Released 1986
Welcome To The Boomtown
Swallowed By The Cracks
Ain't So Easy
Being Alone Together
A Rock For The Forgotten
River's Gonna Rise
Swimming In The Ocean
All Alone In The Big City
Heroes
"We didn't play a single show until after the record came out, ... I still don't know what happened. I was in a lot of trouble with a lot of different things and I was engaged in this 'young guy catharsis' thing. It was a couple of screw-ups in someone's bedroom with a portastudio, that's all it was. And talk about an unlikely duo, I was wrestling with paranoia and depression, and he was essentially agoraphobic. One day I was looking at 15 years in prison and he was a set painter at a movie studio, and the next we're being asked our opinion on world events. Both of us were freaked. It was like 'What happened?'". (David Baerwald, 2002)
For me it all started with this girl.
See, I met her at the barn we had down here in the 80's called One Step Beyond. It was too big and had lousy sound but I saw a lot of great bands there. And one night I met this girl. I was 20 years old.
So I got her number and we spent a week playing phone tag (we didn't call it phone tag back then. And there were no cell phones or e-mail). Finally when we did manage to catch each other, she told me she was going to see David+David at One Step Beyond next week, and did I wanna hook up. So I said yes.
Gulping, because I hated that damn "Boomtown" song that was always playing on the radio in the stockroom where I worked. I was not impressed with David+David, but I was very impressed with her. So I made my way down there and hung out with the throng outside the completely sold-out show until some girl sold me a ticket for $12 or something. And I got in and found her, and I got to see David+David.
***
If I was gonna describe the music on Boomtown, well, think 80's. I mean, 80's all the way. So 80's it oughta come packaged in a pair of parachute pants, with a picture of Ronald Reagan embossed on the disc. It's a time capsule straight from it's era. More dated, sound-wise, than probably anything else on this blog. Buried in sythesizers. Layers of jacked-up guitar. Mechanical-sounding drums (even with a live drummer). It's perilously close to - well, no, actually it is, what a friend once referred to as "El Lay Barf Music." And I hate El Lay Barf Music. And I hate 80's production and synths and layers of guitars. But Boomtown, well, there's always an exception. It has something else.
In part I know it's because, underneath all the glitz and glamour of the production are songs that bite hard and deep.
Ms. Cristina drives a 944
Satisfaction oozes from her pores
She keeps rings on her fingers
Marble on her floor, cocaine on her dresser
Bars on her doors, she keeps her back against the wall
The songs roll out a cast of characters - Handsome Kevin, who deals dope out Denny's, listening to the ground. The anger-management challenged singer of "Ain't So Easy", who cajoles his lover back after punching her with promises of future happiness, all deeply felt and insincere ("I'm sorry about your eye, I'll find a way to make amends" he says). The ships-in-the-night lovers of "Being Alone Together" - which does not refer to having private time as a couple. The mysterious lynch mob in the vaguely gospel-ish "River's Gonna Rise" ("God ain't in his heaven, something ain't right/I hear church bells ringing in the middle of the night/They're dragging a man by his insides/Through the broad daylight). The adventurer of "Heroes" ("Past the battered old bodies of dead, dead dreamers/Past the tethered and fettered"), the bartender pouring drinks for lonely drunks in "A Rock For The Forgotten", Steve, Eileen, and the unnamed dancer of "Swallowed By The Cracks" ("Me, I became this drunken old whore"). If these lyrics and characters and themes sound awfully close to Velvets territory, its because they are.
Which brings us back to the music. And this is the puzzle. Because normally I would, should, and want to, hate any record that sounds like this - "the upscale mixes and faux-soul exaggerations of generic AOR are such a turnoff that I wouldn't have played this twice ..." as Christgau accurately put it. But he did. And so did I. Eventually I wound up buying a copy. Then it went in the Great Record Purge. I never wanted to hear such a thing again. And I didn't even think about it again for probably a decade. And then I did. And I wanted to hear it. Hey, guess what? As a former Top Forty hit it's in still in print - in a budget-price edition, too!
The thing is, normally, an album with songs like this, I would regret that it didn't sound the way it should sound. That the songs weren't something more stripped-down, hardier, edgier sounding - music that backs the lyrics all the way. Sometimes, I do, almost, feel that.
But then I do, and I realize that's the key to Boomtown. The sparkly 80's music fits. Maybe it doesn't back the lyrics all the way, but it sounds right, in a way that a Velvety drone or Stoogey rampage or even sparse acoustic just wouldn't. Boomtown sounds like its supposed to sound.
***
Now, a great way to end it would be to say what a great show D&D put on, and what a magic night it was and how I married the girl.
Nah. We went out a few more times and then went our separate ways. As for David and David - well, they played the whole album - I don't know if it was in order or not, nor do I recall if they played any unreleased stuff. They did one encore - a rather pointless cover of "My Generation" - a choice I found very odd - which The Who - even the fagged-out Who of 1987, would have no need to worry about. And then they were gone.
And then they were gone. David and David never made another album. Boomtown is their statement. And it's a good one.
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