***** New American Classic
Rolling Stone

The Iron City Houserockers' second album is amazing:  a blunt, bitter, often overpowering story about how it feels to grow up blue-collar and desperate in America.  It's a tale that few rock & rollers have even tried to tell, and usually those that have did it by revisiting the scene artistically after having escaped it in life.  But the Houserockers, six working-class musicians from Pittsburgh, are still caught, and their honest, passionate message is no longer an option.  If you want to get out, you'll have to fight.  And even then, the best you can hope for is a draw.

Have a Good Time is rooted not only in the streets but in the factories, bars, and cheap homes of a steel-mill city.  The Houserockers' lyrics are charged with a gritty specificity that creates an entire living world piece by piece:  nothing feels left out, nothing is glossed over.  Though chief song writer Joe Grushecky clearly identifies with his audience more closely than any rocker this side of the Clash, he also sees himself, quite self-consciously, as its spokesman - maybe its only one.  He wants to memorialize these beaten-down lives, but he wants to change them, too, and realizes that his own rage will be worthless unless he can get others to feel it.  Grushecky is keenly aware that the things you do to run away from the trap are part of the trap, and for all his anger, his tone is often cautionary.  "If you can't be a man/You better be one of the boys" is his last word on Jimmy the rocker in "Pumping Iron".  In the title track, where a derelict warns him: "Boy, you better wipe off that stupid grin/and learn something while you still can."

But the pressures, dangers, and occasional exhilirations of this life come through most directly in the music itself.  Soaring lead guitar liens are abruptly choked back by the rhythm secion.  There's an edge of fear in Marc Reisman's wailing harmonica.  Gil Snyder's piano barely misses being dragged under by the beat.  It's pure urban R&B, laced with menace (the reference to Chicago bluesman Hound Dog Taylor's Houserockers may be accidental, but it's perfectly appropriate), and the closest thing yet to a northern equivalent of Lynyrd Skynrd.

Characters, lines and situations recur from song to song, and even when the connections aren't explicit, they're still there.  You sense that the cocky kid who lands in jail in the title tune is the same kid who loses his girl in "The Price of Love", finds a new one in "Angela" (the LP's lone happy number and the only cut in which the music breaks free) and ends up hunting in vain for a one-night stand in "Junior's Bar".  They style may be derived from Bruce Springsteen, but it's more likely that lives like these are what inspired Springsteen in the first place: i.e., the Iron City Houserockers take for granted a credibility that Springsteen has to strive for.

The contrast between "Old Man's Bar" and "Junior's Bar" works because the Houserockers make it clear that while the music may be different, the underlying emotions aren't - the kids at Junior's will wind up at the Dom somebody without noticing that anything's changed.  Similarly the put-down in "Blondie" is something that a less-committed band could never have managed.  Lines like "Now they're playing your songs in all those places/That won't let me and Angela in" cut too painfully to be denied.

Toward the end of the album, the teenage hero is on the run, the victim of a robbery committed:  Huck Finn with no real territory to light out for.  "Runnin' Scared" is the grim, logical conclusion to the story.  But then, to close the LP, the singer steps toward and speaks in his own voice - about blown gigs, about the kids who keep coming back night after night, about having to go to work the next day.  "Rock Ola" is somber and elegiac, its lyrics implying endurance even as they admit defeat.  "Rock-ola, Rock-ola" Joe Grushecky whispers. "No one can ever know how much it means to me".

You'd be flattering yourself if you contradicted him.
 

ur ears in years.