The Specials, "Too Hot"
I’m glad I got into the Specials when I did. I was late to the party and it was at least a decade overdue, but I did get to see them live twice here in Boston, before Terry Hall died. And what was even cooler? I took my daughter with me to both these shows, when she was five and eight years old. More on these nights—one more special than the other—in a minute, after I’ve put you through the usual rigmarole of How Brad Discovered the Band.
I wrote a while ago about my two-year obsession with the Pogues. See “If I Should Fall from Grace with God.” In that post I had other preoccupations, and I didn’t fully relate how deep this went. E.g., I didn’t talk about how I went out and bought a plaid wool Irish driving cap that I wore all over everywhere including in the summer, or how I asked for and got a tin whistle for Christmas and even tried, for the second of three times in my life, to brute-force through the first thirty pages of Ulysses. I pulled down every available Pogues B-side from Napster—there were many—along with myriad live recordings of dubious origin and sound quality. And in between Torts and Con Law readings I was beating the streets looking for ever more Pogues content. There being no YouTube like there is today, to offer dozens of live treatments on demand, I was excited to find a VHS copy of their Live at the Town & Country video available for rental.
There was a tech company operating in the Boston metro area in those days. They rented videos and sold snacks. You went online and consulted their extensive VHS listings, picked a movie that was available in your area, and an hour later a bicycle messenger would deliver the tape to your house, along with some Twizzlers, a Snickers bar, maybe some cold Cokes. Kate and I were early and enthusiastic adopters. We loved this company. One day in the middle of winter we were driving up Memorial Drive, along the Charles River, and one of their couriers was pedaling up the road with his blood-orange bag (green trim, as I remember) slung over his shoulder, slogging through the snow and slush. Watching this happy warrior conduct his commerce—elements be damned—I was positively inspired. “These guys are gonna be huge,” I said to Kate.
A minute later they were out of business. Hello, Netflix. And this is why I don’t play the markets. I just hopped upstairs to ask Kate what the name of that company was. She couldn’t remember, either.
In any case, I’m pretty sure Live at the Town & Country arrived at my door in one of those orange and green [NAME OF DEFUNCT COMPANY] bags. I breathlessly dropped it in the VCR hatch and watched it straight through, beginning to end. There came a point, deep into the video, after that tipping point in concerts where all pretense falls away and the band members say fuck it: let’s switch on the lights and just have a party, when the Specials’ Lynval Golding appeared on stage and the Pogues and he played a cover of “Rudy, a Message to You.” This would be yet another case where I first heard Band X’s Signature Song played as a cover by Band Y.1
(UPDATE: just now Kate sent me three texts from the bedroom:
Kokomo
Kokomo
Kozmo
Third time is the charm: as hard as Siri just tried to rewrite history in the Beach Boys’ favor, the video-and-Twizzlers company was indeed Kozmo.com.)
But okay, yeah. I thought “Rudy, a Message to You” (Apple Music, Spotify) was brilliant. And although they were reupping music traditions an ocean and 4,400 miles apart, it seemed like only a hop, skip, and a jump from the Pogues to the Specials. On the strength of that logic I ordered in the Specials’ Singles Collection from one or the other of BMG or Columbia House.
To this point I didn’t really get ska, as a scene. It seemed to have a relationship with punk, which I didn’t fully understand. I had stuck in my head this clip from Sid & Nancy, the 1986 biopic of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, see also “Helter Skelter,” wherein director Alex Cox hammers home how, in a blink of an eye, the London punk scene burned itself out. Four punters sit grimly against a wall while the Pistols play “No Feelings” (Apple Music, Spotify) in the next room, and they’re already plotting their next move. One of them says he’ll become a rude boy.
Now of course from their earliest days the Clash straddled the ska/ punk fence a fair bit, suggesting their interest with “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” (Apple Music, Spotify), about a curious but racially, um, distinctive visitor to a reggae club, and for that matter their cover of Lee “Scratch” Perry’s “Police & Thieves” (Apple Music, Spotify). By the time London Calling was released in 1979, the Specials were up, running, and well on their way into the stratosphere, Joe Strummer having invited them to tour with the Clash a year earlier. You can hear the Specials’ influence—or if not that, their shared references—on “Rudie Can’t Fail” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Revolution Rock” (Apple Music, Spotify), both of which are very-Clash songs, but at the same time ska-inflected with complex arrangements (i.e., horn sections).
Rancid came out the year I walked out through the college gates, with my copy of London Calling tucked under my arm. See “Olympia, WA.” They were modeled after the Clash in many respects, including the ska components. Except in their case the ska came before the punk, with principals Tim Armstrong and Matt Freeman having made their bones in the Operation Ivy NoCal ska outfit, before they went punk-forward under the Rancid banner. For all their mohawks and beet-red dye jobs, Rancid’s roots were showing from the jump, with “Time Bomb” (Apple Music, Spotify) landing hard on the backbeats, while Tim sang of black coats, white suits, black hats, and Cadillacs.
So by the time I was parked on that couch in, I dunno, 2002 watching Lynval and the Pogues sending their stern-yet-riotous messages to Rudy, it seemed ska music was lurking around every corner. And that London 2-Tone scene in particular was punk-adjacent, Pogues-adjacent, everything-adjacent, with the Specials as its standard-bearers. All right then: I’ll have a look.
The Singles Collection is one of those hits compilations that goes quickly out of print, to be replaced by a new, slightly different compilation five years later. The selection most certainly wasn’t the special-est of the Specials, but it did hit several of the high points. Ghost Town, of course, and a smashing cover of Dylan’s “Maggie Farm” (Apple Music, Spotify) that earned regular play on road trips to Virginia and Ohio when the kids were little.
Two things I wonder, relative to “Maggie’s Farm”:
(1) Is it uniformly the case that covers of Bob Dylan songs are easier and better listens than his originals? Consider as well Jimi’s “All Along the Watchtower” (Apple Music, Spotify) and the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” (Apple Music, Spotify).
(2) Do Florian and Lila have “Maggie’s Farm” lodged in their deep subconscious like I did so many Neil Diamond songs my parents played on the regular, when I was too small to take note of what I was hearing? Will they come back to a song like this two, three decades from now, find it strangely familiar and new at the same time, and decide that it sounds like home and feels like love? Kinda I hope so.
The Singles Collection was fine, but I didn’t get spun-up on the Specials, really, until ten years later. One day in the fall of 2012 I walked into the Newbury Comics just across the street from my office—as I am wont to do even now on a lazy afternoon—and they had “Too Hot” (Apple Music, Spotify) playing over the PA. I loved it. Bass, drums, guitars, keys, vocals all hard at work, but having agreed in advance to pull back completely on the downbeats. The music sounded like sunshine, bright and warm. But the band having decided it was in fact too hot, and you, Listener, need to sit over there behind these half-turned window blinds, I could hear just those uniform and regular strips of it that were allowed to pass between the slats.
Amazing, and I probably should have guessed this was the Specials, because they were up to much the same business on the “Rudy” single I already knew. On “Too Hot” the band jacks up the tempo over the last 30 seconds—a steady acceleration that carries the track over the genre boundary from reggae to ska, and it’s just so goddam minimalist and cool. So that happened, and I was basking in it, already decided that I would buy this record once I figured out what the hell it was, and then the next track came on, which was “Monkey Man” (Apple Music, Spotify).
Wait—you’re kidding! That’s the song playing in the background in Sixteen Candles, when Long Duck Dong is riding the exercise bike at Jake Ryan’s party!
I’ll leave to you all whether it’s sad or in fact inspiring that I carry in my head musical cues from movies I’ve seen thirty years ago. It’s not exactly the case that my mind is a steel trap. These days I’ll see a movie or read a book, and I’ll forget the entirety of its plot a day later. But you’re never so impressionable as when you’re twelve, thirteen years old watching teen movies on HBO.
I made a beeline to the checkout counter. The Newbury Comics in Harvard Square generally does you the favor of telling you what they’re playing over the PA, via a plastic “Now Playing” bookstand up front where they post a hard copy of the LP. And on that day, it turned out they were playing The Specials’ first, self-titled record. My computer tells me I went home and bought The Specials on iTunes, which seems like kind of a dick move, given it was the clerk at Newbury Comics who turned me on to it. Not sure why I would have done that, but that Earlier Iteration of Me must have had his reasons.
In any case, The Specials is a close-to-perfect record, and pound for pound (to borrow a line from “Too Hot”), it’s better than The Singles Collection. “Rudy,” “Too Hot,” and “Monkey Man,” sure. But consider “Stupid Marriage” (Apple Music, Spotify). Court in session! Neville Staple shouts. Rude boy, you have been brought in front of me and charged with smashing this woman’s window. Before I sentence you, what have you got to say in your defense? Terry’s answer: she’s my ex-girlfriend, and she married another guy. Five months for Terry, who is led away grumbling:
He wanted to be something but she knows he never will. She’s got him where she wanted and forgot to take her pill. And he thinks that she’ll be happy when she’s hanging out the nappies. If that’s a happy marriage I’d prefer to be unhappy.
This leads right into “Too Much Too Young” (Apple Music, Spotify), where it seems Terry is now taking the matter up directly with this lost love, and at least “using his words” now, as we parents used to say to our young children:
Now you’re married with a son when you should be having fun with me. He’s just another burden on the welfare state. Ain’t you heard of the starving millions? Ain’t you heard of contraception? Now you’re chained to the cooker making currant buns for tea.
Hard to imagine that six minutes of these and like arguments won’t win the lady back, but you would do well, Terry, to pitch in for the glass repair, too.
But The Specials isn’t just a document of youth’s bad ideas and wrong impulses. No less an authority than David Bowie tells us that the rising generation’s knuckleheads still may have something to teach the incumbents (Apple Music, Spotify), and on the subject of racism, who has more moral authority than this 2-Tone band? “Doesn’t Make It Alright” (Apple Music, Spotify), is regrettably on-point a near half-century later and—alas—likely will still be in 2079. Progress comes in fits and starts.
I could go up and down this record, touting each and every track. But let’s cut to the chase. Armed with “Monkey Man” and “Ghost Town,” I was able to convince Lila, then all of five years old, to come with me to see the Specials play the House of Blues down by Fenway, on July 11, 2013. This wasn’t our first show together—that was the Wiggles, see “Hotel Yorba”—but it was our first without costumed mascots. Even so I was confident the Specials would keep my daughter entertained. I had earlier watched the footage of them playing “Gangsters” on Saturday Night Live, jumping and squalling and waving toy guns in the air. (If the suits in 30 Rock allowed that content to post to YouTube, I would have linked it here.) Even if the years had slowed them down a little, I expect they’d hold Lila’s attention.
Lila and I entered the venue at ground level, and it quickly became clear that she wouldn’t be able to see the band over the backs of the crowd. I hoisted her up, and we shimmied and danced to the music. She was beaming from ear to ear. From time to time party bros would walk by, lifting their glasses to me and shouting things I already knew:
Your daughter likes THE SPECIALS!
[pointing at Lila] Aw, man—she’s THE BEST.
When you have small children, you steadily gain strength in your upper body—but only up to a point. As they grow and grow and grow, adding mass in the process, your muscles work harder to lift, hold, and carry them. Then you reach a tipping point where they just become too goddam heavy. I remember the last time I carried a sleeping Florian out of the back seat of Kate’s car, into the house, and up the stairs to bed. We’d spent the day at Crane Beach on the North Shore, we were all a bit worn out on the road home, and I’d already made one run up the stairs carrying Lila. Now for the older brother. I opened the rear door, took one look at him, dropped into a squat and said a short prayer. Somehow some way I managed to flop that kid over my shoulder, steady myself, and haul him through the garage, into the house and up to the first floor. While it was happening I new it was the end of an era.
All this to say that I still had it in me in the summer of 2013 to hoist my daughter into the air and give her a sight line on the band. But it was only for short bursts. Ultimately I had the bright idea to take her up to the balcony. It was crowded up here, too, but Lila had a certain magic about her, and the same spirit that had gripped so many of the bros below parted the crowd for us, so that she was able to stand right up against the railing and peer over it at the stage. We skanked and twirled and pogoed and miscellaneously danced the night away, reserving special energy for “Monkey Man.” It was the best.
During the encore, Lila and I got cups of water from the bar. She was tired—and thirsty—and it made some degree of sense to leave during the last number, so as not to get bogged down in the departing crowd. The House of Blues is a buttoned-down, over-lawyered venue. This can be a good thing, such as when they distribute ear plugs in advance of the otherwise tortiously loud My Bloody Valentine concert. Here, though, it seemed a bit much for them to confiscate my five-year-old’s “open container” on the way out the door to Lansdowne Street.
Papa (to bouncer): There’s no alcohol in that. It’s water.
Bouncer (answering): Yeah, but how do I know that?
The night was such a success we decided to take a second run at the Specials, when they returned to play the very same venue three years later. By this time—to be precise, it was September 12, 2016—Lila was eight years old, going on nine. Old enough, apparently, that she was now age-ineligible for any of the deference and solicitude the punters had given her last time. Can’t see the stage, Little Girl? Tough shit. This was disappointing. She and I spent some time sitting on the floor of the balcony, amid the tall trees of thoughtless clubgoers, many of whom—so I bitterly noted—knew few if any of the songs and were talking animatedly about nothing along the balcony rail. We spent some time playing games on my phone and left early.
I’d say many, if not most, of my three dozen regular readers aren’t residents of New England. And if you don’t live here, you may be laboring under the misimpression that Bostonians are cold, brusque, and elbow-throwing. Massholes is a word we hear a lot. But that’s not really fair. It’s only after you turn eight, or seven, or six—I haven’t pinned down the exact age limit—that strangers in town are required by local custom to treat you with disdain and/or suspicion. Here below you can see two versions of my daughter in her Rude Girl merch. The former was Queen of the Evening and Belle of the Ball, yet the latter (apparently) deserves none of your love, New Englanders. All good, though, because I have endless reserves of my own to give her.
But let’s end this post before it gets, um, too hot.
Tip your pork-pie hats to the Specials, and raise a glass to Terry Hall, who sadly left us two Decembers ago (The Guardian, The Quietus). And on that note and above all, ENJOY YOURSELF, because IT’S LATER THAN YOU THINK (Apple Music, Spotify).2
I mentioned Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Born to Run” (Apple Music, Spotify) in passing a couple posts ago, see “Title Music from A Clockwork Orange,” but in the end this phenomenon may merit its own post.
The second record, More Specials, ain’t half-bad, either.