Bobby Bare Jr. – Look what the old man made me do
Fed up and feuding with Bare at the time, Grimes exited the band. Twang-rocker Tim Carroll took over on guitar, bringing a style that was equal parts Chuck Berry and Sex Pistols and co-writing an appealing slacker anthem with Bare called “Why Do I Need A Job”. Before the second album, Brainwasher, Carroll was succeeded by multi-instrumentalist Kevin Teel. Things were going OK, though Immortal had shifted parent companies from Sony to Virgin, and corporate circumstances were a little weird.
Brainwasher moved into harder, grungier, more indie-rock territories, and today Bare admits most of the songs didn’t hold up to the material on Boo-Tay. The live shows were fun, with Bare onstage and L.E.D. screens flashing messages like “I have the Andrews Sisters in my milkshake,” but more critical and audience attention was paid to the over-the-top stuff at the expense of nuanced songs like “Miss You The Most”. Until his death in 1999, Silverstein had personally critiqued all of Bare Jr.’s songs (and co-wrote “I Hate Myself” from the first album), but some of the compositional work was now lost in the bluster.
There was, though, hope for another shot at a single.
“The guy who signed Beck was our A&R guy at Virgin, and he loved ‘Why Do I Need A Job’,” Bare explains. “In my mind I could think, ‘This is the guy who heard “Loser” and said “That’s it.”‘ And he’s telling me the same thing about my song. But I know better. Honestly, nobody knows what’s going to be it. It’s people throwing shit up on the wall as quickly as they can to see if it sticks. Eventually, by sheer number of times you’re tossing, something will stick up there. We didn’t stick. That second album sold 3,000 copies.”
Tracy Hackney, the dulcimer player, was tired of road life and missed his wife, and he quit in 2001. The rest of the guys kept going, living in a strange universe where one night could be an all-night jam with Kid Rock and Winona Ryder in a San Francisco bar (sober through the ’90s, Bare said he began drinking with the new millennium in what was “a really bad idea”), and the next day could be sleeping on the floor of a minivan on the way to Portland.
Then the label situation got weirder, with Bare getting a $10,000 advance toward the next record just before Immortal was dumped by Virgin. Bare sought and received permission to cut some, as he says, “acoustic-y” tracks for the alt-country independent label Bloodshot, as a side project. Somewhere in there, the rhythm section left as well.
“For the Bloodshot album, Young Criminals’ Starvation League, I didn’t use the other guys from Bare Jr.,” he said. “And why should they dedicate their lives to me when I’m going to go off and record with other people? It was a bummer that they left, though. They were real, real good.”
So, anyway, right then — in 2002 or so, right when the front money and the big budgets went away and the headbanging ceased and the kids in the backwards baseball caps completely disappeared from the crowd and Bobby Bare Jr. was pretty much left alone to re-create himself and his music — that’s when things picked back up again.
Word on the street was that Bare had soured on rock ‘n’ roll and was working on an “Americana” project. The Starvation League album, though, didn’t end up sounding much like anything else “Americana,” and it certainly wasn’t some logical next step from the traditions of Hank Williams, Uncle Tupelo, Jason & the Scorchers or Bobby Bare Sr.
“What I think is so tragic about a lot of the alt-country stuff is that it can be kind of theme-party,” Bare Jr. says. “And no matter what you do, you’re not going to be better than Hank Williams. There’s already been a Hank Williams. You might sound exactly like him, but you’re still no better than just as good as he was. And you had a blueprint to get there: You’re in a cover band.”
Starvation League was not a cover album, though it did include a version of Silverstein’s infinitely depressing “Painting Her Fingernails”. With Nevers at the production helm and containing songs that were as good as the ones from Boo-Tay, the album trafficked in different sounds than had been present within Bare Jr. The themes — wonder and self-doubt — remained constant, but the environmental shift from driving rock to what Nevers called “psychedelic country” offered a new perspective.
“It was something I thought of as totally to the side,” Bare said. “I had no idea if it was good or bad. It was so stripped-down, not hiding behind a bunch of amplifiers, and it was pretty eccentric. We made it in seven days, and I couldn’t believe I could put so little effort into something and have it be good work.”
It was good work, though. Grimes, who began working again with his old friend around the album’s release, called it “refreshing” and praised “a universal identification in those songs, where you go, ‘I feel exactly like that.'” The stripped-down settings allowed listeners to get the jokes on first listen, and the lack of screaming guitars helped Bare project enough subtlety for people to realize the jokes weren’t just jokes. The sound wasn’t inherently commercial, but the album outsold the supposedly highly commercial Brainwasher.
“Brainwasher sold 3,000, and they spent $800,000 on it,” Nevers said. “The first Bloodshot record, we spent $7,000 and sold 15,000.”
The whole thing reconfirmed some lessons Bare first learned in watching his dad make Lullabys, Legends And Lies: Calculation doesn’t guarantee success, and creative freedom can reap rewards beyond self-satisfaction. That is, if the artist is any good. As Bare began touring again, this time with a different set of backing players and a looser feel, Papa Bare looked on with pride.
“I told him early on, ‘If you have a dream, don’t let nobody mess with it,'” says Bare Sr. “Well, he’s been punching it out there, going after it and doing it his way. I try to talk him into kind of splitting the difference, but then his eyes glaze over and I shut up.”