The Life of Coleman Francis - Part I

Back in 2008, the original cast and crew of Mystery Science Theater 3000 gathered for a panel discussion at Comic-Con in San Diego. In the hands of a James Lipton or a Charlie Rose this might very well have been legitimately interesting and produced some fireworks, shedding new light on the actors and writers of the beloved show.

Instead, the event – like so much of what is fed to the masses to keep everyone neatly pacified – was a watered-down affair, hosted by funnyman Patton Oswalt, who reminded everyone to watch The King of Queens, and then proceeded to boldly lob grapefruit after grapefruit at the panel, which they effortlessly hit out of the ballpark, to the delight of the assembled sycophantic fanboys and girls. If you’re looking for a discussion with MST’s principles regarding creator Joel Hodgson being driven to quit because of producer Jim Mallon’s obstinacy, you’re better off simply googling “jim mallon dick,” rather than watching the footage on the 13^th MST box set.

However, despite the carefully tailored sterile tone, there was one truly instructive moment, a moment pregnant with subtext, heavy with the burden of history, that went completely unnoticed by the audience, the world at large, and even the panel members themselves.

“Was there ever a movie,” Oswalt asks early in the discussion, “you started to sit down and watch and thought, ok, this is gonna be great, and then you realized, oh, this is actually a hidden gem, this is pretty good, or… was there ever a movie that was so bad, so horrifying, that you’re like, this would be – we can’t even make fun of this. This would be cruel.”

“Manos the Hands of Fate,” Bridget Jones Nelson pipes up. The crowd erupts in applause. A lost film from virtually the moment it was released in 1966 by El Paso fertilizer salesman Harold P. Warren, Manos was re-discovered by MST writer and cast member Frank Conniff, ridiculed during MST’s fourth season in 1993, and has been an infamous cult classic ever since. 2011 saw a Manos special edition DVD, featuring the original movie, the Mystery Science Theater episode, and the 30-minute documentary Hotel Torgo.

Twenty minutes later, Frank Conniff throws in his two cents on Manos: “That seems like of all the films we did, that’s kind of the one we brought to the world in a big way, um, that otherwise – and I also like to think that, when people talk about directors who made bad movies like Ed Wood, I like to think that we contributed to the fact that maybe Coleman Francis’ name comes up.”

A scant smattering of unenthusiastic applause greets the mention of Francis’ name. The loudest clapping comes courtesy Kevin Murphy, the voice of Tom Servo for nine of MST3K’s ten seasons.

Coleman Francis’ last credit in a movie – acting, directing, or otherwise – is from 1970. He is billed as the “Rotund Drunk” in Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Less than three years later he was dead at the age of 53. If his partner Anthony Cardoza is to be believed, Francis was found in the back of a station wagon with a plastic bag over his head, and a tube either around his throat or in his mouth. He is interred in the Columbarium of Remembrance Mausoleum, near Cecil Kellaway, at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles. His tiny nameplate reads simply: “Coleman C. Francis. 1919 – 1973.”

***

There are no books written about Coleman Francis. There are no documentaries about his strange Hollywood career, no webpages devoted to explaining the three movies he directed. Ed Wood fans chafe at the mention of the Medved brothers’ The Golden Turkey Awards, but that’s where most of them first heard of Wood. The book at least brought Wood’s name to a whole new generation of fans and researchers. None of Coleman Francis’ movies come up in the Medved’s book. Francis himself doesn’t come up in the Medved’s book.

It’s as though the coffee-obsessed, portly friend of Russ Meyer never existed.

In a world where a movie as ghastly as 1997’s Titanic wins academy awards for best picture and director, and Elmer Bernstein starts his career by scoring Phil Tucker’s Robot Monster, you would be right to characterize the absence of Coleman Francis from most scholarly works on American cinema history as cosmically unfair.

You would also be right characterizing all three of Francis’ movies as nearly unwatchable. He knocked out three in six years as a director: The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961), The Skydivers (1963), and Red Zone Cuba (AKA Night Train to Mundo Fine, 1966). Individually they are the nadir or filmmaking, and watched in chronological order, seem to somehow get worse as you go.

But this is no reason for Francis to be forgotten. As shockingly bad as his triumvirate is, any one of them is still much, much better than, say, Ted V. Mikels’ Astro Zombies. Yet, it is Mikels, not Francis, who gets his own chapter in ReSearch’s famous Incredibly Strange Films issue.

So who was Coleman Francis? Sadly, there really isn’t much to go by as far as surviving participants in the three movies he directed. The testimony of his welder friend/partner Anthony Cardoza, who was involved in all three movies, is tantalizing but clearly biased.

And then there are the movies themselves. Inscrutable, impenetrable, nonsensical, they stand as Francis’ legacy to the world, and perhaps ultimately the best source of biographical material. If we know nothing else, we certainly know this: coffee and light aircraft were very important to this man. The more unsubtle points of the director’s personality are there, however, embedded in the frames of his movies, waiting for the truly fearless to sift through them and make some sense of it all.

Mail Bag!

Dear Margie from Glasgow, KY:

Thank you for your email of May 15^th. We apologize for taking so unconscionably long to reply – we’ve been getting used to our new digs in Snyder, TX.

Yes, the entire Rantin’ Russell staff has seen Fritz Kiersch’s 1985 masterpiece Tuff Turf – a few of us over ten times – and we’d like to say in all sincerity that this is one of the most important films of the last 30 years.

We could hardly agree with you more: Tuff Turf truly is a watershed movie, launching, as it did, the careers of a young James Spader and an even younger Robert Downey, Jr. And you are right again – Kim Richards dances provocatively to the same Jack Mack and the Heart Attack that played at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta during the 1996 summer Olympics bombing. And yes, that is Robert Downey, Jr. playing drums for none other than the Jim Carroll Band in the elaborate warehouse sequence.

But to the Rantin’ Russell staff, Tuff Turf is so much more than just Spader, Downey, Richards, and Jack Mack and the Heart Attack. Kiersch’s nuanced movie operates on multiple levels all at once, revealing new secrets to the viewer every time it's popped into the DVD player. It is a prodigious work of art that cannot be understood in a mere two or three viewings.

For instance, although countless essays have been written about Jim Carroll’s and Jack Mack and the Heart Attack’s roles in Tuff Turf, how many people remember that there were actually three bands contributing to the Turf’s eclectic soundscape? Dale Gonyea carries the day in the film’s unforgettable country club scene, playing, as J.R. & The Z-Man, the most mind-melting version of The Isley Brothers’ Twist and Shout any of us on staff have ever heard. We’ve come to see that scene as the focal point of the whole movie: a scene played for laughs, which is somehow still unintentionally funny.

It’s also a joy seeing Art Evans as the high school security guard, proving to his critics that he’s more than just the loveable Morgan in the Nine to Five TV series, or the “intern” in Scott Baio’s tour-de-force, The Boy who Drank too Much.

Additionally, in the age-old tradition film noir, much of Tuff Turf is shot on location in LA, lending a vibe of gritty realism to Spader’s existential journey through Los Angeles as a stranger in a strange land. The absolutely gorgeous crane shot of Sandy’s Burgers was shot at 6235 Lankershim in north Hollywood. The montage of Spader driving Mones’ (Nick’s) car through LA finds us in Santa Monica, at Superba & Pacific Coast Highway. The Hiller family home was also in Santa Monica, at 12951 Panama St.

Finally, the movie’s most iconic building – the liquor store where Kim Richards’ befuddled father works – still stands at 5900 N Figueroa St, in Highland Park, with the “Coldest Beer in Town” sign intact. (Discerning viewers will recall Tim Roth living across the street from this same building in Reservoir Dogs.) Built in 1921, the building was on the market for $4 million in 2012.

But the film’s most subversive moment comes towards the end, at the 1:13:05 mark on your DVD, when veteran TV actor Panchito Gomez turns the whole works on its ear by brazenly breaking the fourth wall. Throw everything you thought you knew about Tuff Turf straight out of the window. In just a few seconds, Gomez takes a straightforward narrative and implodes it, leaving the viewer reeling: why does Gomez look at the camera – if even just for a second – while Spader and Richards argue about her marrying Paul Mones? Director Kiersch’s instincts pay off in spades here, framing Spader and Richards in the background while Gomez fills the foreground, eavesdropping, knowing their every thought and move. We know what evil is creeping up on our protagonist, but we’re left with more questions than answers. Was Gomez ad libbing, or was this actually in the script? At press time, emails to Kiersch have gone unanswered.

And the endless barrage of lines that inform and infect our daily lives here at Rantin’ Russell. “Why don’t you learn to use it before you cut your balls off”; “Your pants are still… dry”; “Get outta here, get outta here, I said. Eddie – get outta here…”; “Life is not a problem to be solved, it’s a mystery to be lived”; “Nick what Nick what NICK WHAT NICK WHAT!!” “Lookit that. Talk about bawls”; “Nice dress”; “…But you know I never wanted to go to any of those goddamn schools in the first place”; “Where the hell’d you get Nick’s car, man?”

It’s worth noting, too, that Olivia Barash holds her own amongst the Turf’s standout cast, one year after playing the adorable Leila in Repo Man, and just a few years ahead of checking into AA.

And then the sundry smaller moments: Matt Clark awkwardly pawing his wife’s shoulder before dinner, as though he’s never really been comfortable around her and fears intimacy. Spader finding keys in the ignition of a Porche convertible near a bunch of porn shops. Michael Wyle mercilessly mocking Paul Mones while dozens of uninhibited youth dance to the Jim Carroll Band. The famed Spader-is-dead scene at the beginning of the movie, where our seemingly comatose protagonist suddenly springs to life and obliterates cockroaches with his dart guns.

All of this and we’ve said nothing about director Fritz Kiersch, who counts Gor amongst his credits. What we can tell you about Gor: It makes a mere 90 minutes feel like three fucking weeks with the in-laws, is more misogynistic than Otto Weininger, and finds Oliver Reed – Oliver Reed, for fuck’s sake – hysterically screaming “SEIZE HIM!” in the time-honored tradition of tragically stereotypical Saturday afternoon despots.

So yes, Margie, we at Rantin’ Russell join you in calling on the Library of Congress to register Tuff Turf as one of the most important American films of the last 100 years. Thank you for your email!

Queen at 40, Part IV

Sheer Heart Attack (November 1974)

“Above all, however,” writes Greg Kot, “there was an intense and effervescent musicality abetted by producer Roy Thomas Baker, a flood of excess that presaged the Queen stadium-rock bombast on the albums for which the band is best known.”

Kot was writing about Sheer Heart Attack, and like so many out-of-the-closet Queen fans, felt the need to pepper his love of Queen’s third – and first truly outstanding – album with certain words, such as “excess” and “bombast,” code-words aimed at preserving some street cred with his colleagues whilst simultaneously indicating he kind of likes the damn thing. “I know they’re absurd, mates, but these couple of songs over here are kinda good for this reason…” That sort of thing. But after Sheer Heart Attack, there was no longer any need to consider Queen any kind of guilty pleasure.

It’s a strange attitude to take nowadays anyway. After being the critics’ whipping boy during their actual operational years, it’s become very fashionable in the last 20 years to talk about what a brilliant band Queen was. And these johnny-come-latelyies are excused for suddenly loving Sheer Heart Attack, the best album of 1974.

Not all vestiges of their chalice-quest days were purged their third album, but lyrics about Neptune of the Seas and magical spells are kept to a bare minimum, and what emerges – at long last – is a genuine rock’n’roll band.

It almost doesn’t make sense, considering how quickly Attack followed Queen II. You’d think a band so addicted to Great King Rats and Fairy Fellers would need a good year or so in detox, but instead, as easily as throwing a light switch, Queen turned a keen eye towards teen angst, historical references, Chuck Berry-worship, and full-bore (Freddie) narcissism just eight months later.

None of this is immediately evident listening to the ominous album opener, Brighton Rock, a ballad of young love at the carnival courtesy of Brian May. Probably not the best pick to open the album after the trauma of Queen and Queen II. Dig this: “…There’s still a little magic in the air, I’ll weave my spell!” And this: “O Rock of Ages, do not crumble love is breathing still; O Lady Moon shine down a little people magic if you will.”

Boy howdee, friends, the first minute-and-a-half of Sheer Heart Attack sounds like little more than a continuation of the dead-on-arrival pointless flailing of Queen II. But the SCA-inspired lyrics are incidental to Brian May’s long-ass guitar solo, lasting just about three minutes (from 1:35 to 4:33), a curious bit of self-indulgence dating back to his 1968 song Blag with Smile, the first band May and Roger Taylor formed. It’s HEAVY, man, and features Brian’s first experimentation with delay and the repeat effect, which he’d utilize more sublimely five years later on Queen Live Killers. Says Brian: “I’d gotten away from listening to Hendrix quite a bit by that time, and I’d like to think that that was more sort of developing my style really.” It’s unmistakably Brian May, a bloody lovely bit of 70s guitar-driven ROCK, and despite simpleton George Purvis’ critique of Freddie’s octave-jumping vocals (“makes for a jarring listen,” he sniffs), Freddie does in fact sound even more in command here than he did on Queen II. If no studio effects were required to help Freddie hit those octaves, it’s all the more impressive.

How far Freddie Mercury had come becomes very clear indeed on the next track, Freddie’s Killer Queen, Sheer Heart Attack’s first single, released a few weeks ahead of the album’s November 1^st street date. After two years and three albums, here is Queen’s Statement of Intent, the song that, more than any other in their 18-year career, sums up the band’s sound and aesthetic. Exactly three minutes is just what’s needed to roll out everything that made Queen one of the world’s greatest bands between 1974 and 1980: three-part vocal harmonies, three part guitar harmonies, unorthodox chords and chord progressions, guitar/bass/drums/piano arrangement, some judiciously-used effects, a crackerjack rhythm section (John Deacon emerges as the bands’ unknown secret weapon on this song, laying down a monster bass line), Freddie Mercury’s vocals (‘nuff said), and gloriously deep production. Notably, it is also a huge departure for what was, for all intents and purposes, a heavy metal band (70s definition) to this point. “…With this single, you almost expect Noël Coward to sing it,” Freddie remarked, before pointing out, “it’s about a high-class call girl. I’m trying to say that classy people can be whores as well.”

As a boy, I always thought it was a bit darker than just being about a high-class whore (shit, we’ve got dynamite, gelatine and gunpowder in the chorus), but it certainly was very different from Liar or Seven Seas of Rhye, and Freddie made it seem completely natural. The song shot to number two in the UK, and broke the top-20 in the states, their first single to do so.

The single’s success assuaged Brian May’s fear that it was too light a single for an album as “heavy and dirty” as Attack (“…it was a hit, so fuck it”), but he needn’t have worried; far from somehow pigeonholing Queen as a cabaret act, it revealed a band at last flexing their muscles, showing they could work outside of the hard rock idiom with brilliant results.

Although, not always “brilliant,” perhaps; Roger Taylor’s piercing falsetto through the first ten seconds of In the Lap of the Gods is plenty disconcerting. Awful, even. And Freddie’s lyrics are all sound and fury, signifying nothing whatsoever. But I take a different approach to Lap of the Gods. It’s a fine piece of music, no doubt, but on Attack’s patchwork side two, where short songs bleed into one another, where oftentimes what you’re hearing is more an idea than a fully realized song, Lap of the Gods is an overture of sorts. Freddie goes through a couple of verses in a stylized, charmingly absurd vocal (“lips” here becomes “leeps”), and the outro commences, Brian’s guitar tone sounding unlike any other in popular music, moving ethereally from octave to octave (2:42 and 2:48), and then the song unexpectedly changes key and ends, on a confounding stutter-beat, leading straight into Stone Cold Crazy.

Not a song, but an introduction, a beautiful red herring, lulling you into a false sense of sereneness before the band (Stone Cold Crazy is, oddly for this period of the band’s history, credited to all four members) abruptly shifts gears – actually, grinds gears is more apropos – and lays down one of the seminal 70s hard rock riffs.

It’s revealing that when Metallica covered Stone Cold Crazy in 1992, they didn’t come anywhere close to capturing the frenetic, barely-controlled chaos of Queen’s original version. Stone Cold Crazy is unmistakably in the key of G major, but holy shit, each time the band hits that B flat chord during the main riff. Holy SHIT. It’s so big, so fucking huge, it’s the biggest B flat major chord of all fucking time, it’s all the stars in heaven and everything beyond, all the universe’s dark matter and gasses floating through time and space, colliding and forming bigger, brighter stars before collapsing into black holes and white dwarves – it’s so blistering, Freddie howls deliriously at 0:47 and then after only one verse and chorus Brian lays down an incendiary lead, over a key change, no less; the simple home key of G is insufficient for the amount of kinetic energy exploding out of your speakers, so the whole band moves up to B for a frenzied couple of bars, settling back down to G just long enough for a 2^nd verse and chorus before blasting off into B again, this time for a longer, far more hectic detonation of Brian May insanity. “Hit it, mon!” Freddie commands, and May does just that. And then a final verse/chorus, where Freddie wonders, “they’re gonna put me in a cell, if I can’t go to heaven will they let me go to hell?” End of song.

This is really all you need. In life, I mean. It’s a desert island song. Really, if this were the only good song on the album, it’d still be worth the $16.85 amazon is charging as I write this. You can’t put a price on these special moments, these songs that grab you roughly from behind and yank you back from the precipice. It’s rock’n’roll made to be played LOUD, and it’s as crazed as anything recorded at the time.

It’s easily the highlight of side two, but the variety here finds Queen pushing the envelope far beyond the self-imposed restrictions of the first album. Dear Friends is a short, pretty Brian May ballad that is a good early indication that the guitarist suffered from depression his whole life. Deacon’s Misfire is also short (not even two minutes), and if you want to hate it intensely, with its ludicrous guitar vamping and awful lyrics (Freddie, singing in falsetto: “Your gun is loaded, and pointing my way; there’s only one bullet, so don’t delay”), go right ahead, I certainly see your point, but it’s somehow deliriously hypnotic, and how can you not dig the four, count ‘em, FOUR, key changes? Absurdly brilliant.

Freddie’s Bring Back That Leroy Brown steals its title from Jim Croce’s Big Bad Leroy Brown, but Croce never had it in him to piece together this pastiche of British Music Hall and Tin Pan Alley. High art it definitely ain’t, but enormous fun it most assuredly is, all silly lyrics, barbershop quartet harmonies and ukulele-banjo strummin’, courtesy the mighty Brian May, one of the great guitar players of the 70s and 80s.

She Makes Me (Stormtrooper in Stilettos), awash in reverb and unexpected chord progressions, is one of the more gorgeous songs of the 70s. Brian May’s vulnerable vox, contrasted with Freddie’s and Roger Taylor’s (on Tenement Funster), bring a texture to Sheer Heart Attack and Queen in general that was – and still is – unique. The Beatles also had this, with three different lead vocalists (four, I suppose, if you count Ringo), but having three lead vocalists in the band, all of whom also sang harmony like angels, gave Queen a depth that most bands would’ve given their left nuts for.

The aforementioned Tenement Funster, sung with preposterous conviction by Roger Taylor, is the drummer’s first truly great song with Queen, fine tuning the theme he would return to frequently: I’m a badass rocker who needs to escape all this boredom and go ROCK – even though he touched on this sentiment in Modern Times Rock ‘n’ Roll. It’s pretty damned silly listening to Taylor singing about the groupies lining up to fuck him at “Smokies,” but some subtle humor (“I got a way with the girls on my block, try my best to be a real individual”) goes a long way with the song’s great melody, and with only two lines during the song’s chorus, Taylor dials more directly into every feeling of angst you ever felt between the ages of 13 and 17 than the Sex Pistols or Nirvana could ever have hoped to.

Flick of the Wrist is Freddie’s wonderfully sadistic take on who knows what the fuck. Many Queen fans argue that it’s about the indignities of dealing with all aspects of the music industry, and this seems somewhat plausible given Queen’s management woes. But who cares? Check out Freddie’s octave-jumping vocal multi-tracking during the verses when he helpfully instructs “INTOXICATE YOUR BRAIN WITH WHAT I’M SAYING, IF NOT YOU’LL LIE IN KNEE-DEEP TROUBLE.” Marvelous. This is what I live for. This is what we should all live for. And if you’re one of those who always accuses Queen of being lyrically blank, and you want something deep, man, the line “prostitute yourself he says, castrate your human pride – sacrifice your leisure days, let me squeeze until you’ve dried” is a dead-on indictment capitalism’s drudgeries and having to find a god damned job, submitting to a stupid fucking boss just to pay the fucking bills. “BUT THAT’S NOT WHAT FREDDIE WAS REALLY SINGING ABOUT,” you slobber. Yes, of course. All great art has any number of interpretations. That quality is what makes great art. You’ve got your interpretation, I’ve got mine. Bugger off, yeah?

Before taking a look at each side’s closers – Now I’m Here and In the Lap of the Gods (Revisited) – there’s this business of Lily of the Valley. Lily of the Valley is Queen’s penultimate Dungeons & Dragons song, and would’ve been right at home on Queen II if not for Nevermore, which is pretty much the same song. The same MO plays out on both albums: Barnstormer song (Ferrie Feller’s Master Stroke on II, Flick of the Wrist here) leads seamlessly into short, pretty ballad (Nevermore on II, Lily of the Valley here) evoking dead medieval crops and Neptune of the seas, setting us up for Epic Rocker (March of the Black Queen on II, Now I’m here on Attack). Yes, that’s Freddie Mercury singing “my kingdom for a horse” without a trace of irony in Lily of the Valley, long after we’d hoped he’d hung up his twenty-sided die for good. Realizing (lyrics aside) what a pretty song he wrote, Mercury would cop Lily of the Valley’s chords and insert them into Jealousy four years later on the Jazz album.

Now I’m Here is Brian May’s homage to Chuck Berry and is stunning. In the Lap of the Gods (Revisited) is Freddie Mercury’s homage to Freddie Mercury and is stunning. How on earth Brian May came up with the riffage in Now I’m Here between 0:49 and 1:00 – more than any mortal soul should be expected to produce in one lifetime, never mind one song – is beyond me. As time wore on and Queen lost focus and drifted further and further into disco/synthesizer hell, May remained the one member capable and willing to write guitar-driven rock’n’roll songs, and Now I’m Here is one of his numerous high points along Queen’s long and varied road. A snippet of Little Queenie, a kindly nod to Mott the Hoople (with whom Queen toured earlier that year) and hook after hook make Now I’m Here one of the indispensible 70s Rock songs.

In the Lap of the Gods (Revisited) sounds nothing at all like In the Lap of the Gods, and was Freddie’s way of putting the world on notice: slag these boys off at your own risk, because writing catchy, anthemic songs came as naturally to Freddie as winning a game when he was down by 9 points with four minutes left to play in the fourth quarter came to Roger Staubach. This was just the raucous warm-up to the far more self indulgent We Are the Champions. And the apocalyptic explosion erupting at Revisited’s end was Mercury’s jarring way of driving this point home. Queen had arrived. And were already better than everyone else with eyes set on conquering the world. And they were just barely warming up.

Mail Bag!

Dear Ted Purefoy from Hernando, MS –

Thank you for your email of April 9^th. We apologize for taking so unconscionably long to reply – we’ve been picking up the pieces after the incident (of April 2013), and moving into our new offices here in Snyder, TX.

You are absolutely correct (and must be a long-time fan of Rantin’ Russell) – founder Russell Bladh did indeed write back in 2007 right here at Rantin’ Russell that The Clash’s London Calling was one of the three most overrated albums of all time (the other two were The Who’s Tommy and The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street).

To answer your first question, the post was not taken down due to negative reader reaction. Although it’s true that readers’ responses were overwhelmingly critical, Mr. Bladh took down the post after the friend of a financier complained that the piece reflected badly on him. And no, the post will not be put back up.

To answer your second question we forwarded your email to Mr. Bladh and got lucky – although he’s currently immersed in very intense psychotherapy, he took the time to send the following response:

“Hi Renee –

“Thank you for forwarding me Ted Purefoy’s email of April 9^th.

“Please tell him that no offense was intended with my ‘Three Most Overrated Albums of All Time’ piece back in 2007. It was an honest assessment of three albums I felt simply did not measure up to the hype that’s surrounded them for years.

“Truthfully, I’ve always felt The Clash – in addition to recording one of the most overrated albums of all time – are one of the most overrated bands of all time.

“The first album is unquestionably stronger in its bastardized American version, wherein ‘Clash City ‘Rockers,’ ‘Complete Control,’ ‘(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais’ and ‘I Fought the Law’ are included to satisfy CBS’ desire for a ‘radio friendly’ record. The original British version contains the great ‘Deny’ and ‘Cheat,’ but is otherwise lackluster. I’ll never understand the hordes of fanboys who say ‘Janie Jones’ is one of the great punk songs (to these ears it’s wholly unremarkable), and songs like ‘I’m So Bored with the USA’ and ‘What’s My Name?’ don’t register at all.

“Give ‘Em Enough Rope was the classic sophomore slump, and London Calling barely contains enough songs to make a good single album, much less the double album we’re left with. I’m fully aware of the legions of critics and fans citing London Calling as one of the greatest albums of all time, but aside from the title track, ‘Spanish Bombs’ and ‘The Guns of Brixton,’ I don’t see what the big deal is. The lyric ‘Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust’ in ‘London Calling’ is easily one of the most asinine lyrics of the 20^th century. This, from ‘The Only band that Matters?’ Pure rubbish. There are probably really only an EP’s worth of good songs here, if we’re being honest. ‘Death or Glory,’ ‘Rudie Can’t Fail’ and ‘The Right Profile’ bore me outright, and will Clash sycophants ever broach the unpleasant subject of ‘I’m not Down’ blatantly ripping off The Kinks’ ‘Waterloo Sunset?’ Probably not, is my guess. Probably the great unenlightened masses of Clash fans will continue obsequiously fawning over the unconscionably hideous steaming liquid shit this band churned out from 1977 to 1982, willfully ignorant of what good music actually is.

“Once again, please tell Mr. Purefoy no offense was intended.”

We hope you enjoyed your personalized response, Ted. Thank you for reading Rantin’ Russell.