Vocalist.org archive


From:  Karen Mercedes <dalila@R...>
Date:  Tue Jan 22, 2002  4:02 pm
Subject:  Re: [vocalist] nick cave--wedding song

Ah - Nick Cave has got boring?! Amazing what age will do to all of us.

I had the pleasure (?!) of interviewing Mr. Cave back in the early '80s
when I wrote about "post-punk" and "new wave" music for magazines like
MUSICIAN. At the time, he was doing a project with Marc Almond (of Soft
Cell), Lydia Lunch, and Jim Foetus (!) called The Immaculate Consumptive.

Cave was the founder and lead singer of the Australian "garage" band The
Bad Seeds that later became known as The Birthday Party. Their music was
very loud and hard driving and his lyrics were extremely irreverent, rude,
angry, etc. etc.

Cave has also written short stories and plays, and is generally known now
as one of the "granddaddies" (at the ancient age of about 40) of pop
subculture. I know that he was trying to get a bit more "mainstream", at
least in terms of audience acceptance, but if your description of his
wedding song is accurate, he may have erred entirely too far on the side
of safety.

One of my fondest memories of Mr. Cave is of driving The Immaculate
Consumptive, after our interview (which took place at about 2.00 in the
morning after their second gig), to their various sleeping places in D.C.
At the time, only Marc Almond actually had enough money to afford a hotel
room - the others were all crashing on various people's couches and
futons. Anyway, Cave was sitting in the back seat of my Dodge Colt,
swigging Cutty Sark straight from the bottle. We were driving up 14th
Street and when we approached P Street, Cave asked me to stop for a moment
and let him out of the car. You must understand that in the early 1980s,
14th and P Street was the very hub of drug dealing activity in D.C.
Curious, I asked him why he would possibly want to get out in that
particular location - and he told me, unabashedly, that he wanted to score
some heroin. So I told him that if he wanted to get out and do this, it
was fine - but that he could not expect me to wait for him, and he'd have
to walk the remaining 6 blocks or so to his friend's house at 14th and U
(still a pretty desperately dangerous neighbourhood). He said fine. SO I
left him there to do his business, and drove on with the others.

Apparently, Nick emerged from the experience unscathed, and I drove around
for weeks with an empty Cutty Sark bottle rolling around under my car seat
as a sentimental reminder of the incident....

If you've ever seen Nick Cave's photo - particularly ca. 1984 - you'd
realise why no drug dealer or other violent criminal would risk taking him
on.

Anyway, I don't know the song you mention, but I can suggest to you that
singing at someone's wedding is not about you and your preferences, it's
all about the bride and groom and theirs. It's their day, after all. The
last wedding I sang at, I was asked to sing "From this moment" by Shania
Twain - this from a work colleague who had heard me sing, and knew very
well she was dealing with an operatic voice. So what did I do? I sang
"From this moment", not attempting at all to mimic Shania's interpretation
of the song, but instead giving it my own - a kind of "legit" musical
theatre approach to the song, which is what I felt comfortable with, and
which the bride and groom both appreciated very much.

I'd suggest that before you totally pull out of the project - or even
before you try to persuade the bride to choose another song (and it sounds
like this song does have some significant sentimental value to her - that
is, SHE hears something in it that moves her, even if you do not) - that
you think of all the different ways in which the song might be
interpreted/performed. Even if it's dreadful musically, perhaps there is
something you can latch onto in the lyrics to make it meaningful to you.
Also, don't even think of trying to emulate Mr. Cave's own rendering.
Unless he's taken some major voice lessons (and I know he hasn't because I
recently heard his rendering of a Kurt Weill song, and he sounded very
much as he did in the early '80s), his is not a technique you even
remotely want to approximate.

There's a lot of dreadful, dull classical vocal music we're all expected
to sing at various points in our career (Gluck, for a start - the man
wrote some lovely brief, simple melodies, but managed to spin them out
through so many repetitions that make his arias so long that they
they become utterly soporific) without protest. Just look upon this song
as another one of those.

Karen Mercedes
http://www.radix.net/~dalila/index.html
***************************************
What lies behind us, and what lies before us
are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson




emusic.com