The Lies And Loneliness Of Room 29
The 2017 Concept Album From Chilly Gonzales and Jarvis Cocker Examine The Pernicious Allure Of Hollywood, And The Avatar For It’s Artifice
Tristan Young @talltristan
There’s a story about The Chateau Marmont and Lindsay Lohan. During one of her extended sojourns in the hotel, at the height of the rebellious and felonious phase of her career, she accrued a $46000 tab primarily from ordering packs of cigarettes and Architectural Digest magazines. When her time at the hotel ended she skipped out on the bill, joining the ranks of churlish celebrity assholes spending the nadir of their time in the spotlight doing something stupid at the Marmont. While the potential validity of the whole tale keeps it firmly in the rumours margin, a story that crazy’s gotta be true. More importantly it aptly sums up the nature and infamy of the Chateau Marmont. The storied Hollywood hotel dating back to the 1930s has been a bastion for cinema’s most elite and scandalous. Over the decades its reputation for accommodating egregious levels of misanthropy and decadence on behalf of the upper Hollywood echelon has cast an ominous shadow over the valley that the community has been reluctant to address. As the film industry at least acknowledges that serious reforms are needed within their sphere, they have had difficulty reconciling their complacency in the divisive legacy of the Chateau Marmont.
On a more fundamentally insecure level- of which is a fundamental characteristic of celebrity- Hollywood as an unstable ecosystem has struggled with the identity of the Marmont, at once a lavish hideout to engage in their casual and cruel hedonism, but also a vector that carries them to the depths of isolation and despair, where the ephemeral glow of cinema and stardom no longer reaches them, leaving them alone to contemplate that hollow pursuits are all this land ever had to offer. Someone so thoroughly engrained within this microcosm would likely be ill equipped- lacking the reflexive self awareness- to fully interrogate this dichotomy. Whereas artists from outside the bubble, say Parisian transplants from the UK or Canadians that found a home in the German classical underground, might never fully understand the toxicity of its seductions to properly illustrate the breadth of the malaise it spreads. While this may seemingly leave us at an impasse, Jarvis Cocker and Chilly Gonzales- the aforementioned exterior observers- considered another option for such a survey. Rather than let the confirmation or cognitive biases of observers contaminate a picture of how the Chateau is a mournful allegory for Hollywood itself, they would let the hotel do the talking.
This brings us to Gonzales and Cocker’s joint album Room 29, released in 2017. Like a satirical and drained version of The Shining, Room 29 centers the hotel itself as a coherent observer of the antics that happened within its walls, brought to life by two unexpected sources. Gonzales, who after hiding in relative obscurity in Canadian rock and then Berlin rap and electronica eventually made a name for himself as a renowned classical pianist. Cocker was the lead singer of storied 90s Brit rock band Pulp, however after that particular bubble had burst, he had been relegated firmly to historical discussions. Cocker once stayed in the Chateau Marmont during his time on the West Coast, even spending time in the coveted suite Room 29, replete with its own baby grand piano; that stay ended up being one of the seeds for this album. Contemplating his time there he wondered, “What if the piano were a mute witness to the many star antics which have taken place in the room? What would it say? It would love to tell stories”. If these stories, full of disillusioned regret and forlorn memories were to be told from the perspective of the piano and other inanimate objects, there would be no one better to partner with than Gonzales.
The Chateau Marmont/ Page Six
Together they crafted a minimalist piano album accompanied by mostly subdued and sedate spoken word lyrics, with the occasional assist from a string quartet. Room 29 is a quiet, disillusioned, and down tempo affair. However it is also seasoned with incisive satire, awkward humour, equal parts self-deprecating and morally poignant. In its delicate and ruminative arrangements it seeks to shine a light on the artifice of Hollywood as viewed from the hotel. It is a light far brighter and disinfectant than the glitzy shimmer of the film projector. The extravagant glamour of Hollywood life would be stripped down and exposed for the lonely artifice it was built upon. With their agenda set, Gonzales and Cocker spend the duration keenly aware that such an invective wouldn’t be convincing merely through derisive commentary. One has to buy into the idea of Hollywood to fully uncover its illusory appeal. As such their perspective as articulated through the hotel itself is a mixture of contempt and compassion. As Cocker intones in the opening track Room 29, “This whole place is built on a lie, but what a lie”.
Gonzales’ quiet and sulking piano, a distant accompaniment to Cocker’s solemn, retrospective cadence is a fitting dynamic to examine the inherent loneliness of celebrity. The whole concept is built upon exhibitionism and having an audience, yet the Chateau Marmont served as shadowed veil to hide from that when the affluent so choose. However, the seedy addiction of the local and it’s “unhealthy, unfair, and extremely entertaining” as Cocker puts it, draw becomes an unexpected and inescapable endpoint for so many. Rather that an intensified manifestation of the eccentric excesses that stardom affords you, Room 29 depicts the hotel as a delphic hole of solitude and isolation. The wandering loops of Marmont Overture are evocative of chamber music and the cavernous solipsism that such sentiments imply. It’s like wandering around the empty floor of a hotel by yourself. Stories ranging from the final tragic days of industry titans such as in Howard Hughes Under The Microscope to family cast aside by the beguiling spectre of celebrity paint a picture of fame without the audience. From this perspective we see fame not from an audience perspective, indeed there is no audience at all. As Cocker laments in Daddy You’re Not Watching Me, “If we all watch each other we will no longer need to bother looking for you”. From family abandonment to a similar sense of loss in regards to fans, the frailty of such a life style is laid demoralizingly bare when the limelight is turned off.
Those connective fibres between the fleeting nature of fame and family manifest in unhealthy complexes and straight up neurosis, as depicted in Clara. Telling the oddly theatrical story of Mark Twain’s daughter, Cocker’s slightly cruel lyrics and Gonzales mockingly whimsical arpeggios illustrate the malignant consequences of seeking and then shunning the spotlight. Twain’s daughter Clara moved into the hotel after her husband died. She regularly held séances with psychics of dubious credentials (as if there was any other kind) to commune with her dearly departed. Her obsession, redolent of something out of Hereditary alienated her from her daughter who succumbed to alcoholism. With a bone dry martini kind of humour Cocker gently pokes, “the last of the blood line was 40 percent proof/ It’s a familial drama but you lack the skill to write it down cause daddy used up all the ink”. Ouch.
That sense of lose and abandonment steering us down mentally perilous paths, leading to despair and loneliness is mapped onto a macro scale through Room 29’s systemic dismantling of the iconography that holds up the vaunted idea of celebrity. Why exactly do we revere and adore these types so much? Therapeutic takes on the idea is that their articulation in fiction/music/literature helps us understand parts of ourselves, but Room 29 is far too gleefully cynical to let us all of the hook. A more pathological take is that by buying into cultural abstracts across mediums we are tying ourselves to systems and constructs that will outlast us. By being a part of that, even through passive observation and admiration, we are transposing a part of ourselves into a vessel that will prove far more timeless than our own frail bodies.
Chilly Gonzales
Room 29 flips the circumstances of this relationship with Hollywood and celebrity by removing the opportunity for observance. By dramatizing incidents, no matter how theatrical or scandalous within the confines of the Chateau Marmont, the very idea of celebrity is short circuited, ironically by an institution that was meant to accommodate it’s most potent distillate. What’s the point of a celebrity if no one is around to watch them do anything. This is explored in Tearjerker, with funeral and defeated keys sparsely appropriated by Gonzales as Cocker musters the energy to lash out against an empty backdrop. His emboldened tenor keeps dissipating when he realizes no one is listening but himself. He retreats into introversion, using the piano as metaphor for celebrity, “these surfaces are shinny, anything wipes of them/ these surfaces are hard, nothing seems to mark them”. So little of them is actual known or experienced, and that disconnect goes both ways. Hollywood is about having an audience, but in Room 29 there is only cursed silence. With Tearjerker Returns, Gonzales does most of the heavy lifting himself, stripping away all of the salacious anecdotes and imagined grievances leaving only instrumental memories culled from their vigour. The soften curiosity of the pianos of the former are supplanted by more starkly realized keys, dressed in finality and resignation.
As the album converses in terms of absence and what’s not there, Gonzales finds interesting ways to articulate that depressing seclusion. He builds his precocious melody in Bombshell with a walking on eggshell kind of mentality. As a mixture of narration and Cocker’s lyrics, presented like destructing a riddle, we learn about the legendary Gene Harlow and her husband who just couldn’t quite hold on to her. As the story moves further from romance and towards not just heartbreak but segregation, a terminal string section swells with dread that feels oddly inevitable. Only after the tragic conclusion is firmly in place does the song evolve into sub tonal ambiguity landing on one final isolated and unnervingly ominous key. More indirect avenues of this sentiment reveal themselves deeper into the album. Salome, named in part after the dogmatic Christian tenet of sinful temptation has a beautiful, saccharine blossoming of illumination in Cocker- actually singing no less- and violin arrangements. However as the meta textural reading references Billy Wilder, the writer of Sunset Boulevard, it seems more of a delicate eulogizing of the silver age of Hollywood. The song mourns that even Hollywood as a cultural creation is a finite one that will eventually wither away.
Cocker is just as willing to morbidly celebrate its eventual demise, scornfully maligning it for what it really is. Just as Room 29 explores the loneliness and isolation brought about by an obsession with fame, it also points an accusatory light at the artifice that lured so many in to begin with. Cocker and Gonzales go to great lengths to expose and debunk the trickery and gas lighting that acts as a tenuous foundation for which Hollywood is built upon. One can trace this all the way back the California gold rush of the late 1840s, which populated much of the state to begin with. Ironically that boom proved just a fleeting and ruinous for most. Tracks like The Other Side, Daddy You’re Not Watching Me, and Trick Of The Light focus on the illusory and ephemeral appeal of Hollywood, and have no interest in letting the institution get away with it any further. Cocker rues his efforts to find out what was behind the silver screen finding only cables, wires, and really bad reception in The Other Side. The final part of that phrase serves as something of a double entendre highlighting just how bad everything looks and sounds once you understand it’s true nature, but also one’s own increasingly problematic depiction as they ensconce themselves further and further into the system, with the Chateau serving as an insidious core. Gonzales manifests this frustrating realization through inquisitive and precipitous pianos that sadly peel down into darker notes as Cocker’s rhetoric grows more hollow.
These proceedings build to a crescendo with the incisive Trick Of The Light. While Cocker’s sardonic wit is deftly appropriate for such subject matter he comes off as earnestly wounded and upset at times here. He begins with stories featuring simulacrums of Ben Hur, Cleopatra, and Dinosaurs populating the hotel. These caricatures do some rhetorical heavy lifting as Cocker references things that not only are long gone but were never really what we thought they were. Elsewhere his language is starkly literal, “I fell in love with this trick of a light/ life with the boring bits edited out”. The further down this through line he descends the more disastrous, monstrous even, it becomes, “I lost it all for good, I lost my wife, but that’s Hollywood”. He reaches out for the light, finding nothing there beyond the illusions of a projector and its attendant screen. And yet like the obvious metaphorical moth to a flame for which he anxiously casts himself, he can’t help but keep trying. There is nothing to latch on to, the substance is gone, “what a surprise, the love of my life, was a trick of the light”.
Jarvis Cocker
From this perspective do we view the delinquents and dilatants of the Marmont as prisoners to a system that has seduced and indentured them? Are they hiding from the invasive eyes of mortality or confined in a hellish loop of abusing and being abused? The potential for this perspective shifts in the song as his revelatory experience is exquisitely captured in the instrumental arrangements, seguing into a 40s horror film score, or the climax of a particularly tawdry melodrama. As if ushered in by fake but overbearing storm clouds and lightning flashes, the string section ignites with a surreal fever dream. The pianos trace operatic flourishes of passion and torture in equal measure. This is the Oscar bait scene. In doing so Room 29 fulfils its purpose of exposing the emotional manipulation of Hollywood but also articulates why it is so effective in the first place.
Homages like this exist all over the album, and are in large part what sells it as a sincere and genuine experience, despite Cocker’s deadpan derision. For an album that chastises the consequences of such a superficial system, it also carefully documents its evolving manifestations. If Trick Of The Light carries the pompous grandeur of Ella Fitzgerald or Marlon Brando, Room 29 also exhibits the innocent tomfoolery of Charlie Chaplin. The Other Side And Interlude 1 Hotel Stationary both prance with the improvised finesse of silent film era pictures. Elsewhere Bombshell and Belle Boy are more akin to boisterous musical theatre vibes. Classical Piano segues into something more minimalist and harrowing in the soap opera styling of Tearjerker. Much of the album acts as an excavation of Hollywood’s many forms; this is integral to it’s critiques coming off as multi faced and properly informed, as opposed to an outsider’s squarely dismissive view point, or an insider’s obsequies rationalizing.
Moreover, despite the Spartan arrangements of Gonzales’ scores, he’s not actually communicating in strictly classical song structures. Minimal though they may be, they are written from a pop ballad mindset, and as such communicate using the same emotional acumen, every bit as capable of extracting the same kind of responses. This really comes through in the brighter or more ostentatious moments in Salome or Bombshell. While Cocker and Gonzales often operate independent of each other in this album (further ingraining that seclusion), their interplay can get really animated at times. The impish delights of Belle Boy or mighty overtures of Trick Of The Light, with both of them effectively accentuating each other are very salient in this regard.
While Cocker must walk a precarious line of sermonizing the cult of Hollywood and deriding its apostasy, he is also occasionally just very funny. “Is there anything sadder than a hotel room that hasn’t been fucked in”, he offers with a healthy dose of irony in the track Room 29. A tortured tale of love that wasn’t meant to be in Tearjerker switches on a dime to when, exactly, is he getting his breakfast that is included in his stay? His soon to be never seen again partner can join if they like. He nails it in “Belle Boy” with the line, “life would be a bed of roses if it weren’t for all the pricks”. The mixture of poetic pretention and bureaucratic efficiency is a succinct summation of why so many denizens of the Chateau Marmont were really just assholes. Gonzales gets in on the fun painting to the wrenching tragedy of Clara in the light of frivolous whimsy, dismissing her plight (rudely!) even further.
The plights of these people, after all, can only be accommodated and empathised with for so long. Eventually they have to see the Marmont, Hollywood, and celebrity for what it really is. Cocker ponders over just how, sadly, challenging that can be for some people, leaving them with no recourse but to retreat into their revisionist nostalgia. “Oh we were cool at Musso and Franks”, he boasts with nervous charisma, desperate for someone- anyone- to believe that was true in album closer Ice Cream As Main Chorus. The slightly pompous showboating of his regaling in the halcyon days of the valley is as rousing as it is slightly sad. His overly ardent oration transitions into eulogy after time. It’s over for all of them. The Chateau may remain but decades after John Belushi’s ignominious death within its halls, it is less of a beacon and more of tomb. Not only where celebrities literally go to die, but where optimism and hope are choked out, supplanted only by petty indulgences. It was good while it lasted. But when the glamor of the light fades all that is left is a disgruntled bellboy, the breakfast bar, and the bill.