Quote:
Originally posted by Johnny Stew
I hate to say this, but aside from a few tracks, the other two albums are fairly expendable.... IMHO.
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Expendable? Certainly not. You must have been thinking of most of Stevie's solo stuff.
Out of the Cradle gets a lot of praise, and rightly so. I just turned some people on to it over on the Cracker web site. It's a timeless album. And it is my favorite Lindsey album.
Go Insane is every bit as creative, but it is not timeless because of the heavy 80s production on it. Even so, some of the stuff was ahead of its time. Listen to "The Fly" off U2's masterpiece "Achtung Baby" or some of the stuff in U2's "Pop." I would say our Irish friends might have taken some production cues from our man Lindsey. Also, listen to Wilco's "Yankee Foxtrot Hotel" and you might detect some influence there. And that's just to name a couple of bands that were (or are) media darlings. Far-fetched, you say? Oh sure. Who woulda a thunk when the Smashing Pumpkins and Hole first came out that they were influenced by Lindsey (and Fleetwood Mac in general)? And who woulda thunk that Camper Van Beethoven, the poster boys of anti-classic rock music, were closet Lindsey fans?
As for Law and Order, in some ways it gave a glimpse of what was to come and in others it was a continuation of "Tusk." Certainly "Trouble" was about as different as anything on the radio in 1981-82. And it was ubiquitous, as "Go Insane" was later.
Think about it: Every time Lindsey has gotten his songs played on the radio with any kind of regularity -- Go Your Own Way, Tusk, Trouble, Go Insane -- they have broken some kind of ground in the commercial music world.
And you call that expendable? No, not even close. The perverse irony is that "Out of the Cradle," musically Lindsey's most accomplished album, is the least accomplished commercially.