30 WAYS OF LOOKING AT WILL OLDHAM
In which we consider His Concert, His Stage, His First Song, His Audience, His Name, His Dimensions, His Jeans, His Belt, His Feet, His Mustache, His Mouth, His Voice, His Words, His Fifth Song, His Accompanists, His Thoughts, His Forehead, His Hat, His Eyes, His Hands, His Shirt, His Guitar, His Right Hand, His Left Hand, His Accompanists (Again), His Tenth Song, His Disposition, His Last Song, His Moon, and His Final Lines.
Man, that’s a fuck-load of words.
All hail Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy!
HIS CONCERT …tonight is in South Brooklyn, over which the Sturgeon Moon hangs low and orange and near level with the land, its light smudged thin and orange in clouds and windowpanes, drifting out dim over the streets and rowhomes and the hullish building where he now takes the stage. HIS STAGE ...is in a place called Pioneer Works which in the century preceding this one and in the century preceding that one was an ironworks for the manufacture of boilers and railroads and steamrollers. From its gray concrete floors and redbrick walls and thick woodbeams up there in the rafters its former function is not hard to imagine. Until Oldham starts to play, and then it seems it was always meant to manufacture not cold dark metal but music. HIS FIRST SONG …rocks gently, on fiddle and guitar, between the roots of A and D major as he calls out a litany — the names of all the animals he wants, like Noah, to “save… before it starts to rain”: Lions, serpents, eagles and cows Skunks and rats and …
