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Brothers in Arms

Reissues from The Blasters and Rank & File

BY phil nugent
The
recent death of Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records, music producer
and father of our country, is a reminder
of how much American pop has changed since it was an entry point
for unhinged young men with calloused hands and oil-stained jackets
trying to find an escape hatch from the assembly line. Today’s
escape hatch, “American Idol,” is more like a kid yuppie’s
fast-track path to a tonier brand of shopping mall. I don’t mean
to sound like a grumpy old man about it. Sure, like most of you,
I’d do the right thing and veer my car onto the sidewalk if I saw
Avril Lavigne standing there, but those Hanson kids are cute as
all get-out, and Justin Timberlake deserves credit for knowing
the right people to hire to contrive an album around what Greil
Marcus has called the lad’s own “paint-thinner voice.” I’m
not deluded enough to think that it’s my place to tell Cameron
Diaz that she could do better.
Still, when you look at these smooth, bright
faces, let alone listen to them fully explore the inexpressive
possibilities of melisma, you have to wonder: do these kids know
that Elvis Presley drove a truck, and if they do, do they think
it was because his parents wouldn’t lend him the SUV? Cunningly
crafted as all this pap — I mean pop — is, you do sometimes
miss the sweaty, obsessive kick and traces of borderline insanity
you find in rock music performed by people who never had the option
of still going for that M.B.A. if the recording career hadn’t worked
out by the time they hit seventeen.
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Sure, like most of you, I’d
do the right thing and veer my car onto the sidewalk if I saw Avril
Lavigne standing there, but those Hanson kids are cute as all get-out. |
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Where do you go now for sounds that might
have made Sam’s toes tingle, something that could set an honest
man with good ears and a red-meat diet to howling at the moon? Something
that draws on a knowledge of life a little broader than you’re
likely to slap together based on a childhood spent being dragged from
audition to audition by Mama Rose? Thank God for the raving maniacs
corralled by the good people at Bloodshot Records, but can they really
be asked to do it all alone? There’s always Springsteen, of
course — apparently you can’t kill him with a stick —
wrapping himself in the flag as if it were a burial shroud and serenading
the fallen Twin Towers with Viagra references while continuing to
righteously flog the ghost of Tom Joad, who by now would probably
love to listen to a little disco or something for a change. Then there’s
highly touted up-and-comers like that fellow from Whiskeytown whose
idea of flouting his integrity is to pout if anyone requests “Cuts
Like a Knife.” I ask you, can you imagine Jerry Lee Lewis ever
losing any sleep over the possibility that someone might get him confused
with the star of “The Nutty Professor”? Can you imagine
anyone daring?
Happily,
a couple of recent reissues, drawn from the catalog of Warner
Bros.’ punk-flavored 1980s label Slash
and assembled in collaboration with the sainted Rhino records,
serve as a reminder that even the union-busting years of the early
Reagan administration had its share of leaded-gas working-man rock-and-roll
to relieve the general tedium. The brawniest and most indispensable
of these sets is the Blasters’ Testament: The Complete
Slash Recordings,
which handily collapses three albums that never quit (The Blasters,
Non Fiction, and Hard Line), an EP’s worth
of lesser but enjoyable live covers, and odds and ends (such as
the band’s contributions
to Walter Hill’s 1984 “rock and roll fable” of
a movie, Streets of Fire) onto two discs, restoring to easy
availability a staggering body of work that, for the most part,
never made the
transition to CD. (The Blasters’s 1981 debut album, American
Music, which predates their signing to Slash/Warner, was re-issued
by
HighTone Records in 1997.)
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As a songwriter, Dave Alvin
was kind of into tight, three-to-four-minute arrangements the way
that John the Baptist was kind of into Jesus. |
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A crackerjack outfit led by the mighty
Alvin brothers, songwriter Dave and singin’ Phil, the Blasters
were originally given a big push by their big label and they did
receive their
due from the music press. Yet they never really caught fire commercially
the way they should have. Nor did they inspire the kind of fanatical
devotion that helped keep other bands with similar working-class
identities afloat. They lacked the bohemian radical-political aura
of the Minutemen (though the Alvins, sons of a union organizer,
bristled with a healthy blue-collar anger, and Dave’s “Common
Man” is one of the great political songs of its era: a righteous
skewering of Reagan that, heard today, could pass for a righteous
attack on George W. Bush), the multi-cultural appeal of Los Lobos,
and the undeniable, sheer treetop-clearing greatness of Hüsker
Dü. What they did have was a passionate commitment to traditional
rock (flavored with blues, soul and New Orleans R & B, the
latter embodied by the tenor sax player Lee Allen and the D. John-style
showmanship of pianist Gene Taylor) as a sound, and the chops to
make it all sound as fresh as paint.
As a songwriter, Dave Alvin was kind of into tight, three-to-four-minute
arrangements the way that John the Baptist was kind of into Jesus,
and he had as his secret weapon bassist John Bazz and drummer Bill
Bateman, the Buckaroo Banzai of rhythm sections: there wasn’t anything
Alvin could write for them, or pull out of his sack of beloved
oldies, that they couldn’t drive through the side of a mountain.
Maybe the combination put off some in the Amer-indie movement because
it was so perfect and pleasurable that it seemed commercial, despite
the fact that the band’s relative failure to sell records or get
on the radio. Perpetually middle-aged-looking, with receding hairlines
and fleshy bods, the Alvins had great faces for radio, which may
help to explain why the then-new MTV threw its vote for the retro-hip
market to the deplorable Stray Cats. The Cats used to sweat up
their funny New Wave-meets-Fonzie hairdos trying to sneak a little “authenticity” into
their act, but the Blasters didn’t need to worry about being authentic.
They were the real thing.
Testament stands as a near-definitive dictionary
of basic hooks and riffs, masterfully deployed. The basic sound
doesn’t change all that much, but you can hear the level
of talent on display deepen as the years go by. Happy at first
to breathe
new life into his favorite clichés, Dave’s songwriting
begins to sketch a real vision of life until it grows ever scarier
and
more
pained on such late tracks as “Common Man” and “Dark
Night.” And Alvin’s singing, a cocky delight from the
beginning, takes on new shades of emotion that really bloom on
a late number
like “Can’t Stop Time,” a sentiment that resonates
with anyone in love with the popular art of the past. You can’t
stop time, but you can salvage some prime artifacts before the
dust settles. Testament is an invaluable time capsule preserving
several night’s worth of serious fun.
Like the Blasters, Rank and File was built around
two brothers, guitarist Chip Kinman and bassist Tony Kinman; they
collaborated on the songwriting and split up the singing duties.
The Kinmans had already made their small mark in the L.A. punk
scene as the Dils. After that group disbanded, the Kinmans formed
Rank and File during a sojourn in Austin, where they made the fateful
decision to embrace their love of country music. They returned
to L.A. and ended up signed to Slash/Warners after having opened
for the Blasters. They cut two albums for the label, Sundown and
Long Gone Dead. The Slash Years, a product of Rhino’s limited-edition
mail-order Rhino Homemade line, slaps both albums and a handful
of extras onto a single CD.
As mechanics, Rank and File were never as tight
as the Blasters, and they were sometimes loose and careless enough
that I’m not sure I’d want them anywhere near my carburetor.
But the sheer unlikeliness of the sound and the wild-eyed enthusiasm
of the performances are more than enough to put most of the material
across. Compared to say, Gram Parsons, the “cowpunk” fusion
of rock and country isn’t exactly graceful; the music yodels
and twangs up front while the rhythm section pounds away like a
blacksmith
laboring to a metronome’s beat. But even if the mixture doesn’t
gel, it sounds like fun, and the fun is contagious.
However the Kinmans came by their cowboy-hatted
country stylings, they carry out the pose with a countrypolitan
gentlemanliness that’s witty and even sort of touching in
this context. Of all the bands that recorded for Slash, Rank and
File
are likely the one that, trying to decide on a nasty name to call
some folks, would settle on “blackguards.” Another
song good-naturedly admits to a low tolerance for the “lemming
dressed all in black” and other “sorry junkie beatniks” littering
up St. Mark’s Place. The song isn’t an expression of
conservative contempt for bohemianism but a sneer at the kind of
complacent
hipster nihilism that Tom Verlaine ragged on in “A Future
in Noise” — the kind of doctrinaire cool that would
try to write Rank and File off as “squares” because
of their boots and good manners.
The band really come into their own on hard-charging
numbers like “Amanda Ruth,” “Coyote,” and “John
Brown” (their kind of political song), which kick up enough
dust to obscure the lights of Vegas. They probably did take their
ideas about as far as they could go, a feeling that was sort of
confirmed by their third album, the 1987 Rank and File,
which goes unmentioned by name in the notes to The Slash Years,
even though it was released by Rhino itself. (Maybe the new collection
is their
belated way of doing penance for having put out that one.) The
Slash Years sums them up, complete with a final live track
— a cover of “White Lightning” — that has
its own time-capsule feel. It’s pretty sloppy, and the vocals
are nothing for George Jones to lose sleep over (whose are?), but
you can see
why the Kinmans would want to sign off with it: from start to finish,
the girls in the audience scream and squeal as if the Beatles were
reuniting with Elvis and Jesus on backing vocals. There are things
in life besides tight arrangements, you know.

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