I used to believe it was karma, in the form of a Hell’s Angel, who punched the late Marty Balin in the face at Altamont. I was wrong. Callous even. I can’t think of a single rocker who deserves to be knocked unconscious, and besides, Balin’s crimes were all in the future, and I don’t think preemptive karma is a thing. No, Balin’s only crime was trying taking the Angels to task for their cruelty. It was a futile gesture, but a noble one.
Which doesn’t change the fact that Balin has a lot to answer for. Sure, he was (with Grace Slick) the vocalist for the Jefferson Airplane, one of the twin giants of the San Francisco psychedelic music scene. And he wrote a tiny, tiny handful of songs that matter (“Volunteers” and “Miracles” being the big ones), and put in a few fine vocal performances with the Jefferson Starship.
But his solo work (he put out more than a dozen albums) was largely romantic AOR shlock, and the one-off bands he was a member of are basically footnotes (Bodacious DF and the KBC Band, anyone?) Indeed, one of his greatest feats was a non-feat; god bless him, Balin had absolutely nothing to do with Starship’s “We Built This City”—he was never a member of the band, which just goes to show he wasn’t as dumb as he sometimes appeared.
Perhaps the strangest, least savory and most unremarked episode of Balin’s long and checkered career was Rock Justice, a musical he wrote and directed for the stage in 1979. Rock Justice premiered at The Old Waldorf club in San Francisco where it flopped about on stage for reasons self-evident to anyone unfortunate enough to hear the resulting 1980 album Rock Justice. So far a I know it has never been staged elsewhere.
The story line is stupid funny—while in the studio to record an album, the lead singer falls asleep during a break and dreams he’s been put on trial by his own band for failing to produce a hit single. His guitarist—duplicitous bastards, guitarists—acts as prosecutor, and calls as witnesses an assortment of rock biz personages, all of whom bear him a grudge for failing to line their pockets. Record exec, promoter, manager, DJ… why, Kafka and Poe working in tandem couldn’t have devised a more diabolical scenario.
Balin’s involvement on the musical side was limited—he co-wrote only five of the album’s eleven songs, and doesn’t sing or perform on any of them. The artists who do perform on the album are an anonymous lot—the only musician of any note is “lead singer” Jeff Pilson, who has played bass with Dokken and Dio and is currently the bassist of Foreigner. The album is only in part a souvenir of the live stage production—it includes four studio tracks, all of them sung by Pilson, who was not a member of the musical cast. And it makes sense, to a degree—three of the four are the tracks that bookend the singer’s dream.
One thing I’ll hand to Balin, and it’s not negligible—he’s just smart enough to know that his concept can only be played for laughs. Part of me wishes he’d gone full idiot and played his brainchild as drama, but you can’t have everything in this life. Balin fills the mouths of the prosecutor and his witnesses with insulting one-liners—the problem is they’re not very funny. Schoolyard taunts, most of them.
And it certainly doesn’t help that the songs, and by that I mean all of the songs, are second-rate high school musical fodder—”Let’s put on a show” stuff. Had Balin and the other songwriters aimed to write some straight-up rock songs, and had those rock songs not completely sucked, the LP version of Rock Justice might have stood on its own merits as a rock opera. But the bad comedy and the bad Broadway feel of the songs put paid to that. As it stands, Rock Justice is a mediocre curio documenting an unsavory non-event that can only be listened to if you’re in the mood to immerse yourself in the sordid element of abject failure.
The musical opens with “Hold Me Close” and “Rock ‘N Roll Dreams,” the two songs the (unnamed) band is working on in the studio before the singer falls asleep and dreams about his arrest, trial, and conviction. The first is a generic hard rocker with show tune overtones—an aspiring Broadway auteur’s idea of a big muscles rock song. “Rock ‘N Roll Dreams” is an overwrought ballad and, well, icky.
Pilson sings about how he wants to make a “million people get up and dance,” but the song itself will make you do anything but. Oh, and he wants (modest guy, our singer) “all the critics in rock and roll” to say “just like Otis he’s a singer with soul.” Well okay. Problem is Pilson, who so far as I can tell has never been a vocalist, is barely a singer, much less one with soul. I wish I could think that this was Balin’s point—that he chose a so-so singer on purpose to support the prosecution argument. But there’s an element of self-pity behind Rock Justice—it’s hard to escape the suspicion that Balin ultimately considers the trial a miscarriage of justice.
After that comes the trial and the witnesses, the first of whom is the star’s manager, whose “testimony” in the form of “Loved That Boy” is sung by Alex Bendahan. It’s a jaunty, bluesy spoken work kinda thing, very West Side Story “hep” if you know what I mean, and features the obviously sleazy and streetwise Bendahan going on in a jive Great White Way about how he discovered the singer. The chorus is full-blown hokum, and so off-off-off-Broadway you may as well be at an amateur side street theater in a suburb of Topeka. Balin makes clear his low estimation of the manager’s rapacious business practices with a not-very-funny jibe—”I took ninety percent,” sings Bendahan, “That’s not that much.” Ouch.
Then comes the live-in-the-theater rocker “Put Him Away,” which is sung by “record executive” Ric Devon. You get lots of wild guitar and one long complaint, mainly that the singer is “a master of disaster” incapable of producing a chart topper (“Whoo, we listened, mouths agape/There wasn’t a hit”). It’s followed by the live “Love Beat,” which is sung by “DJ” Frank Daniels, whose complaint is the same as the rec exec’s—the singer ain’t got what it takes. “Love Beat” is, incongruously, a disco song—obviously Balin, who always knew which way the wind was blowing, was not above pandering to the trend du jour.
Also live: “promoter” Rocky Sullivan’s “Mogul of Rock,” a frenetic ersatz hard rocker of the sort you’d get if you asked a Broadway type to write a frenetic hard rocker. Makes me think of Meatloaf, it does. He too is disgusted, and comes through with the borderline funny line, “But, a telephone booth/Was the biggest hall he could fill.” Lame, sure, but Groucho Marx in comparison to most of the humor on display. “Not Happening” is pure show tune, and bad show tune at that—”Not evident, not evident, not evident” sing a crew of Sha Na Na rejects, followed by “He’s no good.”
One Dyan Buckelew then steps up for the defense with “Testify,” a ramped up and very loose (and oily) adaptation of the Parliament’s 1967 hit “(I Wanna) Testify.” It’s a manic rock ’n’ soul number that oozes “Let’s put on a show” enthusiasm, and it’s utterly exhausting. It’s followed by Pilson’s denunciation of the biz “Take It Off the Top.” What we have here is sub par Cheap Trick with a vocal performance intended to reach the folks back in the cheap seats, and while I’ve heard worse rockers, the lyrics stink.
“Guilty, Guilty” is yet another hard rocker taken at an almost punk pace and is sung by “judge” Mark Varney. The lyrics take you nowhere—this should have been the big moment of judgment, with a message that sums everything up, but all you get is Varney tossing off lame insults and repeating “Guilty, guilty, guilty, put him away” ad nauseam. I do like that “String him up”—it’s as good a sentence for the guy guilty of this abomination as any.
The LP closes with the singer waking up and returning to the studio to close things out with the waste of breath “You’re Such a Part of Me.” The song proves the prosecution’s case, which I doubt was Balin’s intention. Had Balin really wanted to write a funny musical he’d have written a deliberately shitty song—one you could laugh with rather than at. But he wasn’t clever or ego free enough to attempt a Spinal Tap—this one, as well as the two cuts that open the album, should suck, and do, but not intentionally. In the end, Balin is simply too stuck on the humorless idea of a wrongful conviction.
Rock Justice is fortunate there are no musical courts—it may well have found itself seated in the electric chair. Marty Balin’s ill-fated musical has, in its way, faced an even worse fate than capital punishment—it’s been banished from the memories of all but a few. Razed, the earth salted, and all records thereof expunged from the Book of Rock. Balin was never the brightest of rockers—he possessed a voice, but smarts weren’t on his resume.
That said, Rock Justice, for all its faults, wasn’t an inherently dumb idea. Played solely for laughs, it might have lived on to become a negligible but clever bauble. Alas, Balin wasn’t any funnier than he was smart. The only funny thing he ever did occurs in “Miracles,” when he sings, “I got a taste of the real world/When I went down on you girl.” That one cracks me up every time.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D-
