{"id":27531,"date":"2024-05-23T05:30:02","date_gmt":"2024-05-23T09:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=27531"},"modified":"2024-05-13T09:24:36","modified_gmt":"2024-05-13T13:24:36","slug":"book-excerpt-the-red-rockers-condition-red","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2024\/05\/23\/book-excerpt-the-red-rockers-condition-red\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Excerpt: The Red Rockers’ ‘Condition Red’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"As a companion to my previous post<\/a> \u2013 a three-part feature on The Red Rockers\u2019 debut album \u2013 here\u2019s an excerpt from my second book, Disturbing the Peace: 415 Records and the Rise of New Wave<\/i>. It covers the same subjects but draws upon different quotes from band members Darren Hill and John Thomas Griffith. The book also includes additional chapters covering the rest of the Red Rockers\u2019 output, and a whole lot more besides. \u2013 bk<\/b><\/p>\n

The band would work with 415\u2019s house producer, David Kahne, to make Condition Red<\/i>, their debut album. \u201cWe went into the Automatt with no pre-production or anything,\u201d says Darren Hill. \u201cWe just banged the record out in a day and a half, I think it was. We’d been playing enough live at that point that I think it was just a matter of documenting our show. We had like 12 original songs, and that’s what we laid down.\u201d Hill\u2019s view on Kahne\u2019s role is that he served more as an engineer than a producer. \u201cI don’t know if he did much in the way of \u2018production\u2019 on that record,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Jello Biafra made a guest vocal appearance on Condition Red<\/i>, helping out on a cover of Johnny Cash\u2019s \u201cFolsom Prison Blues.\u201d He admits that he had never heard the song before that day in the studio. \u201cI didn’t have any Johnny Cash records at that point, so it was a new song to me,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I gave it my best, but my name was a little too prominent [on the sleeve] for the lack of work I actually put in.\u201d Four decades after its release, Biafra remains impressed with The Red Rockers\u2019 debut long-player. \u201cThat album survives the David Kahne treatment pretty well,\u201d he says. \u201cIt’s still a full-on rockin\u2019 album.\u201d<\/p>\n

David Kahne pauses before offering his thoughts on Condition Red<\/i>. \u201cOn the first record, they really\u2026 what\u2019s the easiest way to say it\u2026 were quite influenced<\/i> by The Clash,\u201d he says. \u201cThat was weird.\u201d But he believes that the record had its virtues. \u201c\u2018Teenage Underground\u2019 is a really cool song,\u201d he says. \u201cI loved that. I thought that was a good punk single, [but one] that could still get some FM airplay.\u201d<\/p>\n

In case anyone was in danger of missing the band\u2019s Clash fixation, Peter Soe\u2019s album sleeve artwork was designed to set them right. As the label\u2019s artistic director, he worked on many of 415\u2019s pre-Columbia era projects. \u201cThe first album by The Red Rockers was one that I was given more complete control over,\u201d he says. He worked with San Francisco photographer Michael Jang to scout a location and shoot the front cover photo. \u201cI\u2019ll be the first to admit that the design was a bald-faced rip-off and mashup of the first albums by The Clash and The Ramones,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe high-contrast effect in the cover photo was achieved by making a copy of the original photograph on a Xerox machine, then making a copy of the copy, and repeating until the desired level of contrast and graininess was reached,\u201d Soe explains. He says that such a process was \u201ca time-tested technique back in the days when Xerox Art was a thing, way before you could just apply a filter in Photoshop to instantly get whatever effect you want.\u201d Soe emphasizes that his chosen approach on Condition Red<\/i> was \u201chonest packaging. The music inside was straight-up classic punk, very much influenced by the early work of those two bands.\u201d<\/p>\n

Darren Hill recalls that the band didn\u2019t have a contract in hand until after their first album was completed. \u201cI remember that was sent way, way after the fact,\u201d he says. \u201cWe’d gone back to New Orleans to sort of recharge, and The Circle Jerks were playing there. I remember showing the contract to Keith Morris. He looked at it, just kind of shrugged his shoulders and said, \u2018You know, they all rip you off. Don’t worry about it. Just sign it!\u2019\u201d So using Morris\u2019 back as a desk, the members of The Red Rockers signed their record contract with 415. \u201cWe were just kids,\u201d Hill says. \u201cWe wanted to have a record out, so this was great!\u201d<\/p>\n

The band’s story is continued in Disturbing the Peace: 415 Records and the Rise of New Wave<\/em>, available from HoZac Books<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a companion to my previous post \u2013 a three-part feature on The Red Rockers\u2019 debut album \u2013 here\u2019s an excerpt from my second book, Disturbing the Peace: 415 Records […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27533,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,41,59,62],"tags":[4390,4882],"class_list":["post-27531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book","category-interview","category-punk","category-rawk","tag-415-records","tag-red-rockers","cat-10-id","cat-41-id","cat-59-id","cat-62-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27531"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27535,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27531\/revisions\/27535"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}