Wonder woman

Mary Timony uncovers a Magic City

by Brett Milano

Helium leader Mary Timony was hanging out in America Online chatrooms recently when she happened onto a fantasy room called "Knights of the Nazarene" and stepped in to investigate. What she found was a Dungeons & Dragons-type scene that turned her off right away. "There was some scenario involving a tiger and a vampire. I started playing along but got really bored. One woman was pretending to be a tiger, then I jumped in and said I was going to pour holy water on the two vampires. It became apparent that they were just total freaks."

So much for the idea of Timony as a dedicated follower of magic -- an idea that people will probably get from Helium's wonderfully idiosyncratic second album, The Magic City (out this Tuesday on Matador). Leaving their rough guitar origins behind, Timony and bandmates Ash Bowie (bass, keyboards) and Shawn King Devlin (drums) explore a Disney-esque sonic world that has much as to do with fairytales as with rock and roll. Timony's vocals are the only obvious link with Helium of old, but the voice is sweeter than before, and so is the music. It's built not on lead guitars but on '70s keyboards (Moogs, Mellotrons, and Chamberlains in every corner), a warm analog drum sound, and an increased sense of melody. And the lyrics cover some unusual ground -- though since many of the songs take place in outer space, you might say that they don't cover any ground at all.

Magic and the supernatural figure into every song. There's a catchy opening ditty about ESP ("Vibrations"), a Cars-like number concerning the problems of having an extraterrestrial boyfriend (the single, "Leon's Space Song"), a rocker about seducing a unicorn ("Queen of the Fire"), and a harpsichord instrumental ("Blue Rain Soda") that harks back to Jethro Tull's Songs from the Wood era. The eight-minute centerpiece, "Revolution of the Hearts," frames a synthesizer jam against a looped drum pattern offering shades of Tangerine Dream and marmalade skies. Producer Mitch Easter pitches in on guitars and keyboards, but the album doesn't have the jangly pop sound he's known for from his days with R.E.M.; the occasional sitar and tambourine are his only signatures here. Those who loved Helium's earlier Pirate Prude EP might not know what to make of this; closet prog-rock fans will be enchanted right away. So will those who play fantasy games in AOL chatrooms.

Hold on a second, old fans might be asking: weren't Helium supposed to be a snarly guitar band doing songs about female rage? And isn't Timony the same angry songwriter who squeezed into a prostitute's outfit for the ironic 1994 video "XXX" -- yes, the same video that caused Beavis to tell Butt-head that "this chick wants it bad"?

"It seemed natural for a girl my age to be expressing anger in music," she explains over chardonnay at the Middle East. "For whatever psychological reason, I found it easier to express it in my songs than any other way. Writing out of anger is an easy framework, and that's one reason I don't do it now. I remember hearing Patti Smith say that she stopped playing music because she wasn't angry anymore. I could totally relate, except that I want to keep playing.

"Lately I'm more into the idea that making music is fun. I want it to be a collaborative, creative thing, rather than using music as a tool. When you're 19, you think that you can change the world. And when you're a girl you think that you can just talk about the sexism and it goes away -- that was the whole riot grrrl thing for me. I'm probably less optimistic now."

But there's the rub, because Helium's old approach would probably be more marketable than their current one. On the recent film soundtrack All over Me (TVT), the early Helium track "Hole in the Ground" sits comfortably beside more recent numbers by Sleater-Kinney, Ani Difranco, and Babes in Toyland (Timony had a small part as a musician in the film). If female rage is going to be a trend, Helium seem well suited to ride it.

"Yeah, it's like someone in some corporation decided that women are a good thing to be marketed," is Timony's response. "Maybe we'll be grateful for that in 10 years, but it grosses me out now. Maybe I needed to make the songs less personal because I got tired of having to explain them."

Because people didn't understand?

"Because they did understand. I had a few bad experiences where people treated me like I was going crazy. I wanted to be a person, not just a person who wrote about gender issues in her rock-music band."

Actually, the changes in Helium have been going on since day one. When Timony joined the band, in 1993, she was stepping into other people's shoes. Originally known as Chupa (Spanish for "suck"), the group were both an outlet for their busy rhythm section (Devlin and then-bassist Brian Dunton were also in Dumptruck, Tackle Box, and numerous shorter-lived outfits) and a vehicle for songwriters Jason Hatfield and Mary Lou Lord. But Lord, who was already visible around town from her subway-station busking, wasn't ready to commit to an electric band. Hatfield pulled in Timony (who'd recently moved to town after leading the DC band Autoclave), then jumped ship himself. (The Chupa demos got recycled for the debut album by Hatfield's band Star Hustler, and for the first Helium single, the uncharacteristically poppish "American Jean.")

The newly christened Helium were then left with a volatile mix of personalities, and a live chemistry that could be cathartic on a good night, scattershot on a bad one. Tensions wound up flaring between Timony and Dunton, who's also been their manager. She later claimed that some of the angrier songs were written about him.

"We get along pretty well now, but that was a desperate time. It was only a few years ago, but I was more of a kid then. We were both really strong-headed and wanted different things for the band. He was focused on having the band do well. I was more impractical, I just wanted to make interesting music with my friends."

After Dunton left, Helium played a few gigs using violin (by the Dambuilders' Joan Wasser) instead of bass -- not their best shows. But it was a small miracle to have pulled it off at all. "We did that out of stupidity," admits Timony. "It was ridiculous, but it was also a lot of fun."

That was the end of Helium as a regularly gigging live band, and the beginning of Timony's being free to do everything her own way. The first full-length album, The Dirt of Luck, introduced keyboard layers and a textured pop approach; Timony and Devlin played the majority of the instruments. Timony's lyrics were still fueled by rage, but a different side was emerging; her persona now was a witch rather than a prostitute. Ash Bowie filled the bass slot around this time, despite a few seeming disadvantages: he's Timony's boyfriend (working with your partner is still a relative no-no in rock bands); he's got another full-time band (Polvo) and another hometown (Chapel Hill, where he still spends half his time, though he and Timony share an apartment in Jamaica Plain).

Still, Bowie's become a significant presence in Helium, helping to instigate the prog-rock direction and playing many of the synthesizers. On the new album he co-writes half the songs, and he wrote and performed one (the instrumental "Medieval People") on his own.

"He's good at the crazy sounds," explains Timony. "He comes from a math-rock background, and I'm more from the Velvet Underground tradition of `feeling' music. So our ideas of what's cool meet in prog rock."

Having fought for control of the band, was she ready to give some of it up? "It was more of a relief; I wanted someone to help out. Since he has his own band, there haven't been any creative problems, only scheduling ones. Our personal relationship is totally separate -- but then, we don't spend too much time together."

The new Helium emerged on last spring's heavily psychedelicized No Guitars EP, which dealt in metaphorical terms with Timony's ambivalence about rock. And it's another case where she made a creative decision over a commercial one. The opening "Silver Strings" may be the catchiest song in Helium's repertoire, but she chose to keep it off the album so the EP could stand on its own. "That's its own thing, in its own little box. It's more theatrical, like the songs take place in specific landscapes. And I could tell it got a lot of bad reviews, because we were so used to positive press."

One unlikely inspiration for the magic references was Timony's day job at Video Transfer on Newbury Street, which created a need for escape. "That gave me the idea that getting away from reality was a good thing. I'm not the kind of person who gets into Dungeons & Dragons or fantasy books, but I do like to reference that in songs. Also I got so bored with talking about rock music all day [in the store] that I got into the mindset of talking about older music, so that's where some of the prog influence comes in. Really, it's only in the past two years that I've even been a rock fan. Before that, it was only the medium that I wrote songs in."

Helium's upcoming CD-release show (set for the 26th at the Middle East) won't necessarily sound like the old Helium. Most of the new songs will be played live for the first time, and the line-up will include an as-yet-unnamed keyboard player. At this point the band aren't sure exactly what will happen -- but it won't be the first time that Helium have made music with that kind of attitude.