Paul Westerberg 5: Come Feel Me Tremble and Dead Man Shake

A year after his double-whammy bipolar Stereo and Mono albums, Paul Westerberg stuck with the formula with two more albums that equally indulged his desires to rock and wallow. Once again he played everything himself, and he’d gotten rather adept at recording in his basement.

Come Feel Me Tremble may have gotten more attention, seeing as that was also the title of a documentary—mostly gathered from camcorder footage—about his tour promoting the last album, usually with a cigar in his mouth. While some of the songs appear here, this is not a soundtrack album. It’s still full of catchy hooks, but the vocals are usually buried, so it’s not easy to hear if anything should be considered profound.

To wit, “Dirty Diesel” rumbles along with a riff one chords except when it switches to a second, and eventually fades away. Titles like “Soldier Of Misfortune” and “What A Day (For A Night)” portend Westerbergian wordplay, but we can’t understand most of the verses. The vaudevilley verses of “Knockin’ Em Back” sit strangely next to the punkier verses, “Wild & Lethal” has some unexpected chord changes and wailing harmonica for five minutes, and “Never Felt Like This Before” is a tender piano sketch that stops after a minute. Two versions of “Crackle & Drag” back to back not only finally provide marked contrast between loud and soft, but it’s only the more acoustic version that cause us to dig into the lyrics, which address Sylvia Plath’s suicide. By the same token, the subject of “Pine Box” would appear to be his father, but that’s only a guess. “Meet Me Down The Alley” tries for the yearning of “Here Comes A Regular”, and he takes a stab at Jackson Browne’s perennial “These Days”; Gregg Allman needn’t have worried.

That’s a mild tie-in to the content of the album credited to Grandpaboy that came out the same day on the Fat Possum label, the subsidiary of Epitaph devoted to aging bluesmen. Dead Man Shake isn’t really blues per se, but is actually rather convincing. Covers are scattered throughout; “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” is older than he is, while Jimmy Reed’s “Take Out Some Insurance” first came out the year he was born. “Souvenirs” is from John Prine’s second album, but nobody expected Anthony Newley’s “What Kind Of Fool Am I?” Of his own tunes, “Vampires & Failures”, “Get A Move On”, and even the title track might has well have been on the “other” album, “Mpls” and “Cleaning House” sound more like the stuff Slim Dunlap would do, while “No Matter What You Say” is more smokey and descends into parody.

While he’s certainly capable as a one-man band, and such economy may have helped his bottom line, it didn’t do much for enriching his catalog. If you’re gonna put out two albums at once, make them different if they’re not stellar top to bottom. Better yet, form a band.

Paul Westerberg Come Feel Me Tremble (2003)—2½
Grandpaboy Dead Man Shake (2003)—2½