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Survival songs
The hard-luck Honeydogs

BY ALLISON STEWART

“It was like a story that you read about, where so many bad things happen to one person that they become almost Job-like” is how Adam Levy describes the past three years in the life of the Honeydogs. “There’s definitely a sense of resignation after a while, but it felt very dramatic during the time it was happening to us. And it basically felt like it sucked.”

The Honeydogs used to be an up-and-coming young alterna-country five-piece of whom moderately big things were expected. Their early work resembled the late-period offerings from their erstwhile neighbors, the Replacements and Soul Asylum, and they’d released several indie albums before signing to Mercury’s Debris imprint as part of the late-’90s alterna-country boom. Melodic and wry, with an occasional fondness for psychedelia that suggested the Beatles, the group’s newer material had begun to earn them a national reputation for straight-ahead country rock with only a touch of twang.

But that was before they lost a guitar player, got signed and dropped by a major label, and had an album they’d recorded, the hopefully titled Here’s Luck, held in limbo for almost three years. And that was also before their bass player went into a coma, which was the beginning of an impressive run of bad luck. It was the summer of 1998, and the Minneapolis-based Honeydogs (Levy, his brother Noah, bassist Trent Norton, and guitarist Tommy Borscheid) were preparing to record the follow-up to their 1997 major-label debut, Seen a Ghost (Debris/Mercury).

“We were just about to enter the studio when I got a phone call,” Adam recalls. “Noah was crying on the other end. He said Trent had a seizure, and he was in a coma. The doctors were saying that even if he ever woke up, he would have really bad brain damage. He was near death. Any concerns about music went by the wayside.”

Two weeks later, Trent, who’d suffered an asthmatic seizure, came through okay. “It was miraculous,” Adam reflects. “He was like Lazarus or something.”

Five days later, the Honeydogs, with a fully recovered Norton but no Borscheid (who had quit the band), began work on Here’s Luck. By that point, though, Debris was in trouble — the president had resigned and, more important, the A&R man who signed them had left. “I knew there was a very real possibility that we were making a glorified demo project that wouldn’t see the light of day,” Adam admits, “but the band never really talked about it. You want to keep your spirits up, so nobody’s saying to each other, ‘Wow, this looks really bad.’ It was kind of a bleak time.”

Filled with orchestral passages à la Pet Sounds–era Beach Boys, and Beatlesque melodic flourishes, Here’s Luck is the most polished Honeydogs recording yet, a complicated mixture of straightforward Midwestern rock and more ambitious string-and-piano-driven pop. The disc almost totally abandons the love songs that were once the group’s stock-in-trade, emphasizing instead darker numbers about misery, alienation, and societal disconnect. Like the Jayhawks’ Smile, it’s a big-sounding album, and an obvious attempt to move beyond the rustic and rootsy alterna-country ghetto.

Unfortunately, it would be quite some time before anyone else would get to hear Here’s Luck. With Debris in disarray and Mercury in the process of being subsumed in the great Universal/PolyGram merger of 1999/2000, the album sat on the shelf at the label as weeks stretched into months, and months into years. “I Miss You,” from the then two-years-old Seen a Ghost, actually started getting national airplay on AAA radio, and the group hoped the exposure would force the label’s hand. But Mercury didn’t budge.

For more than two years, the Honeydogs (who have since added guitarist Brian Halverson and keyboardist Jeff Victor to their line-up) lived hand to mouth, playing occasional gigs and taking day jobs to survive. Adam Levy worked as a social worker, counseling juvenile offenders and refugees, and wrote a lot of songs. Being dropped by Mercury seemed a foregone conclusion: the question was, would the label let them keep Here’s Luck? Finally, last April, they were released and given the album for a nominal sum. They quickly re-signed to Palm Pictures, who put Here’s Luck out this past January.

As bad as things have been for the Honeydogs, Adam is the first to admit that it could have been worse — at least they’re getting the chance to release Here’s Luck. And he and the rest of the band are determined to take something positive away from those three years of bad breaks. “We just look at it like, from suffering comes strength. Sometimes you get your ass kicked so badly, all you can say is that there must be a reason this is happening. I felt like if we could weather the storm, maybe now we can get the rewards, one way or another.”

Issue Date: April 12 - 19, 2001