Dream Baby Dream by Suicide is definitely bright pulsing orange, cerise, purple and bright pure white, all lit unsparingly with no refuge for any shadow.
I have listened to the long version of this track about 27 times today and I genuinely can’t decide how to take it.
Option A: Face value. A slow heartfelt mantra lifting the one you love up into the light of your own optimism, giving them license to dare to expect better, to want more, a declaration of total love from someone who can’t quite believe in it anymore.
Option B: Harrowing scenes. A junkie lying next to the near corpse of the woman he loved* but who he drug-dragged down into the Stygian depths of his own shallow helpless hell, muttering semi-incoherent psycho babble into her ear to at least give her the gift of something not entirely wretched in her passing. The words tearing an ever increasing toll from his soul, his tears scalding his cheeks as he realizes all he has ever done is to corrupt, infect and sully everyone he has ever come into contact with^^.
As I write this approaching midnight I’m erring on the side of hope and love, but with a side order of junkie death psychosis thrown into the mix.
Dream Baby Dream was a non-LP single bridging Suicide’s first two albums. It was produced by tour mate, Suicide fan and very tall chap Ric Ocasek. It is a deceptively simple piece of music even by the standards of their debut album, a tick-tock beat, some gently swelling chords, the spectre of a xylophone, the most obvious and simultaneously most effective chord sequence in all recorded history, plus Alan Vega’s sincere Elvis croon.
This is not a song to listen to at midday. This is a song to play in the dark, preferably looking outside at a neon sign that no longer fully lights. Its a song born of that flicker of technological failure, a song born from a well of emotion dredged out of somewhere hidden away and numbed for years, a song that almost embarrasses the singer and listener alike because, feelings.
This backing track on Dream Baby Dream is so rudimentary, almost a placeholder you feel and because of that it sets Vega’s vocals off perfectly. After a short while you fail to hear anything but that voice, his incantation, his repeated mantra that intensifies with every repetition and tiny variation. It’s a bravura performance.
Bruce Springsteen, who knew Suicide from when they recorded in the studio next door to him around this time, plays Dream Baby Dream sometimes as the last song of his set. In his telling it is everything he tells the crowd to do over the preceding 3 hours, boiled down into unvarnished simplicity, an invocation to hope, to dream, to keep on burnin’.
I remain a bit less certain of its good intent. I suspect Mr S is simply a better, more spiritually aspirational man than I and we all get the Dream Baby Dream we deserve and/or need**.
There are two versions of Dream Baby Dream on my spiffy RSD 2019 orange vinyl copy^*, the ‘Long Version’ and the normal 3:13 one. My advice go for the 6:20 version every single time, it is how it was meant to sound; you will still need to loop it for half an hour to get the full blam-blam-blam though.
The other track here is ‘Radiation’, an ostensibly darker treat, but still excellent. You will be shocked to learn that over a one finger synth line Vega mutters all manner of chilling post-fallout reportage without any ambiguity at all, but maybe with a slight touch of Augustus Pablo dub about it.
Mama, Oh mama I look at the sky Four horsemen Look at that, man Oh I started to cry
Sweet dreams.
1256 Down.
PS: this post tangentially inspired by Mumbling Tony’s recent spate of Springsteen posts. Good on ya.
*probably on a bare mattress exhibiting a legion of decidedly unsettling stains, in an unlit room, flickering light from the lights outside glinting off the broken glass and needle slivers on the rubbish strewn floor.
^^should have saved this for Christmas day, eh readers?
**his recently recorded version is not so good, it starts well but he goes all maximalist towards the end, it all has the affect of a love letter written in too large a font, in bold and underlined.
^*only limited to 2800 copies, so there are probably only a few copies on my street. I suspect Doris and Bernard have an original ’79 copy so passed on the reissue.
27 times? You are my hero.
It got better each and every time.
I’m chuckling.
Velvet Underground meets Moroder. Should work and does!
They wanted to get Moroder to produce this and their second LP. Now that would have been great.
Suicide, Springsteen and Augustus Pablo. This post has everything!
Do you play the first Suicide LP often? I find I’m not often in that particular mood.
Thanks Bruce. Not often, but I do get it out to play 3 or 4 times/year, I listen to the individual tracks more on mixes etc. I would worry a great deal about someone who wanted to listen to ‘Frankie Teardrop’ often, both for them and their loved ones.
I absolutely love just how out there Suicide were, both then and now, out-punking all those conformist punks.
For sure. Them and Throbbing Gristle. Truly outré outliers.
I find TG all but unlistenable. Yuk, Cosi Fanny Tutti’s autobiog is a brilliant read though.
I would imagine it is, er, colourful.