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The Rabble
The Rabble
Trans-World (Canada) - 1967
Roulette (USA) 1968
Michael Panontin
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Five boho lads from Pointe Claire on Montreal's west island were the Rabble, a nominally funky, oddly eccentric alternative to the Haunted's straight-on garage rock. The Rabble is a psychedelic curio sadly languishing in oblivion, even as scads of American and international crud is scraped from the bottom of the dustbin of sixties psychedelia. What gives?
Formed in 1966 by leader/guitarist Mike Harris (a slight pause here to allow for fits of apoplexy across Ontario*), the Rabble did the requisite club and bar slog across Montreal island, eventually playing before 4,000 people at the Queen's Park love-in in Toronto on May 22, 1967. The Rabble, the first of two albums released by the band, found its original release on the Canadian label Transworld in 1967, but after a surprise substitution for Cream in 1968 in Montreal in front of 5,000 fans, the Rabble soon nabbed the attention of U.S. label Roulette, which subsequently released this record south of the border.
Unlike other bands of the era, who strove, ultimately successfully, to establish rock as a serious medium (as evinced no doubt by the emergence of rock criticism at about the same time), the Rabble were eccentric, stippling their music with wit, sarcasm and whimsy, not unlike the Mothers of Invention or the Fugs.
The Rabble kicks off with the spry single, 'Golden Girl', a brilliant slice of romanticism that captures stirrings of a more soulful rather than sexual nature. It is a kind of young adult's quest for a kindred spirit, locating its energies somewhere between the gut and the solar plexus, a marked contrast to the pelvic swagger of the Stones and their disciples of the day. 'Black Potato', on the other hand, is a tribal paean, replete with goofy jungle-like chants, to the humble spud, the "almighty black potato". 'The Crushing Hand of Mother' mixes odd time changes with social commentary and the Zappa-esque prescience of "your mother's got a hold on you, yeah / controls all the things that you do, yeah" before snapping into a staccato guitar riff and then back to its languid lament. And then there is the patently absurd 'Can I Squeeze', which belts out some of the nimblest guitar rhythms before popping the gross-out question of the century, "Can I squeeze your boil? / Can I crunch it munch it squeeze it eat it?"
The Rabble, while far from being a classic sixties record - it loses itself all too often in a sort of indulgent heavy blues sludge on other tracks, probably considered more adventurous at the time - is a regrettably overlooked charmer of a disc that should have been reissued long ago.
(Though tough to find, The Rabble and the follow-up Give Us Back Elaine finally found their way onto CD in 2008 in Quebec on the Disques Merite label.)
* To our non-Canadian readers, Mike Harris was a neo-con premier who governed in Ontario from 1995 to 2001. The above text could be roughly translated as "founded by leader/guitarist Margaret Thatcher" or "fronted by vocalist George W. Bush" or something to that effect. You get the idea.
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Link: The Rabble
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