According to the Rolling Stone article “Seeking Soul Asylum,” run in late 1992 and penned by Chris Mundy, lead singer Dave Pirner one night at a gig was “slipped a tab of acid and followed the show by spray-painting the band’s mobile home gold.” It’s the type of episode we’re usually quick to laugh at. But LSD can be very harmful stuff to the psyche — in fact it’s the primarily embraced culprit behind the descent into insanity suffered by original Pink Floyd singer/songwriter Syd Barrett, who, per report, before getting immersed in use of the drug was not only heady but gregarious and charismatic.
Soul Asylum’s Let Your Dim Light Shine (1995) plays like the work of somebody who unwillingly had to undergo an acid trip. Notwithstanding the first cut, “Misery,” which traipses along in median Soul Asylum tempo, mood and subject matter, the whole thing is pretty much smattered with eclectic craziness and closely juxtaposed opposites. It’s a full-bodied alternative rock album insofar as it represents a widely toggling constellation of moods and scenes. It also, though, tends to harbor different conceptions of reality altogether, hence mimicking an acid trip. The psychedelic, absurdist “String of Pearls,” for instance, tells the kooky and labyrinthine story of how a chain reaction of human events including a Siamese Twin president and a man dying by hitting his head on a urinal led a priest to finding a whore’s lost necklace in the street. The tender, almost heartbreakingly gorgeous “Eyes of a Child” emphasizes innocence and almost the type of purposeful naivete championed by Kurt Cobain, another probably unfortunate houser of ample hallucinogenic attrition.
Let Your Dim Light Shine also boasts some of the band’s best hard-rocking songs ever put to wax, like “Bittersweetheart” and “Crawl.” Matters come to a head, you might say, though, with “Caged Rat,” which follows “Crawl” by one slot at track nine. In short, “Caged Rat” is a haunting, intimidating phenomenon of a rock track that was not heard of at the time of its release and could never be duplicated afterward. Actually, the effect of its influence on artists could theoretically be traced to the Smashing Pumpkins cut “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” of later in 1995 and its incessant chorus of “Despite all my rage / I am still just a rat in a cage”. I mean, no one cares as much about Billy Corgan’s perceived reputation of artistic integrity as Billy Corgan himself, so I figure I’m in the clear here.
“Caged Rat” is a dichotomous song composed of two separate, distinct phases, which happen to fall temporally within the verse and chorus, respectively. The verse, as to be starkly contrasted with the chorus, actually sidles in easily and “coolly,” like a jazz number, or the work of a band prone to locking themselves in the studio for weeks on end smoking weed and listening to Herbie Hancock. Part of the effect of this, then, lends itself directly to its counterpart, which is the chorus, a kind of hardcore punk [1] vitriolic explosion of the words “Caged rat / Caged rat / Caged rat”.
The sheer stylistic disparity between the two segments and the discrepancies in mood looms to represent, I think, the highs and lows, as well as the mood swings, of an acid trip. What’s more, with the subject having been lured into the corner by the concept of enlightenment and edification, only to find himself coerced into a state of myopia and dimness, the song also plays with the query of shifting sense of reality, or shifting realities, we get with the throes of LSD-related brain damage. Ultimately, I think, “Caged Rat” stands as the summit of Dave Pirner’s catharsis in the wake of that awful experience of involuntarily tripping. It sums up the frustration, the confusion and the unwanted shifts and illusions of the psyche sure to come with someone inundating your world with the madness and Cubist horror of an unexpected acid trip.
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