Citizen Self by Myself a Living Torch

Myself a Living Torch was a perplexing San Francisco-based indie/alt rock band active from 1991 to 1993 featuring the Ohio-born songwriting talents of singer/lyricist Jeffrey Bright (previously of Dayton’s influential 1980’s jangle pop quartet, The Pleasures Pale) and guitarist/multi-instrumentalist, Eric Schulz (now Goner Records artist, Harlan T Bobo). Bassist Chris “Troy” Green and drummer Christopher Fisher rounded out the lineup. Green, also from Dayton, and now deceased, previously appeared there in avant-garde acts Dementia Precox and Mom. Oakland, California, native Fisher gained Bay Area recognition with early punk rockers Impatient Youth, in addition to West Coast fame as a teenage skateboarding sensation.

In early 1992, in a significant make-or-break gamble Bright tapped all available resources to finance a 24-track studio project aimed at besting previous MaLT recording projects and introducing the band's developing sound to the world. In spring of 1992, the band committed a set of highly produced and arranged songs to 2-inch tape. Self-released in September that year on CD and cassette, the 6-song Citizen Self EP was produced by Norman Kerner at Brilliant Studios in San Francisco. Brilliant was chosen for its uniquely live acoustics and compliment of vintage and modern recording gear. Kerner had recently achieved local renown producing well-received records for Sister Double Happiness and American Music Club, then two fast-rising stars on the West Coast indie scene.

The compositions on Citizen Self fuse several genres into a sound not easily categorized, and provide an effective platform for Bright’s darkly comic and often surreal lyrics. Throughout the six tracks, musings on the body politic, plots of existential abandon, and broader themes of philosophy and resistance are set against diverse instrumental settings — all to varying effect.

“Orson Welles,” the disc’s opener, weaves guest player Steve Cornell’s haunting pedal steel with Schulz’s gritty playing to underpin an intriguing, tragedy-tinged cultural reference. “Life Is Too Short but Death Is Forever” follows and inhabits the same island of melancholy and melodrama but arrives on a completely different sinking ship, one bobbing in more languid waters. Bright contemplates the inevitable, his own paralyzing inertia, and ends by dipping a toe in the era’s pressing social issues, all while a string quartet floods the view with a lush score written by Schulz and arranged and conducted by Linda Holland from San Francisco’s Conservatory of Music.

Citizen Self revolves around the record’s two most urgent, modern rock efforts, “Do Big Men Really Run the World?” and “Requiem for a Golddigger.” In the former, Bright posits a challenge — or at least yearns for an alternative — to toxic, macho-centric power structures and contemporary male roles in American culture. The song spins on Schulz’s buzzing, hyperdelic vibrato guitar sound and Fisher’s trippy beat. Notably, brief and contrasting voice samples lend an absurdist element — which continues merrily into the next cut. “Golddigger” is a curious track bursting with soaring, arena-quality guitar lines, an infectious rhythm figure — arguably the best work on the record from Green and Fisher — and, as if to spite the song’s commercial potential, a nonsensical, surrealist wordplay apparently describing fawning admiration for a less than scrupulous money chaser. Perhaps it’s all tongue-in-cheek sarcasm — an anti-rock anthem. Perhaps it’s a stab at those who blindly worship at the high altar of hypocrisy and commerce. Perhaps it’s both. Or something entirely different.

Through its last two tracks, the EP zigs and zags to a disquieting conclusion. At first blush, “Mermaid of Marin” and “Devil-Ache on O’Farrell” appear to be wildly divergent creatures. Closer inspection reveals them both as spawn of the same frightful monster mother. In late 1988, Bright, Schulz and Green all transplanted to San Francisco from Ohio, and manifestations of that cross-country, eye-opening leap drive the sub-currents of both songs. “Mermaid” is the awakening of an environmental consciousness — a wave-swelling satori at Marin’s Black Sand Beach, then an occasional hangout for the band. “Devil-Ache” conceives a protagonist, far from home, dislocated, alienated and adrift in the city’s seedy Tenderloin. In both, the geography of an alluring but frightening new landscape (physical and psychological) plays a prominent role. With its mellifluous miasma of guitars and textures, and its impressionistic lyrics, “Mermaid of Marin” may be the record’s glittering prize and crescendo. If so, the ocean-side bliss is short lived. As the set’s disconsolate closer, “Devil-Ache” yanks the whole enterprise back to grimy concrete in a psychotic swirl of pulsing, bluesy, urban rock.

In the final fade, appropriately and apocalyptically, Bright returns to the record’s overarching theme. Teetering on the abyss, he implores a darkening universe for deliverance from the curse of absolute awareness; from the existential dread of inevitable emptiness; from the devastating realization that Western Civilization, in all its machinations, and for all its glories, ultimately relies perversely on the insatiability and wanton nature of the self. “It’s never enough. It’s never complete. I need some greater stimulation.” On and on and on…

While Citizen Self, in its time, was likely too dense, too obstinately ponderous for commercial success — by a wide margin — it shouldn’t be ignored as a significant contribution to the San Francisco indie music scene of the early 1990’s — despite the band’s aversion to fitting neatly in that same scene. Today, over 25 years later, the record exists as a prescient, if overreaching, commentary on the state of the young adult American psyche in the waning years of the 20th Century, and the only crystalline rendering of the enigma that was Myself a Living Torch.

By turns surreal, beautiful, arch, and melancholic, MaLT’s sonic adventures explore the meaning of love and role of sex in a failing, depersonalized culture. Literate enough for lasting relevance, tuneful enough for disposable pop; dark, sometimes heavy, but always with sly humor and a dash of hope. Active in SF CA between 1991 and 1993 ... Credit Louis-Ferdinand Céline for the incendiary name.

jeffreyalanbright.com
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