Concrete Situation III

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Dogs “Woman Machine” (1974)
Guilty Razors “I Feel Down” (1978)
Electric Manchakou “Murder #2” (1990)
Break Up “I Want” (1977)
Angel Face “12 ½” (1978 [?])
Dentist “Subway Sect” (1978)
Strike Up “Strike Up” (1978)
Bollock “Petite Fille” (1980)
Ted Destroyer “Raide A En TB” (1983)
Soggy “I Wanna Be Your Dog” (1980)
Loose Heart “Hot as a Gun” (1976)
Snipers “You Call Me Gipsy” (1979)
Tötenköpf “Crippled with Rheumatism” (1978)
Safety “Comment Lui Dire” (1979)
Dogs “19” (1977)
Gunslingers “We’re the Real Sinners” (2012)

Here's the third installment of Concrete Situation and the third part of Digging in the Detroitus, featuring bands from France.

Not New York, Los Angeles, or London, but Detroit and Paris. Punk originated in a shared global condition that defined the 1970s, a decade of economic crisis and political calamity. It was a decade marked by violent collisions of past and future modes of thought, culture, and expression—atavisms crashed into newfangledness. It was, it turned out, a decade of profound unevenness that resolved into the proto-geo-mono-culture of the Reagan-Thatcher 1980s. It was a decade of profound possibility and of its destruction. The French bands that adopted the Detroit sound, that hewed riffs from the same duramen as Asheton, Williamson, Kramer, etc., did so not to invent punk but because they heard in this sound a recognizable throb of unfulfilled promise, both micro (the TV eye) and macro (the Motor City burning). For Guilty Razors—actually Spanish—it was the unfulfilled promise of socialism replacing Franco’s fascism. But mostly it was the epochal political-economic blue balls that convinced a cohort of bands to sound this way.

Erogenous zones equally were colliding with abandon in this time before HIV. The decade’s unleashing of erotic energies was the countervailing tendency to the cock-blocking of revolutionary mass movements. Yet punk, and particularly these down-on-the-street varieties of rock, aimed to collectivize rather than commercialize libidinal eruptions, as was the more likely path. If the unevenness of punk’s development across the globe can be rendered in apostrophe, then it would be that London’s visuality was the counterpart to L.A.’s physicality, which was the counterpart to New York’s empty-cranium philosophizing, which we shall contrast herein to the synaesthetic transubstantiation achieved in Paris of eros as riff.

Dogs maintained the longest and most successful career of the bands included here. But like all bands, they began in the rehearsal room. Released over four decades later, this May 1974 recording of “Woman Machine,” a track that never seems to have made it much beyond the room’s threshold, has the requisite unmediated and unpretentious feel. No one was meant to hear the mostly uninspired vocals (Dominique RIP) or the wildly varying guitar levels, but here they are, and we are grateful. This is Detroitus as an injectable formula. Shoot it, comme on dit, in my veins.

I no longer quite remember what happened, but when the Guilty Razors “Guilty” LP appeared in 2006, I had some type of bad dealing with the label. It left a filthy taste in my mouth, leaving me never to appreciate the record fully. But this track, appropriately named “I Feel Down,” recorded in 1978 in Spain, is a low-key one-off monster. Guilty Razors were the real deal, and they reached the heights of punk with their indelible “I Don’t Wanna Be A Rich,” released on Polydor (!). Nevertheless, hearing how they got there and where they wanted to venture reveals a map of the globe, with direct flights plotted like in an old cartoon from Paris to Madrid to Detroit and back.

Though Electric Manchakou first recorded in 1985, this track, “Murder #2” (the second version of “Murder,” rather than homicide in the second degree), was recorded, hard as it is to believe, in 1990. Earlier iterations of the band date all the way back to 1979, but they did not really hit their stride until a decade later, across the Channel. They benefited from some distance from the 1970s, as the sound evoked a high-pressure amalgam of long-gone groups, though with Ashetonium coating the surface, but punked up, and thus truncated to no more than a couple minutes, so it doesn’t ever overstay its welcome. The band was mainly a pair of faux-idiot fellas plus various jobbers. This is music made by people guided by little more than their love of it. Ambition is nowhere to be found. It’s just pure jouissance. “I’m walking down the street, and I’m looking for wild shit,” indeed.

France was home to Skydog Records, which released innumerable Stooges and related records, including the infamous live recording of an angry, wasted Iggy et al called “Metallic K.O.” The proliferation of Detroitus in France is surely attributable to Skydog, but it was not the only French label to get in on the easy action of bootlegging Detroitus. Ron Asheton tells a story about how “the two Frenchies,” in his term, “tracked us down” in Los Angeles, seeking demo tapes and next thing he knew, there was an LP of New Order. “I hope you don’t mind,” the motherfuckers quipped. He never got paid, and he also never supplied a high-quality master recording, meaning that what we have all heard is drawn from a dubbed cassette. Anyway, Break Up was one of a handful of French bands that no one had really heard until they were unearthed by the incredible Memoire Neuve, Danger, and Cameleon labels. Break Up discovered the formula: if you’re going to steal a riff, steal the riff.

Of all the Detroitus a la Français, Angel Face may be the most legendary, known and discussed in crazed, if hushed, tones among tape traders for years. The band was unleashed through a lycanthropic posthumous LP that came out in 1985, seven or eight years after it was recorded. The band returned in the 1990s and recorded more tracks, in a more focused and honed version of their original style, all of which eventually came out on a 2016 double-LP, which may have slightly decreased the band’s legend and mystery. Anyway, if “Raw Power” had been recorded in Paris, it would still have been the worst of the three best records ever, but it might have sounded like this.

There is something so perfect about naming your band Dentist, when your sound is so pugilistic, your whole vibe is “I’m gonna punch your fuckin teeth out.” Unlike most of the bands here, Dentist hailed from Nice, though they were clearly not nice. This song, recorded in the month of my birth, is called Subway Sect, and, to be clear, they sound much more like a subway sect of violent street urchins out for nighttime bovver than the more refined and erudite London outfit led by Vic Godard. Anyway, this is on the punky end of things, but band members went on to play in the digestibly ‘60s beat/garage–oriented and far more well-known Boyfriends in the ‘80s.

Strike Up, not to be confused with Break Up, were another no-hit wonder who recorded a Stoogified assault on all things decent in 1976, wasting not a single drop of sweat on originality, even naming the song after the band and vice versa. In fact, Strike Up may have been the very first French punk band, dating their origins to 1973, possibly beating the Dogs and providing members for the godlike Loose Heart (see below).

The obscurity level is soaring off the charts here. This sweetly menacing 1980 track by Bollock was barely released, appearing only on an extremely limited promo compilation 7" of other obscurities produced by the godhead Cameleon Rec. (also included in its “unreleased” boxset). With a title like “Petite Fille” and a photograph of the band hanging out on a tank turret, one gets the sense that Bollock operated by coin-flip: fight or fuck. Sometimes the coin landed on its third side and they did both.

Phaser? Check. Machine gun drumming? Check. Stolen riff? Check. Who the fuck was Ted Destroyer? The world’s smartest caveman, that’s who. The band Ted Destroyer, Ted-led, lasted about five years and playing mostly in Grenoble, in the foothills of the Alps. Their obscure LP was based on a live recording in Paris made over deux nuits at the, um, legendary Club Gibus. The band hoped to make it to the United States, but by ’83 everyone was on the verge of forgetting what actual hardcore punk sounded like, so it’s probably better they stayed home instead of shaming the U.S. punk scene. This song is about the skyjacking of an Air France jet in 1976, which led to the Israeli special-operations force hostage rescue at Entebbe in Uganda. What exactly it was meant to convey, I’ll leave to your imagination. In a 1984 article about Ted Destroyer, a writer asked, “Mais la violence, la hargne est-elle vraiment une porte de sortie due quotidien?” Is violence, is aggressiveness really the way out of the quotidian [or everyday life]? Ted said: you bet, motherfucker.

Speaking of violence: the ultimate unholy matrimony of Motörhead and the Stooges can be heard in Soggy’s exuberant exultations. From Reims, northeast of France, where no one gives a shit about anything other than manure and the Pope, Soggy burst forth to jolt the city, and the entire globe, out of the decrepitude, senescence, and enervation that the ‘70s had wrought. I could have put a dozen covers of Ig and the Ashetons on this mix, but only one is sufficiently muscular, priapic, and impetuous to stand triumphant over the rest, like a cro-magnon with his quarry, a clubbed baby yak on the dusty steppe, palms now wetted—soggy—with blood, waiting for the war.

Every few years, I experience a record as a revelation, and I am born again, reinducted to the maniac guild, the seekers of lost songs, the platter pathfinders, the recoverers of records. Loose Heart, the perfect storm of progenitors of Detroitus in France, but also so goddamn much more, was one such confirmation-revelation. This is rocknroll as ancient scripture, songwriting as Rosetta Stone, with members of Strike Up, Angel Face, and Stinky Toys all doing a stint of ritual divination here. The band is nothing but raw, unfiltered, unpretentious-but-worthy-of-all-the-pretense-and-more riff after riff. There are two 1976 live recordings now on vinyl, equally immediate, one from Paris and the other from a shit suburb of the city known mainly for its prison—six songs, three repeated. Of all the tracks here Loose Heart’s is the one with the greatest “Je ne sais quoi” quotient. Earthly longhairs transubstantiated into the angelic, one rough, urgent, hard-dick riff after another. And I should perhaps say that this one is not even the best one, from the inferior of the two recordings. Mon dieu.

It wasn’t only Skydog that unleashed the Detroit sound on France. There was also Revenge Records, which ripped off Ron Asheton multiple times, as well as the even more obscure and perfectly named Sonics Rec., which got into the easy action by reissuing or bootlegging Australian Detroitus for the European market, including the Fun Things, among others. The French scraped the very bottom of the well, as heard on this live recording of a cover of the probably-best-forgotten one-off concoction (other perhaps than when they made speedballs) of Johnny Thunders and Wayne Kramer, called Gang War. It’s played by the mostly cravat-wearing powerpop band the Snipers, released on 45 in ‘83. This was recorded at the famed Le Bataclan while the Snipers opened for The Real Kids, and sleeveless copies of the single found their way into the LP release of their “All Kindsa Jerks” LP on France’s New Rose Rec.

Apologies in advance for ruining your day with Tötenköpf (no fash). This band is mostly French and a little Swedish, and the “recording” occurred in Sweden in early 1978. Perhaps the first but far from the last band to take “L.A. Blues,” “Little Doll,” and “We Will Fall” as its sonic template, it is possible to chart a lengthy series of bands from Sweden, including Leathernun, and elsewhere that descended, even if only with dim awareness, from this ecstatic noisy fuck shit sociopathy. Also, if calling the album "Ann Arbor" isn't enough, the close resemblance to “Wild Thing” here is the rotten cherry on top.

On the other end of the Detroitus spectrum (yet still clearly on it) from the lanky terrorists in Totenkopf are the nice young men of Safety, who also know their way around a riff. Recorded live in Lyon in 1979, “Comment Lui Dire” does feel a bit more French overall than most of these tracks, but in the context of ‘70s French punk, the track has the requisite vibe, avoiding London or New York. Leaving us to wonder, how do I tell him that French punk is actually good?

More thoroughly fertilized by Ashetonium, though now breaching a new layer, the first release by Dogs is another riff fest, with cocky attitude to spare. They were definitely older than nineteen by this point, but it’s the dirty thoughts that count. Sublime.

By the time bands like the Dogs were discovering and embodying the Detroit sound, the originators of that sound were bitter, burned out, riffed out, drugged out, locked up, and fucked up. The nouvelle vague of France was brimming with exuberance that the originators could no longer muster after descending into the maelstrom. The Gunslingers manage to combine that spiteful feeling of exhaustion with the exuberant musicianship, collapsing the space-time continuum. It’s an alternate 1974, recorded in 2012 and released a decade later. Thus, as the latest and possibly last flicker, they have kept alive a sound that could not have coalesced but under the right conditions. Yet it might never actually have breathed, lived, survived, thrived, fucked, fought, if fate’s wheel had turned a degree or two in either direction. The radio birdman was up above. But he was actually a skydog, out for revenge.