Ways To Be Entertained in July Obscure Southern Record Of The Month. We tend to be skeptical of actors who try to write or singers who try to act or, frankly, anyone who parlays success at one art form into a stab at another. So when novelist Madison Smartt Bell e-mailed us about his debut album, Forty Words For Fear, with Wyn Cooper, we didn't expect much. We were wrong. This is sonic moonshine - weird, bluesy, and not a little bit ragged. But it will get you where you're going. --Esquire - July 2003 Anything Goes When novelist Madison Smartt Bell gets together for five days with North Carolina rock legends Don Dixon and Mitch Easter to make a record, the results are inspiring. B Y S T E V E K E T T M A N N from: The Independent Weekly KERNERSVILLE - Something happened late on the third night of a recording session last month in a studio just off Main Street that showed how sometimes, if you mix together enough creative energy, talent and experience, and shake it up in fresh ways, you might get lucky and surprise even yourself. This was no conventional project: Acclaimed novelist Madison Smartt Bell and poet Wyn Cooper joined North Carolina rock legend Don Dixon (producer and bassist) and a crew of top-drawer musicians to make a record out of songs Bell and Cooper wrote together, half on a lark, for Bell's novel Anything Goes. Just to make it all really strange, Bell was on lead vocals (and rhythm guitar). Cooper, who wrote the words to the songs, kicked in with readings of some of his poetry, funked-up so it fit in with the mood of the record, dark and weird and bluesy with song titles like '40 Words for Fear' and 'Room Full of Tears' and 'The Girl in the Black Raincoat.' 'I would just love for this record to be a part of some sort of overall movement of a return of art in pop music,' said Mitch Easter, who hosted the five-day sessions in the sleek, million-dollar studio he and Shalini Chatterjee built in their back yard. 'The word pop has become synonymous with possibly the worst music ever made, but what I see pop music as is just non-high-brow music, which means a vast array of culture for everybody.' Left alone That third night when everything came together, Dixon took a few hours off to head to his daughter's dance recital a county or two away, and it was like a rainy day at grade school when the substitute teacher heads to the lounge for a smoke and all hell breaks loose. Easter and the others did not let loose with any paper airplanes, or electrocute any cats, or fill any chalkboards with spectacularly obscene limericks. They just grinned as if they had. You almost had to think Dixon had it all planned. Three decades have passed since he burst onto the scene as bassist and vocalist of the Chapel Hill band 'Arrogance,' and if Dixon knows enough to be bored by fame, he also knows enough to remember that feeling of breaking through with something. He has the itch to do it again. You can see it in his eyes, in his quiet, thoughtful smiles and in the way he almost hops in his chair when he pops open the pull tab on yet another of his fizzy musical ideas. 'You're not worried about whether someone's grandmother is going to put this on at their wedding reception,' he said one day during the sessions. 'You care about whether someone is going to put this on and pick up the headphones and really listen. It only has to be a few people. Anybody who writes poetry in the face of no one giving a rat's ass knows what I'm talking about. 'The appeal of working on this is you have two smart guys who have a lot of ideas and have created these things, and now we just have to figure out how to make this work. The groove and feel side of music is not necessarily an intellectual process, but to create these things you have to create an environment where you have those levels.' Sometimes that means ducking out, which felt in a way like it was one more mad Dixon scheme to channel the creative process. Before he hit the road to watch his daughter, he urged the crew to carry on without him. Maybe, he suggested in an offhand whisper, they co
