Eclectic Company: Goodbye R.E.M., Hello Erik Frandsen

I was sitting in a Starbucks the other day, drinking their special blend of burnt iced coffee (why is that a flavor of choice???), taking calls and dispensing advice about this and that, and catching up with my peeps on bookface, when I saw an early 1980s-era photo of R.E.M. and notice of the band’s break up from my pal Laura Levine, a rock photographer of great note (Google her, and go see her works in various prestigious shows on display now), who took early B&W photos of the Athens, Georgia-based 4-tet that helped create their American-art school-boys-invoking-The Beatles image of four louche yet goofy guys. Laura, who now lives in Phoenicia, New York, and was hard hit by Hurricane Irene (yes, send lawyers, guns and money), was one of the rock crits and photogs crowd we hung with when I was married to spouse 1, the louche yet goofy Tom.

Carson is a music, TV, and culture columnist for the likes of The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Esquire and GQ, and is now, too, a celebrated novelist (Gilligan’s Wake, Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter), who’s recently moved with cat(s) and wife 2 (far more successful marriage, clearly) to NOLA. R.E.M. was one of the passions we shared during our brief association, having fallen for their sound on demo cassette tape. When we befriended them, R.E.M. were fledgling entertainers, and, let’s be honest here, a combo that hadn’t really got much of a clue about how to play their axes, and had even less nous about how to perform in public. But Tom (and I), traveling the country to promote his first novel, Twisted Kicks, with guest DJ slots on alternative radio, and short readings in punk clubs, ran smack into R.E.M. at one of our earliest stops, and because he was the famous one, they asked if they could jam behind him (shades of Kerouac and bebop!) while he read pages from his picaresque roman à clef. Which they did, charmingly, sealing the deal on a mutual admiration society. (We’d already seen them, post-demo received, in less-than-optimum circumstances in New York, awkwardly trying to fill the huge stage of The Ritz (in the venue now know as Webster Hall), strung out in a straight line along the front perimeter of the stage, where they could neither see nor interact with each other, as opening act to the Gang of Four, and had cringed for them.)

I personally wore out their first single, “Radio Free Europe”/”Sitting Still” trying to decide which song I preferred, in the three-plus months we were on Twisted Kicks’ patrol. And Tom always played one A side or the other when, as we lumbered from one weird music outpost to another across the country, but especially around the many punked-out cities of Ohio, he was asked who he would recommend the local scenesters take note of. When we got home to New York in December, Bob Christgau, Dean of American Rock Critics, and music editor of The Village Voice, asked us what we’d seen and heard during our promotional odyssey, sniffing out cover story material. But when I told him I’d seen the future of American music, talking up R.E.M., he recalled that ill-favored opening for Gang of Four and dismissed my assessment out of hand. Harrumph. Well, at least I got the last laugh, if not the last word.

It’s been more than three decades of R.E.M. now, and over that time, drummer Bill Berry had to retire for health reasons, manager Jefferson Holt had to retire for personal reasons, and Michael Stipe, Mike Mills and Peter Buck leaned from starboard to port as they composed, toured, recorded, licensed and filmed their musical ideas for various record labels and sizeable international audiences, becoming home town heroes and starting up and supporting many local businesses there. I haven’t always attended to their new songs, and for several albums they completely lost me. But for the love I bear “Radio Free Europe” still, for “Losing My Religion,” “Man On The Moon,” “Stand,” and “It’s The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” and for many years of wonderful moments on stage, on record, and on screen, I will forever be grateful that Michael, Mike, Bill, and Peter made music and gave it to us with energy and honesty. A class act in work and retirement.

So apropos of my plan to learn to play barre chords, I went to see one of my former guitar teachers — a finger-plucking genius, with many fine musical credits to his quiver — play for an hour in a tiny Greenwich Village restaurong with a big grand piano stuffed into a corner, and seats for about 50 extremely intimate friends. After many years of occasional acting gigs and boatloads of various musical performances, Erik Frandsen wrote and performed in one of those fabulous vest pocket musical revues, Song of Singapore, where the actors are also the band, and the plot is a tongue-in-cheek loose clothesline of a tale on which the witticisms and musical numbers are briefly pegged before they shoulder each other offstage as rapidly as you can catch your breath. (Amelia Earhart’s plane goes down and she resurfaces with amnesia as lead singer in the house band in “Rick’s American Café” in, where else? Singapore.) Not surprisingly, the ultra-smart Erik is the first person I knew who finished The New York Times Sunday crossword in ink, in less than 20 minutes, setting himself particular rules to make the puzzle last longer (start in the center, and only do concentric circles leaving no gaps; do all the down clues only; work backwards from last clue to first), and the gorgeous finger-picking arrangements he taught me (“Buddy Can You Spare A Dime,” “Blackbird”) still make musical heaven when I remember how to play them. At Caffe Vivaldi, he played and sang his own and others’ songs with nostalgia and sophisticated runs, stringing the tunes together with snarking asides to the delight of old friends, a few tourists, and Lawrence Block, the fine mystery novelist, whose lyric “I took Jesus for my Savior and Jack Daniels for my friend” was only one of the fine lines dotted and crossed among a dozen songs that included an early holiday number, “Christmas In Brooklyn.” If you’re a fan of smart and sassy lyrics and the tastiest acoustic guitar licks this side of bluegrass, Erik Frandsen’s a taste you should acquire.