Don't All Thank Me At Once by Brett Milano

Author:Brett Milano [Milano, Brett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: 125 Records

7

The Come-On

“I think it’s time to do that Midnight Oil, Diesel and Dust thing,” Scott told me in a 1989 interview. “I think I’ve got some hooks that could work in the modern world.” At that time, Diesel and Dust was an easy shorthand for “commercial breakthrough from an unexpected source.” A critical favorite and a label priority for years, the Australian band found the right formula on its 1987 album, which employed smoother production and sharper hooks; “Beds Are Burning” became the first and only hit single about Aboriginal land rights. Just the thing to give hope to a songwriter after a half-dozen years of near misses.

And the songs Scott was writing were indeed something special, reflecting his desire to get more direct. “Sword Swallower” was a confident rocker, a rare throwback to the bravado of Blaze of Glory, pulling Scott’s patented trick of delivering a between-the-eyes chorus, repeating it only once and then cutting the song short (roughly 90 seconds in this case). “Inverness” was a contender for his most touching, heart-on-sleeve ballad, rhyming the title with “I bet you’ve never actually seen a person die of loneliness” and adding “Oh Inverness, all in good time.” (His penchant for wordplay was strong as ever: the title doesn’t refer to the town in northern Scotland but to his own meaning of the word, a state of turning inward. There’s also an Inverness north of San Francisco, an artistic town that Scott may have visited.) Also single-ready was “Idiot Son,” whose exuberant melody couched a lyric about the strained relationship between a gambling mogul and his sensitive child. Since Elvis Costello had recently scored a hit about his own grandmother’s struggles with dementia (“Veronica”), something like “Idiot Son” didn’t seem too big a commercial stretch.

But alternative music (by now an established radio format) was changing, and nobody really knew what it was changing into. A glance at 1990’s top songs evinces a free-for all—for perhaps the last time before the Nirvana storm hit. Jane’s Addiction (“Been Caught Stealing”) and Nine Inch Nails (“Head Like a Hole”) both suggested where the mainstream was heading. At the same time, old standbys like the B-52’s (“Roam”) and even Iggy Pop (“Candy,” with the B-52’s’ Kate Pierson) were having some of their biggest commercial success; R.E.M. was halfway through its mid-career hot streak. And Midnight Oil wasn’t the only left-field band finding overdue success: Concrete Blonde hit with the irresistible girl-group update “Joey” and Game Theory’s one-time Enigma labelmates, Social Distortion, offered spit-and-polished punk on their hit self-titled album. Creative pop writing was alive and well, if slightly on the margins: the Posies had a small breakthrough with “Golden Blunders,” the Smithereens were on the third hit (“Yesterday Girl”) from their third album, and the Sundays had a moody, melodic album.

Stylistically diverse as these records all were, they had one thing in common—they all presented a slicker, shinier version of college-radio sounds from a few years earlier. Two more radio hits from the era,

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