Skeptics of Yoko Ono’s power to hold musical interest — quite a few remain, alas — are directed to Approximately Infinite Universe. This 1973 album, boasting John Lennon on guitar, is the closest Ono, well, approximated studio rock verities until Double Fantasy, 1980′s collaboration with John. Because Ono preferred unusual chord combinations and sprung rhythm tempos, few tracks sound like Doobie Brothers, Eagles, or even Steely Dan; the musicians seem to respond to her inflections and stresses instead of working out conventional arrangements. The results are the familiar refracted through the strange: check out “Kite Song” and “Move On Fast.” This double album also redefines “sprawl” as a vital kind of counterpoint: when she essays singer-songwriter balladry, she complements it with a tongue in cheek permutation, complete with saxophone. In the cred department, she includes a howling rocker called “Yang Yang” anchored by boogie piano, hand claps, and Lennon’s unhinged guitar that might have scared the hell out of any punk graduate, class of ’76. If there’s a must-hear Ono album, it’s Approximately Infinite Universe.
Gleeful, acerbic, at times leaden, Savage is Eurythmics’ best record after 1983′s Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This). What support I hope to rally will probably number in the half dozen; outside the ghetto of eighties radio the duo just aren’t popular these days (inspect the devastating comments on Tom Ewing’s Freaky Trigger entry for “There Must Be An Angel…”), their albums denizens of budget bin, joined by other period David Stewart productions (Tom Petty’s Southern Promises, Daryl Hall’s 3 Hearts in the Happy Ending Machine, Feargal Sharkey’s debut). A shame: “period” is what Savage avoids. It’s as if Stewart and Annie Lennox recorded a small-minded electronic record as the followup to 1984′s Touch instead of the yuppie soul-nostalgia cryogenics of Be Yourself Tonight and Revenge, their stab at Glass Tiger arena rock.
Playing at times as if the songs were written to accompany their astonishing videos, Savage is most effective when Lennox, accessing her roots in the Graduate School of Advanced David Bowie Studies, rummages through a trunkful of feminine tropes: tramp, whore, Downing Street darling, abandoned lover. The spaces in the arrangements allow her room to breathe; no horns or soul sisters on this album. Opening with a string-damaged, art-damaged demo called “Beethoven (I Love to Listen To),” the first half of Savage never lets up: Lennox writhing and cooing at the memory of a lover in Timbuktoo (“Got my name for him/He’s my little guru”), enchanted by the idea of the not-at-all-rhetorical question in “Do You Want To Break Up?” and peaking with “You Have Placed a Chill in My Heart,” a song both twinkly and piledriving — an unlikely combination. Alarm bells ring when the title track’s patrician languor augurs the Jimmy Iovine-assisted adult contemporary cemetery that is 1989′s We Too Are One, not to mention Lennox’s solo career. Fortunately guaranteed karaoke killer “I Need a Man” boasts a performance with nary a bodice a sight and David Stewart’s whammy bar, sheathed for half an hour, everywhere. The second side is meh until “I Need You,” an acoustic number that mocks sincere acoustic numbers, especially when the band is predictable enough to place it at the end of a sequence for “maximum” effect (Stewart-Lennox almost kill the joke by including fake supper club din). Her voice never more plush and detached, as if Greta Garbo were feeling her way through English, sells the insincerity. “I need you to listen to the ecstasy I’m faking,” she sings, repeating the last two words for emphasis, advice she took with grinding literalism upon going solo.
Neglected Nineties Album #3: Belly’s King. Tanya Donnelly’s arpgeggios and songs about witches, squirrels, and Gepetto seduced men for whom Kate Bush was at the time the hum of a Fairlight. We weren’t prepared for the toughening of her sound represented by King, produced by the legendary Glyn Johns. Although the drums get stroppy on “Super-Connnected,” this is rock whose strength and suppleness shredded the competition on those strange alternative rock days — from the “Gold Dust Woman” slinkiness of “Unkind and Unwise” (“I want you soft in the middle”) to the chord changes of the title track.
Tom has a go at Bryan Adams’ laboriously titled (Everything I Do) I Do It For You,” which spent sixteen weeks at Number One in England — an unsurpassed record. Adducing his good sportsmanship and dedication, he listens to it sixteen times and posts his reactions. His conclusions? “I still find it quite hard to get a grip on,” he confesses before awarding it a “4.”
I had the same reaction in 1991; so did my friends. Although its reign wasn’t as imperial in the States, it still managed to hold the Top 40 hostage for most of the summer after Paula Abdul’s slushy “Rush Rush” oozed away on its own trail of slime. The singing, playing, Michael Kamen arrangement, lyrics — none of it offends me. None of it moves me. I had lots of girl friends in the summer before my senior year of high school, most of whom pined for men as sexy as the ones whose chests and hair are luminously shown on the cassingle cover of Extreme’s “More Than Words,” or identified with Marie Fredriksson’s plight in “Fading Like a Flower (Every Time You Leave),” Roxette’s last big hit in America and their best ballad, albeit a forgotten one; but no one, to use the vulgar, ambiguity-fraught word I was just learning, “related” to the Adams ballad. It created its own momentum: it was on a soundtrack to a monstrous blockbuster Kevin Costner movie, a ballad, and sung by Bryan Adams. The last fact struck me as odd then and now, for after the tepid sales for 1987′s Into The Fire the pop audience regarded him as a faded star whose admittedly massive streak (five top fifteen singles from 1985′s Reckless!) persisted as nostalgia; despite the ubiquity of “Run to You” and “Summer of ’69,” Adams as superstar cutie was as vacuous as Corey Hart.
As T.S. Eliot wrote, after such knowledge, what forgiveness? The pairing of Adams and Robert “Mutt” Lange, a producer who is to sonic heft what Albert Speer was to architecture, produced a couple of decent chugalug rockers on Wake Up The Neighbors: the Number Two followup “Can’t Stop This Thing We Started” and a far better ballad called “Do I Have to Say the Words?” which, besides serving as the soundtrack to my first summer job in 1992,* boasts a guitar solo searching for a compelling song. And this is Adams’ problem. A hack by nature can’t surprise himself, much less his audience, which is why he’s incapable of the novelty sufficient to woo back the audience after its attention starts to wander, as it did after 1995′s “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman.” Its title, by the way, offers yet more evidence of Adams’ knack for them. Imagine Erasure claiming it. Imagine Adams covering “Star.”
* Miami Subs. The second and most played: Genesis’ “Hold On My Heart” and Kathy Troccoli’s “Everything Changes,” the latter proudly boasting the best Taylor Dayne vocal I’ve ever heard.
I would not have thought it possible that No Jacket Required would sound like a sparkling pop album in 2010. The paradigm for the Sparkling Pop Album has shifted in favor of youth. Part of NJR’s charm is listening to a dorky never-been having fun with sampling keyboards, a mixing board, effects pedals, and a surprisingly well syncopated Earth, Wind & Fire horn section. Collins sought a context in an MTV-defined marketplace, and found what eluded a lot of his trad-rock peers: stick to what you know, but update it sonically. Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t listen to new music: like fellow thirtysomething Stevie Nicks, he heard Prince once and liked it (“Sussudio”); like a lot of English performers, Peter Gabriel’s drum sound bewitched him: note how the rhythm track for “Doesn’t Anybody Stay Together Anymore” mimics Gabriel’s “No Self-Control.” One example of big beat angst works (“I Don’t Wanna Know”), the other doesn’t (“Don’t Lose My Number,” which epitomizes why lots of people wanted to punch his jaw). I don’t particularly enjoy “One More Night,” but Collins and co-producer Hugh Padgham carve a space for Collins’ bathos out of monotony: the singer’s multitracked harmonies, a three-note melody line elaborated upon by Collins’ keyboards and that oh-so-rote eighties rhythm guitar lick.
Speaking of keyboards: studying the credits of this and …But Seriously (Collins was big in the Soto household; I also own the 45 for “Sussudio”), I realized that this drummer plays all of them. A considerable part of what renders his good solo material listenable is his way with the ivories, or, rather, how he programmed them. Face Value’s “This Must Be Love” is a good example of how Collins understood the possibilities of the Prophet 5 keyboard almost as well as Gabriel and Kate Bush; he gets it to sound as if it were another harmony vocal. NJR has lots of examples of Collins’ skill at integrating the Prophet and the Oberheim-X (“Long Long Way To Go,” a more sophisticated cousin of Genesis’ “Man on the Corner” and Collins’ later see-no-evil-hear-no-evil homeless plaint “Another Day in Paradise”).
Has any other megastar ever developed his career so shrewdly? Think about it: a bald, frumpy middle-aged Brit was the biggest male star on the planet for a few years running. Starting in benign anonymity as drummer for an English prog rock band whose every album until 1992′s We Can’t Dance outsold its predecessor, he stepped to the microphone after the departure of its beloved lead singer for the US breakthroughs “Follow You, Follow Me” and “Misunderstanding.” In between he did well-regarded session work for the likes of Brian Eno. He releases a hushed, self-effacing solo album that compensates for its absence of vocal charisma with a walloping drum sound. By 1984 he’s hit Number One for the first time with a well-structured movie ballad and nominated for a songwriting Oscar. Serious about his journeyman roots, he produces Adam Ant’s solo debut, Eric Clapton, ABBA singer Frida (her lone US hit “There’s Something Going On,” which I reviewed here, deserves tons more airplay), and, most spectacularly, EW&F’s heaven-kissed singer’s Chinese Walls, whose “Easy Lover” is a model of hamfisted eighties formula-rock. From this moment forward Collins has the invisible touch, scoring six more US Number Ones and tons of Genesis hits until his determined dorkiness clashed with the grunge era’s youth fetish upon the release of Both Sides in 1993. His only salvation is an anonymous hack ballad from a Disney movie that lands him the Oscar he thought he needed as validation.
I’m not defending Collins as an overlooked master. Like Paul McCartney his video and public persona is several shades of unctuous and creepy; he’s like the kid in sixth grade whose parents and teachers reminded him of how talented he was. What I want to make clear is how those huge Collins and Genesis hits straddled all kinds of pop music taboos.
As a massive Cure fan in high school who couldn’t stand Disintegration, I’m surprised by how few impressions Joe Gross and I share. Sure, its singles were ubiquitous “modern rock” and MTV presences in 1989 and most of 1990, but even at the time Disintegration sounded stolid and ugly, like one of those rocks that jut into the ocean, wave-eroded, covered in kelp and barnacles, immoveable. With the exception of “Untitled,” the second half is an unmediated slog of guitar riffs and drum beats repeated without variation for three or four minutes (the effect is far from trance-like). I didn’t know anyone at the time who loved it either; frankly I heard more comments then regarding the band’s sudden mass popularity (maybe my friends couldn’t admit at the time how much they loved it because purchasers of Forever Your Girl owned copies too). One of Gross’ sharper observations – Disintegration‘s “oceanic size matches its audience’s conception of its own sadness” – sounds true in retrospect. Morrissey’s run of delightful solo singles in 1989 and 1990 certainly did a better job of matching our conception of our own sadness. The singles are aces, though, “Lovesong” aside. The remix of “Lullaby” was the first Cure song I loved – what an entrancing sound.
No, what made me a Cure fan was borrowing copies of their back catalogue, using Mixed Up as a gateway. It’s forgotten now, but Mixed Up almost matched Disintegration in exposure. “Pictures of You” tumbled off the Hot 100 just months before Mixed Up and its Manchester-baiting single “Never Enough” squeezed the air out of the college charts so that Depeche Mode and The Replacements could barely breathe. Discovering the seven-inch versions of “Inbetween Days,” “Close To Me,” “Why Can’t I Be You?” and especially “Let’s Go To Bed” on Standing on the Beach educated me on Robert Smith’s frivolous side, and while I could understand the bifurcation of his talents I heard angst enough on those frisky singles to dissuade me from dipping my toe into Faith and Pornography. If you must attend a wake, make sure there’s singing and dancing to render the stupid game bearable, you know? The B-sides and esoterica on Japanese Whispers (readily available then) were also instructive. I even had time for The Top‘s addled wordplay and eclectic-or-die arrangements. This is a long way of saying that I prefer the commercially mediated miscellany of Wish to the monochromatic Disintegration.
I pay my respects to the country of my youth on occasion. I wasted no time buying a pristine copy of the remastered Faith when visiting Chapel Hill last weekend, and it’s not terrible (thanks to Ned’s yeoman work). Which is to say: the likes of “All Cats Are Grey” and “Drowning Man” sustain their moods and earn their dourness; they remind of Bergman movies like Winter Light and The Silence – potential Cure song titles! – in their equating of introspection with the sorrow that surpasseth human understanding.
The Traveling Wilburys served as nexus for much of my early listening. Thanks to Volume One, I was able to draw a link between it, “Got My Mind Set On You,” and that fuzz guitar-anchored pop tune appropriated by Nike. I also bought Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy, whose fluorescent-lights-under-the-bog production by Daniel Lanois still holds my interest, Jeff Lynne’s solo Armchair Theatre (reviewed here), and checked Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever out of the library. I fell hardest for Roy Orbison (I recorded “You Got It” as many times as I could catch it on the radio). The success of Volume One was such that it marked the last time a group of aging musicians didn’t so much shape the music charts as create an alternative space in which baby boomers and kids like me could savor multi-tracked harmonies and keyboard ostinati.
Tom Petty was the only one in the crew who didn’t need the comeback. 1987′s Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) was his third consecutive album to sell less than its predecessor, but he still got plenty of radio and MTV play. Taking advantage of the combined geezer/MTV support earned by Full Moon Fever, Into The Great Wide Open applied Jeff Lynne’s lacquered productions to the usual batch of Heartbreakers songs: “rocking” in a blustery way, meaningful in an obvious way. What separates my generation from the one that grew up with Damn The Torpedoes as its Petty benchmark is its willingness to exchange a certain midtempo mushiness for vocal understatement. To put it simply, Petty sucks as a singer. He whines when he wants to roar, yowls like a man whose Pomeranian bit his toe when he thinks he’s expressing the restlessness in his soul; thus, his would-be anthems devolve into rants. Maybe Lynne’s habit of cushioning Petty with sixteen thousand overdubbed acoustic guitars did the trick. Suddenly “Learning To Fly” projects a detachment that feels earned instead of affected (in 1983 “Learning To Fly” would have sounded like Petty wanted sympathy for not sullying his principles with octagonal drums and eyeliner). A typical example of early nineties CD bloat, ITGWO limps to its conclusion burdened by songs whose hooks don’t compensate for their familiarity (Greil Marcus favorite “Out in the Cold” kicks up a lot of parched dust), but the expanded running time gives Petty room to stretch in ways he never did — or would again.
Although the album lists the Heartbreakers in the credits, it’s impossible to credit Benmont Tench for the keyboards, or to praise anyone but Lynne for those harmonies on the soft, loping, quasi-manifesto “Built To Last”; from first note to last ITGWO bears the marks of a project fraught with tension for all concerned. A full third of these songs address friendship; the characters in Petty’s songs hasten to assure “you” of his fidelity even as he’s stepping away, never to return. “Two Gunslingers” actually stoops to limn a narrative; its pirouetting synth hook tugs at the “I’m taking control of my life” as if Petty suddenly understood paradox and counterpoint (his refusal to seek “closure” is another plus). “You And I Will Meet Again” has the kind of graceful, unaffected acceptance of fate that I expect from a Rosanne Cash song, with drum track and harmonies to match.
It’s Petty’s curse that his longevity entitles him to any kind of scrutiny. As nimble as the Heartbreakers have been over the years they don’t match Mellencamp’s Kenny Aronoff-anchored backing band for toughness, or the E Street Band’s incorporation of synth-pop tropes that signified their reluctant acceptance of how Things Have Changed between men and women. I suppose there’s far worse things to be than the William Dean Howells of rock, cranking out perfunctory rock whose considerable craft is its own reward instead of startling listeners with freckles of hysteria. Petty’s curse is to straddle the fault lines of rock’s version of modernism and rock’s intrinsic need to affirm verities no one but its practitioners believe in anymore. Into The Great Wide Open makes for a fascinating case study: the Tory hires his idea of a Liberal to form a coalition government, ignorant of the fact that hanging out with George Harrison and Bob Dylan tends to contaminate one’s ideas of progress. But I understand my adolescent attraction to this album — teenagers are a pretty conservative bunch, especially when, like Petty, “circumstances” force us to say we won’t back down.
Before I knew how Robert Christgau felt (“As public figures and maybe as people, these imperialist wimps are the most deplorable pop stars of the postpunk if not post-Presley era”), I knew how their bass lines and gauche synthesizers felt: slimy, delicious around the edges, lacking nutritive qualities. I’ve said repeatedly that my parents didn’t pay for cable, so, like Madonna, Double Duran projected themselves solely as a radio act during the greatest Top 40 era of the last thirty years. My mother bought a vinyl copy of Seven and the Ragged Tiger; only”New Moon on Monday” and “The Reflex” got any home stereo play (still haven’t heard a tune called “Tiger Tiger”). “The Reflex” was especially fun for a ten-year-old’s overstimulated imagination: a couple of tricky drum parts, comically contorted vocals, lines like “I sold the Renoir and the TV set” and, my favorite, “I’ll cross that bridge when I find it.” By the summer of 1984 my world had crossed that bridge into Duranmania. A girl named Sylvia with Molly Ringwald hair boasted Trapper Keepers with Simon and John’s faces. My friend Alcides hummed “The Wild Boys.” The following summer the first of my inexplicable crushes hit me, and the Power Station didn’t deserve it.
That was that as far as my loyalty to The Fab Five went. I have no recollection of their late eighties fall from grace – not even the fairly huge “Notorious,” a #2 hit in late 1986. I did hear “I Don’t Want Your Love” and “All She Wants Is” on Shadoe Stevens’ American Top 40, but payola probably greased their chart success. Their 1993 “comeback” generated a lot of good will. Friends said, “Hey, they weren’t so bad after all!” When “Come Undone” followed “Ordinary World,” this rather homely incarnation of DD accomplished what Jesus Jones did in 1991 and Oasis couldn’t three years later: a British band scoring consecutive top tens. They recorded an album — desultory, charmless except for the idea of turning “Femme Fatale” into a Mr. Big song — but nobody played it much. I actually listened to Arcadia’s eponymous 1985 record (a dollar at the university bookstore) more often: the Le Bon-Roger Taylor-Nick Rhodes axis’ slower, portentous, pretentious version of a Duran recording. I can imagine them offering drinks to guests Grace Jones and Andy Mackay, but what on earth could they have said to Sting (“Yes, Gordon, we think it’s a wonderful idea for you to tour with Branford, if it’s for the rain forests”)?
I bought Notorious at the same university bookstore, the cassette gnawed on the side as if by a wolf, mouth alive with juices like wine. The Nile Rodgers production sound I knew from Let’s Dance, Like a Virgin,and Cosmic Thing had calcified into a flat, brassy din in which instruments sound like they’re rattling around in an oil drum. Still, the Le Bon swagger – endearing or bone-chilling, take your pick — and flair for the garbled aperçu injected energy into tracks whose grafted horn passages, soul girl wails, and elongated synth parts couldn’t compensate for the loss of crucial band members, not to mention the sonic spritz that was inseparable from the celebration of opulence and consumption (I suspect that the lyrics to “The Reflex” or “New Religion” accurately reflect the state of a mind clinging to what it can remember about high school poetry and the Herb Ritts shoot it took in evening last, sated by cocaine, sex, and hair gel). However, before you’ve had a chance to miss Andy Taylor’s fourth-rate Steve Vai imitations, Le Bon’s falsetto ably substitutes on “A Matter of Feeling.” A song called “Vertigo (Do the Demolition” [the what? Is the Demolition like the Safety Dance?] rhetorically wonders about real life in your illusion hiding behind a dark cloud of confusion but actually boasts a pretty chorus that goes down smoother as a Bond anthem than Pat Boone’s favorite song about hellfire released a year earlier (“Vertigo” is closer to a-Ha than a-Ha’s own Bond anthem, which sounded a lot like Duran’s. Confused?). The best song on Notorious is the forgotten third single, remixed for release, a rewrite of Roxy Music’s “In Every Dream Home a Heartbreak,” vulgarized for the eighties. The second best is the chugging “Hold Me.” The rest sounds like Arcadia and the Power Station meeting once for the sake of the kids before the divorce hearing, which means it’s a classic-era Duran album in all but spirit. No one who cares about Duran after buying Rio need own this, but consistency’s your hobgoblin they are scarier ones than Notorious.
The Rhythm of the Saints is the quietest, best behaved album of Paul Simon’s career. Three years after the popular and critical success of Graceland, Simon actually did the expected thing after a career spent confounding fans: he traveled to another Third World country and recorded some of its musicians live. The difference, though, is that Saints is as programmatic as that sentence. I won’t get into the Graceland argument again; suffice it to say that Simon played with musical tropes with which he’d shown some fluency as far back as “Mother and Child Reunion.” By contrast Saints sounds transcribed rather than experienced. Saints — even plaster ones — surely have more varied rhythms than the unrelenting one Simon appropriates for this record. For all the delicate skeins of guitar spun by Simon and Vincent Nguini on songs like “Spirit Voices” and “The Coast,” the bongos, gourds, and catas rumble as unobtrusively beneath them as coffee percolating in a pot. Graceland is not singer-songwriter-static in the traditional sense; for all its “exotic” carapace The Rhythm of the Saints IS. Simon and engineer Roy Halee treat the percussion tracks as touches of musique concrete, much like Joni Mitchell used Burundi warrior drums on 1975′s “The Jungle Line” or manipulated string sections on 1973′s “Barangrill. In other words, the cranks who scolded Simon for exploitation in 1986 had better cause in 1990. Singer-songwriters worry about inertia, airlessness.
Luckily, the songwriting remains superb — what he lost in momentum he gained in detail, compassion, scope. Simon is one of the few singers who can find a musical correlative for a dubious bit of poetry, as he does, for example, in the low-key “Can’t Run But,” on which his frosty pronunciation of “the cooling system” matches the relentless euphonium hook. It would have found a happy home on the infamously dark second half of Talking Heads’ Remain in Light. So too “The Cool Cool River,” a tentative sequel to Graceland‘s “The Boy in the Bubble,” but whose electric guitar hook crackles with a tension unresolved by neither the balm of Simon’s voice nor the attempt at optimism of the “I believe in the future” section (nice chord change and horn section on this one). “The Obvious Child” is a terrific first single – drums bursting out of the gate, Simon’s hard acoustic strumming, cryptic lyrics about crosses in the ballpark limning the midlife crisis of a dog who’s lost his bark after all those years of smooth rides.
As I’ve written in other Unspooled essays, the myth of adulthood shaped much of my adolescent listening. Despite my love of pop and a certain kind of rococo miserabilism, I was a sucker for what we’d now call NPR rock (god knows what might have happened had Wilco and Neko Case released records then). My folks sure weren’t Simon fans, or even Simon & Garfunkel fans, but I could listen to my Rhythm of the Saints cassette and pore over its densely packaged lyric sheet and liner notes without welcoming them to the nightmare of Meat Beat Manifesto. The Born in the Right Time tour was one of my first shows. I’ve told the story before: the first and only time an artist has played a popular hit, said “Woo! Alright! Let’s try that again!”, and played it again. On the other hand, I smugly renounced my membership in the cult of boomer-yuppie nostalgia when I sat unmoved by the lighters waving through “America” — the incredulous dad type beside me almost threw his beer in my face when I asked him the name of a Simon song I didn’t recognize (it was “The Boxer”).
It took The Rhythm of the Saints a few years to recover from the euphoria with which it was greeted, and 1990 itself makes for such a puzzling year to assess anyway: a crossroad in which the revolutions in hip-hop and college guitar-rock intersected with house, cool boomers like Neil Young and Lou Reed, and the first stirrings of grunge Bristol trip-hop. Hell, “The Obvious Child” made Billboard‘s Modern Rock chart for a few weeks, which should you tell something about demographic confusion. Of course a Paul Simon album marketed as Graceland II: Brazil would please Los Lobos fans. It remains a fan’s record, stalwartly defended (my mate and former Stylus colleague wrote a terrific reappraisal a few years ago) but whose subtle songwriterly involutions demand the concentration of listeners warmed to the task.
What kind of profile do Neil Finn and co. boast? I fell in love with Crowded House the way Matos did with Marshall Crenshaw’s Field Day. For reasons I don’t know, “Don’t Dream It’s Over” experienced a revival in the fall of 1992. It was all over the radio, its stately gait, unforgettable guitar hook, and melancholy organ showing up the vulgarity of The Heights’ “How Do You Talk To An Angel” and Toad The Wet Fucking Sprocket. So many breakup songs, so little time, yet “Don’t Dream It’s Over” really sounds as good as the likes of Dave Marsh have claimed. Refusing to pin down the “it” that’s over, Finn as vocalist croons, holds back, and belts while Froom’s organ pushes and prods, as Nick Seymour’s bass and Finn’s guitar sketch the contours of the subtext they won’t reveal. If I ever scripted the perfect gay dance sequence in a high school prom movie, “Don’t Dream It’s Over” would soundtrack it. As a jaded chart watcher, I’m amazed that a song this subtle peaked at number two in the worst pop year of the decade.
(Here’s a peak at Crowded House’s live — and sartorial — prowess during this era)
I bought the 45 rpm single of “Don’t Dream It’s Over” at a local megastore that sold them; this particular pressing had Crowded House’s only other US top ten single “Something So Strong” on the flipside, so, really, it was eight minutes of what Grant McLennan once called hope then strife. Besotted, I got the House’s eponymous 1986 debut, and after a hurried listen through “World Where You Live” and “Mean To Me” concluded that the hurdy-gurdy keyboard sound in which producer Mitchell Froom was just beginning to specialize and odd time signatures were exactly what I missed in college radio (AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s actually interesting review made the same observation…from the perspective of a college student in 1986!). A seventeen-year-old accommodating to adulthood whose knowledge of romantic despair hoodwinked him into assuming he knew something about bliss leaned very heavily on “Can’t Carry On” and “I Walk Away.” After playing the album repeatedly through December, I bought Temple of Low Men, whose diminishing returns (success sucks + no songs except the ones about how success sucks + our producer’s weird keyboard noises = second album) did little to dim my enthusiasm for Finn’s chops. He still gets little credit as a singer — something of Crenshaw’s way with playing with scales at will plus the hint of a self-mocking detachment. It’s only because of my discovery of the Go-Betweens, actually, that I’ve overlooked Finn’s considerable talent.
I had some acquaintance with Finn’s past: “I Got You,” the tune he wrote and sang for older brother Tim’s act Split Enz, still got a lot of airplay. Curiosity drove me to buy an Enz comp, regrettably. While I’m the person least susceptible to the shibboleths of punk, this band’s music struck me as suspect: beholden to the gimmick, musically and lyrically; garish; too many months in a leaky boat with fellow travelers like Pete Townshend, Paul McCartney, and other fortysomethings so bewildered by the state of things that injecting wacky synths into three-minute songs counted as membership fees for a club whose decor was more familiar than they expected. Crowded House’s one album with Tim Finn Woodface served as a tonic: a homespun affair, with an air of burning oak in the fireplace. Nothing like it in either CH or Split Enz’s catalogue, just a collection of acoustic ballads which use Revolver as a starting-point and don’t look back (maybe I’ll write something about this album someday; it’s a lost minor classic).
A long introduction to Tim Finn’s Before & After, but I have to emphasize my reluctance to embrace him as little more than the usurped victim, the older brother whose above-average talent was too recessive to get noticed without the aforementioned gimmicks. B&A’s anachronistic sound is closer to 1987 than 1993: several people credited on keyboards, contributions from veterans like Richard Thompson (the Finn brothers are revered by bizzers, as their latter-day collaborations with Radiohead, Johnny Marr, the Dixie Chicks, and Eddie Vedder prove). No, this album reflects a studio-rock aesthetic closer to a John Hiatt effort, with the financial renumeration: I succumbed to a few critics at the time who praised T. Finn’s “classic” musicianship. The single and Thompson co-write “Persuasion” is actually the best song; its indelible acoustic hook and passive-aggressive charm distinguish it from the glop bordering it on either side. The rest is better sung than Hiatt could manage, but betrays a similar weakness for singer-songwriter tropes like walking-you-home that a Bonnie Raitt or, yeah, Marshall Crenshaw could transform into something that signifies.
Incidentally, this post concludes the first set of my Unspooled series. Please vote on the next bunch of cassettes unearthed from my stash. I apologize in advance for their white paunchitude; these all date from a time when I actively reached out for this sort of thing. Please vote.
Johnny Marr earned so much good will from his work with The Smiths and on Electronic’s eponymous album that his participation on Billy Bragg’s “Sexuality” persuaded me to trust him one more time (I gladly avoided his work on The The’s Mind Bomb). Propelled by a sequencer track and Marr’s foregrounded acoustic strum, the track screams 1991; wait till you get a load of the lyrics. Post-AIDS pansexualism, and you can practically see the paisley shirts. Just because you’re gay he won’t turn you away, but remind him of his past as a lefty recording agitprop over trumpet/guitar accompaniment and the best he can come up with is “If you stick around/I’m sure that we can find some common ground.”
Don’t Try This At Home is a long album. Very long. This was one of the first times I noticed CD-era bloat and its consequences. Even in 1991 — when I was still learning how to sort through albums I didn’t like and trust my own judgments — I balked at the abundance of rather tuneless acoustic plaints over perky pop like “Sexuality.” When a girl I dated that year made a mix tape of Bragg songs gleaned from Talking with the Taxman About Poetry, I was startled in a pleasant way to hear the aforementioned agitprop; at least it wasn’t equivocal, universal, and liberal; it was radical. On DTTAH he approximates these convictions on, of course, another Marr co-production/collaboration, “North Seas Bubble,” in which he anticipates Gore Vidal’s nasty-awesome remark about contemporary England (it’s not a country anymore, it’s a U.S. aircraft carrier) by almost twenty years and nearly snaps his guitar strings in doing so. The only other song fans of Bragg and Wilco’s later work adapting Woody Guthrie is the country-folk shuffle of “You Woke Up My Neighborhood,” to which Michael Stipe contributes patented tuneless backing vocals.
One more note about Johnny Marr in 1991: he also wrote a song with Kirsty MacColl called “Walking Down Madison,” the closest she ever got to a college hit in this country (my local Top 40′s Sunday night “post-modern music” show played it quite a bit). In the blessedly abbreviated canon of English white people adapting hip-hop, this ranks very high; MacColl is smart enough to situate herself as an outsider, a flaneur whose travels force her to notice blight. Just think of how dire it could have sounded. For clues, remember how former radical Billy Bragg approached the nettlesome matter of affecting a Social Consciousness while attempting a pop crossover.
Give EMF credit: “Unbelievable” doesn’t turn my stomach like ubiquitous wedding classics like Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration.” One of my earliest club memories was dancing to “Unbelievable” months before it hit number one at the now-defunct Red Room on Lenox Avenue (during spring break, come to think of it). Its parent album Schubert Dip floundered whenever the post-Manchester buzzsaw guitar/sampler ethos, atoning for its hedonism, tries to embrace Serious Issues, but relistening to it last weekend wasn’t one of those dispiriting experiences thanks to which you question the sanity of your adolescent taste. Schubert Dip actually sounds like a record teenagers would have recorded: the breathy, out of tune vocals, the channeling of energy into tracks whose rickety structures need all the help they could get, the songs about girls that are petulant instead of enraged — give the Jonas Brothers a Fairlight and backwards baseball caps and they’ll come up with something just as fetching. Forgotten second single “Lies” drapes house-influenced keyboards all over a limp chorus, while “When You’re Mine” might have been a spectacular Black Box moment had Martha Wash sung its chorus.
So I was one of those suckers who bought the Unexplained EP in the summer of ’92, convinced that James Atkin could do more with his vocals than imitate a man receiving oral sex for the first time. Resident mastermind Ian Dench, who’s credited with guitars and keyboards but if we believe the interviews did much more, sculpts reasonable climaxes around Atkin’s explosions of pique, especially around “Getting Through.” The problem: the hooks are decent, but not car-commercial-historic like the ones in “Unbelievable.” So what we get is a buzzing, rather frantic guitar-centered Inspiral Carpets record. And yet: let’s give Dench-Atkins credit for “Search and Destroy,” a completely convincing cover of the Stooges classic. Maybe I’m soft because EMF’s is the first version I heard, but kudos for reminding us that it’s a song written by and for pissed-off teens. Is it as good as Iggy’s? Oh yes it is. Its genius: anyone with half a brain’s worth of guitar licks and breathy vocals can convey its angst.
I may have been the only man in America to buy EMF’s official Schubert Dip followup, Stigma. A depressing record: much better than its predecessor, yet refusing to concede one millimeter to the wedding/bar mitzvah crowd that made “Unbelievable” unbelievable. “They’re Here” actually samples the KLF’s “3 AM Eternal,” surely some kind of post-modern miracle, and “It’s You (That Leaves Me Dry)” uses those orchestral synths in ways that an Emilio Estevez action flick from 1992 would have respected. Give EMF credit for insouciance. Jesus Jones’ Mike Edwards considered himself an artist.
