The Flesh Eaters
A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die

As an uncompromising listener that I was in my younger years, there were two categories I just didn't trust. The first was the "supergroups". The second, the poets lent to rock.

Following the precepts of the perfect rude boy, I stayed away from those I identified as authentic spreaders of the rock plague and, sometimes mixing the wheat with the chaff, I distanced myself as much from the, to me then incomprehensible, West Coast dream of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, as from the pompous symphonism of Emerson, Lake & Palmer or the affected FM-sound of the deeply wrong Asia. In the same way, I had not yet been enlightened by Jim Morrison, for whom at the time I held more or less the same opinion as the Mephistophelean Uncle Frankie ("A spoiled teenager"...). And even the rock poetess par excellence, Saint Patti Smith, had betrayed me with that unfortunate 1979 that seemed to throw three years of glorious blank generation into the trash. How could the same artist who began her career with words like "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine...", come out with an album that praised conjugal and immaculate love from the cover itself like "Wave", as well as end the Italian tour by honoring Pope Luciani?

A thin-haired Los Angelino made me reconsider. His name was Chris Dejardins, but for everyone, more conveniently and radically Chris D., as befitted the punk era. More than a musician, a social agitator. An intellectual with an open forma mentis capable of catalyzing the emerging "scene" of the City of Angels around him, using in turn the written word for fanzines, newspapers, stories, and poems, the camera as a filmmaker, and naturally also music, the extreme medium to convey his visions. In short, the West Coast's answer to that Jim Carroll who had begun to crack my stupid certainties regarding intelligence applied to rock'n'roll. And precisely to throw in my face all my ignorance, Chris, poet-singer with the "nail", explained to me that with the right attitude even a supergroup could have its reason. He called them The Flesh Eaters, an homage to a lousy horror B-movie of those much loved by Lux Interior and Poison Ivy. At the end of the '70s, the reputation of our jack-of-all-trades in the "circuit" was such that future famous people like Stan Ridgeway would initially join his "open" project. But a rock group only needs one poet, so after the more conventionally one-two-three-four debut of No questions asked, Ridgeway would go on to contribute a literary talent balanced between Carver and Arthur Miller to the techno-morriconiano epic of Wall of Voodoo. No big deal, thought the remaining poet, if you have the fortune to assign the guitar parts to Dave Alvin, the bass to John Doe, drums and percussion to Bill Bateman and DJ Bonebrake, and finally, the saxophone to Steve Berlin. Royal flush. Supergroup served.

On the second long-distance attempt, in 1981 Chris and his happily co-opted collaborators dished out their masterpiece. "A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die" might seem the quintessential punk title, yet... Yet, from its predecessor of just a year before, this distanced itself with the strides taken by someone wearing seven-league boots. Here punk is like Dejardins for his own. It is the catalyst, the one that makes the various elements react. Imagine a voice like Darby Crash's that, however, isn't content with intoning the urban requiem for the decline of Western civilization, but launches into a ride through the unhealthy Seminole swamps of Florida, side by side with the Bad Indian Jeffrey Lee Pierce and the Iguana of Fun House. The final destination of these frenzied punk-rock-blues artists is certainly not the open prairie, but darkness, as the formidable cover had warned us.  Forget any affinity with the Los Angeles-based group Christian Death or the cheesy dark bands of contemporaries across the Atlantic. If anything, it's the pact made at some Southern crossroads with a Papa Legba decked with mohawk and spikes. The gothic lyricism of Chris leads us to dance a surreal stomp with the devil ("Satan Stomp"), to dig our own graves ("Digging My Grave"), not before praying until we are drenched in sweat ("Pray Till You Sweat") and struck by a malarial fever ("River Of Fever"), but we don't mind. If one must die, better to do it with reins slackened, accompanied by the frenzied rhythms and robust intertwining between Alvin's guitars and Berlin's sax, which here seems more like a crazed disciple of James Chance than the graceful future accompanist of mariachi rhythm'n'blues of Los Lobos ("See You In The Boneyard"). Until an old-time hero like Cyrano de Berger's Back comes back to conjugate Weirdos and Crimes punk with Creedence and epic rock, the journey will seem truly otherworldly to us. But in the end, for us who will by now have definitively entered this voodoo rite with Mephisto and Baron Samedi, we will lose even the last hope, galloping with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse ("Divine Horseman") towards the last, unknown frontier of American rock.

Yes, after this, I could even trust Jim Morrison.