Pure Punk Picks
Stranded – The Saints
“Stranded far from home” doesn’t suggest to me that you got on the wrong train and have to get off at the next stop to take the next train back in. To me it means you’ve left your old life behind you, your old ideals. The ones your folks told you to take to keep you safe and warm and no worry; if you die of dullness in the path they set up for you. They will feel at ease knowing, that in your premature death, no harm or danger will ever come to you.
And who can blame a parent for this?
But ones young mind and desires takes one beyond the black and white picture your young mind sees in front of you. Suddenly, you have color with the music, the art, the books you discover- it makes you want to step out of your own town, even if you rarely, physically leave it, your mind is traveling far away.
Your mind and your ideals are walking to new destinations. You’re not really stranded but you are far from home and far from what society expected and your parents hoped you would be.
With songs so great as this to provide the background- Well, surely there could be no better place to be, than stranded!
This is a song that if I was flying an airplane and it was about to crash into the side of a mountain- but if this song was playing? I’d be fine with that.
There’s a handful of punk songs that encapsulate the feeling, to me, of listening to Boston college radio (WMBR) in 1977, 1978. And “Stranded” by the Australian band, The Saints, is one of them.
(Let alone Roxy Music’s best album, made about five years before this time, had the same name as this song).
Here was a rush of rhythm, a crashing, circling, cyclone of guitar, an urgent, pressing feeling from the vocals that signified a jubilant stampede of passion and energy and excitement. Of the blood boiling inside your skin waiting to expand and explode!
Maybe a touch of the New York Dolls here, maybe a dash of The Ramones there, maybe a sprinkle of Iggy or a pinch of The Modern Lovers with the “All Right” and the “Come On.”
This is punk at its inception- pure, passionate and perfect.
But within this song though it may sound like you’re lost, that you have no destination and no idea how to get there if you did. It still sounds like that wherever you are, it’s the place where you really want to be even if you’re uncertain where you are or even where that is.
And what this song signals to me- is I needed to be lost, I needed to be uncertain. I needed to put my trust in my instincts, in my new beliefs, wherever they would take me.
I needed to believe that this was the ride to take me out of my dull, dull, ordinary existence.
I think I made the right decision hearing how great this song still sounds.
I bought a fuckin’ ticket.
And I never looked back.
(Slimedog)
