Made To Be Broken

One night back in the 1985, I missed seeing Soul Asylum’s set at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco because I went to see the Butthole Surfers at a different venue.  The Butthole Surfers played in front of video footage of bloody car crashes, shouted frightening slogans through a bullhorn, set the drums on actual fire, and just generally left the audience shattered, but by the very next morning, I knew I’d made the wrong choice: the sibilant hiss of the words Soul Asylum were ricocheting down city streets the moment they left the stage.

What does it say about a band, that 30 years later, I remember a gig I missed better than the one I saw? We may not have had the internet or social media back then, but somehow word was out: miss Soul Asylum at your peril. By going to the Buttholes, I had imperiled myself, but was able to make it up a week later when they returned to play the I Beam and knocked me flat.

Even forewarned, it was something of a surprise, because in those days records really didn’t do much to tell you what a band was going to be like, live. Soul Asylum’s recorded output was a case in point. At the time I first saw them, I had probably heard one track from their debut (Say What You Will) on my local college radio station, and not really taken it in, so being blown away by them so thoroughly was unexpected. And in early 1986, soon after the afore-mentioned gig, they released Made To Be Broken, their 2^nd LP, again produced by Bob Mould of Husker Du. As on the first one, Mould attempted to recreate their live sound in a recorded setting, and the result was radically different from the echo-y, click-track-ish, groomed vocal records we were used to hearing on major labels (and on records made by bands from England). To the unaccustomed, this sounded loud and fast and slightly unintelligible. It took a while to get used to. But when one did, one realized: Soul Asylum rocked. They howled. They crashed through the beat with the kind of passionate intensity that infers that, yes, anarchy has been loosed upon the world.

Soul Asylum’s work differed from punk rock in that a, their lyrics were vastly more clever and b, they were just so much better at playing it. The music was an astute mix of hard rock chords bashed out beneath a high, keening vocal style that both mimicked and mocked the status quo. Experiencing their live performance was an exercise in hearing; in slamming, banging, and absorbing guitars the way car springs absorb shock and then, because every action has an equal and opposite reaction, spewing it back out as fandom.

In short, going to see them created the kind of bodily pleasure that was integral to 1970s and 1980s and 1990s punk rock experience. But one wonders if it can translate to future generations. Soul Asylum themselves posed this question on the song “Ain’t That Tough,” when they wondered aloud why it is that bands “just get passive,” before they get old. (Note: I always thought the line was "just get passe" but I now stand corrected by the songwriter. I like my version better though.) It’s a question well worth asking, but thanks to the magic of postmodernism, surely the records that document it – records like Say What You Will and Made To Be Broken and the extra tracks included here in, some of which were live staples -- won’t sound as dated to young people as, say, melodians do to me. Indeed, I challenge a kid from 2060 to listen to “Ain’t That Tough” or “Ship of Fools” or “Tied to the Tracks” or “Whoa” and not, well, rock the fuck out.  

For those kids, Made To Be Broken may well be the finder’s key that opens the box in Special Collections – the box labeled ‘origins of grunge.’  Because although it has been argued that the sound of grunge wafted west from Detroit, like a sonic mushroom cloud exploded off the MC5’s detritus, another theory is that well before it got to Seattle, it settled first on Minneapolis. It was there, in the late 1970s, that bands like the Suicide Commandos and the Suburbs helped transform a sleepy Midwestern city into a truly spectacular incubator of post-punk bands and fans, one whose legend lives on today. Husker Du, The Replacements, Prince, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis…the list of massive talents who were living and working there in that era is truly eerie.

Looking back, it’s hard to say why Minneapolis’s music scene was so much richer and nicer and deeper than that of other similar sized cities at the time, but to an outsider, there are two unique aspects about the location: the State’s unusual liberal bent during the otherwise reactionary Reagan 80s, and the horrible weather. Maybe places like Minneapolis kind of lend themselves to a more socialist approach. In Minneapolis, if a person accidentally lost their mittens in the scrum by the club door, they’d literally freeze their hands off if someone didn’t lend them others.

Perhaps it was that harshness that bred a prairie-form of hospitality, a ‘we’re all in this together when we go’ mentality that permeated the music and the mindset there. In New York City, and Los Angeles, and Boston, bands competed in a cutthroat manner for the very small amounts of cache and cash that were available; they affected a snooty viciousness that rock ‘n’ roll has always cultivated.  Not so in the Twin Cities, where the watchword was Ubuntu (if they’d known it). Indeed, there is a video in existence on YouTube of the Minneapolis Music Awards of 1986, in which Soul Asylum tie for best garage band in Minneapolis with their friends Husker Du. In it, Dave Pirner grabs the mic. “I’d like to remind you that we’re here tonight to celebrate music,” he says. “…and music is not something that can be judged.”

That naïve statement, so out of touch with the tenets of not just music, and business, and the vile soul of corporate America itself, is truly emblematic of the remarkable charm of both the band and the city. But then, the stakes were so low back then. Music wasn’t a competition because there wasn’t really even a pie to divide up. That lack of pie was exactly why, in those days, bands like this toured constantly. They’d get in the van, as Henry Rollins puts it, and head up and down the country, east coast, west coast, up Hwy 70 and back on 80 or 90, playing town after town after town. The audiences were invariably tiny and the bars were indubitably dank; the bands would sleep on the floors of fans houses in order to save on hotel bills, eat only fast food and throw out their dirty socks rather than wash them so the van wouldn’t smell too bad. It was a brutal endeavor but the result was tangible: these bands smoked live. Also, it was the only way to circumvent the death grip commercial radio and MTV had on the playlists of America, since this was pre-streaming, pre-MP3, pre-iPod, pre-shuffle.

And it was also beautiful. It was beautiful, first and foremost, because the bands were beautiful in themselves, in the way that all boys that age are. Second, it was beautiful to witness, because they had the work ethic of an American farmer circa 1845, if their seed was songs, and the soil was sonic, and the music they played had been tilled to perfection. You think that playing super-fast guitar runs and keening in a high pitched voice is special, that practitioners of that art deserve giant amounts of money and fame and debauchery? Nope. It turns out any kid with a cheap Fender and garage and a lot of time to practice can do it too. And, at least in the case of Soul Asylum, they can write the shit out of a couplet as well. 

That’s what you’ll hear on Made To Be Broken —a record that takes a bunch of middle American white bread influences and then puts them in a dumpster, willing us to dive for its treasures. It is a sound that is neither as impenetrable and dark as Slayer, nor as just plain dumb as Dokken, and it is as good an explanation of the Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure/Wayne’s World/Spinal Tap aesthetic as anything out there.

A young John Wick and friend

Like Bill, and Ted, and Wayne, and Nigel, Soul Asylum were just kids back then, really, just some little boys in ripped jeans and high top Converse All Stars. But their ability to harmonize, play their guitars in unison, and ultimately, withstand a decibel level that could have harmed even a snake, had been honed into a sharp, pointy, sonic stick of a weapon. Why were they weaponized, you may ask? Honestly, just because. Nowadays, when people look back at the late 20^th century, they will note that it was a time when there were no wars for boys to go fight. Instead, for forty or fifty years, between Viet Nam and 9-11, there were only hobbies: sports, robotics, taking drugs, and, for the lucky or crazy few who had wanderlust, courage, and deep if suspect poetic instincts, forming a band and taking it on the road.

That must be why when I think of these bands playing live, I think of them like commandos; as if they were some kind of crack team of sharpshooters or Special Forces, a perfectly coordinated team of ninja assassins sneaking in to some citadel on a rescue mission and absolutely killing it. The citadel was The Mainstream, of course – the 1980s Reagan world where everyone wore polo shirts and voted Republican — and the rescued were the rest of us.

No, there weren’t any wars back then, so the boys in the bands had to create their own battlefields, and Soul Asylum were the masters at it. Like their friends in the Replacements and in other bands all over the country, they plotted sorties behind enemy lines. They crept up on the battlements.  And then they took the whole thing over the top. Of course, it was all pretend, but then, that is how it should be. What a glorious time in our history, when those kinds of actions were only metaphorical. 

Today, what’s made to be broken are actual things -- toys, iPhones, printers -- planned obsolescence is, alas, a viable business strategy. But in 1986, objects were more robust, and Soul Asylum’s dictum really referred to the way they approached both making music and living life. As they sang on “Never Really Been,” “Ain’t it strange how some things never change, Ain’t it strange how nothing stays the same?” 

Yep. It surely is.  

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--A reissue of Made To Be Broken is out now on Omnivore Records. It includes extra tracks, and you can purchase it online at the link or at your finer record stores. The previous words are the liner notes.

--Soul Asylum's original bassist Karl Mueller died in 2005 of throat cancer.  His wife, Mary Beth, has created a non-profit organization dedicated to educating people about the eight preventable cancers that are avoidable through lifestyle changes or early detection and treatment. You can donate here: https://killkancer.org/