"I have a lot of cheap, little keyboards and this octagon [sic – optigan] thing and this synth module that has a zillion different sounds in it. A lot of the keyboards I got at thrift stores. I have a little Casio SK-1 that has a built-in sampler. My favorite microphone I found at the landfill. It was on a CB base station. I've got these wireless intercoms from the '50s from an auction from a dentist's office.”
Mark Linkous, interview for Swizzle-Stick, 1999.
It’s a bit like the plot from an early Philip K. Dick novel, Time Out Of Joint (1959). An everyman living in a quiet rural town in 1950’s America begins to have visions of a future (one in which young punks sharpen their teeth, sport dyed mohawk haircuts, and sniff solvents, if I remember this book right), or is he really living in this future, circa 1998, and hallucinating the past? Mark Linkous, recording with (or as) Sparklehorse between 1995 and 2010, made often gentle, occasionally fierce, rock music encrusted with effects that sounded like they were being made in the 1950s with crystal sets, valves, early transistors, and wire and tape recorders, and sang them in a voice sent through crackling telephone wires to the Sparklehorse present.
Mark Linkous was born into a coal mining family in Virginia, USA, joined a motorcycle gang after leaving school, and, inspired by seeing The Johnny Cash Show on TV, and wanting to stay out of the mines, became a musician.
The Sparklehorse story starts with a disillusioned, drug-sick Linkous returning to Virginia to recuperate after a spell in the LA music scene in various bands; he credits Tom Waits Swordfishtrombones album with re-inspiring him, and the early Sparklehorse sound can be heard as a delicately muted distant relative of Waits’. Linkous’ songwriting is less dependent on folk and blues motifs, there’s a gospel influence in the chord changes but it’s likely to run into a spooky chromaticism derived from the Beatles, who derived it themselves from some unknown Central European nexus by watching spy films and listening to sounds around them in Hamburg. The song Linkous brought back from LA, and first formed Sparklehorse to record, is the fast rocker ‘Someday I Will Treat You Good’, and such fast, hard fuzzed up rockers appear across all the albums.
I left my baby on the side of the highway
She just couldn't see things my way
Someday I will treat you good
Someday I will treat you fine
Someday I will treat you good
You know I should
Everything that's made is made to decay
Well, I'm shrinking bones in the sun
Won't you tell me why that the beautiful ones are always crazy
She's whispering like Morticia now
‘Someday I Will Treat You Good’ appeared on Sparklehorse’s first album Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot (1995), produced by friend David Lowery of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker; Cracker, who Linkous roadied for and sang with occasionally, played on Vivadixie and had recorded a song Linkous and Lowery cowrote, ‘Sick of Goodbyes’, on 1993’s Kerosene Hat. It’s been a long path for Linkous to find expression with Vivadixie, and the lovely ‘Weird Sisters’, something of a failed revenge fantasy, opens with the line “The parasites will love you when you're dead”
Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, like the other early Sparklehorse albums, was more successful in the UK than the USA, and widely admired by indie musicians there, including Radiohead, then enjoying massive success.
In 1996, on a tour of the UK supporting Radiohead, Linkous took too many drugs and passed out for 14 hours, with his legs trapped beneath him, cutting off circulation. The resulting potassium overload once freed caused his heart to stop and damaged his kidneys, requiring dialysis; it took several surgeries to save his legs, and 6 months in hospital before he could walk again, and longer before he could function musically.
The album released in 1998, after a protracted recovery – Linkous needing to relearn guitar, and in doubt as to whether he could ever write songs again - Good Morning Spider, features a Daniel Johnson cover and one of my favourite Sparklehorse songs, ‘Painbirds”, with its gentle rocking rhythm and minimal lyrics; though Linkous has stated that most of the Good Morning Spider songs were written before his accident, on this album and the next, It’s A Wonderful Life, there’s a similar feeling to Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom, the sound of an artist grappling with pain and changing expectations after a life-changing event.
It’s A Wonderful Life’s ‘Apple Bed’, a duet with Nina Persson, is an existential audit, delivered with molasses slowness like a bad dream, that relays the pain and hope of Linkous’ situation in symbols that represent feelings rather than ideas or events:
Of horses wet with melted ice
They would not heed my advice
And burdened limbs of its weight
To break and rot a whispered fate
Please
Doctor, please
A remedy in a bloody sea
To breach the hive and smoke the bees
You can be my friend
You can be my dog
You can be my life
You can be my fog
Please
Doctor, please
The witches will return to their sticky tree knots
I will feel the Sun
I will feel the Sun
I will feel the Sun coming down
I wish I had a horse's head
A tiger's heart
An apple bed
‘More Yellow Birds’ has a lyric, oracular and cryptic as ever, that captures many of Linkous’ themes at once, there’s regret in these lines
Is your jewelry still lost in the sand
Out on the coast, or rushed into the brine?
and
I fell in with snakes in the poisoned ranks of strangers
Please send me more yellow birds for the dim interior
The final two verses comprise a set of fantastic funeral arrangements and prayers for the afterlife, and remind me of Edgar Allan Poe (who was born and died elsewhere, but grew up in Virginia).
Will my pony recognize my voice in hell?
Will he still be blind, or do they go by smell?
Will you promise me not to rest me out at sea
But on a fiery river boat that's rickety?
I'll never find my pony along the roiling swells
A muddy river or a lake would do me well
With hints of amber sundowns and muted thunderstorms
A sunken barge's horns, with the cold and rusty bells
Themes of pain and decay are in his songs before Linkous’s accident, but it turned him inward, facing an inner child which cried for consolation, and it’s his search for consolation in the darkness, often captured in his gritty, flawed sound and uncomfortable tempos, as well as the shifting interplay between despair and hope, regret and acceptance, in his lyrics that speaks to us. I use T. S. Eloit’s useful term objective correlative loosely in these essays, but in Linkous’s frequent references to horses and ponies in songs from the post-accident period we can use the phrase exactly as Eliot intended it, the symbol, or sustained metaphor, in a Symbolist poem – the horse is a creature that runs free, needs care, and will go into harness –. Edwin Muir’s “free servitude’ that “still can pierce our hearts” (the name “Sparklehorse” itself describes the motorcycles Linkous also loved).1
With Duane Zarakov, who captured the Linkous sampler sound well, using a recording of whale songs, I covered ‘More Yellow Birds’ for a Facebook tribute group a while ago; the chord changes seem too simple to support such a moving melody, until they do.
On It’s A Wonderful Life all aspects of the Sparklehorse sound are present; some Beatlesque chromaticism, a 90’s heavy rock feel on ‘King of Nails’, the inner child lullaby of ‘Little Fat Baby’, and some almost purely experimental tracks where the sampler dominates. It’s Sparklehorse’s most haunted album, and evokes the quintessentially American religion of Spiritualism, that genteel occult practice inspired by the invention of the telegraph and telephone, which, allowing the transmission of disembodied thoughts across great distances, made the receipt of messages from “the other side” seem scientifically respectable for a while.
The fast song on It’s A Wonderful Life, ‘Piano Fire’, is the Sparklehorse song that first hooked me; PJ Harvey sings backing vocals'.
The Cardigans singer Nina Persson was a devoted Sparklehorse fan and one of the great voices of the CD era; Linkous would produce the self-titled first album for her side project A Camp in 2001, and co-wrote the final track ‘Elephant’. Linkous as producer of A Camp is overall restrained, with good pop ears (Persson later described A Camp as “my perfect country record”) and there’s little of the playful self-sabotage he applies to his Sparklehorse productions; the Daniel Johnson cover ‘Walking The Cow’, where he’s a bit more indulgent, is a perfect blend of their styles.
2006 found Mark Linkous, after a long period waylaid by depression, working with producer Brian Burton (Dangermouse) on the fourth Sparklehorse album, Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain, which revisits the styles and themes of It’s A Wonderful Life with a more colourful pop feel (several of its songs being outtakes from It’s A Wonderful Life, some already released in various formats). In Dangermouse, whom he contacted after hearing the Jay-Z/Beatles mashup The Grey Album, Linkous found a producer he could trust to create modern settings for his vintage sound without losing its essence.
‘Shade & Honey’, a version of which was released on split 7” (with Mates of State’s ‘Lower’ and The Shins ‘Caring is Creepy, It Is’) in 2001, was featured in Lisa Cholodenko’s 2002 film Laurel Canyon, where it’s sung by Allesandro Nivola (it’s one of the two Sparklehorse songs his band is recording in Frances MacDormand’s studio, the other being ‘Someday I Will Treat You Good’). Hearing this version of ‘Shade & Honey’ over the trailer for Laurel Canyon is a bit like hearing The Clientele’s ‘I Can’t Seem to Make You Mine’ at the start of The Lake House.
‘Some Sweet Day’, which opens with Mark sampling his own vocal, is another lovely song, perfectly performed. Dangermouse’s production touch, in a light pop arrangement (with all instruments played by Linkous) like early solo MacCartney, meets a glorious synth and sampler cascade, which falls across the chorus like a meteor shower.
And on the seven-and-a-half minute ‘Morning Hollow’, framed by some loud fuzz distortion effects that really could last longer, Tom Waits (who also guested on vocals on It’s A Wonderful Life) drops in to play piano.
In the course of creating Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain Mark Linkous showed Dangermouse a number of unfinished songs which he didn’t feel suited his voice, and in a brilliant piece of artistic admin, the producer gathered together an impressive cast, an indie who’s who of Sparklehorse fans, to help him finish and cover the songs. Linkous only sings on a couple of tracks – ‘Daddy’s Gone’, a duet with Nina Persson which will be revisited on the next album, and(?) the title track, intoned by filmmaker David Lynch, who also sings, quite well, on the gloriously desolate ‘Star Eyes (I Can’t Catch It)’. Julian Casablancas from The Strokes (those muzzy vocal treatments on their 2001 debut This Is It may have owed something to Sparklehorse) gives us the inspired ‘Little Girl’ and makes it sound like his own song, guitar solo and all (the guest singers share co-writing credits with Linkous and Burton).
Black Francis from The Pixies sounds just like Iggy Pop, circa The Idiot, on ‘Angel’s Harp’, a controversial performance, and certainly nothing like Sparklehorse, but one that’s grown on me, followed by Iggy Pop himself, barnstorming, almost inimitably, through ‘Pain’.
Pain, pain, pain
Bad brains must always feel pain
The problem started with my attitude
It's all lust, direct and crude
There are good people in this world of bums
But, sadly, I am not one
Dark Night of the Soul strikes me as the great collaborative document of its era, a tribute album that lets every contributor rewrite their own tribute in their own way, within a flow where nothing’s out of place. That Linkous was still alive, and a vital part of the project, makes it even more marvellous. One of the best performances, ‘Grim Augury’ is sung by Linkous’ close friend Vic Chestnut, who, not being available for It’s A Wonderful Life when Linkous wanted him, had his answerphone message sampled. Here, he’s fully present.
Chestnut’s suicide in December 2009 struck Mark Linkous hard and probably contributed to his own death, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the heart, on March 6, 2010.
To be the close survivor of a suicide isn’t something I’d wish on anyone, and it’s only in recent years that those closest to Mark Linkous have completed two projects in his memory. One, the documentary This Is Sparklehorse (2022), is one of the worst rockumentaries I’ve seen, so protective of his memory that critical events and moods are redacted and the music left undefined and unexplained. But the set of songs finished last year, Bird Machine, is that rarest bird of all, the posthumously completed work that’s a perfect contribution to the discography (i.e. the opposite of every Hendrix album since Electric Ladyland).
The fast song is ‘I Fucked It Up’; there are too few fast songs, but all those there are show that Sparklehorse had the soul of a great biker rock band.
Well, I coulda had the homecoming queen
But I drove my minibike into a tree
Well, I think she would let me kiss her
But I fucked it up real good
Well, I coulda discovered a planet
But I didn't wanna hurt nobody's feelings
Well, I coulda been a rock and roll star
But I fucked it up real good
Bird Machine uses Linkous vocal and other tracks recorded by Steve Albini before Dark Night Of The Soul (apart from ‘Daddy’s Gone’, which reworks the track used on that album), with additions by Matt and Melissa Linkous that create a consistent Sparklehorse mood, with a hard edge that respects the original decision to record with Albini.
Rehearing all the Sparklehorse albums in chronological order makes me appreciate how diverse a songwriter Mark Linkous was. Because he had such a distinctive sound, and because of the Symbolist confusion of his lyrics, I had formed the impression that he was always zeroing in on one big, autobiographical thing. But, to read the lyrics is to know that, within these hedgehog limits, he’s writing about as many different states of being, as many different people, as he can, and his songs are full of surprises.2
Note on the CD Era
The long playing vinyl record, or LP, was developed in the 1950s and could hold around 40 minutes of music, making it ideal for pop compilations and singles-based collections and, increasingly, for the results of studio sessions by serious rock musicians, intended to be listened to as complete works. The format was friendly to shorter classical compositions but not to works such as operas or larger symphonies; a work by Bruckner or Mahler might fade out mid-movement, and the listener had to awaken from their trance to turn the record over or find the next disc. When it became possible to transcribe sounds to digital formats, the new Compact Disc was designed to overcome this limitation, with the specification (set by Herbert Von Karajan) that it be able to hold Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in its entirety,, the slowest canonical recording being Furtwangler’s, which lasted 74 minutes and 33 second. Thus the 12cm disc was chosen over the competing 11 1/2 cm disc design, and the first mass-produced CD (1982) was Karajan’s recording of Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony (Eine Alpensinfonie, Op. 64), a continuous work (though of many short sections) lasting over 50 minutes. The first mass-produced pop CD was Abba’s The Visitors. (Ironically, the U-Matic videotapes used to master CDs at the time were only 72 minutes long, so Furtwangler’s slowed-with-reverb remix of Beethoven’s 9th had to wait till 1997 to be heard on one CD).
With 72 minutes to fill, artists whose sales were mainly on CD, which was the case for all successful artists by the mid-90s, were encouraged to fill them, and often did, with material that would once have gone on their B-sides, rarities compilations, or experimental side projects. What made this “deep dive” phenomenon compatible with pop listening habits was the fact that the CD player was the first audio playback device to be equipped with an easy-to-operate track skip button (as the Bluetooth speaker is today). Sunnyvale, reviewing Bird Machine (4.2/5) for Sputnikmusic, described its music as “wrapped into the most concise runtime ever for a Sparklehorse release”’ - that’s because it is, finally, a Sparklehorse work specifically made for the vinyl LP market.
Algorithmic Hauntology: In 2007 Mark Linkous recorded, over two days, a 40 minute EP of experimental, mostly instrumental tracks (there’s one song, ‘In My Heart’) with Christian Fennesz, capturing the ghostly, mechanical, ambient side of his music.
“Sparklehorse” is a classically Anglo-Saxon poetic construction, and Linkous was a student of the art. On the flipside of ‘Someday I Will Treat You Good’, there’s a setting of William Blake’s poem ‘London’.
πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ' ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα - "a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing” – Archilochus, quoted by Isaiah Berlin in The Hedgehog and the Fox, 1953.