By David Rovics
The Fifth Estate
April 2017
At
a time when independent publishers and record labels are going out of
business at a rapid rate, PM Press keeps on putting out books,
pamphlets, videos, and various other things – including CDs.
One
of their most recent releases is a 5-CD box set retrospective
containing close to 100 songs by singer/songwriter, Robb Johnson, titled
“A Reasonable History of Impossible Demands.”
If you are a Robb
Johnson fan, you’d immediately recognize the box set’s title from one
of Robb’s songs, the chorus of which echoes the Situationist slogan from
the revolutionary May/June days of Paris 1968.
But, you have
probably never heard of Robb Johnson unless you happen to have grown up
on the fringes of the punk and/or folk music scene somewhere in England,
Scotland or Wales, sometime between 1986 and the present.
Robb
Johnson is the quintes- sential great songwriter you’ve never heard of.
The one that proves the whole record indus- try is full of shit, among
other industries.
Why was “Anarchy in Hack- ney” not on the
Billboard charts? Why doesn’t “At the Siege of Madrid” appear in all the
high school textbooks as a teaching aid for that lesson on the Spanish
Civil War? ( You know, that one.) Well, you know why.
But now, at least,
Robb’s music will not only be known on the fringes of the British punk
and folk scenes, but on the fringes of the anarchist scene in the US, as
well. And, who knows what’s next.
To put Robb into some kind of warped, personal context, as a teenager I liked Bob Dylan a lot.
I
still do. But I just assumed the media hype I grew up with must be
true, that Dylan was the best politically-oriented (at least for a few
records) songwriter the English lan- guage managed to produce.
Then,
at the age of 19, I hitch-hiked from San Francisco to Seattle, went to
the Pike Place Market, and was com- pletely blown away by a guy named
Jim Page, who was busking there.
That was in the 1980s. It wasn’t until more than a decade later, on my first tour of England, that I discovered Robb.
It
was one of those inevitable dis- coveries for a politically-oriented
songwriter touring the folk clubs of England to make. Probably one in
three people I stayed with, after attending my show, asked me if I had
heard of Robb.
And, regularly subjected to Robb’s CDs as I was
on that tour, I was happy to discover that this was far from an un-
pleasant experience. On the contrary, I was hooked. Like Jim Page, Robb
writes at least as well as Dylan, but with more authentic emotion and
much better politics.
Robb has documented his life and times
from the 1980s to the present, always with chilling insight, often with
humor, sometimes with an old-school punk band, oftentimes with just
voice and guitar.
He is a master of the instrument, particularly
with his intricate fingerstyle playing, reminiscent of other masters of
the technique like Jim Page or Alistair Hulett.
In addition to
songs about his times, from Thatcher’s reign to Thatcher’s death (“Ding
Dong Thatch”), to the fall of the Soviet Union (“Breakfast In Chemnitz”)
to Blair and Cameron’s foreign wars and the resistance to them (“I Am
Not At War”), the box set includes a whole CD’s worth of Robb’s gorgeous
songs about love, childhood (“Real Cool Purple Shirt”), and parenthood –
some of which also manage to include World War I history in them, among
other things (“When Harry Took Me To See Ypres”).
Taken as a whole, you’ll get an excel- lent primer on some of the more notable events of the 20th century from this collection.
OK,
now go look him up on You- Tube. But if you still have a CD player and
you got an extra $45, the full-on Robb Johnson binge via PM Press is way
better.
David Rovics is a Portland, Oregon- based
singer/songwriter and anarchist. His many songs and albums, and his cur-
rent touring schedule for the U.S. and Eu- rope is at DavidRovics.com
