GutterPutter

I decide to start myself a new series to fit in with Under the Label (will change its name to something that’s better in the future). It will deal with the overlooked albums that have garnered a notable following, but is not on the level of the likes of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It’s mostly a bit of an alternative to the anniversary articles that I had done over the past year. It won’t go in-depth with how much impact it had left on the music industry or even its genre. It might not even be a kind of work that I would fawn over at first.

Instead, much of the attention will be given on what makes it beloved to its cult following when a casual listener or even an indiehead would find it alienating or hard to digest. From its instrumentations to the lyricism to the context, just because a record lacks coverage from little marketing or promotion doesn’t mean that it will remain forgotten forever. Never underestimate the power of a shout out or the internet in making the unknown omnipresent in the right time.

The first album that I will cover is the Oregon-based post-hardcore folk punk the Taxpayer’s most ‘famous’ entry – “God Forgive These Bastards”: Songs From the Forgotten Life of Henry Turner. Good luck trying to squeeze the entire title into 60 characters for SEO purposes because it’s already not the most digestible one in the world. Never mind the joke, there is a certain zaniness around it that makes it acquire a small attentive fanbase over the decade since its release in June 2012. Buckle up because the mythology around it is pretty ruthless to say the least.

Context

Baseball. It’s not the most exciting sport in the world like football or, if you ask me, competitive gaming. Nonetheless, it’s known for its frequent round of scandals and drama. All sports are rife with narratives and while it does feel horrible for the media to devour it up for attention, people do love a good story in real life. The Black Sox Scandal, for instance back in 1921, sees one of the greatest players in Joe Jackson be barred from playing in the major leagues for life for fixing the 1919 World Series. Meanwhile, Babe Ruth’s alcoholism and womanising, with his most famous episode being an affair with Claire Hodgson, leaves his marriage with his wife Helen strained from 1923 to 1929. With the prospect of divorce being taboo in the married couple’s Catholic beliefs, Ruth has to keep his affair going despite its illicitness, choosing to “[stay] friends” for a time being. (Creamer, 1992, 281-284)

Aside from the two, you always hear stories from past films, shows, virtually any medium about a promising player in his youth whose career-ending injury had left him bitter and jaded. Cliche as it might be, it does comfort others in a weird sense about how unfair life can be at times with its jerky timings. It’s easy to find yourself daydream about becoming the best in your younger years. However, once you find that it can be easy to lose everything in one go once you get your goals, how willing are you to remain on top? Anyone can screw you over, mental health can screw you over, even bad timing can screw you over. It’s this kind of cynicism that makes these struggling would-haves beloved to others. Luck can be a devil as much as it can be an angel.

Bearing these in mind, it’s not hard to see what makes Songs From The Forgotten Life of Henry Turner a favourite among its quiet, yet devoted following. Outside of the tongue-in-cheek grim humour and snide remarks of ‘I Love You Like an Alcoholic’, few ever enquires the concept behind the album. I would argue that, once you take into account the Great Recession in 2008 and the corporate anxieties on finding a dream job afterwards, the album portrays a very humane representation of a flawed individual. Expect a lot of directions throughout this article to point at what makes Songs From The Forgotten Life of Henry Turner sticks out as the Taxpayers’ definite statement on abuse, mental health, post-sports disillusionment, and relationships.

But what about the band? The Taxpayers is a brainchild of Rob Taxpayer who, accompanied by his family members and a handful of friends, had long since held an interest in making concept albums. Similar to the likes of Okkervil River or the Mountain Goats, the band sticks out through its more overtly political references and its vocal DIY abidance which is punk enough in itself. Songs From The Forgotten Life of Henry Turner might not address the political fiasco as clearly as they tend to be, but it might be this aversion that helps to give the album its own life to rule over.

‘Atlanta’s Own’ – Theme and Plot

On the album’s Bandcamp page, the description tells of a story between the narrator and the titular character of Henry Turner. In a Gatsby-esque form of admiration, the narrator admits to being curious about him who, despite his apparent flaws, “had a magical brilliant quality to him” for his outrageous life. Following Henry’s passing from drug abuse and an impoverished lifestyle, the narrator sets out to both record every anecdote he told while researching all that is needed to fill in the gaps. What is left is, according to the narrator, “an amalgamation” of his life where each chapter is “grand, significant, and a little bit false.” While we may not know of the true account of what had happened, maybe that’s not the point of the album. Instead, it’s the character study that counts in the end.

Songs From The Forgotten Life of Henry Turner is all about its eponymous character through his tragic downfall to insanity and separation. That is, if you could even argue that it is a tragedy From the mise-en-scene beginning of ‘As the Sun Beats Down’ to the live recording of an interview in “Let the Seconds Do Their Worst”, the whole world is seemingly up against Henry. Violence prevails, madness upheaves, and pure aggression is the norm within the life that Henry had resigned himself to. There is no need for him to dream big if his attempts to go high only leads him to go further down.

Take the unexpected dislocation of his arm in ‘Atlanta’s Own’ to which the two commentators struggled to lament on that shattered dream with a rapid-fire quip on what he had almost achieved. “A moment from a perfect game but hey; some records were/ Never meant to be broken. Right?” Henry’s whole life is defined by his one injury that shuts him off from his calling of a lifetime. Instead of batting, he’s forced to move away from his home town to make a living off from working in a steel mill in ‘Who the Hell Are You?’. We learn later on that his payment wasn’t even enough to help pay his rent as noted in ‘Goddamn These Hands of Mine’. His neighbourhood is a mess with implied teen thugs and drug dealers.

As we learn later on, life back home might not even be ideal as in ‘Drinking With Mickey Mantle’, his mother shoos away his doting grandfather who had left him a wristwatch back when he’s five. To say that he’s unlucky offers him little justice in the grand scheme. If anything, his descension from his prime could as easily be attributed to his self-sabotage. His self-righteousness against the shoddy neighbourhood in ‘Weapon of God’ and his climatic biting of a businessman’s ears in ‘The Business Man’ all point to how his anger is no justification to his rage. For a bit of symbolism, I would argue that his attack in the latter song is a pretty Freudian admittance of his envy that he never reaches up to the potential that he could well have.

Thus, we’re left with a portrait of a man whose unfortunate turning of events has not left him an excuse to lash out against the lifestyle that he despises. Ranting about the devil or offering up with a bit of pity on his life, Henry is as much a perpetrator of his fate as he is the victim for all that we learn of him. As we later on learn, it’s his failed love life and estrangement that truly pins down the cycle of self-abuse that he drags himself deep into without a light at the end of the tunnel. Of course, we’ll get to that later on.

‘Weapon of God’ – Genre and Production

As mentioned in the beginning, the album is from a post-hardcore folk punk band so expect there to be high-tempo, eccentric performance. However, with a minimal production that entails a mesh of the instrumentals with only the vocal part standing out, we are drawn to it like a rock opera where the surrounding sound palettes serve as stage directions. The maniacal feeling, that persists throughout the majority of the album, puts us in a place where we can get a jest of how Henry is feeling from his brief period of relaxedness to pure bout of mania.

In the event of his mental breakdown, expect a cacophony of free-form jazz melting down in proficiency to come about as noted in ‘The Business Man’. Maybe check out the low-quality mic with its crackling vocal performance as Henry’s isolation leads him deep into his delusions in ‘The Carriage Town Clinic’.

What struck me in particular are the more intimate side of the instrumentals where the folk instruments take precedence to the electric variants. With its slower tempo, it gives you time to take in with what is going on when Henry starts to show signs of guilt or recollection. In ‘Let The Seconds Do Their Worst’, a female interviewee, representing Henry’s sibling for good measure of his unreliability, is accompanied with a backing wave of an accordion, a banjo, a trumpet, and a saxophone.

This kind of authenticity, to me, marks a rare bout of lucidity where we learn of what makes Henry human. To see it repeat back in ‘Drinking With Mickey Mantle’ presents a joyous bout of memory where his talent was encouraged and nurtured by his grandfather. The penultimate track in ‘Some Rotten Man’, with its wistful guitar riffs and its use of staccato and legato, makes for a gut punch as the sobering impression sums up Henry’s nostalgic look back. The fact that the riffs itself is inconsistently played with notable changes underpins his regretful look back on how his life, and his relationship, is a mess that he had made. Now, let’s take a good look at how the relationship ties up everything about Henry.

‘Some Rotten Man’ – Relationship

When we learn of Henry’s relationship in ‘I Love You Like an Alcoholic’, the explicit mentioning that his love life is filled with abuse and unhealthy co-dependency is, to put it nicely, not great. To learn that he has a daughter who doesn’t want to reconnect with him in ‘Some Rotten Man’ hits hard. We don’t know whether or not he’s abusive to his daughter in the same way he was to his spouse. This ambiguity sums up everything I think there is to need to know about Henry Turner; what we know about him in reality matters little if he continues to harm everyone around him.

To put what we know of his family that he had neglected as an adult into the last three tracks of the album captures what makes the album a beloved classic to its following. In leaving his love life and fatherhood for last, we are taken to judge him as an individual for his crazy, erratic, and even grotesque behaviours. His past does not justify his attitude at all. To learn about his wife that he never gets along with and his daughter who wants nothing to do with him only proves that his post-baseball disillusionment does not excuse how he is an awful individual.

To throw his immediate family in accentuates the degree of how he is, above all else, a terribly human person. To hear him lament about how he remembers the day of his wedding and how his brief mental incarceration stops his damaging is heartbreaking in ‘Some Rotten Man’. The ring that “wouldn’t fit” feels symbolic of how even at his most emotionally open, Henry just can’t seem to reach the point of resisting his impulses for his spouse’s sake. His letters that hasn’t been returned from his daughter puts a picture of someone who’s not only isolated, but is believed to be best remained so as to not hurt many more.

Thus, it’s not hard to see why, at the end of the album’s Bandcamp description, the narrator sums up Henry, at his very best, to be “a kind, strange friend.” Whether it might be down to an undiagnosed mental condition or if his short-lived baseball successes really did mess him up hard, Henry’s past violence must not get in the way of his attempts to empathise at the end of the day. I would like to think back to the ending where his sister, after looking back at the past, described him as “a lovable [ass]”. No matter his failures, it shouldn’t overshadow that he has some friends at the end of the day.