GROWN-UP CABARET LOVEDOLL
Abby Travis is desperate no more, performing elegant, obsessive songs with soul and grace
You don't have to turn around to know Abby Travis is speaking. You can peg the owner of that sultry, husky voice without even seeing her pale, pretty face. It's funny how it sounds so deep and dark when she's ordering a club soda on a Wednesday night at Tangier, where the chanteuse/songwriter holds her monthly Mata Hari club. Yet, when she steps onstage, a creamy, black-clad bonbon amid the scarlet decor of the restaurant's back room, her voice flutters sweetly, as high-pitched as any ingenue's.
Is it true
the best years of my life are through?
Snuffed out like my misspent youth
Is it true?
What's to prove?
Regurgitated shallow views
A sunset on a sea of ewes, "baa baa"
I'm not condoning such whining
and moaning
Still you gotta wonder sometimes
when solitude's your only friend
And now was the time to carry on,
carry on, carry on ...
The tune, "Now Was," is a languid, world-weary ballad, punctuated by glitter-rock guitar, lilting bass lines, and nimble piano flourishes. "It's almost like a midlife-crisis song," says Travis a few days later, after playing the recorded version for me in the small studio behind her Fairfax District home. She's wearing battered jeans, high-heeled boots, and a chunky-knit black turtleneck, her black Bettie Page 'do framing deep-set green eyes and a red-lipsticked mouth. "But keep in mind that I'm an early bloomer, so I don't really think I've reached my midlife yet."
The Hollywood native hit the L.A. underground at age 16, playing bass in the Love Dolls, a chick band born out of Dave Markey's 1984 cult classic Desperate Teenage Lovedolls. An agile bassist, she famously played with both Beck and Elastica on the 1995 Lollapalooza tour, and has been a backup player/singer for acts as diverse as KMFDM, the Meat Puppets, singer-songwriter Michael Penn, Spinal Tap(!), and Butthole Surfers leader Gibby Haynes, with whom she toured last fall.
But Travis is also a solo artist, and her music stands out from just about anyone she's backed up. With her knack for dryly sardonic phrases and romantic sense of the macabre, she built a following among lovers of gothic cabaret-pop with 1997's The Abby Travis Foundation and 2000's Cutthroat Standards and Black Pop. Her latest works, slated for an album titled Glitter Mouth she hopes to release by early summer, have already been getting airplay on Indie 103.1 ("Now Was") and Rodney Bingenheimer's KROQ show (an exceedingly damaged take on the Shangri-Las' already twisted "Past, Present and Future"). The tracks she plays on this rainy-yet-sunny Saturday afternoon blend glam and jazz, goth and rock, cabaret and trip-hop.
Her parents - Mom worked in politics, and Dad was a news cinematographer - seem the very definition of opposites attracting: "They would actively debate the news in pretty erudite ways; I mean, they would yell at each other, but both of them could back up their ideas." This trained her to pay attention and not take opinions at face value - a characteristic reflected in our caffeine-fueled conversation, which veers from the state of the world to Michael Jackson.
Travis's musical influences are similarly wide-ranging - from Broadway to Bowie - which can be disorienting. But with the Glitter Mouth material, she deftly pulls the disparate threads together, abetted by a dazzling array of collaborators, including singer-songwriter/keyboardist Kristian Hoffman, Meat Puppets guitarist Curt Kirkwood, lounge artist Joey Altruda, and L7's Donita Sparks. The tunes have complex pedigrees, yet the music - particularly such trip-hop-flecked tracks as the airily soulful "Grace" and the erotically obsessive "Le Petit Mort" - feels more contemporary than anything she's done. Still, the musings in a number like "Now Was" are more sophisticated than most mainstream pop.
"It's one of those ideas of, 'What is my potential? How do you define success?' It kind of comes from self-doubt, but it's also kind of funny," she says, confessing that she may have lifted the "now was" concept from a tune in Stephen Sondheim's murderous-barber musical Sweeney Todd. You could imagine "Now Was" done traditionally, with just piano, but the album version has a vaguely Marianne Faithfull feel. "The lily's starting to wilt," she says wryly, when I suggest this.
The humor is key, however, and the irony is sharp as a bodkin. "Now Was" may reflect the singer's uneasy maturity, but it does not despair. Indeed, Travis's music often plumbs unhappy or unsettling emotions yet never wallows in self-pity. "I take my work seriously, but I don't take myself seriously, but most of my work is about me, so that's where a lot of the humor comes from," she says, laughing.
Still, she's starting to take her career more seriously. She began Mata Hari last July, excited about "finding a place for my little glitter-rock cabaret vision," she says. "I thought [Tangier] would be perfect, because it's elegant but not pretentious." A fan of over-the-top costumery - she's been known to wear elaborate headdresses and unfailingly appears in public dolled up like an old-fashioned movie star in busty dresses or slinky gowns - she naturally attracts clubgoers with interesting attire, who give Mata Hari the faint patina of a bygone speakeasy.
"I'm not one of those people who's always totally decked out," she says. "But I like that idea of going out and [dressing up] ... . When certain people come to the club, I'm happy to see them just because they look so fabulous. It adds to the overall environment."
Guest performers have included such striking figures as Ann Magnuson, Mink Stole, Mulholland Drive crooner Rebekah Del Rio, and a cross-gender stripteasing little person named Bobby Pins. Yet, despite the colorful personalities of Mata Hari's assorted offbeat vocalists, drag queens, and musical acts, it has a relaxed sense of community. "There's been a really low diva factor," Travis says. "Everyone's been really mellow, which I'm -" she breaks off, applauding happily.
Still, she's planning to hold Mata Hari less frequently, mainly to keep from burning out on all the organizational details. Although she'd love to concentrate exclusively on her own stuff, and has, like many independent artists, had her tunes placed in TV shows and sold via download sites like CD Baby and iTunes, she still needs those backup gigs. She's also recently begun producing others, such as former Extra Fancy singer Brian Grillo, but her ambitions are far grander than knob-twiddling.
Or maybe that should be, far more Grand Guignol. "I'd like to do a musical version of the film Sante Sangre," a grisly 1989 tale of familial horror, murder, and revenge. (Hello, Sweeney Todd!) "I'd also like to modernize the style of singing in musicals," she says. "I hate that overly melodramatic way Broadway people enunciate."
First, however, she has to finish Glitter Mouth. Despite her many morbid fascinations, she hopes people find this collection uplifting. "Cutthroat's the kind of record you have to sit down and listen to," she says. "Whereas this one is something folks could enjoy without having to be so intellectually taken in by it. A lot of that came from touring, where it was just me and Kristian. Sometimes we were at venues that really made sense, and other times we were playing with some metal band, and I'm there in my little cabaret dress. And it's like, OK, I want to do something that rocks a little harder now."
Published: 02/24/2005
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