Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1987
by Scott Miller

"Where the Streets Have No Name" - U2
I received a couple more year-of-release corrections, bringing "Mandinka" and "Dream World" from 1988 to here; I was kind of thinking of '87 as not quite the heart of darkness of the eighties, which would be '85 and '86, but bad enough. The number of acts I was actually rah-rah rooting for and excited about was near an all-time low. But now with the dream team in place, it's kind of a good collection, and I enjoy listening to each of these songs. Well, except this one, to be honest. I just plain admire its ability to do what it does—the guitar build-up at the beginning is remarkable, and it's done with amazingly little processing: hardly any reverb, which for '87 earns Eno and Lanois a gold star right there. And it deserves credit for capturing the world's imagination as a not-too-jive faith-based project. Yet, it's not short, and the lyrics, while undoubtedly earnest, are scarily incoherent and pretentious. "I want to run/I want to hide/I want to tear down the walls/That hold me inside/I want to reach out/And touch the flame/Where the streets have no name." I accept that as a breathless desire for spiritual transcendence, but does anyone actually want to hide, tear down walls, touch flames, and be on nameless streets simultaneously, either metaphorically or otherwise?

"No New Tale To Tell" - Love and Rockets
"Going against nature is part of nature, too" is a cute line, and as stomp-clap anthems go, I'll take this over "We Will Rock You" and "I Love Rock and Roll."

"Cotton Crown" - Sonic Youth
Listening to Sonic Youth in general isn't the surest bet to lift my mood, but they unquestionably have their moments; there's a warmth and loviness to this one, as well as the fetching almost-off-key category of indie appeal that SY do as well as anyone. You can almost imagine Sonny and Cher doing this one, maybe lying semi-conscious on either side of a room at the Chelsea.

"Touch of Grey" - The Grateful Dead
Interesting that the Dead had the ability—that they didn't whip out but a time or two a decade—to be as catchy as anyone. "Sorry that you feel that way/Every silver lining's got a touch of grey" is a believably conveyed sentiment to defuse contentiousness, which is probably an underappreciated skill honed in Dead culture, what with having to work out economies in miniature for vending, etc. at the scale of their live shows.

"Ambitious" - Wire
Wire seem like people who would have had no trouble adjusting to the ice cold production timbres of 1987, and in fact the first-round comeback album The Ideal Copy comes close to giving the sensation that Wire invented all of this. Close. They ditched some of the melodic chops that set 154 apart. "Ambition," eighties embodiment that it is, has an appeal unrelated to past Wire or to other artists; "When it's cold I feel cold/When it's hot I feel ambitious" is a hilarious refrain, perfectly delivered in one of Colin Newman's most theatrical voices, with touches of Ferry, Waters, and even David Thomas.

"Just Like Heaven" - The Cure
For simply running down a major scale, this is one sturdy and universal hook. The Cure are one of the most extreme cases of me never being very close to wanting to own the album, but I've absolutely got to hand it to them for being able to write something memorable. I guess they're one of first adolescent bands that cleanly missed my adolescence.

"Mandinka" - Sinead O'Connor
I had this in 1988; oops. Nice big guitar sound—another eighties scarcity. By the verse B part and those great head-voice hoots, you realize from both the music and words that Sinead is out to take things new places. She knows Mandinka. And she uses a real live band—but fight the real enemy: drum machine!

"Cara Lee" - Chris Stamey
I hate the production; it sounds like he decided to try to make it into a Peter Gabriel record late in the game. I'd heard the song live and it's a killer. Still a great cut. More tragic was the case of the once staggeringly beautiful "Time and All She Brings To Mind," which ended up sounding like "Born In the U.S.A."

"Sweet Child O' Mine" - Guns 'N' Roses
Everybody's favorite guitar warm-up pattern turned megahit is just fine in my book. The lyrics are even decent. Starting to cry if he stares at her face too long is emotionally accessible; so is hating to ever see an ounce pain in her eyes. "She's got a smile that it seems to me/Reminds me of childhood memories" has a probably unintentionally weird appeal. Just how remote a similarity to something is seeming to remind someone of a memory of it? I'd say there's a very real chance she bears no mental connection whatsoever to his childhood, wouldn't you?

"Waiting For No One" - Carnival Season
The singer of Carnival Season gave me a copy of this album when I was out on tour—one of literally hundreds of such demos or indie releases I've received from artists with whom I've shared that fleeting friendship in which social context the material is enjoyable, and that's all I ordinarily expect. This one just keeps impressing more and more as time goes on. Produced with punch and farsightedness by Tommy Keene (Guns 'N' Roses sound anemic by comparison), this frenetic, loopy, hypermelodic rocker comes closer to being a 1987 cut able to pass as, oh, a 2005 Panic At the Disco recording than is generally conceivable.

"Fireplace" - R.E.M.
There was no better news in the eighties than the huge success of the supremely worthy R.E.M., but their breakthrough hits, "It's the End Of the World As We Know It" and "The One I Love," were musically unremarkable. Not "Fireplace" (or, for that matter, most of the rest of the Document album); it's inventive, sophisticated, and great sounding. There are only a few lyric lines in the song, but isolating "Hang up the chairs to better sweep" as a signifier for new beginnings, exaggerated to a crescendo of throwing the room's furnishings into the fireplace, is exhilarating and just a little disturbing. Besides a typically oustanding Stipe vocal, the highlight is Steve Berlin's fabulous school-of-Coltrane sax work.

"The Cross" - Prince and the Revolution
A vague Eastern inflection on the guitar and in the structural lyric details temper what is otherwise a straight Christian sermon—a very effective one. The key verse, following one about a starving mother, is: "We all have our problems/Some big, some are small/Soon all of our problems/Will be taken by the Cross." One's own death and the threat of others' death are foregrounded, with the clear directive, "Don't die without knowing the Cross." That much blunt solemnity is admirable and audacious enough, but putting across the idea that striving for an empathetic mind is both a duty and a favor to one's own spiritual being in an intelligible and engaging way is a no small achievement.

"Alex Chilton" - The Replacements
I insist on the original vinyl for this one; the CD mastering I heard sounds like someone lost the thread of a grand compression plan. It's easy to imagine the Jim Dickinson production leaving a fair amount of madness to be dealt with in the stereo master. Who would think to write a song about Alex Chilton? Brilliant. Musically, it's a still pretty but more bracing variant on "I Will Dare," and lyrically, it follows the "Candle In the Wind"/"Vincent" rule: a song about a celebrity has to contain some complaint about the masses' indifference in death. Here, "If he died in Memphis, wouldn't that be cool?" And a decent job of that it was, actually.

"Levitate Me" - Pixies
Fort Apache certainly turned out its fair share of great results, with Gary Smith's—bracketed by this and Submarine Bells—impressing mightily. "Levitate Me" is as the Pixies very nearly as fully realized as they ever would be ("Come on, pilgrim, you know he loves you"), as was the art direction match made in heaven that was the commencement of Vaughan Oliver's hair and picture frame graphics.

"Moonhead" - Thin White Rope
Guy Kyser's spooky account of what I would guess is a mentally ill protagonist deciding to kill himself because he's at risk of killing his girlfriend is the apex of Thin White Rope's murder ballad, spaghetti Western, Riverside, CA via Davis, CA rock. The intricately interlaced guitar theme here is stealthily introduced and becomes a powerful climax, and Kyser's voice is iconic: kind of, Johnny Cash after he'd wandered insane in the desert for a year.

"Palindrome" - The Ophelias
This recording stands out amid those of the era—it sounds absolutely like a million bucks. I think Tom Mallon may be responsible for the sound, but at any rate, this is pre-David Immergluck, and thus figures to be largely the Leslie Medford show. The 6/8 time, the harmonica, the faux-anachronistic drama of the vocals ("History is written in the buff/But by the time you read it, it's all window dressing stuff"): all rippingly good.

"Not My Slave" - Oingo Boingo
Danny Elfman has had a wild career; from the social-conservative jump, jive and ska of Oingo Boingo to what must be one of the most lucrative film scoring careers in Hollywood (the Simpsons' theme and the Edward Scissorhands score being among the most memorable), he's a vastly talented guy who can be musically annoying in the extreme. I don't have a rational explanation for why the ignored single "Not My Slave" rubs me so much the right way, but I'd venture to characterize it as some supernatural conjunction of Steve Nieve and the Smoking Popes. Certainly the Farfisa and verse vocal hooks ("With everyone around telling us what to do") are very strong.

"Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before" - The Smiths
I'd call this the highest musical altitude to which the Smiths soared. It's a very good lyric set; not their very best, but containing at least one top-drawer zinger. The verse uses the same chords and is closely related to the chorus, building to the payoff of "Nothing's changed, I still love you/Only slightly, only slightly less than I used to." There's a rich density of chord changes, sounds, and ideas that works well against the backdrop of the normally more discursive, duotone presentation of Morrissey and Marr.

"Dream World" - Midnight Oil
Here's another case of eighties elements brought out of their initial charter and reassembled to serve the good. Diesel and Dust was a fine whole album, and a big step forward for Midnight Oil (I thought "Power and the Passion" was just irritating). The guitar arpeggios and portamentos are just right. Something about the way Peter Garrett says, "Your dream world is just about to end" makes me think my dream world is just about to end. I guess this is an environmentalist take on undesirable land development but the emotion translates to any case of taking a wonderful situation for granted.