REVIEW / INTERVIEW
Col. Jeffrey's Amazin' Cavalcade of the Stars!
Some of the Indie Kingdom's biggest names tell the tale of an allergy-crazed crusader. Chris Slusarenko is the evil mastermind behind it all.

by ZACH DUNDAS
zdundas@wweek.com

Admire the sheer bold brass of the thing:

...The operatic tale of a boy with bad allergies, who grows into a man (or is he a robot? Or something?)...

...With even worse allergies (they set him hallucinating, a stone drag when you have to fight in underwater fire battles, which he does)...

...Populated by sinister and opaque monster-mistresses like Strident Wet Nurse and Doctor Mom...

...Told through a cycle of exclusive trax! from some of the shiniest knights of Planet Indie Rock (we're talking Guided By Voices, Stephen Malkmus, Quasi, Black Heart Procession, etc.) strung together with atmospheric incidental sound...

...Vacuum-packed with drawings by such titans of the modern comic book state-of-the-art as Joe Sacco, Jim Woodring, Adrian Tomine, Kim Deitch and Peter Bagge...

...Fattened with typically dyspeptic liner notes by Portland rock writer Richard Meltzer...

...Dispatched into the world via a two-city, two-night series of premium live action?

Meet Chris Slusarenko, the boy who dreamed. Once of Portland bands Svelt and Sprinkler, Slusarenko now tends to the whims of local cinephiles at Clinton Street Video. In the midst of slinging celluloid, however, Slusarenko found time to conjure the strange story of Colonel Jeffrey Pumpernickel, a concept album just released on his own Off Records imprint.

"It seemed like an idea whose time had come," Slusarenko says of the Pumpernickel scheme. If that seems like an oddly presumptuous thing to say about a project this sprawling, hear him out.

"I never thought I'd be the one who had to do it," he elaborates. "For years, I kept thinking I would walk into a record store one day and find this great project that used all these different artists to tell one story, and I'd take it home and it would become my favorite record. It never happened, so eventually I just found myself doing it."

And so Slusarenko cobbled together the impenetrable story of Pumpernickel, a man with allergies so nasty they cause him to trip into psychedelic alter-worlds. Eventually (actually, immediately), it becomes impossible to tell which of the story's surreal war scenes and ghastly medical encounters are "real" and which are a product of his allergen-addled perceptual state. This naturally makes the true nature of our hero hard to parse, and there are hints that Pumpernickel isn't all man, see?

So far, then, Pumpernickel is a rock opera squarely in the tradition of Tommy, The Wall and Zen Arcade, all tales of wandering heroes with profoundly wacked identities. However, breaking from the "tortured auteur" model that has informed most rock operas, Slusarenko sliced up his narrative and handed the pieces to dozens of different musicians. He says he gave them minimal direction, allowing them to twist his characters and plot as they saw fit.

Pumpernickel turns out to be a hybrid, part traditional rock opera, part all-star compilation record that many an indie label operator would happily puncture his mother to release. "I'm curious," says Slusarenko. "Will people want the answers to the story right away? Or will they treat it as a great collection of exclusive songs from a bunch of artists?"

As a simple compilation with some high-concept window-dressing, you couldn't do much better, though like most Various Artists efforts, Pumpernickel is a little uneven.

Quasi, GBV and Black Heart Procession all turn in sharp takes on their own established formulas, like expert mystery writers retrofitting time-tested plots for their latest airport paperback hits. Though most of the album is very strong, the stranger offerings seem to flesh out Slusarenko's story the best. Howe Gelb's ramshackle desert blues, Weird War's warped soul and Ann Magnuson's deranged hospital epic all advance poor Jeffrey's voyage through this vale of psychotropic tears better than more straight-forward fare. Malkmus' ill-advised experiment with a drum machine and vocal FX, on the other hand, is so bad as to be oddly compelling. Four short instrumental pieces by Goldcard provide some of the album's most cinematic and elegant moments.

By and large, Slusarenko's daringly weird vision comes together extraordinarily well. While performances by stars in both Portland and Seattle this weekend kick the Colonel into the world, one can't help but wonder whether there might ever be a full-scale production of this bizarre epic, which has clearly already played out, in living Technicolor, on the insides of Slusarenko's eyelids.

"I'm thinking children's theater would be the way to go," says Slusarenko. "Oaks Park would make a great venue. Or maybe there could be a film that was split into sections, each section directed by a rock musician who has made a really bad movie. Like you could give part of it to David Byrne, because True Stories sucked so bad. It could potentially be the worst movie ever."