Album: Crocodiles
Year: 1980
In the fall of 1980, I was kind of adrift. I’d graduated from high school, just about to turn 18, but I really had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. So, as a stalling tactic, I went to Fresno City College, where I could dip a toe in higher education while waiting for life to shove me in one direction or another.
So my days were spent doing data entry at my dad’s office or going to City (where I mostly remember hanging out in the quad area or playing ping-pong) and my evenings were spent drinking beer out in that neighbood with the streets but no houses, going to shows with Tim and singing with the band I’d joined just after graduating from high school.
At some point that semester, Tim — who was also going to Fresno City — introduced me to a guy he met in a class named Tom. It turned out that not only was Ton as big of a music fan as Tim & I were, he was also somehow mysteriously involved with the radio station at Fresno State, KFSR.
Of course, in 1980, KSFR wasn’t on the air yet. For decades, it had been transmitting on something called “Carrier Current,” which basically meant that it was hard-wired to various places on the Fresno State Campus. Supposedly, people could get it at the dorms, but the only place I ever heard it was the KFSR office. But according to this Tom guy, KFSR was going to go on the air soon, and Tim & I would make excellent DJs.
So all I had to do is, like, pay $40 to become a Fresno State Extension student, and once a week I could be a DJ for a radio station that broadcast to nobody.
Sign me up!!
I think I started doing it in January or February of 1981, and the coolest thing about learning to be a DJ at a radio station that nobody was listening to, of course, was suddenly having the ability to sample a wide variety of recent music. It was the first time in my life I was able to do that.
Rather than buying records sight unseen, or hoping that some radio station had an adventurous streak, I was able to listen to new things on my own timetable.
And of course, one of those records was Echo & The Bunnymen’s debut album, Crocodiles, which didn’t come out in the U.S. until December of 1980. At the time, I remember that Echo & The Bunnymen had been lumped in with a tiny wave of new British psychedelia, along with Teardrop Explodes and Wah!, mostly because the singers had all been a band together.
While I never quite got Teardrop Explodes and don’t remember Wah!, I instantly liked Echo & The Bunnymen, especially songs like the druggy “Villers Terrace” and today’s certain song: “Rescue.”
With Will Sargent’s big riff doubling back upon itself and the chickenscratch rhythm guitar, “Rescue” felt simultaneously intimate and cavernous, giving Ian McCullough the chance to enquire:
Won’t you come on down to my
Won’t you come on down to my rescue
In the middle, after a bit of a rave-up, “Rescue” breaks down and bassist Les Pattison and drummer Pete DeFreitas start stumbling at the end of every measure, wandering around in a daze, looking for some rescue as McCullough asks:
Is this the blues I’m singing?
Is this the blues I’m singing?
Is this the blues I’m singing?
Is this the blues I’m singing?
On one hand, “Rescue” doesn’t sound like a blues, even if you can hear elements of funk in the guitar — it’s funk translated through Lou Reed’s guitar parts in 1969 Live, so. On the other hand, what could possibly be more blues than a young man wondering if and when he’s going to get rescued.
The answer is unclear, and “Rescue” ends in a round of double-tracked McCulloughs wondering if anybody’s going to rescue him while continuing to wonder if he’s singing the blues as Sergeant just plays that riff over and over and over until the fade.
“Rescue”
“Rescue” performed live in 1983