Garbage Days Revisited #57: Soul Asylum - "While You Were Out" (1986)

 

"Here's to fallin' off the world’s dark side/Driftin' in alone on the morning tide/Riding on an all night train through the crystal caves/Where the moonlight shines the path for a better day" - Soul Asylum - Crashing Down

Mention Soul Asylum to most British music fans who aren't "in the know" and their response will probably be to roll their eyes and remember that terrible mushy acoustic ballad Runaway Train song which gave the band a Top 10 hit over here in 1992 and which instantly condemned them to be written off as limp third division corporate Cobain wannabes. Of course though, that's far from the full story - if EVER there was a band whose hit sounded nothing like the majority of their catalogue prior to that point then it was Dave Pirner and co.

Obviously if you remember the early instalments of Sounds From The Junkshop when I was reminiscing about the early '90s, you'll remember that I had precious little time for grunge - to me it just seemed like a lumpen clodhopping swamp of misery compared to the spikier more energetic likes of Carter USM or the Senseless Things or the Wonder Stuff who were the bands I ended up following back then. The truth is though that, as I discovered upon getting a bit older, the movement only really became that after Nirvana hit big with Smells Like Teen Spirit. Prior to that, "grunge" (not that the movement really had a name at that point) was really more the preserve of stoner goofballs from Seattle and the north Pacific coast with a love of sloppy riffs, punk energy and, believe it or not, a sense of humour. In their early days, Nirvana were less about polished production and sluggish heroin laments and more about grinding out earthshaking riffs, raging punk energy and the odd fun cover version like Love Buzz. Similarly, before Soundgarden became masters of tedious over-polished corporate angst, they were writing songs with titles like Big Dumb Sex and Full On Kevin's Mom and similarly bruising guitar work while Mother Love Bone, who would mutate into Pearl Jam, were shamelessly in thrall to the big epic Aerosmith-style stadium rock sound of the '70s on their sole album Apple (a future GDR subject for sure). And then there's Soul Asylum.

It's interesting because I think most grunge fans who prefer the movement's early stuff (which in my experience is most of them to be honest) have their moment where they realised the movement had been co-opted by the major labels and turned into a toothless attitude-free facsimile of what it once was with the edges completely smoothed out and the studio gloss layered on with no expense spared. I remember talking about this with my wife, who's a couple of years older than me and was into grunge as a teenager, not too long after we started dating and she mentioned that for her it was the aforementioned Runaway Train song. And it’s a fair point, it literally drags along for four minutes and has about as much in common with the riffed up slacker cool of early grunge bands like Mudhoney as the corporate funded punk bandwagon jumpers of the late ‘70s like the Boomtown Rats and the sodding Police did with the Sex Pistols. But the truth is that prior to this, Soul Asylum had done two classic high-energy alt-rock albums and two which had their fair share of good moments on as well. So how did we get from there to here? Read on dear reader, read on...

Soul Asylum actually formed as far back as 1982 in Minnesota just after fellow Twin Cities natives Husker Du and the Replacements had both put their first albums out. Their debut album Say What You Want Clarence, Karl Sold The Truck was a compilation of their first few EP's and was a bit sloppy but had some promise. It was Made To Be Broken, released in the early days of 1986, that saw them really step their game up - although it's not quite all killer no filler, the first half of it absolutely storms it with the paranoid aggression of Tied To The Tracks blasting things into gear in fine style before the rough-edged drunk laments of Ship Of Fools and Can't Go Back ("Fifteen years later, caught in time's incinerator/Yesterday's worries are today's/But the good times seem so near just sittin' back and drinkin' beer" - yeah, that sounds familiar...), the slow-fast early hours spaced-out paranoia of Another World Another Day, the almost cowpunk title track and the angsty acoustics of Never Really Been ("You know it's hard to be nice when hate becomes your vice and you can't find peace anywhere") round out an absolutely killer first six tracks even if, in true Stiff Little Fingers Nobody's Heroes style, the second half of it just can't quite live up to that (with the honourable exception of the slow-building Ain't That Tough).

While You Were Out which followed in the dying days of '86 saw the band do what every good follow-up to a promising album should do - build on the strong bits, iron out the creases and come up with a genuinely excellent album which packs a punch throughout. Although the likes of Freaks and Miracle Mile bring the punk energy, there's enough variety in here to keep things interesting. The mid-paced No Man's Land is an anti-gentrification rant ("One fine day the builders came and made new rules for an old game") which sounds oddly prescient if you've lived in London in the last ten years or so while the frenetic Crashing Down could easily be a Senseless Things song that just happened to arrive five years early. Closer To The Stars bristles with disquiet and the anti-authority diatribe The Judge was covered by none other than the Wildhearts on their Stop Us If You've Heard This One Before covers album. The wilfully sloppy countrified lament Passing Sad Daydream meanwhile sees frontman Dave Pirner snarling all his angst out over a laconic backing which slowly builds to a furious conclusion to close the album out ("And I'm so far from home now/But there's nothing left there anyway"). This really was the sound of Soul Asylum properly arriving as a force to be reckoned with.

While You Were Out brought Soul Asylum to the attention of major label A&M and there were some fears that their somewhat cavalier approach might end up being blunted but their debut for their new paymasters Hang Time was actually just as good as While You Were Out, fired along by two absolutely killer singles Sometime To Return and arguably the band's finest hour Cartoon. Elsewhere, Down On Up To Me cranks through on an almost Zep-heavy riff, Little Too Clean bounces around like an out of control pinball, Standing In The Doorway and Beggars And Choosers provide the spiky angst payload, Endless Farewell drifts into gentle psychedelia, Marionette is pure power-pop and Twiddly Dee almost goes into country territory.

Unfortunately this was the era of Poison and Warrant being the big unit shifters in the States and despite being a fantastic album, Hang Time made a very meagre splash commercially. It seemed it hit Soul Asylum's confidence a bit as well as the follow up And The Horse They Rode In On just seemed a bit unsure of itself by comparison - a good half of it was still killer (Spinnin', Easy Street, We 3, Nice Guys Don't Get Paid) but there were a few moments in there that drifted towards anonymity. Soon afterwards, A&M dropped the group and supposedly they were on the verge of splitting up.

Of course, what happened next is history - Dave Pirner and guitarist Dan Murphy decided to retreat to doing acoustic gigs in Minnesota (partly due to Pirner developing hearing problems) and road testing new material that way. It brought them to the attention of Columbia records who signed them for the Grave Dancers' Union album aka the one with Droneaway Train (crap joke I know, I care not) which gave them a Top 10 hit over here and in the States but also saw them lose pretty much everything that had made them a standout group to begin with.

The irony is of course that having listened to Grave Dancers' Union again for the first time in over two decades as I write this, it's actually...dare I say it...not as terrible as I remember it being? Ok, sure, there's the obvious downside of The Hit but the likes of Somebody To Shove, Black Gold and Sun Maid are actually alright and Without A Trace has some lyrics that still make me smile a bit even if there's still quite a noticeable amount of filler here similar to And The Horse They Rode In On. No, the problems really started with 1995's Let Your Dim Light Shine which was already facing an uphill struggle by being released into the teeth of the grunge backlash (and over in the UK the rise of Britpop) but the group really didn't help themselves by essentially trying to write a dozen Runaway Train copies only even less interesting. Sales tailed off and Soul Asylum would find themselves dropped back to the margins they'd sprung from a decade before.

Soul Asylum never split up of course and they've kept on valiantly plugging away to the faithful ever since. Pirner is now the sole original member with Murphy having left a few years ago and longtime bassist Karl Mueller succumbing to cancer in 2006 (initially replaced by none other than Replacements/G'n'R man Tommy Stinson). In spite of the fact that, to these ears, they've never really topped that killer one-two of While You Were Out and Hang Time, I do still end up listening to their new albums occasionally hoping for a return to form but, if their previous effort Hurry Up And Wait (Nite Songs review here) is anything to go by, I'm not sure it's ever gonna happen. Ah well, win some lose some...

It may well have been a slow downward slope for Soul Asylum for the last 30 or so years but for While You Were Out and Hang Time alone, they deserve a lot better than to be remembered as second division grunge bandwagon jumpers (if you're gonna start picking on a band for being the point where grunge really corpo'd out and became the snorefest it had developed into by 1994 or so then my suggestion would probably be Silverchair. Urgh). I'd recommend Made To Be Broken, or at least the first side of it, as well and even And The Horse They Rode In On and Grave Dancers' Union both have their moments. And you know something? That's a lot more good material than a lot of bands ever manage.