Dare to Be Surprised

It’s easy to forget just how deeply weird the ’90s were. On a global scale, you had the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact satellites (Sputnik’s Down!). Hundreds of millions of people were thrown to the wolves of economic chaos and misery, and the Cold War that had provided the defining framework for understanding the world over the previous half century suddenly evaporated. Hapless theorists were left to speculate about “the end of history,” even. Confusing! At the local level it was a time when one could sit down with one’s father as he watched NASCAR on TV and hear “Natural One” by my underground music friends the Folk Implosion — their song inescapably employed as bumper music before the next commercial break. Also confusing!  One gets the sense it was a little confusing for The Folk Implosion’s John Davis and Lou Barlow, too. They were in the middle of recording Dare to Be Surprised, the follow-up to their 1994 debut album, Take A Look Inside, when it happened. The KIDS stuff — the handful of songs and instrumental tracks they’d contributed to the soundtrack of the now infamous Harmony Korine/Larry Clark film — had been something of a lark, but it was while recording it at Boston’s venerable Fort Apache that they met Wally Gagel. A happy accident: Gagel happened to be the house engineer on duty the day they showed up, but they found in him someone whose general sensibilities, and, critically, enthusiasm for new wave, matched their own.  The results marked a shift from earlier Folk Implosion efforts. The partnership between Lou Barlow, already an indie-rock veteran with two of the era’s most influential bands in Dinosaur Jr and Sebadoh amongst his credits, and John Davis, the erstwhile librarian whose skeletal solo work paired elliptical guitar figures with lyrics that evoked the language poets, seemed at first like an opportunity to get silly with it in ways that wouldn’t have sat quite right with their other projects. What came out of Fort Apache was different: mannered, moody, dubby even (they sampled Erik Satie, for crying out loud!). Lacking the budget to go back to the proper studio that the KIDS gig had afforded them, the Folk Implosion settled instead on Gagel’s small recording space in Boston’s South End. There were rules, rules born from frank conversations. No chords. No strumming. No indie rock! They whiled away afternoons in the park writing lyrics, trading lines. And over a year of episodic sessions, a weekend here, a few days there, an album came together. When “Natural One” blew up it could’ve changed the calculus — the opportunity was there to scrap what they’d been working on and start over with major-label money — but they elected instead to stay the course, confident in the process.  It seems a bit of a shame from this remove that Dare to Be Surprised was destined to live in the shadow of the KIDS soundtrack’s success, but the ’90s were a weird time, and it was sometimes hard to recognize things for what they were. What this was, it’s clear now, is the sound of a band truly finding its feet, and forging something genuinely new in the process.