Know what? It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted about a
song from the Nineties. There wasn’t a single song from the Nineties all last
month. The neglect is starting to get to me. I mean, the Nineties weren’t all
bad, were they?
That was when CDs took over, and before downloads did.
Before iPod and mp3s. Somewhere in there came the capacity to burn copies of
CDs, but that was still kinda rare, for me. Much more common were used CD
stores. Here in CT, where I lived from 1994 onward, there were several.
Visiting them became kind of a parent and child bonding ritual in my daughter’s
teens.
One of the things we picked up was
Kerosene Hat by Cracker. Cracker was the band that David Lowery formed
when Camper van Beethoven broke up. I got their CDs because I liked his voice
on those quirky CvB albums, particularly
Our
Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart (1988), which was one of my favorite
albums of the late Eighties. I still get a great charge from it. Cracker came
along while I was in grad school and had two albums out before I even knew it.
The one I got first, I think, was
Golden
Age (1996) the third one, which is still my favorite. But
today’s song is
from the second one. Unbeknownst to me, it has been named as one of the
definitive Nineties songs. So why not include it if I’m really trying to
resurrect the Nineties.
It’s a song I selected to start a Nineties compilation CD
for Anna some time during her college years, I think. I suppose that, even
without
Spin magazine’s sense of the
song’s significance as a moment when alternative got bigger than mainstream, I
wanted the song to manifest something. What it manifested, to me, was the point
at which alternative
went mainstream, which is to say that Cracker was more
radio friendly, in the “classic rock” sense, than CvB ever aspired to be. That’s
not a criticism, really. It’s just one of the things about the Nineties,
whether you’re a young-un or an aged, that all that music that I’ve spent most
of these posts singing the praises of had by then become old. Classic. And the
new stuff—new rock? Yeah, was like an oxymoron. Cracker, briefly, stood in that
place where some others could thrive—like Wilco, like R.E.M. of the same
period as
Kerosene Hat, like Pearl
Jam and the Pumpkins, and others riding through the hole that Nirvana rode their
truck through.
So, what’s the song about? I heard it as the recognition by
a dude around my age (Lowery) that a girl could make him feel like . . . well,
like he felt when he was young. Lowery was 33 the year the album came out, so
you see what I’m saying. I mean
really young. “I’ll be with you girl / Like being low / Hey hey hey
/ Like being stoned.” It was as if, in their 30s, Lowery and crew were finally
achieving the kind of garage band success they believed in as teens. And it was
probably girls then in their teens—in the Nineties—that were inspiring (and
buying) the song. For me, the girl in question was my own kid. It was a high, being dad to a youngster, let's be clear on that. And that’s part
of what I was passing on to Anna as well when she came of age. We had fun when we were together (and I just danced with abandon at her wedding, so there). And this track also passes on the fact
that alternative hit a classic rock midlife crisis that produced some good
stuff because that anxiety is there, that edge, that sense of riding a wave
that is going to smash you into a wall sooner or later. Call it fate or age or
that moment of “The fruit is rusting on the vines.” And rust never sleeps.
I remember listening to Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad”
around 1996 and hearing it as both a throwback—to Dylan’s Guthrie era—as well
as a prescient view of the underside of the Clinton boom. Because the money and
fun was draining from lots of things, and, by the standards even of the hard-up
Seventies, the Nineties felt a bit threadbare and desperate. And that’s what I
liked about the sound Cracker created 1993-96: this was not rock star stuff—even
if
Kerosene Hat did almost go
platinum (a million sold)—but much more attenuated somehow. If only because of
all of us trading in and re-buying used copies, passing that same joint around
and around. “Hey, don’t you want to go down / Like some junkie cosmonaut?” It’s
a druggie song—but even that feels nostalgic (there’s a song on there called “Nostalgia”
and when they end with the Dead’s “Loser,” well . . . ).
And
here is “Low” being performed on Conan O’Brien.
Look how young
he is!
What I have a hard time imagining is how I would’ve listened
to this stuff if I were a kid in college at the time. At that age it would be
possible, I suppose, to let the song’s drugginess be a vicarious experience,
but it seems to me music perfectly suited to the druggy days of the
Seventies. So there’s sort of a time warp effect when I listen to the album,
not just “Low.” Though I'm not for a minute saying that the Nineties weren't druggy. And that's what Cracker's for, it seems to me.
And that opening sally is good enough for the gusts of
desire that come and go in the midst of the Stone: “Sometimes I want to take you
down / Sometimes I want to get you low / Brush your hair back from your eyes /
Take you down, let your river flow.” That’s about as close to “Let It Bleed”
territory as these guys will get (well, except for “Sweet Thistle Pie” and “I'm a Little Rocket Ship”). Because, in a sense, they’re rock poseurs,
deliberately spoofing on the familiar ruses of the rock ethos. Which is something that makes me like the song, makes me able to accept it. It’s not
completely sincere about its classic rock status. It’s teasing the genre but
with a competent grasp of what riff rock was all about. It’s just that Lowery
is too “aware,” too alt, simply to go for it. And I respect that. And anyway . .
. here’s to being 30-35.
Green, green are her
eyes / A million miles, a million miles
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| 1980 |
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