Day 28: Big Tent Revival - Open All Night

Big Tent Revival aced the ‘sophomore slump’ test with their second album, 1996’s Open All Night. Proving it was possible to tackle the problems of the everyday without talking down to the regular folks who go through them, the Big Tent fellows offered a refreshingly direct message that the Lord cares about everything his followers go through.

Set against a hearty background of meat and potatoes rock and roll in the vein of Bruce Springsteen or John Mellencamp, opener “Mend Me” offers up a stark confession that though the singer stands on a stage in front of you “he can’t escape this life of sin.” Like the Apostle Paul “what I want to do I don’t do, what I do I don’t want to do” and finally the honest (and throat shredding) confession “I am broken, mend me.”

Honesty is the order of the day on Open All Night. In “Letting Go” chief songwriter Steve Wiggins confesses that much of what he lives “is a façade” and now he’s “letting go.” In “Famine Or Feast” Wiggins talks about his broken down car and his friend who is a doctor and how he is sometimes tempted to envy him. But on Thursday nights the two are found “studying God’s word” and now he realizes that “we both have our reasons for praying to the Lord.” This realization is not a pat answer, as the narrators problems have not been solved, but a light of hope that God sees every situation we go through “famine or feast.”

Producer John Hampton (The Gin Blossoms, Smalltown Poets, Audio Adrenaline, Todd Agnew) does wonders with this sort of “heartland” rock and roll, and makes the guitars and Hammond B3 organs on Open All Night shimmer and shine. “The Best Thing In Life” has a guitar line that chimes like Buffalo Springfield’s 60’s classic “For What It’s Worth” but features a ferocious breakdown at the bridge of the song that lifts the message of what Jesus did on the cross “that was free”. “Here With Me” and “Personal Judgment Day” bring the passion and tuneful songwriting in the country blues tradition and furthers the theme of every day circumstances being pregnant with the possibility of God’s presence and teaching.

In an music industry climate (secular and otherwise) that is increasingly narrow in it’s parameters of what subject matter is appropriate or cool that month, it’s refreshing to listen back to Big Tent’s second album and recognize that the struggle of the every day is sometimes as compelling and worthy of covering as that latest, popular worship tune. In Open All Night Big Tent Revival wrote perhaps the best set of blue collar Christian rock and roll songs ever put out.