Bar Band Supreme: Les Sans Culottes

- by Mike Morgan

When I was a young upstart back in South Africa, I had three wall posters in my bedroom at our family flat on Essenwood Road, Durban. One depicted John Carlos giving the Panther salute from the winner’s podium at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Another was of Julie Christie, all togged out in her Saturday night git-up a la the film “Billy Liar.” The third was a large photograph of an early manifestation of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. At the bottom of that poster, printed in large letters was the following, “The World’s Greatest Bar Band.” This was in 1975 and the album “Born to Run” was shaking up the rock and roll world, even in Durban. There was something very striking about that piece; it wasn’t just the attitude and pose of the band, arms folded, no smiles, the usual tough boy look...but it was the sheer audacity of the statement. The image and all that it conjured up never left me. What balls!

This led me to the big philosophical question that most greasers face, but hardly ever bother to answer, namely what makes a band a great bar band? Here’s my elementary take on philosophy. There are four kinds of questions in life. One would be “How do you boil water?” Another would be “How much money do you have in your pocket?” That’s the formal or empirical stuff. The third category is the what’s right and wrong dilemma, which sometimes doesn’t provide answers but instead stokes more fuel for thought. Finally, when one has grappled long and hard with number three, which is the bailiwick of philosophers, then one is prepared to answer question number four, which is the bar band poser. After all, some issues hold more gravitas than others. Accessability, relationship to the audience, showmanship, honesty, work ethics, soul and taste are all necessary criteria. The bottom line is that a good bar band entertains the stuffing out of working stiffs at a price they can afford.

Since those South African days, I have always been on the prowl to discover others who would contend for the title. Living in America for now almost thirty years, I have seen Bruce Springsteen and his entourage rule themselves out as a bar band. His music, as good and consistent as it always is, has nothing to do with this sad state of affairs. He is far too popular to play in a bar venue, and if he occasionally does, it’s always unannounced, something that most people find out about after the fact. So I had to look elsewhere. And for years, I knew I had the answer, not right for everyone, but right enough for me. The Iron City Houserockers, born out of Pittsburgh PA were it. Led by Joe Grushecky, himself a personal friend of Bruce Springsteen, the Iron City lads approached music with the same guts and bravado as their famous counterpart, but with one significant difference. They never moved out of the bar. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I and my pals saw them countless times, often traveling to the Pittsburgh area and the Rust Belt. A typical posting for a Joe Grushecky show would read something like this, “Live, Saturday Night...The Steelyard Inn...Route 3, Youngstown, Ohio...next to the Waterbed Store...8pm to 3 am...$5.” The Iron City Houserockers had won my award. They still might claim it, since they’re not dead yet. On those nights, the bar would be full of people that didn’t have much at all, but the music and a chance to have a few shots. The unpretentiousness of the environment was downright liberating. During that period, I was into the Egyptian Disco phase of ensemble wearing. At the Iron City Houserockers’ gigs, decked out like a pinball machine, I must have looked like the village blacksmith at the opening night of the big-city opera, so alien was my attire to the working uniform of plaid shirts and John Deere hats. It didn’t matter. We were all there for the same reason.

But with the waning of youth comes the search for things a little closer to the home front. In 1997, Lurch Magazine cohort, Jug Band crooner and close friend Bill Carney informed us in our local that he was going to start a French rock band. Inspired by Serge Gainsbourg, and all of the cool that came with that stuff, Bill was on a mission. His band was to be called Les San Culottes, the people without knee breeches, a Jacobin term to describe the activists during the French Revolution. A year later, he had it together and LSC played their first gig at Freddy’s Bar, Brooklyn, USA. Almost ten years later, with six albums and so many bar gigs to their credit that they are too numerous to chronicle, they are still at it. In my little universe of checks and balances, they have a shot at the title. In fact, I believe they are my new champions. So I’ll go out on a limb and say it. Les San Culottes is my world’s greatest bar band. Here’s why and a few yarns to along with it too.

Firstly, LSC always had a vision, important in any artistic endeavor. Given that there have never been any band members who are fluent French speakers, the project always had a lampoonish side. But it is also committed to putting out a high quality product. The combination of not taking oneself seriously enough to become pompous and self-righteous, together with the chutzpah and nerve to produce clever rocking songs is a winning one in the bar band competitive stakes. At first, the group was just plain funny to see, all gussied up in frilly shirts, ridiculous sequined outfits with berets and black and white swag tops (do you have a license for this minkee?), the women singers dressed to the nines cooing and shakin’ all over up on stage, Bill mugging it up in the middle of it all, and each band member with a ludicrous moniker such as Clermont Ferrand, Kit Kat Le Noir, Johnny Dieppe, Julius Orange, Edith Pissoff and Max Gauche. But it didn’t take too long before all of this schtick, still extremely rib-tickling and entertaining to this day, was surpassed by the music itself, which in the words of the immortal critic is “fucking good mate.” Les Sans Culottes had morphed into something quite unexpected. They were no longer a cartoon and a cover band. They had become the real thing.


Bill writes most of the songs, and the band contributes to that process. He is the lead singer, there are two women singers, who either provide background harmonies or are featured as solo singers on certain songs. The music is supplied by a rhythm section of bass and drums, a guitarist or two, and a keyboard player. There is a continuous turnover of personnel, itself a story of epic proportions and malarkey. But central to the operation is Bill Carney, who has kept the ship afloat. He even had to take former band members with stupid axes to grind to court for attempting to steal the name, start a second faux-French rock and roll band, and claim ownership of the idea, which is and always has been Bill’s. Bill won the day and the spoilers were relegated to tribute band status, without being allowed to use the name Les Sans Culottes. Thus, the group’s history is not without it’s own soap opera high-jinks. This merely adds to its infamy and growing mythical status. Crikey, how many combos have had a bass player whose stepfather actually walked on the moon.

The music draws heavily from the sixties, a kind of French response to the British invasion. Listening to LSC one can hear the influence of the Kinks, and the big girl group operations of that era a la Dusty Springfield, and the Ronettes, in a sort of stripped down Phil Spector wall-of-sound arrangement. The guitar rockers bring back memories of Detroit’s MC5, the Motor City Five, whose notorious live album “Kick Out The Jams, Motherfuckers!” still plays often on this writer’s turntable. There’s even a touch of Parliament Funkadelic to round it all off. It’s a veritable mish-mash of the sound that used to make listening to the radio an enjoyable exercise, when the Top Ten was actually comprised of decent music, not codswallop.

The songs themselves are riotously hilarious, skewed digs at the French take on the world. “Ecole du Merde” (the School of Shit) speaks for itself. “S.O.S. Elefants” is borrowed from an idea by the French folk, political songwriter, Georges Brassens. He was France’s answer to Phil Ochs. He used gorillas, but Bill and company sing about a herd of elephants who bust out of the zoo and roam the city in search of corrupt politicians and hacks, an anthem to rogue justice, Hannibal style. “No Merci, Oncle Sam” is the French rejection of U.S. political hegemony and cultural imperialism, with reference to the U.S. being the “Economic Taliban” of the globe. This has always been a favorite starter for the band, especially during the Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld junta years. This ain’t just shake your booty nonsense. It’s clever enough that the frat boys won’t understand it but still tap their feet, the hipsters will feel like their getting their geld’s worth, whilst the more astute members of the audience will dig the joke and rattle their walkers.

Bill is also a master of repartee, delivering one-liners and sarcastic barbs from the stage in-between songs in his broken French patois. One memory was at the “Celebrate Back to Brooklyn Festival” in the summer of 2001. Arlo Guthrie was to be crowned the King of Brooklyn that day, and Les Sans Culottes performed earlier in an outdoor park in Dumbo, in-between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges down on the river front. Dead pan, Bill announced that upward of a million people were expected and that “the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was closed man,” evoking Arlo’s famous comment, memorialized at Woodstock thirty-two years earlier. All seven of us who were old enough to remember were thoroughly amused. Another was a passing reference to shopping on the Rue De Chanal (Canal street in Chinatown, which is actually full of imitation luxury items), hardly the top-shelf answer to gold card consumerism on the Champs Elysee or uptown on Fifth Avenue. LSC gigs are packed with these sorts of quips and swipes, and if you blink or have to go the can, you miss ‘em, but they’re part of the whole sublime package.

Les Sans Culottes have come a long way. I remember back in 1997, when Bill brought in their first demo-tape to O’Connor’s bar, one quiet Sunday afternoon. Patrick O’Connor, the publican, dutifully played it and everybody tutted politely with comments like “not bad,” “hmmm,” or “how about that.” At the end of the bar was George M (now passed on), an extraordinary old punisher, himself a wealthy gin-swilling coot, who would rattle off these high-falutin’ non-sequiturs of gothic insufferability, in short a gigantic pain-in-the-ass. In his memory adorned in the men’s room of Freddy’s Bar, there is an arrow above the toilet pointing down to the bowl with the wall graffiti that reads “The George M Memorial Library.” Anyway, George M was his usual verbose, imposing self that afternoon, and, as he swayed on his seat and stirred his martini, he pontificated the following: “Ah, the French...The French. They seduced Eisenhower you know. The wine, the women, the food, Eisenhower was completely duped by the French.” This, of course, prompted Pat O’Connor, whose hero was always General Douglas MacArthur, to enquire as to whether Eisenhower himself was a spy. From such humble yet earth-shattering gibberish was Les Sans Culottes introduced to the masses.

And they are still doing it, which is not just testimony to their staying-power, but also a recognition that they are getting the job done. If you live around NYC, look up the local music press, you’ll see their name appear regularly in the listings. And get on down to the establishment that night. They play in bars, music clubs, outside French restaurants on Bastille Day, they’ve even played a few times at the Windows Of The World on the 107th floor of the vaporized skyscraper (before that happened, naturally). You’ll get your Euros worth and hell, you might even wind up agreeing with me that they deserve to join the ranks of former Black Panther athletes, beautiful English movie stars and Jersey song smiths, all of whom festooned my wall way down south a long time ago. Viva Les Sans Culottes!

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January, 2007