I am sitting at my desk at my government job. I take a break, look away from the screen, put the papers away, and start to reminisce...
Back in the day, I worked with a guy named Ian. He and I and a bunch of other 20-somethings were on the street team for Zipcar, which mostly meant setting up promo tables on street corners and trying to convince passersby to join our company's car-sharing program. Ian was a trip, man. He was around my age, but he looked like Jon Glaser with long hair. He lived the self-described "anarchist" lifestyle, which at the time was extremely foreign to me.
As a 25-year-old still living with his parents, I had no concept of what Ian's life looked like. Personally, my big takeaway was that anarchists clearly don't believe in daily showers. I was also pretty fascinated with what his weekends looked liked. According to Ian, as we drove to some posh university to convince international students to buy a Zipcar membership, he had just spent the night with other anarchist friends, drinking Hurricane forties, and playing a game called "Tire"(?), in which someone would throw a tire up into the air, and everyone else would try to hit the tire-thrower in the face with their empty forty bottle(??). Ian had the scars to prove it.
As a 25-year-old still living with his parents, I had no concept of what Ian's life looked like. Personally, my big takeaway was that anarchists clearly don't believe in daily showers. I was also pretty fascinated with what his weekends looked liked. According to Ian, as we drove to some posh university to convince international students to buy a Zipcar membership, he had just spent the night with other anarchist friends, drinking Hurricane forties, and playing a game called "Tire"(?), in which someone would throw a tire up into the air, and everyone else would try to hit the tire-thrower in the face with their empty forty bottle(??). Ian had the scars to prove it.
Ian's preferred music was loud and dirty punk rock music. I didn't mind when he blasted it on our weekly drives, though that was mostly aesthetics as opposed to me understanding what the music even was. He also listened to a band called Johnny Hobo and the Freight Trains. Now that one hit me pretty good. The chorus on their first song on their first official album goes: "In my dreams / I am dirty, broke, / beautiful, and free." I took that as Ian's manifesto, even though he never articulated it that way to me (or possibly never could).
Free. Free from what? I dunno, man, all of this? As I gesticulate wildly toward various aspects of society that surround me as, again, I sit here at my desk at my government job. Note that I'm gesticulating only. Note that I still buy into the system, the system that I ostensibly disdain, while also feeding that same system with my labor and my inaction. I get it, man. I get the impulse to say "fuck it" and spend my Friday nights on the corner with Ian. But note that my arms have no scars.
I think the big thing that I've come to understand since those long-ago days with Ian is that anarchy can be a means to end, as opposed to just an escape. In this regard, Ian was perhaps not the best representative of this idea in my life, seeing as he did the reckless hooliganism thing and also worked for a subsidiary of a blood-sucking publicly-traded car rental company. He never really expressed to me ever actually standing for any particular beliefs. Either he just didn't stand for anything, and the anarchy was an excuse to get drunk on malt liquor and fuck around (understandable), or he had correctly sussed me out to be a square and didn't think I could be trusted (also understandable).
Had I been exposed to an Ian type who actually put purpose behind his so-called rebellion, then perhaps things would have been different. After listening to Bacchanal 'n' Philadelphia this week, I'm starting to get the sense that, in an alternate universe, Erik Petersen could have been that person for me. He was no doubt that person for plenty of other people, once-upon-a-time teens who were born a decade before me and lived in a very different Philadelphia than I live in now. The "My Philadelphia" spoken about in that eulogy is not a Philadelphia I've ever known (though, lol, Johnny Hobo gets a shoutout). I'll readily admit that.
In fact, I may even be part of the wave of gentrification that Mischief Brew spends a good chunk of this album rallying against. I cut my young adult teeth on Saturday nights in a blossoming Fishtown, the same Fishtown that I grew up being told was a "bad" neighborhood by my parents, the same Fishtown that my parents will now readily visit themselves to buy overpriced pizza. I may ascribe to the values of "love and rage" that Petersen speaks about in "Every Town Will Celebrate," but I know that I am part of its faceless crowd, waving sweatshop flags, and celebrating the gentrification that tampers down that very same love and rage, and rebellion, and adventure, and so on.
There are times while listening to Bacchanal 'n' Philadelphia that I feel like a fraud. I felt a certain thrill and kinship with the idea of rallying against the F.O.P. in "Boycott Me!"; I want to be the hero of tomorrow. But I'm reading along with the lyrics on a website that threatens to swallow those lyrics whole with a large advertisement for Wendy's new $5 Biggie Bag deal. I want to be a rebel, but I'm buying into the system that squashes rebels like bugs. I'm a coward. I don't want to be squished.
I don't think it's easy to be the rebel that Mischief Brew asks you to be, and I don't think that Mischief Brew is making it seem easy either. They present the rigid dichotomy in "Fare Well, Good Fellows": "You either blaze your own trail / Or you're diggin' your own grave." What does blazing one's own trail even look like? Maybe Ian thought he knew, but he was getting a paycheck cut from the same capitalist pigs I was. Maybe Erik Petersen knew the secret, and maybe that secret was so terrible that he found that he couldn't handle the burden in the end.
There are times while listening to Bacchanal 'n' Philadelphia that I feel like a fraud. I felt a certain thrill and kinship with the idea of rallying against the F.O.P. in "Boycott Me!"; I want to be the hero of tomorrow. But I'm reading along with the lyrics on a website that threatens to swallow those lyrics whole with a large advertisement for Wendy's new $5 Biggie Bag deal. I want to be a rebel, but I'm buying into the system that squashes rebels like bugs. I'm a coward. I don't want to be squished.
I don't think it's easy to be the rebel that Mischief Brew asks you to be, and I don't think that Mischief Brew is making it seem easy either. They present the rigid dichotomy in "Fare Well, Good Fellows": "You either blaze your own trail / Or you're diggin' your own grave." What does blazing one's own trail even look like? Maybe Ian thought he knew, but he was getting a paycheck cut from the same capitalist pigs I was. Maybe Erik Petersen knew the secret, and maybe that secret was so terrible that he found that he couldn't handle the burden in the end.
Or maybe (most likely) the unshakeable truth is that we live in a world that is designed to squish the free-thinkers and the innovators and the rebels. "Old Tyme Mem'ry" says you can either be fake rural or impoverished in the city. "Devil of a Time" says that all that fun you're having in your gentrified city is shallow and pathetic. "Rambler's Ghost" says that if you manage to break free of the system, then your story will be swallowed back up and profited from by rich old vampires who will then keep the money and leave you to die in a ditch. There is no way to escape. We will all fall in line in time, and exterminated if not.
Okay, so where to turn to here? I never had to learn the answer. Ian never had the answer. What answer can we get from Mischief Brew, on their 2003-via-2016 album that fully acknowledges that it exists in an unbeatable capitalist society ("I ain't no preacher for I'm full of blasphemy" on "Roll Me Through the Gates of Hell")?
At the end of my rope, I turn to "Dirty Pennies," a truly breathtaking story-song about a unhoused woman and the cop who had previously cared for her, who had cared so long ago that he can't even remember doing so. This is a tale of compassion, and how our society is structured to gut you of that compassion. The story ends with the cop telling his son a hypothetical story of compassion, hours after he completely discarded any chance of compassion toward another human being who needed it. The talk is talked, but the walk is not walked, it can't be walked because he was given a badge and a baton and is told that the only way that society can function is to chase those dirty and sad and pathetic homeless scoundrels as far away as you can, and to use violence if necessary, and to lock 'em up if they even try to sleep near you, because this is normal. Kindness is abnormal. It has to be if you want to survive.
And so, what I really think "Dirty Pennies" is trying to say here is that the ultimate act of courage you can perform is to have compassion for your fellow man.
Being a rebel is hard. Grappling with my part in the gentrification of my city is hard. Blazing my own trail is fucking hard. Not being lulled to sleep? Motherfucking hard. But having compassion? That's easy. Doesn't feel like it, sometimes.
Okay, so where to turn to here? I never had to learn the answer. Ian never had the answer. What answer can we get from Mischief Brew, on their 2003-via-2016 album that fully acknowledges that it exists in an unbeatable capitalist society ("I ain't no preacher for I'm full of blasphemy" on "Roll Me Through the Gates of Hell")?
At the end of my rope, I turn to "Dirty Pennies," a truly breathtaking story-song about a unhoused woman and the cop who had previously cared for her, who had cared so long ago that he can't even remember doing so. This is a tale of compassion, and how our society is structured to gut you of that compassion. The story ends with the cop telling his son a hypothetical story of compassion, hours after he completely discarded any chance of compassion toward another human being who needed it. The talk is talked, but the walk is not walked, it can't be walked because he was given a badge and a baton and is told that the only way that society can function is to chase those dirty and sad and pathetic homeless scoundrels as far away as you can, and to use violence if necessary, and to lock 'em up if they even try to sleep near you, because this is normal. Kindness is abnormal. It has to be if you want to survive.
And so, what I really think "Dirty Pennies" is trying to say here is that the ultimate act of courage you can perform is to have compassion for your fellow man.
Being a rebel is hard. Grappling with my part in the gentrification of my city is hard. Blazing my own trail is fucking hard. Not being lulled to sleep? Motherfucking hard. But having compassion? That's easy. Doesn't feel like it, sometimes.
Bacchanal 'n' Philadelphia ultimately makes a big point in saying that this "anarchy" that we speak of when we talk about Erik Petersen's legacy and when we talk about how we spend our Friday nights and when we talk about music that is affixed with the "anarcho-punk" genre tag is NOT just anarchy for anarchy's sake—i.e. this isn't anarchy in the sense that we are smashing each other in the face with empty forty bottles. This is anarchy as a way of rallying against an unjust system that is designed to keep the rich in power and keep the poor it their place and punish any act of kindness whatsoever. To love your fellow man and rage against those who don't.
For all these reasons, it's important that Bacchanal 'n' Philadelphia is mostly just Erik Petersen and an acoustic guitar. No distractions, just a scraggly-voiced Philadelphian with his heart on his sleeve. The message cuts through clear and deep. There is plenty of space to feel, which is an act that we are rarely afforded these days. I appreciated the opportunity.
For all these reasons, it's important that Bacchanal 'n' Philadelphia is mostly just Erik Petersen and an acoustic guitar. No distractions, just a scraggly-voiced Philadelphian with his heart on his sleeve. The message cuts through clear and deep. There is plenty of space to feel, which is an act that we are rarely afforded these days. I appreciated the opportunity.
I don't think that "be compassionate" is some ground-breaking or novel concept. If you are reading this review on this tiny little blog, then you already knew that the idea of compassion is important. To hear the concept expressed so clearly and so urgently, though, was what makes this album special. It's going to stick with me for a long time.
GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5
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