Outernational, A Band

Unlike the Cure's Robert Smith, I've always had a special place in my heart for "message music." It didn't always have to be Phil Ochs or Country Joe and the Fish though, although I loved both of the songs I just linked to. The Velvet Underground was just as radical... to put it mildly, in an expansive way of defining political messaging. Not to mention Dylan. And Dylan is kind of what this post is semi-about. Well, it's not really about Dylan except that Amnesty International is making a new album of Dylan cover songs.

Did you listen to that Velvets song at the link? Man did I love that... it was behavior altering for a semester I dropped out of college. Before I did though, I never missed a Velvets show in NYC. I think I went to every single Exploding Plastic Inevitable gig at the Dom on St Marks Place. I was just a teenager at the time-- and damn lucky I could get in-- but I met all kinds of cool people at those shows. Including 3 fellow teenagers who had just arrived in NYC from California, Jackson Browne, Tim Buckley and Steve Noonan. They weren't famous, just cool. I invited them back to crash at my campus after the show, about an hour away from the city. I was booking the concerts at the college and they were all singer songwriters and I got them gigs whenever I could. I gave Tim the opening slot on the Doors concert. Jackson wound up as the quasi-lead singer of the campus house-band, the Soft White Underbelly, a precursor of the Blue Oyster Cult.

Last week one of my neighbors, drummer Jim Keltner, was recording a new song with Jackson. He's worked with Jackson before. Who hasn't he worked with? He's probably best know for the drumming he did for George Harrison, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan, Dylan (hold that thought... it'll come in handy in a moment), the Stones, Gary Wright, Leon Russell, Roy Orbison, Jerry Garcia, Elvis Costello, Ry Cooder, Sheryl Crow... you know... everybody. If he's not the most famous drummer in the world, he's totally the most famous drummer on my block.

Remember that band I mentioned a week or so ago, Outernational? It was in connection with some anti-American hysteria Cuban-American fascist Marco Rubio was pushing at the Ronald Reagan Library. I posted a cool song and talked about how they were in Mexico working with Calle 13 and how Tom Morello from Rage and Chad Smith from the Peppers produce them. They're back from Mexico City and this weekend they're doing their song for the Amnesty International album, a new version of the one way up at the top, "When the Ship Comes In" (1964, way before any of these Clash-inspired NYC musicians was born). But lately their drummer has been Chad and this week his other band has a new album out they're out promoting.

So... who's the best drummer in the world who I know who knows Dylan songs and who heard the Outernational demos and totally loved them? Right! So this week, Jim Keltner started the week working on a new Jackson Browne song and ended the week working on a cover of an old Bob Dylan song with a band that only a handful of people know about so far. Remember I said how I booked the Doors to play at my school a few paragraphs back? I paid them $400. No one knew who they were when I booked them and Steven Krantz, the sophomore class president shook me out of a reverie during the show to demand I not pay "these clowns." "Light My Fire" had just been released as a single but the band wasn't famous yet. I knew them from a tiny bar where they played all summer one year under the 59th Street Bridge. The place only held like 60-70 people and I went every night so I got to know them. That's what seeing Outernational's going to be like if you catch them now.

I don't know what their version of "When The Ship Comes In" is going to sound like but listen to Dylan doing it with some Stones up top and then listen to this random Outernational song below and see if you can figure it out. I can't help thinking about what it was like on that first big Clash tour in 1977 with the Buzzcocks, the Slits, and Subway Sect. Special. Catch 'em if you can, although lately all they seem to do are immigrant rights gigs in Arizona.

Don't Expect To See Outernational Playing At A Marco Rubio Rally

Instead of blogging and tweeting, I spent most of Wednesday hanging out with Miles Solay, the singer from Outernational. A mutual friend, Casey, introduced us a few days ago and Miles reminded me a lot of Mick Jones when Mick was a kid. And Outernational totally loves the Clash. So instead of doing my work we sat around swapping music stories, playing favorite Bob Dylan songs and talking about Calle 13 (who he's on his way down to Mexico City to record with this weekend-- just one duet for Outernational's new album). Anyway, turns out my old friend Robert Greenwald did a video for an awesome Outernational cover of Woody Guthrie's, "Deportees," the song up top. Tom Morello's singing on it with them. It reminded me of a nasty, bad-natured, even ill-tempered and disrespectful, tweet I sent out to Florida's right-wing extremist senator Marco Rubio earlier today, this one:


The reason I said something that awful to a fellow American is because the U.S. has treated Cuban refugees in a very special way. Where my ancestors, like many thousands of European Jews fleeing fascist persecution, were barred from entering the U.S.-- all my relatives are in Brazil-- anti-Castro Cubans were always welcomed with open arms here, to put it mildly. That has a lot to do with why the Florida Republican Party is a neo-fascist bastion and why politics in that state has become so weird (and not "weird" in a Mitt Romney kind of way). As ThinkProgress reported yesterday, Rubio clearly has no understanding of America and harbors a fascist vision for our great anti-fascist democracy. He dismissed the importance of programs like Medicare and Social Security during a speech at the Reagan Presidential Library, arguing these initiatives “weakened us as people”:

These programs actually weakened us as a people. You see, almost forever, it was institutions in society that assumed the role of taking care of one another. If someone was sick in your family, you took care of them. If a neighbor met misfortune, you took care of them. You saved for your retirement and your future because you had to. We took these things upon ourselves in our communities, our families, and our homes, and our churches and our synagogues. But all that changed when the government began to assume those responsibilities. All of a sudden, for an increasing number of people in our nation, it was no longer necessary to worry about saving for security because that was the government’s job.

Watch this Cuban fascist trying to sneak his anti-American propaganda into the political dialogue:

Americans may have certainly taken care of each other in the absence of formalized access to affordable health care, but that support did little to drastically ameliorate the fears and anxieties of seniors. As Ted Marmor explains in The Politics of Medicare, “The biggest fears included not being able to pay for care and risking turning to children or siblings for help, or it meant relying on the charitable attitude of the doctor or hospital. Most profoundly, it was the sense that illness or injury-- bad enough themselves-- could be disastrous for family finances unless you were lucky enough to have retiree coverage from a union or government plan.”

Indeed, prior to Medicare’s enactment in 1965, “about one-half of America’s seniors did not have hospital insurance,” “more than one in four elderly were estimated to go without medical care due to cost concerns,” and one in three seniors were living in poverty. Today, nearly all seniors have access to affordable health care and only about 14 percent of seniors are below the poverty line.

Even conservative strategist David Frum saw through the lurking dangers hidden in the foreign ideology dripping from Rubio's speech yesterday.

One of the effects of the Tea Party movement is to cut the Republican Party off-- not only from the measured policy preferences of the American people-- but from the Republican Party’s own history. It shrivels the GOP into a party without heroes, or rather a party with only one hero, Ronald Reagan, and otherwise a long succession of false and deluded leaders.

And it points Republicans to a doomed future of continuing failure and recrimination. After all, if almost every elected Republican leader of the past 100 years save Reagan fell short of conservative  principle, then it seems overwhelmingly probable that the next Republican leader will also fall short of conservative principle. In which case, conservative principle has become a vehicle for guaranteeing eternal conservative disappointment and alienation. Unhealthy, no?

I can't help but think if Cuban fascists hadn't been coddled by the U.S. and had had to work for immigration and citizenship status like everyone else, they wouldn't have clung to the inherently anti-American fascism that is the entire hallmark of Marco Rubio's disgraceful political career.

When Miles left my place today I opened my e-mail and found a video of Rubio's speech along with plea to send him money to help elect more right-wingers to the Senate. "The debates going on in Washington today are not much different than the challenges Ronald Reagan confronted and overcame," his e-mail stated. "We can overcome them again, but we'll need to start by electing more conservative leaders to the United States Senate. Your contribution to our Reclaim America PAC will help us support limited government candidates for the United States Senate who share our common principles, our view of the proper role of government..."

On the other hand, if you're not an advocate of Rubio's fascist political ideology and you support democracy, equality, freedom and human dignity, there actually is a way to make the Senate a better place-- by replacing corporate shills like Rubio and his cronies with tribunes of the people... like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren-- and you can do that here.

So what does this have to do with Outernational? Did you listen to the song? Listen again.