CONCERT REVIEW: The Return of Sons of Freedom
- by John Walker
The magic of rock and roll usually strikes in some out-of-the-way place. It's just too hard to access the transcendental part of the self when you're packed into a football arena with 70,000 Stones fans, most of them there just to say they were there, to take part in some kind of "history" whose significance they would be hard-pressed to explain. But, in a hot, sweaty club, on any given evening, the magic can still be unleashed full-force, and at such times Lou Reed's line about someone "whose life was saved by rock and roll," far more than just a pseudo-religious image, becomes Truth.
I once participated in such a neo-pagan event with a band called Sons of Freedom, also known as Canada's Greatest Rock Band. Admittedly, this title could be misleading, as many of the most well-known "rock" bands (we're not talking Young or Cohen here) my dear old country (Canada) produces are utter shite: Barenaked Ladies, anyone? Cowboy Junkies? Well, The Guess Who were good, anyway. So maybe we should dispense with national boundaries altogether and just say that SOF are one of the greatest rock bands in the world. With the appearance of their eponymous debut in 1988, featuring jagged hard-rock classics like "Alice Henderson," "Mona Lisa" and the raging neo-punk single "The Criminal," all of which pulsated with an outsider's fury, it was immediately evident that this was not the latest hyped-up example of musical mediocrity emanating from the Great White North, but a band capable of walking with giants.
Fast forward to late summer, 1992. Just in the door after a 3 hour road trip, I get an excited call from a fellow SOF devotee telling me that "The Sons are playing tonight in Guelph!"
The bar, a joint called The Trasheteria, situated in this pleasant little Southern Ontario town. We'd seen SOF before, as they flogged their second album, the wholly inspired Gump, in bar after bar on the Toronto to Windsor rock circuit. They were always great. Artistically, Gump was and is the 90s bastard offspring of the unholy triumvirate of decadent post-60s rock: Bowie/Iggy/Reed, who joint contributions during that time have never been equaled. SOF's singer, James Jerome Kingston, aka Jim Newton (or JJK, as we call him), combines the surly vocal snarl of the Pop, the gutter-dandy glam of 70's Bowie, and the squalid lyrical vision of vintage Reed. The band, three guys named Don (Harrison-guitar; Binns,bass; Short, drums) play as if melded into a singular psychic space, a seismic hard-rock rhythm machine dispensing with any superfluous musical elements which would only serve to gum up the works.
As they took the stage, the band looked halfways between pissed and pissed off, and JJK especially looked like he was staring into some kind of drug-induced abyss, focusing on something far beyond the confines of the steamy club. Were SOF ticked at having to play such venues when they'd just made a sophomore album--after a few years of management and record company hassles that virtually paralyzed them--that topped 99% of the competition? Couldn't blame them. Had they been on the road too long? Probably. But whatever was providing the Muse that evening, the ensuing concert's intensity level reached a peak that happens on very rare occasions (an evening with The Patti Smith Group at a bar in Ann Arbor, Michigan comes to mind). From the time that JJK snarled "Baby don't go rattling my monkey cage" from Gump's sizzling "You're No Good" into the mike and the band fairly well exploded into the pounding riff that propels the song, you felt like the top of you skull was being shorn off from sheer passion, torment, and rage emanating from the band.
A few songs into the set, members of the stunned crowd, packed into the bar like proverbial sardines, began exchanging knowing glances, as if we in realization that we were all participating in some kind of semi-secret tribal rite, with SOF as the shamanistic intermediaries between us and some unknown but beckoning realm. The band kept digging deeper into meat of the tunes, JJK pouring out tales of earth-bound debauchery and despair tempered by an ever-present search for spiritual transcendence: "Given a chance I'd crawl back up the womb/I can't stand the sight of another day/There's no relief in all the drugs I take/So just gimme a reason I should stay" (from "Jesus and Jim"). You kept expecting a let-up at some point in the show, a break in the stream of intensity surging from the stage, but this never happened. Everything eventually became a blur within the continuous maelstrom of monster rhythm. Finally there were encores: still no let-up. Then they were gone. Members of the crowd staggered from the place in a confused, but reverent hush, stunned by the fact that this hadn't been another mere night out at the local "alternative" club. Rock and roll, declared dead so often by jaded cultural observers, was "born again" this night at the Trasheteria.
As of this writing, the Sons of Freedom are getting set for a return, after taking a hiatus for a couple of years due to more bad record company deals and frayed nerves. A new album, Tex, will accompany the tour--singer Jim Newton describes it as "a kinda bastard son" of the first two albums. "Some songs sit in a "son of Gump spaced-out powergroove, whereas a couple others are nasty little brash punk assholes." Green Day and Offspring, look out!. "We've been enjoying playing the new songs live," adds JJK. With their current cultural influences ranging from William S. Burroughs to Charles Bukowski to John Coltrane, Newton and SOF are sure to provide many more nights of that elusive rock magic on the upcoming tour--I, for one, can hardly wait.
