My All-Timers: 18. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds — Let Love In
I think the reason it takes a while to become a true music fan, usually not until the age of about 12 or 13, is that when you’re younger than that you are scared of pretty much everything. Imagery that might seem benign as a teenager can hit you as a tween and give you the creeps.
This is what happened to me with Nick Cave. The Bad Seeds played the 1994 edition of Lollapalooza, back when it was a summer-long country-wide tour. MTV News was doing a round-up of all the bands playing it (Kurt Loder and Tabitha Soren were probably involved). As they showed clips of familiar bands like The Smashing Pumpkins and The Beastie Boys, Nick Cave popped up on my screen, hunched over and screaming his lungs out. My 11-year old eyes could barely comprehend what they were seeing. I had seen what I thought was crazy, like Kurt Cobain yelling into the camera, but this was different. This was primal and odd — not at all the nicely manicured package in which most of the bands I liked were presented.
So it took many years for me to even think about Nick Cave again, let alone listen to one of his records. Before getting into the Bad Seeds, I fell in love with Cave’s previous band The Birthday Party and their record Junkyard. The utter racket those guys produced served as a good explanation for where Cave came from and why the Bad Seeds were what they were. Cave has a sensitive songwriter’s heart, but he’s also a goddamn maniac. Those two qualities came together to make the Bad Seeds, and that sound was never more crystallized than on Let Love In.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are one of the very few bands I love who could possibly fit the term “goth.” They’re not as downcast and drab as Sisters of Mercy or Bauhaus (both of whom are a solid NO THANKS for me), but there is an air of dark menace that lurks through everything Cave says and does, even when he’s showing his supposedly tender side. Though his piano ballad side wouldn’t really show up until records like The Boatman’s Call and No More Shall We Part, up until Let Love In he was channeling his inner Sinatra and crooning like a master. “Nobody’s Baby Now” sounds like a 60’s girl group song on Oxycontin — bright and sunshiney, but sluggish and full of dread. And “Do You Love Me?,” split into parts that open and close the record, uses lots of slow reverb to create one hell of a mood.
The two very best songs on Let Love In need to be explored in depth. The first is “Red Right Hand:” a quiet creeper with bad intentions. The subject of the song is vague — is it about a drug dealer? A hitman? The human embodiment of Lucifer? Whoever he is, he can make your dreams come true, and he can ruin you too. Backing this uncertainty is reserved playing, never getting too loud. But after the end of each chorus, as the band has dropped out and Cave sings, “his red right hand,” there are two booming hits of a huge drum, way in the background. These hits could be symbolic of bullets, or stomping of the ground, or anything you can imagine. When the Bad Seeds play this live, the dim lights flash on those two hits, and it’s one of the coolest stage lighting cues I’ve ever seen.
The other most awesome song on this record is “Loverman,” which has such a raucous vibe that Metallica covered it. Surely James Hetfield thought he could sound evil singing the verse’s refrain of “There’s a devil waiting outside your door — how much longer?” But he was no match for the sleazy menace that Cave channels on the original. For years I have assumed “Loverman” was just a lark about an unnamed creep, sort of like “Red Right Hand,” but listening back this week gave me a revelation: this song is about Cave’s addiction to heroin. The devil waiting outside his door is the allure of the drug, and the band’s groove behind him is sultry and foreboding. And then each chorus is a blistering explosion that is clearly meant to signify Cave giving in to his demons and letting the “Loverman” decide his fate. I’m not even going to bother researching whether or not Cave has confirmed my theory, because I love it too much for it to not be true.
The modern incarnation of Nick Cave is an older man, still a bit tight-wired but distinguished and weary from the years. The Bad Seeds are much more quiet now — their last record, Skeleton Tree, reflects the incalculable sadness of Cave losing his teenage son in a freak accident. Yet even when he’s crooning low over a morose piano track, it’s impossible to not think of the wildman he once was. His voice is too distinct and otherworldly to be anything other than Nick Cave, the heroin-addled screaming savage who tinkered with his abilities and made genius stuff like Let Love In. No matter what version of Nick Cave you’re listening to, you’re in the same reliable, ghoulish hands.
