Albums of My Life - 1994 - The Bottle Rockets "The Brooklyn Side"

by Steve Pick

The 2009 version of the Bottle Rockets are just about as great a live rock band as you'll find anywhere on the planet. Back in 1994, they were a bit more hit and miss on stage (though they could reach masterful heights on a good night), but they were busy recording some of their most iconic songs. The Brooklyn Side contains eight great songs the band is still performing after all these years, more than on any other of their records.

Brian Henneman was and is the front-man for the Bottle Rockets, but he's never been the only songwriter in the band. No matter the source of the material, however, Henneman has always shaped it into something that sounds distinctive - his love of Neil Young, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and John Prine, among others has helped him create a blend of southern country-based rock that carries a hard-edged kick while always giving a nod in the direction of pop hooks. (Henneman would, in fact, the next year contribute quite a few of his trademark hooks to Wilco's debut album, A.M.)

The Brooklyn Side was the second album by the Bottle Rockets, a reconstituted version of the 1980s St. Louis band Chicken Truck. Henneman was the front man and lead guitarist (nowadays, he shares that guitar duty with the sizzling John Horton, giving the band one of the best one-two punches on that instrument you can find). Mark Ortmann was (and is) back in the drum chair, and Tom Parr returned to rhythm guitar duties. The bassist was new, Tom Ray replacing Parr's brother Bob.

I saw Chicken Truck at least as often as I saw Uncle Tupelo back in those pre-fame days for these local favorites. There were times they walked on water in that little basement bar at the original Cicero's. But that band never had the money to really go in and record a great record. I'm not saying producer Eric Ambel was given an unlimited budget from East Side Digital (a label then not much longer for the world; the album has since been reissued by Atlantic). But, he did give these songs the dynamic punch they deserved, as the band took what had been a collection of crowd pleasers from their live shows and turned them into a coherent and powerful album.

The Brooklyn Side tackles issues of social class without ever coming off as a polemic. "Welfare Music," the astounding opening cut, puts a human face on what was at the time being called "welfare queens," the poor single parent women trying to raise a family and subsist on the pittance given by the government. It also has one of the earliest musical attacks on Rush Limbaugh, something nobody expected to be as timely fifteen years down the line as it was when it was first released. Musically, the song is a masterful sing-a-long, with a folky vibe that can easily be punched up into a rock powerhouse.

Then there's "Thousand Dollar Car," a song which has suffered only from inflationary pressures which makes younger listeners question the thought that any automobile could ever have been sold for so little. But, it is a perfect example of the Henneman wit - "Might as well take your thousand dollars / and set fire to it" or "1000 dollar car's life was through / About 50,000 miles 'fore it got to you." (It occurs to me that I'm possibly making a typical assumption that Henneman wrote these lyrics - I can't find my physical copy of the CD, and the internet doesn't have writing credits for this album, which is unusual - I know that Tom and Bob Parr, Ortmann, and Scott Taylor - a high school English teacher of members of the band - have written songs, too.) It's funny, but also connects us to the lower classes - only the poor would ever buy a car that cheap, even though it's going to cost them more than a more expensive car would in the long run.

"Radar Gun," which goes back to the Chicken Truck days, is a roaring anthem sung from the point of view of a sadistic cop giving tickets; "Sunday Sports" is the tale of a man with few joys in life going for what he can which manages to sound pathetic and yet sympathetic at the same time; "I'll Be Coming Around" and "I Want to Come Home" are fairly conventional thematically - the former is about a guy who wants to have an affair, and the latter about a guy who wants to be forgiven for having one - but are among the most delightfully catchy songs of the last 20 years. And "Gravity Fails" is a stunning masterpiece of Henneman hookishness wedded to lyrics of desperation to hold on to the woman who grounds him.

As with most albums of the time, The Brooklyn Side goes on about ten minutes longer than it could, but the best material is so strong that the lesser songs just seem like a brief break from perfection. It's probably too early to tell if Lean Forward, the band's latest album, is as close to greatness as The Brooklyn Side, but despite all the good work they've done in the fifteen years between them, it's these two albums which strike me as the Bottle Rockets' one-two punch.