If you don't own this album or don't go out and buy it right away you're dumb, Part IV...

While Jackson's politics may be misguided at times, his rock and roll credentials are most impeccable (Saxon indulgences and all). A testament to his accreditation is this band and this record. I think it was Jackson and his friends who first put a Rose Tattoo album in my hand sometime back in high school. I flipped it over, saw the photo of Angry Anderson who happens to be a midget, and without listening to it said, “This is novelty crap worthy of heavy mockage”, or something to that effect. Jackson has blogged a couple of posts referencing Rose Tattoo recently and I had pledged to give them a second listen. Last time was a couple of months ago. I ordered a couple of discs from Amazon who had a hard time finding copies and they’ve been on back order for months. Well, this one finally showed up and let me say this: If you have any concept of what rock and roll is, then you will know that this album and band are the very dictionary definition. If you recognize AC/DC’s Dirty Deed’s, High Voltage, and Powerage as the baseline for all that is good, then you will understand the greatness of this album. Forget Angry’s vertical challenges. Forget the coincidental fact that like AC/DC, they’re from Australia (although, there must have been an entire scene going on in the mid to late seventies down there that I would have loved to experienced). This is kickass guitar driven blues rock at it’s finest.

For the last couple of weeks since all my employees have been cut loose, I’ve been taking advantage of the empty office to blast tunes on the boom box my warehouse guys left behind while trolling the job search boards for work. It’s been quite cathartic. It was also the perfect time to drop this disc in a give it a crack. After the first bars of “Rock & Roll Outlaw” I felt stupid for having missed jamming to this stuff all these years. What was I thinking?! By time the last chords of “The Butcher and Fast Eddy” faded I was crying under my desk in embarrassment for my snobbery back in the early eighties. Unless you have some strange aversion to guitars plugged into Marshall amplifiers (and if you do, I truly feel sorrow for your miserable wretched life) this band is the real deal.

Don’t fall victim to such rash snap judgment like I did so many years ago. Get this record now, because if you don’t then you are clearly dumb.