Incredibly strange music

Gus Van Sant's 18 Songs About Golf

by Matt Ashare

The first and only time I met Gus Van Sant -- in the deeply artificial atmosphere of a film junket for his 1995 black comedy To Die For -- he was thoughtful, soft-spoken, guarded. The film's stars, Nicole Kidman and Matt Dillon, both made you feel as if they were opening up when they got grilled by small groups of critics and reporters. Not Van Sant. He wasn't pretentious or unfriendly, just reserved. And he certainly didn't do anything that would have indicated he had a song like "RISD" in him.

"RISD" is a lo-fi recording of Van Sant playfully singing the text of the BFA degree he received from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975 over a messy little guitar riff, and it's not one of those oddities that's available only on a black-market celebrity outtake tape, like the ones featuring Buddy Rich mercilessly cursing his band, or Oasis's Gallagher Brothers taking the piss out of one another in the studio. You can hear "RISD" and 11 other originals by the director of Good Will Hunting on the CD Gus Van Sant, which was released along with a second, even stranger Van Sant CD titled 18 Songs About Golf earlier this year by the tiny Portland indie label Pop Secret (Box 203, Portland, Oregon 97208).

Recorded by Van Sant in 1983 (six years before the film Drugstore Cowboy put him on the map), when he was living in Darien, Connecticut, 18 Songs About Golf is the earlier of the two. True to its title, the disc features 18 Van Sant-penned ditties that allude to, were inspired by, or in some way refer to golf. Just in case the significance of the number 18 isn't immediately apparent, he divides the disc into two sections -- "Front 9" and "Back 9."

The rough-around-the-edges lo-fi aesthetic of 18 Songs places Van Sant the musician roughly a decade ahead of the times, since bedroom four-tracking didn't come into vogue till the early '90s. But his ties to a musical past are also apparent -- his deadpan, out-of-tune vocals, for example, are very Lou Reed (think of Lou doing some of his sillier genre excursions, like the Velvets' "Lonesome Cowboy Bill"). And the simple, rather goofy premise brings to mind another Reed disciple, Jonathan Richman. "Nothing's for Free," the opening track, has only one short verse: "Nothing's for free/But can be bought really inexpensively/Take these golf clubs/I bought them down the street at a garage sale." Elsewhere, Van Sant uses golf lingo as metaphor ("She's caught just like a ball in a trap"), waxes romantic about the golf course ("I like to take a ride around you"), and gets the blues ("My ball is lost/It's gonna cost/Two strokes from here/To reach the clear," he croons over a lazy 1-4-5 shuffle on "Lost").

Gus Van Sant was recorded a couple years later, when he was living in Portland, and it's the more serious and confessional of the two discs. Here his musical palette had broadened to include what sounds like a Casio keyboard and some real drums along with acoustic and electric guitars and a cheesy drum machine. The CD opens with the creepy "Momma Can't Walk," in which it turns out that along with not being able to walk, the singer's mom is apparently dead. "Independent Wealth" seems to be Van Sant asking his father to send him some cash. And "My Kind of Girl" is filled with amusing Jonathan Richman-style observations like "She's got my kind of legs/The kind of legs that like to walk around."

There is, as you've probably surmised, nothing to rival Van Sant's filmmaking on either of these CDs, both of which may some day go down in Re/Search publications' ongoing annals of "Incredibly Strange Music" next to Senator Robert Byrd's Mountain Fiddler album, Mary Tyler Moore Show star Ted Knight's Hi Guys, and, of course, Alfred Hitchcock's classic Music To Be Murdered By. But for anyone interested in getting to know better the director of Good Will Hunting from a distance, 18 Songs About Golf isn't a bad place to start.