Remember the first time "Smells Like Teen Spirit" mugged you from the radio? After just 20 seconds of guitar grind and drum flail, you somehow knew that rock 'n' roll had been rescued. It went to shit pretty fast, didn't it? Soon enough we had Seven Mary Three and cookie-cutter pop-punk. The '90s decline was not all-encompassing, though. Plenty of bands grabbed the paddles, yelled "Clear!" and tried to shock rock back to life. Problem was, hardly any of them managed to fully seize the mass consciousness.
To wit: Rocket from the Crypt. The band formed in San Diego in 1990 and earned press support, some radio play, and even a shot on an MTV Spring Break show. The guys were grabbed up by a major label. They toured and worked and sweated as rock 'n' roll turned to mush around them. In '97, they cut an album (RFTC), with hitmaking producer Kevin Shirley (Aerosmith, Black Crowes). Interscope barely released it. After much wrangling, the band finagled out of their contract and this year issued their ninth full length, Group Sounds, on the independent Vagrant imprint.
In a matter of weeks, it sold more copies — about 6,000 — than both of their Interscope albums combined.
The first 30 seconds of "Straight American Slave," the lead track from Group Sounds, have the same sort of apocalyptic energy as "Teen Spirit." A lone guitar emits a corrosive lick that bends upward and gives way to a stomping groove and thick mountain of chords. Frontman John "Speedo" Reis enters with his brawny vocal — Mitch Ryder gargling carpet tacks. As the chorus approaches, ragged sax and trumpet bum-rush their way in, scuffling with the guitars, thickening the sound. The music boxes your ears, makes you realize just how rare it is to hear this type of unfettered exhilaration in today's rock.
Funny thing about "Straight American Slave" and the rest of Group Sounds. Coming from a band long linked with punk, the music doesn't sound particularly so — to these ears at least. It's more like a mixture of revved-up garage rock and MC5 crunch, spiked with R&B.
Reis considers the notion. "I don't know what it is," he says. "What is punk, what is rock 'n' roll, for that matter, is not for me to decide."
Why not? After chewing on the matter for a bit, we more or less agree that RFTC is punk with regard to aesthetic, but decidedly non-punk in terms of what the genre is today. "Punk rock has become digested by mainstream culture," he asserts. "It's big business now. It's defined by a drumbeat, by a tempo, by the particular sound of the guitar. It very much has rules. What attracted me to punk early on was that it didn't have rules."
One reason that the six-piece RFTC dodges handy categories is that the members have voracious appetites for music in a variety of flavors. "It's not that we're dedicated to including as many influences as possible, but we're complete music junkies always looking out for that next special CD," Reis says. "It all fertilizes what we do creatively. We incorporate things we like in our music, probably beyond our means of comprehension."
Case in point: The guys are seriously enthralled with Ethiopiques, a French reissue series of crude Ethiopian soul music recorded from 1969 to '74.
Rocket also finds considerable inspiration from American sources. The band cut nine of the 13 tracks on Group Sounds in Memphis. "We're a band that totally respects the history of rock 'n' roll and soul," Reis says. "We enjoyed walking the same streets as many of our heroes, eating at the same restaurants."
For the disc's closing track, "Ghost Shark," a brooding near-ballad with R&B seasonings, Reis and his cohorts went the extra mile to record the lead vocal. "The engineer had a cousin who knew the caretakers at Graceland," he says. "We brought a mobile unit up there one night and recorded the vocals right in front of the eternal flame at 4 a.m."
Acting as their own producers, the group developed some recording techniques to re-instill a sense of immediacy, a resolute in-your-faceness, to the tracks. Under Shirley's watch, RFTC was recorded completely live in the studio but still came off as too clean. "We had to put thought into making it sound more fucked up than it was," Reis says. One "simple and cheap" trick the band adopted for five songs was to record the bass and drums in their practice space on a boom box, then dump it onto a 24-track analog machine. "It gave it that low-end, explosive quality," Reis adds.
The result is definitely not lo-fi. "We didn't want to sacrifice it being sonically right up on you," he says. "We wanted it to sound crappy on one hand but not missing any frequencies. It's strange: We wanted to have quality sound, but have the equipment on the verge of malfunction."
Strange but highly effective.
Rocket From the Crypt has been called the greatest live band there is. A lot of bands have been called that. Perhaps such hyperbole results from whence they came. While many of their peers in the alt-rock community either stared at their shoes or flailed about, overcome by angst, RFTC put together something of a snappy little show, matching outfits and all.
"I guess a lot of it had to do with our reaction to what we saw," Reis explains. "When we started the band 11 years ago, a lot of bands were adamant not to show any joy on stage. Not to play for the audience was part of punk's reaction to inflated rock 'n' roll heroes, the guys with one foot on the monitor. We hated that, too, but at the other end of the pendulum was to completely not acknowledge the audience, play with your backs to them, not putting any thought toward giving them a show."
Because of this showmanship, because of RFTC's unyielding joie de rock, because they stick to their own vision, because of their long-held underdog status — because of a lot of things — the band can claim some of the most fervent fans around. A few are even willing to get branded. As decreed by the sextet, anyone who tattoos the RFTC logo on their person is granted free admission to the band's shows for life.
Makes you wonder if any inked-up fans will turn out at the St. Pete show. "There definitely will be," Reis declares. "There's always at least one."
Contact Music & Features Editor Eric Snider at 813-248-8888, ext. 114, or snider@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Apr 5-11, 2001.