White Flame
American Rudeness

Do not confuse with the homonymous and contemporary British band, the White Flame of "American Rudeness" are American and now lost not only in the mists of time and the dust of the shelves but also - at least in the figure of the founder and prominent member of the band, Mark St. John - also to this valley of tears; the recovery operation is therefore more posthumous than posthumous can be.
The notes from Munster - the label bringing this CD to Europe, or for those who prefer the always beautiful vinyl edition - speak of a lost gem, and various reviews bring up everything and more to celebrate the find: Stooges, MC5, Velvet, Zappa, the Band, Mott the Hoople, Captain Beefheart, even Stones and Count Bishops (!), even going so far as to cite Kim Fowley, kraut rock and imagine proto-punk roots just to make it heavier, as proposed in his review by Chris Sanchez, the re-discoverer of this work, who had the good sense to quickly bring it to Anthology Recordings, the label that reissued it in the USA. As if this album were the most successful potpourri not only of American music but worldwide ever heard. Wow! And who are these guys?
Now it's certainly true that such sounds echo through the grooves and that the album doesn't disappoint the promises of giving us "some quirky and dirty rock and roll" lit by the Coop-like dominatrix on the cover, but it must be remembered that it was released in 1978, with early punk beyond the zenith and with the success of Blondie and Talking Heads already accomplished in the homeland, plus the Police coming from overseas. Talking about proto-punk when punk was already sailing at full sail seems to me a bit questionable - also because there are no strong callbacks in the sound to the post-punk made in the USA à la Dictators, Dead Boys, etc. - and I find it more honest the definition by St. John himself (even though he writes it 30 years after self-producing it with friends in Connecticut), who talks about a moderately parodic work, "tongue in cheek both lyrically and thematically (...) in a bow to the Disco movement of the late seventies and as a counterpoint to the rock songs."

Listening to it, all the references made by the reviewers hold: there are the dirty, guitar-laden riffs of Detroit, there's the New York sound of the Velvet more than Zappa, and I would also say of the later Velvet (the title-track, "Ailing Dogs", "Lewd Dude", "Dangerous"), there are all-American pieces that are beautiful but not very original, which, even if not cutting, are all enjoyable (from "Obedience Trials" down to the end), and they alternate with neo-tribal-psychedelic pastiche like "Makumba Love" or the hypnotic, beautiful simplicity of "Blame", but the variety - although logically subtracting linearity - in the end does not annoy.
The album is therefore beautiful and enjoyable as the work of enthusiastic and frustrated young men (definition by Chris Sanchez), late epigones of an era to which their heroes belonged. Eager to pay them the right tribute, they managed to produce an outdated artifact: when it was released, "American Rudeness" was effectively competing with sounds from too illustrious predecessors to even be imitated and thus ready to sink in the sea of hard rock already too full of excellent corpses left without all the success they would have deserved. On various levels - and sounding in the right years - there hadn't been enough space even for Picts, Janus, Josefus, Black Widow, etc., etc., etc., let alone if these guys were going to break through. As if to confirm that the effort of the White Flame was dead on arrival, the only one of the four of the band (which also included Dave Perry, Rich Ricciuti, and Dan Cronin) to have a mini-career in the music world, playing for a short time with the Kiss of "Animalize", would have been Mark St. John, also the author of two solo albums and little else.

That the album is nonetheless very appreciable is beyond discussion, much better than illustrious flops (and which also had more sponsors) like a Doug Yule or a Jobriath, but it was obvious there couldn't be a large audience for such a group at the time. They can be enjoyed with pleasure only now that time has removed it from the problem of having been inspired by music too dated at its release, and that their moment has finally come is yet another proof that when we think we know everything about the rotten music we listen to, here's a new little surprise. Which is never a bad thing.