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… And Out Come The Wolves. Rancid.
1995, Epitaph. Producer: Jerry Finn, Rancid.
Purchased, 1995.
IN A NUTSHELL: Nineteen powerful, hook-laden, short and fast songs come at you in rat-a-tat style that overwhelms – in a GOOD way. Bassist Matt Freeman is a master, and co-guitarists/vocalists Tim Armstrong and Lars Frederiksen put their limited vocal abilities to excellent use on melodies that will stick with you. Don’t hold it against them if they sound like some other bands that came before them: this is a record that stands on its own!
NOTE: The setup – below the line ↓ – might be the best part … Or skip right to the album discussion.
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In fifth grade, at Ebenezer Elementary School (yes, that was the name), my terrific teacher was Mr. Keesey. This was in 1977, ten years after the big splash made by the Summer-of-Love, and the ripples of the Hippie culture were still being broadly felt, even in my little PA town. His thick, round glasses, close-cropped brown hair and penchant for pull-over sweaters made Mr. Keesey look far more “straight” than “hippie.” And while I’m sure there were hippies of all shapes and sizes, Mr. Keesey’s short stature[ref]As a fifth grader, I was taller than him.[/ref] only intensified his outward appearance as a square. But he brought the Hippie message of peace and love to my classroom.
Mr. Keesey was Ebenezer’s “celebrity teacher,” a prize 
for certain lucky kids in their last year in elementary school, supposedly a cool, fun guy, (a reputation my older sister confirmed when she had him three years before me) with a place-your-desks-anywhere policy and a wooden tower in his room that allowed for activities both six feet off the ground, or in the secluded Underneath. On the first day of class I knew he was different than anybody who’d ever stood in front of my classrooms when he delivered a monologue stating he didn’t think of himself as the leader who made rules and yelled at kids for breaking them, and forced everyone to do whatever he wanted them to do; but instead thought of the classroom as a shared space for all of us, in which we all make the rules together and help each other to stay within them. He said he’d play guitar for us some days, we’d have class outside some days, and we could call him “Jim.” 
He invited anyone to challenge him to a game of chess on the chessboard on top of the tower, and pointed out the big, round signs hanging in the room, each with a single word: “IALAC.”
This stood for “I Am Lovable And Capable,” and Jim wanted us to say that phrase to ourselves whenever we saw the signs.
To put it mildly, this was NOT a teaching style that I, or any of my classmates, 
had ever seen before!! It was as if an egg-headed, rod-fingered alien had come to Ebenezer to speak to us from a beautiful future we could not comprehend. Either that, or a hippie. The level of unease felt by my classmates and me at this (for our school) radical style of pedagogy was such that, while we loved the tower and the chess and the signs and the rule-making, no one ever took him up on the invitation to call him “Jim.” He was always “Mr. Keesey.” We all respected him so much that we felt we HAD to call him that.
He put us into groups for math and reading, and I got put into the “smart-kids” group, 
with my buddies, Greg and Bruce, and a girl, Juli, who would later go on to graduate high school a year early to attend M.I.T.[ref]Greg and Bruce and I didn’t really belong in the same group as Juli – sure, we were smart kids, but she was, well, more than that.[/ref] For Reading/Language Arts, our group used a cool workbook called The Dopple Gang, a hip, 70s, cartoony book that reminded me of a groovy paperback version of The Banana Splits TV show.
Mr. Keesey was big on reading. Together as a class we read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; The Hobbit; The Phantom Tollbooth; and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. In our individual groups, we took part in a reading program called “SRA,” a color-coded system by Science Research Associates[ref]The program is still around in digital form, but the 70s version is described very well, and quite comprehensively at this site.[/ref] in which students read a group of ten or twelve individual non-fiction stories at their own pace, answered 20 questions after each story, and then, when a sufficient number of questions had been correctly answered, and all stories in a color were complete, moved to the next color. The readings and questions got progressively more advanced as you moved through the colors. If you made it through all the colors, you’d end up reading 100 to 150 stories. In our group, Juli flew through the colors. Greg, Bruce and I did not.
I’m sure there have been many times in my educational career when I bent the rules, sneaked a look at a classmate’s paper, or “borrowed” homework answers from a friend; but I generally didn’t cheat. School was one of the few things I felt really good at, so proving I could do well on my own was a point of pride. So to this day, as a 50 year old man, I remain ashamed of the enormity of the cheating scheme undertaken by my buddies and I on those damned SRA cards.
You see, kind and trusting cool-guy that he was, Mr. Keesey allowed us to sit anywhere to do our SRA reading, and – so we could grade our own work – gave us access to the SRA Teacher’s Box that 
contained individual answer-key cards for each story. So as Juli’s performance really started to outpace our own, and my two pals and I felt completely outclassed, we realized we could choose to read our SRA while sitting in corners, or underneath the tower, or even out in the hallway. And since the Answer Cards fit neatly against the pamphletized stories, it was not difficult to select a story, select an answer card and scuttle off to a dark place to cheat like hell. As Juli completed four or five stories in 30 minutes, we could complete three or four ourselves, instead of the one to three we could do on our own. (We never did the same number or more than Juli: we were smart enough to realize nobody would buy that.) We finished the entire SRA reading program in a few months, several days after Juli, while many kids never made it through one color on their own. We felt like stars, winners. I did for a brief time, anyway.
We’d answered Mr. Keesey’s love and kindness with – at least in this instance – cheating. It felt wrong to me then, and it feels wrong today. I’m sure many kids did the same; perhaps even Juli, that vaunted intellectual prodigy, was cheating as well. (After all: she was no dummy.) And maybe, ol’ Jim knew what was happening but figured the benefits of providing an opportunity for ten year olds to take on individualized reading projects with little oversight outweighed the risks of a few sulking, pride-wounded boys cheating. (After all, we weren’t graded on the SRA program.) Still, I wish I’d done the reading without cheating.
I don’t dwell on this episode much, but I was reminded of it while considering my #41 album … And Out Come The Wolves, by the band Rancid. This is because many people – whether they understand it this way or not – think of Rancid as cheaters. 
Nobody really uses that term when discussing the band, but it’s what they think. The band “cheats” because they sound, unapologetically, like The Clash. Some people are very anti-Rancid over their sound. And I wonder – as someone who’s felt guilty about cheating – if maybe some folks’ dislike for the band is driven by the guilt they feel over their own past indiscretions[ref]That consideration is, perhaps, PERHAPS, merely projection from a neurotic navel-gazer who assumes everyone is as hung-up on (or even remembers) their 5th grade “scandals” as he is.[/ref]. “These guys are cheating, and they don’t even care!!!”
When I heard the band’s hit “Time Bomb” on the radio in late 1995, I was immediately taken with the band. Singer Tim Armstrong’s slurring singing on lyrics about their music scene, the punky/ska beat, the fun video … I liked it. I liked the organ, and the catchy chorus and I went out and bought … And Out Come The Wolves.
As a big Clash fan, I was excited that someone was trying to carry on in their tradition. As I’ve written before, I tend to seek out artists who sound like my favorite artists. All music is loaded with the musical inspirations of those who write it; there are very few truly “original” artists out there. And the ones that do sound like no one else, I guarantee you’d hate. And while it’s true that any punk or punk-ish band since 1977 
will bear some resemblance to The Clash (punk itself being a rather specific, sound-limited genre), Rancid’s double guitars, dueling singers and ska-influenced tracks made them particularly ripe for the comparison. Sure, the band’s mohawks and chains seemed a bit dated in 1995, but I didn’t care – the songs were great! But I found when I played the album for others my age who also loved The Clash, most were dismissive, at best; others were downright angry. “If I wanted to hear The Clash, I’d listen to The Clash!” “They’re totally ripping off another band!” “What’s this retro bullshit??” They thought the band was cheating.
But creativity is weird. It’s a personal experience that isn’t as simple as finding an answer key and secreting it away to a hidden spot. A band of young Clash fans in their basement writing songs inspired by their heroes haven’t cheated at all.
Actually, they’ve added their own twist to the sound they love. Consider the bass in “Maxwell Murder” (particularly beginning at 0:58) and compare it to any bass line by Paul Simonon on any Clash song. I think you will hear a difference.
It’s less than a minute and a half of 
energy and power, and Matt Freeman’s frenetic bass is the engine. His bass solo at about 0:59 is one of the coolest I’ve heard – and is unusual in a punk rock song, where the fast pace of songs relegates many bassists to simply bashing through the root notes of chords. As with most of the songs, the lyrics border on unintelligible, but in this case they seem to be about a hit-man.
Freeman’s bass is one of the defining features of the album (and the band) and powers such songs as their follow-up hit, “Ruby Soho,” and “Disorder and Disarray,” one of many songs about these punks’ discomfort with the big record labels who descended on them in the wake of the success of bands like Nirvana and Green Day.
But what really powers the album is – believe it or not – the sequencing of the songs and the very small space left between the songs. Nineteen short songs that 
are fun and catchy and powerful and that come at you in rat-a-tat fashion, each one a wave at the beach that smacks into you just as you groggily rise in the surf from the last one. It’s a relentless album, and it’s difficult to recreate that feeling in words, but if you have 50 minutes or so, try to listen all the way through.
After “Maxwell Murder” comes “11th Hour,” a D.I.Y. anthem calling fans to action. It features two other key aspects of the Rancid sound: squawking, somewhat-in-tune vocals and harmonies (that sound awesome, somehow) and guitars that play off each other, not unlike the two guitar sound of The Clash (it must be said.)
Guitarist/singers Tim Armstrong (the lefty) and Lars Frederiksen (the righty) also frequently trade off lead vocals, as in “Roots Radicals.”
It’s a hyper-catchy song, with a jumping 
bassline, and Armstrong and Frederiksen harmonize brilliantly, particularly given their limitations. The band wears their “if-we-can-do-it-you-can-do-it” ethos on their sleeves, and many of the lyrics (like those in this song) tell the band’s story. I think for many kids in the rock era, bands like Rancid[ref]Any bands, really. I liked prog rock as a teen, and as diametric as it is from punk, it helped me cope.[/ref] were a key to coping. Songs like the excellent “Listed M.I.A.” (Which may be the most upbeat song about suicide ever!) talk about the hard times; songs like “The Wars End” tell you things can get better.
A terrific triumvirate of totally torrid tunes (sorry about that) begins with the excellent “take me away from the big city” lament of “Olympia, WA.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsTKUrcLR2I
The riff is killer from the beginning. Armstrong leads the snarling verse, 
then the excellent, singalong chorus begins at 0:45, with Freeman’s bass leading the charge. It’s one of the most-fun choruses to shout ever! It’s followed up by another shout-along classic, “Lock, Step & Gone.” It’s more of the same: awesome bass line (with another bass solo, about 1:22!), dueling guitars, sneering harmony vocals. But somehow it doesn’t sound the same.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs2-HhEtBAA
That one is followed closely with another favorite of mine, “Junkie Man,” featuring lyrical help from poet/Basketball Diarist/”People Who Died” guy Jim Carroll.
I think it may actually be about Carroll, a well-known junkie who definitely could 
tell you what the story is, as the song asks. It’s got a neat scratchy breakdown, with spoken words written by Carroll.
There are 19, YES NINETEEN, songs on this album. Some are better than others, most are great, a few are merely very good. “Daly City Train” is another autobiographical gem. It’s a ska song, and it’s fun and rocks and makes me want to shout and dance along – as almost all of the songs do. At 2:40 it features a kind of rap that may be the most unintelligible rap I’ve ever heard. And I love it!
So many great songs. “Journey To The End Of The East Bay.” “She’s Automatic.” The super-excellent “Old Friend,” which I can’t believe I didn’t write about more! “As Wicked.” “You Don’t Care Nothin.” “The Way I Feel.” Any of these songs would be part of a great mix-tape, and when they’re placed end-to-end with hardly a break, they’re a battering ram. Just as the band states on the song “Avenues and Alleyways.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMMA86g0y0Y
So, listen. I’ve forgiven myself about that fifth grade cheating incident. I swear. 
But I understand if you were in that class with me and worked your ass off to get through the Blue cards, only to find out the “smart kids” were cheating their way all the way through Brown!!! It’s just not right. And it might trigger your senses of justice and vengeance. And that’s fine, take it out on a cheater like me. But don’t hold it against a band like Rancid. They didn’t cheat! They just wear their influences on their sleeve. And if you get past your resentment, you’ll find there’s an excellent record waiting for you to hear!
Track Listing:
“Maxwell Murder”
“The Eleventh Hour”
“Roots Radicals”
“Time Bomb”
“Olympia WA”
“Lock, Step & Gone”
“Junkie Man”
“Listed M.1.A.”
“Ruby Soho”
“Daly City Train”
“Journey To The End Of The East Bay”
“She’s Automatic”
“Old Friend”
“Disorder And Disarray”
“The Wars End”
“You Don’t Care Nothin”
“As Wicked”
“Avenues & Alleyways”
“The Way I Feel”
