Rockin' In The Free World

Uncle Sam might still be the biggest and the baddest (if not the last) heavyweight left in the world superpower wrestling federation, but he sure ain t the people s favourite. Not since Watergate has the old blowhard s credibility been so far down the tubes, perhaps most acutely symbolised by the image of a soda-suckin President sweating his way through a sex-scandal on live TV, then attempting to smokescreen the whole affair by bombing the hell out of them durned Eee-rack-eez.

Last Independence Day, comedian Bill Maher broadcast a wickedly funny skit in which he addressed America as a lover/spouse who d lost all sense of fun, a fuddy-duddy, workaholic, non-drinking, non-smoking, non-cussing Sam The Bald Eagle gone dull from pursuing a career as The Global Policeman. A few months after that, Newsweek ran a cover story entitled Honk If You Hate America , addressing growing impressions of the US as a totalitarian empire rotten to the core with racism, classism, drugs, lawyers, guns and money.
This was Amerika, oppressor of small furry nations, a continent rent apart by bazooka-totin fundamentalists on one side and pinko PC Nazis on the other not so much one nation under a groove as over the barrel of a gun. Even Primal Scream, maybe the last English rock n roll band worth bothering about, seemed to base their entire Exterminator press campaign around anti-Yank rants.
And yet, against this backdrop, an insurrection of sorts. Last November in downtown Seattle, freaks and straights, teamsters and greensters of every stripe rioted in protest against corporate hegemony at the World Trade Organisation meeting can you imagine young Irelanders pulling the same stunt outside the RDS?
Anyway, if the battle of Seattle signified vital signs in America s youth, then a fragmented revolution has also been taking place in rock n roll, slowly, incrementally, but with a cumulative effect over the past three years.

Move away from a mainstream congested with sports-metal frat-wankers, diluted hip-hop acts and boy-bands producing pap music with all the consistency of babyshit, and on the fringes you ll discover tiny labels such as Kranky, Touch And Go, K, Drag City, Quarterstick and many others, carrying out what amounts to musical missionary work.
It s reassuring that just as a previous generation of left-field acts Sonic Youth, Jon Spencer, Pavement, Fugazi, Mercury Rev, The Flaming Lips have established a kind of benign hierarchy, their younger brothers and sisters have ensured that the US underground network, under the dead scutch grass of grunge, is teeming with life.
These acts are as variant as the territories from which they hail. There s the Constellation colony in Montreal, acts like Godspeed You Black Emperor, Do Make Say Think, A Silver Mt. Zion and Sackville producing spell-binding records based around minimalist drone and avant-rock structures.
There are blues-rock traditionalists like Cash Money from New York and multi-lingual backwoods loonies such as Old Time Relijun, while down south, And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Dead uphold that longstanding mad-bastards-out-of-Austin tradition, exploring a kind of primal American noisecore reminiscent of Sonic Youth circa Bad Moon Rising, tempered by the hell-bent anguish of Zen Arcade-period Husker Du. The Deadsters lauded debut Madonna has just been picked up by Domino for European release, and prospects look good for an autumn tour.
Then there s the California noir/surruralist contingent, spearheaded by Grandaddy, who ve just followed up their country-krautrock-postpop symphony Under The Western Sky with their sophomore effort The Sophtware Slump, which is getting more than the odd nod as album of the year so far. And in roughly the same neck of the woods, from San Diego, The Black Heart Procession s creaking, funereal dirges have enraptured no less than Johnny Cash. All this without even tapping into the Chicago post-rock lot or the Apocalachian/alt-country cadre of Lambchop, The Handsome Family, Giant Sand, 16 Horsepower et al.
But all expository passages aside, the three groups I most want to talk about here are Royal Trux, mAKE UP and Delta 72, acts which have much in common; a preference for small labels, the kind of work ethic that would give most mainstream bands a heart attack, plus a love of both traditionalist and futurist manifestos; as comfortable with the Stones and the MC5 as Suicide and Sun Ra.
Plus, none of these bands are spring chickens, least of all the Trux, who have been lurking and loitering around the peripheries of rock n roll for a good 10-15 years now. Formed when Neil Hagerty left sleazoid terrorists Pussy Galore (who also included a young-ish Jon Spencer in their ranks) to hook up with Jennifer Herrema, a six foot-something suicide blonde with Axl Rose s voice, Johnny Thunders clothes and Nico s attitude, the band shambled their way through a series of untitled (and often unlistenable) albums, braving heroin addiction, homelessness and all manner of big city squalor.
Since 1998, Royal Trux have released three frankly mind-bending albums in quick succession. Accelerator and last year s Veterans Of Disorder were raw, innovatively produced records with an outrageous dynamic range that drew on everything from school s-out garage rock to Ornette Coleman s hard-to-fathom principles of harmolodics to classic Stones/Dylan/Velvets moves.
And now comes Pound For Pound, a more bluesy (songs like Call Out The Lions and Deep Country Sorcerer found this scribe hollering the word boogie for the first time since he heard ZZ Top s Tush ) and barefaced record than its predecessors, but the perfect soundtrack to being 16, sitting around in car parks after school, swapping spits and cigarettes.
The idea was we wanted to stay true to capturing the live shows that we d been playing over the last couple of years, and that required everybody in the studio playing all at once, Jennifer rasps down the line from London. The basics were built on a chemistry, whereas a lot of times in the past I guess the underlying chemistry was completely synthetic, so the vibe was a little more disjointed.
That s putting it mildly. But as well as blowing speakers and minds in equal measure, Jennifer and Neil have, under the pseudonyms Adam & Eve, also produced Washington DC mAKE UP s breakthrough plastic soul album In Mass Mind, plus The Delta 72 s handsome new opus 000.
With mAKE UP it was a record mostly about Ian s vocals, Jennifer explains. Prior to In Mass Mind, I never thought anybody captured his vocals in a way that made you pay attention to what he was saying, and that was a big focal point on the production, at least for me. Working with The Delta 72, we really worked hard on arrangements, and we started throwing a lot of things into the mix that took it out of one specific genre, like the kind of Richie Havens guitar and the hand drums and the whistles which went back to, like, the Philly thing.
Also from DC, The Delta 72 are the youngest and most orthodox of the three bands featured here, but the new album 000 snapshots a band maturing at a promising rate.
The Deltas albums are all put out by Touch And Go, the Chicago label that brought you The Jesus Lizard, early Urge Overkill and Mule, while sixties activist and one-time MC5 svengali John Sinclair supplied the liner notes of the band s second album The Soul Of A New Machine, released in 1997.
So, while the band boast friends amongst the hardcore community in their native city (the group s 1996 debut The R&B Of Membership was recorded in Dischord s Inner Ear studios with help from Girls Against Boys Eli Janney and Fugazi s Brendan Canty), frontman Gregg Foreman was raised on Al Green and Memphis soul (his mother worked for Motown) before gravitating to punk s iconic/iconoclastic spirit, that school of rejecting rock n roll but also embracing it at the same time. Like, loving The Stones but also hating the stadium rock mentality.
All three of these bands have notched up roughly a dozen albums in the last five years alone. Such productivity has some pretty serious political implications within an industry that demands a two or three-year album turnaround, causing slow-witted acts to get old and stale before their time.

Rewind several months to December 99, the Dublin date of mAKE UP s European tour. I ve just raised the subject of productivity with Ian Svenonious, who hasn t eaten in two days, his simian features made even more gaunt with hunger.
Every new record release is kind of treated like the Gulf War, like this industrial endeavour with press saturation and a world tour that lasts 12 months, he avers. It s really anti-creative and sort of cynical. The Beatles were putting out two records a year at least in the sixties, constantly producing and trying to keep up with the Joneses. And when the standards were that high, music changed really rapidly and people had to develop really rapidly and I think that is a much better standard.
The relative success, or at least viability, of bands like mAKE Up and Royal Trux highlights a widening rift in the music industry. As mainstream star acts become increasingly more distanced from the public by publicists, PR people and numerous middle men, smaller labels and distributors like Domino and Southern, through the internet and e-mail, actually enable fans and journalists to deal with the musicians directly and without much pretense.
On this level, both Jennifer Herrema and Ian Svenonius betray a healthy irreverence for the American rock industry s old boys club.
Jennifer: Once anything becomes successful on any kind of commercial level, they ve got their stories down and they will never change. I know this so well. You know, I interviewed Keith Richards and we talked for a really long time, and he was pretty revealing, but it didn t really matter in the end, because the control was through his editor and press agent that actually put the interview together, and it said all the same old shit stuff that you would ever think Keith Richards would say.
And so we got our manager to call up and tell em that we wanted the piece pulled unless what he really said was put on the record, so finally they ran the piece, but it was a really big ordeal; it was politically incorrect for him to actually reveal any part of himself other than this persona that we know, and I think that s what goes on with a lot of popular artists.
Ian, ever the conspiracy theorist, has his own take on the star system.
Rock n roll history is such a load of crap, he scoffs, and it s all mediated by people s ongoing relationships to the record labels. Like, for example, we all know the official history of rock n roll as per the Stooges and The Velvets, how they were sort of the torch-bearers for the new streetwise sound of punk rock and how otherwise the seventies was a wasteland. That official history which has been tattooed into our brains is all mediated by the fact that Lou Reed and Iggy Pop both have contracts with their record labels who are making money off their reissues, and it s a vested interest in them to maintain these myths.
But really history is much more complex and multi-layered than that, he continues. This official history is as per bourgeois white people who went to art school. So Greil Marcus tastes are reflected in it. But there were lots of wild men of rock n roll and really challenging records made in the sixties and it wasn t all fucking Iggy Pop. Iggy Pop was very much a kind of a Jim Morrison rip-off, but we re not gonna call him a rip-off because this is the way things develop, it s a cumulative process. But people kind of give him the scepter, and he s such a blowhard, such a self-promoting wanker. He s so boring and stupid.

The place is the Temple Bar Music Centre in Dublin in December of 1997. Delta 72 mainman Gregg Foreman might be a DC boy, but he s guiding me through the labyrinth of passages that lead to the band s dressing room. As the guitarist hobbles down yet another flight of stairs on his gimpy foot, I m wondering whether or not to broach the subject of this impediment. All becomes clear later, as Gregg discusses the perils of playing in a particularly physical band.
Normally if I don t have an injury like this broken foot, I could do splits and all sorts of James Brown-influenced dancing, he explains. That s how it happened, by going too crazy. I just scale speaker stacks and land wherever I land. I ve hurt myself plenty of times playing, but this was like the first or second song and I was in such pain that I was like, I have to go to a hospital now . But I finished the whole set and played two more shows with the broken foot before I realized that it was completely fucked up.
Foreman, despite his NY Doll hair and studied cool, is understandably wary of being labeled a revivalist. Tons of New York bands have this sort of blues angle, he frowns. We don t. To be a white band and call yourself a blues band seems comical. I ve tried to do tons of different things, whether it s all synthesizer sort of Eno stuff, or Morricone or Sonic Youth or Hank Williams or Bomb The Bass or anything. As long as it s got some soul, it s good. We just try to be natural and let it happen. The bass and drums go from Stax to that Northern Soul stomp, but I m definitely sort of the No Wave angle. And then the organ goes from, like, horror films and science fiction to a little bit of Booker T.
Gregg particularly relates to acts like The Stooges, who weren t regarded as technically proficient, but were way ahead of their peers in terms of sheer instinct.
Fun House is so incredible, he gushes. The way they operated on that sounds totally like a machine, it s really instinctive, but at the same time it s really heavy. That groove is almost progressive, the timing is like an avant-garde rock band. I m sure people like Can could really play in those signatures, but with The Stooges comin from Detroit, it definitely seems more guttural. They and the MC5, to me, took off where the Stones left off. And maybe the No-Wavers took it from them. It never really came back to England. The closest thing is like, Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream, who has all the fake Stones moves and music down, but it s just too . . . little. I think the first Jesus & Mary Chain record, Psychocandy, had a lot of soul for what it was, a really dark, beautiful, Velvet Underground, spacey distortion record.
That was then. This is now, three years later, and things have changed. For one, Farfisa-tickler Sarah Stolfa has been replaced by Boss Hog keyboardist M Boyce. And with her, many of the primal elements of the band s sound have been jettisoned in favour of something just a little left of The Black Crowes. 000 reeks of notions like tradition and heritage: the tracks not produced by the Trux twins are handled by Sally Yakuds (Plastic Ono Band, The Band, Tom Petty) and the whole thing was recorded in Philadelphia s Tongue And Groove studio on a board that saw service on Purple Rain, Exile On Main Street and several Led Zeppelin records.
And while there are bands doing a hell of a lot more than The Delta 72 to force rock n roll through boroughs it would never normally brave without a big stick and a torch (the Primals and the Trux to name but two) with 000, Foreman and pals have definitely reached an advanced point of departure.
So, to conclude, how does Jennifer see the state of the nation as it stands?
I think there s some stuff just starting to go on that is completely apart from anything still considered underground, she declares. You ve got real underground bands Rolling Stone wouldn t give the time of day to, but they re out there doing some shit that I have never heard of before. I got sent a package last week with a CD by Quintron and I was just like, This is some shit. Wacked. I think that there s stuff going on like that now, but not a lot of people are aware of it.
Royal Trux Pound For Pound is out now on Domino. The Delta 72 s 000 is available on Touch And Go. mAKE UP s Save Yourself is out on K Records.