Details, July 1992
Author: Matthew Sweet
Obsession: Hoarding
Let's start with a disclaimer: I've never called myself a pack rat. I just have a lot of stuff. I like having it around. Ever since I was a kid I've tended to get into extreme realms and tried to learn everything about them: Charlie's Angels, movie monsters, trout fishing, sea monkeys, space, reptiles. Name any lame subject and I was probably obsessed with it at one time.
Being inquisitive made me acquisitive. Like when I was into monsters, I had every monster magazine, and posters of my favorites. When the Viking landed on Mars, I called Carl Sagan and asked him to send me some photos. I still have the picture he sent me a panoramic view of the Martian surface hanging in my recording studio at home.
Japanese comics and animation sparked my latest insane craze. A few years ago, I stumbled across an American comic, Evangeline. I loved the look of the girl so much that I named a song for my latest album for her. Evangeline led me to Japanese comics, and I wound up sticking my head into scary science fiction conventions, looking for related stuff: posters, bootleg videos, and T-shirts. I even used Japanese animated footage for my first two videos from Girlfriend.
Collectors collect, pack rats hoard. The promise of possession is intrinsic to the thrill of the hunt. Like, I had to pick up a cheap guitar because I kept smashing my other guitars on stage. So I nabbed a great extra-cheap Gibson SG. Now that I know this store has more of those Gibsons left, I have an itch to get them all. Just to know I have them.
Pack rats aren’t materlialistic in the classic way. When I get a great guitar I don’t care if it gets scratched or dented. I would rather use something and abuse it than have it lying around pristine. It just means I’m loving it more. Most of the things I hoard aren’t expensive, just odds and ends I can get free or things people give me. Like right now, my bags are covered with stickers I’ve picked up on the road. At home, the wall around my desk is papered with postcards, clippings, and photos, anything that amuses me for the slightest moment, that reminds me that there’s some reason to keep on living.
My mess has always been a big part of my comfort zone. When I started writing songs as a teenager, I would sit in my closet, surrounded by piles of clothes and boxes, and lean back into the hanging shirts so no one could hear me . Now, when I’m on the road, I haul a lot of junk around -- video games, my CD player, CDs, clothes I never wear -- to stave off depression. Invariably it all ends up strewn around my hotel room. I pity the maids.
Some people find it hard to live with a pack rat. In my book, the ideal woman knows how be a pack rat and feel god about it. She’s got to be able to run with you and be trashy, or else you’ll always be at odds. Of course, there’s always that little kid in a guy that hopes someone will clean up his room for him. My girlfriend is really cool. We can get a huge pile going and she can feel comfortable about it.
See, there are a lot of people who think pack rats have some hideous disease. I prefer to think of myself as an interesting and rather harmless aberration of nature (with a hideous disease). It’s the obsessively clean people you have to watch out for people who think they have to purge to be pure. They generally end up miserable and have nothing to play with, sort through, or hide underneath. And I wouldn’t call that healthy.
Matthew Sweet is a hugely underrated singer/song-writer who has been releasing albums of finely crafted pop/rock songs since 1986. Born in Nebraska in 1964, his music has influences of The Byrds, Elvis Costello and especially Big Star. Particularly well worth checking out are the albums Girlfriend and 100% Fun. A new album Blue Skies on Mars is due out any time now (April 1997).
This month's Friend of Threat is pop demigod Matthew Sweet. We were as surprised as you are, but apparently he's a long-time reader, his albums are littered with eclectic film references and he's posed with our mag in way more upscale publications. Way to go. Matthew!
And since Georgia, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Mare Winningham and written by Jennifer's mom, Barbara Turner, is all about the music business, we decided to trick Matthew into reviewing it for us. Of course, his final piece was 5,000 words - about five times too long, but still.... The opinion of the crack team of FT reviewers? A solid 8+. "Reviewer needs more confidence," they felt, but "Instincts are both valid and resourceful." Matthew Sweet is welcome back to review movies for us anytime.
First of all, what you already know is that I should never ever agree to write articles, because this always happens where I dread to do it forever and ever. Somehow I always say I'll do it, even though every time I swear it's the last time I'm ever going to. I guess my big fault in this situation is I was a big fan of Film Threat magazine, which I now know that nobody else in the world even knows what it is. If I say. 'Oh yeah, I'm reviewing that movie for Film Threat," they're like, "What's that?" I'm like, "You don't know Film Threat? lt's Cool."
Actually Tony, my bass player, who has been playing with me since I guess before Altered Beast, was in it. While I was recording 100% Fun he was making this movie. He even called up on my birthday and Jennifer Jason Leigh left a message on my machine in Atlanta where I was recording, and he got her to write me a postcard. He had me sign a record for her or something. I said, "Oh cool, Jennifer Jason Leigh! Tell her I think she's great." And then at the end of that year - it would have been last year - we spent New Year's Eve at Jennifer Jason Leigh's house. It was a very small group of people, like maybe ten people.
We felt totally scared because we didn't know anybody and
worst of all, they played charades. So it was like Jennifer
Beals, Jennifer Jason Leigh and like six or seven other people we
didn't know that well. I guess John Reilly, who is an actor
friend of ours who plays Herman, the drummer in Georgia,
was there as well. So I actually met Jennifer once.
So anyhow, when they asked, for some reason I said I'd review it. Film Threat arranged for me to go to the premiere of the movie, okay Which then I had horror about for days and days, because I imagined myself sitting right next to Jennifer and everyone, and then being unable to stifle a laugh. Or I'd look over at Tony and I'd have to crack up at him because he had some line in the movie, which we now all know is the famous, "I love you, Seattle" line. So anyhow, we arranged to go to this remiere. As it turned out, it was really lucky because my wife Lisa had a super late day at work and got back kind of late, so we couldn't really make it there in time. We got there like ten minutes late. We thought, "Oh man. it's got to have started. We're not going to go." Of course later on, nobody would believe we even went.
So my management calls up Film Threat to see if they could set me up my own screening. So I went there, across from Paramount, and met with Paul Cullum. I think Miramax was afraid I was going to trash it. He was telling me it was really hard to get the screening. Paul Cullum conveniently ducked out because he had already seen the movie, or said he had. It's a movie about musicians which are always the hardest to take in movies for me because it's weird being a musician and watching people do that in movies. Especially Tony pretending to be a musician!
So I saw the movie and I was really distracted through the whole thing. I went through the gamut of emotions: like, this a really cool movie - it's kind of a fresh kind of thing, it's not like other movies; to, wow it's so unbearable making it through this scene; and then being really moved by some amazing piece of acting by Jennifer Jason Leigh. By the time it was over, in a way I thought it was really cool and in a way, I kind of couldn't stand it. It was really grim. I didn't know how I felt about it. But most of all, I thought I can't review a movie and be like a real critic. I just go to movies that I like and have my own basic way of understanding what I feel about them. As far as discussing them and for other people, will it be fair or not? And especially kind of knowing everybody, I just felt stuck, like I didn't know.
I went through this whole week of touring before I got back and was supposed to work on the article. I briefly fantasized about just plagiarizing a big, long glowing review from some major newspaper or magazine, which also seemed like a good Film Threat thing to do. Then I thought, "Oh you know, I can't do that because maybe I'll get in trouble or something." Then I thought, what if I see the movie again with one of my rock critic friends which is a medium I'm really comfortable with - and somehow get him to talk with me about it or whatever. And it never occurred to me, but Bud pointed out that I should in fact be being paid for this. That if I understood how much I was making, I would have completed the article. (Confidential to Bud Scoppa: Ixnay on the oneymay - do I come over to Rolling Stone or wherever and screw up your deals? Cullum.)
Oh, yeah - so Cullum meets me at the screening room, and he brings me the magazine and says, "So you're familiar with the review section.. I'm thinking in my head, yeah they're really short and they're usually goofy and have very little to do necessarily with the movie. They just give it a little rating and that's all good and well. So we're leafing through that section and Cullum turns to the next page which is a huge two-page spread and says, "Here is where your face will go." I'm thinking, Jesus Christ, add to my misery! And this is before I even saw the movie and started procrastinating on the review. You just don't know how many times I've done this. It's really pathetic! Maybe this could be the end of it already.
I do have to admit I liked it better the second time. I think it's an interesting kind of movie in that it tries to examine kind of an unnameable tension that exists between two people without ever really bringing out what's at the root of that or having any big climax occur. It's pretty much a real-life portrait of kind of a grim situation. The only person you get any kind of humor out of is the grimmest character of all, Sadie. Jennifer's character. Which is sort of a weird thing. It's a very dark movie, I think. The more I think about it, the more I appreciate it, sort of. It did have something in it that isn't usually in a movie. For all of the cliches of the rock band movie - you know, the "you gotta go to L.A. to make it" kind of mentality - its darkness and heavy underlying theme still overwhelms that cheesiness of it. And Mare Winningham was good in it. She was very well suited for the role, I thought. Good singer, good songwriter.
But Sadie. She is so grating as a personality. Her voice just reflects so much her desperation. That's really what the character is supposed to be like. You have to look at her character as almost an insane asylum/super drug-addicted kind of personality that's a wacky soul. One of the things that really occurred to me the first time I saw the movie was that when she is sober, you almost can't tell the difference between that and her completely wasted persona. It's like, she's that weird all the time, which is kind of an interesting thing I think.
As a singer, Leigh did some things sometimes that I thought if she had a quality of voice - and you've got to wonder if she wasn't trying to fuck up her quality of voice - she did some things that were amazing! I really thought she did an amazing job. Just her phrasing, her delivery, was amazing. I mean, I think you're supposed to think that. The first time I saw the movie, Axle (Max Perlich, Sadie's husband), was almost the lone bright spot in the movie for me. I like that guy. For some reason I just found him really funny. He kind of made me laugh, just his awkwardness and that he was such a sweetheart, but also kind of retarded. I like that actor. I've seen him in other stuff.
They're all really living it - I can see that. But you know, I'm fucking cynical.