The Vulgar Boatmen are an archetypal cult band. Those of us who love them really, really love them, but the three albums the Indiana/Florida band released between 1989 and 1995 never reached a wide audience. So, the reissue of debut You And Your Sister, bolstered by a pair of new remixes and three previously unreleased tracks, is a gift. Dale Lawrence and Robert Ray wrote strummy, propulsive tunes that could recall Good Earth-era Feelies, the Velvet Underground or Stax/Volt soul. The band will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Q&A with Lawrence.
Lawrence: When punk rock ambushed an unsuspecting world in 1976, it was sometimes noted that here was the first major rock genre to completely avoid all black musical influence, any trace of R&B. It was music that knew how to rock, but it didn’t necessarily roll. Its roots could be traced to handful of ’60s mod singles, things like “You Really Got Me” and “I Can’t Explain,” the roughest, most pared-down (and probably whitest) of British Invasion hits. Those records’ roots were even narrower: basically the Kingmen’s “Louie Louie,” itself an R&B cover with all the swing ironed out.
The Sex Pistols, as usual, were a somewhat different case. Like Elvis Presley, whose earliest records invented rockabilly without sounding quite like typical rockabilly themselves, the Sex Pistols didn’t really sound all that much like most of the punk music they spawned. They had an edge, a command of dynamics, that set them apart. The Who were certainly an influence (“Substitute” was in their live sets from the beginning, and Steve Jones’s guitar tone owed something to Live At Leeds) but not the main one. No, the Sex Pistols’ whole style, what’s most important about it, really comes out of a single record: “Road Runner,” the song Jonathan Richman wrote and first recorded with the Modern Lovers, then perfected at his first solo sessions. That version was released as a single in 1975 and was riding the charts in England just as the Sex Pistols were forming.
“Road Runner” is a perfect record, and it works its magic in a very specific way: by rocking back and forth on two chords, until momentum turns to delirium, until vocals become incantation. There’s really not a lot of rock ‘n’ roll that works quite like that, but the Sex Pistols definitely do. “God Save The Queen,” “Holidays In The Sun,” “New York,” “EMI,” “Bodies”—all build and peak and explode in exactly that same way, propelled by their own momentum to a climax they couldn’t stop if they wanted to. Thirty years on, those records still make my heart race.
And, so, where did “Road Runner” come from? Well, Jonathan Richman may have laid down the law to his bandmates early on–no hint of blues influence would be tolerated—but he didn’t say anything about gospel, which is what the climax of “Road Runner” most resembles. By gospel, I mean ’50s black gospel, groups like the Soul Stirrers and Sensational Nightingales. Records like “Be With Me Jesus” and “Lord Remember Me” begin and end by riding the same two chords of “Road Runner” (the I and IV) into a frenzied fever dream. Just substitute “Radio on” for “Be with me Jesus” and voila. (“White Light White Heat” could also be considered a missing link here—except it never makes my head swim like “Road Runner” or the Highway QCs.)
And there you have the black roots of punk rock.
Video after the jump.
