Black Gold — Soul Asylum and their Winning Work Ethic
Dave Pirner & Soul Asylum are alive and kicking and out on tour now.
Dave Pirner & Soul Asylum are alive and kicking and out on tour now.
I am a Midwestern boy through and through — born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Maybe it’s the Nordic or Germanic history but the throughline of many of its inhabitants, past and present, is their work ethic.
While it’s true I’ve spent far longer on the East Coast than I did in the Midwest, you can take a person outta the Midwest, but you can’t take the Midwest outta the person.
One of the traits we Midwesterners carry with us, wherever we hang our hat, is our work ethic. It’s solid. It’s certainly something I’ve carried with me through the years and it’s something I look for in others, regardless of profession . . . or gender.
I was once asked by someone I was dating what I loved about them. So I thought about it — and I really thought about it. Sure there were lots of things like intelligence, sense of humor, etc. After a long pause I landed on “Well, you have a really solid work ethic.”
Turns out women don’t consider “work ethic” an attractive attribute.
Once upon a time, the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul) in Minnesota was a hot music “scene” — Prince, Husker Du, The Replacements, etc. But scenes are transient (see Seattle, Athens, Austin, etc.) and eventually the scene moved on. However, Minnesotans are industrious folk and the Twin Cities soldiered on…and they still are.
That said, I have to imagine being a musician from Minnesota is tough.
Think about it. The penultimate literary rock God, Bob Dylan is from Hibbing, Minnesota. In the Twin Cities, you’ve got the genius of Prince and the scrappier benchmark bands (but no less literary) like Husker Du and The Replacements fronted by Bob Mould and Paul Westerberg respectively.
For reasons that elude me, Soul Asylum is rarely spoken about with the same reverence as Husker Du or The Replacements. They’re contemporaries of those bands but somehow they’re often overlooked.
After years of banging out five albums on indie label Twine/Tone and then A&M Records, they finally had some luck at Columbia Records with 1992’s Grave Dancers Union.
From a Rolling Stone article in 1993, just after that release:
“You see, over their 11-year existence (now, 35 years), Soul Asylum has been called many things: Americas best live band; music-industry misfits; punk poets; insightful adults trapped in terminal adolescence; the last great gasp of life from the early-’80s Minneapolis music scene. They’ve even been toe-tagged as dead and gone.”
As I write this in 2020, it would seem the more things change, the more they stay the same. All of those things still hold true for the band.
But despite the success, longevity and yes, work ethic, when considering the pantheon of well-known Minnesota musicians, Soul Asylum always seems to be the afterthought. You know after everyone lists Dylan, Prince, Mould, Westerberg, it takes a Soul Asylum fan to say: “Hey, what about Soul Asylum?”
“Oh yea, they’re great too.”
Everyone knows Bob Dylan and Prince are flat-out geniuses, Bob Mould is a genre-bending musical and creative polymath (see The Daily Show theme song and WWE affiliation) and Paul Westerberg is one of the most respected songwriters of my generation. Again for unexplained reasons Dave Pirner is incorrectly left off that call sheet.
When your contemporaries are those guys, it’s going to take A LOT of talent to rise above the noise. Many bands tried, very few succeeded.
Soul Asylum succeeded.
Make no mistake, tenacity wasn’t the only thing that helped break Soul Asylum.
Principal songwriter Dave Pirner is a great and wickedly underrated songwriter. He’s clever, funny, reflective, open . . . he’s pretty much all the things that make a great writer. Above all else, Pirner writes relatable songs.
If one had a singular criticism about Pirner it may be that he has only stayed in his songwriting lane all these years. But that’s hardly a criticism. AC/DC has been making the same album for their entire career! Also, not a criticism. Pirner writes what he knows and he writes his songs in his voice…that’s what makes a great writer.
I wouldn’t expect Dave Pirner to make an experimental noise album any more then I would expect Bob Dylan to release a hardcore rap album.
So what gives? Why can’t Pirner and Soul Asylum get the respect their fellow gopher brethren get?
The history is there, the performances are there, the songs are there, the work is certainly there and yet somehow the respect is lacking.
I’ve seen Soul Asylum several times over the years. In fact, I just purchased my ticket to see them this week in NYC.
For me it was …and the horse they rode in on that piqued my interest. From there I worked my way backward. Shortly after I’d exhausted their back catalog, Grave Dancers Union dropped. And boy howdy did it. It was (and is) a great album. Their success was hard-earned and well deserved.
Unfortunately, right after Grave Dancers Union, grunge hit. And that genre and the industries approach to it took no prisoners. Straight-up rock bands like Soul Asylum became a casualty — despite the attempt to label them as “grunge”.
Their follow-up to Grave Dancers Union, Let Your Dim Light Shine, was also a great record…that very few people paid attention to. It had the bad timing of being released in 1995, at the height of the sounds from Seattle. The album's release also coincided with Dave Pirner’s notoriety for his movie star dalliances.
They threw out one more record on Columbia Records in 1998 before being dropped by the label.
Dave Pirner and co-founder and lead guitarist Dan Murphy drifted apart, other members left or were fired and one passed away.
But Soul Asylum wasn’t ready to be toe-tagged.
Like a phoenix rising the band dropped The Silver Lining in 2008. Arguably one their best albums. They enlisted fellow gophers like drummer Michael Bland (Prince, Paul Westerberg) on drums and when original bass player Karl Mueller grew too sick from cancer to play, they brought in Gen X’s own Keith Richards — and fellow Golden Gopher Tommy Stinson (The Replacements, Guns-n-Roses) to finish up recording and tour.
It was this line-up I saw in 2008 on a triple bill with Everclear and Cracker at Webster Hall in NYC. Soul Asylum was right in the middle…and they were on fire. On that night in NYC, there was no better rock band. The proof lay in the fact that about 40–50% of the audience left after their performance before headliner Everclear.
Since then things have changed for the band. In 2012, Tommy Stinson left to go do Tommy things (a Replacements reunion among them) and co-founder/lead guitarist Dan Murphy retired from music altogether.
Yep, a musician retired from music without dying. And talk about doing a 180, Murphy went into the…wait for it…antique business. How’s that for a career pivot?
But did Dave Pirner quit? Nope. Retire the name? Nope. He and drummer Michael Bland enlisted Winston Roye and Ryan Smith and are doing what Soul Asylum does — continuing to work.
Dave Pirner and Soul Asylum are as solid as anything you’re likely to encounter. Pirner is a solid songwriter, a solid guitar player, a solid singer, and a solid front-man. In other words, Pirner’s work ethic makes him reliable and he’s always going to deliver. 100% of the time? No. He’s human.
But most of the time, yea. He’s a professional.
It genuinely makes me wonder where the love is for this band. Sure, they haven’t sold millions and millions of records, but neither has Bob Mould or Paul Westerberg.
Soul Asylum is almost like the Rodney Dangerfield of Rock and Roll — no respect.
But if after 35+ years in the music business with a few million albums sold and you’re still alive, sounding good, articulate, creatively viable and working, well, that should command some respect. Especially when your catalog is as deep and rich as Soul Asylums.
Yet, for some inexplicable reason, few seem to care. If it weren’t for their tenacity and work ethic, Soul Asylum’s career would have imploded after Let Your Dim Light Shine.
Dave Pirner may not carry the industry or historical gravitas of Bob Dylan or Prince or even Bob Mould or Paul Westerberg but he’s no less talented. He and Soul Asylum deserve a seat at their table to be sure.
They’ve worked hard to get there but that’s not why they deserve the seat…they deserve it because their hard work is pretty damn good.
And you just can’t be good without doing the work.
The goal of any creative life is to create. And you can’t create without doing the work.
“Youths write to me all the time and tell me their bands will get nowhere because of all the bands in the world. I tell them there has always been awful music and that no great band ever wasted time complaining, they just got it done. Their ropey ranting is just a way to get out of the hard work of making music that will do some lasting damage.” — Henry Rollins
That identifies a Midwesterner, the work.
That identifies Dave Pirner and Soul Asylum, the quality of the work and their work ethic has allowed them to do some lasting damage.
That means something. Well, it should mean something anyway.