New to Me: The Long Ryders, State of Our Union (Island, 1985)

by hiram lucke

As part of an ongoing series of reviews titled “New to Me,” I’ll write about albums and artists that are new to me (duh!), while not necessarily new to others or even new in a temporal sense, pointed out by friends or found while reading.

I’ve skipped over the Paisley Underground for a long time. I knew about The Rain Parade and The Dream Syndicate and my wife likes Game Theory/The Loud Family quite a bit*, but I missed it for a couple of reasons. I lived in the midwest, not the West Coast, and by the time I was exploring music in the 80s, my taste ran towards thrash metal, REM/Husker Du, and weirdo bands like Pere Ubu. The sort of throwback pop-psych-with-80s-polish of a lot of the Paisley Underground stuff of the period didn’t suit my musical fancy. All that said, I did decide to look into it some more this winter, specifically the twangier side of the scene, The Long Ryders.

State of Our Union, originally released in 1985, was the major label debut of the band. The Long Ryders were an alt-country band before the term was invented and overused. They were part of a scene including The Blasters, Jason and the Scorchers, and Beat Rodeo, among others, that fused a rootsier sound with late 70s punk ideas and sounds. State sounds more like Buffalo Springfield on a couple pots of coffee than most of the other bands listed above (whereas Jason and the Scorchers sounded like an old honky tonk tune by Lefty Frizzell or Hank Thompson sped up and given some distorted muscle).

State is also loosely organized around the problems afflicting Reagan-era America: poverty, the general malaise and self-absorption of the me decade, mistrust of the government, and the laissez-faire attitude of the government towards average citizens. The characters that inhabit the album are working class or poor: truck drivers, Okies moving to the West Coast, farmers losing their livelihood and land, hobos and trains. This inclusion of images of the past is a nod to Steinbeck and the photos of WPA photographers like Dorothea Lang (“Grandpa said it would never happen again/The lesson it was learned real good before… sell the houses sell the farm, but you just can’t ride the boxcars anymore”) and also draws a connection between the trickle down economics of the 80s and the Depression. Even if it was just a self conscious nod to the honky tonk milieu they were working within, the populist stance of the songs places it in opposition of the government of the time without succumbing to the pitfalls of more overt protest music.

The album starts with a cartoonish war cry and whistle on the tune “Looking for Lewis and Clarke”. While the character stands in Mubuhay Gardens (a San Francisco punk club actually spelled Mabuhay Gardens) he thinks of folk singer Tim Hardin and also namechecks Graham Parsons (Sid Griffin, co-songwriter for the band, became one of the foremost Parsons scholars in the world). Both men were folk/country influenced songwriters who died from heroin overdoses, relegating themselves to cult status as performers and icons of songwriters in the genre. Earlier in the verse, a president walks through Harlem after someone thinks they see a congressman hawking plans for money in the park. All of these people, those who are corrupting the government and those who are against the corruption of the government, are looking for Lewis and Clark. Lewis and Clark, the alternately hailed-as-heroes and belittled-as-egomaniac-fools explorers and trail makers for a passage to the West, were looking to expand the country, spy on British and French fur traders, and catalog friendly and hostile Native American tribes. The hero/plunderer dichotomy of Lewis and Clark is the crux of the song.

If all of these characters are looking for the explorers and the freedom/power grab they represent, Griffin posits the question of whether rock and roll is also plundering the past (with the song’s echo of “Louie Louie” towards the end) or whether or not it is forging a new path to (or in, since the band was from LA) the west. I think that Griffin and The Long Ryders were actually finding that they could forge ahead with a “new”art by plundering the past, whether musically or lyrically, and many of the songs on the album bear this out. Plus, it’s all wrapped up in a driving rocker that you can sing along to at top volume.

Griffin is probably the most known member of the band and “Looking for Lewis and Clark” is probably their most famous song, but the real gems on this album were written by the band's other main songwriter, Stephen McCarthy. Sounding more like a less trebley Buck Owens, songs like “Mason-Dixon Line” and “Here Comes That Train Again” wouldn’t sound out of place on contemporary country stations. Griffin does have some great songs in the same vein, including “Good Times Tomorrow, Hard Times Today” and “State of My Union,” a song that just screams for a new country remake with its Southern-pride refutation of why the US owes most of its culture to those states. It also has the best lines on the album (“We gave you blues and jazz and country and western, too/We ought to ask for ‘em back after what you put ‘em through”) and features the down-home people and hell-raising good times that were The Long Ryders' specialty.

Unfortunately, though, I don’t think down-home people bought albums by The Long Ryders. Their albums were mostly bought by college radio listeners and those hip enough to know about underground music. The band was a part of a series of commercials for Miller beer in the 80s (along with the bands The Del Fuegos, The dBs, and The Cruzados) and were labeled as sellouts by the underground culture of the time. They never quite hit it big enough in the rest of the country to put themselves over the top. They released one more album and broke up, forming other bands and pursuing other projects. All in all, State of Our Union suffers from a few 80s production values, but overall stands as more than just a testament to the past. The lyrics and characters hold up well, and as new listeners rediscover roots music and its populist appeal, the album will be relevant in years to come

* I do like The Three O’ Clock, which should just point out that my taste in music has no patterns at all.