Standing Over By The Record Machine: Red Rockers’ Condition Red reissue returns in better condition

A tale of Fender Princetons, Rat pedals, and parking garage echo chambers, and the best early Clash-style punk rock New Orleans had to offer. And yeah, I wrote the liner notes to this remix/remaster.

“When you die a rocker, you die red!” Red Rockers in their prime: (l-r) John Griffith, Darren Hill, James Singletary. (Pic courtesy of Red Rockers)

Welcome, all you beautiful weirdos and dreamers. Welcome to The ‘Stack,  where your thoughts find a chorus, and your voice finds an echo.

But first, let’s turn to matters of national importance: Is it true that Trump has some serious goddamned body odor going on?!

Yeah, yeah. I know. That man wreaked so much damage upon The American Way in just four short years in The White House, they felt like a 20-year epoch that turned us into one of those “shithole countries” he used to snarl about. Maybe he’s finally getting his comeuppance in court soon. We should be sober as a judge (unless that judge is Clarence Thomas), discussing how to ensure that Cheeto Mussolini never gets a second term.

But especially after he made such classy moves as mocking a disabled journalist, #TrumpSmellsBad just makes me guffaw like my 115th viewing of Used Cars.

According to The Independent, it all began when deposed GOP lawmaker Adam Kizinger tweeted the following on December 16th:

Some Cheeto Mussolini spokesman or other fired back in the most mature fashion possible: “Adam Kinzinger farted on live TV and is an unemployed fraud. He has disgraced his country and disrespects everyone around him because he is a sad individual who is mad about how his miserable life has turned out.”

Then Kizinger went on The Meidas Touch Network and replied: “It’s not good. The best way to describe it... take armpits, ketchup, a butt and makeup and put that all in a blender and bottle that as a cologne.That’s kind of that. I’ve been amazed that everybody is just kind of learning about this now.”

The mud’s been flying since, all over Twi- …er, X. The Lincoln Project has even produced a 30-second spot about it:

Really, both Forbes and the So What? Substack may be right. Maybe it’s irresponsible to swarm on the guy because he may/may not stink. Not when there’s more important crimes to consider with that. Like how he’s a treasonous, lying-ass narcissist who should be in jail and not the Oval Office….

Enough of that. I know there are people who hate when I talk politics, rather than rock ‘n’ roll. Most of them Cheeto Mussolini supporters. That’s okay, I’ll stop. Because right now, I wanna get into a record I’ve been obsessed with since it was released in 1982, just receiving its remix and remaster. And yes, I was honored to be commissioned by the band themselves to pen the liner notes for this new edition. Ignore that. I’d write the following review, regardless.

Red Rockers – Condition Red [LP] (Liberty Spike Recordings/Sundazed)

“Red Rockers sound like they've been locked in a cupboard with the Clash's first album for three years. Yeah, great isn't it?”

– our boy Lester Bangs

Entire batches of you are now surely gulping, “Red Rockers?! Those guys that did ‘China’?!” This, despite having prepped you in a post on December 21….

Forget all that! Before Columbia Records happened to them, the Red Rockers were a guns(-of-revolution)-a-blazin’, honest-to-Jah, capital-P PUNK ROCK BAND from the home of great R&B and rice and beans. They were true Clash City Rockers, slinging guitars with enough serrated edges to chainsaw through a preacher’s podium, courtesy of singer John Griffith and James Singletary. Darren Hill’s low-hanging Rickenbacker bass could trigger earthquakes. And drummer Patrick Butler Jones had all the brute-force slam needed to rattle your fillings loose. And they had songs. Songs full of righteous anger, bred in an American South that is a perfect punk petri dish. As I wrote in those liners, “You have to have something to rebel against. The specter of Dixie and all she stands for makes ripe grist for the mill. It makes you more fierce in your commitment.”

No wonder the original spirit of JoeMickPaulTopper hung over Condition Red like tear gas-scented perfume. Red Rockers agree.

“Absolutely, without a doubt,” affirmed bassist/lyricist Hill. “We wore it on our sleeves. The Clash influenced my musical sensibilities, my politics, spirit – everything! They spoke to me like no other.” Griffith and Singletary both concur wholeheartedly, though Griffith added another key influence.

“We loved the first two Generation X albums!” he raved. “We patterned our look and our style after them, and The Clash.”

No wonder I was a goner at age 17 for this band, and this record. Combat Rock was issued around the same time. Condition Red served as my inoculation against that album. Ironically, the Red Rockers were chosen to open select dates on the Combat Rock US tour. Perhaps The Clash used them as stand-ins, for all who preferred “White Riot” to “Rock The Casbah”?

Pure and simple, Condition Red was “White Riot” rewired. The Red Rockers channeled The Clash’s early streetwise swagger to fight for justice one ripped chord at a time. Tunes like the aforementioned “Guns Of Revolution” and “Dead Heroes” rewired that Brixton anger for the bayou heat, those guitars spitting fire rather than bullets: “A left-wing terror is taking over,” Griffith sang on the former (changed to “right-wing terror” for the band’s recent reunion show). “Scared little rich man, you’d better start running/Guns of revolution….”

“I was raised Southern Baptist, upper middle class – we all were,” Griffith told me for those liner notes. “But we were aware of what was going on in the world, and we thought this is what you do in punk rock: You speak out.”

“We wanted some sort of social commentary, something to stand on,” said Singletary. “We wanted to have some kind of relevance, without being too heavy-handed about it.” 

“Hence,” my liners continue, “anthems like ‘Teenage Underground,’ totally rejecting adult mindsets: ‘Just wanna live life fast, and know who we are.’”

After losing Jones, gaining ex-Stiff Little Fingers drummer Jim Reilly, and getting talked into an uncomfortable new wave bargain by Columbia Records, Red Rockers recorded two more albums, toured with U2, and were done by 1985. They all went on to other things – Cowboy Mouth in Griffiths’ case, managing every band I love (such as New York Dolls and The Replacements) in Hill’s –-  but their old punk band kept calling back to them. Then the master tapes were found in Sandy Pearlman’s garage.

“The guitar player from Huey Lewis and the News grabbed them at an estate sale, out of the garage!” Hill enthused to me last year. “We thought they were gone forever! All we did was open the tapes up and take all the reverb off. It made the guitars sound so much bigger. Everything just sounds better. It’s unbelievable.”

Yeah, that reverb. Condition Red fucking well SWAM in it! Imagine “Heartbreak Hotel” multiplied by a thousand million. No, that’s still not enough!

This reissue is, as I wrote in those liners, “Condition Red as Red Rockers might have done it, had they better understood how to use the recording studio in their youth. It sounds as if it was recorded last week. Everything roars like you are in their practice space with them. The guitars have teeth, the bass is loud and thick, the drums thump and the vocals cry. You also get ‘Nothing To Lose,’ the sole debut single track that wasn’t re-recorded for Conditions Red, as well as ‘Voice Of America’ and the other songs Columbia rejected for the follow-up LP. You even get Don Pardo introducing them on Saturday Night Live.” 

When hardcore bulldozed its way through the early ‘80s punk scene, Red Rockers held their ground, a granite monolith weathering the storm of breakdowns and blast beats. Red Rockers were the last embers of old school punk’s original fire, their music a defiant middle finger to the changing scene, and to the retrograde Dixie social order. And it’s finally allowed to ring free, loud and clear, minus all that reverb. Aren’t you glad that dude from Huey Lewis and the News got those tapes to them?

BONUS GAME: Can you spot Jello Biafra’s cameo on their rendition of “Folsom Prison Blues”? (Biafra texts me in five…four…three….)

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