Adam Again - Dig
Music You Might Want to Consider - A
It’s September 1992. A year prior, the popular music landscape was shaken to its core by the release of Nevermind by Nirvana. Everything, overnight, went from big hair, leather pants, and clean guitar licks to flannel sheets, torn jeans, and distorted guitar jams accentuated by just the right amount of feedback.
In the Christian music world, artists like Michael W. Smith, DC Talk, and The Newsboys, were headlining good, clean, Christian music festivals like Creation Fest and Kingdom Bound. The faithful would travel for miles to catch a glimpse of their favorite singers, maybe buy some cheesy t-shirts, and hear various sermons about evangelizing your community, your high school, whatever.
As a card carrying member of that Christian community, both then, and now, I don’t remember a lot of sermons talking about angst, sin1, or doubt. You didn’t find a lot of music about that back then.
Until Nirvana. Then everything changed.
No music encapsulated the angst of Gen X better than Nirvana. We were the first generation to grow up with divorced parents, the AIDs epidemic, and terror from the Middle East. And that made us an anxious group of teenagers in 1992. For Christian teenagers, we found ourselves with that anxiety coupled with an unhealthy fear of God2 and a lack of good music to encourage us through it.
I was drawn to Nirvana because of this fact, and while I will always love Nevermind, I wish I had discovered Adam Again around the same time.
What Nirvana did for run of the mill teenage angst, Adam Again did for everything else.
Led by Gene Eugene, a former child actor3, Adam Again started out as a Christian new wave alternative rock band in the mid-eighties. They, along with bands like Daniel Amos, the 77s, and Lifesavers Underground, formed a very unique alt-rock community from Southern California. Bands that were categorically Christian, but creatively exploratory and, for lack of a better term - dirty.
These bands didn’t paint a pretty picture for believers. They wore their struggles and their doubts fully on their sleeves, and suffered for it. Adam Again got almost no radio airplay, despite the technically sound musicianship and the moving poetry of their albums.
Where the world had Nirvana, we had Adam Again.
Dig is their third album, and it’s my favorite for a lot of reasons. Gene’s vocals are backed beautifully by the vocals of his then wife Riki Michele, and those vocals are supported by a foundation of sound that’s a mix between distorted grunge and funk, which is most evident on songs like “Walk Between the Raindrops”, and “It Is What It Is (What it Is)”.
But the real stars of the record are the 1-2-3 punch of “Deep”, “Dig”, and “River on Fire”, which seem to encapsulate the journey of someone through doubt, pain, questions, and failures. Gene plays with a lot of metaphors in each of thes songs, and, on “River on Fire”, he admits that he pulls them out of the air.
“River on Fire” itself, is an emotional rollercoaster, the story of a man admitting his shortcomings, knowing he’s failed his wife maybe a few too many times. The song itself is almost autobiographical, considering his marriage was falling apart at the time, and that fact alone makes Riki Michele’s backing vocals even sadder.
You can even hear the Leonard Cohen influence in the structure of the song as well, it’s almost a cousin to “Famous Blue Raincoat”4, like a letter to someone they loved and then lost. It hits me in the gut every single time, the slow build to the destructive feedback in the end, almost like it’s the inevitable crash landing, happening in real time.
Sadly, Gene Eugene died from a brain aneurysm on March 20, 2000, almost 22 years ago. He was only 38 years old. Adam Again produced one more album between Dig and his death, the sublime Perfecta. We’ll never know what an old Gene Eugene would sing about, but it’s fun to think about.
But we’ll always have what he gave us. And it was a pretty awesome gift.
Well, except for sexual sin, they always had a few sermons about that.
All I remember is, when I was a teenage Christian, my fear of God was less a godly fear, and more a fear of judgment, or being left behind by the rapture.
Seriously. Dude was in an episode of Bewitched when he was a kid. I looked it up.
Gene actually recorded a great cover of this in the months before he died.
Nice review. You put me to shame!