Here in the bipolar ward if you shower you get a gold star, \nbut I'm not going far till the Haldol kicks in-until then, \nuntil then-I'm strapped to this fucking twin bed and I won't get any cookies or tea till I stop quoting Nietzsche \nand brush my teeth and comb my hair. Days pass slow in slippers and robe, but my ghost still bangs on the roof like John the Baptist in the rain \nwhile the nurses play Crazy Eights.
- from "My Ghost" by The Handsome Family
When the Handsome Family played at Vertigo last fall, I was surprised to find myself following the duo, which consists of husband and wife, Brett and Rennie Sparks, down Walnut to the venue. Walking a couple of feet behind them, I felt a little dizzy. This is who I've been moved by for over a year, the band that grabbed me from my tiny closet of a room in Chicago to walk amongst the living once again and they're strolling past Sports! \nBrett, the guitar player and singer, sings in a rich baritone with a deadpan delivery. He's from Albuquerque, as his typically slow drawl would suggest, and was once known to work on oil rigs in Texas. A complicated figure, he was hospitalized around the time of The Handsome Family's second album and diagnosed as a manic-depressive. \nRennie, who's been known to play autoharp, melodica and bass, writes the lyrics for the group. She's a Long Islander with a very homespun and dark humor. The author of a book of short stories called Evil, she writes tales of modern culture meeting old and weird folkloric parables. I remember her telling a story that night at Vertigo, something about Mariah Carey going to the center of the earth to make the perfect bowl of mac and cheese. That'll give you some idea as to where her imagination lies.\nRaised in a hard line Jewish home, I would suggest that Rennie's humor comes from her upbringing. Speaking of it in Sex & Guts, she says, "When I was a kid, they [her parents] thought that if I didn't know about Christmas, I would be safe. So they didn't tell me anything about it. Then one day, we were in the mall, and we saw this man wearing a red suit, out front. I said 'Who is that?' She said 'Don't go near him! He's a very bad man.' And I said 'Why?' She said, 'Because he started World War II.' So I was terrified of him for a very long time. But then I heard from someone in Sweden who told me that they were always told that Santa Claus was in red because he was wearing bloody reindeer skins."\nBuilt on a sound that combines Johnny Cash with The Carter Family and records which are usually recorded in their living room, The Handsome Family is minimalist by necessity. The songs are merely vehicles for the tales they hold. Brett can break down on the guitar, but only when words fail or time needs to pass in song, and that doesn't happen often.\nDespite the ruins of pop culture they have most likely been subjected to, Brett and Rennie have managed to pull out the traditionalism in today's world. In other words, they wouldn't necessarily deny the existence of Britney Spears, they would simply see her in a long line of Betty Grable's painted on the side of early fighter planes. This refusal to deny the existence of a modern world puts them ahead of a huge list of alt-country morons who don't afford the world they live in with such heedfulness. As Greil Marcus has wrote, The Handsome Family implies that the worst has yet to come.\nIn my time of need, and as you can imagine, The Handsome Family didn't necessarily make me a happier person. What they gave me was a sense that in spite of the death that surrounds us, there is a stronger force at work. Love, television, music -- these are simply ways to pass time. In the end, nature wins out, push it too far and it will destroy itself if it doesn't destroy us first. If this doesn't sound like a sufficient push to get out from under the sheets to you, I find it to be the only one.
