SOUNDTRACK: CRO-MAGS-The Age of Quarrel (1986).
In a post from a couple of days ago, Rebecca Kushner mentions a bunch of punk bands that she either knew or hung out with. I was amazed at how many of them I’d heard of but didn’t really know. So this seemed like a good opportunity to go punk surfing.
Cro-Mags are another of those classic punk bands that I never really listened to. I mean, sure I’ve heard of them. And that album cover is well known to me. I just never gave them a listen.
This is their debut album. They are still together but have only released 6 records. And their later stuff is much more heavy metal oriented. But this first one is classic punk.
There a whole bunch of really short songs–eight under two minutes. But there were hints at the metal direction because there are also some longer songs too. Opener “We Gotta Know” is over three minutes and even has a wild guitar solo from Parris Mitchell Mayhew. “Seekers of the Truth” runs to over four minutes and is comparatively rather slow paced.
But the punk elements are there too. Chanted call and response and a song like “World Peace” has a good moshing break down.
Overall, it sounds a bit like a few of the metal albums form the 80s that I really liked. There’s no reason I shouldn’t have listened to this back then. They’ve even got pointed lyrics that as a teen I would have really gotten into
Interestingly, their follow up album, Best Wishes, had a big lineup change. Their bassist (and the only guy who has been with the band for all of these years) Harley Flanagan took over on vocals. His singing style was very different. The short songs are gone and the metal feel really dominates.
In Kushner’s essay she talks about Harley the hare krishna and you can see that spirituality in his lyrics
Days of Confusion which is only 2 minutes long has this lyric
In these days of confusion much illusions try to get you
Try to trick you Every single day
Much aggravation and frustration
Devastation always heading my way
And I know why I’m suffering
Looking for satisfaction my mind keeps leading me astrayAnd I know and I see spiritually there’s gotta be a better way
[READ: February 2, 2021] “Passeur”
A man is in Krakow, the only major Polish city to have survived World War II without its buildings being severely demolished.
He is staying in “a pension” (which I’m picturing as a hostel) and asks where the nearest ATM is. I enjoyed this line:
It’s not far, she said, sighing regretfully, as if she wished she were sending me to the other side of the world.
He says he has never been in this square before, but he knows it by heart. Or at least he knows the merchants–grandmothers selling vegetables and home-made goods.
Then he looks in a barbershop and he sees a man who looks comfortable there, Ken.
Ken was born in New Zealand and died there.
Ken had lived all over the world and many years ago he took the narrator under his wing. Ken was sixty, the narrator was 11. For the next six or seven years Ken was the biggest influence in his life.
The French word is Passeur–often translated as ferrymen or smuggler but with more of a sense of guide. And that was Ken.
His parents approved of Ken. He made them foursome for cards and he loved Paris (which pleased his mother).
He sits with Ken and shows off his sketchbook. They share a beer and watch a chess match. They go off to see the man with his carrier pigeons. Ken marvels that they used pigeons during the world to relay valuable secrets. They would shrink the letters to a tiny size to fit on the pigeons legs and then increase them when the pigeon arrived.
Collodion film and carrier pigeons–strange how things come together.
They return to the chess match and as they watch a man make a mistake, the narrator nudges Ken to tell the man about the mistake.
Dead men don’t move pieces!
There’s a nice image of Ken being a master at shuffling cards
Sometimes the cascade looked like a moving staircase–an escalator–or a playing cards ladder. Once, later, he said to me when I was complaining of not being able to go to sleep: Imagine you’re shuffling a pack of cards, that’s how I go to sleep.
Sometimes death is not he end.
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