Jesse Malin – Re-generation
Those five days at Loho Studio in New York, with a number of friends chipping in, resulted in The Fine Art Of Self-Destruction. Romantic and disillusioned at the same time, it is full of references that feel autobiographical even when they’re elliptical: family stories, cautionary tales from the music business, nostalgia for an adolescence when “me and Holly snuck into night clubs/The politics of punk rock church.” New York is present throughout, as both setting and character. The cover photograph was shot in the Delancey Street subway station, just a few blocks from where we’re eating lunch.
Malin says the album’s title (and title track) reflected a growing awareness of his own tendency toward self-sabotage.
“I’d broken up bands, ruined relationships with girlfriends, watched my parents’ marriage fall apart, and I think you just kind of mirror that,” he explains. “I was comfortable in this dysfunction. I kept having the same relationships over and over again. If something was good — like, me and my cousin would get this great toy for Christmas, and we’d look at each other and say, ‘Let’s break it!’ We’d smash the truck, or break records, whatever. It was like, if you got something nice, to mess it up.”
The album’s sound, loose and warm, was far removed from anything Malin had done before. “We wanted kind of a ’60s Phil Spector/Andrew Loog Oldham Rolling Stones feel,” he says, in one of dozens of rock history references that litter his conversation.
“I definitely had low expectations,” he continues. “It was something personal I needed to do, it was like an exorcism: Get this record out. And at the time we were making it, I thought it was gonna suck, ‘cuz Ryan wouldn’t let me re-sing anything and we were doing everything live. I thought, this is just gonna sound like garbage.”
He admits to a surprised satisfaction at the result. “After we stepped back and played it in a bar, we were like, wow, something’s happening,” he recalls. It was first released in the U.K. in October 2002 and quickly garnered favorable British press. Malin, an unreconstructed Clash fanatic and friend of the late Joe Strummer, says he’s always felt in tune with British pop aesthetics in music and film; the response to his album proved the appreciation worked both ways.
After the subsequent U.S. release on Artemis Records in January 2003, Malin hit the road for a year of near-constant touring. The Fine Art Of Self-Destruction may not have made him a rock star, but it established Malin’s name and introduced him to audiences who had never heard of D-Generation.
“It was kind of surprising to me that people actually mostly got where I was coming from,” he says. “I’d been in bands before where we thought we were doing the Stooges and the Dolls and the Replacements, and the rest of the world thought we were doing Poison and Motley Crue and Guns N’ Roses. So for people to come up to me and be like, ‘Wow, I really get the lyrics to this record, I get your stories that are this urban slice-of-life stuff,’ it was nice to see that.”
If it was surprising that the average music fan “got it,” Malin was close to amazed to find that his admirers included Bruce Springsteen. Malin had spent years defending Springsteen to dismissive punk-rock friends. He didn’t expect reciprocation.
But after recording a cover of “Hungry Heart” for a benefit Springsteen tribute album called Light Of Day, Malin heard from his manager last fall that the Boss himself had called and said, “I want to talk to Jesse.” Springsteen had heard Malin’s full album, liked it, and wanted to invite him to play some charity holiday concerts he was organizing in New Jersey in December.
When Springsteen called on the day after Thanksgiving, Malin says, “I started thinking, what Christmas songs do I know. Like, the Phil Spector album, no wait, the Ramones have a Christmas song. And he goes, ‘No, we’re gonna play your songs. Me and Max and Nils, I’m gonna be your sideman and we’re gonna do ‘Queen Of The Underworld’ and ‘Wendy’ and whatever.”
Malin drove down for rehearsals at Asbury Park’s convention hall, flattered if not overwhelmed — at least not at first. But upon entering Springsteen’s home territory, he says, he became increasingly self-conscious about who exactly he was going to see.
“You realize that he’s down there, at the end of this road, down by the water,” he says. “And I have to go all the way to the beach, through this town of Asbury, this decrepit town, all the way to the beach, and he’s gonna be there, this guy who wrote all these songs. So it starts to hit me as we’re driving through Asbury, that’s when I started to get nervous. Like, you know, going up the river to see Brando as Col. Kurtz: He’s at the end of this thing, and I have to deal with this.”
When he arrived, he says, Springsteen and his bandmates were so relaxed and friendly that he quickly settled down. Even so, Malin sounds a little in awe. “To have him right next to me, as my sideman, playing all the solos, singing all the harmonies, rocking out — he’s like in his 50s, and we’re playing ‘Wendy’ at super speed, and he’s going crazy, headbanging. I was like, wow.”
The shows went well, and Malin got to meet other guests ranging from Sam Moore to Bon Jovi. The last night, everybody went out to dinner together. Not surprisingly, Malin says he took some cues on dealing with it all from his friendship with Adams.
“When I was pretty nervous, I said to myself, wow, this is weird, and then I remembered Ryan,” he says, “thinking when I saw him on TV, standing next to Keith Richards and Willie Nelson and playing ‘Dead Flowers’ or whatever. I’m like, ‘If that fucker can do it, I can go up there. If Ryan did it, I’m doing it too.'”
So, then, the second album.
“I knew I needed to keep my thing going, keep putting my product out there, music, whatever you want to call it,” he says with a laugh. “But then it got kinda wacky, because you start to make another record and you think, ‘Well, I had three years to build up these songs, now I’ve got a year and I’ve been on the road the whole time.'”