SOUL ASYLUM:
CAN'T GO BACK AND DON'T WANNA

Loud Fast Rules was made to be broken. But Soul Asylum is a little bit tougher.

Story by Eric Lindbom.

Soul Asylum are the eye of their own storm - a raging tempest of noise, feedback, and ever-shifting tempos - and there in the midst are four guys with untucked shirts, oblivious in the face of obliteration.

Grant Young flailing his sticks. Jagged toothed Karl Mueller, a menacing-looking bassist in black leather who's really sweet. And Dan Murphy, the eager guitarist who sings his lungs out, hair sweatgummed to his forehead.

And the maelstrom itself -Dave Pirner, whose rasp makes him sound like he was born to die of a runny nose. Pale, gangly, deathly thin, his sternum protruding, Pirner releases energy in one fitful seizure after another. He chops away on guitar and then hurls himself across the stage, becoming his own tackling dummy. He whips his long, limp hair. Under Irving Plaza's lights, he resembles A) A hippie being electrocuted, B) Rapunzel with the dry heaves C) Shawn Phillips and the motorboat D) All of the above. Yet his eyes are dead, sometimes shut. Like the rest of the band, he's immersed in his own thunder. Welcome to his nightmare.

WHY THIS SELF COMMUNION in the middle of a bar? Laughs Murphy, who has written two of the band's most corrosive tunes, "Long Way Home" and "Can't Go Back". "In Providence, I looked out at the crowd and this really homely girl blew me a kiss. I said I'd never look out again".

Even before that happened, there was a time when Soul Asylum didn't like what they saw when they scanned the audience. At first, the hardcore nuts gawked and then, once the music had changed, bewildered zombies chewed their lower lips and stared blandly.

So now, by force of habit, Soul Asylum are still lost in their own trip. No matter. Here's a band that can be forgiven some introspection. They've stayed the course, as Ronbo would say. Now audiences are paying attention, proof that Soul Asylum have arrived.

Their name is spreading beyond the bathroom graffiti grapevine and out into the open. Tastemakers always want to play John the Baptist, but Soul Asylum took such a bumpy path to get where they are that in their hometown, they're only cautiously dubbed with the damning tag, "Minneapolis' Next Great Band".

RIGHT NOW, SOUL Asylum are one of America's great rock bands. Check out their latest album, Made to Be Broken, for instant verification. On it, Soul Asylum kick up the dirt of some muddy backroad situated somewhere between the Allman Brothers and Moby Grape. But they don't need to parade their roots like beaming geneologists ever-mindful of their place in a "historical rock heritage". Many rock bands become more victimized by their influences; once they finish the obligatory alms, then they make their music. Soul Asylum have no such identity problems.

But they aren't their own best critics, either -so they leave Irving Plaza convinced they've bombed. Never mind that their tight/sloppy frenzy stunned a crows waiting to see Husker Du, and that when everyone started to understand, the band tossed in their hilariously seasick reading of Neil Young's "Looking for a Love". For the encore, Mueller pumped out the bassline of Wild Cherry's "Play That Funky Music White Boy". As the Jam deteriorated, Murphy improvised a rap about Mitch Lee, a Minnesota college basketball player charged in a rape scandal, and Pirner decided to pull the plug, disarming Young one drumstick at a time. It's the kind of show where you gotta wring your shirt and brains out afterwards.

Similarly, Made to Be Broken practically melts the turntable, but after the head rushes wear off -from the tumbling fury of "Whoa!" and "Don't It", to the metal shredding of "Ship Of Fools"- it's the songs themselves that make it the yardstick rock album of '86. White noise rage and the facile malice of older lyrics like "I'm Sick of That Song" have led to world-weary reflection. Made to Be Broken seethes with regret, from Dan Murphy's "Can't Go Back" ("15 years/caught in times incinerator") to "Tied to the Tracks", the single which asks, "Don't you remember/the years we got nowhere?"

The album, recorded in a speedy session, was a trial by fire for Soul Asylum and phase one of a longterm goal - getting their shit together. Producer Bob Mould, Husker Du's king of manic determination, was drill instructor.

"HE TRIED TO antagonize you to get you going", says Murphy. "Me and Dave were trying to do background vocals and he'd say, 'Ha-sounds like shit, guys'. Everyone talks about the Huskers and us, but one thing those guys did was convince us to get out, tour and work. Bob gave us numerous pep talks, 'Get off your asses and play', he'd say".

"What's cool about the way Husker Du works", Pirner adds, "is that by the time their record comes out they have the next one finished. They have this clockwork thing going. You can't make an album and sit and think about it for a year".

Pirner knows, because Soul Asylum have spun a lot of wheels to get where they are today -broke, in debt, sort of well-known, and really wound up because after years of searching they've finally found their voice.

It used to be the hoarse holler of Loud Fast Rules, an unruly, teenage noise band born in '81. Loud? Sure, but the name spoke volumes in other ways. On the one hand you could call it hardcore cheerleading -"loud and fast rules, man". The flip side rang more like a lament of resignation: "stick to the hard and fast rules of hardcore; stay stupid, comrade".

Back in 1981, Minneapolis was smack dab in the midst of the halcyon hardcore period which had sprung from the womb already retro. The "Scene", with its slew of shit-fer-brains converts, took up residence at Goofy's Upper Deck, a downtown strip joint.

The real impact of this hardcore implosion fell on those who took the cues and moved on: Husker Du, already the Alexander Graham Bells of hardcore, Man-sized Action, the Blue Hippos (seeds of Otto's Chemical Lounge), and the Replacements, whose Stink summed up the vibes of the time.

Loud Fast Rules were understandably viewed as byproducts of the trash compactor. Pirner originally played drums ("Danny asked if anyone could play the drums and Dave claimed he could even though he'd never done it before", recalls Mueller) but handed over the sticks to a forgotten individual who stuck it out for two long weeks before Pat Morley stepped in. Their first gig took place only because Pirner had to produce a band for a St. Paul beer bust or get busted up himself; his first band, the Schitz, had backed out. But Pirner had jammed with LFR four times, and he begged them to step in, with a case of Heineken riding on the deal. Bassist Mueller turned up with a finger newly gashed by his Grandma's tablesaw. And that was just the beginning. "There were big fights. Morley got punched in the head. The cops finally said 'You guys get out of here'", Mueller recalls with a grin.

Loud Fast Rules carved a legacy for themselves as drunken, unreliable, but usually gripping -although emerging flirtations with country and blues went unnoticed and unappreciated. Finally in 1983, tired of being viewed as part of the hardcore holding pattern, they redubbed themselves Soul Asylum and recorded over 20 tracks for a Twin/Tone album, which eventually was truncated into the underrated Say What You Will EP.

Many of those unreleased tracks will finally come out on Time's Incinerator, a 19-song Twin/Tone cassette due out by the time you read this. The cassette serves as a bridge between the now and the then, since outtakes from both their records are included with demos and live Loud Fast Rules cuts, plus a six-minute cover of James Brown's "Hot Pants".

A long year crawled by before the EP emerged. Beset by delays, the band became increasingly sluggish. By the time the EP appeared they were bored with it. The loitering hurt their heads more than anybody supposed. Nobody was betting on Soul Asylum to go the distance. They never seemed "driven". Instead, they were laughing behind the wheel of a swerving beater, nicking curbs and pruning mail boxes until the gas ran out.

Sometimes the gigs were endurance tests. Laugh along with the out-of-tune guitars. Wonder if Pirner could struggle through the next song without choking on a furry phlegm ball. One night he baited the crowd by croaking his way through every verse of "Like A Rolling Stone". When Pirner began blurting into a saxophone it seemed like a pay-me-and-I'll-stop audience confrontation.

They were already improving, but during their first tour (shows from that time have become folklore to the handfuls who saw them) the band hit another roadblock. Though drummer Morley booked the tour, he became tired of the drink and drive road grind. Late at night in the truck, between Cleveland and Boston, he told Murphy that in two years he'd probably have a kid. "Right then, I knew it would be his only tour with us", Murphy said.

Murphy was right. But when Morley quit and checked in for alcohol treatment, he proved hard to replace and Soul Asylum went into another tailspin. By now they seemed as lucky as Mookie Wilson.

WHEN THEY REFORMED a year later with Young on skins, Twin/Tone didn't exactly give them a hero's welcome. After the departure of the Replacements to Sire, the label wanted a band with enough perseverance to tour regularly. Soul Asylum had never been a pillar of stability and a live demo failed to impress anyone.

Twin/Tone told them to prove themselves, offering to distribute a single if it passed the mustard with the label's staff. Soul Asylum were left to their own devices and with Mould's help, quickly knocked off "Tied to the Tracks"/"Long Way Home". The label was ecstatic about the single, decided that the band had risen to the dare and chose to push them.

More propulsive and melodic than any of the EP's boilerplate punk. "Tied to the Tracks" caught fire on the college charts. Unfortunately, "Long Way Home", Murphy's superior B-side, which sounds like the Eagles' "Already Gone" on speed, didn't make it to the album.

Since then, Soul Asylum have been hard gigging troupers, headlining as well as supporting X and the Huskers.

"We do this for our own personal satisfaction", Pirner says. "And anyone else who digs it, fine. We've always looked for a big reaction, whether it's good or bad. We just want to slap people in the face".

PIRNER SPEAKS WITH a sleepy, deadpan exasperation -like he's suffered a lot of fools uneasily. He says he became a singer through default. "I was the only one that had the balls and coordination to play guitar and sing at the same time. I just started screaming. I remember way back when at church camp I did know how to sing and now I'm sorta rediscovering that. It's a lot funnier now because I have a grasp of what I do. I know what I can do", Pirner says.

He's equally nonchalant about his songwriting. "I write blank verse shit and play guitar into a tape recorder continuously. Then I just sort of put things together. I come up with a melody and think of something I wrote two weeks ago -or sometimes I'll write a whole song in one sitting. I always have this big surplus", he says.

The acoustic ballad, "Never Really Been", shows how Pirner can turn a phrase and come off sounding morose and wise: "Hey, ain't it strange/how some things never change/ ain't it strange how nothing stays the same?" In the next verse he sings, "I've learned to accept and not to expect the respect and neglect that I get".

Back home in Minneapolis, Pirner and his bandmates practice, watch soap operas, and live on a broken shoe-string. Pirner says he can get by on zilch, but it's tougher for Mueller, who manages the band's meager assets. Fortunately, Soul Asylum somehow have legitimate access to a Visa, that most seductive of credit cards, which lets the holder run up enormous deficits that require only piddly payments in exchange for a lifetime of debt and high interest charges. With their plastic and t-shirt sales, Soul Asylum are just barely keeping their heads above water.

THEY ALL AGREE that it's touring -not dabbling in the studio- that's what they're really all about. And they'd rather talk about last night's gig than this month's record. "When you do something yourself, you're so self-critical, even our new record I'm hard-pressed to like", admits Murphy, mentioning glitches he wished he could go back and fix. "Look, we're not Steely Dan", says Mueller. "That's never gonna happen, no matter how hard we try. But that's okay, too".

As for the next-great-band-from-the-frozen-north tag, Young declares, "You've gotta ignore that shit because it doesn't matter. It's like people coming up to us and saying you think you're a hardcore band. People don't know we started doing this before we knew who the Replacements and Husker Du were".

Backstage at New York's Columbia University, tempers are running high. A crowd of collegiate geeks, helped onstage by supposed bouncers, makes the Huskers' set seem like a cage match. Pirner sneers that college crowds are a problem because they can only release their energy at certain times of the year, like right around mid-terms.

"I went to college for a few years. The best times I had were sitting in the TV lounge watching 'All My Children'. It was stupid", Mueller recalls.

"If you want to get fucked you go to college" Young suggests, then changes his mind. "Except it doesn't work".

PIRNER GRIPES THAT tours are split between playing guitar and long waits, spent crammed inside their truck with nothing to look at but each other and the Super Hero stickers on the wall. But actually, their hobo life of sleeping on a new floor each night and eating out of Baggies doesn't seem to faze them all that much.

"We have to deal with each other on a professional and personal level. A hard part is separating the two", explains Young. "You avoid each other", says Mueller. "You gotta learn to live with it. It's really interesting for me to cope with these really strong personalities around me and try to understand 'em all the time because you have to make all these compromises". Each day is a new drama of "who's gonna be the big grumpy asshole for the day", Pirner chimes in.

After the gig, it's Mueller's turn. He's arguing about t-shirt sales with somebody in the bar. Finally, following a long wait at the curb (sub-zero dawn) it's time to pass out.

Somebody sleeps in the truck with the roadie and everybody else looks for floor space. Wrapped in mildewed sleeping bags, the band members look like Palestinian refugees as they trudge through the burned-out East Village, land of gas can gentrification. Everyone's dressed to freeze, especially Pirner in wet, rotting tennies and jeans with knee holes gaping. At the crashpad, the beer's running low. It's only February, but Mueller breaks his New Year's resolution never to drink a Budweiser again. It's explained that Budweiser is one of the more common, cheap, pisswater beers in New York. The band is aghast. They drink a lot of cheap beer and know something about it.

"Pfeiffers is an honest American beer ($7.16 a case). I've never seen an advertisement or heard about it. It's cheap, it tastes like beer and it gets you drunk", asserts Pirner. "If beers were bands, Pfeiffers would be the band to listen to", he adds, perhaps hitting on a slogan. "If we're in the liquor store the cart magnetically draws itself toward the Pfeiffers", adds Young.

The band members begin geographically breaking down the US by cheap beer. First the bad news:

"Fox Deluxe gives you bad beer farts". "Bohemian Club is the rudest thing". "Kingsbury is a cheap Pfeiffers imitation. Too watery".

Though nobody in Soul Asylum looks as video-ready as the Del Fuegos, they could still do a solid commercial for the sensible, penniless guzzler.

Though nobody in Soul Asylum looks as video-ready as the Del Fuegos, they could still do a solid commercial for the sensible, penniless guzzler.

SOUND AFFECTS: BEER POURING. GRUNT OF SATISFACTION.

FM DJ VOICE: "After a hard day of cranking Made to Be Broken, crack open a -"

Though nobody in Soul Asylum looks as video-ready as the Del Fuegos, they could still do a solid commercial for the sensible, penniless guzzler.

SOUND AFFECTS: BEER POURING. GRUNT OF SATISFACTION.

FM DJ VOICE: "After a hard day of cranking Made to Be Broken, crack open a -"

WHEN IN: DRINK

Wa. State-- Rhinelander

Cleveland-- Heileman's Falstaff

Kalamazoo-- Wiseburg

New York-- Rolling Rock

Minneapolis -- Pfeiffers

? --Ortleibs

Hell-- Fox Deluxe, Bohemian Club, Budweiser

(Exhaustive research provided by Soul Asylum)

Big Thanks To Rafs For Typing up this puppy

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