Loren MazzaCane Connors
Up in Flames
They come on a handful of small labels; on CD, LP, and seven-inch vinyl; in solo, duo, trio, quartet arrangements, they seem to spring out of the air like thoughts. It’s as if Connors breathes through his guitar, generating records like most people produce carbon dioxide. Maybe he’s playing his guitar constantly and someone is simply following him around, recording. This theory has only been supported by the live performances I’ve seen. A couple years ago in Chicago, on a program of duo and quartet sets, he stepped up onstage during intermission–apparently to sound check, but he started playing and just kept playing until, a good ten minutes later, Licht joined him, officially starting their set. Connors seemed hardly to notice.
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A lot of people are music fans, even music obsessives, amassing huge record collections and spending their nights in smoky clubs. And some of them come to find that just listening isn’t enough. They become critics, archivists, future-tense historians: people who know that the popular history of music is full of empty spaces, injustices, and blind spots, and sense that the richness of what’s fallen between the cracks is probably light-years beyond what’s out there blinking in the spotlight. One of them, Harry Smith, was proven so correct in every more-or-less educated guess on his 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music that he got to brag, in a speech just before he died, that he had lived to see his dream come true: “I saw America changed by music.” But did he actually have such a master plan–or the idealism to believe it could happen–or did he just have a fabulous ear?
Since then, undeserved obscurity has been a treatable, if not curable, disease. Master unearther Byron Coley began campaigning for Guitar Roberts, aka Loren MazzaCane, aka Loren MazzaCane Connors, in Spin and Forced Exposure in the mid-80s. While Connors was never the Delta-farmworker, Pentecostal prophet, or few-fries-short-of-a-Happy-Meal visionary troglodyte of the folkies’ fantasy, there was (and is) something about the aching sense of isolation in his soundworld that made him seem archetypal, mythical. He had been self-releasing records since the 70s, both solo and with collaborator Kath Bloom (daughter of literary scholar Harold Bloom). Shortly after Coley’s rhapsodies started flowing, a string of tiny labels–New World of Sound, Road Cone, Menlo Park, Lotus Sound–provided further conduits for Connors’s prolific stream, but Connors continued to keep a few coming himself on his own Black Label.
Coley himself discovered the recordings during his Spin tenure. “As a fan of extremely personal and hermetic musical visions, it was immediately appealing on an aesthetic level, and the music was so weirdly otherworldly that I was immediately won over,” he says. “Although he was obviously coming from a blues background, the tone and attack of his guitar work were clearly emanating from another dimension. People had sometimes spoken of Beefheart’s bands playing a kind of martian blues and Loren’s playing evoked that for me as well.”
I was in New York for the last week and a half of this stand, and was pleasantly surprised to see Connors looking healthy and rocking harder than plenty of strapping youths half his age. Many of these nights he played with his new band, Haunted House, an improv-rock quartet featuring Atlanta transplants Andrew Burnes and Neel Murgai on guitar and percussion and Connors’s wife, singer Suzanne Langille, on eerie wailing vocals that don’t lose their ethereal quality even in their lower registers. Their debut, Up in Flames, is a pretty dramatic step for Connors–for the first time I’ve heard, from behind the veil of distortion and reverb he’s fond of these days, he subjugates his haint-ridden compulsiveness to someone else’s groove. Murgai is the secret weapon here, doing more with a simple Persian daf than most rock drummers can with a whole kit. Their 23-minute version of Lonnie Johnson’s “Blue Ghost Blues”–which Connors and Langille have sketched out before, on the 1989 album In Pittsburgh (reissued in 1996 by Dexter’s Cigar)–is a stealthy tour de force that in a better world would leave a whole generation of electric-blues wannabes gibbering in the dust.
