Neko Case has called her pal Kelly Hogan “the Zelig of rock ‘n’ roll.” Her name appears in the credits for albums by Mavis Staples, the Mekons, Will Oldham, Matt Pond PA, Amy Ray, Giant Sand, Archer Prewitt, Alejandro Escovedo, Drive-By Truckers, Jakob Dylan, Tortoise and many others, Case included. Hogan’s fourth album has been a long time coming, in part because she’s been busy as a crucial part of Case’s band (anyone who’s seen Case live has witnessed Hogan’s amusing banter), in part because of the nature of the project. For I Like To Keep Myself In Pain (Anti-), Hogan sent letters to her songwriter friends, many of whom she’d sung with, asking them if they would send her a song, either one written specifically for her or one that “you think I could do right by,” as she said. That process started several years ago, and results yielded songs from a veritable who’s who: Vic Chesnutt, Stephin Merritt, Andrew Bird, Jon Langford, Janet Bean, M. Ward and others. Hogan will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our recent feature on her.
Hogan: We got excited about it when we first got cable TV back in high school, but then it kinda turned out that there still wasn’t much on. MTV only had a slim repertoire of videos, which equalled multiple playings of “Hungry Like The Wolf,” “When The Bullet Hits The Bone,” and god if I haven’t seen “Missing You” by John Waite at least a couple thousand times. (Spoiler alert: He really was missing you … a lot.)
It was the same way with all our movie channels back then, too—The Blue Lagoon, Stripes, The Great Santini, Caddyshack and Fame played over and over and over and over again. They weren’t necessarily bad movies (I even found something to like in the tepid Hurricane starring Mia Farrow—that Polynesian dude was hot!), but the repetition got a old pretty fast, until … until … Eddie Murphy’s brilliant and bulletproof stand-up routine Delirious got into the mix.
He was a wunderkind, 23 years old, firing on all cylinders, and improbably Ginzu-sharp in his over-the-top, tick-tight red leather suit. Start to finish, the routine is perfect—aerodynamic, airtight, no flies and completely hilarious. We’d watch it every time it came on, from any point in the routine. We never got tired of it. His bits became part of our family vernacular: “It’s the fart game, son—you’ll play one day.” “Want a lick? Psyche!” Just quoting a small line from a long and complicated Murphy story ” … and then a big brown shark caaame … ” was enough to imply the whole bit for us, and we’d laugh like we just heard the whole thing—and I’m talking about the kind of laughing that makes you feel like you did too many sit-ups. The kind of laughing that’s makes it bearable to be alive.
We knew the entire show by heart and fulfilled the prophecy contained in one of Murphy’s Delirious bits where he complained about white people trying to tell his jokes and messing them up. Yes, we did do his bits every day at the bus stop and at school, and I’m sure we sucked ass. But Eddie, we tried, man! We tried.
We had such high hopes for his follow-up film, Raw, and while it had its moments, most of the time it just seemed so … I don’t know … angry? We kept going back to Delirious and its vivid characters: Eddie’s mother Lillian and her wicked aim with a high-heeled shoe, Aunt Bunny and her mustache (“Goony Goo Goo!”), Uncle Gus and his lighter-fluid habit (“now that’s a fire!”) and Eddie’s drunk dad, pounding his chest and telling it like it is (“This is my house, motherfucker!”) and almost resting his cocktail glass on a coaster made of hard, dried dog turd in the den.
We loved Murphy’s perfect impressions of Elvis; fat and flatulent, or young and sexy and singing his lines in his movies, “Lemonaaade … that cool refreshing drink!”—and Murphy’s legendary takes on James Brown, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson in my personal favorite routine about singers and their undeniable sexual gravity—a comedy bit of Eddie Murphy’s to which I’m now very literally attached.
In winter 1997 while visiting family in Georgia for the holidays, I was bummering around Athens on New Year’s Eve like an ambulatory ’bout-to-cry super-saturated solution. I had moved to Chicago that April and was acutely homesick, trying to keep from getting sucked into the the mysterious black hole of panic disorder, and dreading an impending romantic break-up. On top of all that, I had also been trying to quit music—trying to quit singing in bands and live like a “normal” person for the first time in my adult life—and it was killing me. I saw an old tattoo-artist pal on the street who flagged me down with, “When you gonna get that tat you been talking about for the last seven years?” and something in me just snapped.
Twenty-four hours later I was drinking bourbon and sporting my first (and only) tattoo; beautiful curling cursive just above my butt crack that reads “Singers get all the pussy.” Yes, ladies and gentlemen—I have a tramp stamp that quotes Eddie Murphy’s Delirious—arguably one of the world’s stupidest tattoos, and I love it. Under a burning needle, I screamed my way into 1998 and went back to music—my normal life—and I’ll sing ’til I die.
Post-script, June 2012: I was promoting my new record, doing a phone interview with an Australian writer calling all the way from Perth, when he asked me, “Was there one defining moment when you knew you were going to be a singer for the rest of your life?” Ha! I took a deep breath and told him the story of my tattoo. Then, for about 10 seconds, there was no sound on the other end of the line, and I was afraid I might’ve offended my interviewer into speechlessness, or that somehow the overseas call had been dropped. I finally spoke up “Hello? Hello?”—and then the writer, halfway around the globe and with a smile in his voice, simply replied “Goony Goo Goo!”
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2EIra4SYoE
