Nick Cave’s Song of the South : Brooding rocker/author takes central cue from Faulkner, O’Connor

Like any self-respecting genius--and the word has been hurled his way more than a few times--Nick Cave seems destined to be misunderstood.

As leader of the Australian punk combo the Birthday Party, Cave earned a reputation as one of the most savagely extreme performers ever to commandeer a microphone, and came to be worshipped by a degenerate contingent of the punk community. He wound up a reluctant messiah who wanted no part of the drugged-out scene that grew up around him.

When the Birthday Party went up in flames in 1983 and Cave began recording highly stylized renditions of unlikely tunes like “In the Ghetto” with his Bad Seeds band, longtime fans thought he was kidding. He wasn’t. Cave loves the kind of excessively sentimental songs typical of Burt Bacharach and Glen Campbell.

Cave operates in the pop arena, but snarling loner that he is, popularity concerns him not a whit. He writes modern fiction, but the sentiments he expresses and the epic scale and style of his writing are more in tune with Melville. He has never taken a Hollywood meeting, but he appeared in two films last year.

A modern man of letters fed on Iggy Pop, Elvis and the Bible, Cave fits into nobody’s marketing demographic, but has nonetheless become a favored subject in the European press, which elevates him to sainthood one week and brands him a banal egomaniac the next. A consumptive vision of alabaster skin, jet-black hair and long, lanky limbs, Cave is a journalist’s dream, and the press has taken to him with such frenzied glee that his work has often been lost in the melee.

“They keep piling myth upon myth on me and it’s now a machine gone way out of control,” says Cave, 28. “It used to really disgust and hurt me, but I’m now able to stand outside this monster the press has built up and watch it with amusement because I don’t feel part of it anymore. I’ve come to realize it’s just rock ‘n’ roll business and that a rock journalist’s work is to create ridiculous walking cartoons.”

The press has had a field day with the nomadic Cave, who splits his time among London, Berlin, and Australia, but grudgingly concedes that he is a gifted and creatively driven man. This year alone saw the release of an album of new material titled “Tender Prey,” the publication of a collection of lyrics, prose, poems, short stories and drawings called “King Ink,” and appearances in “Ghosts of the Civil Dead” (a film he also scripted), and Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire.”

On the eve of his first U.S. tour in two years (he plays Bogart’s on Thursday and the Club With No Name on Friday and Saturday), he recently put the finishing touches on “And the Ass Saw the Angel,” a massive novel he has labored over for three years. It will be published this year by Black Spring Press.

A reclusive, soft-spoken man, Cave is admittedly obsessive about his work, and all his projects explore the same basic themes: the yearning, remorse and dread that surround unrequited love, revenge and salvation.

His recent European hit single, “The Mercy Seat,” is an inquiry on the theme of justice written from the point of view of a man on Death Row, juxtaposing the throne of God with the electric chair. Also featured on “Tender Prey” are a murderer, a voyeur,a jailhouse chant titled “Up Jumped the Devil,” and an ominous anthem of pending apocalypse titled “City of Refuge.”

The dominant influences on Cave’s writing have been pulp fiction, morbid country music and the Bible, which attracts him as literary work and moral code. He takes his central cue from the leading writers of the American South, William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Like them, Cave turns a brooding eye on star-crossed souls undone by forces beyond their understanding. Masterful at evoking a sense of a place in the grip of a fevered dream, Cave suggests that the very Earth itself is simmering as it conspires with the gods to drive men to ruin.

“My ideas about the South are central to a mythical world I’ve created which serves as a background for my novel,” Cave says. “It’s not set in the South as such, but takes place in some remote part of the world that could as much be in Australia as America.”

Described by Cave as “a comic novel in the manner of Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Wiseblood,’ ” “And the Ass Saw the Angel” is a violent saga told from the point of view of a lying voyeur. While Cave explains the book as an exploration of alienation, obsession and voyeurism, in a larger sense it’s an exposition on the subject of faith.

“It’s possible to get through life without a religious structure but I don’t think that’s a very fruitful way to live,” says Cave. “I’ve been dabbling with a lot of vague religious inclinations, but I’m reassessing all that and at the moment don’t know where I stand in regard to my religious beliefs. However, I do believe people need some element of spirituality in their life. Whether or not it has anything to do with God is another thing.”

Though there’s plenty of food for thought in Cave’s recent output, the European press has been more interested in the fact that Cave recently came to grips with a long-term drug problem.

“Entering the drug clinic isn’t something I feel a great need to talk about, but the press has made quite a big deal of it,” he says.

“They sold me as dirty merchandise for a while and now they’re selling me as clean merchandise. Both are equally false and insidious, and I’m getting tired of having to weigh up my life in terms of whether or not I was on drugs. I always thought the judgements people used to pass on me would stop if I quit drugs, but they haven’t. They’re exactly the same.”

While Cave isn’t particularly keen on discussing his drug cure, he is willing to talk about recent changes in a more abstract way. “Over the last years I’ve had blinkers on about a lot of things but I feel like a lot of chains were lifted off me when I finished my book.

“The book takes many of the ideas that have been echoed in my songs and explores them to the point of exhaustion, and now that the novel is out of the way I feel free to look in new directions. Having said that, I must say I have a certain temperament that does lean toward certain emotions, and I don’t feel like that has changed at all.”