“…the strongest album an American band has made this year, and when the year ends, the word “American” may come off.” — Village Voice
“A new American classic… the Iron City Houserockers take for granted an authenticity that Springsteen has to strive for.” — Rolling Stone
“One of the strongest, most uncompromising and impassioned pieces of vinyl to come across this year… one of the most important rock bands to hit the streets since Graham Parker and the Rumour.” – Detroit Free Press
“One of the best albums released so far this year… in intelligence, perspective and rock ‘n’ roll it is not unlike an American version of The Clash.” —Lincoln Journal Star
“If you’re tired of listening to the sort of pseudo-punks who sound like they can always re-enroll in art school, check out the genuinely passionate Houserockers. These guys know what it means to play rock ‘n’ roll as if there were no other salvation.” — Boston Globe
In the summer of 1980, the music press was abuzz with the arrival of the album that many felt would come to define rock and roll in the eighties: The Iron City Houserockers’ Have a Good Time But… Get Out Alive.
History played out a little differently, of course. Still, four decades on, the 40th anniversary reissue of Have a Good Time But…Get Out Alive (released today digitally, available June 19th on LP and CD) still stands as the epitome of Pittsburgh rock. The reissue sounds as fresh and fierce as ever–more so in fact, thanks to a noticeable sonic upgrade.
Even if you were around and aware at the time, it’s understandable if you missed the album’s original release–it was back in the day when artists and bands had regional followings. and the Houserockers definitely had a regional sound. Grushecky attributes the album’s magic to “a mixture of Pittsburgh Rock n’ Roll, Jersey Shore savvy and soul, and English mystic and muscle.” Credit Steve Van Zandt, Mick Ronson, and Ian Hunter for some of that infusion (they all contributed to the album), but the influence was there from the Houserockers’ very first album, Love’s So Tough.
Critics and fans were quick to pick up on the similarities in sound and sensibilities between the Houserockers’ 32-year-old lead singer and a certain New Jersey rocker, and comparisons (mostly favorable) abounded in reviews and articles.
The band even drew the notice of Bruce himself, who dedicated “The Promised Land” to “Joe and the Iron City boys” when he came through their hometown of Pittsburgh that autumn.
Bruce Springsteen and Joe Grushecky had already met by that time, introduced to each other by Steve Van Zandt, who arranged five tracks for Have a Good Time and played guitar on one.
“[Steve] was going back and forth between our session and The River with Springsteen and the E Street Band,” Grushecky told Rolling Stone in 2011. “One night I walked with him to the Power Station and he introduced me to Bruce. Over the years we became friends. We had a lot of similarities in upbringing and age and the whole nine yards. He was playing the same songs in New Jersey that I was playing here in Pittsburgh.”
Joe and Bruce do indeed share a lot in common: born one year and one state apart, they both became local heroes and civic figures, giving voice and giving back to those otherwise mostly ignored by popular music.
Only one became a superstar on the global stage, however. A year after their release, The River was flying high, but Have a Good Time had run its course. The Houserockers would go on to release two more albums, and Joe would bring us great music for decades to come (frequently collaborating with Bruce, who produced Joe’s 1995 American Babylon album that brought him to the attention of Springsteen fans like me), but none would garner the attention that Have a Good Time commanded during the summer of 1980.
But there’s another differentiator between the two famously blue-collar musicians: only one of them actually wore a collar at all. Bruce Springsteen employs keen observation and deep empathy when crafting his songs. Joe Grushecky, by contrast, draws from a well of first-hand experience.
Joe has been a special education teacher for most of his adult life, focusing on the hardest and most hardened of high school students. Today, at the age of 72, Joe continues to teach by day and rock by night. (Even during the pandemic, you can catch him live at home every Wednesday night here.) He actually is the working man he and Bruce have always written about.
I’ve always been fascinated by the fact of Joe’s dual identity. (Who among us hasn’t fantasized about a second life as a rock star?) Is Superman really Clark Kent, or is it the reverse? That’s basically the first question I asked him when we spoke recently: How would Joe Grushecky introduce himself to a stranger sitting next to him on a plane?
“Oh, I’m a musician,” he responded. “I like teaching, but music’s my passion.”
He’s spent his life doing both. He started teaching back in the seventies, and the first job he stuck with was working with kids with severe developmental, physical, and emotional disabilities. “One kid could talk, nobody could walk, nobody was toilet trained… Older people didn’t want to work there, but I was a young buck.” It was a challenging environment for a teacher of any age: “I had to tell them, please have these kids dressed when they’re here!”
Not many people have the empathy and stamina to last in a role like that, but while Joe left teaching temporarily when he embarked on his music career, he came back to it when he needed the supplemental income–this time as a special education teacher in a public high school–and has stuck with it ever since.
I’m married to a high school special ed teacher, so I thought I could identify with the challenges of Joe’s day job. But I was wrong: his Pittsburgh school is a little rougher than my wife’s school in suburban Seattle. “Our school district is one of the poorest and worst districts for violent crimes. One of my students was arrested for murder. One summer about eight years ago, between prom and school starting there were fourteen kids involved in murders, arrested or killed.”
Joe may lead two separate lives, but they occasionally overlap: Songs like and “First Day of School” and “Who Cares About Those Kids” (both on his 2013 Somewhere East of Eden album) are inspired by first-hand experience (“What affects me most is seeing that day to day struggle”), and for a long time, Joe brought music into the classroom, working with kids to mount an annual themed rock and roll show–one year a salute to the 1960s, another year to the nineties. This year, he took his students into the studio.
Over the years, Joe’s been an active school and community fundraiser, helping the school get new band uniforms (They wore the same ones for forty years!), computers, supplies, whatever’s needed. When Pittsburgh was ravaged by Hurricane Ivan-induced floods in 2004, it was Grushecky who organized a benefit show and pulled in Springsteen.
One of the songs Bruce and Joe played that night was “Pumping Iron,” the most enduring and Pittsburghian track from Have a Good Time.
“Pumping Iron” has become Joe’s anthem, and over the years, he and Bruce have played it together 25 times. To put that in perspective, until Bruce started playing The River in full in 2016, that’s about the same number of times he played “Fade Away” along with about an album-side worth of tracks from Bruce’s own 1980 LP.
“Pumping Iron” was even one of the last songs Bruce performed live before the great pandemic of 2020 took him, Joe, and every other musician off the stage for the time being.
But the Have a Good Time reissue offers far more treasures for both long-time and new-found fans alike–in the form of a bonus disc of outtakes and covers, carefully transferred from cassette and decades-old reel-to-reel. “I could’ve made three discs from those tapes,” he admitted, but he had to be careful. The reels hadn’t been played in a long time, and Joe was worried they would fall apart.
Of the bonus tracks, the one that stopped me in my tracks was the six-and-a-half-minute version of “Don’t Let Them Push You Around,” a full four minutes longer than the taut thrasher that graces the released disc.
“That one stopped me in my tracks too!” Joe laughed. It’s not just the length, I remarked–it’s how much is going on. I was about to compare it to Bruce’s “Thundercrack” or “Kitty’s Back,” when Joe beat me to the punch:
“It was my epic, you know, like ‘Freebird,’ or ‘Rosalita,'” the kind of song you play at the end of the night when it’s time to pull out all the stops.
You can definitely hear the punk vein, I said, especially at the outset. “But then it just takes a left turn. On the album, you lean all the way in and just commit to the punk–is that Steve’s influence?”
“Yeah, Steve heard it and reworked it. We basically just kept the guitar and harp solo!”
What was that like, having those guys take apart your songs and rebuild them?
“Well, I was a young guy. Our first record was basically our club show, no arranging or anything. Just stuff we were playing. We just tightened it up for the album, left out the big long solos because of the time constraints.”
But on the second album, “we had Steve Van Zandt, Mick Ronson, and Ian Hunter, these top-flight seasoned pros in the studio, and they were way ahead of us. I went to college for five years, so I was behind everyone as far as the music business goes. Arranging, people picking your songs apart, that was a whole new experience. Being a young guy new to the game, it felt like someone didn’t like your song, like they were saying your kids are ugly!”
“It was a real eye-opening education. Some of the songs were completely deconstructed, others are note-for-note.”
“Hypnotized” is another fascinating bonus track, an almost eight-minute work-in-progress track that offers fans fascinating insight into Joe and the band working out one of my favorite songs on Have a Good Time. (It has a similar riff-driven groove to the Rolling Stones’ “Shattered.”)
Joe admitted to me that even the eight-minute outtake was actually a lot longer on the original tape: “Johnny [his son] and Brian [his sound engineer] talked me into putting it on the disc. It was twenty minutes long–we had to edit it!”
Why Have a Good Time (or for that matter, the Iron City Houserockers themselves) never achieved the success they so richly deserved is one of the great mysteries of rock and roll. But thanks to the wonderful new 40th anniversary edition, there’s a new opportunity to discover the best band most of us never got to know at the time.
Have a Good Time But… Get Out Alive is available to order today on digital; coming June 19th on LP and CD. If you’re a Houserockers fan, you already know you want it; if you’re an E Street Band fan, trust me: this is an album you should own.
