Rock's Boy Genius

The violinist is on the bus, hiding from the Texas heat. This tour is the first time she's ever had hotel rooms on the road, she says -- customarily, her bands finish the show by asking the audience for a floor to sleep on. The drummer says that his other band used to do that, until they got popular and fans started arguing over who would play host.

The bassist interrupts. "I spent my per diem on fingernail polish." He had to: It was a blue-black that matched his bass perfectly.

Then the flute player tells them that it's time to unload the equipment, and all fourteen members of Bright Eyes go to work, carrying keyboards and cellos and vibraphones into the Engine Room, the Houston club where they're playing tonight.

Bright Eyes is the name of whatever band Conor Oberst happens to be performing with at any given moment, pouring out his astonishing flood of words, reminiscent of rock logorrheics such as Morrissey and the young Bruce Springsteen. (Just to give you an idea, the title of the band's latest record is Lifted or the Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground.) Sometimes, Bright Eyes have been just Oberst on guitar and a pal on accordion. A few months ago, it was Oberst in a powder-blue suit with a six-girl backing band. Now it's a pop orchestra of indie-music folks in their twenties, living on pizza and beer. They'll each earn $3,000 or $4,000 by the end of the six-week tour, depending on how many T-shirts are sold.

After the gear gets loaded in, Oberst surveys the club's dressing room. He's twenty-two years old, five-feet-eight and has the skinny body that goes with a vegan diet. The backstage spread includes tortilla chips and oranges, but no alcohol.

"When we started touring," he says, "we'd get to the club at four, and there'd be beer and wine. Now it doesn't show up until just before we go on."

Casey Scott, the bassist with the painted nails, and drummer Clark Baechle burst into the room. They've found the amazing Emo Video Game on the Internet, in which you have to save one of the Get Up Kids from being sodomized by Steven Tyler. You can play any of seven singers, including Chris Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional or Mr. Conor Oberst.

"You run into Dave Matthews on the street, and you have to kill him," Baechle says.

"Did you play me?" Oberst asks. "Yeah," says Scott. "Your special power is you throw mirrors" -- a reference to the Bright Eyes album Fever and Mirrors -- "but when you use it, you die, too." Oberst nods approvingly.

When you're sad, it's comfortable," Oberst says. "I guess when I started, I was intentionally trying to write hope into songs." Oberst was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on February 15th, 1980: "One day too late for love," he says. His dad, Matthew, is an information manager at Mutual of Omaha; his mom is the principal of an elementary school. "He was always hamming it up and singing from the time he was two," says his mother, Nancy. Like his two older brothers, Oberst went to a Jesuit high school; he spent his spare time making amateur movies and acting in local theater productions, including Peter Pan.

When he was ten, he started learning chords on the guitar. He never practiced scales or Metallica riffs -- as soon as he knew two chords, he started writing songs instead. Around that time, he also found the Antiquarium, a record store in Omaha that served as a mecca for other musicians. "It's a conservative place," says Oberst of Nebraska, "which makes the music and art community more self-reliant."

Three semesters into college at the University of Nebraska, he dropped out to go on tour. His parents worried at first but decided he was doing OK financially -- he had enough money to buy a house. Some of Oberst's Omaha pals started the label Saddle Creek, which is thriving with the Faint and Bright Eyes; in its first month, Lifted sold 30,000 copies. Major labels have been courting Oberst, but he's not interested in trading creative control for a pile of money. "As long as I can buy records and books and musical equipment and maybe some clothes, I'm pretty stoked," he says. "I don't need a yacht or anything."

Oberst tends toward excess -- his songs can last ten minutes: "There's a point where they feel complete, and that's where I stop. Maybe for some listeners they felt complete four minutes ago -- they can fade it out."

He says he spent a few years not caring about consequences, drinking too much and taking whatever drugs anyone gave him. Then, on December 17th, 2000, he consumed a whole magnum of Jameson's whiskey in Chicago. The next day, he went through alcohol withdrawal, and his heartbeat was like a hummingbird's. He checked into a hospital for four days.

After that, he moderated his intake and transformed his depression into anxiety. "Every time my heart would race, I'd freak out," he says. He wore a heart monitor strapped to his body -- whenever he had a "cardiac episode," he called doctors, who would look at the results and assure him it was just a panic attack.

Discussing Lifted, Oberst says, "The whole record is a celebration of life and music and loving." That may not seem to match up with self-loathing lyrics such as "Fuck my face, fuck my name/They are brief and false advertisements for a soul I don't have." But Oberst has decided that eventually anything we do will be forgotten and rendered irrelevant. "Anything beautiful fades away, and anything ugly fades away, too," he says. "It almost hurts to love things, because they have to stop being that. And that's just the nature of life." So he wants to create something that will touch somebody else right now.

Flutist Jiha Lee looks Oberst over before he goes onstage. His hair is a floppy black tangle, and his shirt is a little grungy -- he left all his clothes in a New York taxicab a few weeks ago. "Unbutton another button," she advises him. "Show the world your hairless chest. Let them know you haven't gone through puberty yet."

The show is astonishing, a kaleidoscope of sounds that answers the previously unasked question, "What would it have sounded like if Brian Wilson had produced an album for Bob Dylan in 1966?" The cello and the banjo harmonize beautifully, as do the trumpet and the vibraphone -- but when the three drummers attack their kits in perfect synchronicity, the music is as overwhelming as the words. And when Oberst sings, "Love is real/It's not just in long-distance commercials," he glows like somebody who's figured out how to be happy.

Afterward, the merchandise guy fills out forms so SoundScan can tabulate the records sold at the show, while the band members methodically pack up their dulcimers and drum kits. Oberst has another beer and reflects on the show: "Screaming's bad for the voice, but it's good for the heart."

Download "From A Balance Beam"

[From Issue 909 — November 14, 2002]