Dredd Foole & The Din
New England "free rock" legends get their due at last
Way back in the summer of 1988, I read about an album in Spin magazine — in Byron Coley’s “Underground” column to be exact — that I’ve been obsessed with ever since. He wrote, in part, “If you’ve got enough of a brain to realize that there are few things better than being smacked across the room by a guitar chord and a guttural shout, Dredd Foole’s new LP Take Off Your Skin (PVC) is your cup of blood. It contains long-standing live faves that’re as beautifully wrought as any hole-in-one, plus a growling cover of ‘Slack’ (first recorded by Minneapolis legends NNB) that will make your hair fall out.” At the time, I was a high school junior, heading into NYC on a regular basis to go record shopping, and on my very next trip to Bleecker Bob’s, I found a copy of Take Off Your Skin in the racks and grabbed it up. The cover art, which I hadn’t seen until that moment, was amazing; if that’s not a buy-on-sight image, I don’t know what is.
The music was even better. Dredd Foole (actually a guy named Dan Ireton) had an unhinged, werewolf-ish howl like a combination of Lux Interior, Roky Erickson, and Birthday Party-era Nick Cave, and the band behind him delivered clanging, pile-driver postpunk rock that I didn’t yet have any real reference points for. I knew “punk” — the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag and Flipper and the Clash and the Cramps and the Ramones — and I owned Iggy Pop’s Blah-Blah-Blah but I don’t think I’d heard the Stooges yet, and I was still listening to lots of Motörhead and Megadeth, too. But regardless, Take Off Your Skin sounded awesome, and the louder I played it, the better it got.
The Din were actually a whole other band, the Volcano Suns, serving as Ireton’s backing musicians just because they were friends and he was such a poetic wildman. This was actually the group’s second incarnation; the first version of the Din was Mission of Burma, but they switched instruments sometimes in order to inject an element of chaos into their “free rock” performances (chords and some lyrics were predetermined, but songs were recorded in a single take). That lineup only ever released a two-song 7”, but the Corbett vs Dempsey label has released two CDs this year — Songs in Heat: 1982 and We Will Fall: 1983 — packed with live and previously unissued studio recordings. Now the third volume in what will ultimately be a four-volume series is out, and it’s exactly what I hoped for when the project was announced.
See God (1985-1986) is a two-CD set documenting the Volcano Suns incarnation of Dredd Foole & the Din, which released a lot more material than the Mission of Burma version. First, they put out Eat My Dust, Cleanse My Soul, a two-track recording of a live performance on a Boston-area college radio station, through the Homestead label in 1985. Then, a year later, they went into an actual studio and spent $600 and 12 hours recording what would become Take Off Your Skin. It, too, was supposed to be released on Homestead — and was supposed to be called See God — but that label was sketchy at the best of times, so it was eventually released on PVC, an imprint run by the New Jersey-based distributor Jem.
The first disc contains Eat My Dust, Cleanse My Soul; a previously unreleased studio recording of “Not a Beast,” a song they’d been playing live for a while and which would wind up on Take Off Your Skin; and a half-hour live performance opening for Swans in Boston in 1986. Swans were an absolutely world-destroying live force in 1986, so the fact that Dredd Foole & the Din were able to hold their own is impressive indeed.
The second disc is mostly taken up by Take Off Your Skin, which has been remastered into an utterly monstrous firestorm of sound. Guitarists Jon Williams and Kenny Chambers clang and grind, at times (like on the opening “Paralyzed”) rising to nearly Keiji Haino-esque levels of psychedelic sound-sorcery as bassist Jeff Weigand and drummer Peter Prescott rumble and crash like a drunken giant stumbling through a forest, pushing down trees in its path. The songs take more or less conventional rock ’n’ roll forms (“Not Right” is almost rockabilly), but there’s always an edge of incipient chaos present, and Prescott in particular seems ready to erupt at any moment. The cover of “Slack” by NNB, a Minnesota-based band who only ever released one single, is particularly unhinged; the way Foole chants the opening line, “I can’t sleep anymore ’cause I always wake up screaming,” has been echoing in my head for three decades. “Not a Beast” features whoa-oh backing vocals that remind me of the Misfits gone even more feral and lycanthropic. Meanwhile, “Alone” is almost a power ballad, and the whole thing ends with the nearly eight-minute “So Strange.”
This reissue includes two outtakes from the Take Off Your Skin session: “Greatest Band in Hell” (a song they were playing as early as 1982) and a second version of “Alone,” and the rest of the second disc is mostly taken up by a rough but worthwhile live recording from the legendary NYC club CBGB. I’m not exaggerating or lying when I tell you that Dredd Foole & the Din’s Take Off Your Skin is one of the greatest rock records of the ’80s, “underground” or otherwise, and to ignore it now that it’s more readily available than it’s been for 35 years would be rank idiocy.
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That’s it for now. See you next week!
Hey, thanks so much for this! Those albums had a heavy impact on me as a teenager, and I still return to "Slack" and other tracks with some regularity (about 1000% fiercer than the original). Thanks for resuscitating that dormant mineshaft!
wow, i lived in boston in those days and, as a mission of burma fanatic, had (and still have) that original 7-incher, but i completely missed the album, and yes, i will get after it.