The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: Vulgar Boatmen

February 1993

A strange but cool band from the Florida hinterland

Dead center between the Gulf of Mexico and the At­lantic Ocean, right at the northern point of central Florida, is Gainesville, a town of 100,000 dominated by the huge flagship campus of the University of Flori­da. It's famed for its football team, the Gators, and for Gatorade, the magically replenishing bev­erage a UF medical college professor invented to give the Gators a leg up on rivals Florida State and Miami. The city made headlines of the worst kind in August 1990, when the hideously butchered corpses of five students were discovered in off-campus apartments. The full details of the reportedly ritualistic or satanic murders have never come out.

Another Gainesville secret is the Vulgar Boatmen, a subtle rock 'n' roll band. It took early shape in 1981 as a combo of three Gainesville art students, one of them Walter Salas-Humara, who went on to form the Silos. The next year they were joined by Robert Ray, a Memphis native and UF professor of English and film studies who, in his own words, "more or less forced myself upon the group." Ray be­gan collaborating on songs long-distance with Dale Lawrence, an Indianapolis musician he knew from his time in graduate school at Indiana University. Soon enough, the group mutated. Lawrence re­named his own Indianapolis band "The Vulgar Boat­men," and the Gainesville VBs set about recording, with Lawrence often the only delegate present from the midwestern version.

---

---

The results, on the 1989 You and Your Sister (Record Collect/Independent Label Alliance) and last year's Please Panic (Safe House/Caroline), sound less like secrets than rumors, whispered tales of romance that just barely hint at sex—the kind of stories boys tell about girls, the kind of stories a boy tells himself. The quietly desperate tone of "Allison Says" connects to the upbeat lift of "You're the One," but it's the drifting reveries of "Calling Upstairs" and "You Don't Love Me Yet" that seal the emotions in the music—seal them, make them indelible, unforgettable, by putting them so far out of reach. They're teen dreams, impossible to re­alize—a yearning beyond sorrow or satisfaction.

Well, it's easy to get all lyrical about the Vulgar Boatmen. So often their stuff sounds like the imaginary songs you hear in your head—vague, half-remembered bits of real records coalescing into a spectral melody that can torture you for days as you try to figure out where the hell it came from. The Vulgar Boatmen make a sound that's just thin enough, cool enough, to insinuate, rather than announce itself. Ray and Lawrence do almost all the lead singing; their voices are hard to tell apart, both manifestly unstyl­ized, seemingly unformed, reaching for some­thing, though Lawrence is thirty-five and Ray is forty-nine. There's no lead guitar as such; again, both Ray and Lawrence play guitar, but as if to find melodies, not highlight them. Weight comes from the bass, played on Please Panic by session man J. D. Foster, from Jonathan Isley's drumming, and from Helen Kirklin's viola. Kirklin, married to Ray, plays with the Jack­sonville Symphony Orchestra and co-founded the Gainesville Chamber Orchestra; on Please Panic she mostly provides texture, an anchor, a dark burrr strengthening the sound, but on "You're the One" she moves out like a lead guitarist, taking over the music. It's the sort of moment that with the Vul­gar Boatmen stands out almost as a kind of vio­lence—as if, suddenly, someone's going to try to make you believe something. But then Kirklin glides back into the theme.

"What's interesting about rock 'n' roll is that its truly radical aspect occurs at the level of sound," Ray said in an interview with the Paris daily Libération. “‘Tutti Frutti’ is far more revolutionary than Lennon's 'Woman Is the Nigger of the World,' and the sound of Dylan's voice changed more people's ideas about the world than his political message did." What's most interesting about the Vulgar Boatmen right now, as Ray and Lawrence sift through their growing backlog of songs and set about preparing for a third album, is the plainly undefended sound of the voices and the music as a whole—and I don't mean vulnerable. There's a terrific sense of people who've dropped their guard in the songs, of people who aren't afraid of embarrassment. When, in "Al­lison Says," Lawrence sings about driving around and around the block where a girl lives, it's not re­motely embarrassing—it's inspiring.

You can hear this same quality, a fatigue with pose and attitude, in Soul Asylum's devastated "Without a Trace," on the recent Grave Dancers Union (Columbia). "I fell in love with a hooker; she laughed in my face," David Pirner sings, and he moves on to tell one joke after another on himself, until you nearly envy his nakedness. The voice found in "Without a Trace" and in the Vulgar Boat­men's best songs is a tough one, though at first "tough" is the last word you might use—it's a toughness that comes from a refusal of any kind of irony. Listening, you can almost imagine that if, for a time, there is a change in our public dis­course toward real talk about real things, irony might just cease to communicate at all, and the lan­guage of the Vulgar Boatmen's songs might cease to seem even a little bit strange.

Strange they are, though, simply in their modesty: generically suburban, white, middle-class, unset­tled, unsatisfied. Songs about driving around and around the same block, as if, even though you know it by heart soon enough, you never really know what you'll find there.

---

Originally published in Interview Magazine, February 1993.