THE TOM COLLINS
Daylight Tonight
Terminus Records
"Rock & Roll....it can SAVE SOULS."
-- Sam Phillips, in 1957, argues with Jerry Lee Lewis about whether they're going to hell during the recording session for "Great Balls of Fire." Jerry Lee does not agree.
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I fell in love with music in the early '70s, a time when no one could conceive of a day when rock and soul wouldn't rule the earth. Growing up out there in the middle of America, rock & roll was a secret language, a lifeline that let a precious few of us know that there was life beyond whatever backwater town we lived in and that, somewhere, there were other people who understood.
ZoSo, Darkness on the Edge of Town, You're Gonna Get It, Some Girls and London Calling were my Golden Tickets, secret passes that helped me survive every day until I could set out on my own and find those other people who knew the magical things nobody else around me could hear.
But now it's 2005 and everything that once seemed like undisputed truth has gotten pretty murky. Loud guitars are no longer the profit center that drives the record business. My own experiences over the last few years have made me question whether the music I love still matters.
Atlanta's The Tom Collins gives a jarring and definitive answer to that question on their new album Daylight Tonight: not only does rock still matter, it's still a matter of life and death. And it's saved my soul all over again at a time when I wonder what I'm doing every single day.
Since I'm publishing this on my web page and not in a newspaper or magazine, I'm probably not obliged to tell you this, but I will: I spent a year working with this band, producing recordings and trying to get a major label to give them the big recording contract that I was certain lay just around the corner.
We recorded three sides at Stratosphere Studios in NYC. Geoff Sanoff did a brilliant job engineering tracks that sounded every bit as good as the songs he recorded for the first Secret Machines album.
We were ecstatic. The Tom Collins played a spectacular showcase in Atlanta shortly after and then got absolutely zero interest from any major labels. And I mean no reaction whatsoever. Have I gone completely deaf or has the business I love just completely jumped the tracks?
The Tom Collins is one of the best live bands I've ever seen. There's the unbelievable tension onstage that only lives in a power trio. There's no rhythm guitar to cover up the dodgy parts; everything depends on the interplay between guitar, bass and drums and there's never a moment for anyone to break concentration.
The Tom Collins' chemistry is cut with equal parts respect, love and hate. No member really wants to be in this band but each one knows he'll never find another like it. Every show teeters between implosion and redemption and somehow they manage to find the strength to go back out and do it again.
Kyle Spence is as good as any drummer I've ever seen and has the most natural sense of that loping "Bonham time" since, well, John Bonham. I had the thrill of seeing Kyle play with J. Mascis and Dave Schools (bassist from Widespread Panic) last year and it was the most amazing set I've seen J. play since Dinosaur Jr.'s legendary 1987 Anti Club show in LA. Brilliant drummer. Check.
Craig McQuiston may be the real genius in The Tom Collins. Left with the task of forging some balance between a drummer everyone notices and an ultra-flashy guitarist, Craig's bass manages to glue the whole thing together. I'm continually amazed at his ability -- both in the studio and onstage -- to really listen to his bandmates and keep the train from jumping the tracks. It's an unbelievably constant heartbeat that gives both Kyle and Fran the room to take risks that would be impossible without Craig's unshakeable foundation. Incredibly in-the-pocket, no flashy garbage bassist. Check.
Fran Capitanelli has always been known as a hotshot guitarist on the Atlanta scene. He somehow manages to graft a Jimmy Page thunder onto Mike Campbell-style chiming melodic leads. He puts as much precision and love into his riffs as he does his leads and sometimes it sounds like he's doing the work of the entire Skynyrd guitar army all by himself. What's changed on Daylight Tonight are his vocals. In the past, singing was almost an afterthought, something he did so the Tom Collins were more than an instrumental band. These new songs are infused with a vocal passion and phrasing that finally measures up to the guitar playing he's always been known for. Add this to our list: certified guitar hero and expressively powerful lead vocals. Check.
This lineup released an album called Deep Cuts four years ago that showed what great players they are but didn't have the songs that were going to change anyone's life. Some part of me suspects that record companies heard that album and just filed the band in a "good band/no hits" category where they were doomed to stay for all time.
But something happened to Fran after the release of Deep Cuts. Me, I have some insider information and I know it involved one of those secret relationships with the kind of woman who's destined to permanently alter your DNA. Having some experience with those women myself, I was lucky enough that these new songs were the first music I heard from The Tom Collins.
The great thing about art (as opposed to gossip or celebrity) is that it truly doesn't matter who that woman was. In our new instant, online, worldwide game of telephone, the meaningless details of those kinds of stories have been given a weight they can't possibly deserve. Who fucked up Fran and gave us these songs? I'll never tell, but anyone who's ever taken any real emotional risks will find plenty to identify with on this album.
Fortunately, in this case, we just get to live through the wreckage of a doomed romance and take in twelve songs about a life transformed by love, sex, loss and redemption.
Daylight Tonight was recorded in Kyle's garage under incredibly primitive conditions. I'm not sure whether the Athens, GA summertime humidity or the winter cold makes for a more difficult recording session, but they pieced this album together over two years whenever they could scrape together money and time.
Which leaves us with twelve songs that can change your life. After we hit the wall with the record companies, I put their music away and spent my time recording other things. Kyle studied our New York recordings and the band quietly went back to work on the original demos. The entire situation was just a memory tinged with mild regret and frustration until I visited Atlanta in early August and Fran handed me a finished copy of this album.
I put in the CD and, after two songs, I pulled over on the side of the road and just started shaking. All of the compromises and hustle and white lies I tell myself to keep working in music and deal with my car wreck of a personal life were stripped away. Daylight Tonight was like an acid bath that stripped off three years of soul corrosion in less than 47 minutes.
There are two albums here: one is the musical powerhouse that refuses to apologize for an undeniable debt to Led Zeppelin, but it's a cryptic sort of debt that imagines that Jimmy Page was ripping off Television's Marquee Moon when he was making In Through the Out Door. This is a power trio: echoes of Cream ripple through the album, but the Tom Collins is also undeniably Southern, somehow conjuring Tom Petty, R.E.M. and the Allman Brothers all at once.
The other album is a singer/songwriter's confessional buried under the rubble of a dynamite blast. And that's the one that saved my soul.
"Back of Your Mind" sounds like the hit single: monster riff, relentless forward momentum from Kyle and Craig, killer harmonies in the chorus, incredibly sexy phrasing in Fran's lead vocal. Except "Back of Your Mind" is all about keeping it together when you don't know what she's thinking and what's she's going to do next or even if she's ever coming back. There's an incredibly complicated emotion in play here: you're allowed to imagine that your girl (or your boy) could show up unannounced and resume a doomed relationship with no advance warning but you can't let it dominate your life. As long as you're not paralyzed, you just might be able to function. Of course, I mostly know this is true by what Fran plays in the guitar solo coming out of the bridge; anything suggested by the lyrics is amplified ten thousand times by a fifteen-second explosion that reveals all the promises to keep it in the back of his mind as the lie that they are.
"Devil on the Streets" acknowledges the siren's call. No matter what boundaries he might want to set, all it takes is her voice on the speakerphone to bring him right back to her arms.
Which leads us to "In the Morning," both a great love song and an incredible rationalization of letting someone use you to cheat on their boyfriend. Featuring the album's sweetest Page riff, it's all about not thinking about what comes after the sex. Telling yourself that you'll be able to walk away clean is a lie; Fran knows it when he writes it, knows it as he sings it and again confesses the truth in an incredible guitar solo. How can you delay the sunrise? Few songs have ever adequately captured that sense of suspended time that comes from stolen time with a lover; Fran gives up trying to sing about it and just lets his guitar tell the story in the outro.
"Hot and Cold" brings us back to reality. The sun has come up and she's about to leave, sort of. Driven by a Skynyrd-level guitar riff, the lovers debate whether last night has any real lasting meaning. Fran puts on a brave face and claims to run hot and cold. Definitely another lie: the extremes he describes are conflicting senses of possibility and panic.
"Talk You Down" gives Daylight Tonight its title and emphasizes the confusion of the situation. Is she coming back? What does she want? Will it be the intimacy of the night or the awkward daytime conversations about responsibilities and limitations and obligations to other people? "I know it's gonna be alright" is supposed to reassure the girl but it sounds far more like a plea that she not stomp his heart forever.
"Why Don't You Leave" and "That Town You Love" are the best songs I've ever heard about luring someone out of the comfortable cocoon of a college town. "Leave" opens with a droning acoustic figure suggestive of Richard Thompson or Bert Jansch and so much seduction in the lead vocal that you can't imagine any woman not following Fran to any urban rathole on the planet. But "Town You Love," which repeats the same lyric, rockets into a metallic explosion that can't help but acknowledge that she's never gonna leave. Imagine R.E.M.'s "(Don't Go Back to) Rockville" with a complete lack of hope that you'll ever get her past the city limits.
"Last Mistake" begins to acknowledge that the whole thing's slipping away. No one knows about the relationship, he can't tell but at least she can be "the last mistake I made when I was young." Somehow the band manages to take an Allmans Brothers riff and mutate into a full-blown Tom Petty chorus complete with harmonies.
"Start of the Summer" is the album's masterpiece. What starts as a mature and reasonable reflection on the transitory nature of a secret assignation slowly devolves into a jealous rage. Fran's laid-back vocal slowly unravels as the guitar figure gets more intense and reality sets in. Time collapses: was it last week or last year that they hooked up? Whenever she stole his soul, now she can go to hell. "Summer" features the album's most beautiful guitar work, which once again has the last word: all the pain and betrayal of the album peaks in the outro solo.
"Can't Sleep" provides some relief, if only because we know it's over. "Even just to talk would make things difficult." On another album, this would sound like a pop song and a radio single, but here there's only resignation. This is Fran's most expressive vocal and he uses it to admit the hopelessness of a reconciliation or even a continuation of the secret relationship.
The band reclaims its honor on "Cycles." A straight-on riff rocker, they know she's feeling some pain and hasn't come out of this relationship without scars of her own.
The album ends with "We All Knew You Would," a Stones-style pisstake on a country song where Fran declares that everyone all knew she'd bail from the start. I'm pretty sure he's lying to himself, but it's a convincing lie, the kind you tell yourself so you have the strength to get out of bed in the morning.
I've played Daylight Tonight at least 50 times in the last 3 weeks. The album doesn't just hold up; it gets better every time I play it. In my career, even I've played the "gimme 3 singles and then who the hell cares" game with bands and this album is just an entirely different animal: a completely grown-up meditation on the consequences of infidelity told by a rock band with staggering prowess.
I know that giving any record this close a reading just isn't done anymore and maybe it's sort of embarrassing that I'm devoting 3000 words to a single album. I mean, I'm supposed to sum up the cultural importance of new releases in 120 words whenever I write for BLENDER. I know media market research suggests that no one wants this much detail and that all music magazines strive to be a quick read so they don't lose the attention of their supposedly ADD-afflicted readers. But I can't help but believe that music and books and painting and sculpture and film are sometimes more important than that. I want records that will change my life and want to make records that will change your life. Daylight Tonight reminded me of that and whatever I'm doing here is some kind of attempt to remind myself why I got in the game.
Through all the struggle and grind that comes with scraping a living out of music, it's hard to remember the mystical power that attracted me as a fierce and lonely kid. I passed on all the opportunities that my college education apparently presented because I couldn't imagine a life without music, a life where I made records that gave other kids the same sense of escape, hope and belonging that got me through the hardest years of my life.
Now that my livelihood depends on getting along with record companies and the delivery of a "commercially acceptable" product, there are thousands of tiny compromises I make every day with recordings, arrangements, mixes, masters, artwork, marketing and everything else that goes with making a record succeed in the big machine.
Daylight Tonight has cauterized my soul. Its refusal to compromise, its fearless exploration of complicated and sometimes unhealthy emotions has helped me make sense of my own life at a time when my faith in my work, my personal relationships and even the validity of values I thought I shared with people I loved has been shaken to the core. The Tom Collins doesn't offer any easy answers but they ask fearless questions about spiritual connection and fidelity, somehow managing to tap into the fundamental power of rock while they're doing it.
I didn't produce any of this album: the band reworked their demos into these final masters and the additional recording, mixing and mastering bears a lot of resemblance to what we recorded together in New York. I'm incredibly proud of that influence but I'm also proud of Fran's refusal to Autotune his lead vocals (which is something I would have done whether he liked it or not). Daylight Tonight is a defiantly independent record, a finely crafted but unvarnished portrait of a truly great rock band.
Ten years ago, I would have signed this band to Geffen Records, put the band on tour support and had faith that radio would have eventually seen the light. We don't live in that world now and bands like this have to find other ways to connect with their audience.
This love letter is an attempt to find a way to make that connection. If you know me and know what I like, then I hope you'll trust my taste enough to track down a copy of Daylight Tonight and decide for yourself.
If you live for Television and Led Zeppelin, Tom Petty and the Stooges, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Ramones, then Daylight Tonight could save your soul. Or at least make you remember why you loved rock in the first place.
When I was 21 and "threw my life away" instead of pursuing a responsible career, this was exactly the kind of record I aspired to make. And now, when the powers that be have deemed the music I love a marginal proposition at best, I desperately want people to hear this music and understand why so many of my friends have devoted our lives to the idea that rock and roll saves souls.
I don't mean this as an indictment of anyone I know who works at a major record company; almost all of them still know what music is supposed to sound like but the system no longer trusts them enough to let them follow their instincts and do their jobs.
The best anyone can hope is that enough people in the real world discover The Tom Collins and create the kind of buzz and energy that forces a big label to sign a band this good.
Daylight Tonight comes out October 4 on Terminus Records.
If you're one of my rock writer friends, you need to review this in your damn magazine because you can't hire me to write it for you. Their publicist is Ariel Hyatt and her email address is ariel@arielpublicity.com.
If you work at a radio station, do something against the rules: play "Back of Your Mind" just because it's great.
If you're a regular human being, check out their websites:
The Tom Collins on MySpace
The Tom Collins Website
Then pay money for the record. If I'm wrong, track me down and make me buy your copy off you. But I'm betting that you'll be buying more and giving them to your friends.
Post this anywhere and everywhere. Just link back to my site and give me credit for writing it:
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