Crime - Rock 'n' roll for grown-ups

Between 1976 and 1979 they released just three singles, and at their own expense (which is why they improvised a "Crime Music Label"), but in hindsight, Crime can be considered one of the most important bands in the history of rock. Capable of forcing anyone willing to take them seriously to rewrite the history of a genre whose peak of sincerity and orthodoxy they represent.

There's a gap between 1973 and 1976, between the Stooges' "Raw Power" – which for its time had reached the summit of violence and nihilism – and the punk/hardcore that would reach a new summit, founding a new era. Crime are the missing link between the Stooges and hardcore, but shouldn't be confused with either. Crime were the first to bring the Stooges' ferocity to California, where hardcore would in fact later be born. But they did so through a learned and intelligent mediation via 1950s rock 'n' roll; and it's rock 'n' roll that marks Crime's greatness and makes them irreducible both to the Stooges (too bluesy) and to hardcore (too ignorant of musical history).

Crime were a quartet of seasoned rockers who, in two-minute songs, were able to express – transfiguring it into perversion through music – all the frustration and abjection not of the metropolitan teenager (as would be the case with hardcore), but of the laborer, the dockworker, whose no-future condition stems from a degraded social status that has by now become second nature. Crime's sound is harsh, stripped-down and powerful: padded out by Ron Greco's bass (active since the Sixties in what would become the Flamin' Groovies), which practically swallows up the drums (Hank Rank), setting this black undertow against the foregrounded rock 'n' roll riffs and the noise-abuse of Johnny Strike's guitar. The connecting thread is Frankie Fix's voice – driving like Mick Jagger's, choked like Iggy Stooge's, perverse like Jon Spencer's.

Ever since the 1990 release of the compilation San Francisco's Still Doomed (22 tracks, 16 of them previously unreleased), we can identify three distinct phases in Crime's output. The first (2 tracks, from 1976) finds them taking the more rhythm-than-blues side of the Rolling Stones ("Beggars Banquet") and roughing it up through the Velvet Underground. The second (11 tracks, from '78) gives us the classic Crime, capable of delivering some of the most imaginative and powerful rock of the era: this is adult music for adults, a soundtrack for drinking and sleepwalking as impotent antidotes to a broken, senseless family, to a destitute and irreparable condition answered only with a perversion of the senses - not for pleasure, but for self-destruction. It's nocturnal music that knows it can't redeem the suffocation of brutal days spent on the job site, at the docks, or wandering the streets. The third phase (9 tracks, from '79) circles back to the first, in a kind of post-rock'n'roll, an ageless rock'n'roll for aliens or the dead, which by then can only lay bare a tragic, apathetic humor.

Every Crime song is its own story, and almost every one of them has the depth to foreshadow genres and forms of rock yet to come. It would therefore be pointless to look for "the masterpiece", because Crime's project was never conceived as a single song or a standout moment: it's a continuum, an unstoppable flow of ideas in which every track contains all the others, and none can be reduced to any other.

As theorists of rock, Crime - even when they roamed San Francisco in police uniforms (glam-style, like the New York Dolls, but without the sexual ambiguity) - never wanted to be mistaken for part of any movement. They called themselves "The San Francisco first and only rock and roll band", and when asked about punk, they'd say they didn't know what that was. And rightly so: theirs is music minimal in its means and baroque in its effect, music for crooks, devoid of any political reference; it's an unbroken dialogue with a rotten self or with a deaf Martian (it doesn't matter if you call it "baby"). It doesn't address any category, any audience: even though there are thousands of drunk forty-somethings wandering city streets at night, aimless and carrying some kind of feeling inside them, they can't add up to an audience, and in this too they remain alone. No one, then, is further from the Ramones than Crime.

In 1987, on "Sister", Sonic Youth paid tribute to this great band: but the cover of "Hot Wire My Heart" (Crime's debut single) is far too little recognition for a band that, back in the '70s, was already doing the rockabilly of X ("Rock 'N' Roll Enemy No. 1"), the drugged-up blues of the Gun Club ("Crime Wave"), the most evolved noise around ("Murder By Guitar"), the voodoobilly later claimed by the Cramps ("Rockin' Weird", "Baby, You're So Repulsive"), Jon Spencer's apocalyptic blues ("Monkey On Your Back"), the best hardcore-rock'n'roll of the Didjits ("Frustration"), and the butchering kind practiced by the Dwarves ("San Francisco's Doomed").

Crime, always percussive and noisy, reach almost dance-like rhythms ("I Feel The Beat") and craft tracks that live by their own light - songs whose secret not even Sonic Youth, for all their efforts, managed to crack ("Piss On Your Dog", "I Stupid Anyway", with titles that would make even Fear envious).

The fact that a band of this caliber is destined for oblivion, that it has never even been acknowledged as having existed, proves once again that rock history is a hypocritical bluff.

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