John Vanderslice comes to Portsmouth’s Red Door Saturday. Film buffs, history majors and bowlers welcome.

The reputation of some rock musicians are often made on their after-show antics. Motley Crue, for example, would have been just four dyslexic guys with large hair in leopard skin thongs, if it weren’t for the tales of copious amounts of sex with groupies and drug abuse. However, there are few artists in the music biz who would invite an entire concert worth of people to go bowling after a show. John Vanderslice just did. “We asked the whole audience at a show in L.A. if they wanted to go bowling and 30 or 40 showed up,” he says (the winners of each frame got free tickets to another show). Of course the singer-songwriter doesn’t need a resume of debauchery to raise eyebrows.

For over a decade now, Vanderslice has produced a wealth of fascinating material from his homemade analog studio in San Francisco. Beginning with experimental rock outfit MK Ultra, he matured into a solo artist, delicately treading a fine line between affable pop-perfect melodies and desperate, sparse, art rock. “My first record was David Bowie’s ‘Low’,” he remembers. “I just loved that Eno period in Berlin.” Hardly the choice of most junior high school kids of the late 1970s.

Vanderslice wears his influences on his sleeve, crafting progressive rock ambition with the narrative sensibilities of Dylan, the Kinks and the Who. Indeed, there are few artists around who can convey narratives of such warmth and hope with tension and isolation on one album so effortlessly. He even resurrected the unfashionable “concept album,” the two most dreaded words in the music industry after “Nick, Carter.” “Time Travel Is Lonely” Vanderslice’s sophomore solo effort, told of isolation on Antarctica, while the follow up “Life and Death of an American Four Tracker” focused on a boy obsessed with making his own home recordings. Both powerfully deal with ideas of solitude and the downfall of their protagonists through Vanderslice’s heavenly arrangements and delicately crafted lyrics. “There’s a lot to be said for trying to unite an album behind one idea…. As a songwriter it helped me learn a lot about structure.”

“Pixel Revolt,” Vanderslice’s fifth record in five years, maintains the artist’s obsession as a sonic aficionado, incorporating guitars, manipulated tape, timpani, cello and piano. However, this is his most autobiographical record yet, lyrically crafting characters clearly meant to be him. “Things happen to you emotionally and you have to ask yourself ‘Do I want to be reminded of this?’” Vanderslice comforts himself asserting that “meltdown” is merely part of the cyclic experience of the singer-songwriter. “Meltdown can become blissful when playing live,” he notes.

Not that “Pixel Revolt” isn’t fraught with far-flung narratives. “Continuation,” the mid-album highlight, weaves an intriguing tale of four cops who are suspected of continuing the murders of a deceased serial killer they’d been tracking. “Trance Manual” tells of a western journalist visiting an Iraqi prostitute. Indeed, the original title for the album was to have been “Radiant with Terror,” an ardent diatribe against American foreign policy. Vanderslice quotes Bostonian poet Robert Lowell, using analogies with the War on Terror and the Cold War. “It’s true now as was 40 years ago that it’s useful for a government to have a perpetual, invisible enemy.… War makes it easier to run a country, you can ask for $100 billion extra for military budgets with no debate.” 

The CD’s title, “Pixel Revolt,” has neither political nor intimate autobiographical connotations. “I was watching Preston Sturges’ 1930s farce “The Lady Eve” when my connection got strange,” he says. “The screen froze, then stuttered. As Henry Fonda moved in stop motion, Barbara Stanwyck slowly came unglued, her face distorted by square wave digital artifacts. Entire scenes were lost somewhere in that winter sky…. When I woke up I had my title.” Vanderslice also notes, “Preston Sturges has saved my life before.”

Vanderslice is dropping by Portsmouth’s Red Door on Saturday, Sept. 10 as part of a six-month tour in support of the record.  With five albums in five years and near incessant touring, he’s one of the few artists who maintain a regular output while consistently achieving critical acclaim. “It’s my job, it’s what I do,” he says. “I like to keep busy, it’s important for me to be productive…. I mean look at those guys in the ’60s, the Beatles and Dylan were releasing two classic records a year in the mid-’60s.” The scope and sheer ambition of his output is testament to a mind that never appears still, that is thinking, scheming, creating.

Portsmouth is one of only three stops on the East Coast in Vanderslice’s long tour. “I’m a sucker for New England,” he quips. “I love the people, the seasons, I’m really looking forward to playing there.”
Songwriter, musician, producer, historian, film buff and bowler (and good pals and collaborator with Barsuk label-mate Death Cab For Cutie among others)—we’ll certainly get our money’s worth when Vanderslice comes to town on Sept. 10, though unlike L.A., the Seacoast’s bowling alleys will be closed by the time the show’s over. “That’s a bit of bummer,” Vanderslice says. “Bowling is fun.”


John Vanderslice
with Alcoa and Northern
in a special Saturday night showcase, Sept. 10
The Red Door, 107 State St., Portsmouth, 603-373-6827
www.reddoorportsmouth.com