I AIN’T GONNA WORK ON DEXY’S FARM NO MORE

The first impressions begin here. Dexy’s Midnight Runners, with a great first album and little popular awareness of it within the U.S., came to New York’s late, great Hurrah club one night in 1980 for their American debut. Disharmonious, weak, a pale shadow of a ripping record, the group compensated for its inability to sound good with overt hostility. Lead singer Kevin Rowland glared at the small but dedicated audience and snarled something like, “There are 10 people with soul here to-, night and eight of them are on this stage.”

Phooey on Dexy’s live, said my friend and I. (obviously, we were the two additional soul-enriched entities). We regretted the disappointment of the event and went back to wearing out tracks on Searching For The Young Soul Rebels like “Bum It Down (Dance Stance)” and “Geno,” a loving tribute to seminal ’60s British soul star Geno Washington.

More than two years later, Kevin Rowland was back in New York, being schlepped around a conservative music industry party and introduced to journalists. Rowland’s bright red beret, deliberately worn-out overalls and shoes with no socks formed a lively contrast with the sea of business suits. Saying a quick hello before he was taken to meet the next in lineTRowland actually appeared quite amenable to the interview we’d be doing the following day. I was pleasantly puzzled. This did not seem like the same man who had bought full pages in the British music press then filled the space with his own essays, instead of talking to the staff.

The punch line begins here. In February, Rowland and his latest manifestation of Dexy’s Midnight Runners played to a soldout show at the Savoy. This tour, unlike the earlier disaster, occurred as the Too-Rye-Ay album and “Come On Eileen” single were swiftly becoming hits. A scant but noticible few in the crowd were dressed in Dexy’s pseudo-hillbilly clothes— a sure sign of impending success.

Punk / pretended to be working class, but it was a middle-class thing. —Kevin Rowland

Kevin didn’t verbosely gush all over the audience, but he wasn’t out to put them down either. Admittedly, the 11-piece lineup of various brass, strings, guitars, and drums looked peculiar, playing powerful beat-centered music while dressed for a day of cotton picking. Helen O’Hare is an excellent violinist, but wearing a schlumpy sweater, hippie sandals and a skirt with fake patches, she sacrificed some of her instrumental sincerity for the sake of fitting Rowland’s on-demand image.

Left to itself, however, the 1983 Dexy’s performance blasted that earlier letdown into a distant obliterated memory. Rowland used his plaintive voice to achieve the emotional heights necessary to recreate songs like “Old” and “Precious” without seeming pompous—one of his deadliest writing pitfalls. “Jackie Wilson Said” and “The Celtic Soul Brothers” were properly spirited, and an encore of “Seven Days” proved that this version of Dexy’s could do suitable justice to a song out of their earlier, horn-dominated repertoire.

I met with Kevin Rowland the day after that reception. Any illusions that the man had evolved past a superficial ability to smile in a public place vanished when Rowland defended his selection of the Sex Pistols and the Specials as worth rejecting in the introduction of “Burn It Down.”

“It was rubbish!” Rowland insisted, the moment T~offered an opinion that those groups made significant musical and social inroads. “Punk pretended to be workingclass, but it was a middle-class thing. It was a bit of fun, I suppose,” he said grudgingly, “but there was too much importance placed on it...it was about as important as Skiffle was in the ’50s.” (At that moment, I felt as frustrated as when a Grateful Dead fan had told me, quite seriously, that the Dead contributed more to music culture that the Beatles.) Arrgh! she moaned in frustration.

“I don’t think that because the Specials were working-class made any difference at all,” Rowland continued, as I tried to hide in a platter of tuna salad. “I just think it wasn’t very good. It’s so obvious, the whole thing.” (Right, Kev, and your tatty blue jeans weren’t an equally obvious response to trendy styles, calculated to arouse attention.) “They come up there with these really obvious statements against the government. It’s rubbish—what can I say?” he repeated. No amount of insistence on my part that the Specials did not orchestrate the wide-spread adaptation of their black/white theme by Britain’s advertising machine would convince him of that truth. It was a fact, Rowland and I had become adversaries.

Within 15 minutes, Kevin would move into an active offensive phase, demanding to know: “What paper do you write for— the Village Voice? Have you got loads of preconceptions about Dexy’s, ’cause I think you might.” But before that, Kevin Rowland, who sought to become Soul Rebel Number One among all the British boys and girls, wanted to deflate the worth of the initial British soul moverfient. Back in the ’60s, when Rowland was a schoolboy, developing his musical tastes, several Northern-based bands played a horn-heavy form of beat music. “I never got into that, ” Kevin declared. “In fact, I hated it. It seemed so regressive.”

What did make Rowland’s heart pump faster were “brilliant records like white funk, James Brown’s stuff and Curtis Mayfield. I was more into that. ‘Cause I lived in London as well, and Northern soul was more Birmingham (where he was raised) onwards.” Rowland “brainwashed” himself with an endless cascade of his favorite American rhythm and blues discs. “For three months, I never listened to anything else. No radios on in the house. It wasn’t so much Motown, more like Stax.”

Even so, Rowland’s admiration of funksters like Van Morrison does not extend to his admitting them as an influence. In a stunning display of arrogance, done so subtly I was appalled by it only much later, Rowland brushed aside my definition of Dexy’s “interpreting” “Jackie Wilson Said.” “I get my influences from all sorts of places,” Kevin informed me, “arid the last place I’d look for influences is music (!). It just happens that’s the music I listen to— it’s a musical heritage, for want of a better word. That’s a fuckin’ awful cliche but it’s true. Like Otis Redding and Aretha, James Brown, back through Ray Charles, Nina Simone and the blues singers. And Van Morrison’s in there and I think Dexy’s . is at the other end. And I see it as one line of things.” One thing’s for sure—Rowland was not modest about his place in history. If this group were not as talented as it is, I would have been hard put to justify staying in that room and eating more dirt.

When Kevin declared, “I take Dexy’s very seriously,” he made the understatement of the year. In fact, Rowland was so sincere about protecting his newly-formed band that he had his first journalistic brawl even before Searching For The Young Soul Rebels was released. According to Kevin, the set-to was entirely justified. “This one journalist had hated me because he came from Birmingham and my brother had once thrown a glass at him, or something. I can’t be responsible for him!

“Our manager at the time was foolish enough to, invite this guy to one of our concerts to review it. So this bloke made up a load of lies about us! He said we were playing songs we didn’t play, said we were wearing clothes we didn’t wear. And the group was good—it was different, it was exciting, there was nothing like it. So he wrote a bullshit review and I saw him and I hit him.”

By the time Dexy’s had released its first album and singles to immediate chart success, Rowland had his tactical plan well in hand. “It was a desire from the very outset to alienate (the press) and be disliked by them\ We sneaked in the back door and came to the point of violent attacks on journalists—which I don’t think is a good idea now (oh really?), but I did at the time. And they fuckin’ hated us from the word go.”

Switching attitudes a short while later, Kevin attempted to put his hardline comments in perspective. “You gotta realize, it was fun doing all the essays. You should’ve seen their reactioni'These were the people who are warning you about 1984 and pretending to be so hip and liberal and free-thinking, and as soon as you challenged them, it showed how small-minded and pathetic they were.”

Eventually, when both the critics’ venom and the audience response subsided—not to mention all of the original band quitting —Rowland “had a year in the wilderness” for most of 1981. As his self-confidence at building a new edition of Dexy’s increased, his cynicism towards the music industry remained/‘When we were working on this new direction, we built up the most ridiculously loyal cult following—we were the most hip group,” Kevin recalled with a smirk. “We even used to get letters from NME writers saying they believed in Dexy’s and wanted to do interviews.” But, maintained Kevin, those writers were prevented from doing so until very recently by their bosses.

Comes late 1982, and with his new lineup, now billed as “Kevin Rowland and Dexy’s Midnight Runners”—because Rowland knew at least he’d always stay in the band—Kevin emerged from his cocoon a more secure man. “I’m a lot more confident now than I was two-and-a-half years ago. I care a lot less what they’ll say now, whereas I did then. It used to rip my heart out when I’d read that they’d got it all wrong and missed the point and portrayed me as a one-faceted person. I’ve got different sides, like anybody else. Different moods. I realize now that the only thing that counts is the records and the performances; The rest is just publicity.”

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 31

Somehow, in his relating of Dexy’s evolution, Kevin overlooked a fundamental impossibility in his expectations. If he set out to alienate the press, but was wounded when his schemes worked too well, honestly, what other result could there have been? Being told that we’d probably have gotten along better if I’d known nothing of Kevin’s reputation, made me feel that this man wanted to be accepted intimately as a musician, but without any consideration given to his true personality. In my book, going along with a scam like that would be cheating at my job, especially since Rowland was uncooperative when it came to discussing those very records and shows.

For example, Too-Rye-Ay contains quite a few songs which seem to connect directily to events in Rowland’s life. “Liars A to E” is a scathing number that hints at references to the press or possibly a misguided Dexy’s audience. “No. Absolutely not,” responded Kevin to the probe. .“Everybody I know has been coming up to me saying, ‘it wasn’t about me, was it?” Well, what’s it about then? “That’s personal,” said Rowland, flatly. At that moment, I frustratedly began to bang my head on the conference room table. “Everything I want to say is on the record, or what I do on stage,” Kevin summarized. “It’s the wrong thing to do, to talk about the words.

“The show is called The Bridge. It’s 11 people. They all play things. I can’t tell you anymore; you have to see it. What else can I say?” Not much, Kevin, except to take a look at one of your .own epigrams that appears on the Soul Rebels album cover: “Old clothes do not make a tortured artist.” That says it all. ^