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Sturm und Drang

Formed in Minneapolis in 1983, Boiled in Lead (the name derives from the Scots murder ballad, “The Twa Sisters”) applied a post-punk, Celtic-by-way-of-the-American-Midwest sensibility to the British folk rock model of Liege and Lief era Fairport Convention. Their 1989 album From the Ladle to the Grave was a career highlight – a near seamless set of 14 songs, played with irreverent humor and punk vim and vigor by perhaps the band’s best ever line-up, that adds Eastern European, African, and Middle-Eastern strains to the multi-cultural mix. Ladle also incorporates political themes – liberal, feminist, antiwar – smoothly and without sanctimony. Their version of “My Son John,” developed from live jams and perfected in the studio, closes the album with fitting Sturm und Drang.

It begins with a brisk, bodhran-like rhythm so ominous you don’t notice, at first, that it’s the Bo Diddley beat – sped up and drained of all joy and sex. Scratchy rhythm guitar joins in, bass follows, and soon vocalist Todd Menton sings the familiar, 200-year-old words. He does so with such lucidity he almost over-articulates them, spitting out each syllable with vehemence bordering on contempt (especially those “non-lexical vocables”: his is the only version I know where the song’s genial “whack-fol-de-riddle” nonsense chorus conveys as much menace – maybe more – as the proper words). His tenor voice neither booms nor shrieks, just tells his tale with concentrated intensity. It’s a riveting performance that seems to channel the wraith-like voices of every soldier ever sent to war who realized too late he was cannon fodder.

And all foreign wars I’ll now denounce
‘Twixt this king of England or that king of France
I’d rather my legs as they used to be
Than the king of Spain and his whole navy

Images of war blur together in the mind’s eye of the listener – a montage of interchangeable flags, uniforms, allies, and enemies against a backdrop of anonymous falling and fallen men. Menton runs out of verses and the band fills the void with a cacophonous, two-minute instrumental mid-section – a scorching evocation of battle, built around Drew Miller’s growling bass and David Stenshoel’s screeching reeds, that brings to mind Albert Ayler soloing atop the Velvet Underground’s “I Heard Her Call My Name.” When the atonal assault ends – as if by ceasefire, with feedback lingering in the air like smoke – the doomy drums begin anew and Menton says his piece one last time, quietly now, almost whispering the words:

For I was tall and I was slim
And I had a leg for every limb
But now I’ve got no legs at all
You can’t win a race with a cannonball

A clarion power chord sounds off in four sets of three, the last of which explodes like a final bomb before slowly fading in the still-charged air. An absurdist touch closes the song with eerie poetry: a lone Irish fiddle is faintly heard sawing mournfully (mindlessly?) away – then abruptly ceases, like the last animated skeleton returning to his tomb before daybreak on Halloween night.

Heroes and Villains

The vocal? I wouldn’t say punk-ish. Just the vehemence, the attack – that’s my favorite word. I’m actually a bodhran instructor now – I tell people to attack. Literally, it’s the whacking thing, it has some punch to it. After you state your case, “I was tall and I was slim,” then unconsciously using the whack – literally saying, “Are you listening to me? Do I have your attention now?”
— Todd Menton (Boiled in Lead)

My recollection about the chaotic center is that we wanted a kind of aural “Guernica.” So yes, it was intended to call to mind particularly the suffering inflicted by war.
— David Stenshoel (Boiled in Lead)

Guernica is an apt touchstone. Pablo Picasso’s iconic antiwar painting – prompted by the 1937 fascist bombing of a Basque village during the Spanish Civil War – was, in a sense, a reinvention of Goya: a reaching back in time by one Spanish genius to another, the latter a formerly apolitical artist suddenly galvanized to create a didactic work. The dark wartime art of Goya suffuses Picasso’s masterpiece – especially his 1814 work, Third of May 1808, created when the artist was 68 (but must have felt 100).

The painting shows a firing squad of French soldiers coldly executing Spanish peasants who resisted Napoleon’s invasion of Madrid – summarily, at night, by stark lamplight. Goya freezes the action before the guns fire, showing the expressions of panic, terror, and despair of the doomed men whose only crime was spontaneous defense of their homes and city. They stand in a mound of corpses – the shooters’ previous victims – like beasts in a slaughterhouse assembly line. A central figure lifts his arms in shock and stares at his killers: “Where is your humanity?” he seems to say. But the soldiers have none. Goya gives them neither expressions nor faces, portraying them instead as a phalanx of sheer military force – a killing machine forged from dehumanized group-think.

A previous artist would have organized these figures into a stylized tableau, minimizing bloodshed and giving each a distinct, symbolic pose and expression. Goya’s image is composed but lacks all Neoclassical stiffness, and his rendering – earthy, gory, loosely painted – pulls no punches in the name of “taste.” Similarly, while his sympathies clearly lie with the condemned men, he refuses to construct a simple allegory with clear-cast heroes and villains – and by doing so, rejects the inherent nobility (or at least inevitability) of war. In Third of May, war is the enemy. Goya’s soulless executioners are, in the end, victims of state power equal to the ordinary folk they murder so mercilessly: because under their uniforms they too are ordinary folk, debased by militarization and – like countless other sons of Mrs. McGrath – played as pawns in a tyrant’s game.

Picasso applied all he learned from Goya to Guernica, recasting the old master’s innovations for the Age of Anxiety. A jeremiad against an act of war, its somber death-scape ultimately condemns war itself by reminding us with each viewing that war always kills innocent people – an intolerable incongruity in a civilized society. Guernica also presciently delineates the most horrific quality of modern warfare – its utter detachment. If Goya’s peasants stare pleadingly into their killers’ eyes, Picasso’s never even see them: the bombs that take their lives issue from unseen assassins, insulated by technology from all face-to-face reckoning.

Coda

We are not worth more. They are not worth less.
— S. Brian Wilson

Boiled in Lead dedicated their searing version of “My Son John” to an anti-war activist named S. Brian Wilson. A hawk-turned-dove, Wilson had volunteered for service in Vietnam but returned, like so many others, deeply disillusioned with the war and his country. His response was admirably proactive: he earned a law degree, joined forces with other vets, and dedicated himself to challenging official government and media narratives of US military actions. In the 80s this meant policing the Reagan Administration’s aggressive policies in Central America – especially in Nicaragua, where the president had cast the former military police of the brutal dictator (and US ally) Anastasio Somoza in the unlikely role of “freedom fighters,” while condemning the popular movement that deposed him as dangerous subversives “in America’s backyard.”

On September 1, 1987, Wilson and other activists gathered at a California Naval base to peacefully protest the shipment by train of munitions to Reagan’s right-wing allies in Central America. They did so by blocking the tracks in an act of civil disobedience. A train failed to stop and plowed through the protestors, most of whom managed to avoid being hit. Wilson was not so lucky. Critically injured, the Naval base refused to transport him to a hospital, so his wife and friends struggled to keep him alive while waiting 15-20 minutes for an ambulance. It was later learned that the FBI had declared Wilson a domestic “terrorist” suspect, and that the train that nearly killed him had been instructed not to stop. Wilson’s skull was fractured and the right lobe of his brain damaged but he survived. He did, however, lose both legs below the knee.