parlando

red rider, "lunatic fringe" (1981)

Posted on March 14th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.

Song Project #14

Young readers may be only vaguely aware that there was a time when MTV not only played music videos, they played them all the time; what's more, they often played music that wasn't on the radio. They don't get special credit for this; not every popular musician was making videos yet, and MTV needed to fill their time; the obscure music MTV played was almost entirely major-label fare that had failed to get on the radio. Even so, MTV generated some hits that would never have succeeded without it -- "She Blinded Me With Science" comes to mind -- and they probably loosened up pop radio programming for a few years.

"Lunatic Fringe" was not a hit in the U.S., either before MTV or after (though it has achieved some measure of ear familiarity through those post-MTV song rescuers, movies and television, apparently having been featured in Vision Quest and Miami Vice [neither of which I've seen]). When I first saw "Lunatic Fringe" on MTV, I had only the fuzziest notion who Red Rider were (I'd stocked their records at the store I worked in), and didn't know it was an old song (from 1981, at least a couple years before I saw the video). I knew they were fronted by Tom Cochrane a decade before his solo breakthrough ("Life Is a Highway", 1992), but I didn't know until I looked it up yesterday that they were Canadian, and apparently very popular there (they even did a late album of their hits recorded with a symphony orchestra). (I'm trying to set a record for highest proportion of parenthetical phrases to sentences in one paragraph).

This is "Lunatic Fringe".

This song is lost in time, ten years too soon. It's pop-hard rock, and radio's always had room for that sound, but it's unrelentingly gloomy and disturbing. In the early nineties, it could have been an American hit. The "whoa-ooah, oh-oh" chorus could come straight from an Alice in Chains song. It doesn't grab and shake you, it insinuates, like a foreboding. It's hardly there at the beginning; it comes on quietly, but when that first guitar ta-chop-chop hits I am paying attention to nothing but that song. I love the noisy guitar slide down to the main riff. The two chords that the first part of the song switches between are good tension generators, and the vocal melody is a perfect complement; I love the way the jump up on "fringe" along with the guitar change sounds like a question. The next two chords in the verse strike a note of firm resolve, punctuated by the drum hit on “coming”. The low response vocal (“wise to you this time”) leads nicely into the chorus.

The rest of the song continues in the same vein. It’s a great marriage of mood and material. Red Rider never succumb to the temptation to oversell it. The synth on the bridge has an unfortunate bright eighties sound, but the notes it plays are appropriate to the mood. The guitar solo is clear and reverby and regrounds the sound; it sticks around and colors the rest of the song just enough. The bridge comes back around as a coda, and they throw in a neat extra couple beats a few bars before the cold stop.

A good, well-executed piece of restrained power that ought to be more remembered.

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