Whatever happened to the Wallflowers?

I picked up a copy of the Wallflower's Bringing Down the Horse this weekend, and I've been listening to it for the first time since it came out. One Headlight and the Difference are clearly the stand out tracks, but the other singles were good, and the album as a whole is well crafted and coherent enough to classify the album as Very Good, If Not Quite Great. Jakob Dylan, the lead singer and songwriter for the Wallflowers is very famously Bob Dylan's son, and there at the time, many people assumed that the best songs were actually written by the elder Dylan, not Jakob. Both parties denied it, and at the time One Headlight was a chart hit, but not a cultural phenomenon.

As time passed, the success of Bringing Down the Horse, and One Headlight in particular, start to seem more suspicious. The band stopped recording for four years, and by the time their next album debuted I was in college and didn't even notice. The band still records to critical acclaim and modest commercial success (not unlike Bob Dylan himself). I'm still not certain, however, that the talent that could create One Headlight couldn't come up with another big hit.

Nobody is going to confuse One Headlight with, say, Satisfaction or Thriller or even Smells Like Teen Spirit as an "important" song. It didn't create or sustain a genre, it's not a particularly complex song, and it didn't really break new ground. It is, however, a perfectly crafted rock song, with wistful lyrics that are actually far more poignant than the sound at first. It's a sad song about a sad man, trapped by conditions not entirely of his own design. As a casual observer (and I'm nothing if not casual), it's hard to listen to this song and not expect to find a greatest hits disc full of such gems.

Of course, the reality is that creating a single great song is an incredible feat, even for the very gifted. Lyrics are simply poetry, and poetry depends on the poet, and success inevitably changes a person's life in so many ways that it's almost impossible not to have the art be changed in some way. It's not impossible to "go back to the well," it's just hard. Couple success with the inevitable maturation everybody goes through, and very few artists, of any media or genre, can create multiple masterpieces.

Breaking down Bringing down the Horse, the album tracks are good and just interesting enough to not skip, the minor hits are good, The Difference was a genuine hit while One Headlight is arguably one of the best songs of the 90's. Does this mean it's a product of genius that was spoiled by later success, or was it just lightning in a bottle? As a counterpoint, look at Stone Temple Pilots album Purple: Another candidate for best of the 90's in Interstate Love Song, a couple of solid hits, a catchy little minor hit. While the filler on Purple is pretty forgettable (STP are a candidate for greatest singles band of the 90s), the set up isn't all that different. Nobody would ever accuse Scott Wieland of being a genius, however he has the rock star persona that makes up for Jakob's superior pedigree.

Many critics have the knowledge and expertise to actually discuss the evolution of a genre or band, but I don't have the depth of experience to do that. Looking at records, I sometimes wonder if art isn't as evolutionary as people think: sure the flow causes one movement to mix with another and branch off, but when you look at individual bands, it's important to remember that each disc is a crystalline moment in time. Every rock historian has stories of great songs added to albums at the last minute, or nearly cut because of a crisis of confidence. I think there might be more fate or timing to the creation of music than we frequently think.