Still planning on a bit of a vacation from this blog -- but I had already mentioned next week's Forgotten Rebels show, and am now being told by Dustin Jak (the vocalist for the Keg Killers) that they aren't coming over to open for the Forgotten Rebels next week after all. Merlin had suffered a shoulder injury, so the previous plan was that Willy was going to fill in... but they ultimately decided it would be better to bow out. Instead, filling in for them, it will be Neurospazm (really spelled with a Z, though Google doesn't like that if you go searching; they could name an album, "Do you mean neurospasm?"). WAIT//LESS and Terminal City Rats remain on the bill, as far as I know!
The odds are I will not be at this show. I'm paranoid enough about my recent COVID exposure, despite it "so far" manifesting only in some very mild symptoms, that I gave away an expensive concert ticket this past weekend, but the worst is yet to come, if COVID indeed is what it is (it may just be a cold but my wife was hugging someone the other week who later tested positive, then she got sick, too, and someone else who was with us, so...).
...But I do love This Ain't Hollywood. It's a perfect punk album, by me, from inspired covers ("Eve of Destruction," Pomus and Shuman's "Save the Last Dance for Me" and Gary Glitter's "Hello, Hello" to three of my favourite originals by the Forgotten Rebels ("Surfin' on Heroin," written by original bassist Chris Houston, whose solo version also bears appreciating; "The Me Generation"; and "It Won't Be Long" -- all catchy, witty and very fun to hear. It's interesting to note that Maximum Rock'n'Roll, a fairly politically correct mag, decries it as relatively tame in its topics, complaining that it lacks the "cavalier offensiveness" of their first album, In Love with the System; they specifically mention "Fuck Me Dead" -- which is hilarious and catchy but gets me in trouble around the house whenever I sing it:
I love rigor mortis when it just sets inI know where you're goin' I don't care where you've been
A pillow in a coffin's just as nice as a bed
And baby I love it when you fuck me dead
...which sort of sees Alice Cooper's "Cold Ethyl," raises the bet and ends up raking in the chips; if there's a catchier tune about having sex with corpses, I don't know it (TSOL's "Code Blue" doesn't even come close). There's also a song celebrating the death of Elvis ("the big fat goof is dead, dead, dead")...
...speaking of which, I actually always thought -- despite having owned this album -- that "No Beatles Reunion" was celebrating the murder of John Lennon, much like the Meatmen's "One Down Three to Go," but it turns out that the album was from 1980, and the song was no doubt written and recorded before Lennon's assassination, which happened in the final month of that year; the lyrics show no indication that Lennon was dead, instead offering the pithiest distillation of how a band can become "the establishment they once rejected," and ends on a pretty witty note of self-sabotage (because if people are sentimental idiots for drooling over Beatles nostalgia, how can Stones nostalgia be better? There's a willingness on the part of the band to undercut their own authority that's pretty likeable). There's a later song that does take in Lennon's death but it's about not commodifying nostalgia -- it's not in bad taste at all...
And then (though Maximum Rock'n'Roll somehow dodges mention of it), there's the ever-problematic "Bomb the Boats," which has some revealing arguments in the comments on that Youtube link, where people are divided between embracing it as a fair complaint about open immigration (quoth one commentor: "this song is about unrestrained illegal immigration promoted by globalists who bring over mass numbers of people disguised as political 'refugees' whose customs are incompatible with Western values... The song seems to be even more relevant today than it was when it was written")... and, on the other hand, defending it as satire ("you do realize the Forgotten Rebels wrote this song to show how dumb people that think like this are?" someone says in reply). There is a third possibility that is not mentioned: that the band were kids who gleefully did whatever provocative things they could think of to get attention and attract outrage, as one finds on their song about wanting to be Nazis. See the back cover of their first 7":
That ("Nazis") is apparently the song that got them in the most trouble, including with the Toronto RCMP, according to Tomorrow is Too Late, the decisive oral history of punk Toronto (and by extension Hamilton, where the Rebels are actually from). The book is very much out of print...
...but the same Youtube link above samples from the book in the comments, and I think since it's already out there, it's worth quoting (sorry, you TOHC people, but if you ever put the book back into print, I promise I'll buy it!). Cut and pasted from the Youtube comments:
Mickey DeSadist (Singer): You know what? The important thing about that EP was that it got so much publicity for nothing. People like bad news, so we just decided to give a pile of bad news and laugh at them. That’s all it was. There was never any real Nazi-anything behind the band. pg. 264
Mickey DeSadist: We were a bunch of class clowns that knew we could do touchy subjects and get in newspapers, and we enjoyed writing songs together and having a laugh. We were fun for the sake of fun. We at one point thought we might make a lot of money for it… pg. 304
Chris Houston: There was something about the obnoxiousness of the record that tested a lot of boundaries. Mickey’s sense of humour is definitely misconstrued by a lot of people, which is okay because they would extrapolate on it, and you’d realize that their imaginations were way more perverse than ours. Ha ha ha. pg. 321
Bob Bryden (producer): Mickey says, “We’re not supposed to do this song but we’re gonna do it anyway. One-two-three-four!” Boom – they do, “I Wanna Be a Nazi.” And I’m just sitting there going, “Oh no, there’s gonna be trouble.” But I didn’t anticipate the depth of the trouble. I had no idea how big this was gonna go. pg. 321
Mickey DeSadist: Some members of the audience were intelligent enough to know we were goofing off. Like, I mean, there’s two Polish guys in the band. We wouldn’t actually make it in the Nazi party, would we? And we did that for a joke only because we knew it was a sore thumb. People were being freaked out that I would talk so casually about guys like Dolf and the boys. So they took everything the wrong way. pg. 321
Chris Houston: It was more immaturity. I think when you hear the lyrics to that song it’s pretty obvious. There’s a disclaimer in the last verse. pg. 321
Mickey DeSadist: I had this theory that if they take everything the wrong way, I’ll get a good laugh out of it and I don’t care. Which was a pretty dumb idea. Have you seen the original version of The Producers, with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder? I remember being fourteen, me and this guy were laughing our heads off, and people thought there was nothing funny about it. That shows you a lot of stuff behind early Rebels. It shows you exactly our idea. pg. 321
Larry Potvin (Drummer): I didn’t believe in bombing the boats or feeding their flesh to the fish, but as a young person I didn’t understand the implications of what was happening there: People escaping communism; ruthless governments that would kill anything and everybody that would disagree with them. Of course these people were getting on boats and getting the hell out of there. I would, too. pg.322
Bob Bryden: So I eventually ended up going to -- I’ll never forget this meeting -- the Burlington police department. […] And these two detectives came in and what was really ironic is they had the Rebels album with the lyrics sheet and everything. Not the EP though, the one that has “I Wanna Be a Nazi” on it. They had the album, because even at that time the EP was hard to get. So they put the album down on the table, and I’m staring at them, and I’m staring at the album. What I had to do was ensure, or assure, the detectives of the Burlington police who were representing the complainer and the office of the Attorney General in this investigation that the Forgotten Rebels were not a neo-Nazi organization bent on overthrowing the government and taking over the world. I literally had to convince them of that, and I did in those exact words. I said, “They are a bunch of kids who are total reactionaries who will do anything to shock you. If you say yes they’ll say no, if you say go they’ll say stop. They will do anything to shock you.” And I said, “Clearly, you have fallen into their trap.” And it was really funny because these guys, at that statement, just folded it up and said “Okay,” and that was that. pg. 322.
Mickey DeSadist: Better Bob deal with it than me. I got a good laugh out of it. Supposedly the RCMP sat there and asked if these guys were involved in any idiotic activity and Bob goes, “No, these guys are just doing it for publicity; they don’t know what they’re talking about.” And the guy from the RCMP goes, “That’s exactly what I thought, too.” What really disappointed me was that the only song that ever reflected anything about us is that we were necrophiliacs - “Fuck Me Dead.” We all had a secret desire to go to the morgue when nobody was looking.
I’m only kidding, in case anybody else is stupid enough to think I’m telling the truth. Why didn’t they accuse us of that? Why didn’t they accuse us of being necrophiliacs? I thought they would have got the joke. It was just bait for the newspapers. pg. 322
Larry Potvin: The next album was gonna be “Surfin’ on Heroin,” songs like that, and that was just when the president was doing this Say No To Drugs campaign. And I objected to songs like “Surfin; on Heroin.” I remember saying, “I don’t know if we should be playing that,” because I felt to become successful… I remember the Ontario Provincial Police breaking down my door thinking there were tons of drugs. We didn’t have anything. We weren’t drug dealers. pg. 323
Mickey DeSadist: What really embarrasses me is when people call me a nice guy when I was trying to make a big deal about coming across as a nasty character. Too many people got that point - that I wasn’t that nasty, I was just trying to be silly and smirking at everything myself. pg. 324
All of which seems pretty much like you'd expect. They were kids -- DeSadist was 22 when the first EP came out -- saying outrageous things to shock and get attention, which, early in the days of punk, tons of bands did, from Sid Vicious sporting swastikas to bands calling themselves things like the Battered Wives or the Dayglo Abortions (who were maybe a bit wittier than the Forgotten Rebels about it; hey, is Gymbo Jak still in the Forgotten Rebels? Until today, I had had no idea he was in the band at all!). It's neither a serious statement about refugees nor a mockery of the people who actually feel these things (I doubt the band would ever have realized, re: "Bomb the Boats," that there would be people out there who would be going, "Right on!" They seem to be aiming to go so far beyond the pale -- the fucking gulls, man -- that no one could possibly take them seriously. Oops!
But they still play some of these songs, which leaves me with predictably mixed feelings. On the one hand, you know, I kind of admire their chutzpah, as I do with Tesco Vee or even Lee Ving -- to get out there and be blatantly offensive in a world where there's really not much space for even being vaguely politically incorrect. But I also remember a certain punk (who I'll do the favour of leaving nameless) talking about one of his first-ever releases that he was keeping out of print, because he was embarrassed by it now: he asked if I'd want stuff I wrote when I was a teenager -- like, say, term papers I wrote when I was into Ayn Rand!!! -- to be made public. I kind of respect that, actually -- being mature enough to walk away from your own juvenilia. One should be allowed to grow up; and the Forgotten Rebels do just that on This Ain't Hollywood, which is exactly how De Sadist describes the album in a recent interview: "This was where we actually became ourselves for reality and not just snotty teens out to get attention. We grew up here…" I don't even own In Love with the System, though I have had many chances to replace it in my collection; I think I'm actually closer in spirit to the author of this blogpost, who takes deeper issue with the more problematic lyrics of the band, and digs up a perfect Lester Bangs quote, to boot...
...but on the other hand, if I do go to this show -- if family duties and/ or COVID don't have me sidelined -- what can I say, "Fuck Me Dead" is a big part of the draw! And, uh, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a necrophiliac.
No, seriously!
More info on the show here!
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