Courtesy of Eric Weisbard
They just want some of your extra time; Ann Powers, two doppelgängers, and Eric Weisbard.
Courtesy of Eric Weisbard
They just want some of your extra time; Ann Powers, two doppelgängers, and Eric Weisbard.
Related Content
More About
Ann Powers grew up in Seattle and began writing for the now-defunct Rocket as a teenager. Moving to San Francisco in the early '80s, she became music editor of San Francisco Weekly, eventually meeting Eric Weisbard, a Queens native fresh from U.C. Berkeley's history department with a thirst for rock criticism as pronounced as hers. Powers and Weisbard would eventually marry; they would also both edit the Village Voice's music section, and in 1995 each co-edited an influential anthology—Powers, Rock She Wrote, with Evelyn McDonnell; Weisbard, Spin Alternative Record Guide, with Craig Marks. Weisbard was also an editor at Spin during the mid-'90s, while Powers spent several years writing about pop for the New York Times.
All of that changed in December 2001, when Powers, now 40, and Weisbard, 38, moved from their Brooklyn home to Fremont and took jobs as senior curator (Powers) and senior program director of the Education Department (Weisbard) at Experience Music Project. Weisbard's first task was to organize the museum's inaugural Pop Music Studies Conference, in April 2002, which was successful enough to occasion a second and now a third conference, hosted this weekend. This year's topic is "This Magic Moment," a good, broad heading for what looks to be a good, broad array of subjects. The Jukebox took place in Powers and Weisbard's Fremont home on a balmy early March evening; during much of the discussion, the couple's baby daughter, Rebecca, slept in Powers' lap.
Ui: "The Grand Piano" (1996) from Monsters, Robots and Bug Men: A User's Guide to the Rock Hinterland (Virgin AMBT, U.K.)
Eric Weisbard: "Nameless, Formless," as far as I'm concerned.
SW: Can you guess when it's from?
Ann Powers: I'd say it's from the dawn of dance music, or it's from the mid-'90s.
SW: This is Ui.
Powers: Oh! It's Sasha [Frere-Jones, Slate and New Yorker pop critic]. We like his writing, but we've never listened to his CD.
Weisbard: Let's just be honest about it. Actually, let's make a more broad blanket statement about it. We care a lot more about music writing than music, if push comes to shove.
Powers: That's not true.
Weisbard: In the case of Sasha . . .
Powers: Eric's speaking for himself. Sasha Frere-Jones is one of the best music writers out there right now. I'd like to take credit for his career, sort of—I was the first person to publish him in the [Village] Voice. He was writing for Pretty Decorating, Ann Marlowe's 'zine. I thought he was a girl. I was seeking out great, wonderful girl writers, but when I discovered he was a boy, I decided he was still really good. And so he wrote some pieces for me. But the truth is I always kind of avoided Ui partly because I had a working relationship with Sasha as a writer and I didn't want to have to make judgments about his band.
Weisbard: As a musician, he was a very good writer, and as a Pop Conference participant, he definitely rocked the house. He was the funniest speaker last year, as he addressed things like Stephen Malkmus' refusal to be great.
The Mountain Goats: "The Black Ice Cream Song" (1995) from Zopilote Machine (Ajax)
Powers: We have a concept: Pop Conference.
Weisbard: [The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle] was not only at the first Pop Conference, but has an essay in the book, This Is Pop, which is from that presentation, which is almost exclusively comprised of quotes from obsessive hair-metal fans who never got over the death of their genre. What's great about John is he can write about anything—write prose about anything and write a song about anything. And he's one of the few people I know whose instinct to write [prose] and instinct to write music are equally well developed, and I think he's extremely gifted at both. And I think he's someone who has this natural Beat sensibility. He approaches everything, essentially, as: His first draft is going to be his best draft, and that's the quality in his music. It's very similar to Kerouac hammering out that endless scroll.
Powers: Maybe a better comparison is not the Beats but Denis Johnson, who wrote Jesus' Son and the wonderful California novel Already Dead, a fantastic book. He sort of updates the Beat story for a more cynical age, a kind of body-fluid-oriented thing, more mental, I don't know.
SW: The piano player on the new Darnielle record is Franklin Bruno. . . .
Weisbard: Another Pop Conference alumni and another guy who combines writing about music [with playing it], which is not easy. Although it should be easier, because these days, in particular, it's a lot of the same demographic: You go to college, you start a band—well, you play music in some way, you write about music in some way—it's a lot of similar kinds of people. Not that that's the entirety of music, but the overlap is there.
Powers: Franklin is very interested in that nexus between philosophy and poetry, but at the same time, he's most interested in musical forms that some might consider premodern or at least pre–rock and roll. There's a kind of fascinating connection there between his interest in the classic song form and his interest in the most esoteric tricks that poets can play with language, and I think that his work is a very clever and insightful look at how language works in that classic form. I'm very interested in that, whether it's Adam Gabbler, who's writing musicals now, or even this new composer Thomas Adés, whose record I was listening to the other day. I'm sort of interested in how it's happening outside of rock, and I like Franklin for going outside of rock.
