The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: The Wallflowers
October 2002
"How Good It Can Get" is a typically expert Wallflowers tune—and a key to why their new Red Letter Days (Interscope) is a break through the wall of craft and moderation the group has always played behind.
Since the band's debut 10 years ago with The Wallflowers, when leader Jakob Dylan was 22, their music has rolled through the radio with an ease Dylan's own father never mastered. "One Headlight," from the huge 1996 album Bringing Down the Horse, so dominated the radio in 1997 that some people figured Bob Dylan wouldn't release his rocks-and-gravel comeback Time Out of Mind until his son made room for it.
On "How Good It Can Get" the singer is introducing a woman to sex: "We'll make a lover / Out of you yet," he promises with infinite condescension—with an and who is this "we"? hanging in the background as the song moves on. Red Letter Days has already kicked off with the life-is-great testament "When You're on Top"—which on the radio sounds more like a commercial than a single (music this vapidly enthusiastic can sell anything) and will end with "Here in Pleasantville" (few will be surprised by the revelation that all is not pleasant in a place called Pleasantville). But a certain momentum is building in "How Good It Can Get," and you might wonder why the musician in Jakob Dylan seems never to have asked himself the same question.
He answers the question again and again on Red Letter Days—and it's something to hear. The violence of "Everybody Out of the Water," the hammering choruses of "Too Late to Quit," the rising groove in “See You When I Get There,” the fists-shaking-in-your-face noise of "Everything I Need," the grinding of brags against doubts in "Feels Like Summer Again"—something as apparently small as the willingness to throw a phrase like "makes me sick" into a melody that seems to promise no trouble for anyone—all of it testifies to a willingness to break through to the other side, and to what you can send back when you make it.
"Everybody Out of the Water" (originally called "New Frontier") is part watching television last September, looking at the ruins in downtown New York, trying to believe what you were seeing. It's part "London Calling"—as it appears on the Clash's 1979 album of the same name, not in this year's creepy Jaguar commercial (pronounced "Zhag-u-ahr" by the pitchwoman). It's part answer record to Bob Dylan's 1967 "Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)," or his 2001 "High Water (for Charley Patton)—itself an answer record to Patton's 1929 "High Water Everywhere," which was an answer to the 1927 Mississippi flood. The promise of John F. Kennedy's presidency—the New Frontier, named for, some cynics have suggested, the hotel where Elvis Presley made his Las Vegas debut in 1956—hangs over the music as the summation of all broken promises, or what's left when the flood waters finally recede. The song gives no quarter, quiets down only to let the clouds gather again, to make the climb of the rhythm back to the top of the song's mountain more exciting than it was the last time around. "On your mark / Get set, let's go" is the first line: Can the music keep up with its subject, or even outrun it?
"Everybody out of the water!" Jakob Dylan shouts again and again. When he says, "The city's been leveled," right at the start, you don't quite believe him—not yet. But the guitar figure snaking closely around a spot the whole song is circling from a shrinking distance convinces you the story is for real. "This is the New Frontier / Everybody out of the water" is suddenly frightening.
And then Dylan is doing things he's never even hinted at before. The word "shit" hurts. The word "sucks" is a void—the way Dylan mouths the word is pure American speech, a complete rejection of all authority, particularly the authority of people saying everything is going to be all right.
That is the message Dylan's own music has communicated in the past. Now he has opened up a hole deep enough to bury his previous hits—and so when on Red Letter Days the suggestion comes that things might indeed be all right, you can believe it's not an idle notion. But it won't feel as good as the argument that everything has gone to hell.
Originally published in Interview Magazine, October 2002