876. Screaming Trees, Invisible Lantern (1988)

“When we did Invisible Lantern, we were probably ready to call it quits,” Van Conner, bassist of Screaming Trees, once acknowledged. “We all had crap jobs, and had no future. You weren’t making any money in a band like that — we were supporting our ‘band habit’ by having a job. You had to take it really seriously to keep it going and sacrifice everything.”

The Screaming Trees had only been slugging it out for three years in 1988, but, in the manner of the day, they were already up to their third full-length album. Hailing from the state of Washington, the band was a natural fit on the SST label, itself only a decade old and already firmly established as the prime source for a particular brand of pummeling rock music, informed by punk, but with a more expansive sonic palette. A few years later, the geography of the Screaming Trees homeland combined with their proclivity for thick arrangements of buzzing guitars to corral them into the grunge movement. The reality was was more complicated, though. Especially early on, they were mad rock deconstructionists, making psychedelic-tinged garage rock that seemed to be rattling apart like a tin jalopy on a rutted road. It’s no wonder they had fervent followers and yet couldn’t quite break through in way that made their guitar-slinging profitable.

Album opener “Ivy” crystallizes the Screaming Trees sound: pummeling hard rock with a psychedelic waver to the guitar line. They were also inclined toward the late-sixties rattled grooviness in the lyrics. The waterfall of guitars on “Lines & Circles” are met with hippie-dippie lyrics — “Crystal faces on a windowsill/ I can hear them whisper slowly/ Like the chill wind/ That moves around this room I’m in” — almost goading listeners into trying to combine pogoing with loose-limbed spins. At times, the real challenge is figuring out which sonic instinct is winning out.

The music also manages to combined lushness with sheer loud rock impact, as on the marvelously gloomy “Grey Diamond Desert” and the thudding “Smokerings.” A minor forecast of how the band would eventually crossover resides in the slick, potent “Even If,” but “The Second I Awake” might be yet more telling, if only because it sounds a little like fellow unlikely hitmakers Soul Asylum, if they were trying to prove their nimbleness. Album closer “Night Comes Creeping” is awash in fierce, jubilant layers. Invisible Lantern doesn’t sound all that much like the product of a band feeling weary of the futile grind of rock ‘n’ roll. Instead, it has the charge of explorations that are still yielding discoveries.

 

 

875. Andy White, Rave On Andy White (1986)

For a Belfast-born singer-songwriter with a folk bent emerging onto the public consciousness in the middle of the nineteen-eighties, addressing “The Troubles” was probably a prerequisite. And so it was for Andy White, who made his debut with the EP Religious Persuasion, on the revered Stiff Records label, in 1985. The title cut, which was released as single, offered White’s direct consideration of the conflicts roiling Northern Ireland. It was enough of a hit in the region that it was considered a coup to get him to recreate the original music video a couple years ago.

“Religious Persuasion” carried over to White’s full-length debut one year later, nestled in the center of a big batch of originals with similar sensibilities. It’s not only the presence of a similar accent that makes the material on Rave On Andy White sound like a preview of what Luka Bloom would emerge with a few years later. On tracks like “Vision of You” and “The Walking Wounded,” my personal chronology with Irish solo performers striding onto the college charts, I can’t help but think of White as delivering a less hopped-up version of what would land with Bloom’s Riverside.

White’s music is probably more fairly compared to the other famed performers who made their way with little more than a guitar, a harmonica, and a knack for pointed rhymes. These are the same scruffy troubadours to whom all the folk fellows were expected to tip their battered hats. “Reality Row” has a modernized Bob Dylan vibe, and the plaintive harmonica on “Tuesday Apocalypse #13” naturally calls to mind Neil Young. It might have been well-trod territory, but White did well by himself scuffing his boots in those footsteps. Rave On Andy White is a small beauty.

 

 

874. David + David, Boomtown (1986)

David Ricketts was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In the late nineteen-seventies, he moved to Los Angeles, where he found employment building sets on Hollywood studio lots and cast around for like-minded musicians up for collaboration.

David Baerwald was born in Oxford, Ohio. In the late nineteen-seventies, he moved to Los Angeles, where he became the frontman for a local band called Sensible Shoe and cast around for different like-minded musicians up for collaboration.

Ricketts and Baerwald began working together in 1984, settling on a band name based upon their shared moniker. The collaboration went smoothly, but Baerwald was simultaneously dealing with a significant struggle with the law. He later recounted he was spending his days in court and his nights working through material with Ricketts. Baerwald was found guilty of the crimes, but a letter from A&M Records helped him escape significant jail time. “I ended up skating with time served, probation, and community service,” Baerwald said. “So I owed them.”

Part of the payment was a hit record. “Welcome to the Boomtown,” the lead single from David + David’s debut, Boomtown, was one of those songs that seemed to be everywhere, although it was only a modest performer on the charts, peaking at #37. Glossy and heavy with mood, the track had a novelistic toughness about it, recalling any number of Bruce Springsteen songs that spun grim romanticism out of low-level malfeasance. Follow-up single “Swallowed by the Cracks” had a similar sense of tuneful grittiness, giving the impression that Baerwald and Ricketts were weatherbeaten storytellers using guitars and amps instead of oil-dappled manual typewriters.

Much of the rest of Boomtown is fairly drab by comparison, lacking a sharpness that helps the first two singles transcend the shiny eighties production. “Ain’t So Easy” has a weird, burbling dance music undercurrent, as if a Howard Jones song is trying to break free, and “Being Alone Together” aspires to the cool shimmy of solo Bryan Ferry, but has leaden, often overly literal lyrics (“All those souvenirs/ Taking up closet space/ She stands in the doorway/ Hot tears rolling down her face”). There are decent relaxed bluesy turns on “All Alone in the Big City” and “Heroes.” Too often, though, David + David are undone by pushing for intensity that seems beyond them. The vocals on “River’s Gonna Rise” are supposed to register anguish, I think. They have more of a grinding gears quality.

The David + David discography stops at a single entry, but the two remained separately involved, mostly behind the scenes, in the Los Angeles music scene. Most notably — and perhaps tellingly — they were among the many songwriters credited on Sheryl Crow’s huge album Tuesday Night Music Club.

 

 

873. Don Henley, I Can’t Stand Still (1982)

The Eagles sold so many records. Somewhat infamously, Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975) still jockeys with Michael Jackson’s Thriller for the title of biggest-selling album in U.S. history. (Both are at 29 million copies and counting.) It can’t entirely be chalked up to misguided Baby Boomer nostalgia, either. The band was a chart force when they were still making new music. The Long Run, the Eagles’ final full-length studio effort until lucrative reunions beckoned many years later, spent nine straight weeks on top of the Billboard album chart and yielded three Top 10 singles, including the #1 hit “Heartache Tonight.”

The Eagles broke up in highly messy fashion in 1980. The individual band members were still bound to Elektra Records, so the inevitable solo albums were under that broad banner. Of the band’s primary songwriters, Glenn Frey was first to record racks, releasing No Fun Allowed in May, 1982. Don Henley followed two-and-a-half months later with his own solo debut, I Can’t Stand Still.

Frey did his best to keep the Eagles vibe going, collaborating with Jack Tempchin, the songwriter who regular fed tunes to the band, including the hit “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” Henley was presumably more determined to distance himself from what had come before. Finding his own new creative partner in ace session guitarist Danny Kortchmar, Henley made music that often abrasive rejected the mellow, country-influenced sound of his earlier. “You Better Hang Up” deploys a ostentatiously grinding guitar riff as Henley sings with a nonchalant swagger that suggests John Waite with less rock credibility. it’s not all tough stuff, though. “Talking to the Moon,” co-written with J.D. Souther, offers a maudlin reminder that Henley was the main creative voice behind “Desperado.”

The album’s high point also brought Henley his first significant solo hit, and let him claim first blood in whatever war for post-Eagles supremacy he might have had with Frey. “Dirty Laundry” made it into the Top 5 on the Billboard singles chart and topped the rock chart. Fervent and muscular, the song works in large part because it effectively channels the caustic worldview that’s clearly part of the lining of Henley’s soul. No matter how many records the Eagles sold with their genial ramble-tamble coastline drives, rock is usually better when it lets the anger show.

 

To learn more about this gigantic endeavor, head over to the introduction. Other entries can be found at the CMJ Top 1000 tag. Most of the images in these posts come straight from the invaluable Discogs.