, too infinite recall that puts our every erratic action in quelling context, Alice B. Talkless offers no escape.

Their language is all the stuff of contemporary activity punctured by the knelling bell of recall. No deed of bravado or bald assertion occurs but that its opposite is limned by a phrase or implied by a wry title. I think of "Nicole Smith Addresses the Jury," which calls to witness the very aggrieved ghost of all history, the executed victim, and refuses to let the verdict of the newspapers stand untarnished by rueful doubt.

The music itself is often a wavery version of some gratuitous pop tune, sorted through the echelons of a conscience refined by a swiftening urge for shining Justice; this urge as overwhelming and permanent in the singer as any adolescent lust. It cannot live by itself in cool detachment, but must cleave, mollusklike, to the heaving ship of circumstance. This judgment, this compelling reconnivance of all an audience had considered settled or solved is at the very center of the punk act.

A rebellion of consciousness must insert a distance between the perceiver and its object for the sake of imposing an aesthetic shape upon all that occurs in the "performance space." It asserts both that "I know what it is," and "It is not what it is" at once. The dissonance of this assertion invokes a true tension in the audience that only a cogitation resembling meditation can resolve. And in punk, as in the whippet-wild customs of the fervid dervish, meditation must take place in the horrid whirlpool of a too-tempestuous activity, a storm of limbs and lights and outr?mages for the sight.

The thoughts of one's own mind become the only rock for setting forth, for all else is blaze and mayhem. And the only description of such self-centered activity in such a situation of sensory overload has always been called grace. Punk evokes grace from those who grapple with it. In the heat of the wrestling match, it is the coolest strategist who prevails, often by less than the advantage of an inch in the swale of sweats.

Down the long bowling alley of the past, a face comes hurtling: Scott Stamper, proprietor of a small rock club bunched in-between two abandoned businesses in the rotted-out Asbury Park of the early 90s. His hair was Hitler-dark, and his eyes a damaged periwinkle blue. At the time, I had been running a raggedy poetry reading betwixt rock acts on the long side-stage of the joint, where the black bar leaned toward the golden rail of the stage from no more than four feet away. The Thunderbird Cafe had that waxy look of a retired stripper stuck attending a laundromat to keep her ten cats in kitty litter.

"Hey there, Gregg. There's gonna be a good act in here next week. Something you would like. A kind of punk performance art thing. Two sisters, a little weird. You'll like it."

Seven nights later, behind the gilded bar of the stage, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth, with only a bass guitar and two querulous voices, Alice B. Talkless took the world to task with all the brazen bravery of any saint. Cheerleaders' struts and call-and-response echoes rocked the badinage between two sisters whose minds had the wired intimacy of a single soul. Their get-ups were Alice in Wonderland meets Bo-Peep -- at the sex shop. The strength and strangeness of their voices registered from a land beyond, as though one overheard the thoughts of a mountain at its own birth. Shepardesses of a herd that didn't know it was lost, they sang for their sheep.

I'm stitched in the rain
stretched from a hangin' twine
pink plastic coat without my feet
crawlin' as the night jumps
from maggoty sheep

One of the sisters in wideeyed and broadbrowed. Her operatic voice curls alluringly, alarmingly around nonsense syllables. She plays a funky-chicken bass that keeps the heady abstractions of patriarchy and personal values on track. Amy Mayhem by name, and she keeps up with her moniker.

"What you won't risk is not what you value," says Alice. Always the call is to a more genuine, more experienced, more involved and damnably emancipated life. And yet this is to be done with all the mental gear of post-post-modern irony, a wary awareness of our individual limitations and our solid responsibilities. Naturally enough, biology and time take up their paired, important roles in this cosmos. These unshakable, pillars of context shift the singers into a burdened responsibility that overmasters comprehension. They are the unslakeable Greek anake and a sure cure for useless hubris. When Alice B. took up the guitar along the yellow brick road of the band's metamorphosis from weird cheers to soul-searing rip-rock, the notes jangled and bent in a way that both demanded attention and yet refused to sound out the edges of the map for the fellow-travelers in the audience. You were always the cat thrown off the roof when Alice et al stepped from beneath the proscenium.

Once, with her voice on dire fire before the raw stop of a brick wall at some dump in hypocritical Red Bank, all of her soaring moral imperatives scanned the room like Zeus' lightning and left no exit. All the space between performer and feted evaporated and we were stuck and paired in the brick nothingness of the sonic moment. An instant empathy, so vast and relentless as to leave room only for nausea in the rigid psyche, was forced on all in the room; a miracle in that vain and vapid town.

Both the sisters are long with "stupid, straw-pale locks" that belie the tailor-fit, arrowy troubles or their female status. They play a three-card monte with words and sounds, and they use the apparentness of their commitment to being time-bound and female as just another card in the torrid shuffle. Self-aware as a surgeon equipped with a mirror, they keep themselves from developing the cancerous egos of other bands by excerpting the lump with a deft twist of the wrist.

The pair have traded out drummers over the years, but have acquired only one permanent new member of the band. Amy Mayhem's husband, darling guitarist and effects master. Oh, there is too much to say of all they may have done together, all that the world might have had at their bidding. Worlds and worlds have been wreathed and unwreathed in their sets. I should have described them better, their burning playing with fire, their solemn costumes and their diaphanous fixations on the ethereal. But my eyes turn inward at their approach, and I am made busy with the effort to save myself at this life-trial I had not realized was already on to its closing arguments. God grant me memory and long life to learn what they have already taught me.

4/1/2006