Red Red Meat and Califone

Tim Rutili and Glenn Girard were the driving forces behind Friends Of Betty before forming Red Red Meat in 1990. Among the Chicago bands, Red Red Meat were already an anomaly, attempting an unlikely "bridge" between modern grunge and the primal blues of the region. The formula worked in their early singles, both Hot Nickety Trunk Monkey (Perishable, 1991), doubled by the Delta blues of slide guitar Molly's On The Rag, and Snowball (Dead Bird, 1992), with the equally strong B-side Idaho Durt, two tracks that added a tasteful use of fuzz to the basic format.

The band’s distinctive "grunge-blues" was definitively established with their self-titled 1992 album (Perishable). Teetering between the angularity of Robo Sleep (Velvet Underground and MC5) and the singability of Snowball (Husker Du and Lynyrd Skynyrd), between the perverse ritualism of Grief Giver (Cramps and Rolling Stones) and the funky gestures of Hot Nikketty Trunk Monkey (Jimi Hendrix and Aerosmith), the group became an inexhaustible machine of vibrations. The album staggers between spectacular numbers like the feverish acoustic delirium of Molly's On The Rag and the ramshackle boogie of X-Diamond Cutter Blues, immersing itself in two breathtakingly long psychedelic tracks: the nightmare of Sister Flossy, worthy of the darker Grateful Dead, and the trance of Rubbing Mirrors, made to bleed with the dizzying jingle of guitars.
It is primarily the guitars that dominate, with interventions always highly personal, pushing the boundaries of blues, boogie, and hard rock, and almost always driven by malevolent forces into contrapuntal lines that are as rough as they are incandescent.

Maturity was signaled by the single with Flank, one of their most distorted, vibrant, and melodic saloon ballads, and Lather, whose melody unfolds over the obsessive rumble of distortions, leveraging slowed tempos and psychedelic chords.

Recovering from the death of bassist Glynnis Johnson (from AIDS in 1992), Red Red Meat released Jimmy Wine Majestic (SubPop, 1993), an album even more balanced between innovative and traditional impulses.
This time the inspiration was openly bluesy, sloppy blues in the vein of Exile On Main Street, following the same intuition that guided Pussy Galore. The sloppy shuffles of Thruster and Smokey Mountain Dbl Dip are a happy result. Red Red Meat often take this further, transforming these pseudo-blues into paradoxical sequences of plucking and pounding that would make Captain Beefheart envious, as in Dowser. But these blues, before being primitive, are shaded with clearly “acidic” sounds, clusters of floating chords in the void that suddenly erupt into bursts of riffs and dreamlike tunes (Stained And Lit and Roses above all).
Red Red Meat rediscover the “dilated” and hallucinatory harmonies of the Meat Puppets (vocals, guitars, and rhythms loosely combined and left to float in lakes of distortion or fuzztone) in tracks like Gorshin and Moon Calf Tripe, reaching transcendent states expressed in the subdued, almost folk-like chants of Brain Dead and even more so Comes. Only the galvanic Cilla Mange bares the claws of Flank. Overall, Red Red Meat’s work is one of the most significant innovations of the 1990s in the blues-rock canon.

Two dragged blues chords from the guitar open the long agony of Carpet Of Horses: little else happens for six minutes. Much of Red Red Meat’s third album, Bunny Gets Paid (SubPop, 1995), revolves around these minimal, somewhat gray sounds, in a sequence of melancholic pub tunes performed almost solo (Buttered, There's Always Tomorrow, Variations On Nadia's Theme) with a narcoleptic laziness reminiscent of Codeine. Over time, there is too little to narrate, but that little is sublime. Perhaps the masterpiece is Rosewood Wax Voltz + Glitter, a tribal dance at the edge of voodoobilly immersed in sheer industrial chaos, reaching impressive levels of absurdity. Another moment of madness is Sad Cadillac, with a bass drum keeping an improbable rhythm and two drunks humming along the guitar errors and piano noises. Only two moments of normality appear: the psychedelic chant of Chain Chain Chain, which finally finds a rhythm (albeit sloppy like a Stones or Lou Reed manual), and the rough ballad of Idiot Son. Guitarist Girard is gone, leaving Rutili free to roam. Perhaps more psychedelic than the previous albums, it surprises in the way it teases angelic choruses (Gauze and Oxtail) out of chaotic and fragmented harmonies. The Taxidermy Blues In Reverse is unbalanced down to its LSD-infused bottom. The album is simultaneously the most atmospheric and melodic of the lot, connecting blues-rock and art-rock in its own way.

Aside from the debut album, which in retrospect did not correctly focus their vocation, Red Red Meat’s trajectory from Jimmy Wine Majestic to Bunny Gets Paid represents a coherent evolution from Exile On Main Street to Captain Beefheart, from Pussy Galore to Jon Spencer.

Continuing the experimental vein of Bunny, the fourth album, There's A Star Above The Manger Tonight (SubPop, 1997), marks the attainment of classical maturity, also highlighted by the fact that the tracks tend to be more instrumental than sung. Their ragged blues-rock suddenly sounds like baroque cantatas. Behind the apparent sloppiness of overlapping odd chords hides a strict logic and cunning performance skill. The quartet may have found the magical balance, with Tim Rutili now a multi-instrumentalist alternating guitar, piano, mandolin, organ, and violin; the invaluable Tim Hurley on bass providing infernal counterpoints; Brian Deck on synthesizer, the album’s real surprise, capable of painting the murkiest, most dreamlike and heroin-addled atmospheres; and Ben Massarella on percussion, impeccable in his distant tapping, sometimes jungle aboriginal, sometimes a Charlie Watts at the nadir of his sloppiness.

At the most accessible extreme of their style are Sulfer, with scratchy riff lines, a cocktail-lounge atmosphere, and a touch of soul chorus (but also a superb coda of phantasmagorical guitar effects); Chinese Balls, with a rock approach halfway between the Stones and ZZ Top; Quarter Horses, a ballad for sun-baked Native Americans in the desert; and Airstream Driver, a sleepy chant at Velvet Underground pace. In the title track, Second Hand Sea, and Bury Me, with brief interludes to break tension, they dig into folk tradition to deliver playful jokes worthy of Taj Mahal.
Their passion for occult ceremonies and inclination to evoke the mystery of pagan civilizations culminates in the slow voodoo ritual dances of All Tied and six minutes of percussion magic in Paul Pachal, a jungle nightmare nested inside a hallucinogenic nightmare.
They establish themselves as Captain Beefheart’s greatest disciples ever with a clumsy incursion into the Louisiana swamps, the comic instrumental fantasy of Just Like An Egg On Stilts, at the peak of harmonic disintegration, where melody is only a disordered accumulation of more or less out-of-tune chords—seventeen minutes of maddening trance.
The standout feature is undoubtedly the imagination of the arrangements, where the ideas of four postmodern reinterpretation geniuses converge. Drawing on an immense repertoire of guitar techniques, a revolutionary rethinking of percussion to enhance its communicative power, and a dissonant fugue art of the synthesizer (in line with the rediscovery of the instrument by Magnog, Cul De Sac, etc.), the band forges a highly expressive grammar of the stream of consciousness.
Masters of postmodernist style-deconstruction, Red Red Meat used blues as a springboard to enter an orbit where all popular music appears as a blurred sea of sounds.

Loftus (Perishable, 1997) is a collaboration between Red Red Meat and Rex, a collection of lo-fi spirituals (Emma's Rubber Leg), hallucinogenic, catatonic blues (Haywine), surreal country music (Theme From Loftus Nine), and robotic jams (Nervous). The coupling of Rex's math-rock neurosis and Red Red Meat's acid-blues depression yields some seriously challenging music.

After Red Red Meat disbanded, Tim Rutili, Ben Massarella and Tim Hurley returned under the moniker Califone. The seven songs on the mini-album Califone (Flydaddy, 1998) continue There's A Star's experiments towards a trip-hop sound while retaining Red Red Meat's roots in black music. Califone's artistic manifesto is On The Steeple, a hyper-psychedelic dub-infected blues enhanced with discordant piano figures, guitar reverbs and swampy percussions. Unlike most trip-hop, that employs high-tech studio techniques, Califone's songs are orchestrated in the name of deranged primitivism: found noises, casual guitar/piano tones, oblique interplay, unorthodox drumming. The country spoof Dime Fangs sounds like a slow-motion version of the Holy Modal Rounders. Down Eisenhower Sun Up updates the West-coast acid-rock sound of the Sixties (would fit on David Crosby's first album). What is notably different, besides the technique, is the icy, gloomy atmosphere. Even the relatively simple folk lullaby Silvermine Pictures seems to be performed by a bunch of vampyres.. Pastry Sharp is a quiet John Lennon-esque ballad drowned in a jelly of slow, dissonant rhythmic elements. Red Red Meat's visceral approach to popular music is replaced in Califone's music by textural arrangements of electronics, statics, found noises, keyboards. Red Red Meat music used to be the quintessence of spontaneity: Califone's music is as artificial as it gets, all processing and reprocessing of sonic ideas.
Their mastery in welding the synthetic and the traditional shines on the subsequent EP Califone (Road Cone, 2000). Electric Fence uses the elements of the previous album (the blues backwash, the dub ambience, the neurotic piano figures, the sound effects), plus a touch of strings, to manufacture a full-fledged romantic ballad, in many ways reminiscent of the decadent mood concocted by Roxy Music. Beneath The Yachtsman bridges tradition (country/folk/blues), psychedelia and trip-hop and perfectly defines their semi-dissonant roots-rock. Dock Boggs, shrouded in dance beats and hazy distortions, offers an ever more unlikely hybrid of the archaic and the futuristic. The EP contains two straightforward acoustic numbers as well: St Martha Let It Fold and Don't Let Me Die Nervous; as if to remember where it all started.
Sometimes Good Weather Follows Bad People (Glitterhouse, 2000) collects the two EPs.

Rick Rizzo and Doug McCombs of Eleventh Dream Day guest on Roomsound (Perishable, 2001 - Thrill Jockey, 2006), Califone's first proper full-length. Tim Rutili finds a superb balance between his rootsy inspirations (blues depression and gospel ecstasy) and modern technology (samples and loops). The rhythm section of Ben Massarella and Tim Hurley grace each track of countless diversions. On the surface, the album is a collection of melancholy, dreamy ballads, but the deeper one digs, the "louder" (so to say) one hears echoes of Calexico's subdued "desert folk". Either way, songs such as Trout Silk (sub-blues groaning to drowse even Taj Mahal, free-form acid guitar, and a magma of lazy sounds) and Tayzee Nub (a nocturnal Tom Waits humming along a bunch of sleeping musicians) are complex, sophisticated compositions. Rutili's stream-of-consciousness poetry complements the spacey scores.
As usual, Califone's sound has two side effects. On one hand, it resonates with the laid-back, dilated, western acid-rock of the Sixties (St Augustine). On the other hand, the marriage of dreary blues and acid melancholy yields dirges such as Bottles And Bones, Slow Rt Hand and the fantastic plantation spiritual Wade In The Water that recall Beggar's Banquet-era Rolling Stones.
The album includes another "simple" lullaby, Rattlesnakes Smell Like Split Cucumbers, and a ten-minute meditation, New Black Tooth.
While not as accomplished and innovative as the two EPs, Roomsound offers plenty of depressed vibrations.

Deceleration One (Perishable, 2002) collects music for films that was performed live by Califone.

Orso is the project of former Red Red Meat bassist Phil Spirito (who is also in Rex), now converted to banjo and acoustic guitar. His former Red Red Meat buddies and violinist Julie Liu help out on oRSo (Perishable, 1998), a charming collection of humble folk and blues songs, dressed with found, toy and home-made instruments, played and sung with the off-kilter manners of Tom Waits (Burial At Sea, Three Chimneys All Different, Fireman's Cough), with occasional nods to Bob Dylan and Neil Young (For Lack Of Better Words). In a couple of cases Spirito attempts a bold form of "avant-folk" (the Captain Beefheart and Holy Modal Rounders romp of Stretch Your Money, the nonsensical rigmarole of Madagascar), that prove more than a passing form of folly.
But the insane orchestration is better appreciated in the instrumental (or mostly instrumental) pieces. Farmer Was A Paranoid Man and Tea Eggs are abstract art, psychedelic freak-outs in the vein of Red Crayola with discrete doses of "musique concrete". Less radical scores yield the surreal vignettes of Rudra Vina, Spider's House, Bubble Lady.
The sounds on Orso's second album, Long Time By (Perishable, 2000) are no less inventive. Almost no song is left to predictable devices, almost every tune is embedded in randomness and chaos. The variety of instruments turns fairy tales such as Mavis into small chamber pieces that retain a surreal character while sculpting a depressed mood. Tom Waits' influence is even stronger, as attested by the drunk and sleepy Third and MaMa. On the other hand, Spirito's primitivism in deranged pseudo-folk number such as Alex Apartment hark back to the era of Holy Modal Rounders and David Peel.
The real treat, truth be told, are the instrumentals, veritable chamber concertos of mad dissonances (Conference Room, Slight Return, Logs), when not delightful, out-of-tune flashbacks (Spokane). We get so used to the whackiness of the project that the almost accomplished pop-iness of Well comes as a shock.

Tim Hurley, drummer Danni Iosello and bassist Noel Kupersmith are Sin Ropas, whose Three Cherries (Perishable, 2000) is one of the most gloriously deranged folk-rock albums of the decade, from the drunk, spaced-out country-rock of Rabbit Dreams to the highly original folksinging of Redtooth (Neil Young with a bad hangover), songs that relish in sleepy tempos and huge doses of melancholy. From the burning guitar distortion of Little Cheater to the abstract cacophony of I Found Your Teeth, from the pop refrain of Tender Facial Rake to the solemn, tender whisper of Tripped On Your Cape, Rutili is magnificent in the way he sinks his mind in every note, in the way his music seems to be falling apart at every verse. As he proceeds in uncharted terrain, the artist is trying to figure out whether he is Alice In Wonderland sliding down the hole, Ulysses adrift in the seastorm, or Ted Bundy stalking his next victim.

Tim Hurley and Danni Iosello continued the Sin Ropas project with Trickboxes On the Pony Line (Sad Robot, 2003) and Fire Prizes (Konkurrent, 2005 - Shrug, 2008).

Califone's Quicksand / Cradlesnakes (Thrill Jockey, 2003) enhances the brooding acid-blues sound of the first album with electronic, jazz and post-rock elements. Surprisingly this results in both an expanded song structure (the seven-minute carnival of eccentricities that flows along the piano elegy Horoscopic Amputation Honey and helps propel its jubilant finale) and a warmer, more melodic approach (best represented by Michigan Girls, a tender lullaby embedded in a soundscape of wooden plucking, limping percussion, plaintive strings and shy guitar riffs; and by Red, a swampy, ghostly blues that whispers a tender tune against a spare background of lazy wooden percussion and random instrumental sounds). Califone still retains the penchant of a roots band (the brief folk ballad Million Dollar Funeral, the brittle boogie Your Golden Ass, the acid bluegrass Mean Little Seed) and a roots band that aims at telling stories (the nocturnal and actually poppy Vampiring Again, the Lou Reed-ian When Leon Sphinx Moved Into Town). However, Rutili's operation has become more ambitious, as proven by the madness of the short instrumental intermezzos, notably Cat Eats Coyote.

Acceleration One (Perishable, 2002) and Deceleration Two (Perishable, 2003) are movie soundtracks composed by Califone.

Califone's Heron King Blves (Thill Jockey, 2004) is another intriguing manifestation of Tim Rutili's continuing experiment, further disintegrating the format of the roots-rock song. Some of the shorter songs mix discrete doses of funk music and soul music with Califone's atmospherics (like an acid version of Little Feat), peaking with the mutant disco of Two Sisters Drunk on Each Other and the electronic and percussive, largely free-form Trick Bird. Apple injects blues guitars and gospel organs into a stew of electronic beats and noises. But then the plain Wingbone and Lion and Bee are just the opposite: heartfelt, tiptoeing folk vignettes. The eight-minute spaced-out and distorted Sawtooth Sung a Cheater's Song retains the funereal oneiric gloom of previous albums, pushing further into the other dimension. Everything sounds as filler compared with the 15-minutes mostly instrumental jam Heron King Blves, a balancing act between organic free-form abstraction and geometric pulsing pattern, a worthy addition to the program of Captain Beefheart's Mirror Man.
The dusty interplay and solos of voice, guitars, banjos, hurdy gurdies, drums and electronics concocts the usual understated post-everything mayhem.

Orso's My Dreams Are Back And Better Than Ever (Perishable, 2004) redefines Spirito's project as languid chamber prog-folk-pop-jazz fusion reminiscent of Caravan. The repertory consists of simple fluffy songs that are tenderly arranged (Carlo Cennamo on alto sax, Griffin Rodriguez on double bass, Julie Liu on viola and violin) and delivered in a warm tone, best being Blind Date, Hartz of Darkness, Loaded for Bear (that echoes Faust's Jennifer), Is Christmas Tomorrow and the instrumental Oh Look Singing I Can Watch This.

Califone emerged as mature songwriters on Roots & Crowns (Thrill Jockey, 2006), an album that reconnected them to their roots-rock origins, recycling elements of blues, folk and country with the erudite nonchalance of a foreign scholar. Being as detached as they are from the populist artists that they (indirectly) quote, Califone can rearrange the semiotics of roots-rock according to their own aesthetic. The songs are pretty but not the way a Midwesterner would expect them to be. They display the urban anxiety that made Red Red Meat so provocative. Brian Deck continues to be the man behind the deranged sonic magic of Pink and Sour (subtly African and funky), A Chinese Actor (a deranged boogie full of noise, and perhaps the album's standout), the six-minute Black Metal Valentine (a syncopated, swampy shuffle), i.e. the three best songs, plus Spider's House (a sort of deconstruction of baroque pop), while Rutili's voice dominates the tender lullaby Orchids and the spaced-out elegy Burned By The Christians. Overall this is a much more radio-friendly version of Califone. Alas, it also has a greater percentage of filler than any of their previous albums. Nonetheless, Brian Deck and Tim Rutili stand as a unique creative couple, which has reinvented roots-rock in the digital age. The closing If You Would is a nocturnal, moribund lament over an anemic piano figure, in the vein of Tom Waits but without the attitude, and ended by a deluge of strings and synths. It symbolizes how far their partnership has gone and where it may be headed.

Orso released Ask Your Neighbor (2008).

Califone's All My Friends Are Funeral Singers (Dead Oceans, 2009) was actually Tim Rutili's first film soundtrack (and also his first film), which marked a nadir in Rutili's transfiguration of traditional North American music. Despite Giving Away The Bride, that sounds like a dub, jazz and Afro-pop remix of an ancestral plantation chant, and Salt, that could be a Taj Mahal invention, this is Rutili's "whitest" album, much more influenced by country and folk music than by blues music. At their best the songs evoke some kind of alternative cabaret (the fossilized Caribbean lullaby 1928, the surreal dance novelty Ape-Like), but mostly they are rather plain and uneventful, with little of the creative madness of the past.

Rutili's Guitars Tuned To Air Conditioners (2016) contains two side-long pieces.