Album: Drivin' n' Cryin', Fly Me Courageous, 1990
Acquired: Not sure where, but I absolutely picked this up in my much younger days.
Best Track: "Around the Block Again"
Lasting Memory: I have no strong memories of or for this particular album, but listening through Fly Me Courageous a couple of time jogged loose a long-held and usually tightly tamped down wistfulness for every band I've ever liked's better -- and most specifically younger --days.
I've already used the phrase "younger days" twice because it is a truism of rock 'n' roll that every band falls off precipitously in terms of output and quality after the age of 30 or, at a stretch, 35. The Beatles had broken up by the time they were 30. The Who's best work was produced in the early 1970s, when Townsend was in his late 20s. Even Too Much Joy couldn't keep the magic going after Jay and Tim stopped being all adolescent and shit.
The list of bands that couldn't survive the transition to adulthood is too long and too depressing to reproduce here.
Which is not the same as saying that individual artists do not age well and produce amazing work well into their dotage. Springsteen, the aforementioned Townsend, Dylan, and even Drivin' n' Cryin's leader Kevn Kinney as a solo artist prove that point. But there is something about a band that makes the entity incapable of remaining essential after a certain point.
And if you throw U2 back at me as a counteragrument, I will cyberslap you. U2's career ended at the same time as Side A of Joshua Tree.
What stirred up these negative vibes is that Fly Me Courageous is just fine as a hard rock document of 1990, but it is nowhere near as good as DnC's first three albums, regardless of what the Rolling Stone reviewer wrote at the time. The country interludes are all gone, and the songwriting has taken a turn to the political and for the much worse.
Also, as far as I knew until just now, Fly Me Courageous was DnC's final studio album. Turns out that the band released three later albums, but when even your fans don't know, that's a tree falling in the forest with nobody around to turn into gig flyers.
A clip of DnC performing the song "Fly Me Courageous" on Late Night with David Letterman is doubly heartbreaking for the nostalgia-minded. And a reminder that comedians generally age as well as bands.
I'll console myself with "Around the Block Again" and move on to my next series of posts about an artist who was so good early in his career that it was almost scary but who has had difficulty raising much besides a donut in his second act.
Up Next: Steve Earle, Guitar Town, 1985
3 comments:
You know who stayed good past 30? Bruce Springsteen. I submit that TUNNEL OF LOVE and THE RISING is as good as anything he did in his 20s. MAGIC has its moments, too.
But it's funny that you mention TMJ, because I was just listening to SON OF SAM I AM this morning, preparatory to sending a copy to a friend as a get-well present.
I DID mention Springsteen as someone who continued making quality music, but I singled him out as an artist, not a band. I even drafted a sentence about how _Tunnel of Love_, made when Springsteen was around 40 is as good or better than _Born to Run_, but I scrapped it.
i hate to add fuel to the fire, but wanted to point out that i've seen kevin kinney recently down in atlanta, doing small (<200 people) acoustic sets. he seems to have some tradition of playing at this one little place the night before thanksgiving, and since i'm usually there for the holidays, we just seem to end up there.
i'd say he's still got some of the country twang going on, in solo form, but yeah, there's so much cliche and predictability in the rest of it that it's pretty tough to enjoy.
this is one reason we should all just wait till we're 40 to start The Band, so we'll have more material stocked up before we totally burn out. (yeah, long shot).
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