Social Distortion

September 19 - 26, 1 9 9 6 [Music Reviews]

Serving up meat and potatoes

Social Distortion turn clichés into great songs
by Jon Garelick
It would be nice to say that the virtues of the punk quartet Social Distortion translate at all volumes -- that with headphones on and eyes closed you can savor subtleties you'd otherwise miss.
Fuhgetaboutit.
The best way to hear the new Social D., White Light, White Heat, White Trash (550 Music), as with their four previous albums, is on the home stereo. Cranked. I'm not even sure the car stereo -- God's gift to loud music fans -- would do the new album justice. The music needs space: lots of vibrating air, lots of room for you to shake your own butt or live out air-guitar fantasies.
Social Distortion are that weird mix of punk-rock reality and classic rock-and-roll fantasy. Nothing about them is subtle, from their wall-of-guitars/drums/bass sound to their black leather jackets and rockabilly slicked-backed hair and their logo -- a cocktail-drinking, cigarette-smoking, porkpie-hatted Day of the Dead skeleton. Like a lot of punk bands circa 1996, they make you wonder whether punk rock has anything new left to say. Social Distortion's answer is to say, essentially, the same old thing, but say it perfectly.
The band trade in the familiar imagery: the hair, the shades, the leather, fast vintage Chevys, faster women who give you kisses sweeter than wine and then drop you cold. The band are forever heading down a lonely highway, running down a one-way street. And those last snippets are from their lyric sheet! It's the sharply defined light and shadows of film noir. The cover of Social Distortion (Epic, 1990) is adorned with three emblematic drawings -- tipped whiskey bottle, tipsy corseted woman nodding on a leopard-skin settee, a tommy-gun-toting bad guy kicking in the door. Don't shoot, G-Man! Social Distortion frontman and songwriter Mike Ness pays self-conscious tribute to the tradition of the rock-and-roll outlaw with such conviction that you have to wonder: it's a cool pose, but does he really believe this stuff?
The new album argues that -- to invoke another cliché -- there's a lot of truth in pretending. The first tune fades in with the ghost of low-mixed feedback into a medium-tired heavy groove that grows in volume and then fades all the way to a drawn-out coda.
The end of a song? At the beginning of the album? But on that last fading guitar chord the drummer counts off a faster four on the hi-hat, and the great wall of six-strings comes in, foursquare and heavier than before, faster, infused with life. "Loving, over and over again," Ness snarls. In a little over a minute, the band has pantomimed the whole death-and-resurrection scene of rock-and-roll lore. It's James Brown, limping off the stage in a cape and then re-emerging, born again. It's Eddie Vedder, giving himself up in a free-fall into the crowd and then delivered safely back to the stage. Ness has been down before, he'll be down again, but he's ready to love and to fight for what's right, six-guns -- er, guitars -- blazing. He knows how to tell the story, which puts him a couple of cuts above your average '90s punk band.
What also sets Ness apart is that he's the real deal, someone who followed hard on the heels of first-generation punk. He grew up in the LA scene that included hardcore progenitors like Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, and Fear, plus the Germs, and less easily definable punks like X and the Gun Club. In 1982, Social Distortion toured with Youth Brigade; that culminated with a stay at the "Dischord House" in DC with Minor Threat. The aborted odyssey was captured in the film Another State of Mind (named for the song Ness is trying to write throughout the course of the movie).
Ness's early songs for Social Distortion are cut from the mold of British punk: short, fast, and, unlike the most radical American hardcore, tuneful. The short, choppy phrases of "The Creeps" (from 1982's Mommy's Little Monster) don't add up to an anthem so much as a slogan. The same could be said of a powerful early single like "1945." But "Another State of Mind" already shows Ness's crafty promise. There's more of a release in the vocal harmonies and longer melodic phrases; and in the film, the circular chord progressions of verse-chorus-verse not only have a classic garagy formal economy but embody the sworls of slam dancers in front of the stage. Watching the daily grind of that cross-country school-bus tour, listening to the song over images of club hysteria ("This road leads to this, and this one leads to that/Her voice sends shivers down my spine"), you can already hear Ness beginning to mythologize his everyday existence.
Ness's drinking, drugging, and all-around bad behavior apparently broke up the band at the end of the tour documented in Another State of Mind. He got back together with guitarist Dennis Danell in 1985; by the time the band had released Prison Bound, in 1988, it was obvious he had learned a lot -- mostly in the form of rockabilly. There was some jail time in there too, and the hard business of getting off drugs and alcohol. He even began to lose some of the Brit inflections of his delivery. (All the band's early albums, as well as the singles collection Mainliner: Wreckage from the Past, are available on Time Bomb.)
After inking a major-label deal with Epic, the band went further into rockabilly and related genres like country and folk, but they always pumped, fast, with the big guitars and a heavy beat. It was riff-rock married to Ness's bitter turns of chord and melody. They had been known in their early years to cover "Under My Thumb"; now they covered Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire." The street-level observations of the early work had given way to a Cash-like American mythology of the outlaw, the outsider, the existential loner.
The broad strokes fit Ness's palette to a "T." Where he used to blacken his eyes in an early glam-punk style (it was a way of looking sad and evoking the audience's sympathy, he said in Another State of Mind) or appear on stage swathed in white bandages, now he paid just as rigorous attention to grooming himself in the image of Brando from The Wild One -- the shades, the hair, a new trim body, many elaborate tattoos.
Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell was the most fully realized yet of Ness's blend of rockabilly and punk. And his opening guitar-and-voice verse on "Making Believe" made the country and folk connections explicit. His awareness of rock styles put him in a league with genre benders like X (the punk country rock of domestic and community turmoil) and the Gun Club (a punk version of Robert Johnson's existential dread). And his prosaic lyrics had become more eloquent. The simply stated dread of a song like "Cold Feelings" was made palpable in the music, being all the more effective for what was left unstated in the lyrics, the tensions that make the singer want to "separate my body from my mind."
White Light, White Heat, White Trash goes back to the band's punk roots; the rockabilly of the past three albums has been subdued. It's a risk, especially since the last album yielded Ness's best single batch of songs. By this point, though, Ness's study of other styles has become ingrained in his own songwriting voice. The opening "Dear Lover" has the same cyclical elegance as "Another State of Mine," but it's been refined even further with his enhanced melodic sense.
This time around, of course, Ness has Sony Music production value on his side. He and Danell have honed their twin-guitar attack into a majestic cathedral of sound, what critic Robert Palmer calls the church of the sonic guitar. The riffs now course through their tunes like deep-flowing streams. Despite the general air of loud pummeling, Ness has a grasp of dynamics. A song's bridge will break for a verse of muttered, fearful-yet-defiant lyrics over an insistent single-string vamp. The punk signature wail of a long, scraped guitar string comes in, followed closely by the hit of the drums, and then the return of those pounding guitar riffs from the last chorus -- like a promise kept. The riffs themselves seem to take on a mythic significance. "Untitled #2," with all those one-way streets, is about constancy in the face of mutability -- about faith and love. And those mesmerizing, familiar rhythms and progressions take on gravity, emotional weight. Here, and in a standard confession song like "I Was Wrong," on-the-beat chording never sounded so sublime.
When we first talked about the album, a friend of mine used the term "meat-and-potatoes rock and roll." He meant it as a compliment, and he was right. In White Light, White Heat, White Trash, Ness asks forgiveness for unnamed sins ("I Was Wrong"), rails against social injustice ("Don't Drag Me Down," with its chorus line, "You're 18, wanna be a man/Your grandaddy's in the Ku Klux Klan"), talks about mutual culpability ("Down-Here -- With the Rest of Us"), and offers an elegy ("When the Angels Sing"). In every case, his homespun thoughts take on surprising authority in those pounded-out, polished chords. It's meat and potatoes with a fortifier of spiritual sustenance.