Everybody needs a National Anthem. I’m not talking about the one they play before baseball games, neither. No, I’m talking about the one that’s yours, strictly personal—the one that keeps you going and keeps your heart pumping blood and gives your life purpose. The rednecks on the under side of the Mason-Dixon Line have “The South’s Gonna Do It Again.” Folks from Alabama have “Sweet Home Alabama.” Brooklynites have “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.” And the good citizens of the tiny principality of Liechtenstein have a great one that goes, “We’ve failed to reach our full potential as human beings/Perhaps because we’re double land-locked and there’s no ocean that we’re seeing.” As for the sticks, from whence I come, well, we’ve got The Silos’ “Let’s Take Some Drugs and Drive Around.”
The Silos may have come from New York City but they sounded—just as their name implies—like Heartland rockers to me, like the guys I spent my twenties with, driving down country back roads past cows and farms with toppled silver silos that looked like the wreckage of Skylab lying beside their red-painted barns, as we got stoned and even more stoned until the cows looked at us funny, or maybe it was just our imagination.
The Silos—their mainstays were Walter Salas-Humara and Bob Rupe—were formed in 1985, and gathered lots of critical plaudits for records like 1987’s Cuba (cowpunks meet the Velvet Underground) leading up to the release of my fave Silos’ record, 1994’s Diablo, by which time Rupe was already history. Anyway, Salas-Humara was a former member of the Vulgar Boatmen, Rupe had a long pedigree of his own, and their alt-country sound won the hearts and minds of proto-alt-country rockers, especially with Cuba and 1987’s Eat the Dust.
Diablo is a European version of The Silos’ domestic release of the same year, Susan Across the Ocean. I prefer the slick European vinyl because it’s stripped-down and tighter, although the absence of “Evangeline” hurts, I won’t lie to you. And to be completely honest I think I prefer Cuba to Diablo, because the former is more raved up and guitar-happy, but it doesn’t have my National Anthem, “Let’s Take Some Drugs and Drive Around” on it. And that’s a fatal omission.
I’ll keep this brief: “Let’s Take Some Drugs and Drive Around” is so anthemic it’s crazy, a catchy-as-blazes salute to being in the middle of nowhere in your early twenties and just taking off in your car with drugs and beer and turning off your headlights like I used to do with my pig farmer buddy Billy Harrison, down those country roads and right into the corn fields. We weren’t looking for anything except maybe a country roadhouse or like I said before a toppled grain silo or a bridge over a stream we could stare down into, utterly shit-faced. And “Let’s Take Some Drugs and Drive Around” totally encapsulates that sense of wasting time and minds, and I could listen to it all day.
“Upside Down Instead” is heavy on the fiddle but a harder rocker than the opening cut, with lots of heavy percussion and in general is one fetching tune. “Shaking All Over the Place” isn’t the crazy fifties rocker the title leads you to anticipate but rather an atmospheric slow rocker with more fiddle and some single note guitar, while “All She Wrote” is has snarling guitars and a snazzy chorus that might as well be by John Mellencamp, and I don’t mean that as an insult. It boasts a short but feisty guitar solo and the inspirational lines, “You play your cards/But you still have to pay the rent” and that’s all she wrote, people.
“Wanna Ride” is another anthem about wanting to ride around on somebody’s motorcycle, and while it’s lacking in Steppenwolf’s “heavy metal thunder” it’s plucky, kind of like a cool song by a hillbilly Big Star. The chorus is to die for, the boys howl, and if this one doesn’t captivate you, what can I say? You must have a fear of speed or something. The title “Susan Across the Ocean” sounds like a Donovan song; instead it’s a slow and simple acoustic look back from a duffer who lost his Susan across the ocean years before. It’s a pretty tune but not my favorite; it’s heartbreaking, sure, but the melody isn’t so lovely it makes make you want to break down, sob sister, the way it should.
“Change the Locks” is a humorous but hard-hitting rocker about a fellow who has gone to extraordinary lengths to lose the girl who haunts his days. He’s changed the locks on his doors, the number on his phone, the kind of car he drives, the kind of clothes he wears, and even the tracks under the train he rides, all while those big guitars wail, finally exploding into a big din of feedback that I love. Why, he’s even changed the name of his goddamn town, he sings, before those big guitars return complete with some cool harmonica. That may sound a bit like paranoia, but it’s nothing compared to the Nixonesque paranoia level of “The Sounds Next Door,” a spritely but pounding tune about a guy who is taping the sounds “through the walls from next door” and sending them to Washington, D.C., presumably to give the CIA or FBI a listen. The fiddle is nice, as is the harmonica, but it’s the seemingly sane sounding vocals that will capture you. I especially love the false ending, which leads to a driving fadeout.
“Start to Burn” is a slinky, organ-driven number that doesn’t grab me until the fetching chorus. “We’ve been diverted from the lessons/To be learned,” sings Salas-Humara, as the guitars and fiddle descend into feedback, and it’s a good solid tune, as is the fiery but slow-building “Nothing’s Gonna Last,” which boasts a great chorus, but won’t knock your socks off the way some of the live tracks off Cuba will do. The Silos shut things down with a cover of the Modern Lovers’ “I’m Straight,” and it’s great. They give you both sides of the chemical coin, you know? Anyway, it sticks pretty much to the original, but Salas-Humara is dead on vocally while the band lays it down on the heavy side with lots of power chords and this baby is pure electricity and well worth a listen, especially with that organ going in the background.
So that’s that. Buy Diablo for “Let’s Take Some Drugs and Drive Around” and you will have yourself a new National Anthem, to say nothing of 10 other songs that will topple your silo. And while you’re at it pick up its more revved-up sister LP Cuba, which mixes the Feelies, the VU, and some pure guitar rave-ups that will leave you in no doubt why it still exerts an influence on alt-country stalwarts.
I’m not 26 anymore, and I don’t do drugs and drive around, but I wish I could go back in time and do drugs and drive around to the Silos, who knew some good clean fun when they saw it. I think America is a beautiful place, because you’re free to do drugs and drive around, that is unless you get caught, because doing drugs and driving around is inexplicably illegal. Still, the song is an inspiration, and should I ever decide to do some drugs and drive around again, it will be the song playing as I do so. In fact, I think I’ll put my hand over my heart and sing along to it now. Hot damn! God Bless America and drugs and driving around! And long live the good people of Liechtenstein!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
