John Darnielle remembers Charlie McAlister in the pages of the Charleston City Paper.
“It’s not every day that you get to scratch seven or eight years worth of poison-oak caliber itch, but that’s exactly what happened the last night on the first date of my three-week spring tour. It was Charleston, S.C, and Charlie McAlister’d copped the opening slot. Charlie first came to my attention when he started sending tapes to the greatly-missed Car In Car Disco Product label, which dutifully released them; he was a shadowy figure in the cassette underground throughout the mid-nineties, if by “shadowy” you mean “totally cool in a where’d-he-come-from where’d-he-go living-legend kinda mystery guy.” His Mississippi Luau album on Catsup Plate is one of my favorite records of all time. (As an aside, let me note that despite my longstanding philosophical opposition to Best Albums of All Time lists, I have got the urge lately to make a list of Them Albums What I’d Generally Consider My Very Favorite Ones Ever, and will probably get around to it sometime in the next year or two.) Charlie’s music could probably be described by any number of not-quite-right music terms: it’s back-porch jug band stuff, sorta, but it’s got a real affinity with guerilla noise warfare, and also with actual gorillas, who nine times out of 10 will make the guerillas look like amateurs. It’s got that organic Neutral Milk Hotel feel, but its spiritual side isn’t the transcendent schtick that Jeff Mangum mastered and then put behind him; Charlie’s spiritual kin are the mediums who charge you a quarter for an hour’s worth of Ouija board in a shack down the highway near some southern beach town, and you think they’re maybe fulla shit but then they hit that huckster vein where it’s not really a con any more because everybody’s agreed to just ride the moment out even if it did start out phony. Charlie’s the wizard in Kansas without any MGM sanitation.”
(John Darnielle, Charleston City Paper)
Read the full article here
Listen to Almost Halloween Time Records tribute to Charlie McAlister here
