Every ten years or so, mainstream America rediscovers 1960s-influenced rock and soul, launches a few scruffy teenagers into stardom, drinks a case of High Life and then goes back to sleep. We're conspicuously between peaks right now, snoring off the ill effects of the Strokes in the early '00s, still digesting Jack White's forays on the marimba, not entirely sold on the The Redwalls as corporate music's next new thing. Still, despite the music world's short, ever-shifting attention span, certain bands have always been making what we now call garage rock. The Fleshtones, along with the Lyres and the Mono-Men, kept this particular style alive through the silly 1970s and the synthy-serious 1980s. The Fleshtones, once from Queens and now from Brooklyn, have been in the business of kicking rock asses since 1976. After a short hiatus -- their last record came out in 2003 -- The Fleshtones are back with their 13th full-length, and it's like they never left. It's the same hard-rocking, two- and three-chord sound, same lineup, same ferocious energy.
Even as forty-somethings, The Fleshtones are one of America's great live rock bands, and Beachhead, recorded by Rick Miller of Southern Culture on the Skids and Jim Diamond of The Dirtbombs, does its best to capture their amp-leaping, chorus-shouting act. It's the kind of production that just gets out of the way, mostly; you don't hear any obvious overdubs or effects, and the sound is warmer than it is clear. You can imagine most of the songs getting laid down in one or two sweaty takes.
Songwriting is split fairly evenly between two founders, with four from keyboardist/singer Peter Zaremba and five from guitarist Keith Streng. Nearly 30 years of writing together, though, seem to have merged the two into one. Zaremba's "Bigger and Better", with its chiming power chords and pounding drums, has one of Streng's best guitar solos, while "Pretty Pretty Pretty", Streng's over-the-top ode to the effect of beautiful women, rides an exultant 1960s keyboard line. Most of the songs have some sort of call-and-response built into them, with Zaremba throwing out the verse and the other band members tossing bits and pieces of it back to him. This shouting back and forth heightens the party feeling -- you feel like anything could happen -- and adds a note of incipient chaos to straightforward songs. There's a bit of R&B and soul tossed into the mix, which you can hear most clearly in "I Am What I Am", and even a nod to blues rock in the harmonica-laced "She Looks like a Woman". Still, most of the songs are pure vintage rock, sped up and wigged out and spiked with yelps. There's a straight-up uncomplicated joy to songs like "Hit Me!" and "Push Up Man" that can't be explained with words.
The Fleshtones are approaching the status of living legends, a name-drop band revered by people like Deborah Harry and Peter Buck and cited as influential by countless younger garage revivalists. Yet as bass player Ken Fox explains in the lyrics to his "I Want the Answers", cult success has its limits. "I want to know why... If I'm so good, I didn't die young. I want to know why... maybe then I'd have me a number one. (Why!) does everybody want to steal my act, and (Why!) did I waste all these years, I'll never get them back. (Why!) does everybody want to bow at my feet when (why!) all I want is to make ends meet." Actually, the track raises lots of other issues. Why did the Fleshtones never break beyond a limited audience? Why are some of history's most entertaining rock 'n' roll party albums -- Roman Gods and Hexbreaker -- relegated to the F section of mostly humorless collectors' shelves? Why is rock "back" when it never went away? Unanswerable questions. Why not just get a copy of Beachhead and shake your ass?
