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In 2003, while still an intern, my big score from the Fantagraphics warehouse was the
Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron soundtrack by "Victor Banana" (which also features vocals by Elinor Blake, aka "
April March" ). The 10-track CD (for a 10-chapter graphic novel), which sports cover art by Dan Clowes, has since then been in heavy rotation: not only do I enjoy the eerie, retro effect of what
allmusic.com defines as "reverbed guitar riffs, shrill vibraphone leads, and exotica-flavored sound effects," I also admire the elusively tongue-twisting lyrics of songs such as "
Chief Wampum's Tradin' Post" and dig the "I got a value, too" yodels of "Value Ape". Imagine my surprise when I read cartoonist Tim Hensley's interview in
Mome [full disclosure: my employer Fantagraphics publishes both Clowes and Hensley] and
discovered that he was behind the album: in other words, Hensley was the Angelo Badalementi to Clowes' David Lynch. While working on this piece, I couldn't resist asking Hensley some questions I'd been pondering for years.
KRISTY VALENTI: That's you singing on the album, right?
TIM HENSLEY: Yep.
VALENTI: In your Mome
interview, you said "It was pretty weird, because he was not finished with the story when I was writing songs for it, and I remember that he sent me this kind of top-secret letter, saying, "This is where I think the story is going." Do you remember how far along the story was when you began composing songs for it? Were any of the songs on the soundtrack composed before this project?
HENSLEY: I can't remember exactly, because I would write more songs as new chapters would appear: seems like he was at least halfway before I started. I think the idea was to have the record done at about the same time as the book, thus it wasn't feasible I could read the last chapter, write some songs, and record and manufacture them in time. At one point, I think Dan also sent me Xeroxes of some pages before they were printed, which was exciting. The only song written beforehand was "O'Herlihy;" Dan specifically put a character named that in the story because he liked the song and wanted it on the soundtrack. There were also a lot of songs written that didn't end up on the record. As I said in the
Mome interview, in retrospect it seems crazy to me to have interfered with Dan's work in progress. At best, I'd like to think that maybe it made him that much more open to the collaborative process, resulting in him making actual, real movies!
Oh, I thought of something else: I remember the album cover appeared in an issue of
Print magazine, and I was listed as the art director. That made me laugh.
VALENTI: Some of the songs have lyrics word-for-word from the book. Was there a back-and-forth, or did you take the words from the book and incorporate them into your songs?
HENSLEY: With the exception of "House of Forever," which I simply set to music, my process was usually just to have the comic open and be looking at a page or a panel as I wrote. I was enough of a fan that I knew the text the way someone might have memorized a Monty Python skit.
VALENTI: Were the rhythms of your songs consciously affected by the pacing of the book?
HENSLEY: Not consciously. I wrote all the songs at two in the morning, which I'm sure helped make them more hypnagogic. Dan did send me a mix-tape of songs that influenced him. There was a creepy piece of singing by the Manson Family like the cult in the comic, Burl Ives doing "Barbara Allen" and so forth. I listened to that a lot.[2]
VALENTI: How was the CD distributed at the time?
HENSLEY: The idea was that there'd be an ad in
Eightball, and you could order it, following in the tradition of comic book ads for an eight-foot ghost, Army locker, Sea Monkey powder... There wasn't really a record label; I mean, it was just me doing the stuff like booking the mastering facility and arranging for the delivery to the pressing plant and then driving over and picking up the boxes. By the time it got to CD, my friend Danny McGough had started a label that was working with a distributor who took some, so it actually made it into a few record stores, where it quickly appeared in the dollar bins. Plus Kim Thompson graciously offered to put it in the Fantagraphics catalog and would request a box every so often.
VALENTI: According to the blog for the band Domino Rally,[1]
"Turns out Tim/Vic/Neil retired from music shortly after "Refrains" was released and requested that when his back catalogue was sold out no more copies were to be manufactured." Does that still hold?
HENSLEY: Yeah, the record is long sold out — 500 10 inch records, a couple thousand CDs. It actually broke even and is probably the closest I got to making a solid successful record. When I released my next CD
Refrains, I was misguidedly thinking it would do about the same, but I think I sold maybe a hundred copies. So there's tons of boxes of that. I would just throw them out, but my dad, who was sort of a business partner in the venture, can't let go of it. If anyone's interested in the
Velvet Glove record, they can find it fairly easily on the Internet. That seems to me more in the spirit of the project than reissuing it. These days there's more freedom for me drawing comics anyway.
Next time: the LAVGCII Graphic Novel + Soundtrack Experience
Notes:
[1]
http://dominorally.blogspot.com/2005/08/like-velvet-glove-cast-in-iron.html[2] Also, another tidbit from Hensley: "The Knoxville song in the one is, of course, from the Louvin Brothers, also on Dan's mixtape."
Image credits:
All images are from Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, ©Daniel Clowes.
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2010
