I'll let you into a little secret - I used to despise this goddamn band.
[] Green On Red were everything hateful about American rock'n'roll. They weren't modern - they seemed positively retrospective. They were way, way too reverential - punk's tattered corpse was warm in its grave and the way I sawit anyone who had a good word for Dylan or The Stones deserved to hang! They certainly weren't roll models - hell, it wasn't so much the lurid drugs'n'booze stories so much as the shirts! Man, those checks were awful! There was also the band's association with the Paisley Underground: a motley gathering of Yank college no-hopers who they reckoned were the rebirth of "classic rock guitar". Pah! Nothing more than an excuse for prematurely geriatric Sixties would-be's to relive adolescences that were probably spent more with their heads buried deep in study than in booming bass bins. Hence, quite reasonably, I hated Green On Red. The trouble was I never heard them.
It was "Here Come The Snakes" first. Someone actually gave me a copy with the strict instructions to lock myself indoors and not talk to them ever again unless I loved it! I loved it! Hearing 'Snakes' that first time was like an electric shock. Green On Red weren't lovingly recreating the sounds of Dylan and The Stones, they were taking a whip to them. "Rock 'n' Roll Disease" and "Change" wore sardonic pot-shots at cosy traditions, high on adrenalin and cheap booze: reckless, wild, and sharp as a hypodermic. The singer, Dan Stuart, seemed almost psychotic. Only a schizoid could pen a line like "If you're lookin' for someone who don't give a damn/Well, I think you've found your man" ("Broken Radio") and then write with painful sensitivity about love on the sublime 'We Had It All'.
More than that, there was a strange intelligence at work. Stuart's songs had a kind of widescreen, cinematic quality to them. They were stuffed with characters, situations and nuances. His songs wore like movies of the mind, blackly humourous narratives from the beyond. When Dan's curiously light-heartedly tortured whine collided with Chuck Prophet's jaggedly poetic guitar howls, they seemed unsurpassable. I was hooked.
[] "Snakes" is only part of the story. Green On Red wore a full band once they began in '81) and made a series of fine albums like "Gravity Talks" and "Gas Food Lodging", prior to which the dude Prophet turned up at Stuart's house with his guitar to positively insist on carving his signature into fireballs like "Hair Of The Dog" and "Fading Away". After the black masterpiece of '87's "Killer Inside Me" Stuart split the band, he and Prophet retiring to lick their wounds surrounding the album nearly destroyed them. Then there was "Snakes" Chuck and Dan plus hired guns), which is where we came in. "Snakes" was the one that had the critics wetting themselves while the public flocked to buy radio-friendly R.E.M albums instead. Poor Chuck and Den, they always were Born to Lose. Following that, they high-tailed it to L.A., cut the largely disappointing "This Time Around" with Glyn Johns and managed to see off most of the critics that had loved the rest of their career! Ironically, the attempt at commerciality didn't sell.
Green On Red still had greatness in them, like 1991's 'Scapegoats', a largely brilliant deconstruction of country music. Stuart and Prophet inject the old coot with all the vitriol, passion and warped sensibilty of their rock records, and songs like "The Little Things In Life" and "Shed A Tear (For The Lonesome)" are melodically plangent, pithily funny pastiches of the genre's cliches - "Funny how we all wound up at the same motel".
Throughout the Eighties and into the Nineties, Green On Red have been taking a brave and lonely road while others have played it safe and fallen in. They're erratic, they're unpredictable, they're irreverent and they're sometimes dumb. They just happen to have made some of the greatest rock'n' roll music to have emerged from Uncle Sam's nightmares in the last 10 years.

You've simply got to hear it.
Dave Simpson

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