Developing the Negative

Mal Content: "It was never the ax in the head that turned me on," says Malinowski (center). "I always liked the downtime moments. The scenes where the boy is spending time in his bedroom, just contemplating the situation."
Photo By: roberta briggs

Inside The Collingwood's cinematic songs of loss and yearning.

by Shaun Brady

I first met Chris Malinowski when I was a guitar-wielding 13-year-old at Mal's Music, his father's Newark, Del., shop, to begin what turned out to be a few years of fruitless guitar lessons. Mal (Sylvester Malinowski, if you care to stand on formality), who taught me only briefly before entrusting my six-string future to Chris, was the perfect teacher/cheerleader. He talked to aspiring teenage guitar gods as equals, and made every kid who passed through his doors feel like they were mere steps away from rock-star status. Yet he brooked no bullshit, whether from student or from parent. It came as a profound shock when Chris and I sat down for this interview and I heard that his father had passed away almost two years prior.

At the same time that he was showing me proper fretboard techniques, Chris Malinowski led Freakshow, a makeup-covered shock-rock band that emerged from coffins onstage to perform horror-film serenades. Freakshow's bassist, Eric Bolen, later reteamed with Malinowski in his current group, The Collingwood, playing on both of their CDs before his own untimely death last October. Malinowski says that both passings, coming so close together, were devastating. "Like somebody had just taken a handful of me out of my chest."

He and Bolen met when they were 9 and formed their first band shortly thereafter. "I played my first gig with Eric at a Webelos meeting in Avondale, Pa., in February of 1980 and I played my last show with him at The Fire in Philadelphia in October of 2004." At the time of that final show, Bolen was playing the bass with one finger. He had suffered a car accident the previous Christmas Eve that cost him his middle finger and the use of two others. "We were in the studio mixing the new disc, and he brought a bass with him and started jamming along with the songs. I'm like, "My God, this guy's doing this with one finger.' He was in pain, but it was working out."

"The nuance that all of this loss has created really is inherent in all of the songs," muses Malinowski. There is an autumnal longing in The Collingwood's music, the wistful guitars and half-buried vocals evoking long-abandoned, dust-filled rooms and the last light of dusk falling on empty suburban streets. The fact that the songs were written well before any of these events makes it "an existential longing, but then these things became manifest with the loss of my father and Eric."

The songs as written express a different sort of loss, one that Malinowski finds difficult to articulate but that involves the lost ideal of adulthood as viewed through the eyes of adolescence, "and whatever enchantment I gave the tiny things that are sometimes there and sometimes not there anymore."

"Overthinking something like walking in someone else's house that I had never been in before and feeling almost a cinematic déj• vu, like I'd been there before in a film. Whatever that intangible is, I try to create that. I don't even know what I'm homesick for."

Malinowski's cinematic sense stems from a lifetime spent hooked on movies. He studied film at Ithaca College in New York, after having consumed a steady diet of horror flicks while growing up. But "it was never the ax in the head that turned me on," he explains. "I always liked the downtime moments. The scenes where the boy is spending time in his bedroom, just contemplating the situation. Establishing shots of a house or a town. There's something really comfortable about those scenes for me. I walk outside and suddenly my life becomes magical because I'm looking at something similar to what I had seen on the screen. I guess it's that immortalization of the mundane."

That feeling is crystallized in The Collingwood's lyrics, which are more imagistic than narrative, an aural slideshow of impressions that forgo the concrete for the sensual. He also hopes to capture it in Alms, You Say, a short film he's written and plans to direct later this summer. The film is "about a teenage vagabond who, via coming into contact with mundane things in his life, sends a wisp of totemic remembrance to three individuals living in this seaside town where he also lives. It's not terribly narrative, it's very vague and, like the music, is very feeling-oriented."

Wednesday's show celebrates the release of The Collingwood's new CD, Sylvester to the Bzz Myapp Accompaniment, which Malinowski hopes will find its way to people "who would really appreciate this, who would cry to it, who would fuck to it, who would laugh to it, who would shit to it, really make it their own."

"I want it to get to the right audience, that's what's important," he says. "I don't want to die without that happening."

The Collingwood plays Wed., July 13, 8 p.m., $7, The Khyber, 56 S. Second St., 215-238-5888, www.thekhyber.com.