Runaway fucking Train

One of rock’s oldest and most trusted memes has been the ol’ “the minute a band blows up its immediately rejected by its ‘true’ fans who were there in the beginning when they were playing to 7 people in Podunkphuck, KY.” And one of the more defined demarcation lines for such a thing was Soul Asylum’s massive hit Runaway Train, released over 20 years ago now. As soon as it was plastered on te radio everywhere, fans of the band screamed “sellout!” and turned their back on them, as if after 10 years of sleeping on strangers’ couches Dave Pirner one day said oh fuck it, I’m just gonna write a massive hit. Because yes, that’s what people do. I’m actually one of the few people who loved the band before Runaway Train AND after. Not because of that song – it’s a good song but not really my thing. It probably did get played too much that summer, and if it had been safely tucked away on one of their albums that nobody bought, the real fans would be holding it up as “genius!” But the band remained the best live band in the world and the followup to Grave Dancers Union is a GREAT album that was of course overlooked because it didn’t include Runaway Train II. And of course the song became the veritable albatross around their necks, having to play it over and over for the new fans while their old ones howled with outrage.

ANYhoo, here’s a fantastic oral history of the song:

Pirner: I was just a punk-rock kid who never played acoustic guitar. Coincidentally, I had a tune that required an acoustic. Somehow I flipped the lyrics into a metaphor about depression. The thing that got it rolling was that I was in a very dark place, and I had somebody that I could call up in the middle of the night. [Laughs] That was it! It's almost embarrassing when I think about how personal it is. The things that were happening at that time in my life were really questioning my own mental health. When the lyric came, I did it in one sitting, but it took about four years for it to come to me.

Maybe even more famous was the video which featured the faces of kids who were, ta-da, runaways:

Kaye (video director): I think as music videos go, it must rank as one of the most important ones. Because it did something proactive for youth. Although Dave Pirner always said that he worried some kids were probably going back to situations that it might've been better for them not to have gone back to. But still it was maybe the most important thing I'll ever do.