52 in 52: Week 7 - "The '59 Sound"

Week of 11/23/14 - 11/29/14

Album from 2008

In my very first post, I briefly lamented not choosing "Get Hurt" by The Gaslight Anthem for the 2014 album. I didn't mind as much though, because I already have 2008's "The '59 Sound" on vinyl and it's a much more full and complex album than the band's newest.

Fallon and his band used to get a little grief for being a Jersey band that "ripped off" Bruce.

But music is cyclical like that, and to some extent, there's nothing new to be done, at least not entirely. Early Gaslight Anthem songs are reminiscent of "Born to Run," "Darkness on the Edge of Town," and "The River," but they're also reminiscent of "Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out the Trash" by The Replacements, most of the Clash's music, and at times even Tom Waits, amongst others. Plus, Bruce sounded like Dylan, and the Clash sounded like the Stones and the Who and ska bands, and everyone sounds like the Beatles. Basically, what I'm saying is, everybody sounds a little bit like somebody else.

But huge props to the Gaslight Anthem for knowing it, and embracing it, and even wanting it. Brian Fallon is one of rock's modern day encyclopedists; a superfan who's talented enough in his own right to deserve his own fandom. His songs include references to everything from the obvious influences like Bruce, Tom Petty, the Clash, and Jackson Browne, to the more odd and not-exactly direct influences like Meat Loaf, Counting Crows, Woody Guthrie, and Elvis Costello, to the non-musical influences like Charles Dickens, "Casablanca," and "On the Waterfront." "The '59 Sound" should have come with footnotes and a list of other music to listen to (which my Gilmore Girls DVD's actually did). It's basically a rock and roll history text book, if such a thing existed. Maybe someday I'll compile such a list, but for right now, I'll leave it at what's in this article.

None of this is distracting. It's a modern-day Jersey Shore sound punk-rock album, that's as full of sound and devotion as it is full of other people's music.

"The '59 Sound" is an album that makes you feel like you're there, wherever 'there' is; it's almost in the ear of the beholder. For you, 'there' might be when you were sixteen and you were always pushing the limits of your curfew, or it might be the first time you tried a cigarette, even if you've never had one since, or it might be a song that you'd never heard before playing in a crowded room that cut through all the excess sound and spoke to you as clear as if it were playing directly into your ears. They are songs about kids for adults, but that makes it sound too simple. The Gaslight Anthem's music, specifically this album, doesn't just sit next to you and poke at your elbow and pretend like they're the first ones to say that being a teenager was fun, they actually show you that shit.

"...I lit a cigarette on a parking meter, the corner boys told her how I was dyin' to meet her..."

"...your high-top sneakers and your sailor tattoos..."

"...in my head there's all these classic cars and outlaw cowboy bands..."

"...Matilda left a note and a rose..."

"...you got Monroe hips, your poisoned lips and knives..."

"...I laid a kiss on a stone, tossed it upside your window by the roof..."

The specificity of lines like these, the youthful yet knowing rasp in Fallon's voice, and the band's seeming sincerity let them rise above modern-day punk contemporaries and imitators like Against Me!, Say Anything, Green Day, Modern Baseball, and Rise Against, avoiding any true comparisons to these bands by excising melodramatic angst from their oeuvre. But their punk licks and occasional detour into rockabilly, (or being an outlaw cowboy band) combined with the smart and cutting lyricism help distance them from being "just" a Springsteenesque Jersey rock band.

There's more to the lyrics than immediate reminiscence, though. There's a beauty, for instance, in Fallon telling us that he's dreaming about his first wife, or coming straight out a telling a girl that she "shoulda married" him. It's this beauty and honesty and freshness that balances out the band's self-awareness. Because it's one thing to be very self-aware, which The Gaslight Anthem is, about their influences, about their sound, about their image, but they understand that that's not enough. It's like those stupid parody movies that will make some sort of meta-joke about the movie being a stupid parody, and the filmmakers think that gets them off the hook; like the audience is then just going to think, 'oh, they know it's dumb, so it's alright.' No, that's lazy. And if The Gaslight Anthem played songs that sounded like Bruce Springsteen and they threw in a couple of Springsteen lyrics to make sure that we knew that they knew, that, too, would be lazy. But that's not what they do. They bring their own beauty to the music, and their own mark, and these references and quotes are used sparingly enough, and often in different context so that the lines take on a double (or sometimes triple) meaning, in that it conjures everything that we already know it to mean, plus everything that Brian wants us to imagine in the context of the new song.

Every single song on this album is a good song in its own way. "Great Expectations" is a song about a passive person, who sits around and waits for something to happen, getting together with people and then getting left behind. This person expects more from life, but is constantly disappointed, and it kicks off the album strong, creating a character that we can sympathize with while still seeing the flaws and problems in their life.

The title track is about the death of a friend in a car crash. He speaks to him, asking the typical questions about death and the afterlife, and then adding his own twist to the conversation, asking the heartbreaking question: "Did you hear your favorite song, one last time?"

"Old White Lincoln" chugs through the verses until the go-go chorus, which really stands out on this album. "High Lonesome" just might be the best song on the album. In fact, it's the first one that I ever heard by the band, and the one that got me into them to begin with.

"The '59 Sound's" closer really brings that specific memory to the forefront. It's also an example of Fallon doing something that Bruce does so excellently, something other than writing poetic lines or catchy hooks about cool guys and pretty girls and cars and smoky nights, and that's making the mundane into the epic. It's throughout the album, but "The Backseat" is the prime example. It goes along with that working class hero persona that Bruce evokes, and it's because he, just as Fallon does, turns regular people who live the lives that they've been given, people who work hard and still have a pretty shitty lot in life, into something that a rock song should be written about. In plenty of cases on the album, these middle American figures are teenagers, as they are on much of Bruce's '70s catalog, and on "The Backseat," which culminates in the chorus: "And in the backseat, we just tried to find some room (to breathe)/(for our knees). It's simple and so very common, but Fallon puts it on a pedestal. He sings like he believes it, and it's the centerpiece of a rock and roll song. And it's beautiful.

The band makes it easy on me when recommending them to people. Oh, do you like Bruce? Tom Petty? '80s punk rock? Rockabilly? Poetry? The Clash? Elvis Presley? X? Wilson Pickett? Woody Guthrie? Then here, check this out! And the fact that they can be that wide-ranging is truly an asset here, because it's not constant tone shifts and different tracks pretending to be different things; it's all of this thrown together in each and every song. So the best way I can end this is to say, if you don't have this album, get this album. If you have it and you've never heard it on vinyl, make that happen, and hear it the way that a rock historian like Brian wanted you to hear it.

Last week's: "Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl"