Knock Knock – We Will Raise Your Child LP (Sacramento)
Like most folks in the same predicament, when my father woke up after suffering a major stroke in his sleep, he found himself unable to read the printed word. He actually walked into the kitchen holding the newspaper upside down and said, “I can’t read this.” Hey, admitting you have a problem is the first step, they say. My father wasn’t a writer, and didn’t have the best taste in pre-stroke recreational reading materials, so I’ve always feared that if I were to weather a similar situation, it would not liberate me of my literacy, but would forever make me write in the style of the liner notes to Knock Knock’s album We Will Raise Your Children. I’ll spare you most of the details, but they refer to themselves more than once as “a band that is here to make hits,” and a central character referred to over and over as “a rocker” (“He is, after all, a rocker.”) Their bio treads on even thinner ice, and if you printed it out, you might have to dispose of it in the OUTSIDE garbage
Something else about my dad: He was pre-rock. Meaning, he was eighteen years older than my mom, was a fighter-pilot and bomber in both WWII and Korea. Dawg was born in NINETEEN TWENTY-FUCKING-THREE. He did not understand rock music when he heard it, and he started to hear a lot of it, in several variations, before succumbing to some form of life-snatcher two years after the aforementioned brain attack. He complained of its repetition as the most irritating aural quality … something I have yet to understand, even to this day. I am convinced, however, that if I were to travel back in time to that morning in 1992 when he was getting all Jerry Lewis with the fucking newspaper and shit … if I were to jet back there with the ya’llternative stylings of Knock Knock in tow, and if he was to immediately listen to it from start to finish (hey, bathroom breaks were instantly WHENEVER and WHEREVER …very presciently-slacker ‘90s of him, actually), his response would be, “I was alive for it yet don’t even know what early ‘70s glam-rock was all about, but I know that these pussies suck at it. And why is that guy dressed like a fake chimney-sweep? What is he going to do, hit me with that shovel? Why are they so fucking happy? Why is the other one dressed like a fake car mechanic and holding a firearm he most likely has no idea how to discharge? Rest of the band looks like a ten-year-old girl watching a fat Frenchman attack Alex Chilton.”
Then he’d turn to me and ask, “Did you write that one-sheet? I can’t even fucking read right now and you come back from 2012 with a poor excuse for wasting two refrigerator magnets? Twenty years and you write like a fishwife’s dullard offspring with walking pneumonia.”
And I’d spend the rest of my time-traveling tokens trying to explain that I didn’t write the one-sheet and that, truthfully, the record sounds like failed Ganglians, which is the last thing the world needs right now. And how all of this is because of an abomination known as King Tuff, which is a whole ‘nother can of crap … “That’s fascinating…now go back to 2012 or shed some light on what the fuck happened to me last night … I’m not doing this with the paper to be funny, boy.”
See, I wouldn’t treat this record like this band would raise people’s children, because all I want to do is leave it in a hot car with the windows rolled up. (http://www.sacramaniacs.com)
(Andrew Earles)
