Judging by the not-exactly-cryptic title, you’d think Live at Biko was just another in long line of Mark Kozelek solo concert albums, this one recorded at the titular venue in Milan this past April. But it’s actually the greatest collection of deadpan one-liners this side of Steven Wright’s I Have a Pony. For example: “If you’re a guy and you ask me when’s my record coming out on vinyl, I’ll kick the shit out of you. If you’re a girl, I’ll talk to you for an hour about it.” Or: “Are you getting tired of these middle-aged ramblings of mine? Because I’m going to do a lot more of them.” And: “When I was young, in my 20s, they’d tell me I looked like Matt Dillon. And then I get into my 30s, and I cut my hair short, they told me I looked like John Malkovich. And now I’m fucking 47, and girls don’t even talk to me anymore. It sucks.” (This is to say nothing of the True Detective season recap Kozelek offers partway through.) But Kozelek saves his biggest howler for the end, when prior to the closing lullaby “Elaine”, he says with a straight face, “this one’s from my record Among the Leaves—old album. Old album.”
For those who haven’t been keeping score, Kozelek has been making records for 22 years now. Among the Leaves—his fifth proper album under the alias Sun Kil Moon—came out a mere 22 months before this Biko performance. But, as the old saying goes, Kozelek’s quip is funny because it’s true. Since Among the Leaves, Kozelek has issued a covers collection (Like Rats), full-album collaborations with the Album Leaf’s Jimmy LaVelle (Perils From the Sea) and San Fran rockers Desertshore (Mark Kozelek & Desertshore), a soundtrack to a documentary (On Tour), not to mention at least five live limited-edition live records. But the distance between Among the Leaves and 2014 feels all the more vast in light of this year’s Benji, a career high watermark that managed to pack a lifetime’s worth of familial grieving, bittersweet nostalgia, celebrity namedrops, and CNN Breaking News headlines into its one-hour running time.
An album that puts the “me” in “meta,” Benji is so dense with intensely personal history that it practically necessitates drawing up a Kozelek family tree and consulting a map of Ohio to follow along. But for all its inter-song connections, Benji is ultimately an anti-concept album, a song cycle whose connections are less the result of a grand narrative than a comment on the uncontrollably random yet cruelly cyclical nature of life. And, in light of Kozelek’s faded public profile, it proved to be a resounding comeback effort from a guy who seemed so resigned to his fate as the cultiest of cult artists that, just last year, he was compelled to write a song called “Hey You Bastards I’m Still Here”. Granted, that’s a Steve McQueen quote from "Papillion"—Kozelek’s all-time favorite movie, we learn on Live at Biko—but the sentiment perfectly defines Kozelek’s temperament these days: perennially disillusioned with the mind-numbing, ceiling-gazing drudgery of small-scale touring, but still emboldened by the intimate connection he has with the audience that remains. (As he sums up toward the end of the set: “I want to thank the people from Biko, who’ve been wonderful and cooked me some really great food … thanks to everybody for being so polite, I’m having a good fucking time. Now I’ve got to go to Scandinavia and eat really shitty food.”)
But Live at Biko is more than just another vault-clearing quickie to keep the diehards satiated. Most of Kozelek’s recent live releases have featured grab-bag setlists, complementing his Sun Kil Moon repertoire with samples from his canyon-deep arsenal of covers and even the odd Red House Painters classic. The Live at Biko set, by contrast, focuses squarely on Kozelek’s post-2010 songbook, and thus functions as both a tidy summation of an especially prolific period in his career, as well as a snapshot of how he’s evolved from one of indie-rock’s most enigmatic figures to its greatest oversharer. And with Kozelek adapting his ambient-electronic excursions with LaVelle and electric-guitar jams with Desertshore to the solo-nylon-acoustic mode of the most recent Sun Kil Moon records, we see a clearer path through his winding discography en route to the staggering peaks of Benji.
At the same time, when placed alongside Kozelek’s preceding work, you can hear why Benji has struck a deeper chord with people who've never really engaged with his music before, or hadn't in years. As Live at Biko illustrates, Benji was hardly the first time Kozelek had crafted a tragic character study about a fleeting acquaintance (“Gustavo”), commented on the thankless plight of the fortysomething working musician (“Sunshine in Chicago”), eulogized a dead relative (“Ceiling Gazing”), or relayed a deep-seated memory through pop-cultural color commentary (“Tavoris Cloud”) or a beloved old film (“Hey You Bastards I’m Still Here”). But where those songs feel like wistful internal monologues, the Benji tracks featured here—particularly the bloody-knuckled performances of “Richard Ramirez Died Today of Natural Causes”, “I Watched the Film the Song Remains the Same”, and “Dogs”—are more like exorcisms, as if decades of pent-up anxieties and insecurities were finally being unleashed through a ceaseless stream of words that threaten to overwhelm the songs’ structures. His unflinching candor has been matched with do-or-die ardor.
But where Benji’s lyrics have a rambling, made-up-on-the-spot quality, Live at Biko reinforces just how architecturally intricate they actually are—as emphasized by Kozelek’s remarkable ability to remember entire 70-line songs without flubbing a single word. And Live at Biko is quick to remind us that Benji is as much a comedy as tragedy, at times forcefully so: After the cheeky reference to albino rocker Edgar Winter in “I Love My Dad” fails to elicit the expected chuckle of recognition from his quietly reverential Italian audience, Kozelek opts to just scrap the song altogether midway through. (“It just sucks. Noted: ‘I Love My Dad’ does not work in Italy.”) Because even if the guy can’t watch the film The Song Remains the Same without being haunted by memories of dead classmates and some poor kid he once suckerpunched on the schoolyard, Kozelek still seeks to answer its eternal question: does anybody remember laughter?
