FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
For those about to rock, we f'n salute you
San Francisco's Alley Boys wear the Hard Core LogoAlley Boys at MRC
Tuesday, March 25Rock 'n' roll is a lot of things to a lot of people. It's Jerry Lee Lewis schtupping his underage cousin. It's Gene Simmons' gynecological coffee table book. It's G.G. Allin eating his own poo. It's many things that most normal people wouldn't do even if the laws of common decency were suspended for a short period of time.
But to me, and I hope to you as well, rock 'n' roll is being able to use the word "fuck" as a verb, noun, adjective, adverb, pronoun and conjunction - what's its fu(n)cktion? - 43 times in the space of a 15-minute interview. That's rock 'n' roll. Rock 'n' f'n roll, if you will.
Billy James, the lead vocalist of the California quartet known as Alley Boys is the individual offering the lesson in Hooked on Profanics as he's trying to pack for a month-long tour, move, buy a Winnebago, pay for a video that has to be finished and at MuchMusic in three days (for the song "Do You Want to Love") and give an interview to some rube all at the same time. That takes a lot of f'n talent.
The Alley Boys music is much like their vocalist - it doesn't pretend to be anything it isn't and it doesn't make any excuses for what it is. It's unabashedly blue collar, tattooed and sweaty, no-nonsense Headstones style of rock 'n' roll. They f'n give 'er every time they step on the stage and plug in their amps, and that working-man ethic has earned them a reputation all over North America. It even earned them a spot opening for the band that let there be rock.
Called in at the last minute to open for headliners AC/DC in their hometown of San Francisco, the Alley Boys so impressed the band with their high voltage rock 'n' roll, that two shows later, AC/DC asked them to continue on for the rest of the tour. Did they do it? F'n rights they did.
"They said, 'Hey, f'n come on tour with us,'" James says, relating the story for presumably the 100th time and loving it just as much as the first.
"Their management called us from St. Louis and said, 'Hey, we just had a meeting and the guys were blown away. They've never shared the stage with anybody like you guys that won the crowd over and that started the energy level out at the same level as AC/DC.'"
The Alley Boys two-year-old debut CD Radio Radio, which is available on Vancouver's Tomcat Records, does a fairly good job of documenting that energy level and might even be responsible for the current interest they're getting from several American major labels. But according to James - who also reveals the band will record some new material when they pass through Winnipeg - the Alley Boys are still about playing live, be it in a small club for 300 people or an arena for 30,000 people.
"We just love the f'n crowds, man and we love to f'n play," James says before conceding that the anywhere anytime mindset has it drawbacks.
"It's kind of tough, but you've got to go back and forth if you've got a girlfriend or a wife or whatever and say, 'Hey man, I'm not going to stop doing this, so understand that now.'
"Nothing's gonna change, we're gonna do this until the day we f'n die. I wouldn't want to be doing anything else."
And you can't really argue with that now, can you? Well, f'n can you? I didn't f'n think so.
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