no. 10 — Live the Dream by Ramshackle Glory
I’m not going to lie, I’m kinda embarrassed to write this one. But this album was a major influence on my life for a solid year or two, and it would be dishonest not to include it. Is folk punk dead? Am I right to be embarrassed by this? It just kind of feels like privileged white people deciding to glorify poverty and justifying it by calling it anti-capitalism. I think there are some nuggets of truth in that for sure, but it feels very performative to me now. Also, this is just me speaking for myself and the way I saw the DIY scene of towns like Portland, Maine and Amherst, MA. Very white! Pretty rich! And most of the bands I went to go see where all white.
Maybe I did it wrong- having never gotten into bands like Against Me! or Pleasure Venom. Ramshackle Glory was The Band when I first started getting into punk. Back then I was driving 6+ hours in a day just to see a show. Travelling from Amherst to Portland and back in one night, smoking copious amounts of weed and carting around a rotating cast of punks. I’m honestly surprised I didn’t get in a car crash during any of those trips. A lot of the shows in Maine took place at this one farm in the middle of nowhere. It was a crust punk’s dream. I remember the last show I went to there; they had several TV’s burning in empty garbage cans and would throw in cans of spray paint just to watch them explode. Throughout the night you would hear loud pops and booms from whatever was in the flames. Everyone was drunk, half of the people in attendance had climbed up a tree. Someone definitely fell at least ten feet out of that tree, but I think they were alright. Random pigs and goats and chickens wandered around while the bands played. There was a toddler running around, but no one knew who she belonged to. Someone was selling hot dogs for a dollar.
Ramshackle Glory never played at that farm, but that place really exemplifies the ways I felt when listening to this album. I remember making one of my coworkers stay in the car with me as we listened to “From Here to Utopia”. I was trying to explain to him why I felt so angry all the time, why the lyrics of this song resonated so much with me. He hated all six minutes and forty seconds of it. I still know all the words, and I don’t begrudge myself the angst and pain I felt at that time, nor the deep driving urge to try and fit in. I know those were the main reasons I made those dangerous drives to places that made me uncomfortable. I know I didn’t have the framework to understand why my misguided privilege led this to be a failed experiment. At the very least, Ramshackle Glory taught me that All Cops Are Bastards, and I stand by that lesson.
You can listen to this album here
