The Stone Roses: Second Coming
The Fine Art of Armchair Quarterbacking
Perhaps the only thing more annoying than a know-it-all in a record store is a know-it-all music journalist. Sure, the Elvis Costello quote about music critics can apply broadly, but the smug, unfunny, self-important frustrated MFA graduate disguised as a “serious rock scholar” is about as unbearable as it gets for me. Add to this scenario TWO journalists cracking each other up with their decidedly subjective “funny” takes on a podcast and it’s next-level, torture, a ring of Hell-level suffering right up there with the DMV and holiday meals with racist extended family members.
So when I was doing research on another media project I’m working on, I stumbled across a well-known music magazine’s podcast. The episode was counting down the worst decisions in music history, a bloated list that ranges from fish in a barrel “hot takes” to armchair quarterback disguised as comedy.
“Musicians make bad decisions. That’s just what they do,” is endemic of the conventional wisdom wrapped in this nearly two-hour podcast.
(Deep breath. Pause…)
After a walk around our nearby town park, I returnedhalf-decade to the page with much less angst and thought about #37 The Stone Rose’s five-year hiatus while making Second Coming.
Yes, the time away from the landmark self-titled LP meant the world caught up to the sound that codified around Brit-Pop but to say the to between albums was misspent is a misnomer. Nearly half of this time away was spent in legal wranglings between the band and its former label Silvertone, which really put a stop on gaining momentum as artists.
Once out from under Silvertone’s contract, the band signed with Geffen and yes, there was a cash-flush Roman Holiday that lasted nearly a year, but after being dismantled both financially and artistically by 24 months in courtrooms, getting away after getting paid feels, well, human.
Maybe the break was a bad business decision, but shouldn’t we draw a line between business and art? To have a music critic call this out in a podcast feels like the antithesis of the very nature of talking about music — in fact, this bit of pointed commentary is about commerce and profits. It’s a line that gets stampeded over and over again by our intrepid rock journalists in their podcasts. Maybe if they were writing for Forbes it would make more sense to second guess the impact on album sales, but here, it feels about as natural as an oral bowel movement.
To say the Stone Roses hiatus and the subsequent album was a mistake feels problematic, and frankly easy to posit some twenty years later.
A few weeks back in the heat of a lecture I spoke to my students about life and school as a rehearsal, a way to couch mistakes and failure as opportunity. That all the work we do in and out of a classroom or workplace ostensively serves as a rehearsal for the moments that matter — creatively, professionally, or personally. These moments come as a culmination of movement and its impact or import is subjective to us, open to interpretation, as well as revision in the passing of time and circumstance. It’s far from the “happy accident” Bob Ross mentality, but not by much, mostly because I cannot begin to assume I have ever been so calm or had such outstanding hair, but the facts stand: no one but ourselves can determine the scope and quality of a mistake and that’s because ultimately we are the ones who learn to live/not live with them. That’s really what we do, musicians, critics, music lovers alike.
Second Coming by the Stone Roses hit the shelves right around the time I was starting college. Their self-titled album was a record I had only discovered a year or two before, as a deep-diving high school music geek with a very patient record store owner walking me through the mythology.
Pre-internet the details were murky but I do remember a dog-eared copy of the NME sitting behind the register, with coverage from the Roses playing the legendary Spike Island show. It’s amazing to think how such an iconic event and movement could happen half a world away and we could be so blissfully unaware. Such was the quaint quality of a day before social media and YouTube.
So when their second record came out, I remember being beyond excited to play the advance single on my fledgling college radio show. A band like the Stone Roses was a big part of why I wanted to be on the radio in the first place. Outside of Mugsy’s Discount Records, WQSU and WCLH were where I discovered music. Of the two stations Wilkes College Listen Headquarters (WCLH) had a fainter signal, which made it all the more esoteric. The right weather conditions needed to exist for it to seemingly manifest on my bedroom stereo.
While DJing at WCLH, my friends at home would occasionally gather in an under-construction cul-de-sac on the town’s highest hill to listen to my show; a timely dispatch from beyond the cornfield limits of our small town, reminding others that culture and art were not out of reach…or maybe they just got drunk in this field and I provided a good soundtrack to pass out on construction equipment.
I bought into the tagline of my hometown commercial, big signal, radio station: “The soundtrack of your life is on...” During my senior year, I even got the chance to commit the tagline to tape as a weekend DJ at WHLM/WJMW. While I was playing Hootie and the Blowfish, Savage Garden, and Shania Twain, once in a while I would sneak The Replacements onto the show, hoping beyond hope that someone would possibly get hip to a record the same way my mind was blown a decade prior.
Unfortunately, the Stone Roses sophomore release had as much impact on radio as an FM signal barely reaching a Pennsylvania hillside. A critical shrug, a band that was growing apart artistically and a world that had come so far in five years ultimately saw the band as flagging and flailing after the bandwagon they had helped to build, gas up, and pave the highway it was speedily traveling — Cool Britannia had left the Roses behind and all that remained was acrimony, firing the drummer, and the splintering of a creative partnership.
Still, I loved Second Coming. It’s marriage of undulating basslines and house-inspired grooves with guitarist John Squire’s Jimmy Page/Les Paul worship was probably a little more guitar-heavy than the earthy-ethereal hippie rave pop rhythms that came to epitomize ’89’s The Stone Roses, but the tunes and vibes are still there. “Ten Story Love Song” is as shimmering a beacon of ‘60s optimism as anything from their debut. And “Love Spreads” is an all-time epic album closer, a chugging snarl of a song that strutted like T. Rex with a Mancunian grit (emblematic of Manchester’s industrial-spiritual connection to Detroit).
30 years after The Stone Roses debut, Second Coming had its low-key vinyl debut in the US (outside of a limited run picture disc in ‘94). Even when a copy found its way to Louisville, it was still technically a European reissue and repress from 2012. Although I had picked up a copy at Fopp a few years earlier (while teaching in Edinburgh), I was shocked to see it in the racks at Guestroom Records. There was a brief moment where promise and potential bubble up into “what ifs” or “could’ve been.” It’s always easier to reflect and litigate the past, especially when your purview into its historical context is as a piece of art you consumed and not created.
Maybe that’s what pissed me off about the podcast, so easy to make calls on missteps and crack-wise in the wake of bad decisions. It’s like gambling on a game after it’s been played? What type of bookie would let you bet on the 2023 Final Four a year after the final buzzer?
If I’m being fair, this podcast was produced in 2022 (the same year of Second Coming’s repress), and maybe with three years of hindsight and reflection, the podcast producers might reconsider their approaches and takes. Probably not, but who am I to judge?
The decaying radio signals of a lifetime ago are slowly oxidizing on cassettes in my parent’s basement — they did their best to record my radio shows even if they were not music fans (or appreciative of the fact that I opted to be a college DJ instead of someone preparing for law school). For a while, whenever I started a new teaching gig/office job at a new college, my mom would ask if they had a Law School. “There’s still time, Jimbo.” And I guess she was/is still right, just not about a future for me as a lawyer.
Regardless of the paths I’ve taken that seemingly moved me further away from a career as a lawyer, it’s not like my parents ever second-guessed my decisions. It would have been easy (and in a lot of cases fair to do), instead, these steps were never about forward/backward/toward, they were an accumulation of distance.
It’s been 30 years since I was a college freshman DJing at WCLH and since the Stone Roses released a full-length of new material. I didn’t become a nationally syndicated disc jockey and the Stone Roses never conquered America. The time between and the time ahead is full of opportunities and choices as they were in 1994 for all of us.
The shape of these moments differs and distorts based on circumstance (and privilege) but what remains is our capacity to carry on, from rehearsal to rehearsal, and let armchair quarterbacks remain comfortably on the sidelines. It’s not like they’re going to ever be in the Stone Roses or take a chance to create art that endures or connects.