The bizarre dream that inspired ‘Vivadixisubmarinetransmissionplot’ by Sparklehorse
Perhaps fitting for an artist who named his band Sparklehorse—and even more fitting for a man who collaborated with both Tom Waits and David Lynch—that Mark Linkous was inspired by dream logic. His music reflected that, too: fractured yet beautiful soundscapes built around timeless songwriting, lingering in your subconscious like something half-remembered from decades ago or just yesterday.
Linkous’ voice was a gossamer-thin whisper that contained fragments of the harsh life he had lived until he tragically ended it at the age of 47. To this day, there are vanishingly few bands that match Sparklehorse in their sound. I mean, who could? It makes sense that the band, as a concept, was the sound of someone giving up on a career in commercial music. Since the early 1980s, Linkous had fronted indie rock bands Dancing Hoods and Salt Chunk Mary, both of which achieved some word-of-mouth success and famous fans but ultimately fizzled out.
Linkous then moved from Los Angeles back to his hometown of Richmond, Virginia, where he began, as he put it to Rolling Stone, “Abandoning a lot of things and just starting from scratch and learning how to write again—learning how to make art out of pain or clay.”
Inspired by his die-hard love for Waits, he decided to move away from bog-standard indie rock tropes into an altogether more esoteric world. A world of gothic Americana meets eerily distorted power-pop, beautiful in its way but still haunting. After writing the first batch of songs for this new project, Linkous formed a band to play them, tapping up his brother Matt Linkous and a number of local musicians from the Richmond scene.
In true Linkous fashion, he named his band in a typically instinctual fashion, combining two words he liked the sound of together: sparkle and horse. In a quite frankly insane stroke of luck, this dedication to doing things his way and not playing the game was what got him signed to Capitol, a significant break a decade and a half in the making.
Lord only knows what the suits must have thought when Linkous decided to title his new outfit’s debut effort Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot. His explanation for the title probably didn’t clear up any reservations they had about the record either, despite the fact that it was perfectly in keeping with everything else that had inspired the album.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Linkous described the title as coming from “a dream I had about General Lee having a crude submarine back in the Civil War, and I could hear an old-time band playing inside, all distorted by the water.” The record was rapturously received by critics on release and made a cult superstar out of Linkous, something he’d remain until his passing 15 years after the album’s release.
And now, 30 years after the album’s release, it remains a genuine inspiration and the kind of success story that might not even be possible in today’s music scene. After being chewed up and spat out for trying to play the game, a forward-thinking musician, an artist in the most genuine sense of the word, decided to focus on his own artistic vision.
By listening to nothing more than his own desires, he made one of the most acclaimed albums of the 1990s. Here’s hoping more musicians are given opportunities to do the same these days.
