Grimm has honed his songwriting and cast his net of topics further afield, in some cases becoming more strident and in others layering new shades of subtlety and sensitivity. Speaking to the angrier tone of the new record, Grimm says, “I haven’t got the time to get rich like Springsteen and then bring my big name to a grand cause like Amnesty International. God bless him for doing it, but I don’t know if I’m going to get hit by a bus tomorrow. And I think I, we, needed to get some shit on the record for posterity.”
Like the guy in “Out There” who learns that “assholes in the suits and ties still rule the world/And the dream of America ends when the alarm clock wails/By day it’s same old job, same debt, same TV fairy tales,” Grimm doesn’t see much cause for optimism: “The rich, suited, white men of the world bend us over straightback chairs and put it to us every day of our lives,” he answers when asked why his characters are bereft of dreams.
Not that a good screwing-over by the powerful is anything new. “Anacostia”, moving with the relentless rhythm of a juggernaut, relates a forgotten bit of national history: the last cavalry charge on American soil. Led by Douglas MacArthur, the cavalry attacked a group of World War I vets who converged on Washington, D.C., in 1932 to protest the government’s neglect of them. MacArthur burned their tent city to the ground.
What’s the lesson 70 years later? “Cavalry charges have taken on this almost archetypal value in our history,” Grimm says. “John Wayne and Fort Apache and the valorous Custer dying with his boots on and similar such horseshit, when the reality of it has always been more like Sand Creek, Washita River and Wounded Knee. Stories like Anacostia, I’d like to hope, maybe just say, ‘History, and heroes like MacArthur, go deeper than the pastel cartoons of our textbooks. Look deeper.’ Icons exist to be smashed, for they’re just things, not truth.”
But don’t imagine that the Hangdogs are draping the world in black crepe paper. The snarling punk rock number “Meet Me At Tommy’s” is a hard-drinking, poseur-puncturing romp through the same landscape Dylan traversed more than 30 years ago in “Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat”: “I hear you’re living with some pasty post-punk Brit/And that every martini bar in Soho thinks you’re the shit.”
“Other People’s Houses”, a Baier/Slim composition, is a cool and funny take on smarmy, nosy freeloaders inspired by a guy Baier once knew, Baier’s early days as a musician living out of the trunk of his car, and “Neighbors”, a Raymond Carver short story about the overly curious couple next door. A show tune underpinned by what Baier calls a “vaudevillian swagger and slightly sinister vibe,” it is — like the East Of Yesterday swing/Broadway number “They Don’t Play No Country On The East Side Of New York” — a musical anomaly that still fits into the album’s contours.
The title track is classic horny rock, spilling over the stage, elbowing its way across the dance floor and threatening to storm the streets. The ministering angels of “Angelita Turns” and “St. Claire Of Cedar Rapids”, transitory or unobtainable as they may be, are balm to a soul wracked by the world’s vicious illusions, each song peppered with the realistic details that anchor us in a landscape of virtual reality.
“Angelita Turns” catches Grimm in a surprisingly mellow mood. “Banger sang a really sweet vocal,” says Karg. “I think we laid sort of a nice basket so he felt comfortable and let his guard down and stopped growling for a song.”
Equally surprising, for such a firebrand cynic, is Grimm’s continued faith in the political system. A fervent, though realistic, Ralph Nader supporter, Grimm has brought the rest of the band around to his way of thinking — even Karg, whose beliefs lie more in the religious than the political realm and who has never bothered to vote before.
Which brings us to “The World Is Yours”, the next-to-last cut on Beware Of Dog. Opening with a string of national cliches (“anyone can be president, the race goes to the strong”) set against the stark strum of a guitar, it erupts into a hornets’ nest of hurt and rage (“‘Cause this land damn sure ain’t my land/And this poisoned world ain’t God’s plan/It’s yours/Take it and burn”). It’s not overtly political, but it is about the power structure, entrenched wealth, and the use of image and illusion to maintain control, even in a democracy.
The problem arises when the song threatens to topple into an awkward blend of hopelessness and preachiness, a risk that tripped up Baier at first. “When Banger wrote ‘The World Is Yours’, I was almost afraid to record it, because I was like, ‘Well, this is such a dour viewpoint,'” Baier remembers. Although Grimm and Henderson were keen to do the song, “It rang a little too preachy to me, but I think in the end we made some compromises and I really like the song now. I didn’t like it initially, I’ll be honest about that.”
What turns the tune from a potentially sophomoric diatribe into blistering censure is the energy and conviction of the delivery, with Grimm’s measured tones of cold fury set against surging B-3 and ringing guitar. The clincher occurs when, having bared his soul, Grimm simply removes himself from the whole business with a decidedly Biblical turn of mind: “The world is yours/I’m just passing through/I want nothing more from you/Given or earned.” It’s enough to give any baby-boomer and former suburban hippie pause, leaving us wondering if we have compromised a little too much, forsaking our commitment to a better world with the lame excuse that perfection is an admirable but futile goal and that the system works most of the time.
If Beware Of Dog opens like Cujo on a bad day, it closes, if not like 101 Dalmatians, at least with a glimmer of resolution. “Somewhere Near Heaven”, with its sweet accordion groove, traces the course of love won, lost and then reclaimed as the singer escapes the world’s snare (“I wade through the flotsam of empire’s decline/I watch ideals shatter on rich men’s design”), reconciles illusion and reality, and transcends his own pain by wishing a former love joy in her new life.
“I truly did, and do, love her enough to want her to be happy even out of context with me,” says Grimm. “If, as the Christian mantra goes, God is love, then love is everything, and if love is everything then it is infinite. It is selling ourselves woefully short that we have certain little finite parcels of it to be apportioned out, when it is the only fucking hope we’ve got as a species.”
Every year, Patrick Langston finds new ways of losing money as a pork and poultry farmer in Canada. He also writes on country music for the Ottawa Citizen.
