Soul Asylum: A Hard Dazed Night

To spend time with Soul Asylum is to learn how to sleep from 9 to 5, when the rest of the world is out punching buttons and lifting crates. In 14 years of music making, Soul Asylum have slowly contorted their lives to adapt to rock & roll’s unusual hours of touring and performing. Rock & roll has not always treated the band well; in fact, it almost split the group up several times. But the Minneapolis quartet persevered, and in 1993 its luck changed, almost too dramatically. Unlike Soul Asylum’s bad luck, their good fortune can be explained in two words: “Runaway Train,” their runaway hit.

Today, Soul Asylum aren’t the same band they once were. They’re a little self-conscious, a little insecure, a little nervous. After all, it’s not easy for a band brought up on a steady diet of punk to accept success without some embarrassment.

With Let Your Dim Light Shine, Soul Asylum’s first album since the success of “Runaway Train,” they must prove that they are bigger, better and, ultimately, more important than “Runaway Train.” In other words, they must prove that the right kind of band can overcome the wrong kind of fame.

Making the challenge even more difficult is the fact that these former Minneapolis punks have pulled what seem to be a few star-trip moves recently:

(1) They fired their longtime drummer, Grant Young, and replaced him with an ex-pickup drummer for Duran Duran and David Bowie (Sterling Campbell).

(2) Their lead singer and songwriter, Dave Pirner, left his girlfriend of 13 years to date a movie star (Winona Ryder).

(3) The band has not just jammed with but has had nighttime conversations about being stars with one of rock’s heavyweights (Bruce Springsteen).

So now you have the handicaps. Take out your score cards and prepare yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, for the greatest battle of the decade —– or at least of the next few pages: Soul Asylum vs. Rolling Stone. In three sizzling rounds you will be drawn ever closer to the answer to the most nagging of musical conundrums: Who can stay up later, a rock band or a rock magazine?

ROUND 1
 “Please bust my chops, because I’m in the mood to have my chops busted,” Dave Pirner says. It’s just after midnight, and the straggly looking 31-year-old with a baby face is standing in a hotel lounge in Austin, Texas, announcing his arrival. He’s only been in Texas for a half-hour, and the battle has already begun. It wouldn’t be the first time his chops were busted today, either. At the airport, security reprimanded him after a passenger on his flight from New York complained about Pirner’s foul language.

“I’ve been fucked with just enough where I’m going to start to draw the line,” Pirner says in his distinct voice, half space cadet, half dorm-room philosopher. He wipes a greasy blond dreadlock out of his face and continues: “I’m just going to disappear – really. Faster and faster, the more pressure people put on me. I’m going to, what’s the word, introvert and go away. And I’m trying to talk myself into that.”

For good?

“Yes, for good,” says Pirner. “And maybe this has never been done before, but I’d like to beat the system. I would like to have the coup of just having been in a great rock band that nobody cares about anymore. Don’t you think I could do that? Here I am for the first time in my life with the fucking greatest band in the world, and I am going to disappear. I will take the band out there on the road and give it to the people with a certain sense of pride. But at one point or another, they’re going to have to understand that if they miss the show this year, it might be the last show. You know? It might.”

But then again, it might not. Pirner is in a strange mood tonight. Six hours ago he brought more than four months of work to an end by approving final mixes for the songs on Soul Asylum’s sixth album, Let Your Dim Light Shine, and he hasn’t yet recovered from the intensely single-minded process that is the recording of a record. Tonight he wants to see how provocative he can be, how many arguments he can start. He’s also fighting an inner battle between his confidence in his songwriting and his insecurity about how the public perceives him.

“My aspiration is to stand alone,” Pirner says in an extremely lucid moment, “to put myself on a pedestal and to hate myself for standing on a pedestal.”

At the root of Pirner’s confusion is success. He’s thinking about how Kurt Cobain dealt with it, how Bruce Springsteen deals with it, how Dave Pirner is going to deal with it. “I wouldn’t kill myself, because that’s been done already,” Pirner says. “I think about it sometimes, though.”

Springsteen, a sometime late-night confidant of Pirner’s, knows the dilemma well. “Dave and I sort of talk on the phone a little,” Springsteen says. “It was a pretty confusing experience when I was that age. Being worried about [being a rock star] is good in my opinion. I was always worried about it. I don’t know if it helped, but I know that it was good to worry about it.”

As the hours tick by, the beer bucket empties, various Soul Asylum members come upstairs to bid Pirner good night, and the conversation grows more surreal. Pirner has a few things on his mind –— things that may have something remotely to do with music —– and seems dead set on unloading them. Picture, if you will, a hotel lounge. Pirner sits on a sofa, engaged in what seems to be a heated conversation with a reporter. Drummer Sterling Campbell sits on a chair to their right, leaning in closely.

PIRNER: But look, Socrates was fucking Greek, man. I mean, what influence has that culture had on us as people now? Those wrapped-up leaves with rice in them … [Soul Asylum’s publicist arrives.]

PIRNER: I mean, that shit doesn’t taste that good, but it tastes pretty good. And you kind of sit there, and you eat it, and you go, “All right, these motherfuckers, they ate this shit, and they made a bunch of motherfuckers drag fucking rocks up a hill to build some big old colossal thing. And they tried to create this whole society.” And what was the food left over from that? These fucking grape leaves wrapped around rice.

PUBLICIST: I have a recommendation to make as a publicist. You guys could stay up all night talking, but the on-the-record portion of the interview should be over at this point.

CAMPBELL: No, no, no, no.

PIRNER: I think I can be held accountable for anything that I should say. I’ll tell you what I want to know, though. What’s Rolling Stone‘s angle here? Do they think we’re rock stars and suck or what? What do they want to know about us, just between me and you?

PUBLICIST [coughs]: What would be the most natural, obvious question to answer that? The new record? Coming off the tremendous success of Grave Dancers Union?

PIRNER: I mean, what the fuck could possibly be interesting about us?

[The publicist is silent.]

PIRNER: Exactly. That’s the right answer.

PUBLICIST [flustered]: Is the tape recorder running? Could you turn it off?