In a 1998 documentary, Mark Linkous holds up an old hollow-body guitar. “This one...do you want to smell it?” he asks his interviewer, who’s standing somewhere behind the camera. “It smells so good.” She obliges, and asks what the smell is. “Just that old wood, old lady smell,” Linkous says in his slight drawl. “It belonged to an old lady who played it in church, that’s how I got this one. It’s 1960.”
The house they’re in is over a hundred years older, built in 1860 or 1840, Linkous isn’t sure. He’s living in Andersonville, Virginia, at this point, in an old farmhouse with his wife Teresa and a few dogs who scamper in and out of the frame. He’s got a recording studio he calls Static King set up in one of the rooms, insulated enough from the rest of the house that he can spend hours experimenting in there without Teresa hearing him. The camera pans across the studio. It’s a mess—gnarls of cables crisscrossing over old amplifiers, old tape decks, tiny Casio keyboards from the ’80s, scratched guitars stood up in the corner. It looks less like a recording studio and more like a patch of woods in the Virginia green outside, where vines dangle from trees and the grass bustles with insects.
Good Morning Spider, the 1998 album Linkous recorded in this 19th-century house, teems with a similar life. Its songs bleed in and out of each other: an organ drone ends one track and begins another; a strand of tape hiss winds through the work. You can hear machines starting up and stopping again, fingers squeaking across the frets of an acoustic guitar. Linkous had a tendency to sing close enough to the microphone that you could hear the spittle crackling off his teeth, like he’s whispering in your ear or through a tin can strung up with twine.
Linkous recorded the album, the story goes, after dying for the first time. He was opening for Radiohead on tour in England and after taking too much Valium, or alcohol, or heroin (he doesn’t remember and the story changes), he passed out in a London hotel room with his legs pinned underneath him. The potassium build-up stopped his heart once paramedics straightened his legs out, and he died for a minute or three; at the hospital, his tour manager was led to the grieving room where doctors would deliver bad news. But there was none, and Linkous got to live again. He even got to keep his legs, despite what the doctors told him when he woke up.
“It must have changed your life profoundly,” the documentary interviewer says of the experience, which strung on for three months in 1996 at St. Mary’s Hospital while Linkous’ legs healed. He pauses, and then, haltingly, replies. “Well, it made me notice a lot more. It made me be a little more perceptive to small things, more, after that, I think. You know? People, babies, animals, insects. Things like that.”
Born in Arlington, Virginia, to a coal mining family, Linkous moved to New York and then Los Angeles after high school to become a rock star instead. He tried to learn Led Zeppelin songs on guitar as a kid and almost gave up on the instrument because they were too hard. Then, “I saw on the evening news, a news flash from London: punk rock!” he says. “And I was like, man, I can definitely do this.”
Linkous joined a power-pop band called the Dancing Hoods in the ’80s. They put out two albums and broke up, and Linkous moved back to Virginia, where he began making music by himself under the name Sparklehorse. He gave up on being a rock star; he even gave up on the idea that he was the one making the music coming out of him. “My songs? I don’t feel like they’re even mine,” he tells his interviewer. “I’m just a conductor.” He likens them to the bugs crawling around in the grass on his property. They’re in his space, but there’s no way they could ever belong to him. They just pass by.
Good Morning Spider, Sparklehorse’s second album after 1995’s Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, retains some of the punk rock fervor that pushed Linkous to both coasts in his late teens and early twenties. “Pig” is the closest Sparklehorse comes to a raw punk song, and “Cruel Sun” sees him shouting against the full lurch of multi-layered guitars. “Happy Man,” a song Linkous bisected with the ambient organ number “Chaos of the Galaxy,” could have been a pop punk chart-topper in a corporate producer’s hands. But if punk ran on spontaneity, coarseness, and attitude, Sparklehorse found life in the details punk ignored.
Linkous constantly approached the purity of pop music and then lacerated it with the quirks and imperfections he cherished. “Happy Man” has a populist enough hook: “All I want is to be a happy man,” Linkous wails. But that line only releases the tension he’s been building up in the verse and pre-chorus, a tension built on lyrics like, “I woke up in a horse’s stomach one foggy morning/His eyes were crazy and he smashed into the cemetery gates.” That’s not radio fodder, not even in the strange ’90s milieu that made hits out of Marcy Playground’s “Sex and Candy” and Butthole Surfers’ “Pepper.” Who wants to see the world from the inside of a horse?
Though signed to Capitol from the first album, Sparklehorse never found the broad audience Linkous hoped it might. It found fans, though, in people like Thom Yorke (who collaborated with Linkous on one song, a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”) and Daniel Johnston (whom Linkous covers on Spider) and Tom Waits (who sang guest vocals on Sparklehorse’s next album It’s a Wonderful Life) and PJ Harvey (ditto). And it found listeners in weird kids around the country who bought Sparklehorse’s CDs or (more likely) pirated them from peer-to-peer networks. Sparklehorse was Soulseek rock, the kind of thing you let trickle through your headphones on your rough nights but didn’t ever really play for your friends. When he sang, he sang for you and no one else, except maybe the june bugs in the grass.
According to Linkous, it’s a rural thing, a facet of artists who live in houses, not apartments, who have to cross miles of winding road in a car to get anywhere. It’s why he made his albums from equipment salvaged from junkyards and purchased from eccentric characters, not on professional equipment in a glossy urban studio. “Country people, being so isolated, they have to kind of improvise with things they have access to,” he says. “Always thought that was a really admirable trait of country people.”
Drive through Virginia enough and you’ll start to see what Linkous saw, all the layers of time and memory that go into making something as delicate and complex as his music. Vines swallow trees, moss swallows gravestones, the hum of bugs blankets the haunted emptiness of Civil War battlefields. It’s a place pulsing with the memory of violence, serene now but weighted by what’s been done there. There’s nowhere in the country with more ghosts.
Sparklehorse’s songs tend to follow you like ghosts, especially the ones on Good Morning Spider, Linkous’ best and most intricate work. I’ll be driving for hours in the dark and find myself thinking of the refrain to “All Night Home”: “We’re gonna drive/All night home,” a companion piece to Roy Orbison’s “I Drove All Night” that works more like a prayer for safe arrival. On “Come on In,” Linkous modifies the children's prayer “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” removing references to the Lord: “I pray my soul to keep/If I die before I wake/I pray my soul to take.” That shift from soul as object to soul as subject feels impossibly lonely, the presence of God implied but not spoken to, unless that’s who Linkous is pleading with when he sings, “Come on in/Take me home tonight.”
These big, ambiguous concepts—loneliness, souls, sadness—populate the album as characters in the near-absence of people. There’s the stray reference to a “you” in there, a few mentions of “he” and “she”, but the majority of living beings here are animals and ideas. The “he” on “Ghost of His Smile” is a pet lizard who died at Linkous’ home; the Joe in “Hey, Joe” belongs to Daniel Johnston. In Linkous’ rendition, clearer and more fleshed out than Johnston’s original, Joe and Jack and the rest of the names fade in the light of the stars above them.
Johnston’s line—“There’s a heaven and there’s a star for you”—appeared on sparklehorse.com after Linkous’ death, the real one, in March 2010. His family put it there as a footnote to their statement on his passing. I don’t know if they thought he wrote it or if they knew it meant a lot to him or if it was just the most resonant language to appear on his albums in the wake of his death. He died in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he’d been living in his last months. He killed himself in an alley you can find on Google Maps, if you really want to.
In the documentary, Linkous talks about being in so much pain after his ’96 hospital stay that Teresa had to hide his guns. It’s eerie, now that he’s dead, to hear him talk about suicide all those years ago. Maybe he knew; maybe he could feel the totality of his own life the way he felt the everything-ness of the spaces he lived and worked in, the details of a place from its bugs to its mountains.
I’d like to think that whatever conducted these songs into being is still here. In a dream a few months after his death, when I was living in D.C., Linkous told me to look for him in the color green. I don’t want to make too much of it, but I saw hawks floating over the highways all that summer, too, and I remember how he wrote about hawks, how “Hammering the Cramps” from Vivadixie was written about a wounded hawk he picked up off the road in Virginia and drove home on his motorcycle. One hand on the handlebars, one hand cradling an enraged hawk, for miles.
Good Morning Spider carries so much melancholy inside of it, but it’s the kind of melancholy that’s existed long before people were around to experience it and will be there long after we’re gone. More than anything, the album shines an old light on the impossible things that happen all the time: dogs coming back from the dead, spiders building webs, the moon yanking the sea around the earth. The bugs that are dead all winter and suddenly not dead at the first hint of green. Human love for the non-human. “It’s a hard world for little things,” Linkous sings on “Ghost of His Smile.” The catch is there’s nothing living that isn’t little.
Here’s another prayer from Linkous: “I’m so sorry/My spirit’s rarely in my body/It wanders through the dry country/Looking for a good place to rest.” He sings it on “Hundreds of Sparrows,” a song about birds and intimacy and coming back to your body after drifting away from it for hours. I think of it when I neglect my friends, which is often, or when I’m not listening to someone speaking to me because my mind’s somewhere else. Then I hear Linkous’ voice in my head and I return to my body while I have it.
