Happy 35th Anniversary to Concrete Blonde’s third studio album Bloodletting, originally released May 15, 1990.
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Anne Rice’s fictional vampiric underworld saw a surge in popularity. It was driven in part by the fact that Rice had followed up 1976’s Interview With The Vampire with the sequels The Vampire Lestat in 1985, and then Queen of the Damned in 1988. But in addition to the building and expanding of what came to be known as The Vampire Chronicles, there was also growing anticipation of the Interview With The Vampire film adaptation, which had been announced in the late ’80s but kept getting delayed due to production issues and casting controversies—most notably the casting of Tom Cruise as Lestat.
“I mean, Lestat is described as tall, rangy, and blonde haired and all that sort of stuff. Tom was none of those things,” recalls director Neil Jordan. “But he had a conviction and a kind of a chilling centrality to him, that I thought he’d be great in this role.” Rice was initially wary of Cruise’s casting and even attended a book signing where readers called for a boycott of Cruise in the role, agreeing wholeheartedly with their complaints. (“Her venom hurt,” said Cruise.) She’d eventually change her mind after seeing his performance, but the agonizing it brought to the planning threw a wrench in the film’s progress. (If all of that wasn’t bad enough, River Phoenix, who was cast as the interviewer Daniel Malloy, died of an overdose outside LA’s Viper Room a month prior to filming. Christian Slater was recruited for the role at the last minute.)
In the midst of this behind-the-scenes fracas, Johnette Napolitano, the whiskey-voiced singer and bassist for Concrete Blonde, had become enraptured by the murky, blood-tinged world of The Vampire Chronicles. Without ever having seen an Anne Rice film—Interview With The Vampire would finally come out years later in 1994—Napolitano was drawn to the balmy leafiness, haunting humidity, and stately plantations of New Orleans, deciding to make it a second home of sorts.
“New Orleans was the first city outside of LA on the first tour we ever went out on,” she writes in Rough Mix, an art journal and memoir. “I fell in love with the city right away and started spending time off down there. Being Californian, the South was mysterious and foreign to me, the huge silent cypress trees draped in moss, the little gas lamps flickering like fireflies glowing in the French Quarter.”
She’d hang out in dark bars, jotting in her notebook and sipping wine, and sometimes even felt like she was being watched. Once, in a guesthouse in the Garden District, she was reading and nodding off, when she felt someone climb up on the antique bed with her. “One knee first, a right knee on my left side, and then swinging a leg over me and I felt the bed sink on my right side. Someone was straddling me!” she recalls. “I didn’t know whether to pretend I was asleep or start screaming. I decided finally, to open my eyes, which I did, and there was no one there. I was in bed alone.” The next morning, she asked the clerk at the front desk if the place was haunted. The man asked her what room she was in. When she told him, he said, "Yeah, well, some people say there's something going on. Everybody says they get real sleepy in that room."
This was during a time when The Vampire Lestat in particular was all the rage among Napolitano’s friends, and maybe it was the little detail of Lestat becoming an ’80s rockstar at novel’s end that drew her to the story even more. Concrete Blonde had come up out of the ’80s Los Angeles rock scene, after the most famous early block of bands—X, The Go-Go’s, The Germs—and before Guns N’ Roses. Hence, around the gritty period of Jane’s Addiction and the psychedelic Paisley Underground scene, before any of those bands broke through and became alternative-music darlings.
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Concrete Blonde released two albums around this time and the second one, Free, yielded a 1988 anti-gun hit titled “God Is A Bullet” and some MTV play. At the time, the band added bassist Alan Bloch so that Napolitano could focus solely on singing. The metallic strut of “God Is A Bullet,” along with Napolitano’s wild wail and the band’s tattoos and big hair, led to people mistaking them for a Sunset Strip metal band. So, soon, the band decided to strip things down and go back to being a three piece (with Napolitano back on bass) for presumably more of a bare-bones punk posture.
After all, Napolitano hadn’t moved to LA to chase stardom like the Sunset Strip bands. She was born in Hollywood, and her father cleaned the pools of the stars. As a young teen, she’d roller skate up and down Hollywood Boulevard. She had an aunt who was engaged to Mickey Dolenz, and who knew Tom Jones. Eventually, when Napolitano and guitarist James Mankey formed the band, they were known as the Dreamers until then-labelmate Michael Stipe suggested the name Concrete Blonde. Meaning, any identification of Napolitano with Lestat the vampire rockstar was probably more ironic than aspirational. She wasn’t the type of gal to be impressed by fame.
By the time Concrete Blonde decided to base their third album, aptly titled Bloodletting, on the dark, vampiric vibe of Anne Rice’s novels and Napolitano’s second home of New Orleans, they had already fused their sound with the Hollywood horror genre, contributing songs to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 in 1986 and The Hidden in 1987. But Bloodletting wasn’t simply an ode to the thriller genre, it was a walk through the horrors of everyday life. “We had a string of bad luck and [Bloodletting] was the tail end of it,” Napolitano confessed cryptically to SPIN in 1990. “A particularly bad relationship. It had never happened to me until I was 29 years old. I had a hard time getting over it.”
We now know that some of the bad luck Napolitano initially danced around was drug-related. The night before recording Bloodletting, the band made the difficult decision to send their drummer Harry Rushkoff to rehab. “He was really strung out, and I just had to send his ass home,” Napolitano told New York Magazine in 2010. Fortuitously, another drummer was available to step in at the last minute. “We’d had a gig the night before and Paul Thompson, the drummer from Roxy Music, was there,” she recalls. “He loved us and just fell in.”
As far as Napolitano’s bad relationship, the dysfunction might have been substance abuse-related as well. “Joey,” the biggest hit from the album, was rumored for a long time to be about Wall of Voodoo’s Marc Moreland, an alcoholic who died of liver failure at age 44. Prior to Moreland’s death in 2002, Moreland and Napolitano covered the Carpenters’ “Hurting Each Other” for the 1994 If I Were A Carpenter compilation, and they also formed a band called Pretty & Twisted and released a self-titled album in 1995. In Rough Mix, Napolitano recounts being in a bar in Europe with Moreland at some point in the ’90s, knocking back shots and beers:
“Is ‘Joey’ about me?” said Marc, hitting his cigarette.
“Yeah,” I said, sipping my beer.
Marc thought for a minute, and blew a long, slow stream of smoke.
“Do you owe me money?” he said.
“No.” I said.
“Oh. Okay.” He said, and picked up his drink.
We sure had a good time, didn’t we?
It took Napolitano forever to write the lyrics to “Joey” because she just kept procrastinating. “So I literally wrote them in a cab,” she recalls. “I knew what I was going to say, it's just a matter of, like, a cloud's forming and then it rains.” Eventually, she spoke plainly about Moreland during a Concrete Blonde “D.C. Sessions” concert in 2002: "I had met Marc Moreland in Australia the first time [Concrete Blonde] toured. That was the first country we toured outside of America. We were opening for Wall of Voodoo in Australia and we just became tighter than anything in a very short time. There was a lot of mutual worship there."
Although “Joey” would spend 21 weeks on the Billboard Top 100, Bloodletting came out during that pre-grunge period when, if you were a teen at the time (and I was), you had to work a little harder to find your weirdness, your “alternative,” and you were wary if it arrived easily. The very early ’90s, in the throes of its ’80s hangover, were sleepier and more understated and not yet hyped and packaged for the Lollapalooza masses. Still, 1990 was the year of Twin Peaks, of Edward Scissorhands, of Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, of Pump Up The Volume. Hence, Pacific Northwest eeriness, Winona Ryder’s gawky gothness, and Christian Slater’s irreverent pirate-radio irony. It was the latter that first introduced me to Concrete Blonde’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” on the Pump Up The Volume soundtrack—and it was only then that I finally hunted down Bloodletting.
The album doesn’t exactly recount any story within The Vampire Chronicles, but it creates a compelling sonic, emotional, and psychological atmosphere that’s a worthy companion to any, or all, of the novels. It’s velvety, druggy, dusky, and sultry, and it would smell like clove cigarettes if an album had an aroma. It combines the goth sensibilities of some of the darkest, most aloof ’80s bands (you know which ones I’m talking about) with the more accessible tones and twinges of harder LA rock. And yet it’s a vampire record that’s neither cold and detached, nor gaudy and gimmicky.
Bloodletting kicks off with a sound that’s both high-pitched alien and insect swarm, that’s then overlaid with thrusting bass and drums. The titular “Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)” stalks and struts, the guitar shimmies in, and we’re suddenly along for the prowl. Napolitano sings with a noticeable growl—although it’s not immediately clear whether she’ll be predator or prey —and sets the scene: “I got the ways and means to New Orleans / I’m going down to the river where it’s warm and green / I’m gonna have a drink and walk around / I’ve got a lot to think about, oh yeah.” And then at some point there’s an audible slurp, and Napolitano chuckles menacingly.
(The song ended up being a half a decade too early—and not just because Interview With The Vampire was finally released on film. In the mid-’90s, the goth and vampire craze would reach a mainstream tipping point. “If 1991 was the year punk broke, 1994 was the year goth broke,” observes Daphne Carr in her 33 1/3 book on Nine Inch Nails. “With the release of The Downward Spiral; Marilyn Manson’s first album, Portrait of an American Family; and the films Interview with the Vampire and The Crow, mainstream depictions of goth peaked.”)
After the swaggering hunt of “Bloodletting (The Vampire Song),” the lush, crushed-velvet New Orleans theme continues with the raucous, thumping “The Sky Is A Poisonous Garden,” featuring wild zigzags of metal-influenced guitar. We also discover that the hunt hasn’t been abandoned when Napolitano howls the phrase “young naked prey.” It’s hard to overstate just how powerful and fabulous of a voice she has. It’s rich and full-bodied, unleashed from both the throat and the soul.
The next song “Caroline” is my favorite on the album, a Stevie Nicks-reminiscent, slow-burn ballad that offers up an atmosphere of rainy mist and smoke machines, cautionary tales and ghost stories. We can’t be quite sure if the titular Caroline is merely a troubled woman who’s disappeared of her own accord, or someone who’s an apparition. It’s all glimpses and half-whispered rumors and abandoned cars, and sonic scraps from the ’80s that we’ll never really get back. Mankey contributes a weeping and soulful guitar solo, and Napolitano manages to capture loss and panging reminiscence in such a husky and dreamy, harmonized way that “Caroline” is the kind of song that burrows under your skin and melds with your own private, locked-away longing.
Featuring mandolin by R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, “Darkening Of The Light” is jangly, witchy, and medieval and describes gazing from a curtained window at the white light of morning, and then takes us by the hand into a leafy garden reminiscent of so many of the scenes in Interview With The Vampire—clouds darkening the face of the moon, balmy magnolias, and secret nooks in the shadows of gazebos and graveyards. Meanwhile, “I Don’t Need A Hero” is hazy, unhurried, and husky—a smoky-bar reflection on a relationship that’s both tiring and intense: “You always said I was a liar / But we burn like a house on fire.”
“Days And Days” begins with a slinky bassline and starts out more spoken word than singing, until Napolitano unleashes a banshee chorus meant to show that the “days and days” of eternity are fraying at the edges. “The Beast,” punctuated by yet more squiggles of metal-tinged guitar, returns us to the hunt. This time the creature is more werewolf than vampire, although the two soon become interchangeable: “Love is the leech / Sucking you up / Love is a vampire / Drunk on your blood / Love is the beast / That will tear out your heart.” It’s then offset by the shimmery “Lullabye,” which brings us back to some of that earlier Fleetwood Mac dreaminess.
It's easy to understand why “Joey” was such a hit. Napolitano’s voice is clear like clean river water, until she suddenly switches and it’s bourbon and cigarettes. She shifts repeatedly between these two elements throughout the song, and it’s utterly hypnotic—vulnerability followed by a sexy steeliness, and then vice versa, over and over. Mankey’s guitar is warm-toned, and the strumming sounds like soft rain threaded with little flashes of thunder in the leadup to another gorgeous, soulful solo.
The album ends with “Tomorrow, Wendy,” a song written by Wall of Voodoo’s Andy Prieboy featuring the haunting chorus “Tomorrow, Wendy is going to die.” It’s about a real-life bloodborne horror, far outside the fiction of vampires. “Wendy was a real person,” Napolitano told Songfacts in 2013. “She was diagnosed with AIDS and rather than suffering the stigma, she decided to commit suicide. It's basically her dialogue with herself as to the decision she's going to make on her own. It’s her one act of dignity in her life. And it's heavy, to say the least.”
There’s an element of children’s lullaby to the track, and the South that featured so heavily as Bloodletting’s inspiration clutched its pearls in, well, horror over the song. “When that first came out, there was a lot of good old-fashioned southern ‘We should burn this record’ kind of shit,” Napolitano recalls. “Between the vampires and Wendy, I think those people just about choked on their whatever.”
Still, Napolitano is in her blood and very bones a denizen of LA, meaning she didn’t let it bother her one bit. In so many ways, Bloodletting was her personal, necessary exorcism. “It’s not a happy record, but I could do two things. I could make a self-indulgent record, which is what this is, or I could lock up all these songs in a closet and do something that wasn’t sincere,” she says. “This will never happen again, this record.” And indeed it won’t. Bloodletting is a vampire record that could have only happened in the Neighties, that hazy hangover between the ’80s and the ’90s that combined the uninhibited weirdness, effortless gothness, and mishmash musical genres of two very kickass decades.
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