Further Elective Affinities – Eyelids Companion Piece
More from Shindig’s bountiful roundtable with Chris Slusarenko, John Moen, Larry Beckett and Peter Buck. Talking about the passions: songwriting, a lost Tim Buckley recording, R.E.M. fan mail and EYELIDS’ new exquisite LP The Accidental Falls, words by CAMILLA AISA.
“I told them they reminded me of the Byrds, and now I’m talking about the best American rock band that ever was!” Larry Beckett, the poet you probably know as Tim Buckley’s lyricist, admits to being enthusiastically blunt the first time he met his new favourite group, Portland powerpoppers EYELIDS. No time was to be wasted after he found out about the band, as he told Shindig! in issue #102. Larry and his wife, Laura Fletcher, soon invited them to their house. As John Moen – who co-fronts EYELIDS with Chris Slusarenko – remembers, “they put out cheese and crackers and a bottle of white wine, like you would when your relatives come to visit”. “I met him and realised he’d listened to our music and really fell for it”, says Chris. Larry had proposed a collaboration right away. “I think we were both flattered, it was sort of unbelievable. But we’re protective of what we do – not every collaboration is a good one, you know? So we were like, how can we entertain this without over-committing? He gave us an invitation to come by and look at his book of songs, and we thought maybe we could find one or two and we could do a single together. That’s kind of our answer to everything: a single. We’ve done a lot of 45s!”, John laughs. Visiting Larry at home changed their minds: soon that supposed single developed into one of the finest records released this year, The Accidental Falls.
Chris recalls: “I went home that night and wrote ‘River’. Being immediately inspired, that took away a lot of our fears. I just didn’t want the record to be a sepia-toned lookback, like EYELIDS putting on their overalls and paisley scarves and doing this tribute. But right away we felt it was coming out of us. That was a really cool meeting that allowed us to relax and become ourselves in a way that I never thought could be possible. We sent him songs without lyrics, and he had lyrics from all sorts of decades that we went through”.
Next stop, the studio. Enter EYELIDS’ trusted producer, Peter Buck. He and Chris have known each other for some decades now: “Chris used to write R.E.M., and Michael and I would answer”, he remembers. “We met him, he hung out with us, but he was 12 or 13. After I moved to Portland, one day I was having dinner with him and his wife and he goes, ‘do you know who I am?’. Holy shit, I said, you’re that guy from Portland that we used to always write to! It’s really an odd experience to be producing him as an adult who has a child that’s older than he was when I met him”. If you talk to Chris, John or Larry, they’ll probably comment on the fact that Peter tends to minimise his contribution, overlooking the visionary guidance he brings to the table. Even when we get to talk about The Accidental Falls he does so: “I don’t like to think of myself as a record producer. If someone I respect wants me to be in the studio, I’ll go. The EYELIDS guys know what they’re doing, I’m there to make sure everything is okay. Some of them have an instinct to keep working on things over and over, so my job is to try to prevent that, keep it lively”. “The first day I got into the studio”, Peter says, “there was this guy, I wasn’t even sure who he was. I met Larry on the couch. I’ve seen him lots since, at shows”.
Peter had been a Tim Buckley fan for a long time: “I don’t remember hearing his stuff until the end of the 70s, when I first started reading about him. I bought Happy Sad, and that made a lot of sense to me. But in the South Tim Buckley was pretty much unknown. I don’t remember selling maybe more than two of his records in my whole two or three year record store career. I would always look at the liner notes, but I didn’t really have any real knowledge for Larry until the 80s, when people started writing articles about Tim and Larry was interviewed and mentioned. I was quite surprised to find out he also lived in Portland”. “Larry was in the studio every day with Laura”, Chris enthuses. “In terms of finding the head space of each song, he gave us complete freedom. He was so encouraging. Making the record was really freeing”. John concurs: “he really is so free as an artist. And giving. Isn’t it amazing to offer decades worth of very personal poetry to a couple of knuckleheads?”. Peter admits that “knowing that Larry is a poet and some of these songs date back to the Sixties made me feel a little more responsible about making the record tell its story”, whilst John talks of “nervous stomachs a little bit in the beginning, while we found our footing. But everyone was so encouraging. As songwriters and as co-producers of the album, we were treated like we knew what we were doing. Which is hilarious!”, he laughs.
One of the songs they set to record was an old jewel Larry had written with Tim Buckley, ‘Found at the Scene of a Rendezvous that Failed’. “It was inspired by an actual life event in my youth”, Larry explains. “It was recorded along with everything else Buckley and I had written when he first got signed to a manager. We had gone to a studio in the San Fernando Valley and recorded everything, including ‘Found at the Scene’.
Subsequently over the years the tape went missing and has never been found. But part of that project was also to create sheet music for some of the songs, and ‘Found at the Scene’ was one of those. When the manager died, those lead sheets were found among his possessions and sold. My friend Jeff Gold, a rock and roll collector and archivist, bought them and transmitted them to me as JPEGs. The sheet music for ‘Found at the Scene’ was missing two bars but I remembered what they were, so I wrote them in and gave them to EYELIDS. It’s certainly the only remaining strong Beckett-Buckley song that exists”. Talking about the recorded EYELIDS version, he points out: “that’s my myself playing piano and Peter Buck improvising the bassline behind me in tears. You guys’ music is why I became a musician, he told me later”. “I didn’t know I was gonna play on it until five minutes before it happened”, Peter adds. “We played it like one time, and that was it. A really intense experience”. It does sound special; remarkably, it also fits in in the most flowing way with the new songs Chris, John and Larry wrote together. “I think it’s a cool seamless record. It sounds like us, but it reads like Larry”, says Chris. The collaboration, both he and John believe, made them honour the process of lyric writing. John explains: “we came up in a time when words were mixed lower in a rock song – it was more about the passion of the moment than the actual poetry. Digging in with Larry’s material made me realise that I really like writing lyrics myself, too”.
You find yourself talking to these men and you keep thinking of all the notes under their belts. Tim Buckley, R.E.M. Guided by Voices, Decemberists, Elliott Smith – you name it. Also, all the new music that’s so persistently vital and utterly gorgeous. You realise they have something in common: it’s not just the “I’m a total fanboy” Chris conceded while talking about his schizophrenic record collection. They are each other’s most ardent admirers. Think of what it’s like to meet a future favourite friend, all the things to discover about them, all the loving energy – and imagine converting all that into chords and lines, whether it’s new recordings or fierce live performances. “EYELIDS is one of the best indie bands there even is”, Larry reiterates. “Never mind Portland, Oregon. In the country. And I think I’ve discovered part of the reason of why that is. Chris kind of embodies the power of 50s music: if you ever see him actually strum chords for a song, you realise that this guy is school of ‘Hound Dog’. On the other hand, John embodies the grace of Sixties artistry. Now, these guys are in the same band, song after song, fusing those two powerful beginnings. And they incorporate all the nuances of all the music that has happened since then. They are completely literate in that. It’s a whole universe of music that they inhabit”.
The Accidental Falls is available from Decor Records HERE
