After 17 years of professional music-reviewing, Noel Murray is taking time off from all new music, and is revisiting his record collection in alphabetical order, to take stock of what he's amassed, and consider what he still needs.
"Blue And Far" by The Jody Grind
Nearly every music fan eventually comes to realize—for a while anyway—that there's no reason to wait for the bands he or she loves to come through town. There are local bands playing nearby nearly every night, and many of them, in the right context, sound every bit as good as the big-timers. It's that context that's tricky. Sometimes it's hard to pin down exactly what we're looking for in a local band. I had a good friend back in college who got annoyed when his favorite frat-bar cover band started doing originals. I had several other friends who tended to latch onto the bands that sounded the most polished, and thereby most likely to some day make it onto the radio and MTV. And still others who seemed to only like bands if they played to crowds in the single digits.
From the moment I saw my first local band at an all-ages club when I was 17, I was captivated by the idea that a bunch of people I'd never heard of could get up on a stage and do a creditable approximation of rock 'n' roll. Then again, growing up in Nashville in the '80s spoiled me. There were a wealth of great bands around then, and because of Nashville's status as an "industry town"—with professional facilities and such—even the youngsters tended to be slicker than bands in other local scenes.
The kings of Nashville in the '80s were Jason & The Scorchers, a blazing country rock band made up of four talented, likable guys that the whole city was rooting for. Everyone hoped the Scorchers' success would trickle down, and everyone appreciated that the band waved the flag for Nashville well, showing the proper respect for country music history while also rocking as hard as any punk act. The Scorchers' early records got the attention of nationally known rock critics and earned them a spot on a major label, but while the band continued to tear up the college club circuit—frequently alongside their good chums R.E.M.—they could never quite find the sweet spot in the studio. Their records frequently sounded either over-muscled or over-wan, and their songs nearly always came off more cornpone than they seemed live. Seeing the Scorchers perform, as on the TV appearance below, it was easy to understand why the majors would want to be in business with them…
…but in the '80s, mainstream rock was all about metallic sheen and synthetics, which meant that the Scorchers at their raunchiest were never going to crack MTV, no matter how well they dressed the part. (And the Scorchers dressed it so convincingly that a decade later I'd walk into a rocker bar on West End and still see about a half-dozen guys decked out like Warner Hodges, complete with fluffed-out hair, black leather and superfluous chains.) The Scorchers did as their label asked, downplaying their country side in favor of their hard rock side, hoping to capture some of that Sunset Strip hair metal fanbase. Instead, they alienated their longtime fans and created dissension within their own ranks. Their dream died by the end of the decade, and a half-dozen or so other potentially great '80s Nashville bands—like The Movement, Raging Fire and Jet Black Factory—found the road out of town getting narrower and rockier. By the time I left for college in '88, the scene was barely flickering. When I returned after college in '92, it still lay dormant.
Of course things were tough all over for local scenes by the end of the '80s, as college rock gradually gave way to indie. I went to school in Athens, GA, which had given birth to The B-52's, Pylon and R.E.M. not so long before I arrived, and which had inspired the documentary Athens GA Inside/Out, about the boundless creativity of its music scene. I watched that movie a couple of times before I left for college, and went to see all its featured bands during my first semester. But the Athens scene was different from the Nashville one, in that it prized immediacy and flights of fancy more than songwriting and professionalism, and I quickly realized that I didn't actually like very many of the best-known Athens bands. (Which didn't matter, since nearly all the bands in Inside/Out were defunct by the end of my freshman year anyway.)
So I went searching for new bands that no one was talking about yet, starting out with novelty acts like The Groove Trolls and The LaBrea Stompers (the latter of which featured my future wife as keyboardist and eye candy) and then gravitating to straightforward rockers with punk overtones, like Five-Eight, Bliss, Roosevelt and Mercyland (the latter of which was led by David Barbe, soon to be the bassist for Sugar). I can make cases for pretty much all of those bands as "good" (except for The Groove Trolls), though for the most part they were really only good enough to be the best Athens band playing in town on any given night, not necessarily good enough to make it outside the scene.
The major exception? The Jody Grind. I started seeing The Jody Grind when they were called An Evening With The Garbageman, playing sets primarily consisting of offbeat jazz and country covers, interspersed with poetry readings by hulking redneck Deacon Lunchbox. They seemed at first like just another novelty act, and my friends and I played our part by making up silly dances and chants to do along with their songs. Then the band changed their name to The Jody Grind and added more and more originals, many of them clever and sentimental, and lead singer Kelly Hogan would sometimes get so into her renditions of "Mood Indigo" or the band's own "Blue And Far" that she'd tear up. And we would too.
When The Jody Grind released their second album, Lefty's Deceiver, they seemed destined for greater things. No other band in the country had a sound like theirs, at once light yet substantial, and drawing on several different rootsy genres without coming off as dour traditionalism. They had a crowd-pleasing live show and an expanding musical vocabulary. I'd go so far as to argue that if The Jody Grind had been the standard-bearer for the budding alt-country movement instead of Uncle Tupelo, the genre might've become more varied and more popular. (And I say that as a major fan of Uncle Tupelo.)
Within weeks of Lefty's Deceiver though, The Jody Grind's bassist and drummer (and Deacon Lunchbox as well) were involved in a fatal traffic accident. And though Hogan and guitarist Bill Taft were the dominant creative forces in the band, they didn't have the heart to go on. Taft lent his services to other Atlanta-area bands—most notably the sublime Smoke, before its lead singer Benjamin died of AIDS—while Hogan has released a couple of good solo albums and has become the designated guest vocalist for any number of alt-country acts, including her friend Neko Case. (Case sounds so much like Hogan in fact that sometimes I have a tough time telling them apart.)
As for me, I returned to Nashville and spent almost a decade writing about local music, finding a handful of diamonds in the rough, but really only one all-timer. (That would be Lambchop, a subject for another day.) Since I stopped writing about local music, I've pretty much stopped thinking in terms of scenes, which may be a better way to approach music. Part of me says that critics—or even civilians—should strive to appreciate artists that are good regardless of their origins, rather than making excuses for them out of loyalty or civic pride.
But another part of me says that since musical taste is so subjective anyway, then honestly, what does it matter if you like a band more because you've seen them live a dozen times at a local club, and have had a beer with the bassist? It's not the most important thing in the world that music's appeal translates easily from listener to listener. If you catch a band on a good night, and they create the same emotional rush in you that Jon Landau felt when he saw Bruce Springsteen in '75, well, it's that rush that matters, not whether you can convince anyone else to feel it too.
*****************
Pieces Of The Puzzle
Jane's Addiction
Years Of Operation 1985-91, 2001-04
Fits Between Guns N' Roses and Bauhaus
"Stop" by Jane's Addiction
Personal Correspondence On the first Lollapalooza tour, Jane's Addiction played in Atlanta in front of me and 10,000 or so of my closest friends, and about halfway through their set, Perry Farrell brought Ice-T to the stage so that they could duet on Sly Stone's "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey." Before the song, Farrell took a moment to bait the Atlanta crowd, calling us racist crackers, and as I rolled my eyes, I imagined Farrell as a teenager, dreaming about the day that he could become a rock star, head into the south, and sing this song in front of a crowd of rednecks, with a rapper by his side. So very brave, our young Farrell. But then to be a Jane's Addiction fan, you to have to endure a certain level of self-aggrandizing bullshit on Farrell's part. That's been both the band's genius and their curse. Musically, Jane's Addiction was never too far removed from the made-up and hairsprayed hard rockers then plying their trade on Sunset—a connection I tried to make when I interviewed Farrell last year, though he was having none of it. They set themselves apart by drawing on elements of avant-garde and shock theater, and though none of it was as mind-blowing or radical as Farrell liked to pretend, both Nothing's Shocking and Ritual De Lo Habitual were and are really exciting records, with songs that burn on slow fuses before exploding spectacularly. (Mucho credit to guitarist Dave Navarro and the versatile rhythm section of Eric Avery and Stephen Perkins.) The band may have had less to say about our culture of sex, violence and racism than they'd hoped, but they generated a feeling of grandness that transcended the skuzz. Sometimes I think portable music devices were invented for bands like Jane's Addiction, so that dweebs like me could walk down the street with headphones on, feeling cocky, politicized and ocean-sized.
Enduring presence? Farrell and Navarro seem to have been actively trying to fuck up their own legacy over the past decade, between Navarro's multiple forays into reality/competition TV and Farrell's succession of fairly shitty side projects. Last year's Satellite Party was especially weak, and perhaps indicative of a permanent shift in the fortunes of the whole Jane's Addiction generation of alt-rockers. These guys were supposed to be the insurgents, but they ending up becoming massively successful, and in the music business, fame and fortune has its own kind of peculiar momentum. It's hard to go back to being a meager-selling cult act one you've been a major earner for a major label, so former players like Farrell keep coming up with ways to pitch themselves as relevant and cutting-edge. When that fails, they move on to the next stage: indie labels and the oldies circuit. Hey, it happens to best of them.
- Comments