Tales From The Video Stash: Aimee Mann - Live At St. Ann's Warehouse

[with special emphasis on "Humpty Dumpty"]

Tales From The Video Stash: Aimee Mann - Live At St. Ann’s Warehouse

[with special emphasis on "Humpty Dumpty"]

Let’s cut straight to the chase: in my own, personal, infinitesimally insignificant opinion Aimee Mann is the single greatest female pop/rock artist of all time since.... well, maybe Kate Bush or Patti Smith or any of the massively talented women emerging in the New Wave era. By "greatest" I do not mean revolutionary or innovative (or you would be totally in your right to beat me over the head with somebody like Björk); rather, I mean somebody who can find the smoothest, tastiest balance between raw natural talent and razor-sharp intelligence. I admire her songs for their impeccable construction, and I love her songs to the point of sometimes shaking all over when she’s at her very best. And yes, when she is at her very best, her melodies can be on par with Paul McCartney for the emotional power of their chord changes and sheer catchiness, and her lyrics can be on par with Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell for their wit and verbal maturity. And yes, for about ten years — from the start of her solo career with Whatever in 1993 and all the way up to the crowning masterpiece, Lost In Space, ten years later, she was much more often at her best than at her worst. (I’ll not hold the comparatively lackluster records, with only occasional highlights, of the last two decades against her — whoever judges a pop artist for what they release after 40 anyway?).

The problem is that I’m pretty much alone here with my opinion. As of today, the casual average person who knows anything about Aimee Mann is most likely a 50+year old geezer who, like so many others, was swept off his feet by the radio and video success of ’Til Tuesday’s ‘Voices Carry’ in 1985 — but has absolutely no idea about where the hell did that gorgeous blonde bass player with her bizarre spiky hair go off to after the group disbanded a few years later. (Read the comment section to any video for ‘Voices Carry’ on YouTube — you’ll find plenty of those geezers out there). The average smart person will fare a little better, but still, most likely, will associate (solo) Aimee Mann with her role in shaping the feel of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia — if you’re a fan of that movie, it’s difficult to imagine it without ‘Wise Up’, ‘Save Me’, and Aimee’s totally gut-wrenching cover of Harry Nilsson’s ‘One’ — and hardly anything beyond that. There’s also the average geek person, perhaps, who cannot forget Aimee’s totally out-of-the-blue appearance in Buffy The Vampire Slayer ("I hate playing vampire towns"), but by now we’re really getting desperate.

There are several interconnected reasons for this cruel ostracism, which I’ll rattle off in ascending order. First, I very specifically wrote «single greatest female artist» not because of Aimee’s biology or identification (which really does not matter per se when it comes to adding up those chords in your songwriting), but because most of her art does cover a pretty narrow thematic range that mostly deals with woman problems — her preferred sport is bad guy assassination and lamentation over failed relationships, and while I really admire how she’s found so many different ways to assassinate her targets over her peak years, this single-minded approach can get tiring. That said, with stars like Taylor Swift showing how you can make millions of fans and dollars with precisely the same approach, this is certainly not the main reason for obscurity.

Second factor is, of course, the utmost bleakness of most of Aimee’s output. She is pathologically incapable of generating happiness — even when she is (very rarely) trying to, her melancholy and pessimism still break through — and people need their idols to throw them rays of hope, so that they can hop onto their train. John Lennon could be angry, bitter, sarcastic, depressed as hell, but he still wrote it’s gonna be alright, you’re gonna see the light. Robert Smith was the prince of gloom, but he also knew how to seduce people with the romantic grandeur of ‘Pictures Of You’, ‘Just Like Heaven’, and ‘Friday I’m In Love’. Even Kurt Cobain had a sort of weirdly empathetic sense of humor, not to mention that his music always made it seem like he hated himself far more than he hated the rest of humanity, which, in turn, made it easier to empathize for him. Aimee’s music, however, can transmit many things — from despisal and condescension to compassion and pity — but it never transmits love for anybody or anything, which makes it a serious boner-killer on the popularity front. Still... people like Frank Zappa, for instance, could get by very well without any lovey-dovey vibes, and end up being the heroes for at least a certain subclass of people, so, again, it’s not the be-all-end-all.

Third and probably most important, Aimee Mann is a naturally introverted type of person with a very clearly pronounced aversion to any kinds of self-promotion — some­thing that I can strongly identify with, and instinctively feel in like-minded people even when simply listening to their music or watching bits and pieces of their activities on YouTube videos. Of course, she records, she puts out albums, she gives live performances, she makes music videos, and every once in a while she engages in some promotional actions, but it’s always along the lines of "oh I’m sorry everybody, they told me I really need to advertise this stuff or I’ll starve to death tomorrow, so yeah, it’s stupid, I know, but can you please go out and buy my latest record". Like a true ancient relic, she wants to believe that good music will somehow survive just on the basis of its goodness, without the banal necessity of giving it an extra push — sorry, Aimee, it won’t. Been there, done that. Even the Beatles needed their Brian Epstein, and that was way back when circumstances were far more favorable for that kind of attitude than in the past 20–30 years or so. So keep on playing those vampire towns — really, there’s no shame in riding the coattails of Sarah Michelle Gellar.

In any case, at the very least Aimee’s addiction to anti-publicity did not go far enough as to prevent the release of her one and only concert movie, Live At St. Ann’s Ware­house, which I am very lucky to own — I suppose it’s been out of print for a long time, and even on YouTube a full video has only emerged very recently.

The title might strike some people as humiliatingly odd — what, one of the most talented songwriters of the early modern age has to perform at warehouses? — but, in fact, as most of the cultured inhabitants of NYC are probably well aware of, St. Ann’s Warehouse is actually one of the most respectable art centers in Brooklyn, having started out as a hub for classical music and later associated with such names as Bowie, Lou Reed, John Cale, Nick Cave, Laurie Anderson, and many other luminaries; Aimee’s «acceptance» there back in 2004 was actually quite an honor.

And, in full accordance with that honor, 2004 was arguably when she was at the absolute creative peak of her career — early 2000’s albums like Bachelor No. 2 and Lost In Space were brimming with fabulous melodies, magnificent lyrics, and (for the first time in her «post-grunge» stage) witty, subtle, atmospheric production, much of which, unfortunately, gets lost in the live renditions, solid as they are. Just as importantly, perhaps — after all, we are talking about the visual medium here — it feels like she also finally found an image on stage with which she was fully comfortable: instead of the generic futuristic spiked hair of the Eighties, or the spasmodic-dirty’n’wild-washed-out look of her early Nineties’ TV appearances, she had embraced a more casual, tranquil, and relaxed style of dressing and acting, as if to subtly stress that music matters much more than image. A preposterously heretical idea even for 2004, I know, let alone twenty years later when music largely acts as superfluous background hum attached to image, but those few of us who still prefer warehouses to superdomes will gladly embrace the heresy, at least inasmuch as they aren’t tying us to the stake just yet.

It’s a fairly short concert, less than an hour and a half altogether, but it’s got an almost perfect setlist for Aimee — so much so that it is difficult for me to settle upon any one particular highlight, as I like to do with these video reviews. Much of it comes from the aforementioned two classic albums, with Aimee only occasionally reaching for earlier stuff from the Nineties (‘Long Shot’, ‘Stupid Thing’, ‘4th Of July’), but she does include two of the biggest highlights from the Magnolia soundtrack and she even previews two of the best songs from the upcoming concept album The Forgotten Arm: ‘King Of The Jailhouse’, in particular, has been my drug of choice for years — one of the most cathartic pieces ever written for when you’re feeling totally down in the dumps and crave for compassion — but if you happen to be a neophyte, the super-slow tempo of the song might easily put you off, so let’s focus on something else.

The two Magnolia biggies — ‘Wise Up’ and ‘Save Me’ — might seem like the obvious choice, as both are beautifully performed and raise the maximum cheer from the audience (which, I suspect, is also generally more familiar with Paul Thomas Anderson movies than it is with Aimee’s backlog), but at the current moment my life certainly aligns more with the subject matter of ‘Humpty Dumpty’, the opening track on Lost In Space, most of which, if you are not aware, was written and recorded after Aimee’s first serious struggle with mental issues (anxiety, depression, intrusive thoughts, PTSD, the usual bunch), and remains far more relevant in this crazy age in which we find ourselves nowadays than we could ever hope it to be. "Say you were split, you were split in fragments / And none of the pieces would talk to you / Wouldn’t you want to be who you had been / Well baby I want that too" is a state of mind in which I have found myself way too often for comfort since 2022.

As a technically conventional pop-rock artist, Aimee has no special tricks up her sleeve on stage: the goal is to reproduce the studio recording as faithfully as can be done without the assistant benefits of studio technology — especially considering that most of the songs were still red-hot and there was no boredom-induced incentive to start toying around with them. On the plus side, though, at the time she was arguably playing with the very best backing band she ever had, including Paul Bryan (who produced most of her subsequent albums) on bass and the extremely talented Julian Coryell (son of Larry Coryell, the «godfather of fusion») on guitar. He did not play the ‘Humpty Dumpty’ slide part on the original album (Michael Lockwood did), but he recreates the pissed-off-and-tired vibe of it perfectly from the first seconds, throwing a wee bit of fuzz into the mix as compared to the relatively cleaner sound of the studio recording. (Too bad they had no time or wish to rework the song to give him more presence — a full-fledged slide solo in the middle would have been more than welcome).

Note that as she got older, Aimee would more and more abandon her old «rock» image in favor of pure acoustic playing, which is really not the best format for her — at the core, she is a pop-rock songwriter in the Paul McCartney or Alex Chilton tradition, and the sound here at St. Ann’s Warehouse is ideally balanced: it eschews the occasionally bland and predictable grunge / alt-rock tones she had going for herself throughout most of the Nineties, but still rings out loud and clear with the occasional wise use of distortion, feedback, or various electric tones that allow the music to snap, bite, and kick ass when circumstances cry out for it. And Julian’s slide playing on ‘Humpty Dumpty’ provides just the right kind of snap for the song (for comparison, a slightly earlier performance on the Jools Holland show, when she was still previewing the tune, is less efficient with the thin harmonium part in place of the slide guitar).

Meanwhile, Aimee herself is performing with an absolute minimum — as in close to zero — of «show» elements; whether she’s playing or just singing, she makes no attempts at any clumsy dance moves (a common feature of her performances in ’Til Tuesday and in her «grunge» era), and she spends much of her time before the microphone with her eyes half-closed, as if that point about being reclusive and introverted needed any more ramming down our brains. But this does give her an easier time to concentrate fully on getting the vocal melody as perfect as possible — including her trademark detours into head voice, which are (almost) as head-spinning live as they are in the studio. (The "get out while you can, baby I’m pouring quicksand" bridge is particularly psychedelic).

Many, of course, will not be able to get into the spirit of the whole thing and just call it as they see it — static, boring, and unnecessary. But if this is the embodiment of a middle-age crisis (Aimee was already about 44 at the time), I wish more musicians (and not just musicians) could have their middle-age crises looking like this: classy, tasteful, masking their desperation with quiet dignity and solid balance. She is literally singing a song here about the end of the world — her personal world, at least — all the perfect drugs and superheroes would not be enough to bring me up to zero (what a great, great line!) — and there’s still enough rhythm, tightness, melody, and empathy to bring a warped smile to your face. This is how you do it.

Thinking back on all the legendary singer-songwriters, particularly female ones, of the past decades, whom I have had the fortune — or, sometimes, misfortune — of watching onstage (only in video form, of course), I realize that the absolute majority bothers about putting on some kind of show, be it Kate Bush’s bizarre dancing or Patti Smith’s aggressive spasming or the cubist shapes of St. Vincent’s guitars or whatever. Aimee — in her «mature» stage, at least — rather hearkens back to the classic style of Joni Mitchell, when music and music alone told the story. But for a show like that to work on the visual level, you have to learn to do the most difficult thing of them all: convince the viewer that the music is strong enough to overwhelm you and «turn» you even as you’re in the middle of performing it. Does that hold true for Live At St. Ann’s Warehouse? If it does, it’s difficult to notice: with the music itself being so introspective, most of that «turning» happens on the inside rather than on the outside. As somebody who claims to perceive Aimee as a sort of virtual soulmate, though, I think I am capable of observing the «turning» — otherwise, I would not find myself drawn back to this video over and over again.

For those of us with a generally sunny disposition, getting accepted into the church of Aimee Mann would be a near-impossible affair, but even so, I think it would be difficult to not at least acknowledge the melodic strengths and lyrical complexities of most of these songs. Perhaps, after all, it’s a damn good thing that these never sufficed to make a superstar out of her: a world in which a songwriter like Aimee Mann is naturally carried to the top of the pyramid would have to allocate at least half of its GDP to the production of anti-depressants. But if you do need anti-depressants, every once in a while you can allow yourself to skip a dose and watch Live At St. Ann’s Warehouse instead. It’s not gonna stop ’til you wise up, you know.