A year spent listening almost exclusively to The Beatles in my teens was like a self-imposed exile in the wilderness. Contemporary music was undergoing many sea changes in 1989, yet I was stuck in the music of two decades earlier. I’m not sure how many times I had to be told about a highly influential local college radio station before I started tuning in to it. This was the year of the Pixies’s Doolittle, The Cure’s Disintegration and R.E.M.’s Green, and those and other releases were like my world had gone from black and white to Technicolor and Cinerama.
Admittedly, it was nearly impossible to escape the reach of single “So Alive” from the Love and Rockets album. It somehow channeled T. Rex while being a slow groove that brought to mind a club winding down in the wee hours of the morning. The line “I feel I’m on the cross again lately/but that’s nothing to do with you” made it feel vaguely blasphemous, but somehow without offending anybody. That line will circle around again at the end, with a twist: “I feel I’m on top again, baby/that’s got everything to do with you”. This made it blatantly sexual, and so well-suited to cap off a decade of such songs as “Addicted to Love” dominating the airwaves.
For better or worse, it became the song which was to be the group’s legacy, the one the most people in the audience yell out for in a concert. But it is the outlier on what is the most uneven and eclectic album of their career. It feels like the trio of Daniel Ash, David J and Kevin Haskins (brother of David) were going in separate directions and finding little common group on which they could agree. Not unlike how The Beatles is the most wide-ranging release of that group’s discography, this self-titled album feels like a band about to collapse.
It starts out on an odd foot, with the very first seconds of “**** (Jungle Law)” confronting the listener with some very crunchy distorted electric guitar, an oscillating sweep of sound and thundering drums. This is far more aggressive than what would have expected for the band’s output to date, which largely conveyed the image of neo-hippies. I mean, they once had a track titled “Yin and Yang (The Flowerpot Man)”. Things have obviously changed by the time of “****”, with the lyrics taking aim at critics, comparing music journalists to cowardly primates in a literal urban jungle and, should they fall from their lofty perch, those critics will meet with violence from the band. Curiously, the profanity in the track is bleeped-out, hence the unusual title. We’ll be circling back to that in a bit.
The next track, “No Big Deal”, is more accessible, but still as loud. From these first two tracks, one might think the album would be an attempt at early industrial music, only to have the third number, “The Purest Blue”, completely subvert those expectations, by being so sparse as for me to barely consider it music at all. It isn’t a song, so much as the barest and most abstract suggestion of one, like seeing the outline of an object in light so dim you can barely make it out. Supposedly, this is a re-working of the previous album’s “Waiting for the Flood”, but I would never have thought that if it hadn’t been explicitly stated by the group years later. Even then, I still don’t hear the original tune under this radical reworking.
“Motorcycle” follows, bringing us back to the territory occupied by the first two songs. It is loud, catchy and it truly feels like we are riding fast and hard on a road that, should we hit the slightest bump, will leave us as one long red streak across an expanse of blacktop. Then it is followed by what I feel is fair to describe as “Motorcycle Part 2”, as “I Feel Speed” takes some of the same lyrics and overlays them atop a glacial tempo and bare instrumentation. It’s like we achieved escape velocity in the hectic wind-up at the end of the previous track and we are now flying through the clouds.
The first track of the second side not only brings us back down to Earth, but well below the surface of it. “Bound for Hell” takes what is supposedly an extension of a 19th century ballad discovered in an old book by David J. The lyrics are a bible-black, fever dream of a train ride through the netherworld. The churning rhythm is like the chugging of an old steam train.
Immediately after this, the album does another 180 with “The Teardrop Collector”, another downtempo, bare and quiet number akin to “I Feel Speed”. For the longest time, my brain somehow twisted this tune up with the Tales from the Darkside episode “The Tear Collector”, providing me false memories of either the track somehow being in a TV show which preceded it by four years, or even thinking Daniel Ash was in it. There’s actually no relationship between the two, unless this track was inspired by the episode, which seems deeply unlikely. Also, the ability of my brain to effortlessly make these bizarre connections suggests my inevitable dementia which will come with old age will be especially interesting.
Next up in the batting order is “So Alive”, so we’ll skip right along to “Rock and Roll Babylon”, a heartfelt paean to the rockers who passed years before, tastefully augmented by string quartet. The tempo slows down even further on closer “No Words No More”, which, despite the title, does have lyrics. They partly concern “a lazy old devil [who] sits on the youth”, which I guess has a correlation with “Bound for Hell”. It is an odd number, a tranquilized, slow fade out to an album of which at least half is this morose.
A 2002 two-CD reissue augmented the album with b-sides that are welcome, even if they would not have been suitable on the album proper. What was the real surprise among the additional tracks is the Swing! EP which was held back from release at the time. Originally intended to follow the 1989 album, only one track was made available in the intervening years. That was “Bad Monkey”, a new take on “****” with radically different music and the profanity not only uncensored, but greatly embellished. It is not something I have listened to more than a couple of times.
The four other tracks, on the other hand, are among my favorites of the band’s catalog. These are weird compositions that channel some weird sensation akin to being unable to sleep in the middle of the night and turning on the TV to find strange, and rather creepy, old cartoons you’ve never seen before. The first song, “Wake Up!” establishes the theme in my mind, with the lyrics concerning “it’s a drag, drag, drag, drag, drag to be woken from a dream.” Then “Cuckoo Land” extends this theme with lines like “want to stay in bed, where my brainpan’s fed, in cuckoo land”. Much of the song brings to my mind not a cuckoo, but the old Looney Tunes short about the dodo. Then there’s “The Early Worm”, which, with the first two numbers, makes for a perfect trilogy. There’s a whimsy to this similar to Syd Barrett’s “Effervescing Elephant”, with “the elephant and the mouse/moved from house to house/what was too little for him/was much too big for the mouse”. There’s even what sounds like a tuba and a squeak toy to provide “voices” for the duo.
Love and Rockets is not the best album in the band’s oeuvre, possibly not even the second or third best. But it is the one disc that became my entry point for discovering alternative rock, and that truly changed my life for the better. There is much I skip over when listening to the album today, and I now prefer more the EP which was not released until over a decade later. Go figure, that is the one recording I most want released on vinyl, though I very much doubt that will ever happen.