There are certain inevitabilities in life, all of which we have known, consciously or otherwise, since we were very young. One is that all earthly existence will one day perish in an apocalypse of our own making. Another: We can expect that until that time, food will be made ever more good-tasting and aerodynamic. Lastly, we have all been certain, no matter how hard we tried to deny it, that this column would one day be devoted to the music of Big Country. That one day is this day, which is now. Thursday.
I discovered Big Country through one of the non-MTV video shows, most likely Friday Night Videos, which used to air on NBC in the early '80s. The "In a Big Country" clip featured the band (presumably--they were wearing helmets) riding around Scotland on ATVs, chasing some willful young lass. But I bought The Crossing, Big Country's 1983 debut album, as many did, not only because the sound was so distinctive--the guitars as bagpipes--but because when they sang about the largeness of the land and how it might inspire someone needing uplift, they seemed completely serious.
Stuart Adamson, the band's singer and songwriter, wrote about Scotland--not the new, semi-Americanized Scotland growing in the cities of Glasgow or Edinburgh, but the old Highlands Scotland of glacial creation and gray skies and evil English lords and William Wallace. There were songs on The Crossing about famine ("Harvest Home"), missionaries making their way home in the dark ("Lost Patrol"), and great bloody battles ("Fields of Fire"). All were grand, all were panoramic. Even the occasional love song ("1000 Stars") sounded as if a man and a woman were breaking up on the edge of a rocky, windswept cliff.
The album's inner sleeve was illustrated with black-and-white renderings of lighthouses, oceans, men dodging falling rocks. The band's logo included a compass. A compass! Who else, except perhaps John Denver, about whom no more shall be said, has dared to write songs about the land, about mountains and storms? With Mark Brzezicki's martial drumming and Adamson's booming voice, the album was intimate yet vast, gritty yet atmospheric, universal yet fervently nationalistic. Listening to it, you really felt--prepare for a word this magazine will regret publishing--transported. Even the band's videos sought to immerse you in a frigidly exotic place and time. While U2 rode horses in the snow in "New Year's Day," Big Country dressed as World War I soldiers and ran through minefields in "Fields of Fire." It was so corny it ached, but its unfettered earnestness was welcome, given the vapidity of the era.
Big Country were born in 1981, when the United Kingdom was producing some of the most ludicrous music ever devised. Synthesizers had sent thousands of actual-instrument-playing musicians onto the dole, and most successful bands traveled with a hair architect, a jeans ripper, and someone to tie scarves around the members' necks and ankles. Still, there was some good music to be found, smart, tight pop that took punk's energy and polished it, exploding the fatuousness of Boston-Journey-ELO spaceship rock, stripping things down, bringing it back to Earth. Squeeze made it, as did XTC, Elvis Costello, and the Go-Go's. We listen to their tight, well-crafted songs and we think, "Of course! This is the way songs are supposed to be--they should be neat and polished and no more than three minutes long." There are no loose ends, no mistakes, and this gives us a sense, dare we say, of the order we can make of the world.
But then we hear something different. We hear something huge and loose and flawed, and when that somehow works, we switch our allegiance and we say, "No, no--this is it, this is the way it should be." Such music unravels everything we know but makes that unraveling, that fraying of all order, feel like the best idea anyone's ever had. It hits higher highs and lower lows, and by the end, you wind up somewhere very different from where you began. This is the Epic Album, achieved by bands like U2, Radiohead, and, most recently, the Walkmen (holy lord, that record is great). The difference between the tidy song/Perfect Album and the crazy song/Epic Album is the difference between driving an efficient, shiny sports car that can accelerate quickly and turn on a dime and driving an 18-wheeler at 200 miles an hour and having it take off, become airborne, and just barely miss flying into a mountain. The Crossing was that kind of album.
So I started following pretty much everything Big Country did. I was too young (13) to go to a concert at a club--and I don't even know if they made it to Chicago--but I caught them when they gave a short TV interview, which I taped on our new Montgomery Ward VCR. Stuart Adamson sat with bassist Tony Butler, at that point the only black man I'd ever heard speak with a Scottish accent. Adamson was pasty, his hair short but gelled in a bedhead style, his eyes small, close-set, and dark. He looked and sounded like a Boy Scout, talking very solemnly about how few bands were making real music, how slick and uninspired things had become.
He and Butler were wearing plaid shirts--one red, one blue. Big Country wore a lot of plaid. This was an era when bands, like the image-conscious gangs in The Warriors, wore matching outfits: The Jacksons had their space-admiral look, Dexy's Midnight Runners had their waif-in-overalls motif, and BananaramaÂ…also had a waif-in-overalls motif. And though such ensembles, even then, seemed tragic, Big Country's somehow felt unplanned, as if the members all happened to show up, night after night, photo shoot after photo shoot, in plaid shirts, presumably selected from closets holding nothing else. These men were so unmistakably sincere that everything they did defied pity or suspicion.
I can't say it was all Big Country's doing, but I too started wearing a lot of flannel. That winter I walked through the snow for hours listening to The Crossing, jumping down ravines, looking for caves, walking on frozen lakes, letting in the cold. I would come home chilled to the bone, my feet itchy from the onset of frostbite, but I felt stoic, like I knew something about the fighting men of the harsh Scottish countryside. It was sad, yes, but this is the kind of experience-through-osmosis adolescents usually get by reading Wuthering Heights or Dune, not from listening to an album. How many bands could claim to have created, in ten songs, an entire troubled, inspired, rainy, sorrowful but persevering world?
Big Country became well known for their live shows, which were spirited, revival-like. During "Fields of Fire" they often did a sort of jig, kicking at the same time, left and right, a little bit Highlands, a little bit rock'n'roll. I eventually found a live import of a New Year's Eve concert in Edinburgh. At the end of the show, while the drummer did a long snare buildup to "In a Big Country," Adamson spoke to the audience, out of breath. "I just want to say..." he said, then he seemed to lose his train of thought. "I just want to say..." he repeated, and trailed off again. After a long pause, he finished: "I just want to say...stay alive." He spoke the words very quickly, as if for whatever reason they were difficult to get out. At least that's how I remember it. Then the band kicked in.
Big Country's next two recordings, 1984's Wonderland EP and Steeltown, were every bit as good as The Crossing, but the quartet never had another hit in the U.S. Eventually they seemed to capitulate to what they felt the American market wanted, creating a series of shatteringly mainstream singles, as if Adamson had been possessed by Kip Winger. Or Kip Winger's less talented brother. Worse, the band traded in their denim and flannel for tapered linen pants and Miami Vice jackets. It was rough.
And now, while a series of '80s bands have been eulogized or even resurrected, nobody talks much about Big Country. Maybe it's because they defy classification. Those interested in the kitsch value of the era might recall Big Country for their plaid and for committing Rock Sin No. 41--having a song with their name in it--but any deeper look into their music separates them from the Kajagoogoos or Dramaramas. Big Country had an original take on the world and might have followed a path similar to U2's--their sound was just as big, and Adamson's worldview was just as idealistic. Yet before they had the chance to make the leap from curiosity to full respectability--a leap made by Beck, the Beastie Boys, and others who started their careers with a misunderstood crossover hit--they abandoned what made them distinctive. And many of their loyalists deserted them.
Stuart Adamson hanged himself in a hotel room in Hawaii in 2001, at the age of 43. He'd disappeared a few weeks earlier from his home in Tennessee, where he'd moved in 1997. He'd struggled with alcoholism for years, and an autopsy revealed that at the time of his death, he had a blood-alcohol level over 0.2. His passing made the wire services, but it wasn't big news in America. It had been, after all, 18 years since "In a Big Country." But for those who still cared--and there are dozens of websites that dissect every word he wrote and publicly spoke--Adamson's death was as affecting as anyone's, including Kurt Cobain's.
For the previous six months, I'd been in touch with the band's manager, Ian Grant, because I was planning to write something about Big Country--I didn't know what, maybe a short biography, or a tribute; I wasn't sure. Grant told me that Adamson was living in Nashville with his wife, who owned a beauty parlor, and that he was writing country music with a band called the Raphaels. At some point while we were trying to arrange a time for me to visit, news of Adamson's disappearance arrived. The official Big Country website posted pleas to fans to report any sightings. It was devastating to watch it all unfold.
Kurt Cobain's suicide wasn't entirely surprising. His head was known to be a dark and tortured place, and there were countless clues that he might someday choose an early exit. But it's harder to get your mind around things, isn't it, when someone whose vision seemed so positive and outward-focusing decides to end his life. How can a man who finished his concerts with the words "stay alive," the words spoken to throngs of young people as they looked up at him soaked in sweat and grinning, hang himself in a Hawaii hotel room?
There's no moral here. There are lessons, maybe, but they cancel each other out. Lesson: Don't forget who you are, and don't pretend to be, say, Kip Winger or a country singer from Nashville. On the other hand: Was Adamson supposed to play Scot-rock in plaid flannel all his life? Lesson: More bands should write about the land, the sky, soldiers, storms, oceans; the world is vast and rock music is uniquely poised to reflect that. Counterpoint: One false move and you've got Gordon Lightfoot's "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." Lesson: Go buy The Crossing. Listen to the eight-minute "Porrohman" and tell me these guys didn't know something about soul and suffering and uplift. Counterpoint: There is no counterpoint to that one. Final lesson: Support your local Epic Album makers. Let the Walkmen and Interpol and Grandaddy know they're necessary to the mix, lest they take the easy way out.
