December 2- 8, 2004

music

Animal Magnate

Autoharp and Soul: "It's so much easier to use animals," says Cory McAbee (center). "They make for better metaphors."

The Billy Nayer Show does the bunny hop.

by A.D. Amorosi

In a world that prefers its art classifiable and easily explained, Cory McAbee offers no simple answers. Neither the mean-ass whimsy of his lyrics nor the stark twists in his films come comfortably.

That goes for his work as singer, songwriter and autoharpist for The Billy Nayer Show. It also goes for his feature film, The American Astronaut, that's been winning raves since its 2002 debut. Soundtracked by The Billy Nayer Show, its DVD comes out next month.

The imagery may seem random—songs about sloths, dialogue like "My father taught me to kill the sunflower"—but don't think of McAbee as cryptic. His style is happily stream-of-conscious, weirdly romantic, even silly. This makes his approach to music and film deliciously Duchampian, even fearless.

"I started making films to not separate different mediums," says McAbee of compartmentalizing his varied art forms, including painting and serial animation. "I wrote [Astronaut]. I acted it. I painted it. I storyboarded it. I played music throughout it. I don't know if it was a goal at my start. But I've always wanted to unite everything I do."

Everything McAbee does starts with The Billy Nayer Show. Like life teeming beneath an unturned rock, BNS has led a charmed, hidden existence. But even amidst the usual suspects of the avant garde, his band and its music are enigmatic. Like a Floyd Patterson left hook, his best work seems to come from nowhere.

The crusty guitar skronk and sinister sarcasm of The Villain That Love Built. The beguilingly psychedelic Goodbye Straplight Sarentino, I Will Miss You. The chugging T-Rex-ian glam of the newest CD, Rabbit.

You don't know those records. Few do. McAbee understands that.

"We know we're beyond the mainstream," says McAbee, choking back a laugh. "Really beyond, I guess. It's very personal music between myself and the band. What we do—it's not an adopted style."

The San Francisco painter and bouncer took to singing almost secretly. "It wasn't as if I was known as a painter," he laughs. "I just didn't really like "featuring Cory McAbee.' So a painter friend of mine said "Why don't you call yourself "Billy Nayer?' Pulled it out of the air."

The name stuck. In 1992, McAbee—playing a "gutsy electric autoharp" whose sound is akin to an angry, wet, fuzz-toned Fender—joined forces with drummer Bobby Lurie and bassist Frank Swart. They became the Show.

The main attraction is McAbee's lyrics. In his blunt, baleful crooning he spins metaphorical yarns about animals. This is not to the exclusion of other allegorical elements: Sugar. Flowers. Oddball characters that crossed his path. But animals suit him best.

"It's so much easier to use animals in order to paint different pictures," explains McAbee. "They make for better metaphors. If you did the same thing with people, you'd hit a wall. It's freeing to write that way."

The aesthetic is elegant, nasty, sexual and loving. You really couldn't imagine songs like "Three Monkeys" (from Sarentino) or "Mama Hen" (from Rabbit) any other way. Like sculptures carved from wood (not chiseled in marble), the animals lend a primal mystery to his stories that other humans couldn't.

Rabbit has an unusually graceful romanticism at its heart. Though narcissistic ("Handsome") and disgusted ("Raymond"), the CD is more poppy and linear than previous projects. His lyrics are as thorny, jagged and beautiful as his voice, and Rabbit captures an animal farm filled with delight and rage.

And everything—the tales of homelessness, anger and physical attraction—comes from McAbee's life. So he says. The hows and whys of his girl smelling like burning sugar or how grease lizards replicate human traits is open for interpretation.

McAbee has a knack for making life an abstraction. Though no mirror image, the desolate, daring Astronaut is also quirkily autobiographical.

"I know. What part of my life is filled with good-looking boys dressed as gladiators? And me, all dressed in leather?" he laughs about the film's junior high school humor, its buddy-film extremism and oddly sexual subtext. "But I wanted to create an outpost society. Men on one side. Women on the other."

The black-and-white Astronaut mixes familiar visions: the cluttered noir of Pi and Eraserhead, the antiquated machine-headness of Brazil, the cowpoke sci-fi of the Star Wars saloon. McAbee turned all that insolent imagery on its head with a hilariously juvenile, almost homoerotic Boys Own sexuality. Add to that a happy milieu of animal references—that McAbee specialty—and the "space western musical" has a language all its own.

Unlike most jacks-of-all-trades (and masters of none), McAbee's nailed the multi-hyphenate tag. "I've had to sell my birthright to do it," he says. (The film cost about a million bucks to make.) "But doing all those things myself helps flush out all the impurities." The Billy Nayer Show might not be as pure as McAbee thinks. But it floats. Like a butterfly. And a bee.

The Billy Nayer Show and The Yarrows, Tue., Dec. 7, 8 p.m., $8, The Khyber, 56 S. Second St., 215-238-5888.