12 July 2008

If heaven's tits were gleaming up to tease me, I'd tumble down the basement stairs

Temptations Lingerie, Collinsville, VA

The lyric above comes from Palace's "The Spider's Dude Is Often There." I haven't posted anything Will Oldham related for a while, but a couple of nights ago while browsing youtube I found this video of Oldham (Bonnie "Prince" Billy) performing "Goat and Ram" in Tel Aviv. I'm having trouble thinking of a clever way to explain how great this performance (and video) is, so check it out.

Also, here's an article Oldham wrote for The Guardian prior to releasing Greatest Palace Music, Oldham as Bonny's countrypolitan re-workings of Palace material. In the article, Oldham offers a pretty funny tongue-in-cheek account of Bonnie "Prince" Billy's emergence.

Oldham on Bonnie
For the second album, I placed my own darkened visage on the cover to rein in his callous insolence. When after the fourth release I had our record service place my own name on the new merchandise, he assailed me with threats of arbitration. He threatened to expose our beguiling arrangement unless I put his new and gaudy stage name, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, on the spines of all future releases.

Because I was convalescing from a painful cryptorchism at the time, I complied with all his demands. From my attic sickbed window I saw how Billy shouldered former playmates out of the way on the village square. He soon acquired a New York tailor and a team of fast horses that blasted by the salutations of old friends.

When I requested that he begin to perform favoured older works such as Silver Threads Among the Gold and Kathleen Mavourneen, he balked and instead added the songs of rude and unscrupulous cads like Kenneth Chesney and Timothy McGraw to his live repertoire. How I dreamed of walloping him with my withered arm! When, furthermore, he informed me that he had secretly recorded an album of my early compositions in the mode of these Nashvillian omnibus conductors, my dormant brinkmanship was finally aroused.


Bonnie on Oldham
It became time, as it will always become time, for a man to do something right and claim his own. What happened then is that I told him (because he didn't know - no he didn't) about foods and sunshine, about good and healthy joyful living, all things that he loathed and was sure were unnecessary but are not, as we know! Good God and just breathing and sucking a lungful of pure water! God, endorsing the muscles of the leg! Climbing trees, please, and telling her that you love her and asking her, for instance: "Where does this limb go, prithee, please tell me it goes ... right ... there" - and it does!

Well, he didn't know any of this. He probably never will. But I do and won't unlearn it. So I will now personify the alleviation of his constant misery. And what I have done is to seal it all beneath my ribs, these baby songs that I have made my own by saying so. They can live more and higher and richer in my throat; finally cleared of his Gollum sputum, they are really very pretty.

Finally, I want to make a toast to him inside his private hell: here's to you, Will, and your happiness. You may now bow down, and kiss the boot of Bonnie "Prince" Billy!

No comments: