Much like Steve Wynn from a couple of weeks back, David + David have made careers out of making music despite only having a modicum of commercial success. They released exactly one album together, which reached #39 on the Billboard 200, before parting ways for unexplained reasons. David Baerwald (amazingly enough, the first name of the two gentlemen responsible for David + David is "David") has released a handful of solo efforts (I was a big fan of his first, Bedtime Stories) and done a lot of songwriting for others as well as working on movie scores. David Ricketts has had success producing albums for others, notably Toni Childs and Meredith Brooks (of "Bitch" fame). Rumor had them collaborating on a second LP in 2016, but near as I can tell that only resulted in another solo effort from Baerwald. Still, they've managed to eat and pay the rent from their talents, which has to beat the hell out of slaving away for some corporation. Just guessing....
Fun Fact: Both Davids were part of the Tuesday Night Music Club, which spawned the first album for one Sheryl Crow, who would go on to have much more success than all of the other Club members combined. Ricketts also had a songwriting credit for Crow's best song, "Leaving Las Vegas." Fascinating, my God.
Released on their Boomtown LP in 1986, "Welcome to the Boomtown" reached #37 (with a bullet!) on The Billboard Hot 100, and was a blast of fresh sounding music chronicling the excesses of those who benefited most from the economic recovery of the 80's. The song opens with a screeching guitar from David Ricketts that's one part noble craftmanship and one part eastern mysticism. It leads into the first vignette, sang by Baerwald with a world weary rasp, of a young woman who seemingly has it all...including a coke habit and the paranoia that comes with it, before he bursts into the worldly wise chorus. He belts it out with an all-knowing and all-seeing fervor that says, Yes, times are golden but look where the hell it got us. The song alternates between the wicked guitar playing of Ricketts and the omniscient vocals of Baerwald, both encased with a driving rhythm that encapsulates both the excitement of new found wealth and the disgust of it wastes. As I listened to it this week in the lead up to this post, I was actually surprised that "Welcome to the Boomtown" was even better than I had originally thought, both as an indictment of the Reagan devolution and as a warning for the Gilded Age that we live in now.
Liner notes: "Welcome, welcome to the boomtown/All that money makes such a succulent sound/Welcome to the boomtown..."
Enjoy:
Fuck Donald Trump,
emaycee
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