Grave Dancer’s Reunion

Dave Pirner says he’s tired of making music out of misery. He’s slouching in his chair in the back of the Uptown Green Mill—he met me here for both the convenience (he lives only a few blocks away) and for the low-key privacy it affords him (so let the man eat his diablo wings in peace, please). It’s two in the afternoon, and he’s nursing a coffee and a glass of water like a man who had to get up at 6:30 a.m. with a hangover.

New Orleans, was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, forcing him to evacuate to Minneapolis. (The Bywater house where he lived with his girlfriend survived, but his two-and-a-half-year-old son’s habit of sticking his hands in his mouth made Pirner especially concerned about the city’s piled-up garbage and toxicity levels.) Pirner acknowledges that it’s been a “real shitty year,” though despite the tragedy and disruption, he and guitarist Danny Murphy found a replacement for Mueller and a new drummer and managed to complete the first Soul Asylum studio record since 1998’s Candy from a Stranger. They are now preparing to tour in support of the new album, The Silver Lining.

At forty-two, Pirner is still rocking the grunge look. He rolled up in a banged-up 1989 Toyota Tercel and walked in wearing a Sun Kil Moon T under two unbuttoned oxford shirts. His baggy Levi’s sag like a teenager’s, and his greasy dishwater-blond hair pokes out from under a ski cap. Despite the vintage getup, there is something grown-up and solid about him. He’s wearing his hair shorter, and, though his sideburns are wispy enough to evoke adolescence, the epidermis on his baby face seems to have thickened. There are a few more crinkles to his squinty smile. He’s still long and skinny, but his midsection looks soft.

It’s not surprising that Soul Asylum’s sound has grown softer too. Pirner says he still tries to write songs and make music that lives up to his “punk rock ethos,” but most of the new songs are melodic pop ballads and anthems. There’s less of the old low growl in Pirner’s voice, and Danny Murphy’s guitar tone and intensity mostly stay within a mainstream rock range, straying into punk rock thrash on only a couple of tracks. The sound may have softened, but they still sound like Soul Asylum.

As a sixteen-year-old living in White Bear Lake in 1992, I was among the millions of suburban kids around the country who bought their triple-platinum masterpiece, Grave Dancer’s Union. We couldn’t get enough of “Black Gold” and “Runaway Train” on the radio or MTV. For a good stretch, Soul Asylum was right there in the grunge pantheon with Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Our college-age siblings and the older people singing along with “Cartoon” at the live shows might have looked down on the band’s adolescent legions, even going as far as labeling Soul Asylum “sellouts,” but we didn’t care. My buddy’s older brother said I should buy Hang Time, one of Soul Asylum’s early albums, but I didn’t until I went to college. He turned out to be right: Hang Time is a great record. But, still, it’s no Grave Dancer’s.

For a good chunk of the nineties, we followed Soul Asylum the way we’d track a hometown sports team on a championship run, eating up both of Rolling Stone’s cover stories on the band. (I loved the one where the writer stayed up all night with a drugged-out Dave—though I found out during our interview that Dave didn’t like that one so much). We took note when they appeared on a slacker-era movie soundtrack such as Clerks (there was a great black-and-white video of the band playing hockey on a convenience store roof). And, of course, we followed the romance between Pirner and Winona—Minnesota’s other 1990s pop totem, Winona Ryder. In addition to its place in the zeitgeist, Soul Asylum was a ridiculously loud and tight live act, and because of Pirner’s slacker sex appeal—nasty white-boy dreads and often clearly wasted onstage—the band was a big draw for girls.

Nineties nostalgia washes over you when listening to the new album—both the pleasant, tingly kind and the icky, cringeworthy kind. Some of Pirner’s heart-on-your-sleeve lyrics are as uncomfortable to listen to in this snarky too-cool age of The Killers and The Strokes as your yearbook photo is to look at. He is as fond as ever of the easy pop-song rhyme, but the new lyrics are bereft of much of the old angst. These are grown-up lyrics, generally on the optimistic, uplifting side. Some titles sound as though they’re on Paxil: “Stand Up and Be Strong,” “All Is Well,” and “Good for You.” “As you live longer, you become a little less maudlin about things,” he explains. “A little more realistic about feeling lucky for what you have and not so caught up with yourself. You understand how your situation is relative to everybody else’s. I feel less dramatic than I maybe did when I was the suicidal teen or whatever.”

As a forty-two-year-old father, Pirner no longer thinks it’s necessary to “impose your anguish on people who don’t really want to hear it.” Even so, the best songs on the new album—the ones worthy of the band’s old-school back catalog—are the ones filled with anxiety. “Oxygen,” a classic loud-quiet-loud meditation on an anxious relationship, makes the hair on my arms stand up. “Slowly Rising” is a nasty Alice Cooper-doing-the-Stooges takeoff about a girl with weapons of mass destruction. “Success Is Not So Sweet” is a bitter ballad that may refer to a victim of a crime, a failing relationship, or maybe the band itself.

Pirner might not want to impose his anguish on us as he ages, but he may be wrong about what we want as we grow up alongside him. Yeah, sure, we have our own problems, but that doesn’t mean we no longer want to hear about his.

Karl Mueller died on June 17, 2005. That morning he had walked the dogs around his south Minneapolis neighborhood and gone back to bed. “He was so pissed,” says his wife, Mary Beth, who was at his side when he died. “His last words were, ‘You gotta be fucking kidding.’ ”

Mueller was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2004, just before the band was scheduled to record its new album. At the time, Soul Asylum had neither a record contract nor a label, but it had finally found a drummer—studio pro Michael Bland, formerly of Prince’s New Power Generation. (The band’s drummer situation devolved into a running joke over the years.) Pirner says, “It was go time.”

The long layoff after the 1998 album had left the band with a seventy-song war chest of demos. No label had stepped up to underwrite the record, but Pirner and Murphy were wary about working with anybody anyway, because recording Candy from a Stranger had been such an unpleasant experience. “We ended up recording that record twice,” Murphy tells me over lunch at Lucia’s. “It’s an experience I never want to go through again.” At one point, the record company, Sony, wanted the band to work with pop-rock guru Glen Ballard, best known for his collaborations with Alanis Morissette. “We don’t really need a ghostwriter,” Murphy says. “We have enough people fighting against the material as it is.”

After the Candy tour, which ended with a humiliating stint supporting Matchbox 20 in arenas, Pirner was burned out. Murphy says that Dave then went through a couple of years of “emotional problems,” and Pirner says he needed to “blow things off for a while.” It was during that time that he relocated to New Orleans and began listening intently to gospel, hip-hop, and jazz. He says he needed to understand where rock music came from.

Pirner had lived away from home before. After Grave Dancer’s success, he shuttled between New York and LA, but for more “superficial reasons,” among them “a girlfriend lived there.” (The one condition Pirner’s management asked me to agree to before our interview was to not ask him any “Winona questions.”) He sees the more recent move as a more significant step. “When I decided to move to New Orleans, that was a lot more accurate to the whole James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist thing about needing to immerse myself in a different musical city,” he says. “To find some new perspective. A different environment where I didn’t feel so secure. I wanted to put myself in a precarious sort of position where I wasn’t so comfortable knowing where everything is, and wanting to run into accidental situations that might be inspiring.”

Accidents had inspired Pirner before—the folk-punk sound of Grave Dancer’s grew out of a bad case of tinnitus. Afraid he was going to permanently lose his hearing, Pirner started writing songs on his acoustic guitar and bringing in more complete versions to record. The result was a more melodious and accessible sound. Pirner’s consolidation of creative control produced Soul Asylum’s first “comeback” (Grave Dancer’s actually came out nine years into the band’s lifetime). When he moved to New Orleans after Candy, he took his autonomy one step further, recording a solo record, Faces and Names, which came out in 2002.

“I wasn’t pissed at Dave for doing the solo record,” Murphy says. “It was something I really wanted him to do.” Pirner felt limited by the musicianship of the band, according to both Pirner and Murphy, and, as Murphy says, “If you hear what people do for so many years, you just take it for granted and you don’t realize what makes them special.” Murphy had his own side project as a member of Golden Smog, the regional all-star band comprising members of Soul Asylum, Big Star, Run Westy Run, the Jayhawks, and Wilco. Still, he can sound slightly bemused when talking about Pirner.

Murphy is clearly the more ambitious and practical of the two. As a divorced father of a teenaged boy, he supplements his income with an antiques business. He can discuss record deals, press events, and timelines in detail, and he doesn’t have any qualms about teasingly casting his frontman as the stereotypical dreamer. During our lunch, he says, “On the last record, Dave was like, ‘Well, this record seems like there are kind of guy songs and girl songs. So why don’t we have a pink record and a blue record?’ ” Murphy laughs and shakes his head. “And I’m like, ‘Because then we would have a pink record and a blue record.’ It’s just, like, total Dave, you know?”

Pirner says the solo project was something he felt he needed to do, if only to prove to himself that he could do it. “It was really frightening, and it was really educational,” he says. “I learned so much having to do everything myself.” That included finding a distribution deal, handling the press, and going after the right gigs—things that Karl and Danny had taken care of in the past. “Just out of high school, they were always the ones going, ‘Let’s get a gig down at the Entry,’ ” he says. Without Karl and Danny, Pirner jokes, “I would have been some flaky songwriter sittin’ there going, ‘I wonder if I should ever play this for anyone.’ ” Pirner is happy he made the solo record, but says it feels good getting back into Soul Asylum. “I just missed it horribly. I felt insecure as this solo artist without a band, without any sort of a team.”

Not that the team always got along. Pirner and Murphy tell similar stories about the first time Murphy flew down to New Orleans to listen to the sample tracks Pirner was working on for the new record. “I bring him into my little studio and play some stuff on the computer, and he just looks at me like I’m from outer space,” Pirner says. Murphy laughs when recalling his assessment. “I said, ‘It sounds like Captain Beefheart on crack.’ ” Pirner credits Murphy with having the stronger sense of what makes a Soul Asylum song: “He says, ‘That’s not Soul Asylum. We’re not that kind of band.’ And it’s incredibly frustrating to me, and I probably would go off in a lot of different directions, but at the same time, I want the band to be happy playing the music that we’re playing and I want the music to be playable by the people who are playing it.”

“It was so weird,” Murphy remembers. “But finally we said, ‘Dave, you should just fuckin’ go away somewhere for a couple of days, take an acoustic guitar, and record seven or eight songs. Here’s a verse, here’s a chorus, and then we can make ’em.’ ”

Time went by and demos were exchanged, but nothing seemed to happen until Karl was diagnosed with cancer. “That’s why we made the record when we did,” Murphy says. “Dave was living in New Orleans, I was living here, and music was last in line. But Karl getting sick, we were like, ‘This is probably the last chance we have.’ ”

When Mueller, Pirner, Murphy, and Bland finally reconvened at Flyte Tyme’s Minneapolis studios in the summer of 2004, there was a new kind of pressure—the almost palpable sense that after all that time, this had better be good. And, at first, the band didn’t handle the pressure very well. “We had to have the right batch of material,” Pirner says, “because it didn’t seem to make sense to put out a record unless it was really a contender. And that was never intended by me. So people had started to get kind of lazy about playing songs that they didn’t think were masterpieces.” Murphy thinks Pirner had himself to blame. “I always tell Dave that he set the standard for what a good Dave Pirner song is, whether it’s ‘Never Really Been’ or ‘Closer to the Stars’ or ‘Without a Trace’ or ‘Black Gold.’ If anything else is not that good, we’re just gonna go, ‘Ah . . . you know, try again.’ ” Their new drummer was taken aback by the in-studio candor. “Michael Bland didn’t really know us that well,” says Murphy, “and every time Dave brings a song in and I’m not like superinterested, Michael would say, ‘You guys are brutal.’ ”

Not that Pirner doesn’t have rigorous standards of his own. During our interview, he made a fairly ridiculous assertion, which in print looks like a Kanye West quote: “I’ve never written a love song.” He said, “I’m averse to writing songs about partying and dancing and sex. I don’t want to write about rock ’n’ roll. I would rather write about anything other than what I think everybody else writes songs about. There are plenty of songs about dancing and plenty about cars and plenty of love songs. I ain’t gonna write love songs.” Pirner said writing in order to craft a hit is “soulless.”

On top of the creative tension, Karl was getting radiation therapy every day for seven weeks, as well as struggling through chemotherapy. “It was ridiculously awful,” says Mary Beth Mueller. “He was tolerating the treatments, but he would get tired and have to sleep on the couch in the studio.” By all accounts, the Muellers’ efforts were heroic. “I get really emotional just thinking about what he must have been going through,” Pirner says, “how difficult it must have been.”

Pirner and Murphy agree that Karl loved the record. “A couple of things were really poignant lyrically,” Murphy says. “And he felt the band should go on,” Pirner says. “It was the first time Karl ever called me and was, like, ‘Hey, man, great record.’ He really liked it. And that meant so much to me. Nobody has ever called me and said that. It’s funny. After you’ve struggled through making a record, you’re usually like, ‘This isn’t any good. We’re fucked, but it’s too late to change anything now.’ ”

At Karl’s memorial service last June, Danny and Dave gave eulogies and Dave sang an a cappella version of Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken.” Soul Asylum is a branch of an extended south Minneapolis rock family, several of whose members—Gary Louris and Marc Perlman of the Jayhawks, Kraig Johnson of Iffy, Lori Barbero of Babes in Toyland—all live within a few miles of each other, and they had all supported Karl during his cancer year, playing benefits at the 400 Bar and walking his terriers around the neighborhood. Now they rallied around Mary Beth. Bill Sullivan, Soul Asylum’s former tour manager and the owner of the 400 Bar, held her arm during the service.

Karl and Danny were good friends at the old Marshall High School in southeast Minneapolis, sharing a fake ID that they would use to see bands from other schools at downtown clubs. That’s how they first saw Dave’s band, The Shitz, at Zugie’s. “We went for the Southwest [High] girls, but Dave did an incredible punk rock version of ‘The Sounds of Silence,’ ” Danny says. Danny didn’t meet Dave until they ran into each other in the parking lot of the Uptown Lunds. Their first show together was as Loud Fast Rules, on October 13, 1981, at the Entry. In 1983, they renamed themselves Soul Asylum after “one of Dave’s mediocre songs,” says Danny. They regularly opened for the Replacements and Hüsker Dü.

A few years later, Karl met Mary Beth through Soul Asylum’s first drummer, Pat Moley, who was a busboy at Faegre’s, where she waited tables. After that, Karl became the guy with the girlfriend: When the band was on the road, he and Mary Beth would go out for lunch while the other guys sat around in their underwear watching CNN. And because she had money from a regular job, Karl had a home to come back to when the tour ended. The couple regularly hosted barbecues for the band’s friends in their backyard.

Karl was tall and quiet, and when the band had its gigantic success with Grave Dancer’s Union, he was the steady center who helped hold them together. “One time, the band was playing some shed in the South,” Mary Beth says. “Karl and I were going to get a hot dog or something, and, all of a sudden, Dave comes running past us, to get behind a barricade backstage, and we’re like, ‘What the hell’s he doing?’ We turn around, and there are these little girls kicking after him. And here’s Karl, completely anonymous. He used to say, ‘All the fortune and none of the fame, thank you.’ ” 

When Karl died, the band took a few months off, then agreed that if they were going to put out the record, they had to get their act together—they had promised Karl they would. “Karl was in Soul Asylum until the day he died,” Pirner says.

But now the band faced a difficult decision: Who would replace Karl, even temporarily? There were rumors that Karl had a short list of candidates, but Mary Beth denies that. In fact, she recruited Tommy Stinson—a former Replacement, whom she’d dated before she started seeing Karl—to finish Karl’s parts in the studio and to play them on the tour. “I had Tommy and his wife and his daughter over for dinner, and I broached the subject,” Mary Beth says. “It was a nervous situation, but since everyone knows each other, I think it was probably just easier for me to tell him that this is what we had in mind. He went to Southwest, so it would have been awkward for Dave and Danny to ask him to do shows.” In any case, it was a bit of classic rock casting that could have made Van Halen or Guns N Roses jealous. (Actually, I’d wager money that Axl Rose is jealous—Stinson is still GNR’s official bass player-in-limbo.)

The new lineup was supposed to debut at the Entry on October 24, but technical problems—Pirner calls it “Karl getting the last laugh”—forced them into the Main Room next door. Backstage, the band was a wreck, at least for a while. Mary Beth was too broken up to come to the show, and the tension among the guys was almost unbearable. Pirner sequestered himself in a corner for his ritualistic preshow cigarette. “I couldn’t understand how I was going to go on without him, you know?” he says. “It was really making me almost fall apart. Then Tom put his hand on my shoulder, and he was like, ‘Dave, it’s going to be OK. We’re going to have fun. It’s a rock show.’ Simple as that. It was so intuitive, and it meant so much to me.”

Murphy points out that Stinson had dealt with a similar situation earlier in his career. “Tommy lost his brother,” he says, referring to the Replacements’ lead guitarist Bob Stinson, who died of an alcohol-and-drug overdose in 1995. And Pirner had known Tommy since high school—at Soul Asylum’s Christmas show this year, he looked over at Stinson and announced, “This guy dated my sister.” He says, “When we used to tour with the Replacements way back in the day, Tommy was so young. Now he’s been through so much, and he’s really understanding and has turned into this great person. During the show, he was making faces at me and trying to get me to laugh.”

That night, because of the temperature difference between the Entry and the Main Room, the band’s guitars were out of tune, and with only 500 fans (who would have filled the Entry) the place had an eerie, half-full look—but the band, dedicating “Runaway Train” to Karl, put on an emotional performance in front of their hard-core fans. The next day, they flew to New York for their big comeback show at the Bowery Ballroom.

“The band did good that night,” Murphy says of the Bowery show. Mary Beth made the trip, and Murphy’s son, Kelly, celebrated his sixteenth birthday. “The crowd was, uh . . . equally as adult [as at the First Ave. show],” Murphy says. “Lots of pot smokers for some reason. They were pretty into it, though. There was a little bit of the spectacle factor: ‘Can these guys still do it?’ We were happy. For me, playing shows just sneaks up on you emotionally. We played so many years with Karl. We’ve had a million drummers, but Karl’s always been Karl.”

The new album was finally picked up by Sony Legacy. Dave jokes, “On the one hand, you’re like, ‘Most of the people on this label are dead,’ and on the other, you’re like, ‘Shit, man, I’m on a label with Sly Stone and Johnny Cash and Miles Davis.’ ” And although both Tommy Stinson and Michael Bland get a lot of phone calls (Axl keeps talking about putting another tour together, and Stinson put out his first solo record last year), they’re committed to touring behind the new Soul Asylum record this summer. Permanent membership could happen.

Now middle-aged, both Pirner and Murphy have families (Murphy is getting remarried this month) and houses (Pirner jokes that his place in Kenwood is the “house that ‘Runaway Train’ built”). But that’s not to say they aren’t self-conscious about the word comeback or questions about where they’ve been.

During lunch, Murphy asks, “What should we name our record?”

“I don’t know,” I say, “but I think Crazy Mixed Up World—the title your manager mentioned—is a little cheesy.”

“Me too,” Murphy says. “We wanted to call it maybe Soul Asylum on a Bus Named Desire.”

“That’s kind of cool.”

“The new one we’re thinking about is The Silver Lining.”

“I like that one.”

“Yeah, it kinda makes sense,” he says.

They end up going with The Silver Lining. And it really is perfectly Soul Asylum. On the one hand, terribly sentimental—a bleeding heart testament to a history of perseverance. On the other, wiseass punk rock—a vague throwaway joke that dares listeners to bring along a meaning of their own.

“It’s funny like that, isn’t it?” Pirner says. “There’s a song called ‘Standing Water’ on the album, and it was written long before Katrina. It seems hard to believe that it wasn’t written afterward.” He crinkles his eyes in a big Dave Pirner grin. “And that makes me feel good that there are certain timeless elements to my writing. I’ll write something, and then five years later it will seem more relevant to me.” 

Steve Marsh is an associate editor at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.