The Chris Moeller Archives

Polly Jean - A-Train Concert Series 6/13/2009 - by Aaron Moeller

Last week, less than a thousand of us lucked into an ideally cool, early summer evening to have made a trip to the ampitheatre of the Minnesota Zoo to hear the stunning sounds of long-time underground rock artist PJ Harvey. After trekking a few hundred yards through a densely-wooded path, we came upon a theatre stage with a lake and descending sun beyond it, a lovely and serene backdrop for summer music. Ampitheatres are definitely great - out-of-doors but no need to carry a lawn chair or a blanket. The strains from the music system as we entered were exclusively those of Howlin' Wolf, another blues original from decades ago.

A few months shy of her fortieth birthday, PJ Harvey has had one of the most enviable careers of any female rock artist. Well-known and respected (read:beloved) in alternative music circles, the British chanteuse spent a number of uncompromising years on the fringe of mainstream success, before everyone realized she was most comfortable remaining in the margins. Recording since the early '90's, she's been a regular on the cover of British-based music magazines and been an occasional cover girl on Spin and other American publications. Rolling Stone's Artist of the Year in 1995 and, more recently, #1 in Q magazine's 100 Greatest Women in Rock, she had a high profile slot opening for U2 on their All You Can't Leave Behind tour and is a legend of the Glastonberry Music Festival across the big pond, among other highlights. And her backstory's a good one- raised by hippie parents on a British sheep farm, she heard almost nothing but pre-WWII blues as young girl.

Sprung from the punk poetess and priestess tradition of Patti Smith and the experimental blues forms tradition of Captain Beefheart, Harvey also has more than a little in common with the dark, Euro-gothic sounds of Nick Cave or Marianne Faithfull, and the howling, avant-garde primalism of Yoko Ono. Take that stew, then add versatile musicianship and a near-operatic singing range and you have PJ Harvey. To half-remember a quote from the competitive Courtney Love, another punk priestess who rarely displays an inferiority complex: "PJ Harvey is the only rocker chick who makes me feel like total shit."

British singer-songwriter Pop Parker was the evening's opening act. His songs were urbane, funny and shockingly risque, a trait that was even more pronounced as it was accompanied by a straightforward acoustic guitar. Early in the set, I spotted PJ Harvey enter from the side of the stage and take a seat in the front row, a move of support for Parker's set that I nonetheless found incredibly distracting.

Dressed in a simple black dress and wearing subtle but obvious stage makeup and bright red lipstick, Harvey was recognized by a few down front and demurely sat and politely applauded throughout Parker's set. It must be said that PJ Harvey, while something of an unconventional beauty, is irregardless, a strikingly attractive woman. Our seats to the right of the stage weren't great for the seeing the whole stage but they were perfect for observing Harvey. Crossing and uncrossing her legs, Parker's music played as I enjoyed the vision of PJ, with an easy air of British regality, sipping tea and dangling a flip flop from the end of her foot. She took the stage shortly afterwards in her bare feet to begin a jarringly haunting and beautiful set with numerous musical highlights, some of which will live in my memory 'til death - right up there with the moment during Parker's set when PJ (no doubt sensing a chill in the air) wrapped a black scarf around her neck and ever-so-slightly hiked up her skirt to pull on knee-high stockings.

OK, I know what you're thinking. This review could easily turn into one of those Esquire Most Beautiful Woman in the World articles, where a hipster writer follows around Halle Berry or Scarlett Johannson for a couple days, taking note of her daily life, trying to find her essence, while hunting for details, the truth of her reality, her vulnerabilities and insecurities, but then gives himself away, revealing that he can never quite define the mystery. He simply can't explain why he doesn't get turned on when other girls sip their tea.

But I defend myself. Sex appeal deserves a mention here as everywhere. PJ Harvey's art is unmistakably and unapologetically sexual. Just as sex is natural, important and ubiquitous in life, so it is in PJ Harvey's music. Particularly in a live context, the way she looks can't be separated from the way she sounds. Known for wearing (or almost wearing) psycho-sexual outfits - she's posed nude for an album cover, for God's sake - with lyrics that would make Prince blush, riot grrrls take notice that this trim and petite singer was never a willowing, virginal wallflower, whether she's howling gutteral 21st century blues or transcendent, orgasmic yelps that reach the top of the scale.

On the bill with multi-instumentalist and sometime collaborator, John Parish, this show was almost exclusively music from their new album, A Man a Woman Walked By, and another shared album, Dance Hall at Louise Point, from 1996. This is music of eerie brilliance but challenging and certainly inaccessible to pop music radio, even by her daring standards. This is dark stuff - lyrically and musically. This is haunted-mother-who-drowns-her-newborn-baby-in-the-river stuff. It's a pre-industrial, backwoods gothic world that the original bluesmen knew, and maybe only Bob Dylan and Tom Waits can also pull off today. Too creepy for your radios.

And it was captivating. "Black Hearted Love" was raw and sensual. Her space age vocal over 19th century banjo counted down the beauty of "Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen". The entire audience certainly felt a little awkward at one point as they slowly figured out that she kept making direct and unwavering eye contact with only me. Don't hate me, guys. Eerie, high-pitched vocals made "Leaving California" stand out, as well as a run through of "Rope Bridge Crossing" and the title track from Dance Hall at Louise Point. At one point, PJ bounded down off the stage during a run of guitar solos and danced (still in her barefeet) with the high school kids mashing on the sidewalk that fronted the stage. During "The Soldier" - a simple, plaintive tune, boasting only crying voice, strumming guitar and plinking piano - a large, white, Great North fowl of some kind whipped across the lake flapping her wings on the surface of the water. A beautiful moment that left us moonshot.

The finest performance was of Dance Hall's "Taut". She began by kneeling, wrapping her simple black dress (surely the classic black mini is the Uniform of the Angels) tight around her knees as the music began its rumble. She then ranted the rapid fire lines of the opening verses as the guitars ignited their respective motors. The song's story is a midnight-black remembrance of Billy, a high school lover, and his car ("the first thing he ever owned except me"), the runaway verses careening toward the dangerous chorus of "Jeee..sus! Save! Me!"

Then "Pig Will Not", a junkyard blues bounding clear down a gravel road. Harsh, random, punk, and positively tuneless. At one point, she literally yelped like a barking dog. She finished with the shouting, nearly-hoarse declaration, "I will not! I will not!" "April" and the Parish-penned "False Fire", introduced as having been a song written for a Hamlet soundtrack, were the encores.

It was a show free of nostalgia, but I was taken back a few times in instances of sober clarity. Back to my earliest days of PJ awareness. At a campus record shop, in front of the storefront windows. With a pixie-ish girl looking out from the promo posters and flats. Of course I was drawn to that image immediately, as I was those sweet, vampishly made-up college girls standing in line for the new album. I suppose in those years as I picked my way through the CD racks for imported Dylan bootlegs that were already 30 years old, I saw myself as a misfit too. Too misfit to smile at the college girls who'd been Chicago suburb, high school cheerleaders. But not misfit enough to say hello to the tattooed and heavily pierced girls who smiled at me in line for the latest PJ Harvey release. But in the world of art - art that challenges the mind, heart and hormones - there is only the present day. I'll have to hit the next tour to maybe hear those PJ Harvey solo album classics, hopefully anything from To Bring You My Love, or from Uh Huh Her (greatest album title ever?), or "A Perfect Day Elise", maybe the finest recording from the post-punk-era rock canon. And they'll no doubt be in reworked and interesting new settings and contexts. When I invite you along next time, be sure to take me up on it, but don't be put off when she sings only for me.

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