THE PUNK ROCK: They’re still a proud meat-and-potatoes bar band.
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On stage June 26 at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York’s Times Square, Soul Asylum frontman Dave Pirner looked as if he’d just crawled out of a time capsule that had been sealed in the early ’90s. Ripped jeans, scarecrow hair, white hightops — you remember the look. And so did the crowd: when the Minneapolis band eased into the tender acoustic opening of “Runaway Train,” the smash hit from their 1992 breakthrough, Grave Dancers Union, the motley crew of radio listeners, industry insiders, and tourists seemingly lost on their way to The Lion King sent up a hearty cheer that had little to do with the performance. This was a cheer of nostalgia, of recognition, of half-remembered fraternity parties where a chiming folk-rock tune about terminal depression soundtracked jubilant underage indiscretions.
The only people in the Hard Rock that night not bathing in memories were Soul Asylum. They were there to promote the release of The Silver Lining (Legacy), their first new studio album in eight years. Much has happened in these guys’ world since 1998’s Candy from a Stranger. Their position in the post-grunge marketplace retreated to the brink of irrelevance. Pirner moved to New Orleans and made a solo album in 2002. And founding bassist Karl Mueller succumbed to throat cancer last year.
You can hear evidence of that tumult on The Silver Lining. “Oxygen” finds Pirner singing about receiving a “couple more volts of shock treatment” — a metaphor whose intensity can’t be lost on a couple of musicians who just lost the mate they’d played with since Soul Asylum’s beginnings in the bustling early-’80s Twin Cities college-rock scene. (At the Hard Rock, former Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson held down Mueller’s spot, as he’ll do Friday night when the group stop in at the Paradise.) Yet the music sounds about as evolved as Pirner’s look. Soul Asylum are still a proud meat-and-potatoes bar band, committed equally to plaintive roots-rock strummers and beery garage-thrash rave-ups; it’s almost impossible to distinguish the new tunes from anything on the outfit’s later albums, give or take a spit-shined melodic hook or two. Which in a way is as comforting for Soul Asylum fans as it is for Soul Asylum themselves. With influential Webzines like Pitchfork viewing every weekday as an opportunity to hoist a new unknown band into the on-line limelight, a rock fan can get flummoxed faster than you can clap your hands and say, “Yeah.” Pirner and his pals are there for those well-meaning tourists who got lost on their way to the new Tom Petty.
“When we started the band, we were completely alienated from the music business,” Pirner says over the phone a few days after the Hard Rock gig, his raspy voice the sonic equivalent of that stringy, unkempt hair. “It was all about punk rock, and part of that is about fuck-the-establishment or whatever. All along the way we’ve had a hard time fitting in, and all along the way we’ve always wondered if there’s a place for us. It’s been this struggle to make a living at it, I guess. And that hasn’t changed.”
SOUL ASYLUM + JACK BRENNAN | Paradise, 967 Comm Ave, Boston | 617.228.6000
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