Soul Asylum -

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

Reprinted Without Permission

After 11 long years of virtual obscurity, the little punk band that couldn't finally does with the success of "Grave Dancers Union"

by Chris Mundy

"And where will you be in 1993?" (a pertinent question from "Never Really Been", Made to Be Broken, 1986)

June 15, 1993, Miami It's day 9 of the Alternative Nation Tour, but for Soul Asylum, it's feeling a bit more like an alternate universe.

Sure, some things never change. Onstage singer Dave Pirner is spinning out of control, dreadlocks and sweat spraying from his head in an enormous, umbrellalike arch. Safely at dreads' length, Karl Mueller is strolling back and forth, leisurely playing his bass and soaking up the spectacle, while guitarist Dan Murphy - perched on the drum riser - pounds his guitar with the same vehemence that Grant Young uses to punish his drums.

Yet outside this island of normalcy, things are getting weird. Very weird. Forget for just a moment that the band is currently playing to more than 10,000 screaming Floridians. The weirdness begins stage right. Here, tucked in front of the Screaming Trees and various Spin Doctors, who sit watching more like attentive fans than tour mates, stands the bottom line personified - Sony Records president Tommy Mottola - watching the Soul Asylum gig with one enormous, shit-eating grin. The band slugs its way through song after song from Grave Dancers Union, the album that has finally made the masses start pricking up their ears after years of critical reverence and the minimal album sales that usually accompany such acclaim. The boss, meanwhile, peers from the wings, periodically checking his investment and then immediately glancing at the crowd full of 15-year-olds diving toward the stage like salmon swimming upstream.

You see, over their 11-year existence, Soul Asylum have been called many things: America's best live band; music industry misfits; punk poets; insightful adults trapped in terminal adolescence; the last great gasp of life from the easly-'80s Minneapolis music scene. They've even been toe-tagged as dead and gone. No one, however has ever tossed around the word marketable.

But the bottom line is beaming, and - as everyone knows - there's no ignoring the bottom line. And then, of course, there's the screaming. Between songs, the June night is filled with the distinct mating cry of the adolescent female - a piercing wail straight out of British Invasion-era soundtracks and horror flicks - which hovers like a cloud in the Miami air. For a band that once kept playing a Tucson, Ariz., show until it had finally chased the last person from the bar, this is certainly a new wrinkle.

After the show, Murphy grabs a beer and sinks into the dressing-room couch. "There were all these shrieking girls," he says with s sip and a shit-eating grin of his own. "I thought my monitor was feeding back."

Because Soul Asylum have grown up loud and alone - singing about disenchantment and alienation to anyone willing to listen - they haven't necessarily endeared themselves to the music-biz brass. More than a decade after the band first began pleading its case to the world, the group of rank outsiders is being told that it belongs after all and is taking the news with all the trust of a kid who has been beaten up on the playground for 10 straight days. On the 11th, he still expects to get smacked. Nowadays, when the music industry offers a congratulatory shake of the hand, Soul Asylum flinch.

"It's not verbalized that it's us vs. them, but we always have that mentality," says Murphy. "If I look at the Top 50, I feel like we've worked harder than all those bands. Damn right. You can't say, 'Who are these guys?' Fuck that. You can go to Tulsa, and there were a hundred people who saw us one time and maybe went out and bought a record. It's not just some new advertising campaign kicking in."

Advertising campaign or no, there is an incredible amount of activity whirling around Soul Asylum. It's no wonder. While their last album, 1990's Soul Asylum and the Horse They Rode In On, sold fewer than 70,000 copies, Grave Dancers Union has gone platinum, and the band is being treated to all the trappings that million-selling records bring. After making their network television debut last November on Late Night With David Letterman, Soul Asylum suddenly find themselves flooding the airwaves. Since Letterman, the band has played The Tonight Show, MTV's Inaugural Ball, Spring Break special and Unplugged and Saturday Night Live. And now, with a moving video for its new single, "Runaway Train," which features public-service-style listings of missing children, the band has become a legitimate news story - garnering segments on Today and CNN.

"I knew the 'Runaway Train' video would generate some interest," says Mueller. "But this has been pretty incredible."

Almost as incredibly, Soul Asylum will play close to 230 gigs this year, including a recent stint opening for Guns n' Roses in Europe and, now, the 44-city Alternative Nation Tour.

When one reels off changes, however, Grave Dancers Union is the most obvious starting point. While the mood of the album is just as desperate as records past, the presentation is more diverse and, in many spots, decidedly toned down. So while hard-core fans scream that the band has sold out, a whole slew of kids buying the album are talking about the brand-new group they've just discovered.

In truth, Grave Dancers Union is just one step past Soul Asylum And the Horse They Rode In On, which itself was one step past 1988's Hang Time (which, therefore, was a couple steps beyond 1986's Made to Be Broken). The true importance of this most recent step, however, is that it's not necessary to use the fast-forward button when listening to Grave Dancers Union. On past albums, Soul Asylum often followed their songwriting peaks with very abrupt valleys. Luckily, these days, the road is remarkably even. The topics are still personal or allegorical tales of strangers in familiar lands, the guitars are still distorted, and the tunes still rely on Pirner and Murphy's vocal chemistry. Now, however, in between the feedback screeeeech of "99%", the punk-and-circumstance stomp of "Somebody to Shove" or "Get On Out" and the metal-tinged posturing of "April Fool" come beautiful acoustic ballads ("Runaway Train", "Homesick") and songs whose urgency is balled up in one midtempo package ("Black Gold," "New World").

"We wrote a really cohesive record, kind of by accident, and it sounds really good," says Murphy matter-of-factly. "I don't think it was what people expected to hear. And the thing is, I think our band has changed quite a bit in the last five or six years."

Pirner sees even less of a difference between Grave Dancers Union and the group's 1984 debut, Say What You Will. "I sort of think that it's all folk music, whether it's really fast or really slow," he says. "You've got three chords, an attitude, a story. I always thought punk rock was folk music. But when I started singing, there was no monitor, it was a million miles an hour, loud as all fuck. Everything got screamed. That was the only way it could fit. And that feels great. But it gets old. You have to start figuring out how you're going to express other parts of your personality."

Luckily for everyone involved, Pirner's songwriting and voice - an instrument that can waver from sappy innocence to a bluesy, gin-soaked scream - seem to be gaining focus and confidence at an astounding rate. "We've lived the same life for the last 10 years," says Young. "Dave is good at vocalizing what we're feeling."

If that's the case, the overriding emotion for Soul Asylum these days seems to be vindication. "When I was very young, I always thought there was something about me that made me different and made me right," says Pirner. "I went through my life being teased. My sensibility was skewed. I've always been very affected by what goes on around me. So now for the first time I'm feeling like I am OK. I'm not really crazy. I was onto something. It's just that nobody ever told me I was. I was always just this outcast in a rock band whose parents were embarrassed about him and all the other kids thought was a freak. So there is a good quality of 'fuck you' involved in all this now."

Of course, the journey to "fuck you" begins with a single step. So, in order to fully understand the Soul Asylum story, it's important to retrace our tracks

September 4, 1992, Minneapolis People are sprawled across Karl Mueller's living room, trying to talk him into singing his rendition of "Like a Rolling Stone." Grave Dancers Union has yet to hit the streets, but tomorrow night the band is opening up for Bob Dylan at home in Minneapolis, and the timing seems right for Mueller to break out the now-infamous, twenty-minute cover version he once sprang on a very unsuspecting audience. But despite the party atmosphere, persistent begging and two coolers full of beer, he's not biting.

Instead, as a nervous calm hovers over the house, the band is alleviating the anticipation of the album's release with a brief history lesson. "It started off kind of funny," says Murphy. "Karl and I were roommates. He was Mr. Punk Rock in Minneapolis. He had this rockabilly hairdo, pierced ears, the whole fucking nine yards. He wasn't very musical, but I just thought, 'This is a guy who should be in a band'. So I thought: 'Get him a bass. It's four strings, it can't be that hard.' We bought a bass, and within two weeks we did our first show."

That show, as Loud Fast Rules, featured Murphy, Mueller and 17-year-old Pirner - swiped from a local high school band - the Shitz - playing drums. It didn=92t take long to toss a guitar on Pirner (adding drummer Pat Morley) and, in turn, for Loud Fast Rules to start making noise.

After their first release, 1984's Say What You Will, released on Twin/Tone records, Morley left, Young joined the fold, and Soul Asylum's current lineup was firmly entrenched and on one seemingly endless tour. If you live in the United States, Soul Asylum have probably played in your town. Twice. Meanwhile, sprinkled in between the journeys across America in dilapidated vans, the band managed to crank out seven releases of anthemlike insights into an outsider's mind, delivered with Murphy and Pirner's pitch-perfect punk harmonies, boyish mischief and wise-beyond-years intuition that has defined Soul Asylum for the last decade. Once you dismiss the band as punch-drunk, it offers something profound.

"I think it's ingrained in the personality of the group that we are who we are," says Pirner. "We live and die by our reputation, and it's too late to change that. Somebody can't turn us into a perfect fucking group."

In the past, however, Soul Asylum were often simply dismissed as yet another replicant band in a Minneapolis cloning experiment.

"When we started playing, there were all these bands, and none of them are around anymore," says Murphy. "Who would have thought that we'd outlive them? We used to get this 'Husker Du Lite' shit. And now there are all these bands that get this 'Soul Asylum Jr.' tag. At least what comes around goes around. But I feel terrible for these bands."

March 2, 1993, nearing the Canadian border Someone is vacuuming the Soul Asylum tour bus. It's been about a half-hour since the sunrise cast a harsh glare on the poker game and boozing that began just after the bus lurched out of Chicago at 1 a.m., and now - while band and crew try to crash for the hour or so before the border crossing - the vacuum shriek is echoing through the bunks like the soundtrack of one vivid communal nightmare.

It is true that this is a bus that could use a good tidying. After opening for Keith Richards in Chicago, the band logged a few bar hours before boarding the enormous vessel and commandeering it to a local convenience store to stock up on beer for the journey. Six hours later, a few empties here and there, the wear and tear of the group's touring schedule seems etched across the 70's-style mock-wood paneling and ultra-ugly deep-ply carpet like character wrinkles on a face.

No matter how you want to slice it, it's been one long, long ride for Soul Asylum. And now the Hoover is wailing like a siren, signaling the looming border guards who perhaps may not have any dogs capable of sniffing through vacuum bags.

Patrol in sight, the now-immaculate bus settles to a stop and opens its doors. Band and crew file out, breeze through immigration in record time and shuffle back without so much as one Canadian official bothering to search for guns, drugs or nontransportable fresh fruits and vegetables.

Outside the customs office, Pirner - who did his part for the cleanup by gulping the remnants of mushrooms left on board - is smiling like a kid who just found out he has a snow day. "Mornin'," he says, ignoring the freezing temperature. "Great day to leave the United States, huh?"

Better stated: "Great day to do anything." World-weary as the band may be, Soul Asylum carry with them the attitude of accident survivors, simultaneously cursing the mishap and thankful to be alive. After leaving Twin/Tone Records, the band signed with A&M Records for what turned out to be a short-lived romance. Of course, it didn't help that the band's last release for Twin Tone was Clam Dip and Other Delights. Forget the fact that the six-song EP was a painfully uneven production that saw the band venture somewhere into the heart of Dokken; the real problem was the cover - a shot that mirrored A&M boss Herb Alpert's own famous album Whipped Cream and Other Delights, featuring a shot of Mueller smothered in a mountain of clam= dip.

"That was a terrible record to put out at the time, not just because of the cover," says Murphy. So, after two records and virtually no sales on A&M, the band faced a period of reckoning in which Murphy founded an antique business, Mueller went back to his day job in a restaurant, and the group considered calling it quits. "We went through that period where we all had to decide if we could live without this, and we all said no," says Pirner. "It was a satisfying moment." And just as label indifference didn't tear apart Soul Asylum, the band members swear they have never let their vision be blurred by their reputation for forever being a half-step away from a number of 12-step programs. "What did Winston Churchill say, 'I only drink for occasions, and sometimes I drink when there's no occasion at all'? says Pirner with a laugh. "I think we have to be a little bit self-conscious and aware that we are going to get nailed with that. But we couldn't have lasted this long if we had no fucking focus. "To a certain degree it can be a problem," Pirner says, "and to a certain degree it's nobody's business. I hate seeing people exploiting their drug habits in the press. If somebody had a real problem, we'd be there for each other. We wouldn't skirt the issue." Murphy sits up in his chair to try to explain further "Booze is a queller of self-consciousness," he says. "That's a real important thing. This band is self-conscious about a lot of things, and it's a lot easier to have a few beers."

For Soul Asylum, the choice to prevail is thrust forward by Pirner's dedication to an artistic ideal, however romantic. While the other members might be devastated if the group disbanded ("It would definitely put an anvil on my penis for a week or two," says Mueller, "but there are other things I could do"), Pirner would be crippled.

"The fact of the matter is, everybody I know is second string to music for me," says Pirner. "I cannot explain to anybody, including the closest people in my life, how music is more important than all of them."

End of Part one

Big Old Thanks To Rafs

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