Double trouble

Local H affirm the negative

by Franklin Soults

The first time I recall reading about Nirvana was in a Village Voice article about a woman whose life-long hobby was taking plaster casts of rock star's penises. On the night of the story, this dedicated archivalist went to see Nirvana play at a small club (I think it was Chicago's Cabaret Metro), and after being blown away by an incredible, kick-ass show, she tried to persuade a very drunken Kurt Cobain to join her stupid club. He looked at her with heavy lids and held up his pinkie. "Here," he slurred, "You can take a cast of this. That's what I think of the state of rock and roll."

In a way, Scott Lucas, the leader of the kick-ass rock-and-roll duo Local H has even less to say about the state of rock and roll. "I don't really think about it too much," asserts the songwriter/singer/guitarist/bassist/whatnot over the phone from his home in Chicago's Wrigleyville, right near the Cabaret Metro. "Since I've stopped listening to the radio and watching MTV and reading Spin, I've been really happy. I have not a care about any of it: it's like a sinking ship that I have no interest in getting on."

As that last quip suggests, Lucas's placid indifference is born of the same implacable frustration and disgust as Cobain's raised pinkie. What's more, both artists have filtered their dour attitudes through their bands the same way other smart, troubled acts from the Replacements to the Quadrophenia-era Who have -- by calling bullshit on everything, including most rock and roll, and maybe even including themselves. It's one manifestation of the essential rock-and-roll process that critic Robert Christgau used to call the medium's ability for "affirmation in the negative": its capacity to throw out a jolting dose of self-negation that feels hugely life-affirming to anyone who has ever wished that Teen Spirit smelled like gunpowder.

Some rock-and-rollers in the past have even called bullshit back on Local H. The problem for these critics is not the band's dark message but a sound and style that resemble Nirvana so closely it seems ripped off. With Joe Daniels on drums and Lucas on all "the other stuff," these natives of Zion, Illinois, deliver the same rough-and-tumble open-chord guitar wallop, the same tuneful vocals soaring into a roar bigger than God, the same lyrical exploration of psycho-social angst. The two bands' career histories are even oddly parallel. Although Local H didn't record until a full year after Cobain's suicide, their 1995 debut, Hamfisted (Island), was as noisy and inchoate as Bleach, and their 1996 follow-up, As Good As Dead (Island), was a breakthrough à la Nevermind. By then, the grunge-shy media didn't want any part of ironic anthems like "Bound for the Floor" and "High-Fiving MF," no matter how catchy and cutting. By default, the band attracted only the most unprejudiced of all-ages audiences, a fan base they courted and won over in a two-year run of solo tours and package shows with the likes of Stone Temple Pilots and Silverchair.

Those tours may be the key to how Local H have finally broken away from the Nirvana parallel on their Pack Up the Cats (Island), their third and most stunning album yet. Where In Utero turned inward from Nevermind's pop reach as Cobain felt the pressures of fame intensify, Pack Up the Cats takes its negation deeper and wider as Lucas loosens up to plumb grunge's roots. "I was trying to get back to the art of making a complete album," he explains. "There's a certain craft to a lot of classic rock records that we were trying to go for. When you listen to records of the '70s like Dark Side of the Moon, you listen from beginning to end. We were really trying to do that, make a record that sounds great, that you would have to compulsively listen to the next track."

That mission led to a tuneful song suite that often blends from one track to the next while adding special effects that aren't reproducible live -- doses of acoustic guitar quieting down the grunge roar, cats mewing under the melody. The band even hired veteran Queen and Journey producer Roy Thomas Baker to try to get back to the organic lushness of the period.

Yet underneath it all, the music is as hard and anguished as ever, opening with a self-indictment that wails, "You think you got the real deal?/Damaged goods are such a steal/It serves you right, it's only stupid me," and then works through anthems to inarticulateness ("What can I tell you that you can't say better?"), selling out ("I wanna hang you up by the résumé around your neck"), and disaffection ("I'm in love with rock and roll . . . but that'll change eventually"). It all culminates with "All the Kids Are Right," an ode to sucking on stage that turns "affirmation in the negative" on its head, giving it up to the all-ages kids in a pure shot of faith, love, and optimism that's electrifying. "Basically, I'm on the kids' side," says Lucas. Needless to say, he won't be joining anyone's stupid club.