Salon.com > Wendy Mitchell

Cynthia Plaster Caster: Art with staying power

Wed, 12 Jul 2000 20:06:00 +0000

Cynthia Plaster Caster became famous in the 1960s for making plaster casts of rock stars' penises, and she's honest about what inspired her. Her work is not a commentary on the sexual revolution, she says, nor a statement about the nature of celebrity. She doesn't glorify what she -- and her artwork -- is all about. She's just a woman with a sly sense of humor and a passion for rock 'n' roll -- and men.

Back in 1966, when she was a 19-year-old art college student (and frustrated virgin) in Chicago, her professor gave Cynthia a weekend assignment to make a plaster cast of "something solid." She and one of her aspiring groupie friends knew what they had to do next. Cynthia didn't succeed in casting anyone that weekend, but her plaster casting supplies got her introduced to Paul Revere and the Raiders. (She succeeded on another level, however, when she lost her virginity that weekend to lead singer Mark Lindsay.) She was hooked: Handing out her "Plaster Caster" calling cards was enough to set her ahead of the groupie pack.

Sharps & Flats

Mon, 12 Jun 2000 19:13:00 +0000

Old 97's frontman Rhett Miller once called himself a "serial lady-killer," but the lanky rocker boy has a way of sounding as literately lovesick as, say, Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian or as sensitive as Aussie songwriter Ben Lee. In Miller's songs, across four records of countryish pop music, Miller comes off as the rare sensitive guy who seems just off-kilter enough to be dangerous. When he's not breaking hearts, he sniffs glue, yelps like a madman and threatens to get drunk and burn the nightclub down.

"Early Tracks" remembers Miller and the rest of the 97's at their loose-cannon best, when they were still down-home Dallas boys with a love for honky-tonkin' fun. Featuring four singles and four unreleased tracks from 1995 and 1996, the short CD collects Old 97's songs from before the band's major-label deal, before their faces were airbrushed on posters and before they started pumping out the wonderful radio-ready ballads of 1999's "Fight Songs."

Sharps & Flats

Thu, 20 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

When Glasgow quartet Travis released their first album, "Good Feeling" (1997), the U.K. music press called the band's work "schizophrenic." True enough, the record was exuberant yet unfocused, wandering from the brooding grunge of "All I Want to Do Is Rock" to the blokey singalong pop of "U16 Girls" and "Tied to the Nineties." With their sophomore album, Travis confronts the schizophrenia label head-on: The title, "The Man Who," comes from a book of schizophrenia case studies, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." More important, the band doesn't jump from sound to sound. Here, all 10 songs wallow in a wonderfully consistent melancholy.

Travis frontman Fran Healy and his former art-school mates have left pub rock behind, recording instead the year's best collection of bummer folk rock. On "The Man Who," Healy can't see silver linings, only darker grays. But the best part is that he can sing lines like "I'm seeing a tunnel at the end of all of these lights" in the standout "Why Does It Always Rain on Me?" and come across sounding like the average tortured guy next door, not just another whiny rock star.

What's the frequency, Michael?

Wed, 20 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Lurking in my video collection is a tape marked "R.E.M. DO NOT TAPE OVER." The tape is from way back in 1989, when I was a young, rabid R.E.M. fan startled and delighted to discover an MTV "Rockumentary" about them. Madonna specials on TV were commonplace, but R.E.M.'s was rare enough that it seemed like it needed to be saved for posterity.

These days, of course, it's far easier to find R.E.M. on TV, with their "Behind the Music" and "Storytellers" specials on VH1, occasional documentaries and countless music videos. The latest sign of the band's pervasiveness is "Rapid Eye Movement: R.E.M. on Television," an exhibition at the Museum of Television & Radio (in both New York and Los Angeles through November). In total, the exhibit offers three hours of R.E.M. -- more than I could have even hoped for back in '89. There are two programs: One is a 90-minute compilation of clips spanning 1983-1998; the other is the 1998 documentary "This Way Up," about the recording of the band's latest album. The second program also includes "Uptake," a tape of the band in a warehouse performing songs from "Up," live and without an audience.

Sharps & flats

Tue, 24 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

"Stars Forever" is Momus' sellout record, born when the British cult singer's tiny U.S. label, Le Grand Magistery, ran up legal bills defending a suit filed after Momus' last record. Transsexual composer Wendy Carlos, it seems, didn't like the song about her on "The Little Red Songbook" (1998) and sued. To save Le Grand Magistery, Momus devised an ingenious plan. His records rarely earn serious amounts of money, so he decided to offer what he calls "song portraits" for $1,000 apiece. Surprisingly, the idea was successful: Within eight months he found 30 people (and a couple of small businesses and record companies) willing to lay out the cash for a tune dedicated to them.

More than a dozen albums of hilariously cheeky and intelligent songs have earned Momus (aka Nicholas Currie) a small but obsessive following. His fans are an eccentric bunch, and on "Stars Forever" they make for good material. One is a Parisian artist, another a rock star with cats. Artist Jeff Koons paid for a song, as did a shy Japanese woman and a gay writer with a fetish for soldiers.

Sharps & flats

Mon, 12 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Like it or not, Merge Records always has been -- and most likely always will be -- known as Superchunk's label. Bassist Laura Ballance and vocalist/guitarist Mac McCaughan started the tiny record company in the summer of 1989 with a few cassettes and 7-inch singles recorded by their friends' bands. Merge did well enough, and soon after, Superchunk parted ways with Matador and started releasing records on their own label.

More than 150 singles and full-length albums later, Merge is still home to Superchunk and a small stable of talented bands. Unlike a lot of indies that latch onto bands that have a particular sound (Bloodshot's alt-country, Lookout's pop punk), Merge favors groups that don't -- very few create anything that sounds like Superchunk's anthemic indie rock. Mac and Laura -- they're known by their first names in the tightly knit indie world -- are simply drawn to bands that touch them, whether they're neighbors in North Carolina (Polvo, Archers of Loaf, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Angels of Epistemology), Southern compatriots (The Rock*A*Teens, Lambchop) or musicians halfway across the world (Bristol's Third Eye Foundation, New Zealand's Cakekitchen, Glasgow's Ganger).

Sharps & flats

Tue, 15 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Danielle Howle's voice grabs your heart, and her songs squeeze it until it bursts. When the singer-songwriter performs live, she regularly slips into short, unlikely comedy routines about wacky subjects like fishing, trendy pants, holidays with her family and something she calls "butt shifts." But on "Catalog," Howles first solo studio album, theres no such levity to cushion her blows.

Howle, who is from Columbia, S.C., plays acoustic guitar and accompanies her picking with a voice laced with elements of Ani DiFranco's raw passion and Patsy Cline's melodicism. Her songs punch so hard because theyre often about the universal experience of being alone -- alone after a loved ones death, alone after a lover leaves, alone in your own little world. Howle doesn't seem to mind being alone, at least part of the time. In "From the Tops of Trees," a song about her childhood practice of climbing trees to watch the goings-on below, she sings, "I was not a social person/But I never missed a thing." But on the subject of emotional alienation, she's less confident. On "Still in Love With You," a song about being wronged in a relationship, she's "the doll with the flaw."