'Gang Rock.' Sounds awesome, but it doesn’t exist. But Gang Rock almost existed. And future multi-platinum songwriter Desmond Child was the man who almost made it happen.
Clearly, the concept was on his mind, as it runs through his debut pseudo-solo record, Desmond Child & Rouge (1978). A year later, a non-LP track, the shamefully cornball Warriors, appeared on the soundtrack for the street-fight-movie-to-end-all-street-fight-movies of the same name.
So he was into it. Unfortunately, he was also into AOR, and let’s face it, this is not the music of gutter-dwelling chain-swingers, this is the music of boating enthusiasts and wine-sippers.
Article continues belowDesmond formed Rouge in the early 70s, Rouge being Des and a trio of back-up singers. After toiling in obscurity in Florida for half a decade, they moved to New York, signed a deal with Capitol, and released DC&R.
Their sound was radio-ready FM rock flecked with whiteboy disco. It could not have been more commercial, musically speaking, and they did score a minor hit with the jittery dance tune Our Love Is Insane. Lyrically, well, that’s a different story. The album is basically a loosely connected series of streetfighting anthems, mixed liberally with boy-meets-girl gunk. Love in the middle of a firefight, as Iggy would say.
The album’s thematic bookends, Westside Pow Wow and The Fight, perfectly illustrate the highs and lows of this unique listening experience. …Pow Wow – about a solemn truce-seeking meeting between NYC gangs – is a fairly amazing bit of theatrical hard rock in the vein of Jim Steinman-era Meat Loaf. The climactic Fight, however, is watery, sub-Queen melodrama that’s actually embarrassing to listen to in its entirety. DC’s pipes are decent but unremarkable throughout, and the music fairly screams ‘bored titless session men’.
But the album is so weird, and careens so quickly between clever and, erm, stupid, that I’m surprised it hasn’t become a cult classic. It’s like West Side Story with disco. It’s like Eddie Money with the Ronettes and knife battles. It’s much too adventurous to be an AOR record, but it’s much too safe to be anything but AOR.
It is either the work of a befuddled genius or a slumming madman, but regardless, deep in its goofy grooves there were glimmers of a wild new wave on a distant horizon, one where disco ducks and moustache rockers alike ditched the dancefloors for the dirty city streets, trading in the hustle for flick-knives and tyre-irons, and beating the living shit out of each other while Desmond Child and his angel-chorus sang sweet victory songs.
Sadly, no one else saw it that way. Although DC & Rouge would make one more album – 1979’s Runners In The Night (which has three songs with ‘night’ in the title!) – this cockamamie AOR musical basically spelt the end of Desmond-the-artist. But please, cry no tears for Mr Child: he went on to make (approximately) one bazillion dollars writing songs for scads of material-starved superstars, from Kiss and Cher to Alice Cooper, Bon Jovi, and even less savoury types (Lindsay Lohan! Hanson!), and is widely considered the biggest hitmaker in rock’n’roll, the go-to guy when you want to score a smash big enough to get you your own Lear jet.
Still, even if Desmond himself is over DC & Rouge, I’m not sure I am. In fact, I often listen to the record and ponder what might have been had he explored his collaborative options. Around the time that Desmond recorded the album, rogue 70s animator Ralph Bakshi directed Hey, Good Lookin’ (1980), his roto-scoped love-letter to the 50s New York street gangs he grew up with. His movie is, for the most part, an ultra-violent cartoon version of Desmond’s micro-musical, and its only major flaw is a lifeless soundtrack filled with washed-out retro doo-wop composed by Ric Sandler, who co-wrote Danny & The Juniors’ Rock’N’Roll Is Here To Stay and At The Hop. Hep tunes, but they were recorded in ’57, and his tepid, hopelessly dated reduxes on …Good Lookin’ helped to sink Bakshi’s film.
Here’s the interesting part, though: there was a point during the production when Bakshi planned on using The New York Dolls for the film’s climactic rock show/bloodbath (and, presumably, for some of the soundtrack). Unfortunately, the Dolls had imploded at that point, so back to the doo-wop.
But what if Child had stepped in, with one of his crazy Westside Pow Wows, and convinced the Dolls to keep things rolling for another year? After all, the Dolls were nothing if streetfighters in thrift-shop frocks, and Dolls guitar-slinger Johnny Thunders was already the patron saint of greasy-haired, leather-jacketed thugs everywhere.
Imagine David Johansen and the fellas pounding Our Love Is Insane into gooey, glammy, death-funk while a couple of cartoon street gangs beat each other to death with bottles and chains? It would have been the greatest JD flick ever. Whole cities would burn down over it. That is the Desmond Child & Rouge in my mind.
Or, what if Dez zipped over to the West Coast and convinced the craziest producer in town (Phil Spector, naturally) to record his gang-fight musical with the weirdest band in town? I guess there’s a few outfits would fit that bill, but I always imagine Chrome, the cyber-acid punk duo from San Francisco, whose 1979 album Half Machine Lip Moves is so unsettling, it actually sounds like it was made by space aliens. Or he could’ve used Zolar X, the Hollywood glam-punk band who wore space helmets and claimed they really were from another galaxy.
Hell, if he didn’t mind the eventual fight-to-the-death with Jim Steinman, Desmond could’ve kept Rouge and just put Meat Loaf up front. Now, there was a guy who could sing his way through a New York street fight. But alas, Mr Child had to do it himself, the world shrugged, and we are left with a mere sketch of what might have been. 1970s Gang Rock remains a mere phantasm.
Still, the next time you want to rumble over some turf, think about this: Desmond Child & Rouge might make for the perfect musical backdrop. Especially if your gang is mostly girls and dudes with perms.
The original version of this feature appeared in Classic Rock Presents AOR #4, published in September 2011.
