Isaac Brock finds a home with Ugly Casanova
Article by Dan Eldridge, Photo by Nancy Froelich, Stylist Katie Constans
Resonance, 11/01/2002
Isaac Brock is doing push-ups on the beer-soaked, cigarette-littered floor of a sweaty rock & roll club. "I've got to get some blood flowing," he explains, clapping his hands together, shaking his head from side to side and pretending not to notice the half-dozen showgoers who have been sneaking glances at him for the past half-hour.
Not that they should be ashamed of gaping. After all, this is the same "lisping rock star," as he calls himself, who wrote and sang nearly every song by the now legendary post-rock trio Modest Mouse. Tonight he'll tear through an hour-long set of uber-depressing cowpoke punk with his new side-project supergroup, Ugly Casanova.
The band started after Modest Mouse fans began spreading rumors than an uncommonly talented--yet mentally unstable--musician was trailing Brock from show to show, scattering demo tapes and cryptic notes across the country. He called himself Ugly Casanova, and was eventually booked to play a handful of sporadic club dates in and around Seattle. The musician who took the stage, of course, was simply Brock in disguise, dressed as a southern gentleman or wearing a fake moustache. Eventually Brock, who turned 27 in July, rounded up members of Califone, Red Red Meat and The Black Heart Procession to record a full-length Ugly Casanova album for Sub Pop Records. The result is just as hopelessly bleak, yet unconsciously animated as Brock himself.
"It's been busy," he says, tearing into a package of Camels and staring through a half-empty bottle of Rolling Rock. "The first day of us getting together to practice I had two root canals and two cavities filled because when I had my jaw broken, the metal that was around it rotted my teeth out."
It's the first of many such rough-luck witticisms to come from the mouth of Brock tonight. Later, he will tell a string of stories about his recent misadventures in self-medication--a 10-day lemonade fast, for instance, or the adult ADD checklists he's been studying--that seem incongruously insecure for an artist whose music has been practically canonized by an entire generation of twenty-something tastemakers.
The again, ever since Modest Mouse seeped into the national consciousness with their 1996 full-length album, This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About (Up), Brock has been fashioned by the music press and fans alike as a sort of self-destructive mad genius. Feeling down on his luck in early 1999, Brock eventually relocated across the country. He settled first in Chicago, then in Gainsville, Florida, and now lives near his family in southern Oregon where he owns and operates Glacial Pace Studios, an in-home recording studio.
"It's not so isolated," Brock says about his new home. "I could walk to a convenience store in 20 minutes. I've decided that I want a landing point because I'm gone so much that it's good to have a place where my shit can be," he says. "The last time I was living in Seattle I was living under a bridge, for Christ's sake, in a van."
An hour later, after his second greyhound and countless beers, Brock leans over the table and lowers his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "This shit we're doing now is complicated," he admits, referring to the frenetic tempo changes and finger-straining chord progressions that make up the bulk of Ugly Casanova's first album, Sharper Your Teeth. "I can't play this stuff if I'm drunk."
But up on stage and under the bright lights, Brock seems more in control than ever, biting his lip, furrowing his brow and angrily shouting out some of the most telling lyrics in his repertoire. At last, he seems grounded. If the guitars and drums weren't shaking the walls, and if his heartbreaking lyrics weren't bringing the crowd to the edge of tears, Brock might even appear tranquil. Finally, it seems, Ugly Casanova has come home.
Home | Ugly Casanova | A conversation with Isaac Brock