Red Rockers Reflect on New Orleans' Punk Past

Red Rockers (John Thomas Griffith third from left)

The reissue of 1981’s “Condition Red” and Saturday night’s show at Tipitina’s wouldn’t have happened without an assist from a member of Huey Lewis’ News.

On Saturday, New Orleans’ punk band Red Rockers will play a reunion show at Tipitina’s, thanks in part to Huey Lewis’ News.

Their debut album Condition Red came out on 415 Records in 1981, but over the years the band lost track of its masters, which isn’t as slack as it seems now. At a time when punk bands were treated like interlopers in the House of Rock and punk was so new that it seemed like it could all go away tomorrow, the concern was simply whether the records would sell and people would show up at shows. Whether the band controlled its master tapes and future uses was an abstract concern.

“We had no idea where they were,” says John Thomas Griffith, Red Rocker and currently a member of Cowboy Mouth. He didn’t know that when producer Sandy Pearlman bought their label, 415 Records, he got the master tapes of Red Rockers and everybody else on the label. Pearlman was best known for producing Blue Oyster Cult, though punk fans know him as the guy who produced The Clash’s Give ‘em Enough Rope. When Pearlman died in 2016, his widow knew Huey Lewis’ saxophone player Johnny Colla, and asked him to help get them back to their rightful owners.

Colla and Griffith both live in Southern California, and when he reached out to return the band’s tapes, it was at a fortuitous time. The initial copyright had expired for Condition Red, and Red Rockers had got their copyrights back from the Library of Congress. Unfortunately, Epic Records, which holds the copyrights for “China” and the band’s 1983 follow-up, Good as Gold, have been uncooperative so they haven’t been able to get those back yet.

When Colla met Griffith to return the tapes, “we found stuff we didn’t even know was on there,” Griffith says. Colla had the original two-inch master tapes of Condition Red and the quarter-inch masters of “China” and Good as Gold. With those in hand, Griffith, Red Rocker James Singletary, and producer Mike Mayeux digitized the tapes and spent three days remixing the album.Fortunately, Pearlman stored the masters in climate-controlled spaces so they were in good condition. There are nightmare stories of efforts to salvage improperly stored, weather-damaged master tapes, but they didn’t have to do anything to make theirs usable.

For Griffith, remixing the album was a chance to revisit a project that started in high school. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, punk was like a secret handshake, and it solidified his relationship with Singletary. They met in high school and connected while riding the bus each day. They really bonded when Griffith, who was already singing, performed The Cars’ “Just What I Needed” and something by Blondie at a school talent show. When Singletary asked him about his musical tastes, Griffith said he liked stuff like that but didn’t know where to find it.

“He said, Dude, you need to come to my house and we need to listen to ’TUL on Tuesday nights,” Griffith remembers. Hanging out together, getting high and listening the New York Dolls and punk rock on the radio set their path. At the same time, the guys he played with at the talent show didn’t understand why he wanted to play stuff like that and Tom Petty—considered a punk fellow traveler early in his career—and not real rock ’n’ roll.

Griffith loved the excitement of punk in all its forms at the time, and he loved how accessible it was. Critics of punk complained that any dummy could do it, but that was also one of its most important features. Punk rock democratized music. “We were like, Man, we can play this,” Griffith says. “We could see ourselves doing the Keith Richards / Johnny Thunders thing all night.”

While remixing Condition Red, Griffith and Singletary were pleasantly surprised to discover that some of the songs are more resonant now than they were during the Reagan era when Red Rockers recorded them. Talking about railing against the Right reminds him of the day when they went to the post office to register for Selective Service—the draft—which became a requirement again in 1980 after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Their song “Dead Heroes” questioned the militaristic impulses of American government:

What does it take for us to win?

Dead heroes on the news at ten.

I'll fight for a better way, to be a dead hero for the U.S.A.

The lyrics are on the nose and brash in the way that first generation punk was, and it was on-brand a band that wore its Clash influence as nakedly as Red Rockers did. Although The Clash are an important musical reference though, a New Orleans punk band was more important to Griffith.

“The Normals were leading the charge,” he says.

The feeling of being an outsider felt by New Orleans’ indie rock and Americana bands in the last 30 years is hardly new. “Everybody knew that if we don’t stick together, we’re going to fail,” Griffith says. “We’re appreciative of coming up in that time frame. We had The Normals. We had a lot of bands around town who were very sympathetic to everybody’s plight. We worked together. Everybody played gigs together. You could count the number of so-called ‘alternative’ bands around that time.”

Even with the spirit of camaraderie, there were limits as to how far ambitious punk bands could go in New Orleans. It was at least a half-day’s drive from any other major city, it was far from any media center, and when the record industry came to New Orleans, it came to party or find a funk band, not a punk band churning out downstrokes. Eventually The Normal and The Cold decided to try their luck—unsuccessfully—in New York, and Red Rockers tried the West Coast, where they found an audience and a label in 415, which also had Translator, Romeo Void, and, importantly, national distribution through Epic Records.

“Nothing was really going to change,” Griffith says, thinking about the choice to move.

For the reunion show on Saturday night, they had to replace original drummer Patrick Jones, who died last year. His replacement, Brian Barbaro played with Pete Fountain and punk band Steffie and the Whitesox, and Griffith’s entertained by the idea of a guy who spent as much time playing traditional jazz is pounding out punk rock with them. But, he says, he’s really good.

When they started thinking about playing a show to celebrate the rerelease of Condition Red, they realized, “If we just do the album, we’re going to be done in 35 minutes,” Griffith says. With that in mind, Red Rockers will flesh out Saturday night’s live show with some appropriate covers performed with musical friends from then and now. They decided that even though “China” is on Good as Gold, it was a big enough hit that they couldn’t skip it. Still Singletary felt like the fingerprints of 1983 new wave dance rock were too obvious on it and wanted to take a different approach.

“James felt adamant that we needed to do it in a more modern way and not with a disco-y vibe,” Griffith says. He still plays “China” and its original arrangement with Cowboy Mouth, but he respects the desire to find a new arrangement and is up for something new.

The bigger challenge for Griffith personally was a basic one: remembering the lyrics of songs he hasn’t performed in decades. “I have such an easy gig in Cowboy Mouth since I really don’t have to sing that much,” he says. Fortunately, there aren’t many lyrics that he’d tweak or revise now, so remembering them isn’t embarrassing. “This stuff is about what we called ‘personal politics.’ It holds up to this day.” In fact, now he looks back at them impressed what they came up with, not because the lyrics are so perfect but because they were the pure product of untrained, inexperienced songwriters, and they still work. “We play them in practice and it’s like, Man, ‘Guns of Revolution,’ we could release that today.’”