EXCERPTS from a Review of "This Is Boston, Not L.A."

.................Compared to Gang Green’s hearty and juvenile rebellion, The Proletariat is dour and prematurely grey. A stern, semi-funky punk simmers beneath bald Marxist lyrics. But do we have to put up with a title like "Religion is the Opium of the Masses"? This lecture would be intolerable if not for the full-bodied blend of the Gang of Four-like bottom and the grimy guitar textures of the Public Image-like top. At maverick’s a week ago, the band’s commitment was impressive, and every song had a specific enemy and friend: racists, imperialists, the unemployed, the Polish workers, and so on. Singer Richard Brown, a jittery fellow who looks like Stiv Bators and has the pinched tone of Jello Biafra, relies exclusively on sour irony ("Bullet through the chest/Flowers on the grave"). After a while, the band’s unsmiling grimness became monotonous, obvious, and oppressive, and as the set went on and on it became apparent that the Proletariat should have been sent to a rural collective. Or at least gotten a subscription to Mad..........

Sunday, August 8, was not a red-letter day for the Proletariat. The Paradise canceled the Proletariat’s afternoon all-ages show because no advance tickets had been sold. The band argued that kids rarely buy advance tickets for all-ages shows, especially those headlined y local bands. Guitarist Frank Michaels said that the had told Paradise management that the afternoon show would’ve outdrawn the late show, and he may have been right --only about 50 people showed up that night. Relations between the Proletariat and Paradise staffers grew chillier as the day wore on. (While I was trying to interview the band in the Paradise’s front bar before the show, a bouncer demanded that we produce backstage passes or wait outside until the club opened. We opted for the friendlier environs of singer Richard Brown’s car, where our talk was completed. "They wouldn’t do this to David Johansen," muttered drummer Tom McKnight.) By show time, nerves were ragged. The Proletariat ended their set after a half-hour, with Brown unleashing a tirade against the club. Not surprisingly, the club manager told the band that it "didn’t have much of a future" at the Paradise.

It’s not that the Proletariat go looking for trouble. In contrast to their solemn, embattled performances, the four band members are polite, funny, and soft-spoken. Even Michaels, the elected band manager (because he’s the only one without a day job), shows no fast-talking, glibness. The Proletariat’s jeans, T-shirts, and nondescript haircuts -- neighborhood barbershop jobs -- are eye-catching only for their normality. "a lot of people tell us that we don’t look ‘punk’, " said bassist Peter Bevilacqua. Which suits him and the band just fine: "I think we’re sort of image-less."

The members of the Proletariat are natives of blue-collar cities and towns in southeastern Massachusetts: Fall River, Taunton, and Freetown. Bevilacqua, Michaels, and Brown, all 22, were friends in high school -- Apponequet Regional -- and went on to Southeastern Massachusetts University together, majoring in industrial relations, finance, and history, respectively. McKnight, 20, was recruited through a friend; in September, he starts Bristol Community College as an engineering student. Bevilacqua, Michaels, an Brown were exposed to radical politics at college; because they didn’t want to be like most students, for whom the romance of socialism is a temporary fling, they quit school in their senior year, determined to practice what they professed. And what can a poor boy do? Inspired by the Clash and the Gang of Four, they formed the Proletariat, though none of them had been in a group before. "The Sex Pistols showed us that you don’t have to know how to play to be in a band," said Michaels. Brown, the most loyal Marxist of the lot, named the band. "We got a letter that said, ‘How can you assume that you represent the views of the entire working class?’ We don’t. All we’re saying is that we’re members of it," Brown said. (He drives a delivery truck during the day; Bevilacqua works in a supermarket; McKnight pumps gas.)

The Proletariat started playing a year and a half ago, just as the Boston hardcore scene was breaking. Because of what Bevilacqua called "similarities in politics and attitude," they appear on the This is Boston Not LA compilation, thought their playing is too slow and studied, their songs too rooted in ideology, to be considered hardcore. "I think a lot of the hardcore bands grab hold of slogans that sound good, and they contradict themselves a lot," said Brown. "We’re a little older than most of them, and we tend to think things out more." The Proletariat integrate a proclivity for rock hedonism with a restless conscience. And at this year’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Rumble, the band blew through the art bands, good-time rockers, and pleasant poppers like a rousing twister.

The Proletariat’s seven-song cassette, Distortion ($4, available at Newbury Comics or by mail from PO Box 534, Kenmore Station, Boston 02215), is one of the most rabble-rousing local releases of the year. Michaels’s buzzing guitar, Bevilacqua percolating bass, and McKnight’s clamorous drumming supply a no-frills boost to Brown’s succinct lyrics. "Events Repeat" is typically terse (‘Events repeat/Red scare remake/Cold war reborn" is the entire song). But Brown’s commanding voice, pitched between John Lydon’s bratty howl and Joe Strummer’s authoritative bark, and the way he couples, repeats, and breaks up his short lines, makes the works cut deeper. On stage, Brown is a dynamo under tight control; his legs twitching to the beat, he ends each song with a habitual hand gesture that looks like a modified sign of the cross.

Most of Distortion is obsessed with corruption -- elected officials on the take ("After the Rise"), imperialist nations on the make ("Torn Curtain," "Westernization"). The Proletariat rarely name names; their continual struggle is against an invisible, pervasive evil. The superpower decried in "Blind" -- "They condemn all change/As acts of terrorists/A people’s revolt ... crushed brutally/They only see what they want to see" -- could as easily be the USSR as the US. Beneath Distortion’s bleak, black-and-white surface is the Proletariat’s desire to illumine the alternatives. Too much of hardcore is selfish, music written by and for member of its exclusive club, those withdrawn from society into fashionable futility. Like the Clash, the Proletariat are punk missionaries -- for better or worse. If there’s one soul to be saved out there, the Proletariat will grab it. Distortion has its flaws. The Proletariat lack subtlety; their lyrics often play like The Communist Manifesto set to guitars ("Educate the masses/They’ll free themselves/Take back the handouts/Hand out the texts"). They need to develop nuance, so that they can explain the stakes in everyday terms. They cite the Gang of Four’s Entertainment as an influence, buy not the band’s current Songs of the Free. After years of poker-faced socialist shuffle, the Gang of Four only recently discovered that humor is useful as both a weapon and a sanity-preserver.

The Proletariat’s first album, Soma Holiday (Non-U/Radiobeat), is a hefty 18-song manifesto from Boston’s most dedicated political punk band. Singer Richard Brown, guitarist Frank Michaels, bassist Peter Bevilacqua, and drummer Tom McKnight back up their terse statements on class warfare an economic inequality with action. In their two-and-a-half-year career, they’ve never been regulars on the club scene, but they must have one of the best benefit-and-all-ages-show track records in town. And when they do perform, they’re a scathing outfit -- a nondescript T-shirt-and-jeans band transformed by the spotlight into a collective entity of noise and emotion.

Produced by label owners Jimmy Dufour and Lou Giordano, Soma Holiday is as galvanizing as a Proletariat show -- frequent midsong tempo changes send numbers like "Another Banner Raised" careering from martial punk to bouncing-off-the-wall hard-core. The record, though, spotlights the nuances that often get swept up into the band’s whirling live sound. Michaels, for instance, emerges as a guitarist who combines flash and restraint. Sure, he can thrash and churn with the best of them, and heaven knows these songs are built on a foundation of gurgling bass and rifle-range drumming that varies little from track to track. But what separates the Proletariat from their hard-core colleagues -- or rather, what unites them with the punks (the Sex Pistols and the Clash) who served as their early inspirations --is their fondness for traditional rock trimmings. Michael's leads and solos (18 of ‘em, all different) glow with imaginative detail. My favorite touch is the way he duplicates the turntable scratching that opens "Famine" and then weaves the sound into a staccato riff that’s as maddening and hypnotic as a busy signal.

That kind of invigorated playing bolsters Brown’s dry, Guardian lyrics. His songs, like those of most political songwriters, are anchored in slogans ("Today’s colonies/Tomorrow’s empires") rather than images. In taking such an approach, the Proletariat risk rhetorical overkill, and in fact Soma Holiday is about four songs too long. But then most bands would have quit after 10 numbers. (One reason for the album’s length is the inclusion of "Splendid Wars," "Events/Repeat," "Blind," and "Torn Curtain" from the limited-edition cassette, Distortion, that the band released last year. These tracks are identical to the cassette versions, but the sound quality on the album is considerably better.) The band is at its most jolting when Brown sets a scene in everyday terms, as in "Decorations": "Cloth on a pole/Medals on the shirt/Bullets through the chest/Flowers on your grave." On "Bread and Circus," the only song here that was written in 1983 (the others date from 1981 and "82), Brown breaks his lyrics down to the minimum -- workaday words piled upon one another like building blocks -- in order to assault Reaganomics: "Many wait/Benefits/Stigmatized/Sit and wait.... Escape/Temporary/Abuse/Alcohol/Lottery/Last gasp."

-Joyce Milman, CELLARS BY STARLIGHT, The Boston Phoenix, October 25th, 1983

(Homestead)

Indifference, Indeed. The Proletariat are a righteous bunch of radical rockers. They play punk that’s comparable to Gang Green but with a lyrical approach that’s about 180 degrees to the left. On their second album the Proles tackle some Big Subjects like poverty, greed, apathy, the Ku Klux Klan, Etc. Because of personnel changes, this 15-song disc features 3 different singers, but peter Bevilacqua (bass) and Frank Michaels (guitar) make sure that there is continuity. The flaw in the process is that the melodies don’t have the sweep or dynamic range of, say, Moving Target’s, but there’s more than enough delights worth unearthing here.

-Jim Sullivan, The Boston Phoenix, November 13th, 1986