Chris Swanson’s Song of the Month:
Mad Season “Wake Up”
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
The members of Mad Season (members of Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam and Screaming Trees), have had their fair share of nights away at sea. “Wake Up,” the first song on their lone album Above, is a mini-epic document of their grasping into the darkness, seeking some shore. The steady-yet-woozy marimba (played by drummer Barrett Martin) adds a crucial sixth sense that too many rock songs lack, and makes the piece feel more like Terry Callier, Angelo Badalamenti or even Bitches Brew than a grunge-era Seattle supergroup. That’s the revelation of Mad Season: it shakes up the lazy (but easy to succumb to) notion that the grunge tidal wave was a shallow one-trick pony, more style than substance. Under its heavy canopy of negative space, it feels more like jazz than rock.
Over a minute into the song, Layne Staley’s inimitable, soulful growl surfaces:
Wake up young man, it’s time to wake up / Your love affair has got to go / For ten long years, for ten long years / The leaves to rake up
We’ve all got leaves to rake up, but Staley’s leaves, caked in primeval dirt, are heavier than yours. That’s why he registers, and why you believe him. Later, he’ll break the calm with the horrifying “For a little peace from God you plead,” while Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready solos as though he’s still trying to earn his way into the classic rock pantheon. An awe-inspiring peak.
It’s tough to talk about this song, or anything Staley was involved with, without talking about what a heavyweight he was. Aside from a few ham-fisted lyrics, there wasn’t anything about him that wasn’t tough. You might not favor his band or his songs, but there was no doubt that he was the real deal; a dark rock anti-hero. When Alice in Chains released Dirt, they openly promoted it as a concept album about Staley’s ongoing addiction to heroin, which eventually led to his death by overdose in 2002. Layne Staley as Doc Holliday.
Like the coast on the horizon, I sense an all-out Alice In Chains renaissance happening in the hard rock/metal realm in 2010, not just with the reformed band releasing an album that is apparently quite good (and quietly approaching gold sales status), but also with an onslaught of artists openly proclaiming them as a creative influence on their work. We’ll see…
Ed. Note: Chris Swanson comes to us from Dead Oceans/Jagjaguwar/Secretly Canadian HQ in lovely Bloomington, Indiana–where flannel is remarkably still very hip. Dig his previous entries on Van Morrison, Caroline Crawford, and Dion.