The Poetry of Chick Graning

Number two in an occasional series about poetry in modern music lyrics.

Who?

Chick Graning. Knoxville, Tennessee.

Even in this day and age, information on Chick Graning is scarce (pardon the pun). We know that in 1987 as a young adult he left Knoxville for Boston to attend Berklee College of Music and, shortly after arriving, met the members of local guitar band Anastasia Screamed “on a bus”.

He took over as lead singer, toured the States and Europe, released two albums and became ex Mr Tanya Donelley. When Anastasia Screamed fell apart, Chick formed a power trio called Scarce - named after a Knoxville girl involved in a drunk-driving incident that nearly killed Graning when he was a passenger. (Scarce’s 1994 song Red would detail the issue - “red’s the sky, red’s the sky and so am I!”)

With Scarce on the verge of a kind of breakthrough in 1995 - Graning’s voice was a kind of Cobain howl/rusty timbred-croon - one day Chick didn’t show up for a band rehearsal. Bandmates Joyce Raskin and Joseph Propatier went to check on him and found him unconscious in his flat. Chick had suffered a severe brain aneurysm. Although doctors gave him only a 10% chance of survival, Chick - thanks to Joyce and others - managed to learn to walk and talk again and play the guitar. By the time he did, though, the musical moment had passed.

He’s surfaced from time to time since then, with the odd album and show, but that’s about all we know about Mr Chick Graning, Knoxville, Tennessee.

So, why?

So now we skip back to 1990. Anastasia Screamed record Laughing Down The Limehouse - a steel-clean, foam-murky rock and roll record which still stands up today. The band are Chris Cugini on tangled guitar, Chris Burdett on murderous drums and Charlie Bock all about that bass. Produced by the band and Drew Townson, the record’s recorded at Newbury Sound in Boston and mastered at Abbey Road. From the kick off - Beautiful - it’s a gnarly, shiny mess - and it’s Graning’s voice and his words - his way with words - that immediately marks this out.

Slip the fine the more to glide

add extra wings they open wide

something runs through like a tide

and washes to infinity

it was light and cold up there

there was a kind of ether on the air

even eagles would paralyse

smokestacks almost seemed alive

smokesnakes almost seemed alive…

This was not ‘I hate…’ or ‘I love…’ but something completely different. No messages. Stream of consciousness perhaps, stream of narcotic smoke consciousness, maybe? There’s masterful assonance in these lines; you can see Graning on his battered sofa in his flat - trucks passing by outside, through the mosquito net, guitar on his lap, cigarette burning (cigarettes play a big part in Graning’s ouvre (this was the 90’s!")), chewing the end of some pen he’s stolen or found, cough-chuckling as he goes through the words.

What’s it about? The sky? Being high? Beauty? Who knows - but it has a feel, and it changes depending on your mood, on where you are in life, space and time. It’s strangely comforting but always running just away from you - and him.

This album in particular is hot-rocked with Graning one-liners and they’re squeezed unmercifully into twelve tracks as though 1) he’s taken Bob Dylan’s cramming as a challenge, 2) he was ruminating on that car trip with Scarce and the unbearable lightness of being, and 3) he’s sometimes suffered precog visions of the future. Time was tight. The juices were flowing and it was as much as he could do to get them into a cup.

I felt like a lost my brain a little while ago

rolled out of a crack in my head - or was it a hole?

it rolled right into my hat,

danced on the brim,

it sat

and when it got down it started to walk

it ran around in circles,

it started to talk

and then it ran into a signpost just like a shipmast

layed in a line of chalk

like a battered scattered toothless haggard

where did it go and what if it mattered?

That alley cat smiled just like a panther…

This from standout track Tide - which contains the fantastic refrain - “I’ve been talking to the seagulls/and they’ve been talking back to ME!”

If you like your rock and roll and you like your wordsmiths, Laughing Down The Limehouse and it’s follow up Moontime are full of cigarette butt diamonds in the park grass. Graning is a mournful, doggy-eyed companion along life’s highways and low-ways but there’s something in his phrasing that’s always interesting.

With Scarce things got poppier and with his later albums (and shows) there’s not the manic energy of these early recordings, but there are echoes of this always, this kind of skewed low-life glamour which isn’t the machismo of someone like Bukowski or Lanegan, or the nihilism of Cobain or much of the grunge wave which washed over us back then, but something more spaced-out and apart and ‘arty’, maybe. This is seeing crooked beauty in walking down to a payphone or the colours of the sky when you’re having a car crash. This is the minutae: exploring the experience of being alive and loving the challenge of describing it not just by words but by mood, by juxtapositions, by layers, by obscuring it, too.

Final track on the album, Notown (I don’t know what this place is - wish it hadn’t been found) is a bluesy beaut. By now we know who this guy is and where he’s coming from.

…there’s a familiar room

and a beaten-on couch -

tell me about all the books

I ain’t even heard about.

There’s a place this’ll lead

and if I remember too much -

just enough to make a soul bleed -

just enough to lose touch…

If anyone knows where Chick is these days, please let me know. If anyone knows him, please say hi.

So that’s Chick Graning, Knoxville, Tennessee, ladies and gentlemen - one my favourite poets.