What's the secret?

Live remain sincere -- and humorless

by Gary Susman

Live remind me of what Eddie Murphy used to say about James Brown; he couldn't tell what the fuck James was saying, but he knew that whatever it was, it was some real important shit to James.

Call me obtuse or uninsightful or simply unskilled in the art of lyrical exegesis, but I have a real hard time deciphering what Ed Kowalczyk is singing about. Not that he doesn't enunciate with perfect clarity, even when he's shouting at the top of his lungs, which is most of the time. Rather, he writes lyrics that seem willfully obscure, arcane, personal, or simply goofy -- all the more perverse when you consider that he's managed to strike a chord in at least the six million listeners who bought Live's last release, 1994's Throwing Copper, an album filled with such heartfelt yet inscrutable arena thumpers as "Selling the Drama," "I Alone," and "Lightning Crashes."

Whatever he's singing about, you can be sure he means it. With arrangements that tend to feature his impassioned yowl, the ringing, chunky chords of guitarist Chad Taylor, and the rumbling, galloping rhythms of bassist Patrick Dahlheimer and drummer Chad Gracey, Live's songs deliver their message with an intense earnestness that borders on the painful -- perhaps for listeners and the band alike. With what is either bravery or foolhardiness, Live follow up their sextuple-platinum megaseller with more of the same in Secret Samadhi (Radioactive). Of course, they've been around for more than a decade, since the members were in junior high school in York, Pennsylvania, so it's no surprise that by their fourth album, they've settled into a comfortable pattern. If it ain't broke, why fix it? Live specialize in songs that ring with anthemic power, even if their lyrics are informed by a creeping sense of spiritual bleakness. Kowalczyk sings like a man of faith crawling through a world of sin and degradation. He's not a messiah, he just plays one on MTV.

I know I sound churlish and cynical, but these are cynical times, and it's terribly, terribly hard to carry off earnestness without a hint of irony, or at least a hint of recognition that you might be wrong. Samadhi has one brief acknowledgment that the band are due for a backlash after the phenomenal success of Copper, one pre-emptive strike against the sarcasm that is the likely response to their otherwise unstinting sincerity. It's a line in "Rattlesnake," the first track: "Is it money, is it fame/Or were they always this lame?" That's it, though; the rest of the album is utterly humorless.

Like so many of us, I'm inclined to blame Billy Corgan. After all, Secret Samadhi (what does that mean? anyone here know Sanskrit?) features such ponderously Pumpkin-esque titles as "Heropsychodreamer" and "Insomnia and the Hole in the Universe." Kowalczyk is merely the latest, after Corgan and Michael Stipe, in a line of shaven-headed, messianic singers out to save rock and roll from itself (and maybe its listeners from themselves). At least Corgan and Stipe (and the rest of the saviors, from Cobain to Bono to Lennon and Dylan) have displayed some self-doubt (sometimes to the point of obsessiveness). Not Ed.

You might expect Live's mystical Christianity to express itself with dogmatic rigidity, and for the most part, you'd be right. On one song, they do seem to express empathy for an alienated gay man: the repeated refrain goes, "They called you queer." Otherwise, they turn distastefully moralistic, raging against daytime talk-show culture in "Freaks" and against the '60s counterculture in "Unsheathed," where, dripping with puritanical venom, Kowalczyk snarls, "Free love is a world I can't linger too long in/`Free love' was just another party for the hippies to ruin." That is, when he's not courting absurdity with such faux Beat lyrics as "Angel, don't you have some bagels in my oven?" or "More peace is such a dirty habit."

Still, Live make a pretty big noise, and they can make big noise pretty. "Turn My Head" and "Gas Hed Goes West" are unexpectedly lovely ballads amid a collection of mid-tempo fist pumpers. And "Lakini's Juice," the single, is certainly stirring, though what it's about remains a mystery to me, from the title on down. Like the rest of Samadhi, it's probably doomed to remain a secret.