Jim Morrison once said, “The West is the best.” It was on the song “The End,” a story about riding out on the westway highway to fulfill an Oedipal dream. On the way he does blue rocks on a blue bus. He seeks freedom at the other end of the country. It’s the farthest west anyone has ever gone–it took almost 1500 years since Christ pointed out the way–and once we got there, there was nowhere else to go, except to go weird. It was the End.
The first track on Cass McCombs new smash album Big Wheel and Others is entitled Sean I and it’s about a four year old boy named Sean. He is being interviewed by a very nice seeming man, who is very interested in the belief system of the son of two Haight-Ashbury hippies from the sixties. Among other things, Sean smokes crack, but prefers to eat it, doesn’t believe in God, for the whole world is the Indian’s world, is willing to kill police officers, and is pretty sure that America is half of the world.
It’s Cass’ attempt to pin down the American Psyche. The tracks that accompany Sean are stories and caricatures of West-of-oddly familiar Average Americans, people you might have known but you more than likely saw them on TV.
(America, where you can eat drugs and kill on TV)
Cass: I believe in junk food and solidarity with the poor and screwed.
What about families? What about unhappy marriage, blind marriage, and divorce?
Cass says, ‘Bah!’ Leave the counseling to the East Coast. The West is free from your college degree high mindedness. His West is a debauched West. It’s been weirded out with its own brightness like looking for gold and the need for prostitutes as provisions. Don’t chyoo know Valley Girls are the descendants of those prostitutes. Towards the end of the album the ghost of Hollywood byooties looms over listeners as the recently deceased Karen Black of Easy Rider and Killer Fish fame, sings, “Brighter! Brighter!… It burns.” Is she warning us? Or is she telling us that it’s one thing to reach the California coast, another to reach the afterlife?
Black, pictured here as a glowing beauty, possibly a ghost
It is here at the end of the world California where Cass has situated Big Wheel. He stands alone as the pious amongst the profane, at least he professes to be; he’s a singer and he wants you to know that here at the end of civilization, amongst the most advanced peoples of the world there are people who want to kill and eat drugs. I know this might sound like the music is rather intense and unpleasant like Gwar or something, but if you’ve listened to Cass McCombs you know that’s unlikely. He does get kinda heavy with “Joe Murder” and “Satan is my Toy,” but otherwise it is very soft and beautiful, like an infant or the word ‘glove.’
It’s almost over, but this seems somewhat incomplete doesn’t it? Like I didn’t quite give you a full review of this album, like I introduced you to someone with her back turned and now when it seems like she might turn onto you I have done something foolish, knocking her full glass all over her dress and the floor and won’t she have to join me in the bathroom to clean up? We’re going to fuck in there without you. And you stand there, silenced and paralyzed by your limitations as a reader, as a listener, with the Hollywood ghost of Karen Black lingering over you while the McCombs asks, “What’s it like to shit in space?”
(Is that the end?)
Link to McCombs’ “Morning Star”: http://theskateboardmag.com/videos/?__mr_id=6758 (copy paste copy paste)