These attitudes-though not that piano– were there from the start. “It might look like my wheels are spinning/ I swear they’re spinning for a reason… I swear, I’m not stuck,” she sings she’s already forsworn. Another song from that album, “I’m Not Stuck,” despite its walking bass, repeats a consolation Mays doesn’t believe. Most rock and roll is about beginnings and endings: “Come Back Then,” like most Scrawl songs, is all middle, its minimal chords describing the task and fears we can’t escape (as the poet says) but can’t accept. It simply stays put in its comfortless three-chord loop. She never will be ready: he’ll never come back, and her attitude doesn’t get worse, but doesn’t get better. Each time a different track stands out this morning it was the gritty, discomfiting breakup song “Come Back Then.” “Come back when I’m good and ready,” Mays says, over and over. Today I’ve been listening mostly to Travel On, Rider (1996), their most ambitious album, one that left some of their indie loyalists cold. Guitarist and principal singer Marcy Mays, bass (and later piano) player Sue Harshe, and their drummers (first Carolyn O’Leary, then Dana Marshall) used simple words, minor chords, and dissonant intervals to portray not unbearable dejection, but the more or less bearable kind: the feeling of trying and failing, and trying and failing, and knowing you have no choice but to try again. When I’m feeling sorry for myself, or when I’m glad, I’ve got plenty of choices: but when I’m feeling like a moral failure, like I haven’t done enough for others, like the universe is (as Randall Jarrell wrote) a squirrel wheel, and if I run fast enough (but I can’t run fast enough) I can solve other people’s problems, make other people happy-when I feel like that, I listen to Scrawl. That makes them ideal for people who want rock and roll but can’t take the optimism, or the selfish angst, on which so much rock depends. Their midtempo rhythms and minor keys (they often write in minor keys) make their best songs glow like blacksmiths’ ingots, heated by frustrations and responsibilities that neither sweet reason nor scowling anger removes. They were the ones with the car keys, the ones who cleaned up after the host passed out and the guests had all left the party, the caretakers, the ones left holding the bag, and if you think that’s an anomalous, almost paradoxical approach to rock and roll, you’re right. Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-ups.” Scrawl began when its members were in their early twenties, but from the get-go they were one of few American bands-maybe the first-who played punk-rock-inspired music about being, and becoming, and feeling like, grownups. It could be a bummer, but it was a glorious bummer, and its propulsive, melodic and serious sounds-as well as its no-nonsense lyrics-embodied the truths that most rock music tries to deny. Through the rise and fall of American indie rock, the years of hardcore and hair metal, college radio and Nirvana, Oasis and No Depression and Riot Grrrl, from the early 1980s to the Y2K bug, the Columbus, Ohio trio were making stripped-down rock music that performed-sadly, angrily, beautifully, roughly, then elegantly- just the opposite of what we usually expect rock music to do. So what does it mean to make rock music that speaks for the responsible older sibling for the friend who cleans up after the party for the people who won’t leave work early for the party, because they need the extra hours for Mom? How would that sound? It might sound like Scrawl. It’s an art of the moment, of damn the consequences, of turning it up and not caring what happens next: it began as a guy thing, of course, but the history of women making rock music is a history of women finding ways to give those qualities feminist ends: “ Rebel Girl, you are the queen of my world.” It began as party music, as music to dance to, but even its most introverted, unhappiest actors-from Neil Young to PJ Harvey or Conor Oberst-embodied the impulse to be individual, telling the world to fuck off, saying “I’m on my own.” When rock becomes too predictable, we complain about routinized or commercial rebellion when it’s working, we identify its sounds (guitars first, live feel, 4/4 beat, and drums) with living in the moment, going for broke, smashing things (if not people), saying no to the Man, or no to the responsible older sibling, or no to Mom. Rock and roll is, always has been, an art of youth, of spontaneity, of simplicity as a protest against old rules, a protest born out of hedonism ( Chuck Berry, the Who), or lust (the Who, Chuck Berry), or moral outrage ( Minor Threat), or existential despair (“Paint It Black,” “ Smells Like Teen Spirit”). Original Scrawl Members: Carolyn O'Leary, Sue Harshe, and Marcy Mays
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