New Work: Bob Dylan Review In Seattle Weekly

(Seattle Weekly, 4.30.09)

Bob Dylan 

Together Through Life

(Columbia)

In 2000, Bob Dylan won an Academy Award for “Things Have Changed”, a pop-blues number he wrote for the Wonder Boys soundtrack. Ever since then, the little golden Oscar statue has joined him onstage, perched atop his amplifier. When I first noticed the Oscar at Dylan’s Portland State University show in 2005, I took it as a joke. After all, Dylan always been possessed with a wry sense of humor—what good was an Oscar if he couldn’t show it off like a kid tacking “A+” homework to his parent’s refrigerator? But listening to his new album Together Through Life, it struck me that the Oscar might actually represent something about the music he’s been making so far this century. I played the album back-to-back with 2006’s Modern Times and 2001’s Love and Theft and it all came together—21st Century Dylan has been about creating a fictional America, his own Invisible Republic, if you will. And his songs have been nothing if not cinematic.

Together Through Life was made because Dylan was inspired to continue writing and recording after penning a number for Olivier Dahan’s forthcoming film, My Own Love Song. “Then the record sort of took its own direction,” Dylan told journalist Bill Flanagan. As a result, we have ten songs that evoke imagery of dusty Texas towns, hot August nights, and lively juke joints, each scene rendered like a sun-bleached black and white photograph that could’ve been taken in either the 1950s or the 1890s, its hard to say.

Produced by Dylan under his nom de studio Jack Frost, the tone of Together Through Life is raw and exposed. Whereas Dylan’s vocals were muddy and smoky on recent albums, they are presented here so that we hear every rip and tear in his throat. Critics love dismissing Dylan’s voice these days as little more than a battered croak, but he’s obviously proud of it (not to mention, after five decades of cigarettes and no sign of lung cancer, he should be!) The way he takes advantage of its deep scars and hardened edges on Together Through Life, I can’t help but think of Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino—both men realize they are too old to play the young rebel, but are just wise enough to play the squinty-eyed outlaw.

Dylan’s clawed vocal chords are the ideal instrument for this latest batch of songs, all of which take place in the wild mid-apocalyptic America he first introduced on Love and Theft’s centerpiece “High Water”. But instead of playing the prophet of impending doom, Dylan plays the drifter on Together Through Life—he’s Mark Twain with a blues band, wryly observing the aftermath. “State gone broke/ The county’s dry/ Don’t be looking at me with that evil eye,” Dylan snarls on the Willie Dixon shuffler “My Wife’s Home Town”. His wife’s hometown, by the way, is Hell, but you get the sense that Hell could very well be Texas, as Dylan later spins a dangerous outlaw-blues yarn with “If You Ever Go To Houston.”

For all its wickedness, Together Through Life is a surprisingly sunny record. While much of this can be attributed to Los Lobos accordionist David Hidalgo (who weaves a light-hearted breeze throughout every song), the mood of each Dylan album ultimately depends on the mood of Dylan himself. Normally as sour as a tablespoon of vinegar, he instead sounds half-drunk on lust and romance for much of Together Through Life. Accompanied by sentimental mandolin on the weepy ballad “Life Is Hard”, Dylan breaks apart words like he’s shedding a tear for each syllable (“My dreams are locked and barred/Ad-mit-ting life is hard”) while on the swampy “Shake Shake Mama”, he delivers comic-blues from the groin (“Some of you women really know your stuff/ But your clothes are all torn and your language is kinda rough”). Scattered throughout are bar-band romps (“Jolene”), misty-eyed romanticism (“Forgetful Heart”), and mariachi blues (“This Dream of You”). 

After only a handful of listens, Together Through Life sounds like it’s the flabbiest of Dylan’s recent albums. The lyrics seem undercooked, the narratives less cohesive. Strange, then, that 9 of these 10 songs were co-written with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, a man I rank among the most underrated American wordsmiths. But who knows what Dylan and Hunter were aiming for, lyrically. Maybe the point was to shoot for the everyman populism of Muddy Waters and Hank Williams. If so, it worked—like those two giants, Dylan and Hunter overstuffed the album with no-brainers like “oh, well I love you pretty baby”, out of which emerge slivers of poetry. “Dreams never worked for me anyway/ Even when they did come true,” Dylan sings on “Feel A Change Comin’ On”. Only a master like Dylan could write a line so obvious and so chilling.

But don’t think the man has lost it entirely. Classic Dylan cynicism abounds on upbeat album closer “It’s All Good”, a song that suggests Dylan sees America as little more than a crooked place run by dastardly politicians, twisted sheriffs, and godless swindlers. “Big politicians telling lies/ restaurant kitchen full of flies,” he sings over the John Lee Hooker boogie. That Dylan views America as little more than a morally corrupt wasteland is nothing new. But the punchline chorus of “It’s all good” offers a new spin on his vision, one that is a fitting refrain for our country’s current era. However, he doesn’t sing the words reassuringly. Instead, it comes off like an accusation, a cruel joke from a wise old man who knows better than to be optimistic about anything…especially a young president in a dirty old town like Washington D.C.

New Work: Neil Young Review In Seattle Weekly

(Seattle Weekly, 4.23.09)

Neil Young 

Fork In The Road

(Reprise)

Neil Young has always been half-crazy and kinda sloppy: the drunken performances and muddy production of Time Fades Away; the goofy anti-nukes musical Human Highway; the abundance of thrash-and-bash throwaway songs like "Farmer John" and "Piece Of Crap" peppering his albums; his old-coot tirades at Farm Aid each year. But Young, 63, has rarely embraced his messy, inner-oddball as fully as he does on Fork In The Road (released April 7), a half-baked concept album about fuel-efficient automobiles in the U.S.A. The riffs and lyrics seem dashed off in spots, as if "good enough" was all Young aspired to here. But there is an electricity coursing through these songs—one not found on Young's other recent "conceptual" projects, Greendale and Living With War, perhaps because it combines Young's two biggest obsessions, automobiles and environmentalism.

Since this is an album about a car, it makes sense for Young to kick things off by suggesting a road trip. "Taking a trip across the USA/ Gonna see a lot of people along the way," he sings on "When Worlds Collide." His delivery conveys nostalgia for the days when highways were free of traffic jams, gasoline was much cheaper, and cars were built to last. The music here is mostly chop-shop rock n' roll. Young's guitar sounds like it just emerged from an auto garage—he's smearing the fret board with machine grease and powering his amp with diesel. Of course, by the second song, "Fuel Line", we learn that the only diesel Young will be singing the praises of is biodiesel, as he vaguely describes a car that is "not the car that she used to be." The car in question would be Young's 1959 Lincoln Continental, AKA LincVolt, which he had modified to run on 100 miles-per-gallon via a 150kW motor, a bank of lithium-ion batteries, and a small generator capable of running on cooking grease, biodiesel, vegetable oil, etc. (www.lincvolt.com)


If Fork In The Road has a "main character", it would be the LincVolt. The car makes plenty of appearances in this scattered narrative, which is essentially about Young driving the car from his California home, through the heartland, and into a vague future in which he hopes the U.S. will be building more just like it. He writes about the car in a manner most songwriters reserve for their wives: she "looks so beautiful with her top down" in "Hit The Road"; she "goes all night on good clean fuel" in "Johnny Magic"; she "loves to go anywhere" in "Get Behind The Wheel". But Fork In The Road is not just about a much-admired car (Young already wrote that song, "Long May You Run"), it's about American mythology, the failure of our government, and the dim-wittedness of corporations.

Fork In The Road is about an old car adapting to a changing world. But it also serves as a metaphor for Young himself. He makes this much clear on album closer "Fork In The Road." Sings Young: "Download this/ Sounds like shit/ Keep on bloggin' till the power goes out/ And your battery's dead." Lyrics like this will not endear this album to the Pitchfork crowd. If anything, they render Young an easy target for hipster snark that loves nothing more than to paint Young as a Cosby-esque, out-of-touch grandpa.

Sure, Neil Young is nothing if not an ornery old coot these days, but most twentysomethings I know bitch and moan about the state of the world so much you'd think coffeehouses and hipster bars were the new bingo halls. The difference is Neil Young is old enough to remember a different time—when manufacturers didn't build "pieces of crap", when you had to save money to buy things you couldn't afford, when hiding behind your opinion with an internet alias wasn't an option. He wears his wisdom proudly, no matter how grizzled and half-cocked it might be. And if he's learned anything in his 63 years, he makes it known on the third track "Just Singing A Song". Here, Young stares 1960s hippie idealism and present-day progressives in the face with the lyric "You can sing about change...(but) just singing a song won't change the world." He's right. Neither will any amount of blogging, or protesting, or bitching and moaning over lattes at Caffe Vita.

So, what does Neil Young suggest we do? Well, I suppose that's up to us, but I'm guessing he'd like us to follow his example. Realizing he couldn't depend on American auto companies or big oil or the U.S. government to develop a fuel-efficient vehicle, Young went ahead and built the fuckin' thing himself. He was so proud of his LincVolt, in fact, that he made a record about it—a half-baked, messy, scrappy, ornery, hopeful, pro-active, oddball album that happens to feature some of his most unapologetically rockin' jams since 1980s Re-ac-tor. And like that album, Fork In The Road is destined to sound even more intriguing 20 years down the road.

New Work: Histoire de Melody Nelson

(SF Weekly, 4.21.09)

Serge Gainsbourg

Histoire de Melody Nelson

(Light In The Attic) 

Even with no knowledge of the French language, it'd still be fairly obvious that Serge Gainsbourg's 1971 album was consumed with lust. The pelvic-thrust basslines, his ear-licking vocals, and the way Jane Birkin exhaled as if being penetrated made Histoire de Melody Nelson legendary from the word go. A gift to his amorata Birkin, Gainsbourg's Nabokovian tale of old-man-seduces-teen-girl has been a much-celebrated masterpiece, which is why it's curious that no U.S. label had thought to reissue the album before tenacious young Seattle indie Light in the Attic did. Though Melody Nelson has been widely available in various import forms for decades, this is the first to feel definitive — its liner notes are packed with researched essays, lively illustrations, French-to-English lyrics, and a 1971 interview in which Gainsbourg discusses the album.

An orchestral-funk concept LP, Melody Nelson opens with the oft-sampled "Melody." The bass slinks into earshot while Gainsbourg's deadpan vocals reek of sordidness and nicotine. Guitars spark orgasmically, but "Melody" is propelled by drummer Dougie Wright, whose sluggish, head-nodding beat practically invented trip-hop. The opener is the highlight, but Melody Nelson resists premature climax. Gainsbourg and arranger Jean-Claude Vennier continue to mesh sweaty funk grooves with majestic, sweeping strings over the course of the album's brief but satisfying 28 minutes. This info-stuffed reissue sheds new light on Melody Nelson, for sure, but its pleasures, like sex itself, transcend history and language. Light in the Attic's treatment makes all other reissues seem like uninterested hand jobs.

If It's Not A House, It's A Home

9020

Brian James Barr

I like to wake up early in the mornings, not before dawn, but just as she is breaking, and brew a pot of coffee. I like to do this because the coffee pot is located just under the kitchen window, which faces southeast. We are on top of a hill, and from the window I can see the houses and trees of our neighborhood, and above them, the sky. In the Pacific Northwest, morning tends to arrive gently, and the post-war bungalows and shaggy firs are usually shrouded in a thin, maritime fog that casts everything in a moody bluish-gray tone. The sky is a smear of deep indigo and, as morning begins to break, becomes laced with strands of tangerine. From the North, airplanes circle around to land at Boeing Field near the Duwamish in the valley below and I watch them. We are far enough away here that we can see them, but not hear them. They fly lower and lower, silent, until they disappear into the fold of the river valley to land.

Our house is very small. Tucked into an 800 square foot plan we have a good-sized living room, a good-sized kitchen, and a hallway leading to two sufficiently sized bedrooms, one of which M and I fashioned into my writing room. Here, I type in the mornings and afternoons at a sturdy oak desk I bought at World Market, surrounded by shelves full of books, two bushy houseplants, and a piano that belongs to M. If the afternoons are warm enough, I open the windows and listen to the rain or the wind or the sounds of the birds. Our two cats often join me while I work, perching themselves on the squat bookcase below the window facing the backyard. The window is a good vantage point for keeping an eye on the birds that flit about between our massive blue spruce and maple trees and the comparatively younger and smaller fruit trees. We have neighbors on all four sides, but do not see those to the back of us thanks to a thick wall of laurel that serves as the Eastern edge of our property line and the Western edge of theirs. Our backyard is, for the most part, private.

We are the third owners of this house. It was built in 1942 during the wartime housing boom and is one of the oldest houses on our street. While it is architecturally non-descript, we like to call it “a ranch-style home bent into an L-shape”. In typical American, anti-bourgeois fashion, the design valued efficiency over flare. The living room and kitchen make up the East-West half of the L-shape, the bedrooms and bath the North-South half. There is no upstairs or downstairs. No attic or basement. If it belongs to any architectural design category, call it “no bullshit”, or at the very least “the bare essentials”. It is just big enough for M and I and our two cats, which are both the size of small bear cubs and are exceptionally skilled at taking up more room in the house than they need.

It is small, but is not stuffy. Something about the L-shape of the floorplan encourages a free-flowing rhythm from one corner of the house to the opposite corner. Each room has ample natural lighting. Our West-facing living room opens up to the neighborhood via two massive windows. In the evenings we sit and read and wave to the neighbors as they stroll past on the sidewalk. The sun sinks behind the house across the street from us. Many nights, we watch the narrow silhouette of a lone hawk circling in the Western sky. The light is soft in our house and evening arrives often as gently as the morning.

West Seattle, April 2009

Real American Heroes: An Argument For Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler

This past weekend, I stumbled across a YouTube video of the magician/raconteur Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller fame) raving about the greatness of The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky's and Robert Siegel's film about an aging pro wrestler facing up to his limitations in life. Not that I'm one to look for validation in the opinion of celebrities, but the fact that Jillette and I shared many of the same reactions to the film made me feel a little less freakish. 

Like Jillette, I'm of the opinion that it is one of the greatest movies I have ever seen. And the more I've thought about the film, the more I'm willing to stick my neck out and declare that The Wrestler is The Greatest American Movie of All Time. Mind you, I'm well aware of my generation's Twittery desire to label every new craze the "best.thing.ever.", but The Wrestler is not the type of film to induce such of-the-moment urges. It's timeless. It's transcends generations. And there is far too much humanity in the film for it to be processed so simply and mindlessly. 

For those of you who have not seen the film, here's the plot breakdown: Mickey Rourke plays Randy "The Ram" Alexander, a middle-aged professional wrestler who was, at his career high, as famous as the WWF stars of the 1980s (Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, etc.) But, as happens so often to guys of his ilk, Randy now spends his weekends competing in low-paying weekend matches in the VFW Halls and high school gymnasiums around his home in New Jersey. He lives in a trailer court, drives an Econoline van, and pounds his fist against the steering wheel singing the lyrics to 80s metal songs like Accept's "Balls to the Wall" and Ratt's "Bang Your Head (Metal Health)". His only confidant is a stripper at a run-down club on the outskirts of town. In order to make monthly rent on his trailer, he works part-time at the local supermarket. After a particularly brutal match, Randy has a near-fatal heart attack and is warned never to wrestle again. Without wrestling and without his fans (however few there may be), Randy realizes he has nothing. He does, however, have a daughter he's been estranged from that he tries, fruitlessly, to connect with. He also tries, fruitlessly, to connect with his stripper friend. He is lonely, he is lost, and the only thing he has ever been good at is the one thing he can never do again. 

Sounds a little phony and contrived, right? Exactly!

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a Seattle filmmaker I know who said she could "go on and on" about the first 30 minutes of the film and the last 30 minutes. As a filmmaker, she couldn't get over the grittiness of the film, the documentary-like angles, the raw lighting. She also could not get over the setting. Like her, I had a visceral reaction to to the landscape, the suburban Jersey gutter of half-empty strip malls, streets and bridges that look as if they've been chewed on, skies that are colorless, trees that are leafless and bony, median strips strewn with litter, and withered grass cowering in the cracks between pavement. The entire landscape is something that gave up decades ago. This is the world Randy Alexander wakes up to each day, and it stands in bleak contrast to his life in the ring where he springs to life as "The Ram", whose mix of physicality and theatrics once earned him fame. Aronofsky gives us slight visual details to emphasize the dual-life Randy leads, which Rourke embodies fully: In the ring, he is proud, broad-shoulder, smiling, bright-eyed, and determined; in the real world, he breathes heavily, wears hearing aids, and walks with his shoulders slumped to the world, carting his wrestling outfit around in a suitcase-on-wheels that he pulls behind him. His face, as one writer put it, looks like it's been caked with plumber's caulk. 

These are the things most viewers have identified with, and my filmmaker friend was no different. The story, however, was what she felt was the weakest--the fact that his only friend was a stripper, that he had an estranged daughter he wanted to connect with, that he wanted to come back from his heart attack and finish his career with one epic "comeback" bout. It all felt, as many have suggested, a bit obvious and predictable. 

I agree fully. But to say the story was predictable and obvious is to deny what the film is about in the first place: A professional wrestler. 

In his 1957 essay The World of Wrestling, Roland Barth observed that professional wrestling is not a sport, but rather a spectacle. Everything about a wrestling match, he wrote, is "endowed with an absolute clarity, since one must always understand everything on the spot." It is, perhaps, the most fulfilling entertainment--whether it be the hero or villain stepping into the ring, you are, as Barth wrote, "overwhelmed by the obviousness of the roles." 

Obviousness, the very essence of the awesome spectacle that is pro wrestling. My mind wanders back to the many Wrestlemanias I watched growing up. How many of us can forget the amplified agony Hulk Hogan conveyed as Andre the Giant body-slammed the great, blonde Hulk to the mat with a leaded thwack! This was the main event of Wrestlemania 87 and here was big, ugly Andre the Giant, looking like 600 pounds of boiled potatoes stuffed into a black swimsuit, tossing our chiseled American hero around like a throw pillow. How could this be, we thought? Surely, Wrestlemania can't end this way? Of course, our man Hogan would eventually pull through by some miracle, pull off an awesome feat of physical strength sending The Giant toppling to the ground. Hogan would throw his body over the dead weight of The Giant like a dragonslayer, screaming to the rafters as the ref smacked the palm of his hand to the mat one, two, three! Then, the reassuring sounds of Hogan's 80s theme song "I Am A Real American" would come booming out of the coliseum's sound system as Hogan stalked the perimeter of the ring proudly, defiantly, encouraging all of his "little Hulkamaniacs" to join in the glory that was his victory! 

Of course, we knew it would end this way. I was only 8 years old when this particular Wrestlemania aired on cable, but still knew that wrestling was theater and the ending was pre-determined. It was obvious and predictable. 

Why, then, have American viewers and critics expected something more from The Wrestler? Well, if you look at the grandiloquence on display at the Academy Awards ceremony each year, it's obvious we are under a spell convincing us that those celebrities and filmmakers are doing something more than mere theater. The films the directors make give us "hope" and the actors are "courageous" for the characters they portray. But the joke is on us because, despite what they say, filmmakers and actors ultimately aspire to nothing more than mere entertainment. Though there is absolutely nothing wrong with this, Hollywood shrouds it in a veil of self-seriousness that makes us unashamed to shill out $10 a ticket for 2 hours of fiction (and don't be fooled by that old friendly face, "based on a true story"). But what is wrong with running a business designed to keep an audience in their seats from beginning to end? Humans need to be entertained, but we are somehow under the impression that pro wrestling is like junk food: Tastes good, but hardly nourishing, therefore not a redeemable aspect of our culture. Why? Because we know it's fake? Because we know how the match is going to end? To this, I say: Unless you have been living under a rock, you knew how Milk was going to end, as well. No surprises there, I'm afraid! 

But I digress. Ultimately, The Wrestler speaks to what it means to be an American. As David Foster Wallace said, there is an unspoken loneliness and lostness in American life. You don't have to be an aging pro wrestler to identify with Randy Alexander's life of quiet desperation. The Wrestler is more shocking and eye-opening than any other film I have seen because it takes our shallow culture and slaps us hard in the face. However, it only works because Aronofsky did not set out to peel back the layers of the pro wrestling spectacle. It worked because they told a story, a story about a pro wrestler filled with all of the cliches and predictability of a WWF match. That they took such a real-life, documentary approach to the film just means that, once again, the joke is on us. (I can just hear Aronofsky snickering: "You really believed that shit we fed you?")

Years ago, my wife's friend introduced us to her new boyfriend. He was born in South Africa to French parents and we hit it off immediately as he pummeled me with questions about American music and culture. He asked: "What would you say is the most American musician?" (I think I decided on Springsteen, for obvious reasons) and "What would you say is the most American movie?" For the latter, he wanted me to name a movie that would explain everything about American culture to a foreigner like himself. I didn't have an answer for him at the time, but if he asked me today, I'd tell him to watch The Wrestler. 

Lou Reed: NYC Man As Middle-Aged Man

Rock n' roll is no country for middle-aged men. Nor is it a country for married men. But it's even worse if you're a middle-aged married man who recently gave up booze and pills and powders. Looking back on rock n' roll, it's been painfully obvious that the business is not kind to the newly settled-down and sober. The 99-cent bins are chock full of artists for whom responsibility translated into a weakening of their artistic hunger. Even Bob Dylan, who is seemingly capable of playing any role in his songs, proved that husband-and-father is the one role he cannot get a handle on (see Self Portrait). 

But what about Lou Reed? Lou turned 38 on March 2, 1980. That same year, he married Sylvia Morales and began attending AA meetings. His first album as a married man recovering from addiction was 1980's Growing Up In Public.

Naturally, many are turned off by the cover. There's Lou, wearing a V-neck sweater and looking wholly uncool. The music inside is mostly bombastic rock n' roll with fretless bass playing reminiscent of Paul Simon's Graceland. It's one of his more musically uninteresting albums. But that doesn't matter. Growing Up In Public is all about Lou's lyrics and voice, and both here are presented as nakedly as possible. The songs are half moral narrative and half unadulterated autobiography, which in turn makes for some of the most brutally honest material of his career. As Mikal Gilmore wrote in Rolling Stone, Growing Up In Public is "like a family scrapbook nobody wants to share." 

My Old Man

"And when he beat my mother

It made me so mad I could choke...

And can you believe what he said to me

He said, "Lou, act like a man!"

The lump in Lou's throat as he sings conveys a patricidal rage. But Lou, who for most of the 70s acted much like a child, proves he is a man, one who has the courage to admit that his addictions are stronger than he thought ("The Power of Positive Drinking") and that he is now aware of the seriousness of love.

Think It Over

"And we really must watch what we say

Because when you 

Ask for someone's heart

You must know that you're smart

Smart enough to care for it." 

Most singer-songwriters have a tough time being this honest. From Dylan to Haggard to Cohen to Oldham, most artists shroud their confessional songs in a thin veil of fiction. Not Lou. Growing Up In Public meant no bullshit and it marked a major artistic transition for Lou, which he would follow up with the incredible The Blue Mask and the less-renowned-but-equally-stunning Legendary Hearts. All three records are about loving his wife, settling down, and coming to grips with his addictions. These are by no means sexy topics, which is probably why they remain neglected by critics and Lou's record label (would somebody please reissue these, for chrissake?) Who the fuck wants to hear songs about marriage and responsibility? Lots of people. There are more married responsible couples out there than there are fucked-up single ones. Unlike Hollywood, Lou proves that one doesn't need to cheat on their partner to spice things up. Growing older with someone else and remaining faithful is interesting enough as is. 

New Work: French Connection

(Seattle Weekly, 3.31.09)

Light in the Attic Releases the “Sgt. Pepper’s of French music.”

By Brian James Barr

Last week, Seattle-based Light in the Attic Records became the first label to release Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson in the United States. Knowing this, the question is: Why didn't anyone else ever think of doing it?

Matt Sullivan doesn't know either, but as LITA's head honcho, he's glad no one had. After all, the 1971 album is widely considered one of the most groundbreaking albums of all time, and Gainsbourg, the petite Frenchman behind it, one of the most influential musicians in the world. The album's sensual blend of rock and orchestral arrangements has been openly slobbered over for decades—and not just by record geeks: Beck's album Sea Change was a blatant Melody Nelson ripoff.

"[Music fans] are always saying 'Oh, well, such and such is a masterpiece,'" says Sullivan. "But Melody Nelson really is a masterpiece. It's the Sgt. Pepper's of French music."

Reissuing legendary albums is LITA's stock-in-trade, yet Histoire de Melody Nelson stands out in the label's catalog (and not just because the cover boasts a topless Jane Birkin). It's the label's first foray into Francophilia, and the first album they've dealt with whose creator was a legend in his own time and whose popularity hasn't waned. Spooky folk singer Karen Dalton and S&M funkstress Betty Davis were both obscurities during their career peaks, whose albums, even in the '70s, you couldn't find anywhere. Thus there was an out-of-the-box urgency and demand for LITA's reissues—the label's purpose, essentially, was to make the public hip to astounding artists barely anyone had heard of. To do so, LITA beefed up the albums' liner notes with in-depth essays, rare photos, and testimonials from heavies like Iggy Pop and Devendra Banhart.

Though Gainsbourg died in 1991, it could be argued that his legend needs no help from a little Seattle record label. As a 2008 New York Times article noted, the man's groin-driven jams and "dirty old man" rep still inspires fashion designers, musicians, visual artists, and interior designers today—not to mention Gainsbourg, a French-themed Seattle bar (co-owned by SW music columnist Hannah Levin).

"It certainly presented a challenge to us," says Sullivan of Gainsbourg's established fame. "How are we going to market this and make this something definitive that people will to want to buy?"

For starters, LITA's reissue is the first to print lyrics in both French and English. Now even more readers can follow Gainsbourg's story of an old sleazeball who runs over a teenage girl with his Rolls-Royce, deflowers her at a fleabag hotel, and later foresees her plane crashing while she's en route from Paris to London. And no reissue had ever elaborated on the album's backstory, juicy though it is. In the thick liner-note booklet, LITA tells the Melody Nelson story with two beefy essays and an English translation of a rare 1971 interview from the magazine Rock&Folk in which Gainsbourg talks about the album in depth. (Quoth Gainsbourg: "I am incapable of mediocrity.") And—DJs take note—LITA's reissue is the first on vinyl, though the album's been considered a break classic for decades.

From an indie-label standpoint, licensing an album from Universal is not hard. But it is a bit pricey (about $3 per CD), and allows for little marketing creativity. Sullivan says acquiring additional photos of Gainsbourg would have cost $1,000 a pop, so don't look for any. Universal also won't give up its licensing rights for TV, film, or digital media (iTunes). This means LITA can't stream the album on its Web site or offer promotional mp3s or 7-inches. But that's where Gainsbourg's cemented fame works in their favor: LITA won't have to work hard to make people care.

Though LITA is the first label to license Melody Nelson stateside, it's long been available in U.S. stores. "There's a French division of Universal, and they've had import versions available—you can go pick it up at Easy Street or wherever. But it was just in a jewel case and only had, like, a little eight-page booklet. It just didn't feel very special."

Sullivan's sentiment highlights the very conundrum of music hustlers everywhere: In the era of downloads, how do you create something people will pay for if they can get it for free? LITA's formula in the past has been to package albums that proclaim "You've never heard of this artist, but you should have, and here's why." With Melody Nelson, LITA is saying "Yeah, you've heard this story, but not all of it." Again, why hadn't anyone thought of that?

"I don't know," Sullivan reiterates. "But to have an album like this in our catalog is a dream."