Crime are legend. A group whose rep cannot be fucked with. One of the all-time cult rock fetish totems. They’re that band you find via smoke signals, by following the clues. The one that, when you finally get to them, obliterates all else.

What The Sonics are to ‘60s American punk, Crime are to its ‘70s (pre-hardcore) iteration. The real deal; the undiluted, full strength dose; the wildest of the wild; the key that gets you entry to all locked rooms.

Unlike most subsequent US punk, image is all important with Crime, and, as locked via their most widely disseminated photos, just the sheer sight of them still hits harder than the actual music of many of their lesser peers. Gaunt, bone-thin motherfuckers, uniform greaser quiffs and flat-tops, dead blank expressions on the verge of a post-photo sneer; this isn’t just BEFORE Malcolm Maclaren ruined everything, it’s an alternate blueprint from a whole different universe. Style never goes out of fashion, and all that.

But the coup de grace, the element of absolute perverse genius, arrived a year or so into their sporadic recording & performance career, when the band took the decision to adopt full, neatly pressed police uniforms, complete with ties, badges of office and accompanying Ray-Bans. A simple move, but aesthetically devastating. As provocateurs, these cats knew exactly what they were doing.

Whether spectators were aroused by an instinctive, lizard brain hatred of the cops, by an unease at the sacred uniform being co-opted by sneering punkers under the banner of CRIME or merely by the cognitive dissonance that results from a confusion between cops and robbers, the band knew perfectly well that when they come out swinging dressed like that, no one is comfortable. Plus, it just looked fucking cool. I mean, watch live footage online and it looks like they actually got those uniforms *tailored*, y’know? Sharp.

And then of course, there’s the music, which at its best is just… incredible. Like Chuck Berry rock n’ roll tied to a chair and tortured with electric shocks and razorblades, rockabilly hip thrusts blurring into the lumbering spectre of grinding proto-Black Flag/Flipper noise aggro. Masking amateur imprecision with feedback and swagger until things got within waving distance of The Electric Eels’ avant-obnoxiousness, Crime spat out an unholy mess of brilliance.

Slicing out the influence of the ‘60s as if it were a tumour (a pretty radical gesture when you’re first on the scene in mid-‘70s San Francisco), what remains zeroes straight in on everything that the more subterranean rock n’ roll of the ‘50s achieved when it appeared, amped up for a nastier, even more divisive decade to come: frightening, incomprehensible, and exhilarating.

One of the most jaw-dropping and unnerving music vids I’ve ever found on Youtube is the Target Video footage of Crime playing a performance in the recreation yard at San Quentin prison - the same correctional facility where Crime’s sartorial precursor Johnny Cash was knockin’ em dead a decade or so previously.

Now, who in the hell thought that a militantly aggressive punk rock band named Crime would be the perfect fit for a morale-raising prison gig, I have no idea. And who the hell subsequently let them walk in WEARING POLICE UNIFORMS, I can’t even imagine. But nonetheless, that is what seems to be happening when the video begins, and, though no violence actually broke out to my knowledge, “uneasy” doesn’t even begin to do justice to the situation that resulted.

One of the great things about Crime I think is the way they knowingly took on the whole ‘bad boy’ cliché of rock n’ roll, but, rather than using it for nostalgia or escapism, they proceeded to push it right back in their audience’s faces as if it were the realest, most tangible thing in the world (a trait they shared with the early years of The Cramps to some extent, but I digress) - and that is exactly what you see in the San Quentin video.

Standing there in the uniforms of San Fran’s finest, the band face down a small army of motionless convicts, some sitting, grinning, holding up photocopied Crime promo posters as the camera pans across them, others standing, arms-crossed and surly. Exhibiting a complete disregard for decorum or good sense, the band launch straight into Piss On Your Dog – originally titled ‘Prisoner Dog’, until their fans started shouting the misheard lyric back at them - the heaviest and most threatening song in their repertoire. Refusing to dial down the kind of aggro-laden performance they might have presented to a crowd of college kid rock fans even a fraction, Frankie Fixx and Johnny Strike stalk the stage like dogs on a leash, giving it all of their best “come on you fuckers” body language, as the amp stacks roar with evil distortion and guards stationed on a raised gantry clutch loaded rifles to their chest as if they expect things to kick off at any moment. Then to top it all off, right in the middle of the no man’s land between the band and the prisoners, a lone woman dances enthusiastically, apparently oblivious to the brooding tensions being exercised in this otherwise all-male environment. What a scene. Love what they’re doing or hate it, it’s hard to deny that this is a band with balls of steel.

Like most people who weren’t knocking about in the Bay Area in the late 1970s, I first became aware of Crime via the cover of ‘Hotwire My Heart’ on Sonic Youth’s ‘Sister’. That was ol’ Thurston Moore hard at work of course – scanning and regurgitating anything hip like an art school photocopier. But as with so many other things, I’m still grateful to him for pointing the way, even if the vague attribution of the song to “Johnny Strike/Crime” didn’t initially mean a lot to me amid the Philip K Dick goofing mirror-message blather of ‘Sister’s sleeve notes.

And like many people (in the UK, at least), I first caught up with the original Hotwire My Heart (A-side of Crime’s first single) shortly after the millennium, buffed up and compressed for maximum impact on Rough Trade Shops’ epochal ‘Rock and Roll 01’ compilation. To say it sounded like the best thing on there is no small boast amid such a monolithic track-listing, and the song’s brain-melting, beyond-punk totality proceeded to launch a hundred over-excited mixtapes of the “fucking eat this!” variety.

Guitars flailing like loose electrical cables, vocals that sound like one of them just hit Gene Vincent in the ass and gave him brain damage, drumming so dismembered and lost in the mix it’s difficult to tell if the player is some kind of improv genius or merely incompetent (I suspect the latter), it’s a recording like no other; unhinged, accidental, psychotic and just impossible to unpack or compute on first listen.

Both then and now, the late Frankie Fixx’s lead guitar playing on these early Crime cuts is a total inspiration, and it’s at its very best on ‘Hotwire..’, ploughing straight in, needle in the red, with only the vaguest idea of what he’s doing, but with a total confidence and bravery that allows no quarter, riffing and screeching cack-handedly as if DARING some damn hippie to stand up and tell him he “can’t play”, slurring notes and letting feedback ring, revelling in the mess, like some moonshine-ripped rockabilly plucked from a one mic rural studio, now suddenly tooled up for the era of full scale noise. Just amazing.

A few years after that white light moment came sneaky downloads of Crime’s first two singles, plus the San Francisco’s Still Doomed compilation LP on Swami Records, a legit copy of which has sat conspicuously on my birthday/xmas present list for years. Frustration on the second single’s A is another work of genius, Baby You’re So Repulsive is as blunt & brutal a punk rager as the name suggests, and even the second 45’s lengthy b-side ‘Murder by Guitar’ has a certain kind of ballsy idiot charm to it, even if it is just an indulgent fuck up of a track really. And as to the comp LP, well that offered more of the same in greater quantities really, though I confess, the relentless aggression and relative tunelessness of Crime’s lesser known demo material wore my weedy senses down to the wire pretty quick, even as ‘Rock n Roll Enemy’ and ‘San Francisco’s Doomed’ took a seat aside the single cuts as firm faves. (Format note: a friend of mine has a vinyl copy of ‘..Still Doomed’ that sounded absolutely ferocious compared to the mp3s when he threw in on the turntable; I coveted it muchly.)

Much water under the bridge since then of course, and this latest collection on Superior Viaduct arrives at a time when the merits of relentless aggression and tunelessness seem a whole lot more appealing to yours truly, meaning that promises of a wealth of *previously unheard* Crime studio recordings (alongside all the material from the singles) had me jumping in anticipation.

So, now I’ve got it, how does hold up? Well, as is usually the case with these ‘complete recordings’ comps of obscure punk and garage bands, the LP played front to back is a bit of a mixed bag, but this more or less chronologically-ordered recap of Crime’s trips to the studio does at least succeed in presenting a slightly weirder and more interesting musical story than yet another “hmm, turns out everything else they did was pretty dull” styled addition to the KBD/Nuggets completest archives.

Obviously it’s great to hear ‘..Repulsive’ and ‘Frustration’ sounding better than ever, and if the somehow-previously-unreleased ’77 recordings of ‘Terminal Boredom’ and ‘Dillinger’s Brain’ perhaps aren’t QUITE as inspired, they still could’ve made for a respectably fucked up KBD-era single, the former song a surprisingly straight up punker that reminds me a little of The Zeros, whilst the latter delves into the band’s weird gutter-pulp crime obsessions with all the subtlety you’d expect (which is to say, none at all). Even ‘Murder by Guitar’ sounds quite nice as heard in higher fidelity here, with its repetition, idiot noise, and winningly dumb declaration that “I’m gonna drive this guitar straight through your heart!” just about winning me over.

Sadly, the newly exhumed studio version of ‘Piss On Your Dog’ turns out to be a bit of a bust, sounding hesitant and muddled, with weak drumming resulting in a flubbed riff that completely misses the fearsome menace of the extant demo and live versions, and the LP’s B-side opens with another bummer, in the shape of the long and uneventful drag of ‘TV Blues’, an ambitious attempt at a slower, more art-damaged kind of song-writing that regrettably never really gets off the ground, sounding, strangely, like a really rough demo of one of those dreary/dreamy late-era Sonic Youth songs that were putting us all to sleep through the ‘00s.

Thankfully after that we’re back in business with ‘If Looks Could Kill’ and ‘Lost Soul’ from ’79, which both fucking rip it, the former perhaps the clearest example of Crime’s re-tooled rockabilly mode ever captured on tape, whilst the latter builds around a metallic, Lou Reed-ish “strutting down the street” riff to brilliantly cool effect, even if the lyrics, in true Crime tradition, sound like they were written about twenty seconds after they started recording (an issue which starts to become problematic at this point in their career, when gradually increasing fidelity means we can finally hear what they’re going on about).

Those tunes catch us on the cusp of the point at which Crime like many mid ‘70s punk bands who staggered into the cold glare of the ‘80s, started to go a bit weird, and not necessarily in a good way. Signposting these changes pretty clearly, ‘79’s ‘Rockin’ Weird’ was produced by none other than Huey Lewis (yes, that one, etc), and the trad boogie piano slapped high atop the somewhat cleaner mix is a bit of a shock to say the least, even if some totally vicious riffing beneath succeeds in salvaging the band’s bad-ass cred to a certain extent.

It’s an odd cut for sure - perhaps an errant example of what might have happened if Crime had reined in their excesses for new waver-era public consumption? Thankfully, the band never really ventured much further in that direction, but it seems that by the dawn of the ‘80s they were heading into stranger waters altogether, as demonstrated on the swan song of their original recording career, the much maligned 1980 single ‘Gangster Funk’ b/w ‘Maserati’.

For years, those song titles have had inquisitive punks running a mile (myself included), and indeed their worst fears would only have been confirmed by actually listening to the damn thing, as it finds Crime apparently pushing toward what I can only describe as some kind of beyond-kitsch, retro-futurist groove-rock, fearlessly embracing such horrors as gated drums, phased fretless bass and random, panning synth swooshes alongside their by now rather contrived curled lip vocal sneer. Imagine the kind of music a neo-rockabilly band might make in some ill-advised ‘80s proto-cyberpunk movie club scene, mixed up with a bit of cut price “we are the future” methodology left over from Neil Young’s ‘Trans’, and you’ll get the idea.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say these songs are “good” (though 'Maserati' comes close), but it’s a testament to Crime’s basic talent for rock n’ roll that they could indulge in such nonsense and at least escape embarrassment, emerging with something reasonably listenable, their trademark strutting aggression left largely intact. It might have been interesting to see where they went next with all this, but, for better or worse, we can assume that a mixture of label poverty, bad living and audience disinterest put the nix on Crime’s planned future-rock utopia at this point, leaving that final single an intriguing oddity, an appropriately uneasy question mark at the end of one of the most relentlessly vicious and original recording careers in US punk history.

Just as ‘San Francisco’s Still Doomed’s ragged skree didn’t really succeed in presenting the whole picture of Crime’s work, ‘Murder By Guitar’s more clinical / chronological approach proves equally unsatisfactory [just two of the essential songs not included: Samurai, Rock n Roll Enemy]. But for providing the other half of the jigsaw, it is essential listening all the same. If you are at all interested in this band (and if you’ve heard ‘Hotwire My Heart’ and you’re not, then fucking hell, you’re in the wrong business), just do the decent thing and get them both. Then play them simultaneously in some kind of audio battle royale. Go on, do it. I’ll be ready in the corridor with a nice cup of tea when you stagger out clutching your bulging forehead. In conclusion: CRIME! YEAH! New songs by CRIME? YEAH!! CRIME! What are you waiting for, buy it already.

Buy from Superior Viaduct in the US, or try Norman in the UK.

Labels: album reviews, Crime, punk rock, reissues