I. THEY SAY MISERY LOVES COMPANY. WE COULD START A COMPANY AND MAKE MISERY: FRUSTRATED, INCORPORATED.
The Soul Asylum girl looks sad. Troubled even. It’s a striking image though. I have always been a fan of striking artwork. Think Spoon’s Gimme Fiction, which also has a random girl:
Or Black Mountain’s Wilderness Heart (2015), which I think is the best cover of the 2010s:
My Morning Jacket’s At Dawn (2001):
The Gutter Twins’ Saturnalia (2008):
These are all striking images, with a sense of otherwordliness to them. It’s our world with a minor adjustment or two. So Soul Asylum’s Grave Dancers Union (1992) and Let Your Dim Light Shine both have that vibe:
I mean, why are those two young girls not wearing clothes and why are they following that woman down that curved road? The woman in the photo seems more like a cult leader than a mother, or at least that’s the vibe I get from the cover.
Let Your Dim Light Shine is more gothic. It reminds me of that front cover of that non-fiction smash hit book from the 90s, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
The statue above is strongly redolent of the girl from the front cover of Let Your Dim Light Shine. There’s an odd, day-for-night creepiness to it that make the two photos siblings in a sense. They are both creepy as hell. But you can’t talk about creepy front covers without talking about the first ever creepy LP cover, the one that started it all. Black Sabbath’s self-titled LP from 1970. The one with the ghostly, partially see-through nun.
There she stands:
Now, the song “Black Sabbath” narrates a scene in which a man comes upon this woman in the middle of nowhere. The first line of the song is “What is this that stands before me? Figure in black which points at me/Turn 'round quick and start to run/Find out I'm the chosen one Oh, noooooooooooo.”
Now, the woman isn’t actually pointing. But, with some poetic license, one could say that her eyes are following the viewer. She wields control, of that there is no doubt.
“Big black shape with eyes of fire/Telling people their desire/Satan's sitting there, he’s smiling/Watches those flames get higher and higher/Oh, no, no, please, God, help me.”
According to Black Sabbath, the woman is clearly a demon, or an agent of Satan, on Earth to do the bidding of the Dark Prince: “Is it the end, my friend? Satan's coming 'round the bend People running 'cause they're scared The people better go and beware No, no, please, no.”
Black Sabbath and Soul Asylum share almost nothing in common save for the fact that they were both much better live than on record. But while Sabbath went on to become rock gods, Soul Asylum scored one major hit “Runaway Train,” one minor hit “Somebody to Shove,” and one hit that landed on the charts somewhere between major and minor: “Misery.”
Indeed, Soul Asylum are a lot like the Screaming Trees in that hardly anybody listens to, much less is aware of, their output from the 1980s. Forming in Minneapolis in 1981, they released 4 albums that decade (1 major label debut for A&M and 3 album for Twin/Tone): Say What You Will, Clarence... Karl Sold the Truck (1984) and Made to Be Broken (1986), Hüsker Dü’s Bob Mould produced the latter. While You Were Out (1986) was made for Twin/Tone but distributed by A&M, who were courting the band, and 1988’s Hang Time was their major label debut. It sold well enough to keep them on the label but didn’t exactly set the world on fire. A collection of outtakes and rarities was released in EP format by Twin/Tone in 1989. According to the band’s Wikipedia, the title and cover art are both parodies of a Herb Alpert record.
Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’s Whipped Cream & Other Delights (1965)
Soul Asylum’s Clam Dip & Other Delights (1989)
Yeah, I’d say Soul Asylum lost that cover competition.
In 1990 Soul Asylum entered the studio with veteran drummer Steve Jordan producing (Jordan had been seen most recently on September 30, 1989 drumming “Rockin’ in the Free World” with Neil Young, Charlie Drayton, and Frank “Poncho” Sampedro. That performance is widely considered by critics as one of the greatest live rock television performances of all time. (The band, said one writer, looked like “a bunch of car thieves…”) That is such a great description. I can’t not post the video.
One last thing before I do: Years later Neil Young told his official biographer Jimmy McDonough that before the SNL set, his physical trainer put him to work lifting weights, doing sit-ups, pulls-ups, squats, you name it, to get his heart rate up to where it would normally be at the point in the set when they would typically play the song (usually an hour in). This explains why Neil Young is already sweating when he comes on and the set is blistering strong. (For LOLZ pay attention to 4:45 of the video where Frank Sampedro nearly kicks Neil in his ass. It’s hilarious.)
I can’t find a way to get Vimeo to do slo-mo but if you pause the video at 5:17 and press play, pausing 3 or 4 times while it’s still 5:17, Neil does a tremendous thing: He pulls all 6-strings off Old Black, his signature Gibson Les Paul. Now, whether you’re playing slinky 9s or tough 12s with a wound 3rd (G), it is NOT EASY to pull 6 string off in one motion, in one tug. If you pause 3-4 times @ 5:17, you can see that Young himself is amazed he did it. Anyway, Young’s drummer that night was Steve Jordan.
Wikipedia: During the 1970s and 1980s, Jordan was a member of the bands for the television shows Saturday Night Live and Late Night with David Letterman. In the mid-80s, he joined the X-Pensive Winos, Keith Richards non-Stones band. In 2005, he joined the John Mayer Trio.
Apparently, Jordan is the new drummer for the Rolling Stones, which would make a liar of both Mick and Keith, who said Charlie was the backbeat of the band and they’d never continue without him. Anyway, if anyone can replace Watts, it’s Steve Jordan.
Steve Jordan also played on a really weird Neil Young album called Landing on Water (1986). The single “Touch the Night” starts with a kinda bone-headed Joe Cocker riff, then segues into a spooky children’s choir and ‘80s-sound synth for the verses. Check it out:
Anyway Steve Jordan was more a session musician than a studio wizard, and he proved unable to transform the manic stage energy you see in that video into studio energy, and Soul Asylum’s first album of the 90s, titled And The Horse They Rode In On, was about as inspired as that abysmal front cover:
That cover is so bad it’s almost funny. But the main problem remained: The band was five albums in and they had still never hit the tape they way they sounded live. To make matters worse, the band had been touring non-stop for nine years and singer Dave Pirner’s hearing was shot. Over somber band meetings there was talk of packing it in.
Not ready to throw in the towel just yet, not when their contemporaries had seen such success (The Replacements were the underground American rock band of the 1980s, and during Soul Asylum’s many many tours they would often run into R.E.M., who were inevitably playing the nicer venue in whatever town they were in, whether Cincinnati or Butte, and staying at a nicer hotel.)
Dan Murphy, Soul Asylum’s lead guitarist, remembers running into Mike Mills one night somewhere in the Midwest in 1988, just after R.E.M. had signed with Warner Records for $12 million and total creative freedom. Mills seemed embarrassed that his band, who mere weeks earlier were just another independent American rock band criss-crossing the country and playing 200-seaters, were now a big rock band on a major label. Murphy waved that bullshit away. “Hey man, you have to do what’s right for you and your band. Anybody criticizing you for thinking about singing to a major? Have they been on tour for 8 years? Do they know what it’s like to sleep four guys to a single motel room, flipping coins to see who gets the bed? You guys have been in that same van since Chronic Town (R.E.M.’s 1982 debut EP), man. If somebody wants to give you money for a bus so you can keep playing shows and keep sounding like R.E.M., you’d be an idiot not to go for it.”
“Of course,” Murphy says, “Sometime in 1990 I ran into Mills in Chicago, and Green (R.E.M.’s 1988 album) had just gone quadruple platinum. He invited me to some hotel party but I didn’t end up going. A year later they were on the front cover of TIME Magazine. Was I jealous? Of course I was. But I didn’t think we were finished. I thought we had more music in us.”
But Pirner was still struggling with severe depression, tinnitus, and hearing loss, so Dan Murphy went over his house one night in 1990 with an acoustic, and the two of them started writing chord-and-vocal melody based songs, not songs written specifically to the sound of a plugged-in amplifier. Nothing against the latter…that’s how Paul Westerberg wrote that immortal opening riff to “Bastards of Young,” but a new approach was needed.
But by 1990 Westerberg was making quieter albums himself. The Replacements’ All Shook Down was, for all intents and purposes, a Paul Westerberg solo album. Most fans don’t consider it part of the canon, although I do. I think “When It Began” boasts a classic Replacements melodic chorus.
“Merry Go Round” and “Nobody” are excellent too.
Given the rest of the record, “My Little Problem” sounds a bit too much like capitulation to old times. Funny story: Apparently, after recording her vocals, Johnette Napolitano of Concrete Blonde left the studio to “go buy a pack of smokes” and never came back. Westerberg found this hilarious…there’s an interview on YouTube somewhere in which he relates the story, but if it were me? I would have taken it as an indictment of the music. Like, Napolitano thought so little of the material that she couldn’t even be bothered to hear the playback. Ouch. Talk about All Shook Down. Westerberg was also able to finagle a studio visit from the Velvet Underground’s John Cale to play viola on “Sadly Beautiful.”
When asked about the dogs on the cover in that same YouTube interview I can’t find, Westerberg lit his umpteenth cigarette and said “they just looked like they didn’t have a chance.” That is such a Westerbergian sentiment. I think I know what he meant though. It’s a popular myth, or old wive’s tale that if a dog gets too wet it can get lost forever because it can't smell its own home on its fur anymore.
It hasn’t been proven scientifically, but Tom Waits 1985 album Rain Dogs helped popularized the idea (fact or fiction, I don’t know) that a dog who gets wet enough will lose the scent of his own home and be unable to get back there. A rain dog is a lost dog. And the dogs on All Shook Down were lost rain dogs.
By the end of 1990, The Replacements, Minneapolis’ biggest band had thrown in the towel, and Soul Asylum, Minneapolis’ 3rd or 4th biggest band was writing an acoustic record because their lead singer needed a break from loud music. Murphy and Pirner put together a set of all new songs to try out locally and were quietly chuffed when one of the new ones, “Runaway Train” was rapturously received.
Murphy: We did a demo of it in a loft with a guy named Brian Paulson. The demo version is not that dissimilar to the version on Grave Dancers Union. It’s just two acoustic guitars, the same harmony vocals, and the same arrangement exactly.
Pirner: It was the first time that the band stopped trying to arrange songs in the practice space. That was the first time we had done anything like that as far as going, “We’re just going to record it. We’re not going to beat it to death. We’re going to get it on tape as quickly and spontaneously as possible.”
Murphy: We played it at the University of Minnesota, and our manager at the time was like, “That’s the one. That’s the one that’s going to change your band.” Our manager said he walked around the room and watched people. They initially thought it was a cover because it sort of sounded like a classic song.
The band knew they had a hit. Not just a hit but a career-changing hit. They recorded it as quickly as possible so no A&R guy could ruin it, and put another hit on there, the Pirner-penned “Somebody to Shove,” and the record was mixed, mastered, and released before half the band’s “people” at Columbia even knew it was out.
Of course, these people felt left out and left angry, bitter messages on Pirner and Murphy’s answering machines (they’ve kept the tapes to this day, just for laughs. Not to try and get anyone fired.) But once “Runaway Train” took off, the lackeys at Columbia couldn’t say anything. And when Tony Kaye approached the band with his revolutionary (for the time) video meant to appear as a public service announcement, the band and label were all in. Kaye even had different regions have placards for their geographical area. For example, instead of Toronto Much Music having a bunch of missing shots of people from the States, placards from Newfoundland all the way through Quebec, Ontario, the prairies of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, then the foothills of the Rocky Mountains outside Canmore in Alberta, and then missing persons from British Columbia, on the Pacific Coast. Similar changes were made to the Missing Person placards in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England (The UK version of the video featured Vicky Hamilton and Dinah McNicol, who each went missing in 1991. Their remains were found in 2007 at a house in Margate and a man named Peter Tobin has been convicted of both murders), Australia, Japan, even Russia.
Ib. DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD
The public service announcement aspect of the video did help recover a lot of lost youth, 26 in total according to director Tony Kaye, but it also had the unintentional effect of returning people to abusive situations:
In 2006, guitarist Dan Murphy stated in an interview with Pasadena Weekly that some of the cases featured in the video had ended in tragedy: “Some weren't the best scenarios. I met a fireman on the East Coast whose daughter was in the end of the video, and he'd been in a bitter custody battle with his wife over her,” Murphy said. “It turned out the girl hadn’t run away, but was killed and buried in her backyard by her mother. Then on tour, another girl told us laughingly ‘You ruined my life’ because she saw herself on the video at her boyfriend’s house and it led her being forced back into a bad home situation.”
So that was an unintentional consequence of trying to be good. And it happens. For example, have you seen Taxi Driver? If you have, then you know that at no point does Jodie Foster’s Iris Steensma ask to be helped out of her situation. In fact, she makes it clear to Travis that she does not want to go home:
TRAVIS: Where is home?
IRIS: I got so many sunglasses. I couldn't live without my shades, man. I must have twelve pair of shades. She finds a pink-tinted pair and puts them on.
TRAVIS: Where?
IRIS: Pittsburgh.
TRAVIS: I ain't ever been there, but it don't seem like such a bad place.
IRIS (voice rising): Why do you want me to go back to my parents? They hate me. Why do you think I split? There ain't nothin there.
TRAVIS: But you can't live like this. It's hell. Girls should live at home.
IRIS (playfully): Didn't you ever hear of women's lib?
TRAVIS (ignoring her question) Young girls are supposed to dress up, go to school, play with boys, you know, that kinda stuff.
IRIS: God, you are square.
This is not to say she wants to stay in her position as Higgins’ pimp. Yes, there is a scene where Harvey Keitel’s Matthew “Sport” Higgins is strong arming her and forcing her out of DeNiro’s cab, and the only scene in Taxi Driver that doesn’t include DeNiro is the scene in which Higgins and Steensma seem to be locked in some kind of
You can’t save everybody, and the band learned this the hard way, both when they found out about the girl who was forced back into a bad home situation, and again in May 2004, when Karl Mueller, a longtime smoker, was diagnosed with Esophageal cancer. He passed away June 17 2005. In July 2006, Soul Asylum released The Silver Lining, a studio album featuring Mueller's last work.
Former Replacements and current Guns ‘n Roses bassist Tommy Stinson joined Soul Asylum for the Silve Lining tour and stayed in the band until 2012. In another connection between the two bands, at the beginning of The Replacements 1982 EP Stink, “just before the first track, “Kids Don't Follow,” audio can be heard of the Minneapolis police breaking up a rent party at The Harmony Building in Minneapolis. It is possible by listening carefully to hear one of the audience members curse the police. The audience member in question is believed to be Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum.”
But the Soul Asylum attempt to re-write “Runaway Train” still felt (and feels now) like an attempt to record something that would “crossover” from Alternative stations to Country stations or whatever the hell “Runaway Train” had managed to do fo the band. Although “Misery” feels like an attempt at a re-write, by no means is it a Nickelback Pro Tools rewrite. Have any of you heard “How You Remind Me of Someday?” where two of Nickelback's #1 hits are split between speakers and you can hear just how insanely similar they are. Like they went to a factory assembly line and asked “One radio-friendly mid-tempo rocker please,” and a few minutes later, out popped this abomination:
II: “THIS IS HOW YOU REMIND ME OF SOMEDAY”
III. KIDS
The pre-chorus "Frustrated, Incorporated" is a brilliant line, it really is, and it speaks to the commodification of youth dissatisfaction that was becoming monetized around that time.
For example, if you look at the front cover of the 1991 Sub Pop compilation The Grunge Years, you see two men in suits shaking hands, talking on an (ancient) cellphone and pointing at (another ancient) laptop.
Sub Pop and their contemporaries were aware of the mass monetization of grunge music (and style...fashion magazines reported major upticks in the sales of flannel shirts and had their models wear them in their autumn issues). By 1994 it was a worldwide phenomenon, not just relegated to music or Seattle. Larry Clark's 1995 independent film KIDS, written by wunderkind Harmony Korine, a random Clark he met whilst skating @ Washington Square Park. Clark cast Justin Pierce as Caspar, the film’s lead, just through watching him skate. Nobody had any idea if the kid could act or not but he could certainly skate. “How hard could it be?” he kept saying to Korine, over and over, blowing him off for table reads so he could go snort ecstasy in his girlfriend’s Queens basement while her annoyed brother, armed with a Telecaster and some sour Zeppelin riffs, looked on. It turned out that Pierce was a naturally talented actor. After the success of KIDS he appeared in Next Friday, the sequel to Ice Cube and Chris Tucker’s hugely popular 1995 film Friday. Released January 12 2000, Next Friday was an even bigger hit than it’s predecessor.
After that Pierce filmed two episodes for the primetime PG-13 series Malcolm in the Middle and did a few other independent films. According to his agent, he was “very concerned” that he career was stalling out. They say it’s hard to make it, but it’s even harder to keep it. You only get one chance to get your foot in the door, and Pierce was reluctant to star in too many indies lest he become known as some kind of Indie King, which is what had happened to Parker Posey in the ‘90s. No studio would hire her because she was the “Indie Queen.” Lucky for Posey, Chloe Sevigny wanted her title. “It’s all yours,” Posey told her breathlessly, thinking thank fucking God. While Sevigny starred in fare like American Psycho (2000), Demonlover (2002); Party Monster and Dogville (both 2003); and The Brown Bunny (2004) the latter showing a graphic unsimulated fellatio scene, Parkey Posey was allowed to be in studio films again, with studio salaries, starting with You've Got Mail (1998), Scream 3 (2000), Josie and the Pussycats (2001), Personal Velocity, The Sweetest Thing (both 2002), Blade: Trinity (2004), Superman Returns, Fay Grim (both 2006), Broken English (2007), The Eye (2008), Spring Breakdown (2009), Inside Out (2011), Irrational Man (2015), Café Society (2016), and Columbus (2017).
In a 2012 interview Posey told IndieWire that the term Indie Queen was more of a hindrance than a help:
“I was trying to work in studio movies, but they wouldn't hire me. I’d get feedback from my agent saying, 'She's too much of an indie queen.' And then on the other side, my name doesn't get the financing to do a movie over $1 million. And I'm called 'the indie queen.' So it's really a challenging path because I know so much about the indie side of the business. Because I grew up in it.”
A similar thing was happening to Pierce. All of the roles being offered him were the same as what he’d done in KIDS. But he was so young and therefore may have lacked the maturity to weather the storm, or perhaps to try Europe or the stage? He had the talent. Instead he went another way. On July 10 2000, Pierce was found dead by suicide in his motel room in Paradise, Nevada. Michael K. Williams is another example of an actor so identified with one role (Omar in HBO’s The Wire) that he never got any real chances to show what else he could do, acting-wise. He was found dead on September 6 2021 from an accidental fentanyl overdose. Williams had struggled with cocaine addiction his whole adult life. I do not believe for a second that he suddenly decided to try fentanyl. I think he was sold bad coke spiked with fent and it killed him.
Pierce and William’s story is similar to how the man who directed Gone With The Wind (1939) wanted nothing more than to outdo that particular work so that he would not be remembered solely as the man who wrote Gone With The Wind.
Rebecca (1940), which Selznick produced but did not direct (you may have heard of the guy who directed it…some British fellow named Alfred Hitchcock), also won the Academy Award for Best Picture, but the Oscars were not as celebrated then as they are now.
Determined to outdo GWTW, Selznick conceived a Western drama film that was to be his masterpiece. He worked on it for years, convinced that it was better than both Gone With The Wind or Rebecca. The new film was titled Duel in the Sun and, after a long and troublesome production, was released in 1946. Here is a quote from Wikipedia:
With a huge budget, the film is known for causing moral upheaval because of the then risqué script written by Selznick. And though it was a troublesome shoot with a number of directors, the film would be a major success. The film was the second highest-grossing film of 1947 and was the first movie that Martin Scorsese saw, inspiring Scorsese's own directorial career.
Despite his own Herculean efforts, and the critical praise of Duel as one of the great films of the century, you can’t argue with public taste, so when David O. Selznick died in 1965, newspapers all over the United States and the world reported that the man who’d written the screenplay for Gone with the Wind was dead. Just as he’d feared. Few, if any newspapers, mentioned Duel in the Sun, or Rebecca for that matter. Just as he’d feared, Gone with the Wind had overshadowed the rest of Selznick's career. It has received critical reappraisal, championed by directors Martin Scorcese (who told James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio that this was the first film he saw and he still loves it to this day). Peter Bogdanovich and David Stratton have both spoken highly of it as well.
Harmony Korine, the 18-year old kid who wrote Larry Clark’s KIDS, was given free reign on the storyline as long as there was an HIV element to the plot. Korine apparently told Clark: “I've been waiting all my life to write this story.” Clark casted unknowns he met in Washington Square Park. Unlike in Hollywood, where every actor is like “pick me! pick me!” the kids who would soon star in KIDS thought Clark was a loser and a liar to boot. Clark was an artist, however. “Routinely carrying a camera from 1963 to 1971 Clark produced pictures of his drug-shooting coterie that have been described by critics as ‘exposing the reality of American suburban life at the fringe and ... shattering long-held mythical conventions that drugs and violence were an experience solely indicative of the urban landscape.’”
I like how Clark showed that drug use wasn’t just a city thing. Drugs were, are, and always will be available in suburban, urban, and rural areas, with the prices rising in that order. The same dimebag that’ll cost you $10 in New York City (hence the name dimebag) will cost you $20 in Fargo, Minnesota. It’ll cost you $40 in Fairbank, Alaska.
Anyway, to gain the trust of the kids he wanted in KIDS, he started skating at the age of 49. He did irreversible damage to his knees, but he earned the trust of Justin Pierce, who he really wanted as his lead. Once Pierce was on board, the rest followed. His performance earned him a 1995 Independent Spirit Award (kinda the underground Oscars).
Three weeks later he handed Clark the script. The theatrical release didn’t do much, but the film became a huge video rental store hit, and launched the careers of Chloë Sevigny, Rosario Dawson, and, to a lesser extent, the aforementioned Justin Pierce. As VICE put it in their 20-year anniversary article:
Korine's provocative script depicted the daily life of morally corrupt teenagers who partake in illicit drugs, statutory rape and various crimes. Clark's documentary-style approach to shooting as well as the insistence on casting real life NYC kids and implanting an HIV outbreak into the plot gave KIDS an eerily "too real" vibe. It may have been praised by the likes of Roger Ebert, the Village Voice and the New York Times, but it had far more detractors up against it, some even calling it "kiddie porn."
Of course, free from all of the controversy was the film's soundtrack. In 1995, there was no American indie rock artist quite so revered as Lou Barlow (especially in my opinion). The poster boy of lo-fi, Barlow had amassed a substantial library of music up to that point through his many projects: Sebadoh, Sentridoh, The Folk Implosion, Lou Barlow, and previously, Deep Wound and Dinosaur Jr. Korine was a fan of Barlow's work and handpicked him to provide original music for the film.
I’m a J. Mascis supporter (back in the 90s you had to pick, Barlow or Dinosaur Jr sans Barlow, sorta like how 60s kids fought over Stones or Beatles) but I love what Barlow did on the KIDS soundtrack. He really gave it his all. Instead of using the film’s notoriety as a springboard to greater success (something many artists would have done without even blinking), Barlow wrote music to fit each and every scene. Jesus, that poignant shots near the end, where a homeless New Yorker keeps keeling over but then waking up just before he hits the sidewalk, over and over again, it’s a really beautiful thing, and it doesn’t feel exploitative like “hey lookit these poor freaks.” It feels very much like a forecast, I thought as a young viewer, a forecast of where Telly and Caspar are headed, of where they were always headed…where they were always gonna end up, strewn about on streets they once ruled, too weak and sick to skateboard anymore…hell too weak and sick to do anything anymore except wait to die.
Barlow’s sound collages, coupled with Eric Edwards raw footage, really really give the film verisimilitude and beauty. Here is Lou Barlow in a 2015 interview with STEREOGUM:
I was really proud of what we did. We recorded that stuff lo-fi on cassette, but that kind of texture sounded great in a movie theater. Things have changed quite a bit as far as the way people use low-fidelity recordings in movies and stuff. Back then, when I saw the film, it still felt kind of unbelievable. I remember seeing the movie and thinking, “You know what? This works. It’s cool.” I was psyched. I mean, these were things I had made on little shitty portable tape recorders. One of the pieces — I think it was “Raise The Bells” — I made it on the portable tape recorders that I found in my parents’ house, using a very cheap keyboard, and it sounded awesome. I was really pleased. It’s funny too, because everything did just get back to normal after that. I was never asked to score another film or make another soundtrack. Nothing like that ever happened. It wasn’t my “in” to the world of scoring films or anything. I was never asked to do it again.
STEREOGUM: That’s really surprising to me. I feel like that soundtrack gets referenced all the time among film people I know.
BARLOW: I don’t know. The thing with the Folk Implosion … I mean, we did a record after that, and we finally signed to a major label on the back of “Natural One.” We really knuckled down and did this real pretty big-production record, but we did it really organically in regular studios, but that record totally tanked. I hear people telling me a lot that the production of that particular record — One Part Lullaby — really influenced them. I’m like, “What? We were dropped from the label after that!” That was the last time that I’ve ever been given a budget to make a record. There was a Folk Implosion record after that I’d done without John, but that tanked too. Still to this day I have never been handed a real budget to do a record.
STEREOGUM: Oh man. That is … such a bummer, actually.
It was the mid-90s man. Oh well. Whatever. Never mind. The whole aesthetic loathed eagerness and enthusiasm. It celebrated...no, it didn't celebrate anything because celebration implies joy. It admitted certain characters into its amoebic scene. Every band came armed with a layer of irony that protected them against criticism.
IV: JON SPENCER BLUES EXPLOSION v BLUES HAMMER
Like the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, for example. If they were ever accessed of being insensitive or improperly respectful or putting on a show of white minstrelsy, they could just point to the name and say "well, it's always been a joke from the beginning." It would be much harder for JSBX to start out now, in 2022, as a band, releasing songs with titles like "Controversial Negro," "Reverse Willie Horton," and "Afro."
And, of course, at the nadir of their career, when they'd released their absolute worst record, the film Ghost World (2001) came out. There is a scene in the film where a ragtime aficionado played by Steve Buscemi goes to a bar to see an elderly ragtime musician perform. He is largely ignored by the crowd, one of whom is a woman who tells Buscemi "oh if you like blues, you really gotta check out Blues Hammer. They're so great." Then Blues Hammer takes the stage. And even as a fan of JSBX I could tell that director Terry Zwigoff was taking a swipe at them. A swat. A slap. In Ghost World the band is called Blues Hammer. The bassist wears a cowboy hat, and the lead singer introduces the band by asking the crowd: “All right, people, are you ready to boogie? 'Cause we gonna play some authentic... way-down-in-the-delta blues. So get ready to rock your world!”
The lead singer is a white boy with spiked gelled hair, whose first song opens with the couplet "Well, I been plowin' behind the mule, son/Picking cotton all day long/Yes, I been ploooooowin'/Picking cotton all day long." The women who told Buscemi he'd love Blues Hammer starts shaking her hips and knocks his pint onto his crotch so it looks like he pissed himself. He goes home, obviously. Anyway.
V. RE-WRITING A SUCCESSFUL HIT SONG WITHOUT RESORTING TO PRO-TOOLS NICKELBACK TRICKERY
Back to Soul Asylum and “Misery.” Other bands have tried to re-write their biggest hits, with varying degrees of success. Some QOTSA fans disagree with me, but I think "Tangled Up In Plaid" is an obvious (and poor) re-write of "No One Knows." It's got that polka beat that propelled "No One Knows" forward, it's got Josh Homme's relaxed drawl in the chorus which switches to a louder approach each chorus. That's my opinion. Some disagree. You tell me.
VI: BART’S A ‘TRY HARD’
Remember the Simpsons episode where the family stays at Flanders' cottage for a weekend and Lisa makes friends? Initially, Bart tries to win the friendship of these kids by performing a bunch of difficult skateboard tricks, but Lisa's friends are not impressed because, as one kids says, "dude, that whole thing just smacked of...effort." "And who does he think he is with that sling shot?" Lisa's other friend giggles. "Dennis the Menace?" See, in the mid-90s it became cool not to care. Or too seem like one was trying to overcome some topdown authoritative system. At one point one of Lisa’s new friends says “my Mom would already be interrupting with rice krispie squares and Tang” and Marge, who has just entered the room with those goodies, pulls a stealthy 180.
Of course, Bart tries to sabotage Lisa’s new friendships when he hears her using his “don’t have a cow, man,” catch phrase. He brings the school year book over to show Lisa’s friends, where she is in every club imaginable, holding the word “GERUND” in one of them as Bart goes “Grammar Rodeo: Head Buckaroo!” Lisa’s friends are shocked, but they don’t cast her out. She simply runs off screaming. Here’s the scene the next morning:
Of course, Bart’s plan backfires when Lisa’s friends turn Homer’s car into a beautiful piece of art.
Lisa: Does this mean you still want to be friends... even though I tried to cover up my nerdish leanings?
“Look,” says the girl whose name I can’t remember. “We don't care who you were... you can't fake the kind of good person that you are.”
”Yeah,” adds one of the boys. “Yeah. You taught us about cool things...like nature and why we shouldn't drink seawater.”
It’s a lovely ending. But we mustn’t forget the earlier part where Bart assumes his skateboard trickery will win them over to his side. It doesn’t work because in early to mid 1990s America, slackerdom was cool. Dissatisfaction. Remember this one?
VII: DESPITE ALL MY RAGE I AM STILL JUST A RAT IN A CAGE
The movie Slackers (Linklater's 1990 version, of course), and his more fully realized version Dazed and Confused (1993). My Own Private Idaho (1991). Nirvana's Nevermind became almost a mantra for a generation, a meme before memes existed online. There is always a sense of limited mobility and/or limited ability to rise above one’s circumstances.
Soul Asylum's 1995 follow-up disc to their multi-platinum selling Grave Dancer's Union (1992) was moulded from this muck. "Misery" came out during a very specific time in American alternative music culture. It was cool to not care about stuff. Being eager was lame. Enthusiasm was lame. The band had made a few halfhearted "we're still punk!" moves by refusing to play "Runaway Train" at the White House, despite being invited specifically to do so. Lead guitarist/singer Dave Pirner would later admit regretting not playing the song, not because some Clinton aide brought it up, but because "some young kid, 4 or 5 years old,” scolded him for it from her mama's shoulders: “‘You didn't play the train song.’” He apologized and played it for her with his unplugged electric guitar somewhere in the West Wing of the White House.
Anyway, the biggest album of the year was Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, a truly ambitious record that Billy Corgan proclaimed “The Wall for Generation X.” with songs like Soundgarden's "Fell on Black Days," The Counting Crows "A Long December," (possibly the most depressing ballad to ever become a radio hit) and the Pumpkins' "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" dominating the radio waves, Soul Asylum figured a dark lyrical and visual approach was the way to go.
The resultant album, Let Your Dim Light Shine, is a perfect encapsulation of the era it was conceived in. The era of KIDS, Reality Bites, Kurt Cobain's untimely suicide, and the disappearance of the Manic Street Preachers' Richey Edwards see med to have plenty of room for another cultural artifact that pushed forward the Generation X mandate: Why Bother? (An excellent Weezer song, btw). “Misery” is a good song, but it is redolent of the assembly-line style of song construction again, isn’t it? The "Frustrated, Incorporated" line is brilliant. Think about it. You just put in a bunch of 1995 ingredients: depression, a feeling of emptiness brought about by conspicuous consumption, the feeling that your life is passing you by, the sense that you are somehow dimmer than those around you, and that if you were to let your dim light shine, you may not even be noticed. As cool a song as it is, it just somehow never gets going for me. The verse and the pre-chorus are the best parts. The chorus kinda sucks, and the rhyme scheme is lazy as hell. “I'd do it for you/would you do it for me?/forever after happily/making Misery.”
Anyway, 1990s alt-rock bands always jumped at the opportunity to be self-deprecating. Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque. Nirvana allegedly poking fun at their leader’s ostensible fixation on suicide with "I Hate MySelf And I Wanna Die." (The joke was less funny after he actually killed himself.)
But I still laugh when Dave Pirner brings out a trumpet @ 3:41 of their appearance on Late Show with David Letterman to play the hook from Wings' "Silly Love Songs" before an annoyed-looking Paul Shaffer runs over & confiscated the trumpet, like a harried fifth grade music teacher. Obviously, Shaffer was in on the joke.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom for music, regardless of how depressing “A Long December” was (and is). The Smashing Pumpkins “1979” pointed a brave new direction (plus dig that joke on the bumper sticker: PROUD PARENTS OF A D STUDENT), a direction more sample-based (as “Ava Adore” would prove) but no less melodic and beautiful. “With the headlight pointing at the dawn,” Corgan sings. His burnout outcast losers in the video driving “faster than the speed of sound, faster than [they’d] thought [they’d] go, beneath the sound of hope.”
I always chose to hear it as “believe the sound of hope.”
Because that’s what I believe.
There’s always hope. Maybe Justin Pierce just couldn’t hear it.
Let your dim light shine.
Soul Asylum’s“Misery” may be remembered best now as the song that plays over the end of Kevin Smith’s I (2006), but some of us know better, don’t we. :)
VIII: WHAT IS THIS THAT STANDS BEFORE ME?
On February 13 2020, Loudwire tracked down the model, photographed by Keith Macmillan, from Black Sabbath’s first LP cover. Her name is Louisa Livingstone and she is currently an electronic music artist. From Loudwire:
Macmillan recruited an 18 or 19 year-old, five-foot model named Louisa Livingstone for the shoot, which took place at Mapledurham Watermill in the English county of Oxfordshire. She wore a black cloak with nothing underneath it, and they experimented with some shots that were "slightly more risqué," according to the photographer.
“We decided none of that worked,” he said. “Any kind of sexuality took away from the more foreboding mood. But she was a terrific model. She had amazing courage and understanding of what I was trying to do.”
Livingstone commented on the shoot herself, recalling that it had been “freezing cold” when they were taking the photos. “I had to get up at about 4 o’clock in the morning. Keith was rushing around with dry ice, throwing it into the water. It didn’t seem to be working very well, so he ended up using a smoke machine,” she explained. “I’m sure he said it was for Black Sabbath, but I don’t know if that meant anything much to me at the time.” The model, who is now estimated to be around 68 or 69-years old, has released electronic music in the last few years under the name Indreba. Check out her songs here:
https://indreba.bandcamp.com/
(Alas, as of Jan 2022, all songs have been removed til further notice. So I checked out YouTube because, as Jerome Flynn remarks in the 2016 Black Mirror episode from season 3 “there’s no cure for the internet,” you can hear Indreba’s songs here. They are relaxing and pretty. Reminiscent of Tycho.)
So the woman in the below photograph:
Is making the music in the below YouTube video:
All efforts to crack down the person who is on the front cover of Let Your Dim Light Shine have so far proved unsuccessful. Soul Asylum were nowhere near as big as Black Sabbath, so I doubt the interest exists to help me find her via an army of internet sleuths. You never know though. If I find she whose dim light shineth, you’ll be the first to know.
Let your dim light shine.