New Monday #33
Happy New Monday!
I had an unhappy weekend, wrestling with a recalcitrant website and customer service people who apparently can’t be bothered.
When I’m pissed off, there’s only one thing to listen to: the most pissed-off, angry music ever recorded, the 1978 Album "Power in the Darkness" by Tom Robinson Band. In particular, a song which you can find at the end of this email. If there’s only one thing you click on today, click on 'Man You Never Saw' at the bottom.
Tom Robinson Band
TRB started in 1976 and released a single, 2-4-6-8 Motorway (an 8-track recording!), which hit #5 in the British charts. It’s sort of a fun singalong thing with a great guitar solo. Doesn’t sound that angry.
By 1977 punk was sweeping England and TRB became part of the movement. Their subsequent records became increasingly angry and political in nature, and with a very specific agenda. TRB was furiously anti-racist, pro-women's rights, and especially pro-gay rights, because Tom Robinson was openly gay at a time when that could get you “beaten unconscious and left in the dark,“ to quote a line from a TRB song.
I heard TRB in 1979 at a high school party. Steve Udry’s house. The kid had records, and taste! Unlike a lot of early punk, the guys in TRB were really fluent players, with a ripping guitarist and an organist, of all things. Some of the songs on the album veered to English music hall, but the attitude was clearly punk. I loved it! The rest of the kids... maybe not so much. It seems quaint now for teenage New Yorkers to be put-off by a lyric like “Freedom to choose what you do with your body, Freedom to believe what you like,” but really, we were a bunch of dumb young preppies stealing our parents' beer.
Power in the Darkness
The title track, Power in the Darkness, is a stone-cold punk rock classic. The opening is Grand Funk Railroad meets Santana, until the bassline comes in and swings the whole thing towards Motown or Sly and the Family Stone. There’s even a spoken word section in the middle... it’s sort of a faux political speech.
It’s a wonderful record, with great sounds and playing. The album was cut at Wessex Studio in London. A ton of great punk records were cut there - The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Damned, Gen X... but also Queen and the first King Crimson album. 24 tracks with a Cadac console.
'Power in the Darkness' got me kicked off college radio a few years later. I will confess that I had been given a friendly warning first, but I was young and just had to open my next radio shift with a song expressly forbidden by Purdue University.
Throw Yourself Down the Mountain
In 1976, an Austrian skier named Franz Klammer threw himself down a mountain outside of Innsbruck to win the Olympic Men's Downhill by 0.33 seconds. He was on the edge of wiping out for virtually his entire run. It was like watching a series of car accidents that didn’t quite happen.
Bands also throw themselves down the mountain, playing with a sense of no guardrails and no safety net. Tom Robinson Band did it on Man You Never Saw. It’s glorious, charging through the verses, nailing the turn-arounds, a savage one-take guitar solo, and the best breakdown (or three of them) anyone’s ever come up with.
These days Tom Robinson is only somewhat calmer, married (to a woman), and still performing his wonderful, smart, angry songs.
Have a great week. I might have thrown myself off a mountain due to website issues but hopefully not.
Luke
