The Capacity for Joy
An introduction to Benb Gallaher
by Chris Busby
They live among us, unheralded and unrecognized: the mad artistic geniuses, eccentric savants and gifted misfits of Maine. Most lead lives of “quiet desperation,” as Thoreau would say, often hobbled by poverty, addiction, disability and/or an acute lack of social skills. They paint masterpieces in basements; they scribble great American novels at the kitchen table at night, like the young Henry Miller; they record strange and wonderful music in their bedrooms by day, when the neighbors are at work and won’t complain to the landlord.
If you’re lucky, they will reach out to you, make a rare connection. Maybe you’re the mailman who catches a glimpse of an amazing painting hanging in a dingy apartment hallway, or you’re drinking alone at a bar and start a conversation with an unshaven stranger, or you edit and publish your own magazine and don’t have to answer to bosses who think outsider music is unworthy of ink.
That’s me. In late October, I got lucky. An e-mail arrived from a musician and writer named Benb Gallaher.
That’s not a typo — I didn’t fat-finger the N key and inadvertently add the adjacent B. As Gallaher explained in a 2012 blog post, he was born Benjamin. Around the age of 8, people started calling him Ben — “a handle that I detested but saw myself as never being able to escape.” In middle school, in Frederick, Maryland, where he grew up, teachers encouraged Ben and his friends to study Russian (“The Soviet bloc had just dissolved,” he wrote, “so it was all Jesus Jones and ‘Winds of Change’ and whatnot.”)
“The Cyrillic alphabet was terribly fascinating to me,” he recalled on the blog. “One aspect in particular that I found riveting was the presence in the alphabet of letters that contained no standalone phonetic value. This was as good as poetry to me.” He goes on to list all those characters, and explains that the one resembling a lowercase “b” is called a miyaki-znak. “Its purpose is to soften the ending consonant of a word like one seeks to soften a blow or a stool.”
“I wondered what would happen if I were to append it to the desultory ‘Ben,’” he continued. “The results were marvelous …. [S]uddenly, my name was two syllables, had a distinct bounce to it, and rhymed with ‘Brenda.’” So now you know.
After ninth grade, Gallaher dropped out of high school and starting taking classes at a community college. While still in middle school, he’d started a punk rock band with some older musicians. “We were incredibly strange, but not on purpose,” he told me in a subsequent e-mail.
The bandmates got to know the owner of a local record shop called Megaphone Music. His name is Jason Willett, and at the time he was playing bass in a group that not a few members of the cognoscenti consider the greatest rock-and-roll band of all time: Half Japanese. (Never heard of ’em? We’ll get to that later.)
This musical connection soon led to others, including R. Stevie Moore (quite likely the most prolific recording artist on Earth) and Jad Fair himself, the co-founder, with his brother David, of Half Japanese and the group’s prime mover since David semi-retired from music in the early 1980s.
Gallaher began as a drummer and vocalist, then picked up other instruments (keyboards, guitars) in the ’90s while gigging with Fair and Willett. The trio did an Australian tour in 1997, and added a fourth member, English musician Mick Hobbs, for a second tour of the continent the following year. In 1999, fate placed Gallaher, Fair and Hobbs in Spain and Portugal around the same time, and the threesome formally formed a new band: Strobe, soon renamed Strobe Talbot. (Not necessarily to be confused with Strobe Talbott, the foreign-policy wonk who served as Deputy Secretary of State for most of the Clinton years, giving special attention to relations with Russia.)
Sadly, just as this flower of creative good fortune was beginning to bloom, Gallaher noticed that his ability to play music was beginning to deteriorate. Unbeknownst to him at the time, he had multiple sclerosis. “Disillusioned, I retreated from playing music, concentrated on my studies and on writing, and moved up to Maine on a whim,” Gallaher wrote to me. He’s lived in Brunswick for many years now.
Fair and Hobbs came to visit him up here, and the trio put some songs on tape. Together with material they’d recorded in Europe, this became the first Strobe Talbot album, 20 Pop Songs, released by the iconic indie label Alternative Tentacles in late 2001. The group was featured on the National Public Radio program The World in 2002, “and nobody bought our record,” Gallaher said. (Industry insiders attributed the lack of sales to the absence of Fair’s name in the group’s moniker, so thenceforth it’s been Jad Fair & Strobe Talbot, a designation that galls Gallaher, and justifiably so — he and Hobbs are Fair’s collaborators on this music, not just his backing band.)
By pure coincidence, the same day Pop Songs was released (Dec. 18, 2001), Fair, Hobbs, new bassist Andy Fisher and Gallaher made its follow-up, Let’s Born to Rock!, in a studio inside a barn in Cape Elizabeth known as the Track Farm. Recorded by local roots musician Rob Sylvain (of the Acadian Aces) and mixed and mastered by John Dieterich of the critically acclaimed post-punk group Deerhoof, Rock! is an exceptional album in many respects.
All 15 tracks were written and recorded in one session, in the same order they appear on the record. “Jad had a notebook filled with handwritten rhyming sentiments,” Gallaher explained. “He brought loops that he’d made at home in Texas to play during the session — you can hear the ghost of them throughout the record — as ostensible song fodder. Mick, Andy, and I would use them to guide tempo and meter, or ignore them outright. I don’t think that Jad cared much.”
As you’d expect, the songs aren’t overly complex, but their stylistic range is impressive. From the Calypso-flavored opener, “A New Year,” they shift to the light pop of “Back on Track” (one of several songs that include backing vocals by Maine’s Mara Flynn) to balladry (“Never Fail”). Later on, they jump to funk (“Music of the Horn,” featuring guitar licks by Moore, added afterward) and dip into psych (“Tick Tock”).
Gallaher’s playing is fantastic — loose, inventive and inspired. I’d rank him among the best drummers Fair has worked with (no small compliment, given that those fellow percussionists include, to drop just one name, Moe Tucker of The Velvet Underground.)
Blasé as he may have been about the compositional process, Fair’s vocal performances on Rock! are all-in. Much of the charm of Half Japanese resides in Fair’s singular lyrics and singing style. Seemingly incapable of irony, moodiness or artifice, Fair is unfailingly exuberant and sincere. Also weird and slightly out of tune (as “tune” is commonly perceived by Western ears), which tends to turn off the vast majority of the listening public raised on pasteurized commercial pabulum.
When Half Japanese released its first recordings in the late ’70s, neither brother knew how to properly play an instrument, but they didn’t let that stop them from making music. The songs that resulted had an authenticity and immediacy that, like punk in general, pierced the bloated, overproduced balloon of that era’s rock music and exposed its musical and emotional bankruptcy. Not surprisingly, the music industry was not eager to be thus exposed, and today most young rock fans who’ve heard of Half Japanese know it as the name on the t-shirt Kurt Cobain was wearing when he shot himself in the head.
Over the past several decades, Fair has continued to make music as a solo artist and with dozens of different musicians in various iterations of Half Japanese (whose latest album, Overjoyed, came out this year); in collaboration with kindred spirits like Daniel Johnston, Kramer, Moore and Willett; and with such groups as Yo La Tengo and The Pastels.
Not long before Rock! was recorded, Fair fell in love with an old friend and got married. His brother David once famously said that Half Japanese makes two kinds of songs: love songs and monster songs. Rock! is comprised almost entirely of the former, with a couple walk-on cameos by Frankenstein and the Mummy. Things most commonly referenced in the off-kilter couplets Fair brought with him to Maine are love, sunshine, popcorn, success, cotton candy, happiness, fruit and primary colors (Fair is also a prolific and successful visual artist).
Like one of his inspirations, Lou Reed, Fair is a master of vocal delivery — every syllable, even those that sound sloppy or spontaneous, fits the song. But whereas Reed was typically tough and somber, Fair is sweet and open, gleefully unhinged. On Rock!, he howls, screams, laughs, cackles, barks like a seal and cries like a gull. If you’ve never heard Fair before, you’ve never heard anyone like him.
Gallaher said Fair’s recent marriage contributed to the remarkably good vibe on Rock!, but there were other factors that lent the session its palpable feel of freedom and joy. “Strobe Talbot is unlike Half Japanese, who’ve a considerable legacy to maintain,” Gallaher wrote. “This was just a band, not an institution, and it felt marvelous to participate for all of us.” (The fellas had also had a few drinks at Granny’s Burritos, then located in the Old Port, before heading out to Cape to record — the buzz is most evident on tracks like the madcap “Party Mix” and the punk freak-out “Drinking Time.”)
The good feelings didn’t last long. In the months that followed the session in the barn, Gallaher was diagnosed with MS, Hobbs with bladder cancer, and Alternative Tentacles “abandoned us,” as Gallaher put it. Frustratingly, Rock! lay buried in a thick tangle of record-label complications for over a dozen years. It was finally released, last May, on Joyful Noise Recordings, as part of Fair’s “artist in residence” series with that label.
Gallaher made a couple more recordings — Bite My Knee, a 2002 collaboration with Hobbs that set Gallaher’s poetry to their music; some pop-punk, in 2003, with a regional outfit called The Chores — but he said his health eventually declined to the point where he was legally blind and could barely walk. “I was given an estimated decade to live,” he wrote. He left Maine, found love, got married and came back to live in Brunswick and raise a small family with his wife. “I resolved to deny that putrid prognosis,” he wrote, and “by and large, my ability to drum has returned.”
Last year he released An Umbilical Cord of Gold, two 15-minute free-jazz tracks performed by Gallaher and local clarinetist Sequoyah Leaf under the moniker Khleb1917.215. And then there’s Moving Things About, a collection of 101 short (many clock in under 30 seconds) instrumental pieces Gallaher made after he taught himself musical notation with a free software program called MuseScore.
Credited — with a hint of spite toward the industry — to Benb Gallaher & Strobe Talbot, Moving Things is actually a solo album. It was released digitally a couple months ago by Hobbs’ Life and Living Records. Listening to the tracks is like wandering through an enormous funhouse, each whimsical or weird composition a variation made by a complex sonic kaleidoscope. Most impressively, Gallaher eschewed the canned rhythms the program provided and played all the drum parts himself.
“I am disdainful of quantized rhythm, because I believe that the spirit and soul and intention of truly human music lies in the cumulative nanoseconds between when an event is expected, and when said event actually occurs,” he wrote. “The sense of danger that arises from infinitesimal (or obvious) imprecision — teetering, barely bridled — is both thrilling and discomfiting.” (This is also an excellent description of his friend Fair’s approach to vocals.)
Although music is part of Gallaher’s life again, it’s still a struggle to make it. “Finding collaborators has been far from easy,” he wrote. “The ravages of poverty, parenthood, and health preclude most social activity.” Furthermore, “I keep getting rejected for disability, but am utterly unable to work steadily.”
I wrote back to ask him why he was being denied benefits. The short answer: “Because I’m not old as shit, and I’m still capable of experiencing joy.” Gallaher is only 36.
If you could use some extra joy this holiday season, pick up Let’s Born to Rock! or download Moving Things About. I played Rock! when I was feeling down the morning after the election, and it worked — I immediately felt better. Like I said, I’m lucky. So is Gallaher. And now you are, too.
Click to hear: “Back on Track,” by Jad Fair & Strobe Talbot
Click to hear: “1-Letter Alphabet,” by Benb Gallaher & Strobe Talbot
