Perfecta
Adam Again (Brainstorm)
After what seemed like years of being teased about an upcoming Adam Again release called Guadalupe, our anticipation for a follow up to the legendary Dig was finally answered at the 1995 Cornerstone music festival. Except the new album wasn’t quite what we had expected. First of all, it was called Perfecta, not Guadalupe. The second thing I noticed, as I eagerly popped the disc into the CD player I had taken to the festival, was the surprising discovery that the opening track was… a ballad??
Adam Again had always been a primarily upbeat band; from the dance pop of their debut In a New World of Time, through the R&B of Ten Songs and the funk of Homeboys, to the alt-rock groove of Dig, Adam Again always left your feet tapping, if not flat-out dancing. And the addition of a top-notch funk/groove drummer had given the preceding two albums a rock and roll boost that I felt the first two had lacked. Not that the band were strangers to emotional ballads, but it seemed odd to open such a long-awaited album with a ballad about the breakup/divorce of the band’s singers.
If Dig’s “River on Fire” indicated the marriage between lead singer/songwriter Gene Eugene and background vocalist Riki Michele was struggling, Perfecta’s opening track, “Stone,” revealed it was officially over. In the notes for Worldwide Favourites — Selected Songs from the Adam Again Era, Eugene claimed “it took me around two years to finish the lyrics,” which I think reveals the struggle of trying to put such emotional and vulnerable feelings into a pop song. Yet, the last verse’s claim that “this song’s not really about me at all… just trying to conjure up some fantasy” let us know that while this new record dealt with some emotionally heavy subject matter, Eugene was insisting on dealing with it in a not-so-serious, tongue-in-cheek sort of fashion.
That irreverent attitude continues a few tracks later, in the slightly more upbeat “Harsh.” While “Stone” remarked on a lover’s lament over the ending of a relationship, this song actually comes from the opposite angle, as a sort of ‘kiss off’ to a lover the narrator is ready to be rid of. Of course the thing which makes these songs even more awkward to listen to, is that as Eugene sings, “Be a dear and leave me alone… Don’t come by or call up my phone… And if there is somewhere that you need to be, don’t make it here with me,” his ex-wife is singing in the background the whole time. I’ve often wondered how the former couple was able to sing these songs while in the studio together, much less the times they performed them live together.
Other songs on the album appeared mostly nonsensical on the surface, at least to my 17-year-old mind, but at some level reflected actual events or situations songwriter Gene Eugene had experienced. After the slower opener, the record switches gears quickly with the album’s most danceable track, “Strobe.” The lyrics to this simple, one-chord song seem to be the most random and silly on the disc, although I’m sure there’s more to the story than meets the ears. It may not be among the album’s strongest track — Gene eventually pointed out that they forgot to come up with a “real bass part” for the song — but it at least gives the listener a nice, fun contrast to the heavier subject matter and darker tone of the majority of the record.
The next two tracks really set the tone for the rest of the album as darker and more musically intense. A story that Eugene would tell at Cornerstone ’97 revealed that the song-title phrase “All You Lucky People” came from a friend of his who would often repeat the line in response to hearing hearty laughter, and the songwriter claimed he didn’t really know what the song was about. But like other songs on this record, it seems he really was trying speak to inner struggles and troubling emotions. As he repeats the words “It’s alright, It’s all right” in the chorus of “All Right,” you get the sense that he’s trying to convince himself that things are indeed alright, in the midst of situations that aren’t really all right.
After the “Harsh” fifth track, the album comes to what I consider to be the record’s “jam session” part. In the Worldwide Favourites liner notes, Gene explained that Perfecta was “for the most part, a big jam session,” being written primarily in the studio over a period of three years. But to me, the sequence of “Air,” “Dogjam,” and “L.C.” really stand out as excellent examples of the band’s ability to create and record extemporaneously. “Air” is a song about a time when the electricity was shut off at Gene’s Green Room studio when he had friends coming over for a recording session. It comes off as a potentially unfinished track with its awkward, abrupt beginning, sparse lyrics, and what sounds like only one guitar part for a band with two guitarists. However, the chaotic drumming during the final lines (“ok this is the life”) give drummer Jon Knox an opportunity to shine in his ability to destroy the original beat and yet never lose the groove due to his technical tenacity. “Dogjam” and “L.C.” both follow suit with raw intros and outros as well as extended jam sections throughout, giving guitarists Eugene and Greg Lawless ample time to pass licks and solos back and forth, as Jon and bassist Paul Valadez hold the foundation of a perfect rhythm section. In a lot of ways, these are the tracks where the band’s musical prowess really breaks out. While “Dogjam” features even fewer lyrics than “Air,” and leaves the listener bewildered at what the “3-legged dog” he’s singing about could posibly be, “L.C.” plays as a tribute to one of Gene’s favorite songwriters, Leonard (or “Lenny,” as Gene calls him in the song) Cohen.
Following four songs that seem rooted in lyrical snark and/or tongue-in-cheek irreverence, the album comes to an emotional climax with the heart-wrenching “Relapse.” The song kind of reaches back to Homeboys’ “No Regrets” in the way Eugene once again found a way to open up vulnerably and autobiographically, yet remain vague enough to not really reveal what he’s lamenting or relapsing back into. Seeing the way that Gene’s friend, Michael Knott, sang the song with such intense conviction and gut-wrenching emotion at Cornerstone 2000's tribute, and knowing Knott’s long-standing battle with alcohol addiction, you can’t help but wonder if maybe he was the “golden voice”/”silver tongue” Eugene actually wrote the song about. Yet, there’s something in the way that Eugene himself sings it on the record that indicates it hits closer to home than merely being written for a friend. In the notes of that Adam Again collection, Eugene said:
I decided to include it on this collection at the last minute. I honestly don’t know why. I hadn’t even listened to it for years. It seems to sum up something which I reserve the right to figure out later.
We may never know if he figured out what that song summed up. After his death, I remember reading an e-mail that he had written where he revealed that he finally recalled that certain lines on a fan’s website had come from this song, like he had forgotten about writing the song, or what it may have been about shortly before his death. Regardless of whether he completely understood what he was singing about, there is an undeniable confession and cathartic release in the lyrics and performance that is instantly recognizable and relatable.
From this point on, the album chills out a bit, focusing a little more on standard songs rather than jam-outs. Starting with “Relapse” and continuing through the rest of the tracks, Gene’s songwriting excels the most out of the entire record, even if the songs and performances are a little less engaging on the surface. Honestly, there were many times when I didn’t make it all the way through the album over the years, mostly because it’s a long-winded album at over an hour… but also because the final songs didn’t grab my teenage sensibilities as immediately. However, as I have matured, and dug deeper into those album cuts, they have proven to be among Gene’s strongest songs, and the subtle grooves create a perfect foundation for his lyrics. “Every Mother’s Way” feels like Gene pulling out his inner Leonard Cohen… an acoustic ballad that seems to lament something in his relationship with his mother. “What’s Your Name” returns to the theme of lost love, maybe Riki, maybe an earlier, unrequited love. “Unfunny,” being the most upbeat of the final tracks and maybe when Perfecta’s most reminiscent of the previous Dig, hints at betrayal or dishonesty. The staccato grind of “Try Not To Try’[s]” verses indicates the lyrical tension of trying to deal with some issues, while the chorus opens up more smoothly into the idea to “try not to try” and the hope that “tonight can be a beginning.” And the album closes with the return of a song that first appeared on the Brow Beat Unplugged Alternative various artists compilation. “Don’t Cry” is a beautifully sad and sentimental song, this time enhanced with the extra edge of electric guitars, yet its arrangement and performance perfectly mirrors the original acoustic Brow Beat version.
If there was one flaw to Perfecta, it would only be that its more raw and intense approach came after R.E.M.’s Monster took a parallel rawer rock sound earlier that year, making the comparisons between Adam Again and R.E.M. inevitable. I remember being a little frustrated with a Christian bookstore salesperson suggesting/recommending the album if I liked R.E.M. As a fan of both bands, I appreciated the attempt to draw the “secular” band’s fans towards this Christian underdog, but the comparisons always felt unfair. While Gene’s voice certainly held similar qualities to R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, the bands actually sounded nothing alike, and the two vocalists had very different approaches to their songwriting and performance style. But in the age of Christian music’s “recommended if you like” charts, comparisons were loose and desperate to suggest alternatives to secular artists.
By 1995, Christian music had expanded beyond the standard “Jesus quota” and Gospel/Evangelistic message. Christian songwriters had much more freedom to express a wide gamut of emotional and experiential lyrics than they have now in today’s CCM market. But, I wonder if this might be Christian music’s first breakup album. Gene and Riki’s wasn’t the first high-profile divorce among Christian artists, but I don’t know that any Christian artist had dared to open up about the experience in such a raw and vulnerable way. Even in the songs not specifically about the breakup, Gene’s words indicated a deep ache and unsettled emotion. Being the master lyricist that he was, he never revealed too much about exactly what he was going through, but still pulled the listener into his emotional state in an empathetic way.
And maybe that’s why it took me years to fully appreciate the record. I had been in love with the upbeat grooves of Dig for a long time, and I probably wasn’t ready for such an emotional, more downtempo album from one of my favorite bands. Over the years, as I have experienced my own heartaches and spiritual struggles, I find myself relating more and more to songwriters like Gene Eugene who can tug at your heart strings by revealing their own woes, yet still point you to the strongest source of their faith. Artists like Gene and Adam Again had so much more to say about the Christian life than what much of CCM limits itself to these days. I think we may never know the full impact that Gene’s death had on Christian music in March of 2000. Even though he had stayed mostly under the CCM radar for nearly 20 years, his influence on the scene was growing, right up until the night he passed away in his sleep. And now, 15 years after losing him, the Christian music world is an entirely different place than it was in the mid-to-late ‘90s. I’m not claiming that his death was the death of that scene, but maybe it played a bigger role than we realize.
