from uncut magazine
TALES OF EXTRA ORDINARY MADNESS
Welcome To the dark, disturbing world of Brett and Rennie Sparks, otherwise known as THE HANDSOME FAMILY. By Gavin Martin
Brett Sparks’ “day of visions” and mental breakdown came on May 9th, 1995. His wife, Rennie, watched helpless but fascinated as he entered the spiral of madness which would end with him tied to a bed in a Chicago State mental hospital, diagnosed a bipolar manic depressive.
As the Sparks, aka The Handsome Family, recall the day which marked a turning point in their lives and their wondrous terror struck music, the sky slowly darkens outside the small north London flat where they’re living during a brief British tour. Distant thunder rumbles and lightning begins to flash. By the time they’ve finished, a torrential rainstorm is raging and the streets are flooding.
“I was drinking a lot, having panic attacks, going through rapid cycles where Id stay up for weeks at a time,” explains Brett, the burly 200-pound Texan, former Born again Christian zealot and student of mediaeval classical composition who discovered salvation in country music.
“I’d do crazy things like rewire the car so the stereo could operate the engine. I was trying to write my own bible. Then it was just…near death experiences, fireworks going off in my head.”
“He became a huge fucking prophet and then the next minute he was eating cat litter,” adds Rennie, inspired lyricist and a former teenage acid head who fled her dysfunctional New York Jewish family to find the dark timeless truths of American life and, with Brett, discovered far more than she’d bargained for. “It was really scary because I’m the one into reading mystical stuff, always on a Vision quest, and here was you running around the house spewing this shit out,” shes continues. “First I was jealous, then I was enraptured by it.”
Brett : “ It was as if someone took a wire out of the wall and put it on my brain”
Rennie : “It was delusional, but I was really moved by a lot of what you said. When I took you to hospital and the doctor started writing down ‘religious delusions’, I went – ‘But what he’s saying makes a lot of sense’. So then he starts looking at me, and its like ‘What are you taking?’ I was sorry we had to medicate all that out of him, but to live in this world you cant be on that level. Did I want a whirling dervish or a husband? I settled for a husband.”
Brett sounds slightly angry. “There’s nothing romantic about it. People think there’s some sort of glamorous link between insanity and making art, but that’s bullshit. If you want to commit to making a piece of art, its more often than not done in a sober piece of mind, especially the kind of stuff we’re doing. When I got out of the mental hospital, I was completely fragile and terrified that I’d never be able to write a song, never be able to record or play in front of anyone ever again.”
After this three week stay in “the nuthouse” (and a prescription for the Lithium that he still takes every day), Brett, and Rennie, pulled through. Shaping their fears and horrors into the lucid visions of Through the Trees, Uncut’s 1998 country album of the year, they fashioned a world of bleak humour and bleak insights where ghosts from Appalachian death ballads roam in modern day Chicago. The Handsome’ journey continues on their new album In the Air, where a sense of illumination and transformation emerges amid eternal mysteries and heart breaking sadness.
Its an album that confirms their peerless position as alt.country purveyors of the bizarre and beautiful and the unique strength of the bond forged when they first met at university in New York – two disturbed loners, intellectual misfits seeking escape from their upbringings.
In her conversation and hilarious onstage banter, Rennie’s parents are a constant presence – sniping and belittling every move. She says that as a child she tried to figure out a way to “burn my house and kill my parents”.
At University, she immersed herself in Greek tragedies and Hindu mythology and was tripping on LSD when she introduced herself to her future husband – handing him a blood-stained card inscribed with the words “My purpose in life is to ravage and send raving the race of man,” a quote from Thomas Pynchon’s novel, V.
“He had a rainbow head and he looked cute. I just wanted to frighten or horrify people, and he was the first person that didn’t run away,” she recalls. After forsaking his early life as a bible bashing redneck in Texas, Brett was balancing his studies of mid-century classical music by playing rockabilly and country in student bars in the evening. The latter passion eventually took over his desire to become a professor, though the arcane learning would surface later in The Handsome Family’s sparse but ornate instrumental arrangements.
“The music department thought I was some sort of Anti-Christ because I was reading phenomenology, taking courses on 12-tone harmony and then at night playing ‘That’s alright Mama’. I just got fed up with the artificiality and pomposity of the academic world.”
Although they would eventually connect with kindred spirits like The Mekon’s Jon Langford, Freakwater and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy (who helped finance and guested on Through the Trees), they moved to Chicago not knowing anymore. “It was a real city, ugly and grey, and we wanted to get into the world, not be stuck in a prissy little campus,” says Rennie.
While Rennie worked as a secretary and wrote short stories in her spare time, Brett became disillusioned with a series of bands he played in. He enlisted drinking buddy Mark Werner on drums and taught Rennie – who’d developed a taste for performing her stories with a troupe of female performance artists – to play bass, and The Handsome Family was born. Their 1994 debut albumn, Odessa, written almost completely by Brett, was “kind of jokey”, covering their embarrassment and self-consciousness at playing country with a surfeit of noise and distortion. It took a second album, Milk and Scissors, and a subsequent much-troubled tour with Wilco (Brett on the verge of of a breakdown, Rennie near suicidal, Werner and their guitarist scampering for good), before they found their true focus, as songwriters and a live duo.
Rennie : “I listened to country stuff and The Harry Smith Folk Anthology and loved it, but I’d never thought id be writing it myself. It clicked when I heard the old story songs. It was so exactly what I was trying to do with my short stories – not extra words, no fat, just clean emotional scary things.
“That was what was so great about the folk songs – they were so concise. I started realising that they’d been re-written endlessly, honed down into a perfect nugget of tragedy or comedy, or both. I no longer thought of them as old dead things, but something each generation could pick up on.”
Rennie employs the folk process in miniature, distilling her fables and laments from myths, legends and everyday events, endlessly revising them before Brett designs the music. Initially reluctant to play as a two piece, he’s developed a combination of junk shop instrumentation (melodica, autoharp, garbage pails) and modern technology (G3 Macintosh, Minidisc) serving the words beautifully both onstage and in the studio.
“We don’t rock in any shape or form,” he concedes. “We realised we weren’t a band, we were just songwriters. With the computer, I can have harps, cellos, full string arrangements that creep in like a fog, stuff I never thought possible.
“I still have qualms about using machines, but it’s the best way to do what I want to do. If I could get five other people onstage, I could do what I really want, but right now I cant afford it.”
Even so, the Handsomes have endured, triumphing over their tormented past. Rennie says if she ever makes money her ambition is to have a painting studio and a “petting zoo” built alongside the Family home/recording studio – thus, all her worldly needs in one spot. There are no plans for any little Handsomes.
“I think its only right that we should not have children,” she insists. “Considering our genetic make-up it would just be like saying ‘Hey lets make a crazy person.’ I think our line should be stopped here. Besides, I had such a miserable childhood, I wouldn’t know how to make a child feel secure. ‘Mummy, I’m scared,’ I’d just have to say, ‘You’re right to be scared; you live in a world full of monsters.’”
She jokes about her forthcoming solo album (“Its called Fuck you Brett,I’ll show you”), and has plans to publish a selection of her stories later this year. She’s already started work on songs “about things and people that disappear” for the next Handsome Family album, a theme inspired by the way her husband’s character seemed to vanish during his breakdown.
“As a younger person, I wanted to crazy so bad. I really glorified it,” she admits. “But when you get there…I guess it was a journey I had to make to realise what was beautiful in everyday life.”
On In The Air, Rennie’s writing shows a new level of contentment and reconciliation that’s typified by ‘Grandmother waits for you’, a song that promises an afterlife where jewels fall from the sky like raindrops, people never grow old and your grandmother waits for you with a brand new pair of shoes.
“Its an idealised grandmother,” she says. “If it was my grandmother, she’d be saying, ‘I got these at a sale,they’re not the right size but you can try to squeeze into them.’”
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