The zeitgeist in pop music is a slippery and unpredictable thing to pin down. One minute every dude with a yelp and a wiry guitar line wants to lead his own Gang of Four; the next, everything’s coming up Springsteen. Trends are weird, and though they can rise to the surface of pop culture’s sluice with little or no warning, those random spirit-of-the-times moments are almost viral — as soon as a particular topic catches your interest, you start noticing it everywhere.
For instance, until my interest was piqued by the upcoming musical tribute to Kurt Vonnegut by Vonegut (sic) and the Slaughterhouse Orchestra at the Music Gallery this Saturday (April 19), I hadn’t given that much thought to the late novelist’s relationship to pop music. In my mind, the crossover was limited to a symbolic title (Player Piano, his first novel), a profound witticism (Vonnegut famously suggested that his epitaph should read “The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music”) and some clever literary references.
But when it comes to indie-rock, Vonnegut’s legacy isn’t all that big a surprise — he does appeal to a certain breed of pallid, dry-witted intellectual with a penchant for self-analysis and dystopian anxiety. In the past month or two alone, he’s popped up on a track by frenetic local-ish indie-rock trio Born Ruffians (“Vonnegut,” off their new Red Yellow Blue disc, quotes Cat’s Cradle) and heavily inspired the Denver, Co. band that bears his name (Vonnegut-the-band’s recent EP Fall Into Place is peppered with references to his canon). That’s just the tip of the iceberg: online, the Kurt Vonnegut Band Page (www.ibiblio.org/brian/vonnegut/bands.html) compiles an exhaustive list of Vonnegut influences (from the obvious to the obscure) in pop music.
In the case of Vonegut — a collaboration between Toronto-based classical composer Scott Good and Dwight Schenk, a gruff-voiced local musician whose (many, many) credits include jammy folkish outfit Basement Arms and the Slipper Orchestra, an experimental rock project that manages to make even “Moon River” sound like a wacky outsider tune — they came by their inspiration through rather serendipitous means.
“Scott and I decided to do a project without having any idea of what it would be,” explains Schenk. “At some point, he sent me a list of suggestions for potential names and included the misspelled ‘Vonegut.’ When I asked if he really meant ‘Vonnegut,’ he said, ‘yes,’ and both of us were like, ‘He’s my favourite writer!’ Somehow, that inspired us to put together a tribute.”
Saturday’s concert should be a fascinating and rather innovative attempt to translate the spirit and content of Vonnegut’s canon into what Good describes as two sets of music with a dramatic narrative flow and a “very operatic quality.” The collaboration was a challenge for both parties — Schenk had never worked with scored music, while Good was unaccustomed to writing lyrics — who drew on the author’s characters and ideas in an attempt to convey Vonnegut’s balance of humour and heady subject matter through their esoteric compositions.
Schenk, who cites Cat’s Cradle as his favourite Vonnegut work (Good’s is Breakfast of Champions, though he claims Cat’s Cradle is a close second) thinks the lauded writer’s mass appeal could help attract new ears to the Music Gallery. “I’ve had a hard time finding anybody who wasn’t already into Kurt Vonnegut,” he laughs. “I’ve only ever met one person who’s read Vonnegut and doesn’t like him. But in terms of people I’ve invited, there are lots of them who’d usually never go out of their way to check out stuff at the Music Gallery, so this could definitely bring in a different audience.”