Busted Stuff - Page 2

The songs that do stand out are mostly very good, though. "Grace is Gone" might be the best track on the album, but "Digging a Ditch," "Where Are You Going," and the title track are all solid. "Grey Street" is as close as they can really come to "rocking," but subject to the "sound, not words" rule above, is a good tune. The only distinctive misfire is "Bartender"-- saying this is sure to draw the ire of the jam-band faithful, but its desperate straining for Significance ("Bartender, please, fill my glass for me/ with the wine you gave Jesus that set him free/ after three days in the ground") is reminiscent of the worst psychadelic twaddle of the Doors and the Grateful Dead, and the music can't distract me from the godawful lyrics.

(Having mentioned them in a Dave Matthews review, it's worth a brief aside about the Grateful Dead and jam bands in general. I like a lot of Grateful Dead material, subject to one simple rule: they were a great band, when they played songs, and even when they strung long instrumental passages together to get from one song to another (the usual "China Cat Sunflower/ I Know You Rider" combo being a good example) but the free-form, experimental, "Derek Smalls on the bass-- he wrote this" improvisational stuff was, for the most part, unlistenable crap. And it was lousy because they forgot what, to my mind, is one of the key rules of improvised music: you can't all improvise at once.

(Most really great improvisational music takes place within certain constraints-- when Miles Davis or John Coltrane were making it up as they went, the drummer wasn't. Somebody in the band needs to bear the responsibility for keeping time, and keeping everybody else in the same ballpark. The completely free-form thing produces occasional moments of brilliance, but only for those brief instants when the whole band happens to wander into the same time signature, or integer multiples thereof. So you get snippets of song emerging from a long mass of material that sounds like the output of five different people in neighboring apartments playing one part of a song they're listening to on headphones. Hence the correlation between the ingestion of massive quantities of drugs and hard-core Dead fandom...

Article Author: Chad Orzel

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