music
The Minus 5
with Eyelids
Friday, June 14 • 8 pm
Sessions Music Hall
$12 advance, $15 door
Subterranean
Brainsick Blues
THE MINUS 5 DEBUTS THE
BRILLIANT, BAFFLING
STROKE MANOR IN EUGENE
By Rick Levin
P H OTO BY M I K E S H E A H A N
M
inus 5’s new release is a concept
album, of sorts. In song after song
on the aptly named Stroke Manor,
words slip their foundation,
falling through a looking glass
of Lewis Carroll-like weirdness
as wriggling couplets scramble
after meanings that forever skitter just out of reach.
Channeled through this kaleidoscope of confusion,
nonsense becomes sense, like a stuttering ticker tape
issuing from the chaotic core of a nightmare.
There’s good reason for this. In November 2017,
Minus 5 front guy Scott McCaughey suffered a
devastating stroke.
A Northwest legend who founded the Young
Fresh Fellows and for the better part of two decades
played and recorded with R.E.M., McCaughey’s music
catalogue — four decades of ceaseless writing, singing
and rocking — was wiped from memory. His doctor
guessed he’d never play again.
“I wrote most of the lyrics to this record in the weeks
after I suffered a stroke,” McCaughey tells me. “I was
touring with The Minus 5 and Alejandro Escovedo in
San Francisco, having the time of my life, and then I was
laid out in the street, possibly dying. A few days later,
as soon as I was able to scratch out words, I started
scribbling away in the ICU, not knowing what I was
doing really, but trying to make something come out of
the part of my brain that was dead.”
Stroke Manor, then, is culled from notes McCaughey
kept as he lay in hospital, partially paralyzed and
largely speechless, confronting ultimate questions of
existence through the vortex of involuntary addlepate:
mortality, identity, past, present and, especially,
future. The record captures dislocated snippets
of conversation, misheard sentences and ambient
confusions all filtered through a gifted musician's
busted brain struggling to put itself back together.
The result is a wonderfully strange, disorienting
and hard-rocking cycle of songs that takes you on an
intimate journey into the heart of McCaughey’s trauma
and recovery, with an immediacy that is by turns sad,
funny and excruciatingly poignant. With his keen
knack for capturing the tragicomic absurdities of life,
McCaughey turns his significant talents inward, giving
us a glimpse of the erasure and loss that hit him big
time. It’s some of the most personal and powerful work
he’s done — a pop gem of darkness and light, with no
shortage of hooks, musical and lyrical.
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“The lyrics are the reason for the album,”
McCaughey says. “They’re frustrating and frustrated
— they’re me trying to communicate something, to find
out if I could communicate, if I could still hold a pen and
get it physically to move... I think this record captures
the feeling, the moment, somehow.”
I dare say it captures something more than
the moment. For instance, in “Scar Crow” — a
phantasmagoric, unnerving song that seems to be
about watching The Wizard of Oz from his hospital
bed, with a heightened suspension of disbelief —
McCaughey suddenly drops this line: “What tears you
apart may later wing into homestead.” The album is
full of such moments, each one wrung from a surrealist
poetry penned in extremis.
In “My Collection,” a furious, fuzzy swoon of sound
buoys lyrics that fight the ultimate loss: “Beneath the
words you used to know ’em / They all climb a ladder
but can’t stay / Except the one you ask to be goin’.”
Other songs, like the album’s wonderful opener
“Plascent Folk,” create a dreamy soundscape of fractured
poetry, as McCaughey strives to regain language, creating
a Joycean steam-of-consciousness: “Monday fraught the
moods across the rat and many moons / Thursday has
been kenneled, lay thee fecund split.”
By turns rollicking and mournful, trippy and
trapped, the music reflects the lyrics in a funhouse
mirror of pop history, as McCaughey taps — literally,
like a spinal tap — his significant stores of music know-
how, partly buried under the brain-bleed that walloped
him.
“The music was the fun part,” he says. “Ideas came
fast, but partly tempered by my loss of physical ability
to play instruments, as well as the jumbled, damaged
mind. Therefore the music also seems from a different
place in me, like the words. I was fortunate that I
remembered basically how to form chords, so I could
construct songs, and figure out how to record them…
The act of willing myself to write down my thoughts
forced me to follow the process through to a logical
end.”
McCaughey recorded Stroke Manor in his Portland
basement, where he was helped along by a slew of fellow
musicians including R.E.M. guitarist and fellow Minus 5
alum Peter Buck, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, Corin Tucker of
Filthy Friends (a band McCaughey also plays in), and
many more. The album is hard driving and topsy-turvy,
a psychedelic pop mash-up that raises a defiant noise
against bedlam that threatens to swallow it.
“I took something that I didn’t really know what I
was doing at the time and took it the full distance,”
McCaughey says of Stroke Manor. “Not knowing
whether it would work or not — but I feel like it really
did work. I’m not saying I wish it hadn’t happened, but
at least I got something out of it. It’s a weird thing. But
it’s my experience.”
Fragility and strength, resignation and acceptance,
darkness and light do a lovely, hypnotic dance across
each song, and a sly humor tamps down the swirling
sense of ultimate loss that surges beneath it all.
McCaughey’s voice has never sounded so vulnerable
nor, at times, so defiant. Listening to it, I don’t know
whether I’m going to cry until I laugh, or laugh until I cry.
“My songs often seem more humorous to others
than I meant them,” McCaughey tells me. “Like in the
past, I’ve considered a song like ‘Aw Shit Man’ as both
the most hilarious and depressing song I’ve written. On
Stroke Manor there are only a handful of bits that I can
imagine I was thinking of something funny. It wasn’t a
funny time, but I did bleed some into it. Literally.”
He continues: “Of course, now when we attempt
to play the songs live, it will be my job to make them
come across as a good time. That is always the goal of
going to a show — to have a good time, right? Luckily,
I’ve got friends who are willing to assure that. So this
time it’ll be Peter Buck, Casey Neill, Jenny Conlee
(Decemberists), Jim Talstra (Eyelids), Alia Farah and
Steve Drizos (Jerry Joseph/Jackmormons), all going
with me onstage. You can’t go wrong!”
The album drops Friday, June 14, and the Minus 5
will kick off its tour that same day with a show in Eugene
featuring that all-star line-up.
So, does transforming a personal catastrophe into a
rock album help McCaughey understand and overcome
what befell him?
“It does help, though I’d be lying to say I can make
sense out of it,” he says. “There are definitely clues and
images where I can recognize what I was trying to say —
and a lot of it I have no idea.”
What’s certain is that Stroke Manor is one of the
catchiest and most compelling albums of the year — a
testament to McCaughey’s grit, guts and boundless
talent. It transcends the hell of its own creation through
a joyous adherence to the healing powers of rock and
roll. Not to be corny, but it’s a stroke of genius. ■
The Minus 5 plays with Eyelids 8 pm Friday, June 14, at Sessions
Music Hall; $12-$15, tickets at sessionsmusichall.com.
E U G E N E W E E K LY . C O M