SOUL ASYLUM Biography by Arthur Levy
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
SOUL ASYLUM biography by Arthur Levy “It’s a crazy mixed up world out there, Someone’s always got a gun and it’s all about money You live with loneliness, or you live with somebody who’s crazy It’s just a crazy mixed up world …” (“Crazy Mixed Up World”) Chapter 1. Every Cloud Has One Renewed and revitalized, Soul Asylum founders Dave Pirner and Dan Murphy return to rock’s front line with THE SILVER LINING, their first new studio release since 1998’s Candy From a Stranger. That album inadvertently kicked off a seven-year sabbatical for the group, which telescoped into the death of bassist Karl Mueller in June 2005, the other founding member of the triumvirate that has steered Soul Asylum through rock’s white water for the past two decades plus. The re-emergence of the group on THE SILVER LINING is as much a reaffirmation of Soul Asylum’s commitment to the music as it is a dedication to Karl, who worked and played on the album right up until the end. They were joined in the studio by not-so-new heavyweight Minneapolis drummer Michael Bland (who has played with everyone from Paul Westerberg to Prince). The band is now complemented by Tommy Stinson on bass, a member of fellow Twin Cities band the Replacements since age 13, and a pal of Dan’s since he was in high school and Tommy in junior high. Tommy was the only friend that Karl could endorse to replace himself in the band. This hard-driving lineup was introduced for the first time in October 2005, when they played sold-out showcase dates at First Avenue in Minneapolis and the Bowery Ballroom in New York – within three days. THE SILVER LINING, Soul Asylum’s ninth full-length album (there were several EPs and cassette-only releases back in the indie ’80s) is every bit as quirky and off-centered cut-to-the-bone rock as their hardcore fans have come to expect, an indication that the Minneapolis -bred band has lost none of its edge. And why should they? “We weren’t Mouseketeers,” Dave says, “we never had any sort of showbiz advice that was useful to us. Everything that we’ve done has been relatively homespun and we’ve had to do it all by ourselves and we never got a lot of fake support or showbiz chops or anything like that.” Soul Asylum’s paradigm – as the prime number opposite of whatever a showbiz rock band is in the ’00s – is unavoidable throughout THE SILVER LINING, as Dave Pirner’s lyrics ruminate on the absurdity of stardom in “Success Is Not So Sweet” and rip into the precarious nature of sanity in an insane world in “Oxygen.” But Soul Asylum is a band of story-tellers in the Midwestern tradition, and the new album also digs deep into interpersonal relationships (“Crazy Mixed Up World,” “Lately”), the fabric of peaceful co-existence (“Good For You”), and even a couple of songs that are redolent of New Orleans, Dave’s second home-away-from-home for the past few years (“Standing Water,” “Bus Named Desire”). The downtown punk rock vibe crashes through on several cuts (“All Is Well,” “Whatcha Need”). The new album was recorded at Flyte Time and the Terrarium Studios in Minneapolis, co-produced by Soul Asylum with Grammy Award-winning engineer-turned-producer Steve Hodge (on various tracks), and with John Field (on various tracks). * * * Chapter 2. The Early Years True survivors of the rock struggle, whose home-made post-punk ethos made them one of the cornerstones of the No Depression movement in the ’90s, Soul Asylum is living proof of the ‘do-it-yourself’ ethic that has always meant life or death to rock bands in the American heartland. The roots of Soul Asylum are in the group known as Loud Fast Rules, formed fresh out of high school in 1981 by teenagers Dave Pirner (songwriter, lead vocals and guitar, but originally on drums), Dan Murphy (guitar), and Karl Mueller (bass). Born in Duluth, Dan was 13 when his mother remarried and he acquired a hippie step-brother who gave him guitar lessons and shared his record collection. “And from the age of 13, that’s what I did. I sat in my room and I listened to records, went through Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Velvet Underground, David Johansen, all that kind of stuff, and rock stuff, I liked Aerosmith, and Thin Lizzy, and went to every show that came to town. So music was my life, my social life. I was a very introverted kid, and I didn’t excel at sports, I’d sit in my room and play guitar and write really dumb songs.” “And you do bond on certain records,” Dave adds, recalling when he and Dan first got together, “like the Velvet Underground Loaded was a record that we both had in common that really seemed like some sort of a jumping off point – if he has the same record that I have and we both love this record, we must have something musically in common.” It wasn’t until much later that Dave’s affection for folk music emerged. “Being from Minnesota, if you’re a songwriter, you sort of grow up in the shadow of Bob Dylan, he’s just part of your life. “But somehow it never really fit into the canon of what we were trying to do as a punk band. It wasn’t until I started listening to Woody Guthrie that it started to dawn on me that this music that Woody Guthrie was playing had a lot in common with the music the Ramones were playing. And that’s where I saw this thing that inspired me to pick up an acoustic guitar.” Dave took the guitar down to the 7th Street Entry, a local club, and challenged all the assembled members of several punk bands to play along on one of Woody’s songs. “I felt this was a very defiant thing to do, to bring a folk song into the punk rock circle. But it was so easy and fun for everybody to play, I kind of took that and ran with it, sort of a no-brainer, I hadn’t really made the connection between folk and punk. It all kind of came together for me in a very quick period.” That incident may have been The Big Bang that ignited the punk-folk movement right there. Chapter 3. The Twin-Tone Era By the time the group signed with Twin/Tone Records in 1984, Grant Young had become their permanent drummer (until 1995) and the name had changed to Soul Asylum. They were taken into the studio by Bob Mould of local favorites Hüsker Dü. “We released our first EP on Twin/Tone,” Dan says (referring to the label that was put on the indie map as the home of the Replacements), “which actually we recorded as a record, and it got re-worked as an EP.” He bought their first van for 600 dollars from a newspaper ad, “and we made it to New York and back, and then the van died, and then we had to do a couple of gigs so we could buy another van…” But the trip to New York, to play CBGB on the Bowery for the first time – in the last slot at 3:00 a.m. – was a badge of honor. “Minneapolis had this ‘let’s wait and see how they do somewhere else’ thing going on in the ’80s, because there was a really thriving music scene there, and you didn’t get any notoriety or attention really until you had arrived somewhere else. New York and Chicago were the towns where people seemed to get whatever it was that we were doing at the time and respond to it.” Success is not so sweet, indeed. They humbly endured the torture of those early years. “Karl started playing bass two weeks before we did our first show,” Dan says, “so it was pretty fucking rough at the beginning, we were a band that would very often fall flat on our faces.” To Dave, success meant “maybe someday I’ll have an amp that works, or maybe someday I won’t have this problem with my jack in my guitar, or a monitor system in a club that I can hear or something.” Dan: “It was all very microman- agement. There wasn’t a whole lot of big picture going on. You had to get it fixed before the next show, because that was in Madison or some town that was really important. It was a very very funny time.” Soul Asylum recorded three high-energy albums for Twin/Tone: Say What You Will Clarence… Karl Sold the Truck (1984), Made To Be Broken (1986, those first two produced by Bob Mould), and While You Were Out (also 1986, produced by ex-Suicide Commando Chris Osgood). Pirner’s introspective and maturing lyrical sense attracted the attention of major label A&M, who initially tried out the band with the self-produced six-song EP, Clam Dip & Other Delights, whose cover notoriously spoofed A&M’s beloved Whipped Dip & Other Delights by Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, a move that did not bode well for Soul Asylum in the long run. Nevertheless, the band graduated to its first level of wide acclaim with the album that followed, Hang Time (1988), produced by iconic downtown New York rock figure Lenny Kaye, erstwhile member of the Patti Smith Group.