Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes's "Soultime!": Soul for the Twenty-first Century

Soul giants Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes have released their first album into the teeth of the digital revolution, and it is worth acquiring even in those convenient but compromised formats.

Soultime! (Leroy Records) is a colorful, organ- and horn-inflected homage to an incomparably better era of  popular music, but it is unmistakably contemporary in its own way. It was produced (and mostly written) by longtime Jukes organist/vocalist Jeff Kazee and (Southside) John(ny) Lyon. There can be a fine line between homage and imitation, and the disc skillfully avoids the latter and its easy traps. (Even if it were mimetic, it would be welcome in a culture of simplistic electronic stolidity and synthetic confection.) Consistent with the theme of this weblog, it is apparently not available the old-fashioned way. Amazon will manufacture a CD-R for you on demand (akin to the DVDs of the Warner Archive Collection) if you cannot abide its (or iTunes’s) MP3 format. iTunes is recommended, despite its digital rights management, since it includes a fairly comprehensive “digital booklet” with liner notes, lyrics, (some) credits, and photos. According to reports on the southsidejohnny.com message board, it is not even available yet at the band’s sensational live shows. Most sacrilegiously of all, there is no vinyl release.

Soultime! is a complicated album, lyrically and, to an extent, musically. Its emotional and thematic lines are not entirely straight. However, to the extent it has a consistent mood, it is one of qualified joy—surely welcome in these desperate days. As Leo Sacks quotes Uncle South in Sacks’s liner notes, “Soul Deep!”, “‘I was pushing my car around Stop & Shop [a supermarket chain in the northeastern United States], minding my business, when I got to the liquors and wines,’ Johnny relates. ‘Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly” started playing and I noticed how people were reacting to the music, bopping their heads. I thought, “It’s time to make people feel good again.”’”

By far the most successful exemplar of Southside’s goals in that regard is the fourth track, “Looking for a Good Time”, an immediately ingratiating, passionate burst of sonic joie de vivre that could make a dead wallflower dance. It is the best track, and it’s probably the greatest achievement from these veterans in quite some time.

Other highlights include opener “Spinning” and its effective, descending instrumental bridge; “All I Can Do”, with an opening fanfare reminiscent of a Bill Conti score and Kazee’s smooth, sui generis, complexly emotive co-lead vocals complimenting South’s gruffer, tougher voice; “Don’t Waste My Time”, in which Southside plays one of his skillful harmonica solos (so skillful it sounds almost like there is a wah wah effect); the angular “Klank”, the very first Asbury Jukes instrumental after forty years as a recording entity; and the pride of “I’m Not That Lonely”. These songs are the core of the album, and they evoke a sense of grandeur, pride, and a well-earned but tempered satisfaction and celebration of life despite all of its slings and arrows. The words are direct and accessible in a way that is not trite. The frequent metaphors, which could falter in less effective and experienced hands, are actually effective (viz., the intriguing, debatable title “The Heart Always Knows”). There is even a clever extended lyric referencing The New York Post and its infamous “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR” headline in “Walking on a Thin Line”.

The album is not without its flaws and inconsistencies. A flat affect of a song alternately titled “Ain’t None of My Bizness” (in the “digital booklet”) and “Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness” (on the iTunes screen) is as much a conventional, militant toleration of human inconsistency and avoidable, correctable weakness as it is an acknowledgment that an individual’s private life is generally no one else’s concern. Both its musical doldrums and its lyrical indifference contradict the forthright passion and implacable stance of the other songs, with narrators that do not abide the human weaknesses that intrude and impede their well-being. The album’s closer, “Reality”, is another downer of a song that is as much an acceptance of unconditional resignation to defeat as a grounded awareness and acknowledgment of what can’t be changed. [For a much more effective crystallization of the latter theme, cf. their “Light Don’t Shine” from 1978’s Hearts of Stone (Epic), a song for the Endarkenment if ever there was one.] There are better ways to acknowledge life’s complications and avoid the impression of unqualified, mindless “happiness” and fairytale clichés (“Light Don’t Shine” is certainly one of them). However, this is a minor objection.

Over fifteen years ago, founding Asbury Juke Little Steven (who wrote “Light Don’t Shine”) told Metal Rules magazine that he no longer listens to much contemporary music. He mostly listens to the soul that would later be cited as an inspiration for Soultime!—but not for reasons of nostalgia. He emphasized that, unlike most new music, it was more relevant to his life in the present than most new music. I think he would agree with me that the delightful new disc from his former cohorts is an exception. Jeff Kazee and John Lyon had some growing pains over the years as they assumed the responsibility of primary writers and producers for the Asbury Jukes, a responsibility previously held by Little Steven and others. They’ve admirably rose to the challenge, assisted by a solid band that can adapt to the discipline of the studio or the improvisational freedom of an Asbury Jukes live show with remarkable ease.

Five years after the disappointing Pills and Ammo, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes have delivered. As the cracks of Western culture continue to widen and its tenuous base continues to teeter in ways that are more than evident in its ongoing musical disintegration, it’s arrival is more than welcome. In a culture obsessed with death (in call kinds of ways, subtle and otherwise), it's a lifeline. As Southside told Sacks, "My job is to provide pleasure and enjoyment. And if that's my purpose in life--to facilitate life--that's all right with me."