There is a bottle of Wild Turkey atop the TV set in the hotel room. On the bed, Paul K is stretched out, rattling a plastic cup of ice and chain-smoking cigarettes while recounting the crooked path from scholarship student at the University of Kentucky in 1980 to musical iconoclast, the best unknown songwriter of his generation.
There are the tales of how he smuggled marijuana from Jamaica, hunkered down in a squatter’s building on New York’s Lower East Side, got hooked on heroin and stole from friends to keep the habit going, all the while never thinking his first record would take 10 years.
There are the lurid details of quitting junk four or five times, the last in 1990 while in prison on various drug charges. “I was white and a first-time offender, so I spent only three weeks in the penitentiary,” says K, who could have faced a 10-year prison term after being arrested at the Cincinnati airport. He spent three years on probation and finally saw his prolific output of songs — more than three dozen homemade cassettes sold at shows and by mail — begin to trickle out on CD, first in Europe and lately in America, where “Achilles Heel” (Thirsty Ear) has just been released.
“I finally had some clarity of vision after I got arrested and got off dope,” K says. “I thought that because I knew (New York deejay) Gerard Cosloy and went on his radio show, all these were indications that success was just around the corner. Meanwhile, I’m putting about 150 bucks a day into my arm.
“I worked two jobs and stole everything that wasn’t nailed down. I never mugged people, never used a weapon — I was too chicken. But I checked out buildings. I rationalized that because these people could afford a two-room apartment and 40 compact discs that I should be entitled to five of these discs, and I could take them down to St. Mark’s Place and sell them for 5 bucks each, which was worth two bags of heroin and subway fare back home. The thinking is so unbelievably twisted.”
K says he was caught up in the romance of heroin, influenced by the writings of William Burroughs and Jim Carroll, and interviews with Lou Reed.
“They were right about one thing: You do learn a lot going down that sort of road,” he says. “I learned how to keep working no matter how sick or tired I felt — it enforces a bizarre sort of discipline.
“And I learned what bad things a decent person is capable of doing under pressure, like stealing from your very best friend.”
These street tales filtered into K’s songs, which adopted the voice of laconic loners, utterly devoid of sentiment and yet filled with tersely vivid images. Combined with his fiercely imaginative guitar playing in a tight rock trio, the Weathermen, K became an underground figure more often heard about than actually heard outside of Lexington.
All that began to change as his word-of-mouth reputation led to a few record deals and he began to tour the country. “It was a huge thrill to have records out, to finally have something exist that was something more than drugs and depression and self-pity,” K says. “Through all those years, I never stopped writing. The creative end wasn’t hard. Anyone can write a song. The hard part was dragging a band all the way up to Chicago or New York.”
K is so prolific a songwriter in part because he is unbound by style. He easily leapfrogs from acoustic folk to sprawling Neil Young-like guitar epics, from punk rants to soulful plaints — something that makes him a tough sell in an era in which a band’s sound must be easily defined or risk banishment from commercial radio.
The songwriter’s one recent concession to the tone of the times was to record “Achilles Heel” over a relatively short period of time in the same studio with the same musicians, giving the record a uniformity lacking in other Weathermen projects. Which is not to say the disc is homogenous. It’s a typical mix of lacerating snarl (“Little David”) and unsentimental pop (“When You Read This I’ll Be Gone”). But it’s a redemptive album by K’s standards, never more so than on the consoling final track, “Everything’s Forgiven.”
“One thing I told the band before we started recording, whenever there’s a lyrical reference to a gun, a pistol or a bullet or dope, let’s try to find a way to change that,” K says. “It’s so easy to get a good dramatic lyric with a needle in it or a 9 millimeter Browning stuck down some guy’s throat. I could write stuff like that for the next two weeks without going to sleep and come up with 200 songs, but it would be cowardly.”
K drags on a cigarette and greets his fiance, Elizabeth, as she enters the hotel room. “There’s a line in `Cold Summer Night’ that says, `Keep your arms around your loved ones, everything will be all right.’ Now when I started in this game playing punk rock, if I heard a song with a lyric like that, I would’ve thrown up. But now, I totally stand behind it. It might be romantic to be an outlaw, or whatever term people use, but having been one of those sorts of people, I have no desire to revisit the territory.”
– The Mad Scene is the latest vehicle for the songs of one of New Zealand’s legendary figures, Hamish Kilgour, previously of the Clean and Bailter Space. Kilgour shares vocals and songwriting with his wife and fellow guitarist, Lisa Seagul, with occasional input from bassist Robert Vickers, formerly of Australia’s GoBetweens, while Bill Gerstel plays drums. The group, now based in New York, has a strong new album, “Sealight” (Merge), which sets the sparse songs in subtle, hazy settings. Melodies drift unassumingly out of patchworks of radiance and shade, though the band is capable of packing a pop kick, as on “Transatlantic Telephone Conversation.” The quartet will perform Saturday at the Empty Bottle.
– The Smashing Pumpkins have parted ways with their longtime manager, Andy Gershon, who is said to be forming a new label under the wing of Geffen Records with R.E.M. producer Scott Litt. The Pumpkins will replace Gershon with the team of Q Prime, power players behind Veruca Salt and Hole, among others.
