The Revolutionaries
Welcome local musical uprisings, on the picket lines and in the coffeehouses.
By Christopher Arnott
Listening party for the CD New Hard Times, 7 p.m. May 22 at Cafe Nine, 250 State St., New Haven, (203) 789-8281, cafenine.com.
Bill Collins:
Stop bitching and do something.
Bill Collins could make a good living just singing Irish songs in pubs, as he does regularly at Rudy’s. But his punk roots with MDC, Fang and Special Forces still proudly swell up, and his strong opinions about the world have only been enhanced by his engagement to local activist Gwen Mills.
So Collins has been attending rallies and getting swept up in the call-and-responses and sing-alongs. Only the material was not to his taste: “I couldn’t believe how colorless these fucking things were,” he says. “No art.” Collins, who’s probably best-known hereabouts as frontman for The Swaggerts, resolved to write an album’s worth of what he calls “picket-line chants.” He ended up recording most of New Hard Times under the band name The Rabble Rousers inBremen,Germany with Elf, the legendary guitarist from Slime. “He’s likeGermany’s Joe Strummer,” Collins says. “A big fan of American roots music.”
Despite enlisting Elf—”I played almost no lead guitar on this, because he’s so good,” Collins marvels—and members of the German rockabilly outfit Velvetone (some of whom have served with Tav Falco’s Panther Burns), the songwriter insists New Hard Times “is not a punk record. It’s something your average person can listen to—not too hard, but not too wimpy. It’ll make people angry, but sort of dancing.” The original plan was to record acoustic versions of the songs in Connecticut and a harder-rocking electric set in Germany. But once in the studio overseas, Collins decided he wanted a blend of the two. So he ended up flying his Irish music partner Gary “Chops” MacConnie toGermany to add mandolin and banjo.
The song titles have universal resonance: “Dirty Tricks,” “Out on Strike,” “Cash is Gone.” “I’ve been writing songs a long time now—this could be my best batch,” Collins says. At this point, New Hard Times is lacking some acoustic songs yet to be recorded and doesn’t have cover art or a label affiliation. You can, however, hear the unmastered results of the German sessions Thursday, May 22 at Cafe Nine. After that, Collins hopes he’ll be playing them more at rallies than at clubs.