Day 16: Vigilantes Of Love - Welcome To Struggleville

This being the occasion of my birthday (and a wonderful one at that, thanks to my three lovely ladies for the nifty hat I'm now wearing, the book of Onion articles to make me laugh, the new coffee mug to drink Joe out of and my stomach full of barbecue spare ribs) I'm going to talk about my favorite band, the Vigilantes Of Love, and why they make my heart sing. I have long since stopped trying to talk friends into loving them as much as I do, but I'll never stop talking about them and the impact, both spiritually and artistically they had on me when I was a younger man. Their records still move me and make me think, and there are so many words-per-minute (ala' Bob Dylan) that I'm still digesting songs years after hearing them.

Formed in Athens, Georgia (a mystical town to me; home of R.E.M., the Indigo Girls and the B52's) in the early 90's, the Vigilantes recorded ten + fantastic albums on various record labels (including a couple of Christian Music releases) and disbanded in the early 00's when lead singer (and main Vigilante) Bill Mallonee went solo. He is still pounding the pavement somewhere near you, pouring his heart out in a cafe or church basement concert somewhere.

The Vigilantes Of Love (a silly name, but the music makes you forget it right away, and really, aren't R.E.M. and U2 silly names too?) sounded like a mix of Bob Dylan's crazy wordplay and cultural observations set against the R.E.M. country rock jangle (think Byrds here too) and crossed with the literary insight of Steinbeck and Hemingway. Dusty folk rock with the soul of the blues and the world-weariness (even in Mallonee's younger years) of John The Apostle at the end of the book of Revelation.

All those elements made up a great stew. Alone each reference could be seen as a copy-cat, but together they formed, for me, a divine soup that blew my mind when I was 17.

When I was seventeen I read these words…

"It’s pretty much the same everywhere you go. You can sense it in the air. From the reserved towns built on the steaming red clay of Georgia – to the toppling ruins and drug scarred streets of Detroit – to the chaotic, bustling, elevated trains of Chicago – to the teeming, angry alienated misery of the Desire projects of New Orleans – to the opulent, reclusive estates of the Hollywood Hills. In the hearts of people across the country and around the world lies a desperation and emptiness that knows nothing about race, gender, class or language. The heart is the one place from where we can all speak. It aches with the unspeakable hunger and incessant whisper down in its core, that “something” is missing. What it is, is what remains unspeakable."

I was sitting in the back of my red pickup truck, holding an album in my lap that I had recently bought. I had removed the album insert and was reading the liner notes. It was the Vigilantes Of Love's Blistered Soul (my favorite album, I'm going to review it on day 365 of this project) These first seven sentences set off a bell in my head as I read them over and over again. It was here that I first realized that music can speak to that lonely, haunted place, inside each of us. You know the place. It has its own particular voice and needs. It’s that voice that speaks so loudly, saying that things are not the way they are supposed to be, that we are not home yet. You can do your best to ignore the voice (we have created a whole industry in this country to try to escape it), to drown it in drink, sounds, sights, and thrills. But in the late hours of the night, it’s there, calling out, “There has got to be more!”

Forget all the religious junk that exists in our culture, all the trappings, all the bad history. Can you honestly say that you feel like things are as they should be? Does the course the world has taken for so long now seem logical? Don’t you hear it, that still, small voice, that seems to say “There’s got to be more… more than the rat race, more than saving for retirement, more than that next high, be it legal or illegal. More, more, there has got to be more!”

There is a verse in the Christian scriptures that captures perfectly this feeling I have had deep down in my soul for so long now. It comes from the book of Hebrews, chapter eleven, verse three. “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth.” Often I feel like these men of faith did in this verse. (And not always for the faith part)

Welcome To Strugglevile sounds like the best folk rock album you never heard. If it had come out in California in the 60's it would be on one of those Rolling Stone top 500 lists that you always see. The title track is a call to see that we all are "down here" where the world is not yet redeemed. "The Glory And The Dream" plays like a lost Gin Blossom's hit with a Rich Mullins touch and "All Messed Up (And Nowhere To Go)" has great wordplay, and is convicting (the church should be a harbor for the messed up, not a place to play dress up).

But the song that stops me in my tracks is "Vet", the tale of a Viet Nam vet who Mallonee used to care for in a mental hospital. It's tuneful (it sounds like a lost T.V. show theme song) and heartbreaking and the best song about Vietnam this side of "Born In The USA" by the boss.

So go look up this album. Buy a used copy on Amazon or listen to it on Spotify. I love it because it opened my mind to how faith and art can mix, and it made me what to mix the two on my own.

God speed and happy listening.

4.5 stars

349 days to go...