A decade ago, if you were looking for a rock ‘n’ roll animal to lead your spring-break blowout but wanted someone cooler than Motley Crue’s Tommy Lee or Skid Row’s Sebastian Bach, there really was only one choice. Chris Connelly, a fresh-voiced underground rabble-rouser who had played in Fini Tribe and myriad Al Jourgensen-inspired projects, was the man for the job.
“Some fans dug up these videos of me performing from that time, and it was just a circus, a complete mess,” Connelly says. “I had to laugh. I was about 22, and doing the things that 22-year-olds sometimes will do, and getting paid for it as well. It was fantastic!”
Those were the days when Connelly was running with Jourgensen’s notorious Wax Trax posse, throwing concerts and backstage free-for-alls. Now, the 36-year-old Scottish expatriate has gone legit. He’s published a book, “Confessions of the Highest Bidder — Poems & Songwords 1982-96,” available through his Web site (www.chrisconnelly.com).
“It’s the first thing I’ve done that’s given me leverage with my family,” he says with a laugh. “I’ve given my mother platinum albums to hang on her wall, but with this book I’ve gained new respect.”
Connelly ponders the fate of rock ‘n’ rollers who become Lou Reed-like men of letters with a mixture of suspicion and empathy. “It’s tantamount to the B-52’s doing Shakespeare, isn’t it?” he says. “Lou Reed spent so much time in the early ’70s being a clown–I know people who saw him at Park West back then when he fell over and couldn’t play. Then he sobered up, put on his schoolteacher glasses and suddenly realized he had something important to say. Iggy Pop has the same problem when he tries to do something different. You’re going to get people who say, `Who’s he kidding?’ When you’re in the public eye, people can be unforgiving. They refuse to see past a certain part of your character.”
Connelly has waged a similar struggle, moving from his postpunk and industrial-disco days of banshee wails and machine-gun rhythms into a more introspective and melodic phase, climaxing with the recent release of his orchestral-pop opus “Blonde Exodus” (Invisible).
“I did an interview with Metal Hammer magazine and the writer was trying to find a connection between my past with what I do now, and I told him it’s a bit like method acting,” Connelly says. “I’m still too curious about all kinds of music to stick with one sound and beat it into the ground. It’s not about genre hopping. And it’s not about searching around for a style of music that will allow me to have a hit, because I’ve grown beyond that point. It’s about me exploring and enjoying what I have up here in my thick skull.”
What Connelly explored on “Blonde Exodus” were the fresh wounds from a failed romance. “That’s one thing break-ups are good for,” he says. “They get the creative juices flowing.”
Connelly also ran on adrenaline and coffee as he recorded the album after hours at a Chicago studio, usually working till 6 a.m., grabbing a cat-nap, and then dashing off to his day job at 8 a.m. “I was so excited about the project that nothing really fazed me,” he says.
The album fulfills the promise of its predecessors, particularly “The Ultimate Seaside Companion” (a hauntingly sparse disc recently reissued by Invisible with additional tracks) and his lost 1995 classic “Shipwreck” (Wax Trax/TVT). Recorded with his four-piece band, the Bells, and a platoon of backing vocalists and string players, “Blonde Exodus” is a song cycle that interweaves musical and lyrical themes in a way that suggests “the movie I will never get to make,” Connelly says. With its sweeping arrangements and lustrous melodies balancing brooding lyrics, it recalls the latter-day work of Scott Walker crossed with “Hunky Dory”-era David Bowie.
Though completed in 1998, the record got held up as Connelly tried to extract himself from a previous record deal. During this frustrating period, the singer got a call from Martin Atkins, the owner of Chicago-based Invisible and the former drummer of Public Image Ltd., to record and tour with an ad-hoc underground supergroup called the Damage Manual. The project brought Connelly back to the days when the rock was supercharged and the personalities larger than life.
“It was very rewarding,” he says. “The band was very combustible, and that made the music exciting. But we’ve all moved on from how we acted years ago. There are certain things that in normal day-to-day life I just can’t do anymore. Now I still take risks, but they all have to do with songwriting.”
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Chris Connelly and the Bells will bring their “Blonde Exodus Cabaret” to the Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia St. on Friday. 773-227-4433
