Unlike his predecessors in the fraternal order of wild-child rock'n'roll frontmen, Nick Cave has shown that aging and raging are not mutually exclusive properties. Thirty years into his performing career, Cave's critical stock has arguably never been higher, following the one-two punch of 2007's Grinderman one-off and last year's Bad Seeds return Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!! To wit, at similar points in their careers, Mick Jagger and Iggy Pop were stocking used-CD-store bins with the likes of Wandering Spirit and Naughty Little Doggie.
Still, it can be difficult to reconcile the diaper-clad zombie doing strange things to billy goats in the "Nick the Stripper" video with the stately, sartorially blessed Renaissance man who, over the past decade, has comfortably infiltrated the pop-cultural establishment through acclaimed screenwriting efforts (2006's The Proposition), Kylie Minogue duets, and crooning Beatles songs for Sean Penn Oscar bait (I Am Sam). The 25th-anniversary reissues of his first four solo albums provide a gauzy lens on how Cave went from fronting one of rock's most volatile, destructive bands (The Birthday Party) to one of its most enduring, redoubtable ones, the Bad Seeds. (They also serve as a bittersweet end-of-an-era time capsule, what with the recently announced departure of Cave's long-time foil, Mick Harvey.) However, what you hear over the course of these albums is not the typical, linear trajectory from chaos to control, but a series of sudden reinventions and relapses. Like the temptation-plagued protagonists that figure in his songs, Nick Cave's road to redemption is marked by sharp, sudden detours back into the wild.
With Cave and Harvey recruiting Einsturzende Neubauten's Blixa Bargeld, ex-Magazine bassist Barry Adamson, and guitarist Hugo Race mere months after the Birthday Party's 1983 demise, the collapsible sound of From Her to Eternity (1984) speaks to the Bad Seeds' hastily assembled origins and fluid instrumental roles. Cave may have be in the throes of an infamous heroin habit that would both fuel and plague him for most of the ensuing decade, but on From Her he sounds like he's in withdrawal from his former band, striving to distance himself from the Birthday Party's junkyard punk, but occasionally reverting to its shrieking hysterics ("Cabin Fever!").
When removed from the context of antagonizing a bar full of pissed-off Birthday Party fans, some of the album's more provocative gestures now feel diffused: While the grim reading Leonard Cohen's "Avalanche" sees Cave already aligning himself with pop's legendary outsiders, the black-cloud ambience and gnashed-teeth delivery make it more closely resemble the opening overture to Goth: The Musical! But with the unnerving piano pulse and feedback spasms of "From Her to Eternity" and the murderous, militaristic goose-step of "Saint Huck", the Bad Seeds refashion the Birthday Party's post-punk splatter into something even more devious and powerful. Here, the band aren't merely providing musical accompaniment to Cave's nightmarish narratives; they're reacting to and manifesting them, favoring space and tactility-- the lacerating scrapes of guitar strings, the tremorous vibrations of piano chords-- over noise-for-noise's-sake. And therein lies the evil genius of the early Bad Seeds: They re-imagined the rock band as foley artists.
The opening track to the Bad Seeds' second album, The First Born Is Dead (1985), elevates that cinematic sensibility with the seven-minute, desert-storming thriller "Tupelo", a song that, even if Cave had succumbed to his smack habit in the mid-80s, would nonetheless have secured his legend. Where most post-punk/New Pop artists of the day had abandoned contrarian values to embrace concepts of affluence and technological progress, Cave and the Bad Seeds went about digging up the deadest of dead horses: the blues-- a music that, at the time, was being neutered into supper-club smoothness by the likes of Eric Clapton and Robert Cray. But if the back-to-roots tilt of The First Born Is Dead-- the first product of the band's four-year relocation to Berlin-- stands in stark contrast to the future-minded, sample-based pop music of the era, lyrically, "Tupelo" is no less a masterful mash-up, weaving a breathless yarn from strands of the Old Testament, the birth of Elvis and John Lee Hooker's "Tupelo Blues" (itself a re-imagination of the namesake city's history, casting it as a victim of the 1927 Mississippi River flood that, in reality, had spared it). The First Born Is Dead is never quite so bold again, adopting a more familiar bluesy swing on "Say Goodbye to the Little Girl Tree" and last-call piano-bar warbling on "Knocking on Joe", and when Cave bellows "I am the Black Crow King", you're more likely to picture one of the Lizard variety. But in the raging reappropriation of Bob Dylan's "Wanted Man", The First Born Is Dead feels like less of a genre exercise and more a distillation of the philosophy Cave would pursue for years to come-- i.e., when it comes to search-and-destroy deviance, punk rock's got nothing on wild-west outlaw history, old blues songs and the Bible.
If the Dylan covers and Hooker references hadn't already established Cave's old-soul aspirations, for his next move, he opted for a strategy that most aged entertainers resort to when trying to revive their careers three decades in, let alone three albums: the all-covers collection. In a sense, what Cave attempted with Kicking Against the Pricks (1986) was not all that different than what any one of us do when we hit a karaoke bar: Push ourselves out of our comfort zones and have a bit of a laugh while doing so-- certainly, the Bad Seeds have never sounded more cheerful than in the sloshed group sing-along of the Velvets' "All Tomorrow's Parties" and the cheeky, cowpoke reading of country ballad "Long Black Veil". But while stacked with murder ballads that fit right into Cave's wheelhouse -- "Hey Joe", Hooker's "I'm Gonna Kill That Woman"— what's most remarkable about the album is the amount of conviction Cave invests in his more schmaltzy selections. Rather than subject AM radio golden-oldies like Jimmy Webb's "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", Tom Jones' "Weeping Annaleah", and Gene Pitney's "Something's Gotten a Hold of My Heart" to contemptuous desecration, Cave sounds determined to use them as vehicles to make him a better singer, and the Bad Seeds a more sophisticated, stylistically diverse band.
Their next album would yield the real fruits of the Pricks experiment: Your Funeral... My Trial (1986) showcases Cave and the Bad Seeds' various modes and models with peak-form precision, building up from the elegantly wasted reveries ("Sad Waters", "Stranger Than Kindess"), creepy cabaret set pieces ("The Carny") and exquisite murder balladry (the title track) of the album's first act before erupting into the show-stopping, whip-cracking surges ("Jack's Shadow", "She Fell Away", a definitive cover of Tim Rose's "Long Time Man") of the second. Every guise Nick Cave would assume from hereon in-- from the dignified piano balladeer of 1990's The Good Son to the mad preacher of 2004's Abattoir Blues-- can be traced back here; indeed, even Grinderman's unhinged "No Pussy Blues" seems a touch less feral once you get reacquainted with the blasphemous depravity of Your Funeral's "Hard on for Love", which intensifies its libidinous thrust into rabid bloodlust and then abruptly cuts out when Cave hits his frothy-mouthed fever pitch.
The Bad Seeds' final Berlin-based recording-- 1988's Tender Prey, featuring certified Cave classics "The Mercy Seat" and "Deanna"-- is not a part of this initial remaster series, presumably so Mute could reissue the band's eight releases for the label in even blocks of four. However, its exclusion also underscores the notion that Your Funeral... My Tria**l represents the true apotheosis of the Bad Seeds, drawing from the strengths of its three quite different predecessors-- the horror-film atmosphere of From Her to Eternity, the apocalyptic oration of The First Born Is Dead, the velvet-jacket suavity of Kicking Against the Pricks-- into a superbly structured, singular work. Every bruised romantic to emerge in its wake-- from PJ Harvey to the Tindersticks, Mark Lanegan to the National-- owes it a tip of the syringe.
The timeless quality of Cave's songwriting sources, and the live-in-the-room ethos employed by producer Flood mean that these albums have aged infinitely better than most bands' mid-80s output, bearing none of the technical sheen, studio gimmickry and drum compression that dates so many records of the era. But these remasters are still worthy additions for both long-time enthusiasts and recent, post-Grinderman recruits. On top of revising the tracklists to their original vinyl running orders (the old North American CD versions bizarrely interspersed B-sides into the flow mid-album), the new mixes render the Bad Seeds' mise en scenes even more nightmarishly vivid-- on From Her to Eternity's chain-gang howl "Well of Misery", Harvey's percussive hits really do sound like hammers hitting rock, while the multi-tracked madness of Your Funeral's "The Carny" is about as close as you'll get to having Cave read you a scary bedtime story in your room.
The four issues are sold separately but, in a clever gambit to make you buy all four, the discs are each appended with sequential portions of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's accompanying DVD documentary, titled Do You Love Me. The films are strikingly simple, comprised entirely of uniformly barren, head-shot interviews with members of the Bad Seeds (Bargeld, Adamson), their peers (Go-Between Robert Vickers, former Birthday Party guitarist Roland S. Howard), celebrity admirers (Moby, Depeche Mode's Dave Gahan, Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner), critics (Simon Reynolds) as well as regular fans, including, most memorably, a stripper from L.A. who-- at height of Guns N Roses' late-80s peeler-bar dominance-- insisted on dancing to Cave's version of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix". But beyond the revelatory anecdotes about each album's recording-- heck, I could watch Blixa Bargeld read out department-store catalogues-- the documentaries show that, for all of his songs' grandiose theatricality, Cave's music affects his fans (famous and otherwise) on the same deeply personal, intimate level. Fittingly, pretty much the only principal not interviewed about Cave is Cave himself-- because, like their subject, the filmmakers respect the distance between those who tell the myth and those who make it.
