Up here on rehab mountain
Posted by Lucas Hare on 4 September 2008 - 1:01pm.
I was listening to Warren Zevon's Sentimental Hygiene today. I believe that this, like Stevie Ray Vaughan's album In Step and Ryan Adams' Easy Tiger, belongs to a genre of 'sober albums': those first forays into the studio after the artist concerned has been a very bad boy or girl but has finally and publicly kicked those nasty drugs and/or booze. So, sober albums. There must be more. Help me out.
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Permanant Vacation by Aerosmith
Not sure how popular Aerosmith might be with most Word readers, but it's a pretty fine hard rock record by any standards, and compared to the previous All Done Will Mirrors when they were all out of their tiny gourds... let's just say it's possible to detect the difference.
From Mars.
Here's a few
Not sure if they all count
Brian Wilson - Love and Mercy
Oasis - Standing on The Shoulder of Giants
Happy Mondays - Unkle Dysfunktional
Cat Power - Jukebox
Iggy Pop - Avenue B (or was this divorce?)
Pulp - We Love Life
Bowie's "Berlin" trilogy...
... starting with LOW.
Still sound great too.
Steve Earle.....
.....his first 6 albums(4 studio, 2 live)were made whilst Earle was addicted to various drugs. Around 1992 he stopped recording and playing whilst he had(as he says)"my vacation in the ghetto".
After a short while in jail for drug offences he kicked the drugs and became sober.....he still is!
His 1994 album "Train a Comin'" is his sober album. He said the songs on the album were all old songs that he'd never got round to recording before.
It's an acoustic album of mostly self penned songs. There's also covers of Lennon/McCartney "I'm Looking Through You", Townes Van Zandt "Tecumseh Valley" and whoever it was who originally wrote "Rivers Of Babylon".
It'll be in my personal top 20 for ever!
I feel alright
I agreed about TAC - but he also said he wrote the songs on it when he was in a bad way - his first wholly clean album was "I feel alright" (geddit) which is also superb.
Carlene Carter
Does her recent (and excellent) album "Stronger" come into this category?
Marianne Faithfull
I think Broken English was a sober album, but she later fell off the wagon. I'm not sure what the next album was when she had cleaned up again.
Also known for falling off the wagon and then climbing back on and falling off again are Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend.
461 Ocean Boulevard was Clapton's post heroin album. Who's Next was I think the first post acid album by The Who. My chronology might be wrong, but Who By Numbers was Townshend's post heroin album. I don't know which was his post alcoholism album. Nor do I kow which was Clapton's post alcoholism album.