Kerosene Hat is the second studio album by American rock band Cracker, released on August 24, 1993. It reached number 1 on Billboards Top Heatseekers chart, and number 59 on the Billboard 200 album chart. The singles from the album, "Low" and "Get Off This", helped Cracker gain widespread notice.
According to frontman David Lowery, the album title comes from the band's early days in Richmond, Virginia. Lowery lived with Cracker guitarist Johnny Hickman in an old dilapidated house whose only source of heat came from two kerosene heaters. To buy more kerosene meant a cold walk to a nearby gas station, so before leaving the house, Lowery would bundle up and put on an old wool hunting cap – his "kerosene hat." "To this day," says Lowery, "the smell of kerosene reminds me of the poverty and the wistful hope we had for our music."
Background and recording notes
Following the release of their debut album Cracker entered the studio in 1992 intending to record their next album completely live to tape. This idea was eventually scrapped, but four live-in-the-studio tracks were released later that same year as the Tucson EP.
Seeking a new recording location away from the distractions of Los Angeles and their record company, the band scouted out a few sites, including a Palm Springs house that once belonged to Frank Sinatra. Eventually they happened upon a derelict soundstage in Pioneertown, California, which was part of an old movie set once used to shoot Western films and TV shows.
As Johnny Hickman recalls: "It really wasn't that much of a sound stage. It was more of a barn. There were holes in the wall you could see through and it was just a huge, huge barn basically. But it was just big enough to open the doors and drive a mobile recording truck into. So we got all of our equipment and the truck into the barn and shut the door and for the next six weeks proceeded to make Kerosene Hat."
Recording took place from Feb 25 to March 25, 1993. The weather was cold, and the band salvaged old mattresses and other material from the junkyard to insulate the makeshift studio.
Song notes
The leadoff track from the album, "Low," had a major impact on the album's success. After Hickman started playing the song's signature riff during a soundcheck in Portland, Oregon, the song came together very quickly. Upon release it became – as noted by Spin – "a ubiquitous signpost of the alternative-as-the-new-mainstream era". Author David Maine calls "Low" the signature song of the summer of 1993, as rock radio added it to heavy rotation and the band's visibility increased. It peaked at #3 on the Modern Rock Radio charts. The track "Whole Lotta Trouble," recorded during the Kerosene Hat sessions and released as the b-side of the "Low" CD single, was also featured on the soundtrack of the 1995 Gen-X film Empire Records.
Contributing to the song's success was a noir-ish, black-and-white video shot by director Carlos Grasso, which was added to MTV's Buzz Bin. In the video, Lowery spars with comedian Sandra Bernhard in a boxing ring and gets knocked out. Grasso claims that during the video shoot, Lowery insisted that Bernhard's punches be real – which meant his face was "all puffy" from the hits by the end of the shoot.
Lowery described "Low" as "part Wizard of Oz, part Flowers of Evil", while NME called it "grunge noir." Due to perceived drug references in the song's lyrics, Lowery was asked by Virgin Records to write a letter to radio stations swearing that there was nothing drug-related about the song at all. According to the letter, the lyric "being stoned" was actually "being stone".
The second single from the album, "Get Off This," was written in response to naysayers who accused Cracker of selling out and making music that was more mainstream than Lowery's previous band, Camper Van Beethoven. Thematically speaking, the song declares the band's independence and desire to write songs that come from an honest place. The song peaked at #6 on the Modern Rock Radio charts.