The Houserockers released Blood On The Bricks.  

We were both just two of a kind,
little reckless and a little wild
our minds ran overtime.
Your family ran a restaurant, 
we made love in a vacant lot,
we used to laugh as we hid from your dad.

But this time the night won't save us,
This time the heartache's just begun,
here they come.
This time the heartache's breaking,
This time we got nowhere to run,
nowhere to run.

    ""This Time The Night (Won't Save Us)"

Punk rockers were fierce.  They could afford to be - they never recognized the concept of "tomorrow".  

The Housrockers rocked as fiercely as Joe Strummer on a good day.  Key to their music was the knowledge that the party was over; adulthood, jobs, kids all awaited.  And it didn't mean that in the heart of that working adult parent there wasn't fierce passion, articulate anger, a hard edge that raged against the dimming of the light.

If the Houserockers were ever going to get the job done, this was the time.  They were rolling in the sort of critical acclaim you can't buy.  Their fans included some of the biggest people in the business - they were in about the same place Bruce Springsteen was after The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, or maybe where Bob Seger was after Live Bullet - so close to the big time, they could smell it.

In the rock and roll fairy tale, this should have been the album that made them household names.

The album was good enough.  And yet the Iron City Houserockers are footnote in the history of heartland rock and roll.  

1 Friday Night 2 Saints And Sinners 3 This Time The Night (Won't Save Us) 4 Be My Friend 5 No Easy Way Out 6 No More Loneliness 7 Watch Out 8 Blood On The Bricks 9 A Fool's Advice

Blood On The Bricks is a treasure trove of great music.  While Have a Good Time (But Get Out Alive) benefitted from Van Zandt, Hunter and Ronson's flair for loud, passionate statements, it also suffered from all three producers' disinterest in taking the low-points - Grushecky's many meat 'n potatoes bar-room rockers -  to their potential apogee.  Blood On The Bricks replaced the three producers with Steve Cropper, guitarist for Booker T and the MGs, the Blues Brothers, and hundreds of classic Stax/Volt songs - and one of the best producers of American roots music that ever slid a fader.  

So while the big, anthemic numbers  - like the title cut, or Saints and Sinners - shone as brightly as any of the great moments on Have A Good Time, it was clear that Cropper had managed to fill in the valleys without leveling the peaks.  The bluesy, barroom rockers - This Time the Night (Won't Save Us), It's Friday Night, No More Loneliness - are delivered with a crackle and flair that had been missing from the first two outings.  Cropper sits in on guitar on This Time The Night, adding a nervous, percolating rhythm guitar that wove in and among Eddie Britt's polished slide playing to turn a pedestrian bar-room rocker into a hard, funky joy of a song.

The title cut is a sharp-edged masterpiece of punk blues.

Hanging on a thread, fighting for a chance, 
Oh, those things they said, were never
meant to last.
On a stretch of town right off the strip, late one night
he wrote her name in blood
on the bricks.

He was a cool  young punk from an old coal town,
who listened for the night, and lived for the sound...
She was a dark-haired Italian in tight blue jeans
Together they swore they'd live out all their dreams...

And as they lay there in each other's arms
all-night DJ played their favorite song,
the one they danced to the night they met.
The Drifters were singing "Up On The Roof", 
And they'd give it all up for two minutes of proof.
Some things aren't that easy, something just aren't easy 
to forget...
Like the blood on the Bricks.

He came home late one night, he'd had a little too much to drink.
He went out and walked down to the wall,
down on East Carson Street.
He cut his vein with a knife, the blood flowed out like a river,
He wrote on the wall "JJ plus Little Girl, 
Baby, Forever..."

She moved out the next morning, she was tired of the games they'd play,
She didn't wanna be there when he threw his life away.
Now the radio's his only savior on a lonely Sunday night,
he walks the railroad tracks, just before daylight...

And as they lay there in each other's arms
all-night DJ played their favorite song,
the one they danced to the night they met.
The Drifters were singing "Up On The Roof", 
but they were never brave enough to face the truth.
Some things aren't that easy, something just aren't easy 
to forget...
Like the blood on the Bricks.

Lyrics on a web page, of course, don't capture any hint of the depth and passion of the song - or any song on the album.  

"Saints and Sinners" was, right after "Born in the USA", the best rock song ever written about Vietnam.  Baby Be My Friend, awash in Van Morrison-ish groove (the riff is a tribute to Morrison's Here Comes The Night) is, and I say this without fear of rational contradiction, the single best "last call" ballad of the 1980's, bar none.  The Morrison riff yields to an exhausted-sounding growl of hope, owing much to the Asbury Juke's Hearts of Stone:

I know it's a hard world we're living in.
Sometimes you feel like giving up, or just giving in.
You feel so downhearted - your whole life rearranged.
Well, just stay by me girl, someday I swear our luck will change.

I made mistakes, that doesn't mean I didn't try,
before I met you I was more dead than alive.
Stay together, and somehow we'll survive...

Baby, baby be my friend,
Be my guiding light.
Baby, baby be my flame,
shine on like a fire in the night

This album has never been re-released on CD.  This is a crime that needs to be rectified.

The critics pealed with delight.  The fans went wild - within 100 miles of Pittsburgh, anyway.

Outside the greater Steeltown area, though, they were still very much a cult favorite.

I was an enthusiastic member of the cult by this time.  And I settled in and waited for their next album.