| The Leeches
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The Leeches live on The Friday Club TV program of December 18, 1987 (click image to play). Freedom Street (3.0M) A cover of a Ken Boothe original in MP3 format |
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In Their Own Words and Music: They Suck in the Eighties |
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It was the Reagan Era. A time of rampant greed...
...a time when the cold war was reaching its climax. President Bonzo was announcing to the
world on the radio how he was commencing bombing on the evil horde. The atomic clock
reached one minute to midnight--a position it had reached only once before--during the
Cuban Missile Crisis. The Moral Majority thrived. "Greed is good" became the war
cry of Wall Street, laying waste to the federal reserve system to insure money ripped off
from savings and loans; laying waste to the SEC, which did not have the manpower to stop
the rampant corruption and cheating on Wall Street. Labor unions were being clubbed into
submission, not by the bats of the Pinkertons but by the long arms of the Executive office
of our country and the lethargy of the people who benefited all those years because of the
unions.
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Campuses across the nation were silent. A new breed of student was in the
schools: the business student. What happened in the Sixties would not happen here, no.
Here would be an ignorance of what was going on in the world. Blinders. "Who cares if
the university has money invested in South Africa, as long as my parents can afford to put
me in school." This was the time of apathy. Many of those who had been liberal throughout the Sixties and Seventies believed that they should own the airwaves and the culture. The bottom line became the mantra. The Nike shoe commercial appropriated The Beatles' "Revolution", forever changing the face of the "counter"-culture; this truly was a revolution, and yes, it was televised, it's just that too many people were too complacent to notice. The counterculture was dead, long live the Baby Boom generation and everything they held sacred. |
It was in this context that The Leeches existed, politically. Although it has been said by many that music and politics should not mix, The Leeches believed that not only should they be mixed, they should be shaken together, to blend in as a whole. The Leeches came out of the same sonic school that spawned MC5, The Clash, The Sex Pistols, Gang of Four and that would later spawn Public Enemy. Yeah, The Leeches were college kids, they were lower middle class, they had the money to buy their musical equipment, but THEY bought it with THEIR money, money they had worked hard for. They payed their own way through college. They weren't exactly poor, but they knew that life was hard for people.
Because of all these things, The Leeches did what they did. Like the Gleaners in Jamaica, who would read the day's headlines over the heartbeat rhythm of the Reggae sound to the people in the Dance Halls and the people in the streets, The Leeches tried to inform people. There were wars being waged, struggles encountered by people from all walks of life. The Leeches were not about preaching; they merely hoped that what a listener heard in a song might inspire that person to seek out the truth, get both sides of the story, and make up their own minds.
