Rose Tattoo
Rock 'n' Roll Outlaw

THE REVIEW

I believe in something crazy. Something abstruse. The day Bukowski impregnated poetry, it must have been the same day when, due to a predestined astral conjunction, five women in Australia got pregnant without any idea that their copulation would give life to what I am about to discuss. Which, in the end, is what has occupied my life. If none of your "whys" has even a question mark left, if life is the last thing you have to lose, if you'd go for the ugliest girl because she does it better and not the prettiest because she's a wooden plank, if for you a day as a homeless is better than a hundred as a bourgeois, if the outcasts and not the perfect ones spark your curiosity, well. Actually, bad. Because it means you've reached the point where the Rose Tattoo are for you.

An exegesis of the band - yes, you heard right - might seem inappropriate and pretentious, but those who think this are people for whom life has gone well, they're university students with dad's money in their pockets who maybe for a year got stuffed with pills and alcohol and think they've become the worst rag in the situation, they're rock enthusiasts who admire form, they're art critics who don't know Giotto. The Rose Tattoo are for pure semiotic analysis: a signifier so bombarded with meanings that it shatters the Chinese ideogram where if you get the accent wrong, the slant-eyed understand whistles for flasks. And of straw-covered flasks, the five tattooed drifters will have sucked many, to the health of rock n'roll.

Let's see. The band's aesthetics would make everyone shudder, and those few who would find it pleasing are the few who'd whisper in your ear "come, come, I'll introduce you to some great ones, sure they're losers, but great". Ugh. Playing there are four hulks divided into categories: jail leftover drunk, obese Maori, puffed-up German, smelly Briton. On vocals, everything but what could embody a frontman's body: Angry Anderson, the bald dwarf. In theory, a stage presence to empty venues. In practice, I, the exegete, tell you that mistreated rock is all here, in this appearance that coincides with substance. The Rose Tattoo are what you see, nothing more, nothing less. They are five scarred teddy bears whose hides could be used to upholster the walls of kitsch homes. That's it. Rock is raw, what is in fashion today is the opposite of rock.

Even what the Rose Tattoo say is very simple and direct. "I don't need lots of people, tellin' me what to do. I don't need a long-haired lady, to love me true as true. All I need is a rock n'roll band, somewhere new to play. And I'm on my way, I'm on my way. I'm a rock n'roll outlaw and I'm on the run. I'm a rock n'roll outlaw I never needed anyone.". From the Gospel according to the tattooed rose, verses 1-4, passage: "Rock n'Roll Outlaw". The immediacy of songwriting that forgoes baroque elements to speak directly in a language loved and still loved by many, but written in the DNA of few, is like that class assignment from a classmate who wrote without virtuosity but stated damn truths. And you there questioning why, despite having written the word "idiosyncrasy," you scored lower than him. Because he is true, he is the disarming truth, he is a way of living descended to earth and made into word. But he is clever, because rock is clever. He managed to escape crucifixion preferring what might seem like a cowardly escape, while instead it is just settling on the sidewalks that correspond to him and that tell bitter truths, a desire for redemption, stories of whores, martyrs, and picaros.

We have thus reached the point. If you are trying to understand where prostituted rock was born, you don't need to go to California but to the land of kangaroos. If you are looking for the records of this poetry of the poor, you have to go to the archives of Albert Productions and not look in the 80s file. I know the path. Seventies shelf, folder 1978, subfolder Rose Tattoo. That's where you will find the band's debut album, also named after street rock.

The music. A filthy and slobbery hard rock, amalgamated with a spit of boogie. It's all simple because it's all radical, roots. With Rose Tattoo, sold in Europe starting from 1982 under the title of Rock N' Roll Outlaw, you will feel like holding in your hands the constitutional paper of rotten rock. The lyrics, free from any ties to bourgeois theorization, seem like precepts and rules. Words telling you how to live, what to drink, where to go, when to screw, why to make one choice and not another. So much for "there is no more religion." There is indeed. The music knows no anchors to anything. It is a battle rock n'roll that points the way to those who then, in the 80s, decided to travel it to the end. Imagine if people who hadn’t found the word compromise in the dictionary even in front of women pulled it out in their work. And indeed, in their music, there are no off-key notes. The compromises are at zero. Just as nations have an anthem, rock has one too, and I'm not kidding.

The already mentioned "Rock n'Roll Outlaw" (The rock n'roll outlaw) is the manifesto, the testament that the genre has left to those who could not live the wave. This is poetry because the elementary and accountant-like metrics are still precise and place pillars supporting great concepts. I could tell you about all the other songs, but the model is that. Drunken music, alcohol that becomes stinky sweat, by preachers in the desert, by random screwing. Then you wake up and have no time to repent because you're already soaked in the fluids of which you don’t care about the taste, but only about the volume of high. "Remedy", "The Butcher & Fast Eddie", "Astra Wally". They are all pieces of inestimable symbolic value. "Nice Boys", which the very first Guns N'Roses performed at the beginning of their career in live shows, is indicative of how this music wanted to be exclusive towards decent folks. Neat, precise boys and daddy’s boys don’t do rock n'roll. That’s how what is apparently inadvisable and unfriendly self-proclaims as anti-diva. And not anti-diva.

This album paved the way for the 80s of sleaze and tough glam. AC/DC worshipped them. To me, in fact, they're comfortably below them. If you still haven't given them a chance, you're the ones who've missed out.