Sass Jordan - RATS (1994)
Music and drugs have a long and checkered history. No cause, perhaps, has racked up more corpses among the popular music set (Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison and Presley are only the biggest names on a very large, very black wall). Yet, paradoxically, no other human experience besides sexual passion has inspired more powerful popular music. And during the 1990s, the queen of popular music drugs was heroin.
In the early 1990s, a friend appalled my former wife Cathi and me with the desire to try heroin. “Why the fuck would you do THAT?” we replied: “They’ve known that shit would kill you since the ‘60s.” Apparently, our friend knew something we didn’t, because she wasn’t alone in curiosity. Heroin was THE glamour drug of the 1990s. Crack cocaine may have given that era the musical mystique of Gangsta Rap, but heroin gave it Grunge. Immortalized in songs like “Under the Bridge” and “Mr. Brownstone(*)” as well as rocker flicks like Trainspotting and Pulp Fiction, heroin exerted a sick fascination over popular culture. And while Kurt, Courtney and Kate reigned as the (un)holy trinity of heroin chic, an obscure Canadian Blues singer named Sass Jordan was forging her own testament to the drug.
Rats depicts the harrowing relationship between Jordan, her lover, and her lover’s addiction to smack. Vomited up with raw vocals and naked emotions, this album sweeps through your room like a storm of glass. Although it’s usually shelved with Rock, Rats is essentially a Blues record in the hybrid tradition of Susan Tedeschi, Kenny Wayne Sheperd and Faces-era Rod Stewart. Shot through – almost literally – with that genre’s gut-wrenching love stories, Rats must have been an excruciating experience to record. Already acclaimed for her powerful pipes, Jordan became one of the few singers who could accurately be mentioned in the breath with Janis Joplin(**). Her shredded singing on tracks like “Damaged,” “Honey” and especially “Pissin' Down” literally makes my throat hurt in sympathy. The rusty guitar-slinging (courtesy of Stevie Salas) cuts like a complimentary buzz saw. This is the Blues the way they should be played – with a dirty broken bottle down gritty steel strings. The rhythm section (Brian Tichy on drums and a variety of players on bass) rocks hard behind the groove while a selection of other instruments (Hammond organ, harmonica, and occasional strings and piano) adds polish to the mix. Every track on Rats is hit hard out of the park by Jordan and her band. And though each song is distinctive, the arrangement of them drives – or, more truthfully, drags – the listener through Jordan’s personal hell.
“Hell” is an overused concept in popular music. Certainly, Black Metal and Gangsta Rap make flamboyant appeals to the Pit. But for all that fire-n-brimstone, the musical style that most accurately depicts human suffering and the hope that makes it worthwhile (yet renders it all the more excruciating) is Blues. How? Because the Blues are real. The emotions wrought up through Blues music are archetypal in scope yet shattering in intimacy. The Blues won’t tell you about Satan slaying multitudes – they’ll tell you how the singer’s heart was fed into a meat grinder and the singer helped Satan put it there. Rats is the epitome of this approach. From Jordan’s opening salvo on “Damaged” to the quiet affirmations of “Breakin’” and “Give,” Jordan charts the smacked-out slide of a relationship from rage to giddiness to eventual surrender.
Despite this grim focus, Rats is exuberant, not morose. It kicks off with a ragged yowl and ends with a Gospel organ. In between, the album rocks like a Brewtown bender. The beefy production, courtesy of Nick DiDia (who performed similar miracles with Pearl Jam) and Michael Wagener (Metallica), sounds dirty but not messy. Propelled by monster Blues riffs and that raging voice, Rats sounds wounded yet compelling. Strung out on the tension between allure and rejection, the album plays out a domestic tragedy in which Sass is a willing (if unhappy) partner to her lover’s self-destruction. Rats is not a concept album per se(***), but the sequence of songs cannot be accidental. The Hell they depict is not the conventional horrorshow of beatings and thievery, but a corrosive decay of love into ruins.
The stark artwork within the CD captures the jagged reflection within its music. Despite the denunciations of “Pissin’ Down” and “Slave,” the real object of Jordan’s loathing is herself. She freely admits that “Dirty is my style/ And I like my oil crude/ You’re the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen/ And I think I love you.” After lacerating her nameless lover and his needlephilia on the album’s first four tracks, Jordan owes up to her end of the problem: she likes her bad boy being BAD. The songs “Ugly,” “Honey” and “Wish” reveal that Sass is as addicted to her partner’s dysfunction as he is to “your old lady heroin.” Like a junkie, she tries to kick him cold-turkey with “High Road Easy” and “I’m Not,” yet keeps backsliding. “Sheeeet – ugly sucka!” proclaims guest vocalist George Clinton on “Ugly.” That "sucka" is Jordan’s kind of “Ugly,” though, and even as she shows her lover the door yet again (“Breakin’”), she doesn’t seem at all sure that she can ever truly be rid of him. One of the album’s many epiphanies occurs in the split-second glide between the cacophonous “Ugly” and the smooth intro to “I’m Not”; musically, it’s like a raucous bender followed by the hung-over morning after and its futile resolution to never do THAT again. Despite an insistence that “I don’t wanna kill myself yet,” the album never really resolves the issue. Its last track asks “In this world I’m livin’ in/ Is it cruel or is it kind?” Like love, like heroin, and like Rats, it’s both.
After a harrowing period that Jordan later called “a descent into the Black Hole of Calcutta,” Jordan apparently kicked that Bad Boy’s habit for good. Her subsequent albums are happier affairs (one even got the double-edged title of Present), and she eventually became a judge on Canadian Idol(****). But although her most recent album, Get What You Give, displays some of the old grit, Sass Jordan’s dysfunctional ‘90s relationship(s?) seem(s) to have provided her greatest inspiration. None of Jordan’s albums, before or since, packs the punch of Rats. Sass Jordan still has the voice of a scalded nicotine angel, but her Blues have lightened spectrum and those milder tones of blue just don’t run as deep – or as dangerous – as Rats.
-------------
Music and drugs have a long and checkered history. No cause, perhaps, has racked up more corpses among the popular music set (Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison and Presley are only the biggest names on a very large, very black wall). Yet, paradoxically, no other human experience besides sexual passion has inspired more powerful popular music. And during the 1990s, the queen of popular music drugs was heroin.
In the early 1990s, a friend appalled my former wife Cathi and me with the desire to try heroin. “Why the fuck would you do THAT?” we replied: “They’ve known that shit would kill you since the ‘60s.” Apparently, our friend knew something we didn’t, because she wasn’t alone in curiosity. Heroin was THE glamour drug of the 1990s. Crack cocaine may have given that era the musical mystique of Gangsta Rap, but heroin gave it Grunge. Immortalized in songs like “Under the Bridge” and “Mr. Brownstone(*)” as well as rocker flicks like Trainspotting and Pulp Fiction, heroin exerted a sick fascination over popular culture. And while Kurt, Courtney and Kate reigned as the (un)holy trinity of heroin chic, an obscure Canadian Blues singer named Sass Jordan was forging her own testament to the drug.
Rats depicts the harrowing relationship between Jordan, her lover, and her lover’s addiction to smack. Vomited up with raw vocals and naked emotions, this album sweeps through your room like a storm of glass. Although it’s usually shelved with Rock, Rats is essentially a Blues record in the hybrid tradition of Susan Tedeschi, Kenny Wayne Sheperd and Faces-era Rod Stewart. Shot through – almost literally – with that genre’s gut-wrenching love stories, Rats must have been an excruciating experience to record. Already acclaimed for her powerful pipes, Jordan became one of the few singers who could accurately be mentioned in the breath with Janis Joplin(**). Her shredded singing on tracks like “Damaged,” “Honey” and especially “Pissin' Down” literally makes my throat hurt in sympathy. The rusty guitar-slinging (courtesy of Stevie Salas) cuts like a complimentary buzz saw. This is the Blues the way they should be played – with a dirty broken bottle down gritty steel strings. The rhythm section (Brian Tichy on drums and a variety of players on bass) rocks hard behind the groove while a selection of other instruments (Hammond organ, harmonica, and occasional strings and piano) adds polish to the mix. Every track on Rats is hit hard out of the park by Jordan and her band. And though each song is distinctive, the arrangement of them drives – or, more truthfully, drags – the listener through Jordan’s personal hell.
“Hell” is an overused concept in popular music. Certainly, Black Metal and Gangsta Rap make flamboyant appeals to the Pit. But for all that fire-n-brimstone, the musical style that most accurately depicts human suffering and the hope that makes it worthwhile (yet renders it all the more excruciating) is Blues. How? Because the Blues are real. The emotions wrought up through Blues music are archetypal in scope yet shattering in intimacy. The Blues won’t tell you about Satan slaying multitudes – they’ll tell you how the singer’s heart was fed into a meat grinder and the singer helped Satan put it there. Rats is the epitome of this approach. From Jordan’s opening salvo on “Damaged” to the quiet affirmations of “Breakin’” and “Give,” Jordan charts the smacked-out slide of a relationship from rage to giddiness to eventual surrender.
Despite this grim focus, Rats is exuberant, not morose. It kicks off with a ragged yowl and ends with a Gospel organ. In between, the album rocks like a Brewtown bender. The beefy production, courtesy of Nick DiDia (who performed similar miracles with Pearl Jam) and Michael Wagener (Metallica), sounds dirty but not messy. Propelled by monster Blues riffs and that raging voice, Rats sounds wounded yet compelling. Strung out on the tension between allure and rejection, the album plays out a domestic tragedy in which Sass is a willing (if unhappy) partner to her lover’s self-destruction. Rats is not a concept album per se(***), but the sequence of songs cannot be accidental. The Hell they depict is not the conventional horrorshow of beatings and thievery, but a corrosive decay of love into ruins.
The stark artwork within the CD captures the jagged reflection within its music. Despite the denunciations of “Pissin’ Down” and “Slave,” the real object of Jordan’s loathing is herself. She freely admits that “Dirty is my style/ And I like my oil crude/ You’re the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen/ And I think I love you.” After lacerating her nameless lover and his needlephilia on the album’s first four tracks, Jordan owes up to her end of the problem: she likes her bad boy being BAD. The songs “Ugly,” “Honey” and “Wish” reveal that Sass is as addicted to her partner’s dysfunction as he is to “your old lady heroin.” Like a junkie, she tries to kick him cold-turkey with “High Road Easy” and “I’m Not,” yet keeps backsliding. “Sheeeet – ugly sucka!” proclaims guest vocalist George Clinton on “Ugly.” That "sucka" is Jordan’s kind of “Ugly,” though, and even as she shows her lover the door yet again (“Breakin’”), she doesn’t seem at all sure that she can ever truly be rid of him. One of the album’s many epiphanies occurs in the split-second glide between the cacophonous “Ugly” and the smooth intro to “I’m Not”; musically, it’s like a raucous bender followed by the hung-over morning after and its futile resolution to never do THAT again. Despite an insistence that “I don’t wanna kill myself yet,” the album never really resolves the issue. Its last track asks “In this world I’m livin’ in/ Is it cruel or is it kind?” Like love, like heroin, and like Rats, it’s both.
After a harrowing period that Jordan later called “a descent into the Black Hole of Calcutta,” Jordan apparently kicked that Bad Boy’s habit for good. Her subsequent albums are happier affairs (one even got the double-edged title of Present), and she eventually became a judge on Canadian Idol(****). But although her most recent album, Get What You Give, displays some of the old grit, Sass Jordan’s dysfunctional ‘90s relationship(s?) seem(s) to have provided her greatest inspiration. None of Jordan’s albums, before or since, packs the punch of Rats. Sass Jordan still has the voice of a scalded nicotine angel, but her Blues have lightened spectrum and those milder tones of blue just don’t run as deep – or as dangerous – as Rats.
-------------
TRACK LISTING
1. Damaged
2. Slave
3. Pissin' Down
4. High Road Easy
5. Sun's Gonna Rise
6. Head
7. Ugly
8. I'm Not
9. Honey
10. Wish
11. Breakin'
12. Give
----------------------------
* - Actually released in 1987, but it’s close enough for government work.
** - Sass later went on to play Joplin on stage in a musical called Love, Janis. How they tamed Jordan’s cover-girl looks down to Janis’ homely appeal remains a mystery.
*** - An expression I’ve been cringing from using since the “Goth kids” episode of South Park, even if it is used correctly.
**** - “Good lord! *choke*”
----------------------------
* - Actually released in 1987, but it’s close enough for government work.
** - Sass later went on to play Joplin on stage in a musical called Love, Janis. How they tamed Jordan’s cover-girl looks down to Janis’ homely appeal remains a mystery.
*** - An expression I’ve been cringing from using since the “Goth kids” episode of South Park, even if it is used correctly.
**** - “Good lord! *choke*”
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