Between Our Lives and the Speed of Sound
Today's formative-album replay: John Hiatt Bring the Family. It was a 1987 cover story by Chris Willman in the Tower Records freebie magazine Pulse! that sold me on this record and its powerful creation myth: At the advice of a small-guitar-shop-concert booker, a newly sober almost-ran singer/songwriter made a last-ditch stab at relevance by banging out a cheap, mostly live-to-tape album in just four days with a supergroup of the some of the coolest musicians alive—and it turned out to be his career breakthrough.
The record I eagerly snapped up lived up to the hype, and then some. Indeed, based on the songs alone—a brace of smart, soulful charts with sinuous shapes and often witty lyrics—it's a roots-rock masterpiece. But all these years later, it's the sinewy, gritty-sweet sound of this record, courtesy of producer John Chelew (the McCabe's Guitar Shop booker who dared/challenged Hiatt to make a record as good as his live shows), that still makes Bring the Family so inviting. It kicks in immediately with the galumphing chug of the opener, "Memphis in the Meantime," in which Nick Lowe's wry bass, Ry Cooder's tasty rhythm guitar, and Jim Keltner's snap-trap drums create an ideal vehicle, a backfiring jalopy, for Hiatt's scratchy blues baritone. The group then zooms in for the jagged shadows of "Alone in the Dark" and back out for the unlikely-chord jam of "Thing Called Love," its central F#7 riff conveying a kind of nervy surprise each time it arrives (the song's home key is D):
That startling, upturned grin of a figure befits a tune that captures one of the album's ostensible themes: new-found maturity, a recognition that there are ties that liberate as much as they bind. It is here, amid joking about not being an "icon carved out of soap/Sent here to clean up your reputation," that Hiatt crustily credits a source for earthly love that's "up above." The music, in short, illustrates the double take of the lyric, "Baby, don't know why the cry of love is so alarming."
While there are other hearteningly glass-half-full moments on offer—the ecstatic singalong "Thank You Girl," the backward-glancing half-embrace of the climactic "Your Dad Did," the sweetly vulnerable "Learning How to Love You," the po-faced "Have a Little in Faith in Me"—for me the album reaches its high point in another kind of grown-up moment, the elegiac kiss-off of "Lipstick Sunset." It takes the familiar country trope of a rascal confessing his rambling ways as a kind of warning to a new love, and lingers for a moment to set the scene of devastation, with "a bittersweet perfume/Hanging in the fields/The creek is running high." Mulling his kinship with the twilight of the title, he speculates, somewhat self-servingly but with bracing clarity, "Maybe love's like that for me/Maybe I can only see/As you take away the light." What elevates the song, quite literally, is Ry Cooder's graceful slide solo, as perfect a bit of scene painting as I can think of in any music, exactly conjuring as it does the sunset of the title, "smeared across the August sky." If regret had a sound, it would be the long arcs and dying falls of Cooder's lightly electrified slide guitar.
A later song, "Tip of the Tongue," is like a heartsick cousin of "Lipstick Sunset," not the lament of a serial offender but the cry of a man who made one huge, life-changing mistake. Its masterful build to a big turnaround and release (at 3:35 here) gives proof positive of Hiatt's dramatic craft. If elsewhere his reach for big vocal moments—on the defiant "Stood Up," or the naked "Have a Little Faith"—verges on the histrionic, it's not to gin up heft in deficient material. All of these songs have strong bones, and can stand a bit of battering. But it's the flesh that Chelew and the band put on those bones that gives this record its timeless strut and vitality.
The record I eagerly snapped up lived up to the hype, and then some. Indeed, based on the songs alone—a brace of smart, soulful charts with sinuous shapes and often witty lyrics—it's a roots-rock masterpiece. But all these years later, it's the sinewy, gritty-sweet sound of this record, courtesy of producer John Chelew (the McCabe's Guitar Shop booker who dared/challenged Hiatt to make a record as good as his live shows), that still makes Bring the Family so inviting. It kicks in immediately with the galumphing chug of the opener, "Memphis in the Meantime," in which Nick Lowe's wry bass, Ry Cooder's tasty rhythm guitar, and Jim Keltner's snap-trap drums create an ideal vehicle, a backfiring jalopy, for Hiatt's scratchy blues baritone. The group then zooms in for the jagged shadows of "Alone in the Dark" and back out for the unlikely-chord jam of "Thing Called Love," its central F#7 riff conveying a kind of nervy surprise each time it arrives (the song's home key is D):
While there are other hearteningly glass-half-full moments on offer—the ecstatic singalong "Thank You Girl," the backward-glancing half-embrace of the climactic "Your Dad Did," the sweetly vulnerable "Learning How to Love You," the po-faced "Have a Little in Faith in Me"—for me the album reaches its high point in another kind of grown-up moment, the elegiac kiss-off of "Lipstick Sunset." It takes the familiar country trope of a rascal confessing his rambling ways as a kind of warning to a new love, and lingers for a moment to set the scene of devastation, with "a bittersweet perfume/Hanging in the fields/The creek is running high." Mulling his kinship with the twilight of the title, he speculates, somewhat self-servingly but with bracing clarity, "Maybe love's like that for me/Maybe I can only see/As you take away the light." What elevates the song, quite literally, is Ry Cooder's graceful slide solo, as perfect a bit of scene painting as I can think of in any music, exactly conjuring as it does the sunset of the title, "smeared across the August sky." If regret had a sound, it would be the long arcs and dying falls of Cooder's lightly electrified slide guitar.
A later song, "Tip of the Tongue," is like a heartsick cousin of "Lipstick Sunset," not the lament of a serial offender but the cry of a man who made one huge, life-changing mistake. Its masterful build to a big turnaround and release (at 3:35 here) gives proof positive of Hiatt's dramatic craft. If elsewhere his reach for big vocal moments—on the defiant "Stood Up," or the naked "Have a Little Faith"—verges on the histrionic, it's not to gin up heft in deficient material. All of these songs have strong bones, and can stand a bit of battering. But it's the flesh that Chelew and the band put on those bones that gives this record its timeless strut and vitality.
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