Mental Jewelry - Live (1991)
90s Intermezzo - some 90s albums I loved in the 90s
One of my little obsessions is first albums. There’s a frequent whiplash of cognitive dissonance because that first album got recorded and released because you’re new and exciting and different from what’s out there. Then, after that first album is successful, your job changes. You’ve now suddenly become part of the music industry machine. Your job is no longer to stand out and do new things. Your job is now to create music that generates listens, that sells units, that fits into what’s already here. And, by the way, you need to figure this out in about 18 months because that’s when the label will want to hear album #2.
Pennsylvania’s Live didn’t make the most original or iconoclastic first record you’ve ever heard. But I think they’re notable because this first album is a very coherent statement of what they wanted to do, and in contrast they were able to follow it up by pivoting to the more commercial sound that was demanded of them and find success with that as well.
Mental Jewelry is an inventive mix of a lot of elements swirling around late-80s American underground rock: REM-style indie country, wiry funk, acoustic balladry, and nervous post-punk. Being produced by the Talking Heads’ Jerry Harrison might have helped it fit into that music scene but you have to give the band credit as well for mature concepts and well-built songs.
Early Live lyrics are concerned with the state of the world with a focus on eastern religion and philosophy. To be honest, this album’s somewhat sophomoric musings about impermanence, phenomenology, and the value of immediate experience were some of my first encounters with Buddhist and Hindu concepts. It was Live’s music, probably more than anything else, that landed me on a track of learning about and attempting to live by Buddhist principles for a good chunk of my life. There’s a much longer piece about this that I’ll work into this pub at some point.
So as you might have figured out, this is an album that sends me off thinking in a million directions. But it’s also a pretty bitchin’ little rock record.
Tracks I Liked
Operation Spirit - One of my favorite frank examinations of salvation, grace, and how distant it can seem
Waterboy - I like to think that the original cut of Adam Sandler’s football farce had this as a title song, but that’s just me.
Good Pain - “makin weapons of peace for the defense of the bloodstains on our peaceful sidewalks”
10,000 Years - “Mr. President I hereby pardon you for your crimes / for they are just as much mine / Selfishness and separation have led me to believe that the world is not my problem / I am the world”
