All Shook Down

When the Beatles were recording Abbey Road's "Oh! Darling," Paul McCartney woke up every day and went to the studio and before saying a word to anyone would record his lead vocal track, looking for a certain rough first thing in the morning quality. Apparently, each time he'd lay down a great vocal, say it wasn't good enough, and come back the next day to try again, before finally getting a take he was happy with. (As well he should be, as the final result is spectacular...although John Lennon didn't think so, and thought Paul should have let him sing it. Siblings. What are you going to do?)

The title track to All Shook Down sounds exactly like that, only in reverse. The vocal sounds like it's about 3:15 in the morning—or maybe even 6:30 a.m.—and the singer hasn't gone to bed to yet; after a long day's night, he's the last man standing, and he's too wired to go to sleep, even if he's absolutely exhausted. And so what can a poor boy do except sing a tender dirge?

Apparently, that's just what Westerberg did. He laid under the piano in the studio and sang snippets out of a notebook. Which is how you get this glorious mess that will often almost seem to make some sort of profound sense and then suddenly veer off into near Joycean (or at least Edward Lear) gobbledegook...and yet. And yet throughout it retains a remarkably gripping power. Because while the vocal style is reminiscent of McCartney's technique from 20 years earlier, the lyrical technique prefigures Kurt Cobain's writings, especially those which would shortly change the world, in a mere 369 days.

Like Cobain, Westerberg has an ability to take an arresting line—or even a phrase or just pair of words—and explore or, more often, juxtapose them against another equally interesting combination of words having nothing to do with the first and yet somehow all the richer for being limned against each other. Often impossible to parse in a literal sense—although delightful to try—there's a certain energy that comes along with something non-linear that in some way manages to speak directly to the heart.

It's a deceptively difficult way to write; plenty of composers attempted to write whimsical lyrics in the aftermath of Bob Dylan's breakthrough, or John Lennon's "I Am the Walrus" period and few (virtually none) succeeded, and the rock landscape was littered with sad grunge wannabes in the wake of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" who thought all that was needed was to put some absurd emo babblings together and emote embarrassing and rock immortality would be theirs. They eventually found out it was not to be, quite a bit after the rest of us realized it.

But not Westerberg. Several extremely large steps above most good writers, here even hung over and strung out, he manages to string together a lyric whose meaning simultaneously flutters just out of reach and takes permanent root in the listener's soul. All while going back, again and again, to a typically Westerbergian piss-take, different in absolutely every way imaginable, on one of the King's most famous hits. And, again, in oh so Westerbergian fashion, he takes elements of his own life—in this case, the fact that he was at that exact point experimenting for the only time in his life with heroin—and combines it with exaggeration and surrealism and produces gold.

Hollywood cops shoot each other in bed
And I wouldn't go to see 'em they put the checkbook to my head
Tinkertown liquors and emperor's checkers
Some shit on the needle, like your record
The fifth gripping week an absolute must
One of the year's best ain't sayin' much
Throwin' us trunks as we're starting to drown
We're all shook down 

She don't do dance and she don't do us
The black and white blues oh yeah I got 'em in color
The fifth gripping week an absolute might
One of the year's best in sight
They throw us trunks says we're starting to drown
We're all shook down 

Praises they sing a register rings
One of the time that nobody brings
Praises they sing shake my hand as I drown
All shook down

The impact of the recording itself cannot be underestimated.

The woozy feeling is clearly genuine, from Westerberg's barely-loud-enough-to-be-considered-a-whisper vocals to the tape loop of his breathing, to Steve Berlin's delightfully creepy yet lovely ocarina, it's one of the most fully realized tracks on the album even as it seems on the verge of collapse at any second.

Which is to say, The Replacements.