I was listening, recently, to an interview NPR's Terry Gross did with the late jazz producer Joel Dorn where he described hearing a bootlegged live version of Cannonball Adderley playing "The Stars Fell on Alabama". He noted that the performance dated to a pivotal point in the jazz great's career when he'd achieved some of his greatest artistic successes and was then moving into a more commercial phase. He was great, but his career was in flux, and he was playing this song in a club on New Year's Eve, for a room full of people who couldn't possibly have cared where the music was coming from. No one was paying attention. But, at least in Zorn's view, it was perhaps the greatest performance of the song he'd ever heard from Adderley - this coming from a guy steeped in jazz who'd heard Adderley's recordings, and had seen Adderley perform the song in person numerous times. But the best time was this performance, for a room full of people, most of whom would remember nothing of it.

There's something poetic about the masterpiece that no one hears. It's powerfully heartbreaking to think of something so wonderful getting misplaced or even discarded from our cultural memory banks, especially when so much trash gets so much airtime. Trash has a way of announcing itself like a rude guest at a dinner party - and there's some value to that - especially when it comes to pop music. But the cost is that the work of the unassuming, un-shocking, and not-necessarily-mindblowing-or-brilliant artist gets lost. And so it is with The Harsh Light of Day, the third album by the Texas trio Fastball, released in 2000. This is a band who will largely (and probably correctly) be remembered only as a pretty good second-tier post-grunge pop-rock act - think Matchbox Twenty without all the record sales - who managed a couple of respectable radio hits in addition to one super-fabulous smash, a song called "The Way", a Twilight Zone-style story song (based on a real and ultimately tragic news event) with a cinematically foreboding Latin beat and an old-timey Saturday evening radio show vibe, about an older couple who decide, one morning, to pack their car and take an indefinite road trip to anywhere: Anyone could see the road that they walk on is paved in gold...

Fastball were still riding the success of "The Way" and its attendant album All The Pain Money Can Buy, and the ambition and confidence evident on the self-produced The Harsh Light of Day suggest a band ready to take over the world. This is the album, so it would seem, that would make superstars out of just plain old regular stars. But that's not how it happened, and after the middling success of the record's ebullient lead single, "You're An Ocean", the record and the band faded out of a spotlight they probably were never meant to fill. The Harsh Light of Day isn't the kind of album that you'd find in a critics' best-of retrospective. It's not the kind of record that college frat boys will obsess over and learn the chords to and try to find the hidden meanings behind - it's too open for that. Groundbreaking, trailblazing, and pioneering are not the adjectives one might credibly use to describe The Harsh Light of Day. You could call it classic. But it's not a classic and never will be.

So pardon me while I shower it with some truly heartfelt affection: The Harsh Light of Day is one of the most reliable records in my collection, one of those few CDs I return to again and again for comfort and joy, no matter my mood, no matter the weather, no matter the time of day or year - the way that some people find comfort in an open-faced turkey sandwich smothered in chunky gravy. It's a warm, inviting record with a great big heart. But it's also singularly ambitious and varied. Each song feels new and distinctive every time - track-for-track, it's one the strongest single collections of songs released in the last decade or so - and over the course of its playing time, its songs accumulate the kind of deeply emotional tug you might get from some forgotten black-and-white movie.

The band make little effort to hide their influences which range from the heart-in-throat romantic balladry of Roy Orbison to the rollicking Tex-Mex rock n' roll of the Fireballs, from the cheddariffic art-pop stylings of Paul McCartney's Wings (the central riff of "Wind Me Up" virtual plagiarizes "Jet"), to the crunchy power pop of "Morning Star" and 70s AM radio-style, soft-rock singer-songwriter gems like "Vampires" and the achingly sincere "Don't Give Up On Me". Guitarist Miles Zuniga and Bassist Tony Scalzo (who sang lead on "The Way") share the lead vocal (and primary songwriting) duties almost equally, and while their voices are distinct from one another, they both come on with an unironic, conversational plainness that borders on generic. But it's that kind of straightforwardness that lights up the urgently pleading chorus of "Dark Street". They don't sound like rock stars, but rather people we might have been standing in line with this morning at the gas station, warming their hands around a cardboard cup of 59 cent coffee. The gratingly repetitive "This Is Not My Life" opens the record with all the huddled-over, clenched bitterness of the morning 9-5 commuter stuck in traffic (again). But, as the record progresses and the guys lay bare their feelings, they become sort of noble - heroic even.

The best song here is "Love is Expensive and Free", which finds Scalzo wandering a sepia-toned cinemascape of love and regret. Like his lyrics, his vocal is plainly matter-of-fact and resigned - you need to pay the cost, you need to feel the loss - but as the song progresses, the music surrounding that resignation, which starts out with little more than some spare guitar plucking and a tap-tap-tapping percussion, grows increasingly grand and majestic, with a sweet, sad, Duane Eddy-style guitar solo - all moody and macho, tremelo and twang - and the tearful asides and interjections of some serenading mariachi horns. The song feels as magically real as the painted backdrop of a spaghetti western, and it never fails to choke me up. The cool thing about it, though, is that it's not an isolated moment here.

I love it when, in the album-closing "Whatever Gets You On", in the voice of a guy beaten up by a long workday, Zuniga sings "Give me Muddy- Muddy Waters, and I'm feeling better". Frankly, it's a perfect description of how I feel about Fastball here. The Harsh Light of Day is just, y'know, one of those records. In fact, the album's biggest weakness is that, considering the artists responsible - Fastball is a fine band, but not a great one, certainly better suited to radio singles or the occasional tribute album contribution - it feels like a magnificent fluke. Nevertheless, it has exhausted my skepticism and I urge you to give it a chance to exhaust yours. The Harsh Light of Day, I love you.

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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:

"The Harsh Light of Day" by Fastball
Hollywood Records
Released 9/19/2000

Produced by Fastball
45 min.

SONGS: This is Not My Life - You're an Ocean - Love is Expensive and Free - Vampires - Wind Me Up - Morning Star - Time - Dark Street - Funny How It Fades Away - Don't Give Up on Me - Whatever Gets You On


Recommended: Yes