Song by song: Joe Grushecky and the Houserockers’ new album
Not unlike the early ’60s, we find ourselves in a time where artists are often thinking three minutes at a time, dropping songs one by one.
Joe Grushecky, who came of age in that era, not only thinks in albums, but in the full story of the album.
“When I sit down to write a record,” he says, “in my mind I’m writing a story. I always have a thread in it and that might not be quite as apparent to some people as others. And sometimes, I’m probably the only one who gets it, but I have a thread. It’s like I’m writing a story or a little screenplay. That’s how I put a record together.”
For “Can’t Outrun a Memory,” his first album in seven years and one of his best, the story covers a lifetime in 12 songs. It all starts with the title track and the tragic story behind it.
Grushecky, who went on to lead the major-label Pittsburgh band the Iron City Houserockers, grew up in the small Westmoreland County town of Biddle with a father who began working in a coal mine from the time he was in the sixth grade until he was drafted into the military during World War II.
“Basically, he had no childhood,” Grushecky says “And he was a very smart man, and he always felt that an education was important. He wanted me to work with my brains — always said that to me. And so after high school I packed up and went to school even though I wasn’t particularly interested in going to school.”
Having been exposed to rock ’n’ roll, he wanted to be a musician, but he was reasonably convinced that wasn’t the most practical route for a kid from Biddle.
When he went off to California University of Pennsylvania in 1966, he says, “I had visions it was gonna be all these hip guys there, long hair, playing guitar, and there going to be music and art everywhere.”
“Well, little did I know I was stepping in a f---ing time machine. It was like back to 1952 going down there in the Mon Valley, and it was quite a shock. I couldn’t have a guitar in my room. We weren’t allowed to have record players. We weren’t allowed to have radios. It was primitive, so I was basically without music.”
He would go home on weekends, but a lot of his high school friends had drifted away, so there wasn’t much to do.
He spent the summer of ’68 in Atlantic City, where he bought his first Telecaster at a pawn shop. In that year between the Summer of Love and Woodstock, music was shifting radically from the “She Loves You” rock ’n’ roll into a harder, bluesier progressive rock.
“So, here’s where the story turns. Here’s where it starts,” he says.
He was making the trip back from Atlantic City with a fellow Cal U student that August. They were having a good time listening to music, recalling the summer and talking about life goals, when they got into a fender bender. When they emerged to inspect the damage, she was struck by a reckless driver.
“She passed away,” he says.
“I escaped with my life. To this day, I don’t know how. It was a miracle. I was basically left out in the middle of New Jersey by myself, had to hitchhike back to Atlantic City after a horrendous car accident where the girl literally died in my arms.
“So, flash-forward to the beginning of the pandemic era. I started having these dreams. And in those days,” he says, speaking of the ’60s, “there was no therapy. I never talked to anybody about it.”
Those dreams were manifested in “Can’t Outrun a Memory,” the most tearful acoustic ballad that Grushecky has ever written or sung.
“I guess I buried it for so long,” he says, “it’s like it’s coming to the forefront.”
He would build the album around that song, but not that nakedly emotional acoustic version. Instead, it got the full
Houserockers treatment, partly on the advice of his son and now longtime bandmate Johnny.
“I played it for him and he said, ‘You know, you’re talking about how you can’t outrun a memory and this song is real slow. It doesn’t sound like you’re running.’”
So, they changed the key from D to F and flipped it into a chugging, mid-tempo Houserockers song with guitars blazing.
The acoustic version would become the coda on an album that touches on Grushecky’s story and familiar themes in four sections that you’ll be able to listen when the album releases on Omnivore Recordings on Friday, just a few months after the career retrospective “Houserocker: A Joe Grushecky Anthology.”
It’s hard to say “Can’t Outrun a Memory” doesn’t rank with the glory days of the Houserockers and Grushecky’s 1995 standout “American Babylon.”
“We’re proud of the record,” Grushecky says. “Multiple people have told me it fits together as an album, as a piece of work that, if you have the time to listen to it, you should sit down and listen to it the whole way through because it does take you on a bit of a journey.”
Let’s take it song by song.
“This is Who We Are”
The opening riff of the album will ring a bell with ’60s connoisseurs, as it leans on the riff from The Byrds’ classic “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” and, to some extent, The Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride.” Although the music reflects his roots, the song is set in the here and now, opening with “I want a home on a quiet street/i just want to be left in peace.” “I just want us to be good again” he goes on to sing in a twist of a well-known political slogan. The song later harks to the classic Houserockers anthem with “I had a good time but got out alive.”
“The country is in such turmoil,” Grushecky says. “It seems like so much bulls--t going on, so it’s sort of a plea for a more peaceful, cooperative time. It could have been a page out of my diary.”
“Here in ’68”
There’s an air of psychedelia in the guitars of this classic-sounding Houserockers song that deals with the political and cultural upheaval of that year, between the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and the Chicago riots, to “The White Album” and Jimi Hendrix.
“’68 was sticking in my mind and then I saw this special about 1968 on CNN and I started reliving those moments, personally,” he says. “That’s the year people in Pittsburgh started growing their hair. It was still a little bit dangerous to have long hair in Pittsburgh, especially down in Cal U in those days, but more and more people were starting to get with the program, as they say.”
“Can’t Outrun a Memory”
The previously discussed title track is a banger with a mix of sadness, anger and release as Grushecky sings, “I can’t escape from what’s haunting me.”
“Just Drive”
This plaintive, whispery ballad about wanting to escape from reality begins the second, more introspective section of the record.
“When you reach a certain stage in life you start thinking … ‘Is everything worth it?’ I guess, I don’t know,” he says laughing. “I write a lot of music in my car. This song is basically about just setting yourself free from all responsibilities and seeing where it takes you.”
There’s also a metaphor in there about his life and career with the line, “Spent my whole life chasing something that’s just around the bend.”
“Sometimes you go to bed and say, ‘Oh man, I really f---ed this up’ and you think about all the battles I should have won,” he says. “You can’t go to sleep until you relive every one. You just lay there in bed and think, ‘If I only did this’ or ‘I only did that’ and a lot of this was linked to the theme of can’t outrun a memory.”
The regrets are career linked, says the father of two, “not a lot of regret about personal stuff.”
“Sleeping Dog”
When I heard this smoldering ballad about burying certain sensitive issues between two people — or letting sleeping dogs lie — my first thought was Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Tuesday’s Gone.”
“I was thinking more ‘Sticky Fingers,’ like ‘I Got the Blues,’” Grushecky says.
“There’s some stuff you don’t wanna talk about, like that accident,” he says. “But it was a life-defining experience, you know, in a bad way.”
The Houserockers, which also includes bassist Jeff Garrison and drummer Jeffrey “Joffo” Simmons, lay the groundwork for Danny Gochnour to take off on the most searing, emotional solo on an album that features many.
“Until I See You Again”
“See You Again,” the Wiz Khalifa-charlie Puth joint, is the third most-viewed Youtube video of all time, but Grushecky is not someone who’s clicked on it.
This song has a similar message with a rowdy bar-toast vibe remembering three friends — Patrick, Pooch and Gizzy — with whom he spent a college summer camping in the Florida Keys.
“Three of my best friends, college buddies, three of my favorite people in the world to hang around with. They’re all gone,” he says. “I would be happy being in the same room with them.
“It harks back to the beginning of the story, my dad telling me, ‘Hey, it’s time to go to school, put your brain to use.’ So, I got there and instead of buckling down and studying, I learned how to party, you know.”
“If These Hills Could Talk”
With track 7, Grushecky shifts into familiar themes of the demise of the steel industry and the devastation it wreaked on mill towns. “A row of lonely smokestacks cast a shadow on a shopping mall,” he sings of the signature image of the Waterfront plaza.
He angrily spits out the words in a Stonesy rocker of a song with a riff echoing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”
“My tribute to Keith Richards’ guitar playing. It’s pretty heavy in that one,” Grushecky says. “It’s just a story, again, about growing up. I can remember driving into Pittsburgh and you’d see the steel mills still going strong. I grew up in a coal country, so I sort of linked it together, the whole working-class Western Pennsylvania thing.”
The line “Down the where the rivers meet/mighty men walked the walk” is a reference to the ’70s Steelers, who made us the City of Champions during the rise of the Iron City Houserockers.
“We Gotta Get Out of This Place” and “Living in Coal Country”
The fitting followup is this industrialstrength cover of The Animals’ classic about escaping a dying town for a better life.
On the initial version of the album, this song did not exist. Instead, it went right from “If These Hills Could Talk” to “Living in Coal Country.” The latter is another heavy-duty rocker that Grushecky likens to a Led Zeppelin song, created somewhat on the fly when Johnny plugged a Les Paul into a Marshall amp and let it feed back. The song references how the energy company “ripped the soul right out of this town” when it left.
“I was having all these dreams about the record,” Grushecky says. “I got up and I was singing, ‘ We Gotta Get Out of Place,’ doing it in the key of A. It’s originally in the key of D or C. And I wanted to fade it into ‘Living in Coal Country.’ I actually dreamt that.”
“I sang it into my phone, got up, called [producer] Rick Witkowski and said, ‘ We gotta cut “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Trust me.’ I dreamt that that belonged there, in between those two songs, so that became like a mini suite about Western Pennsylvania.”
The songs speak to the jobs leaving Pittsburgh in the early ’80s and the population either dying off or going with them.
“The Houserockers,” Grushecky says, “we lost probably half our crowd, in 1980, ’81 when the mills started closing.”
“Who’s Fooling Who”
An addendum to that suite, if you will, is this chugging rocker with a groove oddly inspired by Tupac’s “California Love.” It’s about our neglect of the environment and some of the division that creates.
“It’s sort of my state of the union address, that I slip into records,” Grushecky says. “My view of the world.”
“Rocked My Soul”
On track 11, the album shifts back into reflective mode with a gently flowing ballad about a lost love that boasts an exquisite Gochnour solo.
“I’m using romantic love as a metaphor here,” Grushecky says. “Just looking back, wondering how you got to where you got, the decisions that you made or didn’t make.”
“Let’s Cross the Bridge”
On the album’s climax, before the acoustic coda, Grushecky rallies the congregation with his very first gospel-soul song — one with an “Exile on Main St.” feel. Grushecky has a little bit of history in this realm having covered “John the Revelator” and “Ain’t No Grave” on recent albums.
“They’re like really old-time gospel,” he says, “This is a smoother gospel-soul.”
The message, circling back to the opening track, is one of unity and reconciliation.
“Looking for peace at the end of the road,” Grushecky says. “Why can’t we get along? Meet me on the bridge, there’s a revival on the other side. Let’s cross this bridge of divisiveness and animosity and get to the other side, for peace and love.
“When you travel, you realize we have more similarities than differences. We just gotta look at it that way. Most people want to live the same peaceful life as you do.”