SECTOR 27 RECORD IN AMERICA: TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER, PARTS 1&2

SECTOR 27 RECORD IN AMERICA: TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER, PARTS 1&2

by

Richard Riegel

So here I am parked on the Danish modern, in the lobby of the Cincinnati TraveLodge Motel, expectantly watching the cars zip by on the parkway out front. Plenty of Saturday-fevered vehicular action out there this afternoon, but not a gray Cortina in sight, so far.

I’m awaiting the arrival of Tom Robinson and “his” new band, Sector 27, of course. Sector 27 are just past the midpoint of their six-week, inaugural tour of the American heartland, and reports from the earlier dates have Robinson still industriously denying that Sector 27 still are in any way a continuation of the old Tom Robinson band.

Not that the new group’s debut album, Sector 27, hasn’t already made a change in direction clear. The TRB were never really the sloganmongers both their fans and detractors liked to think, but Tom Robinson’s own aggressively-good-liberal sty/e, backed by the band’s catchy punk/folkrock sound, had a lot of previously-detached old activists fervently hoping that a new withGod-on-our-side millennium had arrived. Tom Robinson seemed wildly eager to support any noble cause which could bend his ear, and as an authentically modemEnglish rock ’n’ roller, he had eons more charisma than the sickly old folkies crusading for No-Nukes.

But the TRB broke up (following a rugged, nerve-shattering tour of the American AOR monolith, significantly enough), and left both Tom Robinson and his optimist fans wondering what musical forms his next protests (because he’s gay, and he can!t just settle back into bourgeois society, can he?) would take.

Back in London, Tom Robinson and his old pal Jo Burt, late of the Troggs, listened to the newer bands that had sprung up in the wake of the trailblazing Pistols and Clash and TRB, neo-wave groups like XTC, Gang of Four, and Cure, bands whose “punk” revolt took on new forms of both rhythmic and lyrical subtlety. The resultant Sector 27 group organized by Robinson and Burt is both as contemporary and subtle as these later bands, and also something of a challenge to all the old TRB-loving activists, all those cheerfully straight “Glad To Be Gay” singalongers.

For instance, Sector 2Ts initial single release, “Can’t Keep Away,” recounts (all very XTC-tastefully, of course) Robinson’s equivocally-charged teenage experiences of hanging around men’s rooms, to find furtive, thrilling, unsatisfying sex. Plenty of inseparable guilt and passion, naturally, but hardly a glib hootenanny chant for the good grey activists to sublet, either.

Which is fine with me, charity begins at home, after all, as Tom Robinson must have realized, while he was out campaigning for women’s rights, prisoners’ rights, Pakistani rights, every cause that needed his magnetic presence. All those other people’s rights, and no time left to exercise his own hard-fought gay rights.

And speaking of the personal, Tom Robinson’s visit has got me finally reading Allen Ginsberg, nearly two decades after I began worshipping Ginsberg’s beat soulmate and literary co-conspirator, Jack Kerouac, both to locate the original “Sector 27” usage (can’t find it yet), and to determine whether Ginsberg’s poetry conveys a more intimate personality then his leapinghippie public figure would suggest (it does!).

So, with another notch in my literary black belt, thanks to Tom Robinson, I relax in the existential ambience of the TraveLodge lobby, my eyes out the door as the collegiate desk clerk snickers at Bob Hope and Lucille Ball in Fancy Pants (1950), playing on the TV beside me, some crazy farce about an Englishman lost in the wilds of America...

Many minutes past my scheduled meeting with Sector 27, with Bob Hope just about delivered from his self-induced jam, a Ford (not a spiffy grey Cortina, but a battered red Galaxie taxi) gingerly turns in at the motel driveway, and ever more slowly crawls up to the entrance. I’m certain those must be genuine British heads bobbing along in the dim interior of the approaching cab, and sure enqugh I soon see a very anxious-looking Tom Robinson, trapped within.

As the passengers debark, amid a flurry of quick Limey talk and whisked-out luggage, I introduce myself to Robinson, who apologetically informs me, “We’re right in the middle of a crisis.” It seems that not only did Sector 27 members Jo Burt and Stevie B. miss the plane from Chicago, but road manager Claire Sheenan, who simply wanted to get Robinson and Derek Quinton settled in their Cincinnati motel as quickly as possible, and then zip back to the airport to bail out the absent 27’s with her credit cards, had the bizarre fortune to hail a cab driven by a lady (Robinson has always supported affirmative action) on her first day on the job, and thus not yet experienced enough to find her way from the Greater Cincinnati Airport (perversely enough located in Kentucky) over to the city itself.

With literal foreigners directing a psychic foreigner, the cab-bound crew took a good hour and a half to traverse the airport-motel run, a jaunt of maybe twenty minutes for locals in the know. With half the band still in Chicago, with the equipment still trucking somewhere through the outlook toward Cincinnati, and (maybe she thought) a green-eyed, coked-up CREEM writer waiting impatiently at the motel for his exclusive interrogation of Tom Robinson’s 1981 social conscience, Claire Sheenan was frantic to escape the endless cab ride, and to get the wheels of art & commerce rolling again. But at least Tom Robinson found some musico-literary value in the experience.

He clicks on his silva thin cassette machine for me,' and a Kentuckyesque female voice is drawling, “Central Parkway. Is this where we turn?” Tom rewinds the cassette, clicks it on again, and the same voice is blissfully anecdotal: “...So when the arson investigator comes out, she tells him, ‘Why he’s always been two bricks shy of a full load! His best girlfriend was a man...’”

Tom is grinning proudly over this captured monologue-verite. He particularly relishes the driver’s brick-quotient method of establishing degrees of socialization, and he repeats that homely phrase, as well as her persistent indulgence in that all-purpose regional fave, “ornery,” time after time. Americana on the hoof, and Tom has it all down on tape. I suggest that Robinson bury a backwards version of the tape in some cut on his next record, to keep old-time Beatles fans listening again and again, for new clues to the walrus’s fatal shortage of bricks.

Fun and games on the road, but a few minutes later, as Derek and Tom and I sit in Tom’s motel room, all of us sipping afternoon tea from rather un-British styrofoam cups, exchanging the usual interviewopener unpleasantries about how rotten American radio is, I suddenly notice that the cassette that captured the cab driver for life is still silently turning, recording my every verbal move. Tom is peering warily at my coy little Write Bros, ballpoint, wondering just what part of his controversial (because gay) person it’s going to take home. Tom was all prepared for the usual total-recall, electronic battle of wills, and this guy is practically cheating with that pen.

I make a sarcastic comment about Robinson writing up the story himself, and saving me a lot of work, while he’s at it, but I’m far more amused than irritated. I tell Tom and Derek that part of the reason I don’t do formal interviews (haven’t they read my stuff?) is that musicians have theoretically already had their say in their records and concerts, and that printing their rote interview responses on top of that can get a bit redundant. I’d rather let my writing imagination go to work on what I hear and see in the musician’s official product, to encourage actual dialogue. (Besides, you guys are getting all the bucks and travel and groupies as it is.)

...Tom Robinson’s own aggressively-goodliberal style had a lot off previously-detached old activists ffervently hoping that a new with-God-onour-side millenium had arrived.

Tom Robinson seems to like my idea, and proceeds to deliver a variety of quotable topics, from Sector 27’s good luck at having signed to the I.R.S. label (“They work with an artist, not for him. We met all ten employees of the company when we were in Los Angeles.”), to the TRB’s final tour of America (“A disheartening experience.”), all the way back to our shared belief that the rock scene can never become new-music vital again (i.e., singles the basic units of the vox pop), until Tom’s and my contemporaries relinquish control of the culture to the real teens. Robinson even alludes (quite discreetly) to the pleasures of rockstar tour life (“I’m sore all over from Chicago”), and I realize that macho caricatures like David Lee Roth’ve got nothing on firm-wristed Tom Robinson.

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SECTOR 27

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 25

Sensual realities are. very much in the air at Bogart’s later in the evening. The opening act, Dayton’s own Dates, look like a real combo for the 80’s; the Dates are both coed and androgynous (jiggling breasts “betray” the bassist as the beat goes on) , and the group’s modem-imaged music provides a perfect context for these new pop scenes. The Dates’ singer tosses crayons into the crowd, as Teresa and I notice that some of the male audience members down in front have their hands on each other, all very subtly, especially as compared to the hetero pawings that sometimes go down there, but still a rare sight in the hyper-genteel Queen City.

Sector 27’s equipment arrived too late for a proper soundcheck, but at least all four members are in attendance as they jog up to the stage. Reluctant frontman Tom Robinson has put aside his interview uniform— faded blue leather jacket, Levis, big white basketball shoes—for an outfit that leaves Rick Nielsen and the Feelies light-years behind in the applied-nerdiness sweepstakes. Here’s Tom Robinson, sex symbol to many a follower, and he’s covered his already amorphous body with wide, beyond-the-call-of-duty-floppy trousers, and a horribly fuzzy, broad-striped cardigan sweater, the very image of nerdhoos, even in its 1962 heyday. Teresa, who hasn’t seen Tom live until this moment, says he reminds her of someone from Leave It To Beaver, and she’s got his immediate look perfectly pegged; tonight’s Tom Robinson looks to be a veritable Lumpy Rutherford lumpenrocker, but a sharply clever/ingratiating Eddie Haskell tongue’s hiding somewhere among those homey threads, just the same.

Not that I’m necessarily informed on 1981 London fashion trends, but I take it that Robinson’s dressed like he is tonight to try to play down his received figurehead role in the new Sector 27. As lead vocalist, Robinson’s at stage center tonight, but he and his floppy clothes are flanked (and outflanked) by the matching, trim, Policeperoxided Stevie E. and Jo Burt, on guitar and bass. I drolly speculate that their twin bottle-blonde tops have something to do with the contractual obligations involved in Police-prosperous A&M Records releasing I.R.S. product in the States, but either way, Tom Robinson looks like he’d be perfectly happy to let anybody but him become the big sex symbol of Sector 27.

Tom would apparently prefer to get on with his modernist, music-hall-rooted rock ’n’ roll. After opening with “One Fine Day,” Tom lets go of his guitar, and it hangs there by the strap, almost limp, as he uses both hands to act out the ingrate-parents-vs.-ingrate-child psychodrama of “Bitterly Disappointed.” Robinson’s dangling guitar, and the very British language of the song, quickly suggest Tom’s one-time mentor Ray Davies (c.f. the band Gafe Society, on Konk Records, ca. 1975), but don’t quote me on that.

For Tom Robinson’s denying even that he’s the old Tom Robinson tonight, let alone a new Davies—“No, TRB is all over!” he gently admonishes some hooter down in front. Freed from the nonstop bass duties that restricted his stage flexibility within the TRB configuration, Robinson becomes more exuberant and loquacious as the songs go by. He hardsells Jo Burt’s sex appeal—“He’s broken more hearts than I’ve drunk tequila sunrises!”—and then aggressively enlists the crowd’s participation on the choruses of the band’s new “Out Jn The Cold.” TR: “Just imagine you’ve been drafted in the Army, and you see Alexander Haig walking down the street!” (Nobody can say Tom’s not topical any longer.) Thunderous “Out In The Cold” responses follow, and I could cite another Ray Davies resemblance, but I think you get the picture.

Robinson now introduces the blonde on blonde on blonde-waves author of those wonderfully skittering, teasing guitar leads, the ultrateen Stevie B., to plenty of cheers and whistles from down in front. Robinson recalls an incident from earlier in this tour, when a “redneck” in a Dallas bar was throwing peanuts at Stevie, and calling him “Faggot,” whereupon the gay bartender faced up to the heckler, and said (Tom’s best Brit-Tex-butch accent takes over here): “Do I have to take your peanuts away from you?”

Robinson dedicates “Bully For You” (The only TRB song Sector 27 still perform) to that social-conscientious bartender. Tom’s singing and talking human rights tonight, for sure, but always through immediately personal examples that are more striking than any shy, righteous slogans could be. As when he introduces “Where Can We Go Tonight?” by saying, “I don’t know if you’ve ever lived with your parents in a small town at the age of 16... but you just want to get away with your boyfriend, girlfriend, or whoever...” As Sector 27 begin the song, Teresa and I instantly flash back to our own gropingadolescent discoveries of each other, on dark summer porches, and in a chilly DeSoto. Yet Robinson is also singing about more permutations of human exchange than the usual boy-finds-girl romanticism; he’s tapping an many levels of meaning as—well, shoot, he fits again—as Ray Davies did in “Lola’”s explosive “I’m glad I’m a man/And so is Lola” couplet.

Tom calls “Where Can We Go Tonight?” a song “from the heart,” and we agree completely—“Right on, brother!” or whatever it was they said in the TRB days. But Tom’s unusually gracious in general, in these days of unbridled rock ’n’ roll egotism. He even calls for a hand for the opening Dates, before Sector 27 encore their own set with the catchy/thoughtful “Looking At You.”

Up in Bogart’s tacky dressing room, Tom Robinson’s besieged with local and regional journalists, who’ve presumably just finished watching the lengthy, edifying Sector 27 show, but still demand to know about Tom Robinson’s politics. I’ve already got my scoop, more or less, so I sit back and watch a tired Robinson politely field some tired questions. A slick-mag trendy makes a lamebrain inquiry about Sector 27 spearheading “a new British Invasion,” while a pony-tailed, leftover hippie tries to get Robinson’s 1981 political beliefs down in antinuke black and white on his tape recorder. Gay = radical, right Major Tom?

Robinson’s friendly but firm in speaking to downplay the social-activist role still persistently thrust upon him: “This band isn’t run as an autocracy...with Sector 27 I’m part of a team.” And, almost with the amused wickedness of an old queen: “But I don’t write all the lyrics now.” Still these media men hound Sector 27’s “personal” songs, to the point that I finally answer for Robinson myself: “But ‘personal’ is more political, in the long run.”

Tom Robinson smiles at my eagerness, and says wryly, “That remains to be seen.”^