Author	Steve Perry
Publication	Musician
Date	June 1993

Sometimes you can’t catch a break, and sometimes good karma pours over you by the bucketful. Here it is early February barely past Groundhog’s Day, and Soul Asylum has already had it’s best year ever. ‘The Tonight Show’. Opening act on the Keith Richards tour. Featured attraction at the MTV Inaugural Ball -where they shared the stage with no less than Al and Tipper Gore, whom a zonked-looking Dave Pirner greeted with a public plea for the new administration to make things better in ‘South America and Kuwait’. "I didn’t think too much about what I was gonna say", he allows. "I wanted it to be spontaneous".

And following nine years and five albums worth of tenuous times, their first Columbia disc, Grave Dancers Union, is a hit. It’s number 51 with a bullet in Billboard this week, having already moved enough copies (280,000 so far) to make it the biggest-selling record by anybody from Minneapolis who is not Prince. Not bad for a band many left for dead after its last A&M album, Soul Asylum and the Horse They Rode In On, stiffed in 1990.

Clearly, room service is in order. Studying the directory of the hotel services for a long minute, frontman and songwriter Pirner finally calls downstairs and orders a sIx-pack of Corona. Meanwhile his bandmates are cataloging the ways success has changed Soul Asylum. ‘Floor hockey sticks’, says drummer Grant Young, pointing to a bundle of shiny new ones over in the corner. The band is planning to play before soundchecks, ‘We go into all these big, empty rooms, and we never get any physical exercise,’ he groans.

That’s not all. "We get our own rooms once in a while now", notes bassist |Karl Mueller, "so you get to control your own TV remote. You get to eat a little better …"

"A big bag of chips" avers Pirner, "instead of a little bag".

Success had also earned Soul Asylum a new label, meant no doubt as a compliment: the next Nirvana. Which grates a little considering the bands’ relative longevity, sort of like calling James Brown the next George Clinton. But hey, no hard feelings. "The only time you feel resentment", says Pirner, "is when you open up your closet and look at that plaid shirt and you just can’t put it on anymore.

"You know what we call that, when a punker moves from Minneapolis to Seattle? Grungy-jumping". But he sounds more touched than irascible about all the recent attention to the Seattle scene. "It’s kind of cute. And I’m not uncomfortable with being a link in that chain that somehow wound itself around the United States. The Stooges, the MC5, the Ramones-see, to me it looks like one big long folk ethic. People think music is based on the industry or something, but it’s not. It’s a chain reaction. There’s a lot of kids out there playing guitars, and it’s a totally natural thing to happen".

In a minute room service comes with the beers.

"Twenty eight dollars?", Grant’s searching the ticket for a math mistake. It’s 28 bucks, all right. Fortunately the waiters cool about offering to take it all back, even offering directions to a liquor store a block from the hotel.

"Hey, tip the guy", Dave whispers belatedly as the waiter leaves with six Coronas on a tray. Too late.

"Twenty-eight bucks for a six-pack man" Grant shakes his head.

"That’s like five bucks a beer", nods Dave.

"If we walked down to buy ‘em at the bar, it’d be 18 or 22 bucks or something", offers Karl. "They add room service charge".

But wouldn’t the label pick up the room service tab?

Grant shakes his head again. "It’d just get charged back to us anyway", he grimaces.

Pirner, like most rock’n’roll frontmen, didn’t start life as a popular guy. "I didn’t get in too many fights", he says of his formative years. "But I did get punched a few times. So … I guess I was a puss. Whatever". Excelling in sports was Pirner’s way of combating his wimpy rep; music was how he fought the sense of isolation that underlay it. Not the music you’d expect though; in those days he was a horn player in school bands and the Youth Symphony. "People definitely thought I was a puss for that" he remembers. "It was like, ‘What do you play - flute?’ But I just went along and did it, because I got this sensation when the whole band was playing along together that was so cool. Kids from all different walks of life got together and played one song. It was a beautiful thing. I loved it. It probably sounded awful, but I loved that it was a common ground everybody stood on."

To this day Pirner remains obsessed with the notion of common ground; if there’s an overriding theme in the Soul Asylum oeuvre, it’s the quest for connections. All that studied postpunk diffidence aside, Pirner has more than a little preacher/healer in him. His songs constantly reach out to proffer reassurance to the geeky, self-conscious kid who’s still alive in a lot of people - the one who gets punched silly from time to time.

The songs on Grave Dancers Union reflect a broader range of emotions, from outrage to outright sentimentalism, than anything Pirner’s written before. The music is different, too, melodic and driving and mercifully unafraid of its own commerciality. "People are really multifaceted personalities", he says", "and the problem with a lot of kinds of music is that they reduce that. There’s a macho element to loud music that wasn’t as much a part of me as I’ve always made it out to be".

For Pirner, learning to broaden his voice as a writer and player was more a matter of confidence than of exposure to new ideas; he’s been exposed to a lot of musical ideas since he was a kid. Early on, "I was into jazz", he says. "It’s weird, but when I first thought of playing music, It was jazz or classical. I’d buy a lot of trumpet player records - Maynard Ferguson records".

Meanwhile "I was listening to the radio under my covers ever since I can remember. I was just into the pure energy of it for a long time before I got into the introspective side of it. I went through this while hard rock/metal phase associated with puberty. After that, I remember listening to Lou Reed’s ‘Street Hassle’, that changed the way I thought about music and what it could do".

Pirner discovered Reed, Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie around the age of 16, at about the same time he first heard punk. "That’s when I first started playing guitar", he says, "I heard the Ramones and the Vibrators and I thought, man I can do this. Once I could play a song on the guitar, it was over: This was my medium. At first it was all punk rock songs, like ‘Screw, screw, screw’ and ‘drive, drive’. Stuff like that.

Lou Reed was pivotal for me. He was cool enough that he penetrated the punk rock movement, and he was smart enough that he took me away from it also, and made me look at it differently. I think a lot of it was realizing the non-musicality of guys like Reed and Dylan. Lou’d got like a seven-note range. And that fit in with the Ramones/Vibrators anybody-can-do-it thing.

"All of a sudden we weren’t talking about Maynard Ferguson anymore. It wasn’t about technique and finesse and mastering an instrument. It’s being able to communicate an idea or a feeling more than anything. I realized you could work your way through all this and get better at it. And you could actually learn in public, pretty much. Nobody cared how well you could play, just how well you got that thing across".

To Pirner it sounded an awful lot like the lesson he heard wafting across the years when he listened to Woody Guthrie. "It wasn’t until I found his music that songwriting started to make sense to me as an ethic - a storytelling ethic. I really like the idea of writing a song to be understood: There it is, it’s real upfront, it’s not convoluted or caught up with any trend or fashion. It’s plain and simple music for the sake of sharing something with somebody".

Punk and its progeny lost track of their original immediacy and visceral honesty, says Pirner -some of his own songs included. At a certain point, the challenge was to pare it down again. "I think I reached a plateau", he muses, "where I discovered that where I wanted to be was not on the avant-garde. I started going, this is bullshit. There’s all this trying to outcool and outweird people, to be the most obnoxious thing in the universe. That’s where we started out. The idea was to be this hateful sort of assault on the senses and shake people up. Make them mad ‘cause we’re mad. We thought that was cutting-edge, and we thought that was more arty because it was more difficult to deal with. It started to feel pretentious. It started to feel more caught up with an attitude than with making music."

Degraded as some of punk’s best impulses may have gotten en route to becoming just another insider’s language, it’s all the same thread as far as Pirner’s concerned: folk and punk, Woody and the Vibrators. "Music by the people and for the people", he says. "Punk music is folk music, and folk music has this rich history that just gets passed on through weird kids in weird places wanting to say something".

The cover of Grave Dancers Union is a kind of spiritual index of its contents. In the haunting tinted photograph by Czech artist Jan Saudek, a mother and two naked children walk down the road with their backs to the camera in a barren, almost surreal industrial landscape shrouded by fog. The emotional tenor of the image is hopeful as well as foreboding, though, evoking a sense of endurance, regeneration and openheartedness that the hard circumstances can’t suppress.

"I saw a show by Jan Saudek when I was in Paris", says Pirner, "and I thought that was it. I tried to get that image for both our A&M albums, but they couldn’t secure the rights. I said I wanted it again this time, and Columbia got the rights. The negotiations were funny -they said it was gonna cost about five grand to use the picture, then Jan’s manager got a hold of it and they reevaluated the price. Suddenly it was like $57,000. Then I talked to the president of the label, Donny Ienner, and said I still really wanted it, could he make it happen? He said well, let me see what I can do. He gets two guys on the phone and the next day it’s settled at six grand.". Pirner laughs at the thought. "It’s amazing what you can get done".

The episode makes a pretty good parable for the difference between Soul Asylum’s A&M days and its new deal with Sony. The band had the misfortune to join A&M at a time when major shakeups were part of the routine there. The A&R man who signed them left the label just before their second-and final- A&M disc, Soul Asylum and the Horse They Rode In On, came out. Around the same time Polygram bought the label; three weeks or so after Horse was released, the new owners dumped dozens of field staffers. Soul who?

"We heard it was a musicians’ label, started by Herb Alpert, that it was a family thing", recounts Pirner. "And that’s what it turned out to be. People in my family bought the record …"

"My family bought a bunch of them" says Mueller

"They gave us things we needed to grow", says Pirner. "They gave us a studio to work in, they gave us producers. But we got lost. We weren’t accomplishing anything by working so hard".

The period following Horse plunged Soul Asylum into a kind of limbo they’d never experienced. They were still under contract to A&M, but it was clear no one at the label felt much commitment to the band -or at least they had no idea how to put the music across. They would eventually work out a deal whereby the band could move to Sony in exchange for a cash payment and royalty points on Grave Dancers Union, but that was a long time taking shape. In the meantime, with two major-label sales bombs on their resume, there was no guarantee they’d be making more music, period.

"I got kind of -defensive, I guess", says guitarist Dan Murphy. "I didn’t think the band wouldn’t exist anymore. But if we took a year off, what was I gonna do in that year?" Karl Mueller felt the same doubts when he found himself going back to the day job he’d held off and on for years, cooking at a local restaurant -only this time with no Soul Asylum engagements in sight. Murphy made some cash and filled his time by renewing his interest in antiques, eventually opening his own spot in a Minneapolis antiques mall.

"I wanted to get as far away from it as I could", Murphy continues, "cause I didn’t have enough confidence to be in a band. That’s the kicker -we’ve never been overly confident to begin with, and you come up against these things you don’t think you can persevere over. We were thoroughly sick of the road and each other. I guess it’s a denial thing: If you don’t think about the band, you’re not in it".

For Pirner the time off between records and recording deals was doubly scary: He’d been having problems with his left ear, and a doctor told him to lay off loud music indefinitely. Like anyone’s first encounter with intimations of the body starting to give out, it rocked Pirner back on his heels for a while -as you might guess from the first two songs from Grave Dancers Union, with their images of encroaching age and disability. "I think there was definitely a period when I had to go, hey, I’m just like everybody else. I’m gonna get old", he says.

"I think", says Pirner, "we just stopped in our tracks then. I had to get away for a little while and think about what I was doing. It just seemed like we’d been playing with our heads down for years, going at this grueling pace: made the record, do the tour, stay on the road forever, come back, make the record, do the tour, stay on the road forever…

"Stopping that for a second was a really good thing. What is this all about? We’re going and going, and nobody has any idea what it means".

What he revisited in that time was "all the insecurities and fears -the whole trip that goes with being in a rock band. This is not gonna last forever; we can’t do this for that much longer, really. So do you get on with your life, or do you get on with your life? Do you say, we gotta seize the moment and have fun with it while we can, or do you say, this isn’t worth it, it’s a dead end? We had this ethic in the beginning that I’m sure you’ve heard before: if it’s not fun anymore, we’re not gonna do it anymore. After a little bit of haggling, we decided yes, it is still fun. It was a great feeling to be able to say that."

It felt like the time Soul Asylum’s first drummer quit, eight years ago. "I was devastated and felt totally deprived then", he remembers. "My music had been taken away from me. At that point and again this time, I realized how important it was to me. That got the ball rolling in a new direction. It was the beginning of a new era for me psychically. I realized I can’t live without this. I gotta do it good. I need to do a better job, to explore more angles. It reinitiated my enthusiasm for the process of making music and the discoveries involved in it".

Pirner started tinkering with the music-making process. In the past he’d always come up with the rudiments of songs and taken them to the band to flesh out in rehearsals. This time he stayed away from the band, keeping to himself and writing finished songs. Some of these he took to Dan Murphy first; then the band was called together. Pirner tinkered with them too: "We said okay, we’re throwing out all the amps for a while and we’re gonna sit in my basement and play acoustic and use brushes.

"That was easy. And I thought, duh, why didn’t I think of this five years ago? Because it brought a whole new perspective to what we were doing. Everybody all of a sudden had to think differently about how they were playing, because there wasn’t this wall of noise that everybody could hide in. Every instrument was more naked, and you were more responsible for what you were playing. You had to be more tasteful. You couldn’t just blast away all the time".

After shopping demos, after the legal machinations of the transfer from A&M to Sony, after interviewing lots of producers and settling on Michael Beinhorn, Soul Asylum took to the studio. But having a record deal didn’t mean everything else got easier. "Now I can say it came out really good", says Murphy, "but the whole time we were making it, in all honesty, it felt like doom. We didn’t know if we’d finish, we knew we wouldn’t finish on budget, the producer drove us crazy and we drove him crazy.

"I do think in a way it made for a more deliberate-sounding record. The sad songs are pretty sad, the aggressive stuff is aggressive. It wasn’t a good experience. We spent three months on this thing, and there weren’t a whole lot of days we were sitting around the studio chuckling. But that needed to be the process for this record, ‘cause that was the mindframe it was written in.

"A lot of people, when they look back at our band, think Made to be Broken was a pivotal record. But this is the best one in terms of songwriting and playing. Whether you like the songs or not, they work, they’re more realized than things we’ve done in the past. I think when we were making Horse we thought we could allude to what the band was about because everybody’d seen us live. I think in general we and our producers were too reliant on our live reputation when we made the records. Horse just doesn’t come off like a live show , even though that was the concept of the record. This time we threw away all that stuff about ‘it’s a live band and that’s the way we should record’. We bought into that one too many times".

Lots of bands have their unsung heroes, the person who has both good musical judgment and common sense, the one who ends up shepherding the creative process and keeping an eye on business matters, too. Dan Murphy is Soul Asylum’s unsung hero. By Pirner’s own admission, "if he’s impressed by one of my ideas, I know it’s a good one. If he doesn’t like something, I don’t necessarily think it’s shit. There are things I can’t get past him that are maybe directions in music I’ll have to explore without him. But I definitely look to him for approval".

Murphy and Pirner play foil to each other in pretty much the way you’d guess from watching them on-stage; Murphy takes care of business while Pirner pours his emotional life into ingwriting -which, more often than not, becomes a substitute for taking care of business in the world at large. "So much of songwriting for me", says Pirner, "is saying things I can’t say to people. If I could be as honest in my day-to-day dealings with people as I feel like I am in my songs, that would be a quantum leap for me. That’s what writing is all about: sitting down and being very precise about what you want to say, and putting as much thought and emotion into it as you possibly can. And then all of a sudden, you do it- and once it’s done you think, okay, I don’t have to tell this to anybody anymore ‘cause I’m telling everybody this."

"We don’t verbally communicate terribly well", says Murphy. "it’s like we’re on two different planets. Making this record, we weren’t getting along at all. I felt put off because it seemed like everything was on his time schedule. I was up all night every night for two months, and that’s not me. It was tedious, but we’d get together to work on the songs - musicwise, it’s a pretty trusting rapport between us. And you do what you need to do to maintain that".

The success of Grave Dancers Union isn’t the only thing that’s changed for Soul Asylum since the days when they went by the name Loud Fast Rules. Dan Murphy is 30 now, and none of the others is much more than a year behind him. Everybody’s married besides Pirner, who’s had the same girlfriend since junior high; Murphy has a three year old son. Compared to all that, the changes they’re going through now don’t seem so dramatic.

Grant: "The more popular this record gets, the more we end up talking about ourselves. You lose yourself a little when you talk about yourself so much. You lose some of the naiveté the music is partially based on".

Karl: "I live in a double bungalow, and people keep asking my neighbor, when’s he moving out? He must be rich now. Everybody wants my fucking apartment. In people’s perception things are wildly different. But day to day they really aren’t."

Dave: "There’s definitely a romantic air attached to the days of being stuck in a van, sleeping on people’s floors and meeting the strangest people you could ever imagine. But when you’re sleeping in that cold van, you’re not thinking Hey, this is great! Things like having a guitar tech have been a very meaningful experience for me. At the gigs my guitar just used to disintegrate, and you could not do the job. It drove me crazy. But hire a guy and then the guitar’s put in my hands and it’s in tune and it’s a great thing. What a great invention: the guitar tech."

If there’s an overriding emotional current on Grave Dancers Union, with all its songs about feeling cut loose from old moorings and unsure of new ones, it’s fear. That seems appropriate when you realize that Pirner wrote the songs without knowing whether Soul Asylum would even get to release them. Or whether he’d get to play his guitar loud again. "I really am afraid", he says. "I was raised to believe you had to get an education or you were fucked. To walk away from that was a big deal for me. I think a lot of my fear is of having to do something I don’t want to do. I cherish the opportunity to make music. During the time I didn’t have it, I was scared to death. I felt totally worthless. I felt like I was stuck back in the world I grew up in".

Having a hit record pushes that specter a little farther back into the closet. But not much. "It definitely seems to me like I’m gonna be able to do it a little bit longer. I can find comfort in that. But it just means," he laughs grimly, "that I’m gonna be that much older when it’s over.

"I’m wary of becoming a victim of my creative output. It really doesn’t’ teach you to do anything else. I’m totally wound up in making music, to the point where I can’t deal with a checkbook. I can’t wake up in the morning. I can’t find my way around in a car -people always drive me. And I sit there and think about writing songs. It’s kind of scary to think of ever going back to the real world and getting a job.

"That’s kind of lame, I know. But it’s still a little too good to be making a living playing music. I’m realizing a romantic ideal: to keep the spontaneity and to give yourself a context to be totally out of control, all the time".