Where the Lifeline Is

By Jay Cocks.

Wash up and get ready for a terrific new band.

The Del-Lords believe in rock not only as a means of rhythmic release but also as a vehicle of conscience. Their songs are fleet enough to get an audience moving and tough enough to make them stop and think once the beat lets go. Scott Kempner plays a hard guitar, writes most of the Del-Lords' material and takes his lead vocals on songs the way a pistolero goes for his gun. Listen to him talk, and it quickly becomes clear that he wants the audience to share the band's life-or-death dedication to the music. "We're doing a pretty damn good job of playing good, honest rock 'n' roll," Kempner says. "We haven't sent people running to the exits. We make believers out of them. Even the crew people that we hire have to respond in one way or another to the music itself. Anybody who is going to touch this music in any way must have his hands clean."

Once touched by the fire of the Del-Lords, a convert may have to hustle around a little in order to get a fix on the band. The group has not bent radio out of shape; in fact, its airwave appearances have been erratic. The Del-Lords' second album, Johnny Comes Marching Home, was released a few months back and made few of the conventional commercial tremors, even though it contains some of the year's best tunes. The songs range between social comment and personal tenderness, with a free-for-all finesse that should have brought the Del-Lords front and center.

Part of the problem may be inseparable from what makes the Del-Lords so distinctive: an insistence on passion when a lot of rock has slipped into neutral, a glorification of rough-and-tumble spirit when much of the Top Ten has all the aggression of a goose-down quilt. "Through the '70s, people became isolated," Kempner reflects. "They became isolated from their music, from their government. We hark back to an older tradition. We have something to say to the people who listen to us."

What is being said goes directly -- indeed, aggressively -- against the grain of contemporary flag waving. In 1984 the Del-Lords kicked off their first album, Frontier Days, with an up-tempo version of an old blues, How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live, which Kempner had discovered on a Ry Cooder recording. The new album opens on a note of embattled optimism with Heaven: "I need something that I can believe in/ And another person just won't do . . . I believe . . . that there's better days ahead/ I believe . . . there's a heaven before I'm dead." Kempner trucks fresh force and vigor to the antiwar genre in Soldier's Home, then brings the war home in Against My Will, whose protagonist is an American hostage. The situation is familiar ("I'm sitting in a foreign country/ In an army barracks hidden in the hills/ I've been here for nearly seven months now"), but the sentiments are not likely to get the Del-Lords invited to a lawn party at the White House: "It wasn't my vote that put the cowboy on the hill/ But I'm the Devil of the West himself/ To a band of wild-eyed men/ Now in the name of God we're being held against our will."

Songs like these did get the Del-Lords an invitation to play at an anniversary celebration for the Nation magazine in March, where the presence of many left-wing supporters of somewhat advanced age led Guitarist Eric Ambel to describe the proceedings as "a stroke party for people who write editorials." The band itself is not exactly full of striplings: Ambel is 28, Kempner 32, Drummer Frank Funaro 28, Bass Guitarist Manny Caiati 31. But the Del-Lords have steeped themselves eye-high in rock irreverence. This is, after all, a group that named itself after a director of Three Stooges comedies (Del Lord), and is delighted to introduce a song about the downside of urban gentrification with the war whoop, "Die, yuppies, die!"

The Del-Lords, together since early 1982, get much of their grit from the streets of New York City's East Village, where they mostly live and frequently play. The East Village harbored punk and the new wave rock scenes, and the area remains a fertile field for cross influences among art, fashion and music. The problem is escalating rents. The Del-Lords, three-quarters of whom are New York natives, logged a lot of time sharing a railroad flat where, according to Caiati, "group banquets of black beans and rice were a way of life." Now, in the old neighborhood, Kempner says that "last week's Laundromat is this week's sushi joint."

Mean streets may make for great songs, but they also require a lot of fretting over the basics. On their first "spit-and-a-prayer-type tour," the band worried about rustling up enough money for cheeseburgers. Today, musing over a recording job, modest perks like takeout meals delivered to the studio are still a consideration. "We are all below the poverty level," says Kempner. "We have had some outside jobs," Caiati recalls, adding with a touch of pride, "and we've all been fired from them." "You can do what you want with your life," is the way Kempner puts it. "We're just trying to live that. We pay the price. We accept the consequences."

In every song he writes, Kempner looks out for "where the lifeline is, where the heart is. Then I follow it." Just now, the Del-Lords' lifeline is on the edge, and the excitement of their music comes straight from that hungry heart that Bruce Springsteen sang about. Kempner is worried that in a time when Michael Jackson gets a $10 million promo deal from Pepsi and major companies underwrite rock concerts, Big Business "has finally discovered the selling power of rock 'n' roll. I don't know if the music's ever going to be the same." The Del-Lords are a solid bet for a band that will always stay hungry, even with all the takeout they can handle.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York