College/Art Rock: The Gena Rowlands Band

Have you ever fallen in love with Janeane Garofalo? How about Gwyneth Paltrow or Helena Carter as they’re up there in beauty on the big screen? Have you ever been furious with Hollywood for drawing you in so much that you’re head over heels for someone who is nothing but a character in a story played by someone you don’t really know who has been made to look a certain way?

…La Merde et Les Etoiles elicits a chuckle and a wry smile, because you know that you’ve done just that: fallen in love with the flickering images in the movie house The Gena Rowlands Band unearths those ways that you’ve been caught up in a tale of fiction while your heart was really in love or in pain by the way the story pulled on it.

Those ideas of reality versus fiction are the subjects grappled with in songs like “Garfalo, C’est Moi,” “Pilot for a Situation Tragedy,” and “Power, Lies, Helena’s Lips.” The music is extremely compelling with the beauty of Bob Massey’s electric guitar that he plucks and strums with this huge, resonate sound despite the laid back feel. Adding to this are the contributions of the rest of the band including strings which gives it a soundtrack sense.

I am also very compelled by the honest self-reflection caused by Massey’s words. “Tom Schroder’s Blues” questions whether that one-night stand did you any good (“You know it’s wrong when you break in the white light of day/Kissing some face that you’ve never seen”). Set to a wandering piano, “Seceding from Our Union” is a new lyric for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” reflecting on the failure of a relationship, fueled perhaps by liquor. While realizing that life will not be like the X-Files (“I guess I’ll never ease Scully’s tension”), “Pilot for a Situation Tragedy” is some extreme honesty about why we watch TV: “This piece of furniture talks to me, it keeps me company/It doesn’t criticize my job.”

Said to be a “Parable about Dating,” “Kong Meets His Maker” finds Jesus standing at the Empire State Building as King Kong was being attacked. Massey gives words to Jesus in this old tale, and what Jesus tells Kong truly describes the kind of love God has for us.

If you’d known she is not the only blonde girl on the planet
I know you’d still do the same thing that you’ve done.

There are better persons on the planet than you and me, but Jesus would still have done everything He could in order to save us.

Finally, like a man sitting at the bar piano in a hotel long after they’ve put the chairs up on the tables, Massey muses on “Traci’s Big Screen Test” about a woman who was sold a huge pack of lies by the pornographers (“What the pornographers refused to show her/Was the hole where the heart goes”). It’s a mellow sadness at seeing how pornography rips the heart out of women (and men), leaving a hole that just wants to be filled with love. Meanwhile, Massey gets the last word, “What the philosophers refused to show him [the pornographer]/Was the heart where the hole was.” The pornographers seem incapable of realizing the damage that’s been done.


…La Merde et Les Etoiles is a 2003 release. In 2005, the Gena Rowlands Band teamed with Anti-Social Music for The Nitrate Hymnal, a multimedia opera by Massey and David Wilson. The songs continue in the same laid back, soundtrack vein while obviously having some operatic, rock opera, and musical touches. See “I Had a Dream” for some truly soulful singing by Susan Oetgen.

Thank you to Bob Massey and the Gena Rowlands Band, Autoclave Records, and Lujo Records for the review copy.