I used to have this personal meme. Called it the “Rock n Roll Fantasy” meme. But it had very little to do with rock and roll, and a lot to do with fantasy. It’s that moment when the orchestra conductor realizes his cellist has dropped dead and announces to the audience that tonight’s show will be canceled because of that since…there’s no one who can play the piece. And then you realize that it’s YOU. YOU can play that piece and you raise your hand and you’re off to the races, greater glory and whatever else the future may hold.
I’ve replayed this for everything I do. From things I do well to things I do poorly. It doesn’t matter. What matters is when the moment calls you answer it.
“Hey. Do you like Gang of Four?”
For years when interviewed for being the singer of Oxbow when people would ask who my personal influences were I’d name…everybody but them. In the very same way that very few people credit their parents…for either not murdering them, or raising them well.
"In '78 and '79 it was called the Winter of Discontent," King said of the hellscape that England had been even before Thatcher dug in.
But on the occasion of the email query (thanks Sonya!) I had realized that not only did I like Gang of Four, but I loved Gang of Four. And seeing them in New York in 1979 had changed how I thought about the performative aspect of music more than many/any others.
“Yes. I love Gang of Four.”
“Well we’d like you to write about them and…”
I don’t remember much of what was said after that. Indeed, I wasn’t even sure what the final form factor was for the piece. Whether it was for a book on the Gang of Four. Liner notes for a box set. Turns out it was for a press release for the boxset.
Which means you have not read it. Unless you’re media. And because you’re not media, you need to read it. It’s a part of my rock and roll fantasy. It’s a part of my rock and roll dream. Enjoy.
At Home We Feel Like Purists
Music, specifically pop music, is as much of a commodity as pork bellies. It's bought, packaged, sold, traded and has as little to do with the Platonic triad of beauty, goodness and truth as, well, pork bellies. And it hasn't just become this way. It's been this way. From its inception to now, its value is what's made it significant in the marketplace. But pressed against a wooden stage in New York at Hurrah's in the late 1970s, what stepped out on stage had nothing to do with any kind of commercial calculus. That I could see.
See, in 1979, after a steady diet of The Ramones, the New York Dolls, Klaus Nomi, fer chrissakes, and on the strength of the name alone, a single, the press and the locale, the Gang of Four was a must see. But wrapped in the earlier vaudevillian aspect of punk rock, new wave, no wave, and a sort of well-meaning but very extant schtick, expectations were in keeping with what had already been seen. But what had been seen would in no way prepare you for what you were about to see.
Four Brits, no leather jackets, no make-up, and outside of an opening song with about two minutes of unremitting feedback, no schtick.
"We all grew up around vaudeville. It was part of the zeitgeist," said drummer Hugo Burnham, from outside of Boston where he toils in academia and presently makes his home. But Gang of Four? "It was anti-schtick. And it was somewhat deliberate because we were serious about what we were doing but we weren't dour. We didn't go as far as the shoegazing thing."
Which is almost right. Gone was the clever art school quirk of Talking Heads or the mordant rumble of a Joy Division, musicians framing what we were understanding about new music at the time. Replaced instead with something that was equal parts both cool and hot, and when they tore into their set that night it was with a life-changing brio.
No "Hello Cleveland!" No foot on the front wedge rock god posturing, just songs and songs played like those that were playing them meant it. It, here, being coruscating takes on very precisely what it was we were doing while we were doing it. Again: not by accident. But very specifically, deliberately.
"We sat in pubs and talked about it," Burnham said. Right down to things like, "No fucking feet on the monitors."
What Burnham fails to mention and this is an amusing Rashomonesque feature of chatting with the three members still living – Burnham, singer/lyricist Jon King, and bassist Dave Allen – is that the no-feet-on-the-monitors "chat" didn't happen in a pub. King, in a call from London, offers an alternate scenario.
…“The fascists that came to the shows. They would jump onstage when we were playing in London, skinheads, and they had knives."
"It happened backstage after a show in what used to be Yugoslavia," King laughs. "And it involved a fistfight." So Gill and Allen settled things the old-fashioned way and while it's unknown who won, at the Hurrah's show there were no feet on monitors.
What there was though after the generalized sexlessness of punk rock -- from Johnny Rotten declaring sex "boring" and for "hippies" and Minor Threat's Ian MacKaye singing that he didn't fuck – was music and performance of said music that was as somatic as all get out and that very directly addressed love, sex, the politics of both, and their wider intersection with politics in total.
But first a little historical political perspective and a sense of the tableau upon which whatever Gang of Four was, was created. In the late 1970s in the U.K., there was 14 percent inflation, 18 percent in 1980, one in five adult males were out of work, interest rates were 14 percent, and there was massive industrial unrest.
"In '78 and '79 it was called the Winter of Discontent," King said of the hellscape that England had been even before Thatcher dug in. "There were piles of garbage four meters high in the street, people weren't going to be buried because there was a strike of mortuary workers and grave diggers, there were dozens of IRA terror attacks in mainland UK, there were plotters looking to pull a coup d'etat, plus Russian SCUD missiles in eastern Europe and Americans sending Pershing missiles to NATO, so threats of nuclear attack. Songs like 'In the Ditch' on Solid Gold? That was the context we were working with."
And given that context, a steadfast mark of Gang of Four's genius that they didn't zig into what was a popular pose at the time (and still really) and try to pull off the working class hero crap that had smart people dumbing down in the name of some sort of shopworn idea of what was authentic. That is, the Gang of Four were driven and obsessed with what middle class art school students should be obsessed with: making great music and art in and of the times they are living, fully realizing that you can't fake authenticity.
Which is when King zags and contemporizes it all. Like he does. Like Gang of Four did. "What's interesting is buying a cup of coffee now: they ask you 'what's your name?' and they insist on knowing what it is. These fake relationships masquerading as real relationships when we all know it's a masquerade."
"Look, in looking back I have decided I really like this sort of troublesome 21-year-old me who wrote these totally un-commercial songs," said King. But the charm, at least for the creator, is that "there's nothing in it that is an attempt to pander to people. And it may sound kind of stupid but I kind of thought of us as like a blues band."
"So I tried to avoid cliché, but it's quite difficult trying to not write about things that everyone else was writing about," King explains." But there's a reason hip-hop is the biggest genre in the world now and that's because it's got some authenticity about it; it talks about things that are actually happening. The world is a shit show now. To not write about it is a remarkable evasion of responsibility."
Something that wasn't missed in 1979 New York either with crime at an all-time high and the city collapsing financially. So mid-set when King dragged a metal crate on stage – "we later switched to a microwave," Burnham said – and started blasting it with a drum stick it was both the sound of the city and the times all at once.
Adding percussive elements in and from trash, well in advance of Einsturzende Neubaten and even Stan Ridgway from Wall of Voodoo who Burnham initially thought they had lifted it from ("No," corrects King), this was a perfect sweat-drenched statement of intent: Gang of Four absolutely were not fucking around.
And it was perhaps this quality specifically that drew the heavy. "We were political with a small P," said bassist Dave Allen who followed a post-Gang of Four career with music tech gigs at both Apple and Intel, which is how he ended up in Portland. "But we were fighting Nazis. The fascists that came to the shows. They would jump onstage when we were playing in London, skinheads, and they had knives." Allen, in general soft spoken, neither laughs nor smiles in the retelling. "The security guards would all run away. Having a big heavy bass in this instance helped quite a bit."
But before reforming in 2005, Allen was the first to leave Gang of Four, in 1981, and his leaving was part of that whole not fucking around piece and almost perfectly Gang of Four-ish. "EMI were always pushing us. They wanted us to make 'hits'. Be on the radio. Top of the Pops," Allen sighs. "That's not what we do. We don't make pop songs. But they had all of these pretty boys. Duran Duran…so I just felt like I had done enough."
And despite the fact though that 25 percent of the band is dead, 25 percent is talking to me via video chat, and 50 percent of the band is in America, the claim that there are no second acts in American lives? Clearly bullshit and so not a surprise at all when Allen says, "we need to find a guitarist."
The 2005 reunion only lasted a few years, but Andy Gill continued with replacement musicians and died right in the midst of touring with them. He left giant shoes to fill. But even considering trying to fill them? A straight-up damn the torpedoes move. To which they are well matched.
"When you try to audition a guitar player they just can't do it," Allen winds up. "They come in blasting thinking it is punk, but we were post-punk. It was us and Wire…"
It certainly was.
And in 1979 when the show at Hurrahs concluded, and they stood on stage for the briefest of moments, drenched in sweat, not smiling as they regarded us the audience, also drenched in sweat, and said "goodnight", it felt like marching orders. And they were.
For? For a murderer's row of people whose music not only kills but lives on in our cars, houses, phones, heads: The Pixies, Nirvana, Shellac, REM, Mission of Burma, Bush Tetras, Savage Republic, 10,000 Maniacs, Mark Stewart, Henry Rollins, Steve Shelley, Sofia Coppola, and more too numerous to name but no less deserving.
Now draw a family tree that across the past 40 years of influencing just about anyone making music, film, or art who proudly claims and proclaims some sort of spiritual connection to the Gang of Four and what have you? A veritable bildungsroman of the greatest things to just about ever happen to your fucking ears. Believe me. I know.
– Eugene S. Robinson from OXBOW