Tuesday Tuneage
The Reds - "Self Reduction"
1979

The Reds are/were a whatchyamacallit band out of Pennsylvania. Easy to dig, harder to label. Like The Cars (new wave with a hard rock edge) and Cheap Trick (hard rock, but we thought they might be new wave due to their name and Rick Nielsen's outfits), The Reds made one of those late-seventies debuts that decidedly sounded quite unlike anything out there in hard rock or new wave. They were arty enough to win over the college rockers, had prominent cool keyboards to signal to the new wavers, and had guitar riffage to placate the hard rockers. And they weren't just some grab bag of genres attempting to be all things to all listeners: Their self-titled debut album from 1979 shows a band that doesn't mail it in or go cold, a singer who sounds like he gives a damn.

I only became aware of them while doing my bimonthly skimming through Chuck Eddy's Stairway To Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums In The Universe, where he tucked their first album in at #279 between ZZ Top's Tejas and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts' I Love Rock 'n Roll. Eddy correctly described them as "sorta like if Joy Division had come from a Philly suburb instead of some stupid factory burg in Blighty." Enough for me to take a six-bucks gamble on their their debut album at Amazon. It contains nine tracks of angsty/angly high-quality rock. Cool cover, too.

So who the fuck exactly were these guys? They seem to still exist as a rumor thirty-five plus years after their A&M debut. Nobody ever slapped a Reds tape into my hands as a youth, they don't show up on those same radio stations that play "What Do All the People Know" by The Monroes, and they aren't appearing this summer at Mystic Lake Casino (featuring two original members.) Googling gets you a few songs on YouTube, that they contributed to the soundtrack for the Chris Elliott vehicle Manhunter, and that they did a garagey version of The Doors' "Break On Through" (though it doesn't top the sheer punk garagey-ness of Los Pets' rip through "Hello, I Love You".) So The Reds are but a postpunk rumor, a mystery for pop archivists to tackle in 2015.