A few years passed before the Handsome Family was born. Between day jobs, the Sparkses hung out in decrepit corner bars, where scary old men in crumbled hamburgs barked jokes about splashing whores with battery acid. They ate a lot of cabbage soup. Brett continued making music. Eventually, it was decided Rennie would play bass in his band.
“I wasn’t going to get involved in the songwriting at all,” she recalls. It still hadn’t occurred to her that writing lyrics could be executed with the same care as crafting prose. But one day Brett asked for some assistance, and Rennie leapt right in.
“I was working for the Sears catalog at the time,” she reveals. “I had to write about women’s underwear. Things like, ‘Lace, the world’s most romantic fabric, now in the easy care washability of polyester!’ These really short, vivid sentences.” She learned to distill a lot of information into a few succinct lines. “When I started writing lyrics, I was like, ‘I can do this. This is what I do all day.’ I have an MFA in writing, but I learned more working for Sears than in any writing workshop.”
Jeff Tweedy, who has invited the Handsome Family to tour with Wilco on two separate occasions, was an early fan of Rennie’s way with words. “Rennie adds very specific details to her lyrics that compel you to believe: These are real situations, this really happened, i.e. you can’t make this shit up,” he writes, via e-mail. “The weird thing is you get this same sensation when they’re about poodles and milkmen. Totally authentic.”
Back then, the Sparkses didn’t take the Handsome Family too seriously. “It was something to do between drinking and throwing things at each other,” quips Rennie. Today, neither of them is particularly fond of Odessa. “It’s not that bad, for a Chicago indie rock band,” Brett shrugs.
During the making of its follow-up, 1996’s Milk And Scissors, Brett suffered a mental breakdown. “I lost my mind,” he says, bluntly. “I went polar, in the wrong way.” He started weighing himself down with crosses, and sporting an eyebrow pencil moustache. During the manic swings, his brain teemed with ideas and insights. “It was like an acid trip. All my nerves were firing at once, like God had his extension cord up my ass.”
He didn’t sleep for days, and would wake Rennie up throughout the night. One day he came home from Bed, Bath & Beyond with several hundred dollars worth of pillows. “I had really gone beyond,” he cracks. His emotions see-sawed wildly. On September 9, 1995, Rennie checked him into a mental hospital.
Brett spent two weeks under medical supervision. He started taking lithium, and was released. He quit drinking for four months and, like many newly medicated artists, worried his creative abilities had been crippled. But he kept taking his pills. “I didn’t like the way the drug made me feel,” he allows, “but I sure as hell didn’t want to go back to the fucking nuthouse. That was horrible.”
The band finished Milk And Scissors. Although the guitars still rocked on tracks such as “Winnebago Skeletons”, the sound had shifted audibly toward classic country. The disc included the first of many vintage covers, in this case a crusty rendition of “The House Carpenter” that drew on Clarence Ashley’s 1930 recording.
A host of folks outside Chicago got their first taste of the Handsome Family when Jeff Tweedy asked them to be the opening act on Wilco’s Being There tour in 1996. “It’s un-fucking-believable that we opened for Wilco after Milk And Scissors,” says Brett, astonished to this day. “We sucked.”
The size of the audiences occasionally cowed them, too. “In Austin, Texas, I turned to Rennie during the show, and said, ‘I can’t make it.’ I was having a full-blown panic attack, onstage. I don’t get stage fright, but all this medication was fucking me up. By the end of that tour, I would just crawl to the back of the van and curl up in a fetal ball.”
As a live act, they still had some maturing to do. Tweedy recalls: “On the first tour they were a fairly ordinary band. Standard configuration: bass, guitar, drums…playing extraordinary songs with world-class lyrics.”
He invited them out on the road again a few years later, circa Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album. “By the time we did the second tour, they had a drum machine and an overall stage demeanor that matched, finally, the genius inherent in their music,” Tweedy observed. “They seemed way more comfortable with who they are. Off-color banter between a husband and wife (Rennie offering to blow people after the show for quarters) offset with songs depicting murder and mental illness achieves a balance rarely seen on rock stages.”
About the ’96 shows with Wilco, Rennie reflects, “It was our very first tour of the U.S., and the beginning of our band moving from being a weekend hobby into being the center of our lives. Unfortunately, as a band moves from hobby to full-time, not everyone sticks around for the ensuing life of motels and highways.” At the conclusion of the three-week trek, drummer Mike Werner, who had been with the band since its inception, resigned.
“I don’t think he enjoyed playing the newer songs,” says Brett, noting that they didn’t offer many opportunities for him to shine. “It was, ‘Here, play this plodding beat for four minutes, and don’t change.’ And we weren’t making any money.” (Werner received a whopping $15 at the end of the tour, Rennie recalls.) Werner already had a successful career as an illustrator; “it didn’t make any sense for him to go on tour with us,” Brett acknowledges.
