Category Archives: music

Review: Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall (2015)

Wylding Hall

Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In the land before time, I taught Audio Engineering with a focus on film sound. Consequently, I have a particular fondness for fiction in the “manager locks up band in a secluded location to record an album & mayhem ensues” genre, which intersects in interesting ways with the “ghost hunters bite off more than they can chew in a secluded house” and the related “student filmmakers set up shop in a haunted house and mayhem ensues” genres. Much like the actual entertainment industry, in horror fiction it’s all fun and games in the haunted house, until its not. Then it’s still fun and games for the reader, and doubly so for those of us who feel like we’ve lived some of these scenes in real-life, albeit with less bloodshed and more substance abuse.

But I digress.

Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall (2015) is a novella structured in a sort of behind-the-music-esque epistolary form. It’s got band drama, a creepy house, a mystery, and enough similarity to actual events to create a frisson of reality for readers who know a bit of English folk music history. Plus, it has a potentially colorful cast of characters wistfully trying to recount events from a time when they were all young, beautiful, and wasted. Hand weaves this all together in an intriguing manner and this is a fast, fun, eerie read.

Forty years after the mysterious disappearance of their lead guitarist, the surviving members of the fictional acid-folk band Windhollow Faire, their manager, and one band member’s ex-girlfriend (now a professional psychic) sit for individual interviews with a documentarian. The narrative unfolds as we jump from interview snippet to interview snippet. Although I feel that Hand did a brilliant job of creating and maintaining mystery and suspense using this technique, and each character is well-realized, their voices are too similar and I often found myself skipping back a page to remind myself who is supposed to be speaking. In less-skillful hands, this would sink the book, but the story is intriguing enough to put up with this minor annoyance.

So, the plot, without spoilers: After (fictional) acid-folk band Windhollow Faire releases their first album, their lead singer dies at the apartment of lead guitarist, Julian Drake. A new lead lead singer is recruited to replace dearly departed but not especially talented Annabelle. Their manager rents a medieval country house in Hampshire and stashes them away for 3 months to write, rehearse, and recover from the tragedy.

Hand was inspired by the true story of the British folk band Fairport Convention, whose manager rented a country house in Hampshire called Farley Chamberlayne so they could regroup after the tragic deaths of their drummer and their lead guitarist’s girlfriend, and record a new album.

I don’t know if Fairport Convention invoked any otherworldly forces during their time in Hampshire. but Windhollow Faire get more than they bargained for when clues emerge that Julian’s brilliant songwriting may be more than metaphorically magical.

In a lengthy interview with Locus, excerpted online on the magazine’s website, Hand talks about her folk-horror vision for Wylding Hall:

‘‘Just because you’re young and really stoned and in a weird creepy place, that doesn’t mean something really weird and creepy isn’t actually happening. I like the notion, too, that you don’t know you’ve seen a ghost until afterward. There’s an Edith Wharton story called ‘Afterward’. Somebody saw something, or they didn’t see something, and then later on they put it together and realized they had seen a ghost. I wanted to play with that, the idea of sunlit horror. Most of Wylding Hall takes place during the day.”

In a recent review of another book by Hand (Waking the Moon), I grumbled a lot about the lengthy insertions of lyrics and incantations. These inclusions are much more effective in Wylding Hall, and they also make more narrative sense as we’re meant to be watching musicians participating in the age-old process of adapting and contemporizing traditional ballads. That process is not only a vital way to keep the art form alive, but also a vital way to conjure dark forces which will allow mayhem to ensue. And at the end of the day, you can’t ask for much more than that from a lively horror story about a group of musicians in a creepy house!

Indiebound lists a full-cast audiobook of Wylding Hall that looks rather tempting, particularly since it might solve the “wait, who’s talking in this part?” problem.

View all my reviews at Goodreads or read the full versions with embedded links here.

Jim Croce cover band

When I was a kid, our next door neighbors had a Hammond organ. They used to let me play it but their sheet music selection was pretty limited.

Very limited.

Let’s put it this way: if you ever form a Jim Croce cover band and need some funky organ breaks for “Time in a Bottle,” I’m your girl.

I have no idea how this post was supposed to end because I went down a rabbit hole for a while. I was linking to Jim Croce’s website and the front page link for “dinner reservations” was deeply confusing until I discovered it led to the Croce’s Restaurant site. Croce’s Restaurant is closing in December. It’s in San Diego, I bet Batty has been there.

I should really get back to lecture writing. Or watching shitty movies. Ooh, my lecture is on urban legends, so I could watch the movie Urban Legends and multitask!

Elvis Died For Your Sins

It’s the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis. You aren’t at work, are you? Of course you aren’t. You’re at home, wearing a sequined jumpsuit and reflecting on where you were 30 years ago today.

I know where I was.

I remember not because I loved Elvis, but because our neighbor Selma* loved, loved, loved Elvis. When Selma learned that Elvis went to the Great Hereafter she stood in the road and sobbed. She didn’t just cry, she wailed. Like a banshee.

Then there were the candles. Eventually there was a neighborhood caravan up to Graceland, which I was not part of. At least in my memory there was a caravan. I don’t really remember if they actually went, my overwrought Elvis-loving neighbors, or if there was just a lot of talk and beer consumption by the light of Selma’s shrine. It was a lovely shrine, under the palm trees in her front yard.

I was very young, so it’s kind of a blur.

There was live coverage blaring from the crappy AM radio Selma usually took to the beach. The grownups drank lots of beer and talked about Our Great National Tragedy.

They didn’t know about the toilet yet, not that it would have mattered. He was, after all, the King.

Yankees get drunk and plot roadtrips to Florida. Floridians get drunk and plot roadtrips to Graceland. It’s the Cycle of Life.

At any rate, if you’re reading this you’re probably not at Graceland today. That means (I hope) that you’re at home, watching the TCM Elvis movie marathon and making dinner from recipes in Are You Hungry Tonight?

The hagiography at the Graceland site not enough Elvis info-tainment for you? Too lazy to search google? Here’s some suggestions for you:

You can visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Elvis Induction Page.

You can read the remarkable list of hundreds of songs about Elvis and/or Nixon. (sadly, with no links or mp3s, but the novelty wears off prettty fast, anyway).

You can groove to the sounds of Jesus Presley.

You can visit the First Church of Jesus Christ, Elvis (who I would swear used to have a better website, but maybe that was a different Elvis Church).

You can go to Vegas and get married at the Elvis Chapel.

You can catch up on the Girls Guide to Elvis.

You can read about the saga of the Elvis statue in Memphis and the efforts to have it restored to it’s former glory:

The statue was popular with tourists. It was so popular tourists climbed onto the base of the statue and managed to pry loose the metal fringe on the jump suit. They also treated it like the front wall at Graceland until the statue was tattooed with well wishes and not-so-well wishes. “I touched Elvis’ butt,” seemed particularly egregious.

That probably would have continued had locals not begun complaining about the condition of the statue around 1994. The question of who was responsible for the upkeep and, more important, who would pay for the needed cleaning and renovation of the statue hit a web of City Hall red tape.

Enter Robert “Prince Mongo” Hodges, local eccentric and self-professed visitor from another planet. Mongo claimed the statue as his own since no one from the city would take specific responsibility.

He announced he would remove the statue, take it in for repairs, pay for the repairs, gold plate it and then install it as part of his former Front Street nightspot Prince Mongo’s Planet. When he showed up at the plaza one morning and a large crane followed, Memphis police were ready. The move was put off when police told Mongo the crane couldn’t park there. Mongo pledged to come back the next day. But his interest waned. Shortly thereafter, the statue was repaired by others.

[read the whole article]

Last, but not least, don’t forget the Elvis Lives fanclub.

—–
*not her real name.

Safety Dance

Yesterday I had two songs in rotation in my brain, Men Without Hats “Safety Dance” (a song of such insidious evil I won’t even post the lyrics) and “Come on Eileen” (but not the original Dexey’s Midnight Runners’ version, the Save Ferris cover, go figure).

Matt, who promised to stop monitoring my brainwaves, clearly hasn’t kept that promise. In the space of about 45 seconds yesterday he quoted lyrics from both songs out of the blue. Or so he would have me think.

At any rate, this reminded me of an album of covers of “Safety Dance” that I swear Rob from Eggs was producing about 7 years ago for Teen Beat. Does anyone have any idea what I’m talking about here? If you do, leave info in the comments. Does it exist? Have you heard it? Have I lost my mind? I didn’t turn up anything last night when I was searching, but I was also exhausted. I’ll have to try again when I have more time. Or I could, you know, pick up the phone and call and ask. That would require effort though.

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Now, this should be required reading for my students. The Daily Adventures of Mixerman – A Documentary

I would laugh if I could stop crying. Or cry if I could stop laughing. One or the other, possibly both.