The End of the Eighties, Track 24

“Her Way of Praying”
The Jesus and Mary Chain
Automatic
1989

A polarizing album, Automatic is The Jesus and Mary Chain one that finds the Reid brothers acting as a duo, splitting vocal duties and fleshing out their sound via drum machine and a synthesizer for bass. Embracing late ’80s bombast, the album sounds big and encompasses everything from fuzz-laced feedback to acid-fueled trips. “Her Way of Praying”, though, has always been my favorite JAMC song.

The sex-as-prayer analogy of “Her Way of Praying” fell right into my religious-questioning, lust-craving late teenage wheelhouse. It’s a song (and album) I have always associated with Maria, who I dated after my relationship with Kari imploded. Here’s what I’ve said about Maria previously…

That fall semester at BG, I took a music appreciation class of some kind (it’s a little fuzzy at this point) in the Moore Musical Arts Center. The first day of class, this cute girl and I chatted briefly and began a classroom friendship, but neither pursued anything beyond that until the end of the semester rolled around. Through small talk in class, we realized we were both from Northeast Ohio. She went to Central Catholic and grew up right in the geographic center of my high school social world. We decided to get together while home for the holidays.

I was at the peak of my punk phase at the time... my hair dyed jet black or blue-black or maroon or purple depending on the week, eyeliner, black nail polish and lipstick, my ears pierced a half-dozen times. She had a simple, girl-next-door beauty. And a boyfriend. Despite my appearance and her ties, her parents and I got along well-enough, and Maria and I spent a large part of those weeks home together. There were many late nights getting to know each other while we drank bottomless cups of coffee and I chain-smoked Marlboro Lights in a booth at the Denny’s on Everhard Road, and hanging out at her parents’ house.

Perhaps not the healthiest of relationships, in retrospect I suppose that’s what dating and youth are all about – the mistakes are a means to an end for finding one’s identity.

Automatic was released just a few months before the holidays, and I was hot and heavy on it through the winter. It got plenty of airplay while home for break and well into the spring semester back at school. All of this plays into the notion that a current album by an artist while you’re deeply immersed in a genre is more important than any other album that artist will release, and that is certainly the case for me and this collection of songs from 1989. While another track from this album will appear later on the playlist originating on the Thursday’s compilation, this album track will always evoke Bowling Green and those Northeast Ohio nights while home for the holidays.

Reverb

The Jesus and Mary Chain

21 September 2012: House of Blues, Cleveland, Ohio

I approach the possibility of seeing alternative acts from the ’80s cautiously. I initially get excited about concert announcements, then often have to do a bit of research on the touring band to see how much of the lineup is original and how much is hired guns. With a band like the Jesus and Mary Chain, though, so long as Jim and William Reid are present, I suppose that’s all that matters.

Jeff and I have had some highs and lows in our retro-concert-going experiences over the years, but with the Jesus and Mary Chain we got exactly what we expected. I was a little nervous when lead singer Jim opened the show with an advanced apology for his sore throat. That’s a move that leads to one of two outcomes: Either the band rises above it and exceeds expectations, or the band uses it as an excuse to mail it in and shit on the fans. Overcoming my feeling of dread, the band delivered, but that’s not to say there wasn’t some of the expected clichéd sourness from the brothers.

Much like the Ryan Adams show I saw at the beginning of this year, there was an edginess to the proceedings that bordered on chaos. The Reid brothers have a reputation for being a bit cantankerous, and it bled through everything they did on stage. The boys bitched about amps and some “technical differences,” and lead singer Jim abused the mic stand so much that it fell apart at one point. But it all seemed to be part of the show, part of the image that has accompanied these tetchy brothers since the ’80s.

The setlist was pretty much everything you’d want from a JAMC show – in fact, the only song missing that both Jeff and I would have liked to have heard was “Her Way of Praying” off of Automatic. But the boys opened with “Snakedriver” and burned through “Head On”, “Blues from a Gun”, “Sidewalking”, “Some Candy Talking”, “Happy When It Rains”, and “Halfway to Crazy” among others before winding down with a seemingly abbreviated version of “Just Like Honey”. But their Wall of Sound reverb wailed on the main set closing “Reverence”. The three-song encore was respectable, but didn’t stand up to the cuts off of Automatic, which sounded surprisingly good live almost a quarter century later.

I don’t actually remember a lot about the first time I saw the Jesus and Mary Chain perform live. On August 22, 1992, I worked 24+ hours straight at the Disney Inn Resort (now called Shades of Green and owned by the US military) where I was an assistant front desk manager on disaster recovery duty as Hurricane Andrew blew through the state. The next day, on no sleep, my girlfriend and I went to the Orange County Fairgrounds to see the JAMC headline the second Lollapalozza tour alongside the Chili Peppers, Ministry, Ice Cube, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam. Sleep depravation during the show and 20 years of life gone by have left me with only snippets of memories from that festival, so the opportunity to see the JAMC again was extremely appealing.

With the hindsight of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s guitar distortion-filled, neo-psychedelic, shoe-gazing influence on bands like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, my appreciation for the feisty brothers’ work is deeper than it has ever been. And it was good to have an excuse to hang out with Jeff and cross another band off our list.

(All photos by Adam Besenyodi.)