So desperate is Hank Williams Jr. to sell his new record, he’s resorted to appealing to the worst, incorporating into his set a nightly ritual of offense:
” ‘We’ve got a Muslim for a President who hates cowboys, hates cowgirls, hates fishing, hates farming, loves gays, and we hate him,’ Williams Jr. bellowed [at the Ft. Worth Stockyards in Texas.] The Dallas Sun reported — the crowd responded with a loud cheer.”
“The 63-year-old singer began his anti-gay commentary a few songs earlier, mocking ‘queer guitar pickers’ in the middle of ‘All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down’ before moving on to his next target: Liberal politicians, who he told to ‘move to Mexico’ …” writes the free-lance correspondent for the Texas newspaper.
As with Ted Nugent, it’s code. Hank, Jr., uses slurs that won’t quite get him thrown out of his big gigs like railing about the n—– in DC and faggots would.
Now that he’s gone down this road any friends he had at record companies in Nashville will deem him radioactive. He’ll be financing everything by himself.
It’s worth contrasting the bigots like Hank Jr., with the Dixie Chicks.
Natalie Manes delivered a mild putdown of GWB in Milton Keynes, England. The wrath of the country music establishment came down on the band and cost it a chart-topping career.
Hank Williams, Jr., hasn’t been a chart-topper for a long time. But country music won’t flay the hide off him like it did the women.
That there’s your hypocrisy, folks, a tacit admission through lack of action that those who package and deliver modern country know well the nature of the audience. The same as the Republican party — white, angry, loutish and frequently worse, masquerading as the upholders and preservers of American traditions and pieties.
Warmth, the pure milk of human kindness, hospitality, civility, empathy and tolerance.
Functionally, Hank Williams, Jr. has turned into a supersized, mainstreamed Johnny Rebel, a very minor 60’s country artist notable for his racist sentiments.
It’s not partisan or biased to lampoon odious reptiles. It’s not my fault old white Christian panty-sniffers and extremists are the base of the Republican Party.
Inspiration taken from David Allan Coe’s “Don’t Bite the Dick,” many places on YouTube, shown earlier in the week.
C’mon. I know I had you laughin’ at “You can’t say that!”
Good rock and roll should often be funny and have the ability to offend the easily offended simultaneously. It’s just the hint of a smile in the statesman-like portrait that does it.
“Does humor belong in music?” Frank Zappa once asked. Rhetorical question.
The Los Angeles Times political gossip page: Nov. 3, 2003:
A couple of MP3 online musical parodies by “Arnold and the Gropinators,” a “Venice Beach garage metal” band, have surfaced … the A-side title, “I Think We Should Make a Carla Sandwich,” is taken from a description in The Times of an alleged movie set incident in which Schwarzenegger and his stand-in trapped stand-in [Carla] next to a food service table. Schwarzenegger supposedly said, “I think we should make a Carla sandwich,” and the men squeezed her between them. After they released her, [she] said, Schwarzenegger stuck his tongue in her mouth.
“Uncle Sam & the JDAMs … responsible for such patriotic anthems as ‘Red Zone Bar-B-Q [Flat Foot Fallouja]’ and ‘Posing for Pix in Abu Ghraib,’ not to mention the Angry Samoans update ‘The Shrub Killings’)… a day will come when we look back and laugh. History works like that.??? — The Village Voice, November 2004
Eight years later and still no one’s laughing. One of the final nails in the coffin of the national reputation.
Often just instrumental punctuated by familiar lines, it was purposely brief, like the two weeks of humiliating national euphoria leading up to “Mission Accomplished!”
It was composed to be one piece, heard linearly from start to finish. You can’t cherry pick it or ignore the words and roll your own play list. The segues from song to song have purpose and the story falls apart if you apply the technology of iPod and shuffle play. (And, yep, I was Uncle Sam & the JDAMs, playing all the instruments except for drums, furnished either by a now old Adrenalinn I or programmable loops and acoustic single shots from Cool Edit Pro/Adobe Audition.)
In 2004 no one wanted satire. No Frank Zappa. They still don’t. There was just the slight beginnings of a surly national hangover that only became more fulminating over the years.
“Oh, yeah?” comes the belligerence. Yes it sucked but we suck less than the rest of the world, or something like that.
Make up an excuse, there are hundreds.
The war was and is a source of national shame. No movies that did great box office were made of it. (Remember Generation Kill? Didn’t think so.) Very few of our celebrity artists had the nerve to sneer at it. The most famous who did, the Dixie Chicks, paid for it with their career.
More records were made with the opposite sentiment, all of them certified dog crap.
I made about eighty Iraq n Rolls. Some were peddled on line, some given away to acquaintances. But most sold in LA County, in Poo-bah’s in Pasadena and Amoeba Records in Hollywood.
No one would review it. I got the feeling the few I sent copies to
didn’t even take it out of the shrink wrap. As today, no one can be bothered.
The tune that earned the most mileage was “I Think We Should Make a Carla Sandwich,” a bonus cut which had nothing to do with the war. It was a joke about Arnold Schwarzenegger and his unquenchable urge to paw women. It was referred on a comedy site and as a result, when I visited Pine Grove the same year, even there a couple people had heard it on the Internet.
Very much a hard rock/classic rock record, Iraq n Roll only departs from the style in its use of drop-in guest vocals by assorted characters.
Can you name them?
Spoiler: The Vice President, Don Rumsfeld, Comical Ali (stupidly called Baghdad Bob by GWB who could never get anything right) and Lyndon LaRouche.
There were even T-shirts made. This was through CafePress at a time when people, including myself, had the stupid idea that you could make anything reasonably priced through publish-on-demand services.
You can’t. All the publish-it-yourself and make-it-on-demand Internet fulfillment houses furnish terrible products which are almost always, by default, overpriced. To keep the prices down you had to select for the cheapest quality materials.
Did you get a T-shirt? I gave some away as promotions.
It will also occur to readers that the war was so long, people born during it, and the many children who grew up in the time frame, have no idea who these characters were or what was actually going on.
Except for GWB and Dick Cheney it’s as if the entire history of the war, its frauds and minor characters have been expunged.
Where and what was Fallouja? What’s a JDAM? (A computer-guided bomb that elicited magical thinking.)
What was the Thunder Run? (It was the armored ride up Baghdad’s main thoroughfare.)
Song title and libretto page from album art.
Few probably remember that while almost none would criticize the war openly in 2004, practically speaking, everyone else of suitable fighting age was privately running as fast as they could the other way.
Originally, the US Army could not meet its recruit/enlistment quotas. Nobody wanted to go to Iraq to get blowed up by IEDs fighting the insurgency and it wasn’t until the economy started to turn sour but good in 2007 that, by necessity, things turned around.
When options ran out there was the military, suddenly looking like the French Foreign Legion for anyone of the right age. (Except France has managed to keep itself out of war for a good long time, now.)
I’ve reissued Iraq n Roll for readers and the curious as an MP3 collection and an archive of .flac files, the latter of which reconstitutes the full audio content of the original CD.
I prefer the original sound — it was well before the Cult of iKit — but you will need a .flac to .wav converter to remake it.
Here is one. Once you have the .wavs, you want to burn it to a compact disc.
For that, I’ve also included the original printable album art for the finished disc and its original prototyping as a black and white mock-up in both archives.
Obscurity! Collector’s items. Have something nobody else wanted or knew about.
Iraq n Roll by Uncle Sam & the JDAMS (aka Dick Destiny) as MP3’s — here
Iraq n Roll by Uncle Sam & the JDAMS — complete album audio in .flac format — is here.
And —
Yes
— you can throw me a tip/pay a slight amount for them, if you like.
Recommended pricing:
Three dollars and fifty cents for the mp3 collection.
Four dollars and fifty cents for the .flac full audio collection.
Or five dollars even for both. What a steal!
Map of Iraq and secret plan of bad guy and gal strategy compiled by the ULTOR (Ultimate Victor) and MULTOR (Monster Ultimate Victor) combat artificial intelligence machine theologians in the Pentagon’s Special Office of Strategies for Reduction of Adversaries.
Uncle Sam is a trademark of the United States. Uncle Sam wants you, you may fire when you are ready, Gridley; we begin bombing in five minutes, shock and awe, remember the Maine, “We are Coming!”, Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), beware of careless talk, loose lips sink ships, Orange Alert, first pull up then pull down, potrzebie and “Mission Accomplished!” are also slogans & symbols which may add to the enjoyment of “Iraq ‘N’ Roll!”
Blessed be and glorious day! Mitt Romney has picked John Galt Jr! Wealthiness, next to Godliness, that’s what Jesus taught. Now it’s time to whip the poor, you know what to do!
Sometimes the paint truck can’t stop in time. Sometimes there ain’t enough men to have one out in front as roadkill catcher. Austerity. Gotta trim those local union workers.
And I have a song for that. Roadkill. And I still play it.
Wade Michael Page, the gunman in Sunday’s Sikh temple shooting, had a history of problems with alcohol, which led to him losing his military career and, more recently, a job as a trucker.
The white racist punk rock scene has existed almost as long as punk rock itself. It lives along side the regular scene, its members often seen at shows by mainstream bands.
If you looked you could find them without trouble in the Lehigh Valley when I wrote for the Morning Call newspaper in the late Eighties and early Nineties.
Reads a piece from the Call in 1988 by reporter Gerald Shields:
Allentown has become an East Coast hub for “skinheads,” a loosely organized group of youths known by their shaved heads who flock to the city every weekend to attend punk rock shows at a center city club, according to interviews yesterday with three youths involved in the local club scene.
Meanwhile, South Whitehall Township police continued their investigation yesterday in the stabbing of three teen-agers on Friday night. Police said the attack was done by a group of about 15 skinheads, who stabbed the youths and beat them with chains …
Local youths who are knowledgeable about the movement said yesterday that skinheads from New Jersey, New York and Connecticut come to Allentown every weekend to visit Oliver J.’s, a center city Allentown under-21 club, which caters to the youths.
I assiduously avoided Oliver J’s.
There’s only so many times you can face writing weekend wrap-ups on fights, miscellaneous violence and petty riots until the thrill wears off and by 1988 I’d seen more than enough bleak punk rock shows.
Another infamous story from a number of years ago is here.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is well aware of this music scene and for the Post, Mark Potok had a few comments:
The assault Sunday put a spotlight on a little-known but vibrant — and sometimes violent — music subculture, according to watchdog groups. “There is a whole underworld out there of white supremacist music of which the public is almost entirely unaware,??? said Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which first flagged Page’s connection to hate groups in a blog post Monday. The group has been monitoring Page since 2000, when he began playing for bands with names such as Max Resist, Blue Eyed Devil and Intimidation One.
“This guy was in the thick of the white-supremacist music scene,??? Potok said. “He was not a fringe player. He was well known in the scene and played in some of the best-known bands??? …
His wanderings at one point led him to Georgia to attend “Hammerfest,??? an annual white-power music festival that the Anti-Defamation League calls “a virtual Woodstock of hate rock.???
Paradoxically, even Nazi punks don’t spend much on the records of their favorite bands, a tacit admission the grim music is 100 percent crap, although the audience very actively engages in live events. One can look at it as the backdrop for bonding rallies where the purpose is to gin up violence and the thoughts of it against others.
The quintessential bottom out of sight crowd, they are thin in the wallet.
A web article from a few years back reveals the numbers behind Definite Hate, one of Wade Page’s bands:
A deal with Resistance [a now defunct label of the National Alliance] isn’t about money: Though the label paid the $2,000 in studio costs, it offered no advance, no video budget and no cut of the merchandise. Definite Hate received $1 for every disc sold. (Resistance’s best-selling release, Rahowa’s Cult of the Holy War, has sold about 25,000 copies worldwide.)
Nothing quite says “No sale” with such rock-ribbed authority like swastikas, SS lightning bolts and “Heil Hitler” tattoos on the face, neck, hands, chest and arms.
Generic Nazi punk hatecore grenade, distinguished only by accidental infamy.
Last night I broke out the original vinyl Chrome box set on Subterranean Records. Quite an original piece, a six album set issued by a band hardly anyone knew. With almost no distribution, it is now old and totally unique, forbidding looking as ever and in mint condition, fruit of doing a fanzine in ’82 at Lehigh University in Bethlehem.
We did a lot of neat things that year. In addition to science.
After three decades, between just No Humans Allowed, Blood on the Moon, Half Machine Lip Moves and Alien Soundtracks, Chrome’s box set still shows the band’s good idiosyncratic sci-fi take on what, underneath all the clatter and funny noises, is fairly conventional hard rock.
Much better recorded than given credit for, special effects and tape snippets were what threw people, making it seem … alien. The rhythm tracks are excellent. Even today most would not know it’s a drum machine on the majority unless told.
Remember, this was before the Linn drum and ubiquitous sampled drums on the pop hit records of the Eighties, so I’m thinking it was directly a response to someone being a fan of the obscure — Arthur Brown’s Kingdom Come and an old machine called the Bentley Rhythm Ace.
All analog, the vocals go through fuzzes, everything gets piped through something like an old Seamoon Funk Machine or flanged, and it’s mixed warm but sinister, a personal interpretation of American war technology and the space age — Insect Human/Slip It to the Android/A Cold Clammy Bombing/You’ve Been Duplicated — in the post Vietnam disillusionment. (Seamoon was in Berkeley and Chrome was basically two guys in San Francisco, so they could have easily had one.)
The Chrome title that got the most focus was Half Machine Lip Moves and it’s the most memorable, but Blood On the Moon and the others are all of a piece. And they never did it live although they sure sounded like they could.
I used to think of Chrome as a kind of stilted sci-fi concept combo that masqueraded as an arty hard rock band in the late ’70s, mostly to ill effect, on much lauded things like Half-Machine Lip Moves. At one point, I had even hypnotized myself into believing that Chrome’s inherent difficulty made them listenable. Moving to the West Coast made busted matchwood of that when I had to decide what to keep for the moving van and what to throw out.
“During the 1970s Chrome’s music did not fit into any particular music scene in America,” reads a Wikipedia entry, with unintentional dry hilarity. Ya think?
A couple years back I discovered that while my mother had thrown out all the original Chrome records I’d bought separately prior to getting the box as a review copy, I’d apparently stashed the latter away in a case that made it to Pasadena.
Little surprises! Now it sells for 150 bucks, cash money.
And I re-hypnotized myself into admiration for the material. Stilted? Sci-fi? Guilty. Hard rock. Definitely. Long re-listening when you’ve nothing to do will have that effect.
The Chrome box is not the same. Some things, one guesses, still can’t be duplicated without more hard work than the age of digital theft will accommodate. That would be a good thing.
(Chorus)
St. Maria, Virgin, become a feminist
Become a feminist, Become a feminist
(end chorus)
Church praises the rotten dictators
The cross-bearer procession of black limousines
In school you are going to meet with a teacher-preacher
Go to class – bring him money!
Trivia: Now who was the more important American innovator? Leo Fender or one of Google’s famous pontificating stooges? Note Fender Strat. (Actually, a knock-off — but it’s still a Strat.)
If this woman were in America, she could join the Tea Party:
“This is not a question of our parliamentary or presidential elections, but a criminal case about … banal hooliganism with a religious motive,” said Larisa Pavlova, who represents Lyubov Sokologorskaya, one of several people who work at the cathedral and are appearing at the trial as “victims” of Pussy Riot.
Sokologorskaya, who described herself as a “profound believer”, said only clerics were allowed at the altar and that the defendants’ bare shoulders, short skirts and “aggressive” dance moves violated church rules and offended the faithful.
“When I talk about this event, my heart hurts. It hurts that this is possible in our country,” she said. “Their punishment must be adequate so that never again is such a thing repeated.”
