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Crowd­ed House has a tremen­dous per­sonal sig­nif­i­cance for me. I have not had many days of undi­luted hap­pi­ness, but per­haps the best of them end­ed with putting on Tem­ple of Low Men for the first time. For some strange rea­son, I had nev­er heard it, though I had been famil­iar with oth­er Crowd­ed House albums for years. So I can’t be objec­tive about the song “Into Temp­ta­tion”. But I think that even with­out the per­sonal asso­ci­a­tions, I would rec­og­nize it as a superbly craft­ed song. And that about sums up Neil Finn’s song­writ­ing: superb crafts­man­ship and intel­li­gence applied to intense­ly emo­tional sub­jects. I am not a sen­ti­men­tal per­son, and musi­cal treat­ments of the joys and dis­ap­point­ments of love don’t usu­ally tug at my heart. But noth­ing seems arti­fi­cial or child­ish when Neil Finn writes it.

For this Focus, I’m lis­ten­ing to the entire cor­pus of Crowd­ed House, and and much it’s pre­de­ces­sor Split Enz, as well as the solo work of broth­ers Tim and Neil Finn. My col­lec­tion is fair­ly com­plete. I have all of the orig­i­nal Crowd­ed House stu­dio albums [ Crowd­ed House (1986); Tem­ple of Low Men (1988); Wood­face (1990); Togeth­er Alone (1993)], as well as the post-breakup sin­gles col­lec­tion After­glow (1999) and the com­pi­la­tion album Recur­ring Dream (1996), which also includ­ed three unre­leased songs. In addi­tion, I have the Bonus Live album which had a lim­ited release as a pro­mo­tion for Recur­ring Dream . This con­tains some unusu­al live per­for­mances, some of which eclipse the stu­dio ver­sions. The ten minute rework­ing of “Hole in the Riv­er” is a com­plete meta­mor­pho­sis. In addi­tion, I have a per­sonal anthol­ogy of down­loads of mis­cel­la­neous live per­for­mances, includ­ing odd-ball col­lab­o­ra­tions with Sinead O’Connor and Cheryl Crow. The only thing I’m miss­ing is Farewell to the World (1996), their last live con­cert in Sid­ney. This is not even list­ed on Amazon.com, so I pre­sume it can be found only in Aus­tralia or New Zealand.

The rela­tion­ship with Split Enz is com­pli­cated. Split was found­ed in 1971 by Tim Finn and some col­lege friends at Auck­land Uni­ver­sity. It rapid­ly became New Zealand’s best-known band. It com­bined a fusion of what was then called “pro­gres­sive rock” with pop vital­ity, and ele­ments of swing and honky-tonk. Their stage shows, by all accounts, were visu­ally spec­tac­u­lar and pre­saged much of the video sen­si­bil­ity that was to lat­er evolve in the indus­try. The band migrat­ed to the UK, where it was a sol­id suc­cess, com­pet­ing with Gen­e­sis for the “prog-rock” audi­ence. Tim’s younger broth­er (by six years) had been a grade-school boy when the band first became suc­cess­ful, but in 1977, he was old enough to join the band. Split Enz only record­ed orig­i­nal mate­r­ial; every song on every Enz album and sin­gle was writ­ten by mem­bers of the group. Grad­u­ally, Neil con­tributed more and more songs to the group, and by the time the band reached a new style and new suc­cess with three excel­lent albums [ True Colours (1980); Waia­ta (1981); Time and Tide (1982)] the band had become a cre­ative dia­log between the two broth­ers. I have vinyls of these three, as well as a cd com­pi­la­tion of cov­er­ing their entire evo­lu­tion, Liv­ing Enz (1991). The band final­ly broke up in 1984 so that Tim could pur­sue a solo career. I have some of his solo albums [ Escapade (1983); Tim Finn (1989); Before and After (1993), though there are sev­eral oth­ers I haven’t heard].

With the breakup of Split Enz, Neil Finn went to Aus­tralia and put togeth­er a line­up includ­ing Paul Hes­ter (Aussie mem­ber of Split Enz), Nick Sey­mour (anoth­er younger broth­er of a suc­cess­ful Aus­tralian band front man), and gui­tarist Craig Hoop­er. They were ini­tially called the Mulanes, and were effec­tively an Aus­tralian band with an Aus­tralian fol­low­ing. The intri­cate love-and-hate, vis­i­ble-and-invis­i­ble, envy-and-rebel­lion inter­ac­tions of New Zealand and Aus­tralian musi­cians par­al­lel those between Cana­dian and Amer­i­can musi­cians. Think of the Mulanes as being The Band. Old­er broth­er Tim was to join the band half way through its career, and the inter­play of tones and approach­es that char­ac­ter­ized the fra­ter­nal col­lab­o­ra­tion in Split Enz ensured that the band remained cre­atively vital.

In 1985, they won a con­tract with Capi­tol and moved to Los Ange­les, at which time Hoop­er left the band. Capi­tol didn’t think much of the Ozzy-sound­ing name, so they re-dubbed them­selves “Crowd­ed House”, in hon­our of their cramped hous­ing at 1902 N. Sycamore St. in Los Ange­les dur­ing the record­ing of their first album. Capi­tol was not enthu­si­as­tic, and failed to pro­mote the album. Des­per­ate, the band played every small-time venue they could to build up a word-of-mouth fol­low­ing, and on the strength of this, suc­ceeded in re-releas­ing one song from the album, the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal “Don’t Dream It’s Over”, as a sin­gle. It imme­di­ately became a mas­sive inter­na­tional hit, reach­ing #2 on the US charts. Anoth­er sin­gle re-release, “Some­thing So Strong”, did almost as well. But in the U.S., their suc­cess was short lived. Playlist-dom­i­nat­ed radio and MTV con­sid­ered their songs “too brainy” for the Amer­i­can mar­ket, and they soon dis­ap­peared from view. Most Amer­i­cans, sad­ly, have had almost no expo­sure to their large out­put of mas­ter­fully writ­ten, per­formed and pro­duced songs. In Cana­da, it seems to have been a dif­fer­ent sto­ry. They clicked with the Cana­dian audi­ence and indus­try, their sub­se­quent albums were wide­ly avail­able, and they were reg­u­lar faces on Much­Mu­sic and MusiquePlus.

Now, I real­ly doubt that this has any­thing to do with any inad­e­quacy of Amer­i­can lis­ten­ers. Capi­tol, even when faced with a hit first album, pan­icked at the sur­prises and com­plex­i­ties in the sec­ond, Tem­ple of Low Men , and buried its pro­mo­tion. Though Neil’s lyrics can be odd and enig­matic at times, the songs gen­er­ally tell a sto­ry which you can sort out, the melodies are strong and catchy, the arrange­ments full of sur­prises and strik­ing effects. There’s no rea­son that half the songs on this album, such as the sar­donic “Bet­ter Be Home Soon”, the aching­ly beau­ti­ful “Into Temp­ta­tion”, “I Feel Pos­sessed” and “Sis­ter Mad­ly”, could eas­ily have been chart hits if peo­ple had been exposed to them. The same is true of “Weath­er With You”, “There Goes God” and “Fall At Your Feet” from Wood­face , and “Dis­tant Sun” and “Locked Out” from Togeth­er Alone , not to men­tion “Pri­vate Uni­verse”, which is a uni­ver­sally appeal­ing as any Bea­t­les anthem, com­bin­ing high art with acces­si­bil­ity to any­one “Locked Out did man­age to sneak to the bot­tom of some U.S. charts because it appeared on a film soundtrack.

If you are Cana­dian or Euro­pean, or from Down Under, you hard­ly need this lec­ture, but if you are Amer­i­can, you are in a for a lot of plea­sure when you explore Crowd­ed House. Not to men­tion a bit of resent­ment for a music indus­try that is not serv­ing you well.

Last­ly, I must men­tion the weak­est part of my “focus”. I only have one of Neil’s two solo albums, Try Whistling This (1998), and I don’t have the album the broth­ers did togeth­er, 7 Words Col­lide (2002), which is appar­ently avail­able only in Aus­tralia. If any­one out there can send me some tracks from 7 Words Col­lide , or from One Nil (or its vari­ant One All ), they will be reward­ed in the after­life with kar­ma coupons. If Try Whistling This is a sam­ple, Neil has not fad­ed strength as a songwriter.