Lid – In The Mushroom (1997)

From the shelves

“I was just like burnt out from going on the road. We partied our asses off on the Pantera tour and I just needed a break and wanted to do my own thing”. That’s how Eric Wagner, speaking with Metal Assault, reflected on his first hiatus from Trouble, the legendary doom metal pioneers he fronted until 1997. His own thing was this decidedly unusual side project put together with Danny Cavanagh, guitarist of British band Anathema.

The collaboration – which also included brothers Timothy and Tommy Reeves on bass and drums – produced Lid’s only album, ‘In The Mushroom’ (Peaceville, 1997), which was quickly forgotten. A bizarre outlier that seems completely detached from its time, it arrived at a moment when the stoner rock scene was on the rise, yet chose a different “lysergic” path. Rather than revisiting Trouble’s classic doom foundations, if anything, it looked to the band’s later, more immediate material and immersed itself in the psychedelic hard rock of the early ’90s, bringing to mind bits of Mind Funk and I Mother Earth, or even Alice In Chains.

The album moves between acidic riffs (‘Lid’, ‘Window Pain’, the latter revived from Trouble’s ‘One For The Road’ demo CD) and surprisingly melodic moments. Tracks such as the Beatles-esque ‘Alive’ or the acoustic ‘The Dream Is Over’ reveal a side of Wagner that few would have expected, and with a different name attached to them, might even have found their way onto American radio playlists.

Part of the reason the project never went any further was Cavanagh’s fragile state at the time. “I did too many psychoactive drugs and had a very unfortunate breakdown”, he confessed in an interview with Bardo Methodology. “This was in America in 1997 when I was recording the Lid album. It was life-changing, just awful”. Wagner provided further details: “We never played [live]. Ever. We just did that record, and then I ran away from the music business for about five years or whatever it was”. As he went on to admit in an interview on the Official Danko Jones Podcast, his priorities had shifted elsewhere: “I had a family of five to feed, so I went out and actually got a job”.

The singer eventually rejoined Trouble in 2002, only to leave again a few years later and launch two new projects: offshoot band The Skull, named after one of Trouble’s most popular albums, and the more diverse Blackfinger. He fronted both bands until his untimely death from COVID in 2021. Oddly enough, Blackfinger briefly sported some unexpected ties with the past: “We did a couple Lid tunes in the beginning – Wagner revealed – but not a lot of people know that stuff”. The idea of resurrecting the songs was soon abandoned.

‘In the Mushroom’ remains a quirky, forgotten gem worth rediscovering. Kscope reissues from a few years ago, both on vinyl and CD, gave it a well-deserved second chance.