| Introducing 16 Horsepower |
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Now, the title of this article is “The Best Band You’re Not Listening To.” But I’m not going to do the TV Guide thing and sing the praises of some band whose albums you already own. I’m not going to talk about the Dave Matthews Band just because their new album isn’t the best-selling album in America. I’m going to talk about 16 Horsepower, and the chances are very good that you’ve never heard of them unless you are a music aficionado (16 Horsepower is a critically acclaimed underground band), you live near Denver (where they are from) or you live in the Netherlands (where they are popular in a rabid, U2 sort of way). In May, the Denver Post called 16 Horsepower
the best rock band in Colorado. A few months ago, the band’s
most recent album, Secret South,landed on Top 10 lists for
2000 by Amazon.com and CD Now. They enjoy celebrity status in Amsterdam,
where their shows sell out months in advance, where they are mobbed
in the streets and were recently the subject of an hour-long television
special. The problem is that in the U.S., as you well know, creativity doesn’t sell well. Sameness does. Britney Spears and Destiny’s Child do. It’s the same reason Pearl Harbor and The Mummy Returns are setting box office records this summer while films such as With aFriend Like Harry are largely ignored. There’s no accounting for a nation's taste, except when it is at least partially driven by the folks who stand to make a dime. It’s the way of the consumer capitalist world, and 16 Horsepower and a thousand other unique bands that we will never hear of are part of the fallout. But I digress. 16 Horsepower consists of David Eugene Edwards (vocals, accordion, guitar, banjo, hurdy-gurdy), Jean-Yves Tola (drums, piano), Stephen Taylor (lead guitar) and Pascal Humbert (standup bass). Edwards and Tola met in 1992 in California where they were both doing carpentry work for B-film producer Roger Corman. The two musicians hit it off, discovering solidarity as friends and artists. Before long, they had formed a band, moved to Colorado and recorded a self-titled EP. Soon after, 16 Horsepower signed with A&M Records and recorded their first LP, Sackcloth and Ashes, for which they achieved widespread critical acclaim. Since that time, they’ve produced two more studio albums, Low Estate (A&M) and Secret South (Razor and Tie), and one live album, Hoarse, which was previously released in Europe and has just been distributed in the U.S. by Checkered Past Records. Describing 16 Horsepower’s music is an exercise in frustration. It’s a full, stirring mixture of minor guitar chords and hollow percussion playing catch-up with Edwards’ throaty, assailing vocals. Reviewers usually employ adjectives like “Appalachian,” “roots,” “gothic,” and “alt-country” to describe 16 HP’s sound, and always with modifiers: “something like;” “a combination of;” “somewhere in between.” In short, 16 Horsepower is too unique, too difficult to describe, too unpalatable for them to ever be a successful band. And that’s just fine with them. “Their music requires thought and passion, and I think people on a pulp level aren’t interested in that anymore,” Rob Ferbrache, the band’s former lap-steel player who now helps produce the albums, told the Denver Post. “Sure, they want to sell records and have people come to their concerts, but they can hold their heads up proud because they are doing what they want to do.” In May, I attended a 16 Horsepower show in Boulder, Colorado. The Fox Theater was sold out, and before the concert the room was filled with a hazy, half-drunken, pre-concert buzz. The band’s entrance on stage was the most uneventful I had ever seen. Edwards walked out, sat on a stool, picked up his guitar, and started playing. His band-mates stood far apart from him and played their own instruments, hardly noticing he was there. There was no back-to-back David Lee Roth/Eddie Van Halen smiling showmanship, no face-to-face Jon Bon Jovi/Richie Sambora guitar dueling (excuse the glam rock references). Tola, Taylor and the Humbert might as well have been playing on three separate stages. And Edwards might as well have been playing in his bedroom. He sat on his stool the whole time, hardly talking at all between songs (save for the occasional deadpan “Thank you for clapping”). He strummed his guitar, squeezed his box accordion, and sang deeply into his mike, nearly swallowing it at times. Sound boring? It wasn’t. It was entrancing. The crowd didn’t budge. They listened. Intensely. Though Edwards remained still, he effused with presence. He seemed to hover above the stage. His eyes bulged and glowered at the audience. Suddenly, 16 HP song lyrics, which are easily ignored on albums, became the central presence of their music. It became clear that Edwards had something to say: “You’re thinking when this is all over “Let us not mince our words; Every audience member wondered if Edwards were talking to them. After a couple of songs, the guy next to me leaned over to his friend and said, “Are these guys Christians or something?” It’s a good and inevitable question, one that the band deals with constantly. The answer: Edwards is, the others are not. As a band, they avoid the “Christian” label like the plague, but personally, Edwards embraces it. “I very much consider myself a Christian,” Edwards told the Denver Post. “I believe in the Bible and God. Everything the Bible says, I believe. It’s just who I am.” 16 Horsepower is the rock equivalent of Jonathan Edwards, the brilliant 18th Century fire and brimstone preacher whose sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is required reading in most American Literature courses. I can’t prove it, but I’m willing to bet that there is a genetic connection between J. Edwards and E. Edwards. J. Edwards was notable for his blatant and unflinching adherence to the scariest parts of the Bible—the stuff about hell and damnation and eternal judgment. And E. Edwards is notable for the same thing—looking an audience in the eye and telling them exactly what he thinks about their prospects for the afterlife. It’s a chilling experience, but one that somehow hasn’t turned audiences off. In a recent article in the Dutch magazine M, Said el Hadji wrote, “[Edwards’ songs] call up images of lost souls in hazy, surreal landscapes in which the war between God and Satan is waged forever. You taste the Christian feeling of guilt. But 16 Horsepower is…beauteous and comforting. Edwards, thank God, is nothing like those gospel-rock singers whose music only serves as a shop window for the edifying message, those pseudo-musicians. Edwards is the only scout of God—as he sees himself—[and] I like to listen willingly.” It’s impossible to separate Edwards’ spirituality from his music. This is not just because he sings about spiritual things, but because he has created a spiritual music. In art, there is a difference between a spiritual message and a spiritual style, and Edwards embodies that difference. Creed is a band that has spiritual content—that is, they sing about vague spiritual things (“Can you take me higher?”). Edwards’ music has spiritual content, too, but it also achieves a spiritual style that is rare in rock music. Edwards’ music is somehow transcendental; it lifts itself from material things and opens a doorway into the spiritual world. Recently when asked in an interview how he brings spirituality into his music, Edwards sang his version of Bob Dylan’s “Nobody ‘Cept You.” His way of responding is telling: Edwards can’t explain it without doing it. He is infused with spirituality, a longing for God and heaven and a regret that he can’t quite find them on his own. That longing and regret find their way into every song, inspiring some of the most extraordinary and significant music on the cultural landscape today. As Edwards told rock critic Mark Brown in the Rocky Mountain News,"I can’t do anything else. I don’t know how to do anything else. I’ve never made any other kind of music that was more simplistic or lighthearted. It’s just not what I do; it’s not what I’ve been given to do."
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