“Ridin’ in an airplane … We’re goin’ back to Vietnam!” Airlifted to us after a quarter-century of exile in Canada, this vicious Wallflowers jam shrieks over Che Underground like a flaming F-15. The instrumental interplay among Paul Howland (bass), Tommy Clarke (guitar) and Aaron Daniels (drums) is simultaneously funky and menacing, and Dave Rinck’s vocals are positively shamanic.
The Che Cafe patio meets the Mekong Delta — with wah pedal!
[Editor’s note: After a false, MPEG-4 start, this file is now an MP3 that everyone can enjoy.]
Wow, where’d this one come from?
And are there more?
This fella in Canada has quietly been selling tapes with these songs for decades! Besides “Survive the Jungle,” his CARE package included Wallflowers Phase One hits “Rubber Room” and “Funland,” the paean to the ur-Wallflowers’ favorite arcade.
BTW, in case you’re having trouble playing the file: We’re going to switch it to MP3 from MPEG-4 as soon as someone more technically adept than I gets to it.
Interesting to note that back in 1983 — when the Wallflowers were rockin’ this number — the Red Hot Chili Peppers were still just tuning up. Anthony Kiedis even looks like a low-rent Dave Rinck!
I really want to hear Rubber Room and Funland! Are those going to be up soon? Survive the Jungle sounds great…just like I remember it. I hadn’t heard it in 20 years.
I finally figured out how to make this file into an MP3! (Thanks to Dave Fleminger for the guidance.) Stay tuned for more Wallflowers!
Dave Rinck offers insights into the Wallflowers’ lyrical approach and amazing, quasi-Tibetan cosmography:
“’Survive the Jungle’ contains the lyrics:
“Riding on the bus, just like on safari,
“Goin’ down and join the army
“Survive the jungle, survive the jungle
“Riding in a rickshaw in downtown Saigon,
“Gonna tip the driver – with a handful of napalm!
“Survive the jungle, survive!
“Hahaha — that was about a vet I once met while I was selling flowers on a street corner (a typical Wallflowers way to make some money for the weekend), and he came up with a huge bag of hamburgers and gave me some (he spread mustard on them with his comb -- yuck).
“But the oddest theme is something that the Wallflowers believed in, a sort of bizarre Wallflowers tradition, which was the existence somewhere down the most desolate, desperate street of crack houses and shooting galleries of an enormous ‘grinding wheel,’ the horrible sound of which essentially drove those that heard it mad, like some sort of street siren it lured its victims to a lost life of homelessness, addiction and alcoholism, you know.
“… Those people you saw down on Broadway downtown late at night, when downtown SD was still a gritty, rough place, and every now and again when we hung out too late (inevitably at Funland, or something similar) Paul and Tommy and I would be walking home at some ridiculous hour, and we’d be surrounded by bums and winos and street people, and we’d look at each other and someone would go ‘oh shit man, you hear it? the grinding wheel!’
“You can hear a line about 2/3 the way through ‘Funland’ that says ‘searching for the grinding wheel’ and an almost inaudible line in ‘Rubber Room’ says that ‘if you put your ear to the wall, you can hear the wheel grind.” I wonder why we thought that way in those days. … “
BTW, I don’t know if the Wallflowers were reading Kerouac at the time — if not, the “grinding wheel” cited above is a really spooky convergence with his Buddhist imagery:
Jack Kerouac from Mexico City Blues
211th Chorus
The wheel of the quivering meat conception
Turns in the void expelling human beings,
Pigs, turtles, frogs, insects, nits
Mice, lice, lizards, rats, roan
Racinghorses, poxy bucolic pigtics,
Horrible unnameable lice of vultures
Murderous attacking dog-armies
Of Africa, Rhinos roaming in the jungle,
Vast boars and huge gigantic bull
Elephants, rams, eagles, condors,
Pones and Porcupines and Pills –
All the endless conception of living beings
Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness
Throughout the ten directions of space
Occupying all the quarters in & out,
From supermicroscopic no-bug
To huge Galaxy Lightyear Bowell
Illuminating the sky of one Mind –
Poor! I wish I was free
Of that slaving meat wheel
And safe in heaven dead
I understand the grinding wheel completely.
In fact- sometimes you run on the edge of it, just trying to keep up.
Bombs Away.
That was the name of one of the most unusual of these characters around Funland. He looked about 70. Toothless, unshaven and grizzly -- he could have been any age. He wore an old baseball-style windbreaker. But that was not his most distinctive clothing feature. He always wore an old football helmet, with the words “Bombs Away” painted in block letters on the back.
Dave and the guys kind of delighted and recoiled from these characters. “Bombs Away” was one of the exemplars of the milleau. Incoherent, he would bum small-change from Dave and Paul, to exhortations of “Bombs Away! You RULE the Wasteland!”
“Rule the Wasteland”
That’s a Wallflower-ism to add from their internal vocabulary -- along with “Taste the Fury, Babyface” and “grinding wheel”. These beyond-the-edge characters were defined, with the admiration that safe distance could allow, as ruling the wasteland.
I can remember that it was really abbreviated after a while to just “rule” and “ruler”. These were used like: “Did you see that guy just rule over there?” “Yeah, there’s all kinds of rulers out here!”
Living at Greenwich Village West, across from the Rescue Mission, I became somewhat intimate with the use of the term -- which I had first heard Tommy use, when walking from Racine & Larramie in Old Town, to his apartment in North Park. We crossed some spaces on India and on Kettner that are probably now full of boutiques and salons. Then, this was a dark space behind the Santa Fe station.
I never realized the Wallflowers had this Nadsat argot and complex philosophical system. Future anthropologists and researchers into comparative religions should be made aware of these very deep currents in the Wallflowerian oeuvre.
And the image of a deranged veteran spreading mustard on Dave Rinck’s hamburger with his comb merits a large mural in San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter.