>>Harmony Of The Spheres: Mercury Rev

It might not be much of a reach to compare Mercury Rev's multi-layered new album, Deserter's Songs (V2), to an imaginary episode of The X-Files in which 19th-century songwriter Stephen Foster is the unwilling victim of an alien abduction. Jonathan Donahue, the man who pens most of Mercury Rev's material, should appreciate two of the fanciful TV script's bullet points: endless landscapes of sound from alien planets coupled with a kind of music best described as Americana.

"We've always tried to achieve something that's timeless with our music," says Donahue, the group's singer/guitarist. "Where if you hear it, you would say, 'I have no idea when that record was made. It doesn't sound like something from 1998.'"

"We hope the new album will be seen that way 10 or 20 years from now," says Dave Fridmann, the band's bassist/producer/engineer. "That certainly was on our 'to do' list when we made it."

Adds reedman/guitarist Sean "Grasshopper" Mackiowiak, "We've just gotten better and better at doing it over the years."

The spacier elements of Mercury Rev's wide-screen epics are immediately apparent and, at times, they come close to overwhelming the band's finely crafted songs. Donahue may deny that mind expansion is the primary goal of his art, but he's thought long and hard about the term "psychedelia" nevertheless. "People tend to think of psychedelic music as those old '60s groups from San Francisco, with wah-wah pedals and people playing strange chords," he says. "It's unfortunate because that music was quite something, and now it gets put into the same category with a lot of crazy crap. Psychedelic music frees the mind and transports you back to an old girlfriend or a place you used to live. We've never thought of ourselves as a psychedelic band, but it does tend to be music using unconventional instrumentation in the context of rock 'n' roll."

The most telling sound on Deserter's Songs - filling the same top-end role as the glockenspiel on those old Phil Spector records - is an instrument that recently replaced the theremin in Donahue's heart. "I love the bowed saw so much more than the theremin," he explains. "The theremin may be space-age, but the saw is more organic. It has this uncanny ability to slide into tones, and it has a natural vibrato. And, besides the sarangi from India, it comes the closest to sounding like my favorite instrument: the female human voice. I've been in love with the saw ever since I heard Jack Nitzsche use it on the soundtrack to One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest."

Though its eerie sound may resemble music from the spheres, the bowed saw - an all but forgotten voice in folk music - serves as a litmus test for Mercury Rev's lengthy list of musical influences. Donahue has always had a hankering for rough-hewn bluesmen like Son House and Charley Patton, as well as the work of old-time vaudeville/burlesque singer Bert Williams. "The blues just hits me where it hurts," Donahue says. "When I'm by myself, I always put on some blues." Since his fragile voice is a study in vulnerability, Donahue's favorite singer should come as no surprise. "I've never thought to emulate anybody," he admits, "because I don't consider myself that proficient, but I really love Billie Holiday."

Donahue began singing - at first splitting Mercury Rev's vocal duties with David Baker, who departed in 1994 - when the band was formed at the University Of Buffalo in the late '80s. "It was out of necessity," says Donahue. "I wasn't the bastard child of Pavarotti. I was just the guy who wrote the songs, and usually singing is the only thing that nobody else wants to do. It's a scary feeling, not just hitting the notes, but trying to get the emotion out of you and onto the tape. You're bound to leave yourself hanging up there on the high wire."

Coming up with lyrics, says Donahue, can be equally wrenching. "Most of them are half-remembered dreams, written down on scraps of toilet paper - dialogue I probably should have spoken to someone years ago, but didn't have the guts to do it."

There was no concept behind forming the band, Donahue insists: "We just wanted to make a tape for our friends." Fridmann - enrolled in the musical engineering program of SUNY-Fredonia, 50 miles to the southwest - got the band's foot in the door. "They had a student recording program there," says Donahue. "And Dave, who became our bass player, could get free studio time between midnight and 6 a.m."

"Every time Jon would come into the studio, whatever band name was on the track sheet the last time was scratched out and some other name would be there instead," Fridmann recalls. "Eventually 'Mercury Rev' appeared - I'm not even sure that name came from us - and it kept staying."

When the Rev's first album, Yerself Is Steam, finally emerged in 1991, the band - augmented by Jimy Chambers (keyboards, drums) and Suzanne Thorpe (flute) - began to play live. Fridmann, who no longer tours with the band, had doubts immediately. "I felt it was never a good thing for that band to tour," he says. "Most bands get together because they're friends. We just weren't that group of people. Being together weeks on end wasn't good for us. It made us not like each other."

Donahue soon began a working relationship with the Flaming Lips, first as their tour manager and then as part of the band. "Jon had been their soundman by default," says Fridmann. "But once he'd worked his way onstage, he hired me to do the sound. And I wound up doing In A Priest-Driven Ambulance and Hit To Death In The Future Head with the Lips." Fridmann recently produced the band's four-CD set, Zaireeka, as well.

It's worth noting that most of Mercury Rev's musical passions are the same genres that gradually fused to create rock 'n' roll. "I was really into jazz as a kid," reveals Mackiowiak, whose surname, meaning "poppy" in Polish, was mutated into "Hoppy" and finally "Grasshopper" by childhood friends. "I loved John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy, and I started playing the clarinet, then the tenor sax and finally the bass clarinet. I was also into James Blood Ulmer and Sonny Sharrock, but I wasn't so totally a jazz guy that I couldn't see the connection between that and Jimi Hendrix or Ginger Baker from Cream. Or even Can and the Velvets. Lou Reed loved doo-wop, but he also loved Ornette. Even the guys in the Band loved Allen Toussaint and all that New Orleans stuff."

These "guys in The Band" (drummer/singer Levon Helm and keyboardist Garth Hudson, in particular) have been a subject of fascination for Donahue and Mackiowiak - who now reside in Kingston, N.Y. - for some time.

"They both live close to us, in Woodstock," says Mackiowiak. "I saw (Band bassist) Rick Danko in the meat market the other day ordering a side of beef, and we'd see Garth and Levon around town. We'd always been somewhat intimidated by them, but we know friends of theirs. So we got them tapes of the new songs and asked if they'd like to play on the new album. A few days later they called back and told us, 'Yeah, we can do some stuff with you guys.' It turned out really cool."

"Both Jon and Sean have been big Band fans for a long time," Fridmann chuckles. "I think, literally, the reason they live in Kingston is because of those guys. If they bumped into them at a meat market, it was because they'd stalked them for two weeks, finding out what time of day they'd be out."

Though Fridmann was absent for the celebrity sessions, he's as happy with the resulting studio chatter as with the music itself. "When you get guys like Garth and Levon into the studio, you leave the tape rolling," he says. "We've got hours of Garth talking about what he thinks about reality. At the beginning of 'Opus 40,' what you don't hear is this false start with Levon cackling away. We didn't want them to feel we were making them the butt of a joke, but we've scattered weird vocal clips of Garth all over the album's hidden track."

Donahue seems as pleased with the new album as he is with the current touring version of Mercury Rev, which consists of guitarist Jayson Russo, his keyboard-playing brother Justin (both of space-rockers Hopewell), Adam Snyder (organ) and Jeff Mercel (drums). "People hear our music and think that one influence is where we're at," Donahue says. "But it may not be the same influence they have in mind. I'll give you an example: A lot of people will say Pet Sounds or Smile, but to be honest, we don't listen to much Beach Boys. But we have the same influences that Brian Wilson had. We listen to a lot of '50s doo-wop and popular standards, early Americana and music straight out of the Ziegfeld Follies era. In that way, we have shared influences - the same stuff that Brian listened to and that Levon Helm and Garth Hudson listened to. We all share a great love of older music. We'll do things we think are wholly original and then hear the same thing, done in 1953.

"As Solomon said in the Bible, it's simply the combination of things. By no means would I say we're unique. But we are a rock band with a certain twist and a desire to create timeless music. We don't put on a record and say, 'Tonight we're in the mood for something from 1994.' We don't care when the fucking record was made. We just want to hear - and to make - good music."