Hal Willner

Closed on Account of Rabies – Poems and Tales of Edgar Allen Poe (Mercury)
An interview with Hal Willner
by William Ham

Quoth the Wilner: “Never Bore”

“It wasn’t a good year for any of us,” Hal Willner says with a touch of resigned ruefulness. “Especially with a lot of the people I chose to work with.” For Willner, 1997 was a year of abrupt departures – many of the collaborators on his justly praised conceptual album projects, including William S. Burroughs (Dead City Radio), Allen Ginsberg (The Lion For Real), and Jeff Buckley, have split this mortal coil for good during the miserable year just passed. It seems appropriate, then, that the undertaking (pun most certainly not intended) Willner had spent much of the year seeing to fruition would be a collection of readings from the master of morbidity himself. Closed on Account of Rabies – Poems and Tales of Edgar Allen Poe (Mouth Almighty/Mercury) is a beautifully conceived and executed album in a tradition that Willner has been renowned for since he produced Armacord Nino Rota in 1981 – the gathering of a disparate and sometimes bizarrely incongruous collection of musicians, singers, and performers to pay tribute to the works of a single artist or genre.

You may know Willner’s work, even if his name doesn’t spring easily to common lips – he was the mastermind behind the popular tributes to Kurt Weill (Lost in the Stars, September Songs), Thelonious Monk (That’s the Way I Feel Now) and songs from Walt Disney movies (Stay Awake). In truth, part of the blame for the current prolifigacy of tribute albums can be laid at least partly at his feet, something that Willner – who has his fingers in many different pies, including albums with Marianne Faithfull and Deborah Harry and the Jazz Passengers (all of whom appear on Closed…) and a long-standing gig doing special musical material for Saturday Night Live – has tried to evade, though, like Michael Corleone, they keep pulling him back in. “I wasn’t going to continue with them, but the last few had been sort of commissioned,” he says. “You see, I never considered these tribute records, except maybe the Monk. They were more sort of explorations, just a guy with eclectic tastes trying to make records that maybe he’d want to hear. I suppose if I were smart, I could have just repeated the formula of Rota over and over again and done a kind of Windham Hill thing – Willner Hill. But I wanted each one of them to be different. I mean, the Disney one was so Cecil B. DeMille – such an insane cast. Then the (Charles) Mingus one (Weird Nightmare) went somewhere else, and after that I considered doing Edith Piaf, but that’s when I realized how weird it was. Suddenly, someone else was doing a Piaf record, and then I’d call some artists and they’d say ‘Well, we’re booked to do the Buddy Greco tribute’ or something… that’s when I figured I’d move on and do other things. But then September Songs, the soundtrack to the Kurt Weill TV special and film, came along, and then this project, which was more the brainstorm of Michael Minzer, who I’d done Dead City Radio and The Lion For Real for. The first few artists were mostly his idea, but I got excited about it once I got into it because it was something different. It’s kind of interesting, because, although it’s very eclectic musically, it doesn’t feel that way. You hardly notice how all over the place it is. At least I don’t think you do.”

Eclectic is the word, indeed. One of Willner’s trademarks is putting together elements – whether musical or conceptual – that seem at first not to go together, but, once heard, seem so perfect you wonder why no one had thought of it before. On this album, that extends not only to the artists (who range from actors Christopher Walken and Gabriel Byrne to enigmatic musicians like Dr. John and Diamanda Galás) but to the packaging itself. The title comes from the recent finding that Poe, who had always been thought to have died in an alcoholic stupor, had more likely expired as a result of encephalitic rabies. But the Willner touch is that the title, as well as the subtitles for each of the two CDs in the collection, were taken from the films of W.C. Fields. “What does all this have to do with Edgar Allen Poe?” he asks in his liner notes. “I don’t know, but I’m sure there must be something… because everything leads to him.”

The latter proclamation was made to Willner by Allen Ginsberg, who, in keeping with the eerie but wonderful spirit of the album, played a part in the recording of what is inevitably the most haunting track on the album – “Ulalume,” a semi-obscure Poe-m Willner remembers first hearing read by James Mason in the film version of Lolita, as read by Jeff Buckley. “I knew Jeff,” Willner says. “I played a role in bringing him to New York. A few years back, I was doing concerts at St. Ann’s Church, and we thought to do an evening of Tim Buckley music. And we had heard that Buckley had had a son, and then he actually got in touch with us, so he came to New York, and you know how great Jeff was – naturally, he was a highlight of the show. And then he stayed in New York, pretty much, we kept in touch and became friends. This seemed just so right for him – I thought that he’d be great reading poetry, you know. I showed ‘Ulalume’ to him, he really liked it, and we recorded it the night before he left for Memphis. And Ginsberg was there coaching him… take that where you want. It was wonderful watching the two of them work together on it, and I think there’s such a sense of innocence and discovery on that track because of it – Jeff wasn’t a veteran at reading poetry and Allen just took him through the poet’s eyes. That was a great night, a great image I’ll always have.”

His next few projects will keep Willner in the company of the departed, including albums featuring Kathy Acker, Terry Southern, and a six-CD Lenny Bruce box set for Rhino, and though he intends to move out of the realm for which he’s best known (plans are afoot for a solo album on Howie B’s Pussyfoot label), he remains deeply proud of his spoken-word and music projects, if a bit nonplussed at how they’ve been perceived. “At the end of it, I’m trying to make albums that hold up like albums – something you can listen to together as opposed to listening to them like a compilation. Mind you, I grew up with the Beatles’ White Album and seeing Tiny Tim on The Ed Sullivan Show, so my idea of a unified album might be a little different than others’. I think Sullivan was a big formative influence for me – to see the Rolling Stones next to plate-spinners next to a monkey act next to Jackie Mason all makes sense to me! It’s intuitive, but it grew out of the times I came up in, hearing “Revolution 9″ next to vaudeville or the early days of FM radio. I realize that now, the younger generation hasn’t grown up with the varied influences that we had, but it’s a shame – there was a willingness to take chances that’s harder to come by these days – people are so afraid of failing now. But I think that putting different elements together with the right continuity and flow can be revelatory – you could have the Replacements next to Betty Carter and have it work beautifully.”