The Sinner and the Saint

Memo to publicists and other speculators in the hype. Never say Maria McKee is singular. It may seem a compliment but the line's inadequate. Instead write: Maria McKee is plural.
I could go further - into the general as well as the particular. Indeed, there may be a gender theory that men in pop tend to the singularity of success while women can get penalised for their confusing plurality. Furthermore, this insight holds true whatever your views about sexism in the record biz and the wider Western world.
Consider your average Joe vocalist in your average rock band. Basically if he is not one of those hard rock steam-kettles who, in any other century bar the 20th, would have been a prized component of the Vatican's choir of castrati, he's a grunt with a serviceable range of less than two octaves.
So he's either a dog, someone whose job is to bark over the rhythm (top dogs and chief mutts: Bob Dylan and Lou Reed) or a cat (whispering English suburban lads, cloned from a smidgeon of the DNA of David Bowie). And one of the grunt's prime functions is reassurance.
Reassurance for his equally larynx-challenged male fans that they can bawl his far from challenging vocal lines in the bath or at chucking-out time. Reassurance for the other boys in the band who'll rarely have to find the melodic and harmonic inspiration to wander off the straight and narrow. And finally reassurance for all those record executives who know their apples won't dare to become oranges or lemons.
Of course, there are exceptions (Tom Waits, Van Morrison, Bryan Ferry and whoever else your tastes incline you to add) but as a hypothetical example, ponder the future of Mr Autocue himself, Axl Rose, if and when Guns'N'Roses finally capsize and he inaugurates his solo career with an album of his favourite party-pieces. Somehow I doubt if anyone will be bothering the bookies with bets on any one or a combination of Axl sings Patsy Kline/Judy Garland/Aretha Franklin/Brecht-Weill. Even if it's grammatically confusing, it's still true: men are singular.
And Maria McKee is plural.
Exceedingly plural. Like so many adaptable
and adventurous women singers, she refuses easy definition. First there's the debutante Maria of Lone Justice, country-rock from the gasoline haze of LA, spiced by a punk and white gospel past, a couple of inputs secular Europeans can still find mighty contrary. But ever since she landed in Ireland and found herself a haven in Rathmines, La McKee has kept adding to her repertoire.
Obviously there's the big-screen ballad diva of 'Show Me Heaven'. A necessary commercial ploy, you might argue, but then she teamed up with Youth for the blissful dance-pop single, 'The Sweetest Child'. For her curiosity always takes her elsewhere. Just when you expect her to be championing her own countryfolk in American roots music or the Seattle scene, Maria is as likely to be enthusing over the latest Brit brats - Primal Scream, Stone Roses, the Orb or whoever.
Watch her at any Cabaraids extravaganza and realise her breadth. Then she'll dress up as a glam-rock princess and mug her way through T.Rex songs. Or sing an antique Hollywood musical tune with just the precise degree of arch nostalgia and then glide into a Jacques Brel classic. Take it from me that Maria is far from finite.
On stage, her moods can also be plural. I catch her twice on tour and the two dates are as contrasting as champagne and last night's mineral water. Dublin at the Tivoli is a homecoming triumph but three weeks earlier at London's Borderline, she's tense, impatient and palpably annoyed by a blasé audience.
This wasn't in the script. Landing at Heathrow on the Friday, I happen to bump into U2's Trabant customiser, Cathy Owens, on her way back to Dublin and raving about Maria's Tuesday show at the Forum. The Borderline has been tacked on as an extra London date but at such short notice, her fans don't hear of it. Instead the club is littered with record company types who've forgotten that emotion can be more than a saleable commodity.
There's no encore. Tonight sulking does make more sense than false etiquette. Besides the Borderline staff are soon jockeying us out so their later dance crowd can arrive. And next morning at her hotel, Maria is still peeved, even getting into a spat with her long-time associate, Bruce Brody, about the travel plans for their next date in Germany.
London isn't as welcoming as once it was. By reverting to her American roots with her new album You've Got To Sin To Be Saved, Maria fears she's got offside with the London media. Former allies are either cool or can't find the space to cheer her now L7 and Courtney Love are London's preferred LA women. Should she have stopped growing up and become a Riot Grrrl?
Hell, that's what I thought she once was. Maria is a fund of stories about her own precocious punk days, mitching around LA's seamiest clubs with her big step-brother, Bryan McLean, once second-in-command to Arthur Lee in Love, Elektra's famed label companions to the Doors and the other band of disreputable renown and original merit in the City of the Angels. But we also both know that she isn't going to freeze her own history to cope with and conciliate London pop-time.
You've Got To Sin To Be Saved is her completing a circle, settling her accounts with one part of her past, a reminder that California and Los Angeles aren't only the Hollywood dream-machine and the site of the Rodney King riots. For California was also the furthest Western magnet for those Southern migrant workers who took their own traditions to the Pacific coast. California is also Bakersfield and Merle Haggard and Baptist churches to salve the wounds of the working week.
And yet Maria can always throw a curve. Back in Dublin at the Tivoli, she doesn't have to melt hearts of ice. The encores are end-of-tour playtime and the last surprise the crowd could have expected is Maria taking over the drums for the Velvets' 'Waiting For My Man'.
She'll never emulate a click-track but that's far from the point as she devotes all her nervous energy into lashing the band along. It's a precious release from responsibility and her own need of artistic perfection. A load is lightened, a burden cast aside as Maria kicks out the angst, plays manic havoc with anyone who's ever falsely presumed her precious and the Tivoli gets to see the spontaneous madcap McKee that her friends care for.
Naturally she closes with Richard Thompson's 'Has He Got A Friend For Me?' from her first solo album. Then her electric piano gives a painful groan and packs up. But if she's been tripped up, she now has both her own and the audience's confidence. Forced to sing alone, she pauses, and weaves her vocal line as if she's still working off the original piano part in her memory and stretching towards some peculiar LA version of sean-nos. That's when you know Maria McKee is special.
And, in moving from Mo Tucker to Triona Ni Dhomhnaill in the space of five minutes, so plural.
"That night, the audience was the enemy and
there was no way around it. And once I get that in my brain, it's very hard for me to shake it." So she disposes of the Borderline as one of those evenings when apathy sends her intensity off to lonely street and back to Heartbreak Hotel.
With Lone Justice, she'd probably have been impossible and inconsolable but now she's found strategies to cope: "A lot of my audiences are voyeuristic in a way. It's a bit of a freakshow and they come to check me out since they don't know what to expect. And I can sense when they're watching and don't know what to think. And if I feel that way, I can go either of two ways. I can talk to them and say (demure accent) 'Hello, thank you' which is kind of naff but it's a way of survival. Or I can go 'Fuck off' and give it my all and nail it but it's a very abrasive situation."
At the Tivoli, she seemed to bridle when someone - approvingly I don't doubt - shouted "Janis Joplin" at her. Her own ambivalence about the Texan exposes much of her own values:
"I prefer her to somebody like Linda Ronstadt or Bonnie Raitt because at least, she was punk, at least, she was on-the-line. When she sang, it was like her life depended on it. I can relate to that but for me, aesthetically, I never really liked her voice much. It's very one-dimensional, very abrasive.
"I suppose I don't like to think of myself as a burnt-out biker chick which is a bit snobby. But I loved the fact that she was committed to what she did because I know that feeling of being on stage and feeling you're going to die. Or everybody's going to hate you for the rest of your life. Or nobody will ever love me. Or my parents did this to me. Or the band hate me. Or I'm blowing it. Or I'm shooting myself to the moon and goodbye now.
"It's like all of those things that are happening in your brain when you're singing a song. It's like fuck me, look at me, kill me, love me, hate me. It's crazy."
No gain without pain. Older performers learn to grow the skin of a protective persona but Maria McKee doesn't yet see herself as an actress, at least in any way that involves the creation of distance.
"I suppose," she muses, "it depends on how you define acting. It encompasses a lot of different things like taking on characters and bringing who you are into a character. It also encompasses being on a stage in front of people you've never seen and who you'll probably never see again and allowing your emotions to stand naked on display and being comfortable enough with yourself to allow yourself become vulnerable. And that's what acting is really about. It's not about playing a part. It's allowing yourself to come forward by telling a story or making a conscious effort to communicate something."
But vulnerability always gets isolated as a feminine trait. Girls are still meant to swoon while guys play John Wayne. And yet with Maria, vulnerability can sometimes seem as much an intentional artistic ploy as any girlish gender instinct. She's both self-conscious and confident when she analyses the matter.
"I'm very extreme in my behaviour in how I present myself as an artist and I've never had any qualms about expressing my femininity to its absolute living, breathing end and also addressing my masculinity to the absolute."
How do you define your masculinity?
"Like getting on stage with a fucking guitar and bashing it. Playing the drums. Leading a band. Being the boss. Singing from a male point of view. And I can go to the other extreme and stand on a stage in a velvet dress and sing like an angel in long flowing locks.
"And," she concludes, "I think the problem I've had is that I've gone to extremes rather than let everything become one being."
Certainly she could have presented an album
that totally contrasts with You've Got To Sin To Be Saved. It's a record that repossesses her California past as part of the American heartland, a record that strives to dip into a deep well of national expression.
For herself, she describes it as "a reckoning, retrospective look on the whole Lone Justice experience, sort of trying to reclaim that territory and getting it over and done with."
Hailing from LA, you might think all this talk of roots artificial. After all, she went to the public school in the city where her companions were media brats, some of the aimlessly affluent kids that Bret Easton Ellis cauterized in Less Than Zero.
Not exactly downhome but Maria will remind you that her parents saved their last dollars to place her there. She's not exactly Tennessee white trash but she's not a Beverly Hills limousine lizard either. Mention white gospel and Elvis Presley and she'll give her witness: "I mean, I was raised in a Baptist church, a white Southern Baptist church, singing those hymns. All those songs that were on the Elvis Presley gospel album, I grew up singing those songs."
So what does white trash mean to you?
"It's not something you can sum up but it's in my blood because my relatives were California mountain people. Like my great grandfather came over from Italy and he raised eleven children in a log cabin . . . For me and my family, the white trash thing is quite mythic, quite folkloric. Like my great grandfather took over an Indian spring and he bottled the water and he said it was 'Life Water'. And he had a gypsy wagon that went around all the fairs of California and it was like a medicine show and my grandmother played organ in the back of the wagon."
The next generation did go to Hollywood. That same grandmother married a cattleman from Missouri who worked as an extra in Twenties cowboy movies. Then, says Maria: "He left the family when my father was 10 because he was an alcoholic and he died penniless in a trailer home just outside Los Angeles. My father never knew where he was though he used to drive past it at least once a week. And then after he died, they found him in this trailer home. And it was quite sad because my father had sent him a Christmas card when he was eleven and when they found my grandfather, they found it on the mirror with the line, 'whatever happens, my last thoughts were of you'."
How does she explain the paradox in the album title?
"Well basically we're all human and without recognition of failure, there can be no redemption. It's not necessarily a religious statement but for me, it's a very real thing about accepting each other and helping each other."
And with her background how does she find Irish Catholicism?
"Irish Catholic guilt and Baptist guilt are very similar. There's a lot of the same taboos and misconceptions of the Bible, a denial of humanness. And so there can be no place for God because we, as human beings, can only find God by admitting we're failed creatures. And the sort of piousness that people project is blasphemous to me in a way."
As for the church in which she was reared she says "my parents left when I was ten. But it was so fundamental that you could not go into a liquor store to buy a pack of gum. And there was no rock 'n' roll and you couldn't go to the movies."
Surely her friends find her continuing Irish exile rather contrary?
She detects three responses. Firstly her old school friends who "have totally different lives to mine and who are married and have kids and perhaps wish I could go somewhere else." Secondly the immigrants to LA like an Australian actress friend "who's quite envious." But thirdly, "the people in the record company think it's this phase I'm going to grow out of."
Not her: "I know I've got to be able to leave here and go there and leave there and come here with maybe a few steps along the way."
And what's next for Maria McKee? "Oh," she surprises me, "I want to do a John Cale album."
I told you she was plural.