Madison Red & the Band That Time Forgot (CD release)

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Clint Thayer

Madison Red and the Band that Time Forgot

The Madison quartet channels its roots sound into political defiance on its newest record, Proletarian Swing. The album’s eight songs evoke the protest anthems of the 1960s and ’70s and respond to the 2016 election and all that has happened since. Their first album, 21st Century Blues & Ballads, showed up on many top-10 lists.

press release: “We certainly never started out to record something as ephemeral (even by pop music standards) as a “protest” album,” explained the band’s guitarist Tom Flinn, “but history intervened in the form of the 2016 election in which reactionaries took control of the American government determined to reverse any progress this country had made in dealing with its three major problems, income inequality, equal rights, and climate change.”

The new politically charged album, Proletarian Swing, is the band’s second collection of all original songs. Their first disc, 21st Century Blues & Ballads, made the “Ten Best Albums of the Year” list on the New York City-based, roots music-oriented, Centerline music blog  in distinguished company that included Corky Siegel, Rhiannon Giddens, Marty Stuart, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Peter Himmelman, and Aimee Mann.

The band’s new offering, Proletarian Swing, is an eight-song collection that draws its musical inspiration from the blues, folk music and rock-and-roll of the 1950s as well as the socially-conscious soul and protest music of the sixties with nods to artists ranging from Henry Mancini to Link Wray, Eddie Cochran, Smokey Robinson, Carlos Santana, Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, Robbie Robertson, B.B. King, Doug Sahm, and the Beatles.

Highlights from the new disc include: “Marshalltown,” a biographical song about the actor Jean Seberg, hounded to her death by President Richard Nixon, who corruptly used the FBI to illegally tap her phones and spread lies that ended her Hollywood career; the title track “Proletarian Swing,” an anthem for 2020 that calls for equal justice and for reversing the redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class to the ultra-rich; the satirical “Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Never Die,” which pokes fun at (among others) aging hipsters, exercise fanatics, and survivalists; and “Going Back to Natchez,” which was inspired by the rural poverty exemplified by the growing number of small communities across the Midwest and South that are on the verge of disappearance.