Soul Asylum -

Rolling Stone, August 5, 1993 (part two of two)

Reprinted Without Permission

by Chris Mundy

March 4, 1993 , Toronto It isn't worth explaining why Dave Pirner's pants are resting near his ankles. What is important is that he is conducting an interview with his bass player. At the moment, however, it is Mueller who has the question: "Am I supposed to sit here and answer questions with your winky hanging out?"

Yes, the interrogation is getting off to a slow start. And while it certainly isn't your typical interview situation, to be fair, the aforementioned winky is neatly hidden inside Pirner's green polka-dot boxers.

PIRNER: How do you feel about the fact that when it comes down to it and we all get fucked up, I'm the one who has to deliver? I basically have to be a spokesperson for the band after you guys are too wasted.

MUELLER: That's never been true.

PIRNER: [Waving his hand in the air] OK, OK. Let's refocus. What about your out-of-body experience?

MUELLER: I really did have one. I was playing along, and all of a sudden I was above the stage, looking down at myself, and I fucked up the song incredibly.

PIRNER: Oh, I hate that.

MUELLER: Yeah, what can you do? There were a lot of times where I wished I could have been out of my body, but that's the only time it actually happened.

PIRNER: You know, nobody understands what makes this group work. It's not a face-value equation. It's a functioning group.

MUELLER: [Scooting forward to emphasize his point] The three other guys, they understand. I'm just not sure that the people that are going to read an article about us are going to understand. Think about how fucking long we've been together.

PIRNER: Karl is the anchor of the band because nobody really understands what he's all about. Karl maintains this mystique.

MUELLER: It's no mystique. I have no fucking idea where I'm coming from. Not at all.

PIRNER: Karl, are you crazy?

MUELLER: [Laughs] You know, I just don't know.

PIRNER: I don't think you are, clinically. And that's good because none of us would have money for the clinic. The crux of the issue is that Karl Mueller is one of the most intriguing characters I've ever met in my life. How many people do you know can get through an entire crossword puzzle in cutting-edge time and then sit down and actually read a Mod Squad book? I have the perfect bass player. I'm stating that as fact.

MUELLER: [Grinning lovingly] Dave, if I didn't have to pee, I'd give you a hug.

March 20, 1993, New York City The mode of transportation is limousine. The drink of the moment is champagne. As people continue pouring into the Saturday Night Live cast party, the members of Soul Asylum are sitting around a huge rectangular table with friends and family in a cocoon of relative calm. just a couple of hours ago the band was careening across the NBC soundstage delivering urgent versions of "Somebody To Shove" and "Black Gold" to a live audience as well as a few million viewers. Now, however, all the outbursts of action seem to be transpiring around them. The band's manager is making a toast, and the atmosphere has the air of an enormous holiday dinner.

"It was a conscious effort on this record to let everyone know we're a group," says Mueller of Soul Asylum's interaction. "It's not Dave and three hacks. It's not a group that some manager put together."

Young interjects. "I had a really hard time making this last record," he says. "I confronted everybody, and they all made me feel that we're all in this together and we're all equally important to each other. To me, that's what this group's about."

For his part, Murphy agrees. To a point.

"Everybody thinks there's great camaraderie in bands, and there is to a certain extent in this band," says Murphy. "But when we have time off, it's definitely time off. I think what gets left out about us is obvious. We're four very different people."

OK, point taken.

The day Mueller was born, his father said: "He has big hands. He's going to be a bass player." For Mueller, one of his greatest regrets is that his father didn't live to see his prediction come true, so when he got married four years ago, his band mates gave him an upright bass as a wedding gift. ("I saw the reaction," says Pirner. "It was the perfect gift.") But while Mueller can come across as the quietest, most no-nonsense band member, he hopes to someday open a bar (Karl's Krazy Lounge) and spends his band downtime reading Hawaii Five-0 and Mod Squad books and tending to his two collections: a rude-food collection that he plans to build and extra shelf for and a collection of 80 snow domes.

Young is the member of Soul Asylum most likely to miss the comforts of home but also point out the positive aspects of life on the road. "Grant is kind of an explorer and somebody that really is always looking to find something beyond what's laid out for him," says Pirner of his drummer. And while in that way Young is credited with being the least realistic member of the tribe, he also carries the burden of being the most "regular guy". Murphy, Pirner and Mueller register in hotels under assumed names. Young registers as Grant Young. Not that regularities impede creativity. When Young got married last Halloween, he threw a costume reception.

It is Murphy who most feels the strain of life on the Soul Asylum treadmill. Recently married, Murphy also continues to run his antique business and has a 3-year-old son from a former relationship. If the band broke up tomorrow, Murphy might just be relieved and would certainly run screaming from the music business.

"I'm starting to appreciate it," he says. "It feels different to me now. But you have a lot of different factors tugging at you. It's real hard. Kids are so innocent. They say things like 'When you're far away, I really miss you.' And you just say, 'Wow.'"

And then there is Pirner. With his lion's mane and impish grin, he is the one Soul Asylum member who is instantly recognizable. And as the band's main songwriter, he also possesses its vision. As yin to Murphy's yang, Pirner lives his life on the border of control. We do know that he possesses a train fetish (each Soul Asylum album has featured at least one train song) and that he doesn't own a television or a CD player - instead opting to read underground comic books. Keenly intelligent, he's also not afraid to play the dumb blond, using his lovable fuck-up persona as a shield.

"I hide my intelligence well, huh?" he says, with a little embarrassment. "Playing the fool. Sometimes it makes it easier for me. People let me do whatever I want because they assume that I'm out there and can't be helped. I have better things to do with my time than trying to convince people I'm not what they think I am. It goes way back for me."

April 21, 1993, New York City Grant Young is beaming, staring at his reflection on the gold record he received just a few hours ago. It's a little past midnight, and Soul Asylum have just finished taping an episode of MTV Unplugged. Back in the dressing room - the spot where the band was surprised with its first gold record just moments before taking the stage - no one feels like leaving.

Across the room, Danny Murphy is hugging a friend.

"What a night," he says, finally. "I tell ya, we walked out on the stage, and I was so choked up that I didn't think I was going to make it through the first song without crying."

June 16, 1993, Tampa, Florida "I'm a mess," says Dave Pirner, by way of introduction to his current personal life. "I feel like I'm at the most insecure time of my entire life, and it feels good. My whole life is completely up in the air. I don't have a place to live. I don't have a place to go. I don't know where my friends are. I'm just living on the road and trying to make it more of a home than ever."

Proof positive exists in a letter that Pirner has just written to a fan: "I've lived on a bus for the last six months. I'm having a bit of a breakdown, and everything seems so superficial."

The major source of Pirner's current upheaval is his breakup from his girlfriends of 13 years - a split forced by his current relationship with actress Winona Ryder. And as attested by the old rock cliche of dumping the lifelong love for a movie star once fame is achieved, Pirner is struggling to figure out which aspects of his new-found status as artist, commodity and sex symbol to buy into.

"I am having a bit of an identity crisis, but it's a very strange identity crisis because people are telling me who I am all the time," Pirner says. "And what they know about me is pretty much who I am. I feel like I have to change my life and make it new again."

And if changing your life after finally arriving at the destination you set out for seems a bit rash, Pirner swears he's not quite ready to tell anyone "I told you so."

"My parents always hated the whole thing, and I think they'll probably have the last laugh," he says. "My dad showed me this postcard that he got from one of his friends. The gist of it was that my dad had been talking to the guy about what a loser I was, then I showed up in Newsweek, and the guy was making fun of my dad. I had a good laugh. But I think they will have the last laugh."

For the moment, however, Pirner is living in the moment, however grueling the consequences. And in this moment, he finds himself perilously close to the alternative-world's version of walking a Tiger Beat. As anyone who's ever sweated through a Soul Asylum show knows, along with the band's touring grind comes plenty of bumps and grinds from the hips of the group's frontman.

"I can't deny that there's a real sexuality about music that I'm totally addicted to," says Pirner. "It's not 'I wanna go get fucked' sexual. It's an animal magnetism that you just feel. But I think I have to deal with the fact that it's going to backfire when I say that I've spent a lot of time thinking about the music I write, and I don't want that to be trivialized. I know I come off as very sexual onstage. It's definitely more so than I can pull off on a daily basis."

But before the spotlight on Pirner threatens to cast a shadow across the entire band, it is important to remember that it is very much a four-headed beast. It's the interplay of Pirner and Murphy, in fact, that most clearly defines the precarious balance of responsibility and recklessness, immaturity and imagination, that keeps Soul Asylum pointed down the highway - even when they continually seem to swerve into ditches.

As the band's primary navigators, each member of the pair has a job in keeping the train moving forward: Pirner loses the keys, Murphy finds them. Soul Asylum wouldn't be the same if both things didn't happen.

"What makes our relationship work is the fact that he has his feet on the ground and has a different sense of reality," says Pirner. "Danny is really making an honest attempt to have a life. I'm a little bit more of a champion of the cause, if only because I have to write the godamn songs. I feel like I'm a goalie. If you lose the game, it's your fault. If you win the game, it was just your job."

Pirner stops and blurts out a laugh.

"The goaltender of rock & roll," he says, rolling his eyes. "But if Danny decides one day that this is bullshit, I'm not going to tell him it's not. He's a smart guy. He has to do things on his own terms. It's a double life, especially for him."

And if Murphy represents the musical and emotional anchor of the band, he also provides flashes of songwriting brilliance. Though he's only written a handful of tunes, for those of you scoring at home, he has penned a few of the band's crowning achievements, including "Cartoon" (Hang Time), "Can't Go Back" (Made To Be Broken) and "Gullible's Travels" (And the Horse They Rode In On).

"It's frustrating in a way, but I think if I wrote more, I'd get more songs on the records," says Murphy. "No one ever says, 'We're only doing Dave's songs.' But in a way I guess I do get kind of an attitude toward it. I feel like I try really hard on Dave's songs, and I expect him to work really hard on my songs. If he fucked them up live, I'd be really mad."

But now, one week into the Alternative nation Tour - which will probably place the band in front of three-quarters of a million people this summer - Soul Asylum seem very much at home. Even accustomed to the rigors of touring, the band still has a limit on its stupidity intake.

"We did this interview with Miss Hawaii," says Murphy, "and she said: 'Hey, I'm talking to Soul Asylum, I hear you guys do a lot of pro-choice benefits. Why?' And Dave goes, 'Duh.' That was the end of the interview. It was definitely the right answer."

Pirner laughs. "I didn't feel like I said too much," he says. "I didn't feel like I said too little."

Even overtures from Lollapalooza met with a polite "no, thank you" from the band, paving the way for the Alternative Nation Tour.

"I don't feel indignant about it, but I don't feel like we have to kiss up to what's trendy," says Pirner, explaining why the band rejected Lollapalooza. "We've been acknowledged and ignored by every movement - the new romantic movement, the hardcore movement, the new sincerity movement - they've all ignored us."

And with that, for the final time, Murphy leans forward to put Soul Asylum in perspective.

"We were on a plane and drinking a few martinis, and there was an ad that chronicled the trendy drinks of the last 10 years," he says. "It started with Jim Beam and went through the fuzzy navel and then all these umbrella drinks and ended up working its way back to the Jim Beam, We thought it should be the new Soul Asylum ad campaign."


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