After a rather well-publicized fall off the wagon following the release of , went five years without releasing an album, but his time in the woodshed seemed to have done him good, as was his strongest album since in 1976. While a few members of the L.A. Mellow Mafia ( ) made cameo appearances on the album, for most of the sessions worked with , and of , who were about a year away from their mainstream commercial breakthrough; they made for a solid, no-nonsense rhythm section and gave the music a passionate, forceful backbone that was largely absent from (not to mention rocking harder than one might expect from the kings of ). put his newly muscular sound to good use; the songs on are at his flintiest, as he indulges in his usual obsessions with machismo ( ) and bad love (the title cut) while also exploring the media's skewed perspective on his addiction problems ( ), his disgust with the music business ( ), and errors in both personal and political judgment ( ). And scored three inspired musical guest shots on the album -- , whose jagged guitar runs embroider the title cut; , whose howling harmonica is the ideal punctuation for the -gone-psychotic ; and , who adds a bed of menacing to proved that was still an artist to be reckoned with, and that which didn't kill him had only made him stronger (and more bitterly funny). [In 2003, was digitally remastered and reissued with two bonus tracks: a previously unreleased Spanish-language version of and the brief ] ~ Mark Deming