Barbara Manning: Overlooking a Perfect Green Blanket

from Smug (v.3, #4)

photo by Smug

By Libby Callaway

Shea Stadium, the setting for my interview with the baseball-loving indie chanteuse Barbara Manning couldn't have been more right. Her two favorite pastimes, baseball and music, were about to intersect. As I pitch the prospect of Manning taking her new Matador album 1212 on a stadium tour (She thought I was crazy, but I told her if Three Dog Night could sell out Chattanooga's farmteam ballpark at least once a summer, I was pretty sure she could too.), the organ meter cues up "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." Manning shrieks, ignoring the tape recorder on the seat beside her.

"Oh! Here we go! Get UP!" She signs frantically to me. "Up, up, UP!" I follow Manning's command to stand and deliver the "other" American anthem, but I cheat and mouth the words, anxious to hear one of the sweetest, underexposed recorded voices of the past decade deliver the goods.

She sings in a voice as off-key and shrill as everyone else in the stands. I'm relieved. Barbara Manning is no diva. In fact. she's sort of the antidote to rock-star snobbery. As a performer, she's been around the block a couple of times, so she could be jaded; she's not. Manning's both an outstanding talent and an outstandingly unpretentious person. In the course of a few hours, she made friends with a crazy lady on the subway, traded Met starts with the middle-aged guys talking shit beside us, and waved and cooed at a cotton candy covered kid wandering up and down the aisles.

Although Manning recorded with several bands over the last ten years (28th Day, The World of Pooh, and Glands of External Secretions among them), it was the group she named in honor of a defunct minor-league team that gave her career the biggest boost and her love for baseball the most media attention. But it's still her solo stuff-- 1988's Lately I Keep Scissors, '92's One Perfect Green Blanket, and a slew of singles in between-- that makes her outstanding in her field--canny use of storytelling matched by divine melody.

photo by Smug

Mentions of America's pastime come up as often as those of hot-dogs, apple pie, or Chevrolet on 1212. Recorded last fall in Tucson with Giant Sand's Joey Burns and John Convertino ("the best line-up I've ever played with--psychic musicians, just amazing people"), the albums songs are more like the temperament of ballboys than the game itself: they lurk as much as they sprint, seethe as often as soar.

The now -signature covers on 1212 lets Manning, yawn other people yarns about babies getting boiled up into Irish stews (Tin Lehr's "Rickity Tikity Tin"), break it to the kids that there's no reason to hold out for that promised pot of gold (Richard Thompson's "End of the Rainbow"), and examine the useless feeling you get when you figure out a relationship is in the can ("Stain on the Sun" by Bevis Frond's Nick Salamon). But it's the album's first four tracks-- the nineteen minute rock opera, "The Arsonist Story"-- that are the most telling about what Manning's been up to since the SF Seals abandoned their class act last year.

"I got the ideas for it while I was out on tour in '95," Manning says between innings. I was driving along and started thinking about the feeling a mom would have while watching the news and finding out that her son is the arsonist everyone's looking for."

The four-part tale of Evil, a young firestarter, begins with "Fireman," in which Manning eerily loops a chanted word, 'fire," over rolling drums and jumpy guitar and bass. "Fireman" moves flawlessly into "Evil Plays Piano" (Manning says the creepy pink-pink-pinking in the upper part of the keyboard is the only piano part she can ply). On "Evil Craves Attention," Manning plays narrator, giving listeners a bit of pop-psyche background into the boy's abusive history. From there, amid authentic-sounding bits of vicious petroleum being poured, a match striking, and cinders crackling like fall leaves, Evil submits to his own destruction in "Trapped and Drowning."

photo by Smug

"I definitely wanted the lyrics to describe what the house was like and what the weather was like outside," Manning says. "And all the instruments symbolize something, like the drum part--that's supposed to be the mother knocking on the son's door or hitting his chest with her finger. Boom boom! Boom boom! 'Where were you,' that kind of threatening, forceful aggression. The drums also stand for the flickering of the fire. The bass is the gasoline trickling down."

"The Arsonist Story," marks the growth of Manning's musicianship as well as her songwriting abilities: she's ready to play the part of uber-arranger Pete Townsend instead of the Queen of Broken Hearts, as she has on her past efforts.

"I'm pretty much intentionally getting away from writing about broken hearts," she says, "because I found that as I got over things, writing about those sad, staring-at-your-ceiling-and moaning over a relationship-gone-bad songs only reinforced the bad feelings I had about myself. So now I only try to write about the positive instead of the negative." She tries to think optimistically about her future in music although she admits her audience, while "vehemently devoted," has been a bit slim for her liking.

"I'd like to see 1212 sell at least twice as much as I've sold in the past, which really isn't asking for much since I don't sell that many albums. If I could just double my audience, I'd feel pretty satisfied with that.

"You know, there are some people who just have an easy time getting an audience, like Palace. I remember when Sebadoh wasn't really known, and now they're playing huge festivals. I just keep seeing people shoot past me."

But just because they outsell her, doesn't mean other musicians don't want her input or heavenly vocals on their tracks. Since the Seals split up, Manning has teamed with some of her musical idols on several projects outside her solo career. She recently spent a couple of months in New Zealand where she collaborated on the writing, recording and production of an upcoming album with kiwi musical luminaries, David Kilgour from the Bats, Robert Scott of the Clean, members of the 30s, Graem Downes of the Verlaines, and Chris Knox of Tall Dwarfs.

photo by Smug

Still, Manning doesn't know how long this rock and roll lifestyle will last. "I had no aspirations about putting out records when I was fourteen, when I didn't know what a record label was or what it did," she say matter-of-factly. "And when I'm in my 50s, I probably wont be thinking about it either. But I do see myself working really hard being a musician in the public eye over the next five years, but I can't see it after that."

It's the next inning and the Mets are about to steal home. Between cheers and jeers, our talk turns to baseball as a metaphor for life.

"I'd say it's because you have to play against your own stats every time you get up to bat," she muses. "[Baseball] isn't that kind of game where you're really playing against anyone else. You're playing against your own record."

She thinks for a minute. "[The metaphor] works if you apply it to songwriting or even to the work I did on this new album, too. I think it shows I'm challenging myself and that I'm pretty versatile and that I'm a good interpreter of other people's material. But I don't think it has much to say about what I've been through-- I mean, I haven't been lighting fires or anything. I think it just shows a growth, a kind of maturity in myself."