I hadn’t seen Soul Asylum since their heyday in the late 90’s. On the Let Your Dim Light Shine tour I’d seen a visibly intoxicated David Pirner spin in circles without falling off the stage and remember all the words to the lengthy “String of Pearls” even though he could barely stand up. Good news, he’s still got it.
Of course, the band isn’t completely unchanged from ten years ago. Bass player and original member lost his heartbreaking battle with cancer a few years ago and was replaced by a series of bass players until the Replacements’ Tommy Stinson stepped into the position permanently. The drummer chair is now filled very completely by Michael Bland, a fantastic drummer and gigantic bear of a man too big to wear anything other than his usual outfit, an assortment of brightly colored overalls. The end result is that the band is evenly divided between drunks and professionals. Pirner started the set in a bad mood, equipment malfunctions had him throwing guitars in frustration, but the more Stella Artois he downed the more affable be became, and by the end of the night he was hilariously adorable, dancing like a goofball and enjoying himself.
The songs that longtime fans like least are the ones I like the best. Unlike them, I really want to hear Soul Asylum’s “sellout” songs from Grave Dancer’s Union and Dim Light like “Runaway Train,” “Bittersweetheart,” and the aforementioned “String of Pearls.” I didn’t listen to the radio in the 90’s, or really ever, so I didn’t hear them one million times. Even though those are the only two records of theirs I own, I still knew a surprising percentage of the songs they played. However, I know for a fact that no one, including me, wants to hear the ridiculous “Misery.” Always masters of the well-chosen cover (I recall their “Rhinestone Cowboy” being stellar), they finished the night with a series of half-played ones including “Cocaine Blues,” and Sammy John’s “Chevy Van” a song that I only know because Joe Pernice included it on the accompanying soundtrack to his recent novel “It Feels so Good When I Stop.” They made it halfway through it before Pirner stopped, laughing, “I can’t believe I remembered that much of it, that song is terrible.”
The venue wasn’t the best, even though they had cleared out many of the tables on the lower level, it is still an awkward place to see a show. Surprisingly for a relatively new venue, the sound was not good. And despite the line outside an hour before show time the room was only half full. All things that were probably disappointing to a fan, but didn’t really bother me. In fact the only thing that really bothered me that night was the opening band. A cheesy, seemingly made-up, Milwaukee band called Bellevue Suite. Every song seemed so over the top as to be a joke, except they weren’t kidding. During a painfully predictable acoustic section of the set, every song seemed like it could have been Extreme’s “More than Words.”
The punchline to the joke that was their set was their banner, which read “Bellevue Suite, the Dark Side of Enlightement.” That’s right, “enlightement,” apparently no one hit spell check before ordering it. It was a perfectly Spinal Tap moment. I had already been scolded by a security guard for taking pictures, but I couldn’t let that one go with out documenting it. It felt strange not to take pictures, I kept reaching for my camera during Soul Asylum’s set. Michelle was disappointed that I hadn’t seen a “good” Soul Asylum show, but I enjoyed it all the same. And I will see them again.
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