Skip to main content

Straight Outa Compton (Prequel): “The Cisco Kid” by War



They started out in 1962 as The Creators, and in 1968 changed their name to Nightshift when they became the backing band for Deacon Jones, the great Rams/Chargers/Redskins defensive end who fancied himself as a singer. About a year later they were recruited by old-school record producer Jerry Goldstein and ex-Animals singer Eric Burdon to form War. With Burdon up front they had a good deal of success (“Spill The Wine”); Jimi Hendrix’s last appearance on stage, the night before his death, was with the band at Ronnie Scott’s. Then Burdon left the band mid-tour due to ill-health and War proceeded on their own to become one of the smarter responders to the gauntlet that Sly Stone had laid down.

The World Is A Ghetto was America’s biggest-selling album of 1973 – its demographic was largely black and Hispanic, and this was supremely refreshing in the middle of the white, middle-class, introspective world of Laurel Canyon; if anything, the multiracial, multicultural and socio-political set-up of War was a far more accurate and comprehensive picture of what early seventies Los Angeles was really like, despite what the segregationist nature of seventies FM rock radio might prefer you to believe.

“The Cisco Kid” was the album’s opening track and first and bigger single and certainly helped win them the Hispanic crossover vote. Ostensibly a tribute to the fifties television series which depicted two Robin Hood-style desperadoes on a mission to do justice to the poor and fight against The Man – although the show’s star Duncan Renaldo was actually Romanian, the titular hero was immediately perceived and received as Hispanic – the song rolls on in a seductively patient mid-paced manner, cleverly altering its arrangement with every sung/chanted line. Its funk sneaks into your backbone. The song’s tale, however, has a much wider subtext; on examination, it is clear that it is really about the fight against institutional racism. No wonder it doesn’t get revived in the newly and cruelly divided world of 2018.

Date Record Made Number Two: 28 April 1973
Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 2
Record At Number One: “Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree” by Tony Orlando And Dawn
UK Chart Position: None

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

“I Would Have Thought In The Middle Of The Atlantic In The Middle Of The Night That Rockets Must Mean Trouble”: “I’m Not In Love” by 10cc

"watching for night, with absinthe eye cocked on the lone, late, passer-by." (Sylvia Plath, "Prospect," 1956) This story begins in 1954, before most people had really recognised anything called rock, and a pop record which is half-perfect. That record, which stayed at number one in our charts for ten weeks, was “Cara Mia” by David Whitfield with Mantovani and his Orchestra and Chorus. Now, Whitfield was never the most subtle of singers and his in-your-face bellowing is somewhat distracting – it is significant that he was the first British reality media star (not from television, because at that time Opportunity Knocks was only broadcast on Radio Luxembourg) since his climactic high C at the end of “Cara Mia” is like a display of gymnastics, or an athletic field event; can he do that triple loop or throw that javelin beyond the stadium? It proves that technical prowess can often render itself unlistenable. But the magic here lies in the extraordinary ...

Threads Of Alligator Lizards In The Air: “Purple Rain” by Prince and The Revolution

The original idea was for a country-style collaboration with Stevie Nicks, to whom Prince sent a ten-minute instrumental backing track, asking her to come up with some lyrics. However, Nicks was overwhelmed by what she heard and feared that the task was too much for her to take on, so the song was reworked in rehearsal with The Revolution, utilising Wendy Melvoin’s guitar phrasing as a new guideline. The song appears to have existed before the film; Purple Rain the movie is best described as lucid hokum, but its soundtrack changed the atoms which constituted “pop,” far more so than much ostensibly radical music of the period. For many of that decade’s generation, Purple Rain the soundtrack was “our” Ziggy Stardust – better conceived, performed and produced in every way – and the title song, which closes the album, was “our” “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.” It is such a patient epic, the song, and about a lot of things, and people – each of the verses addresses a different su...

A Disaffection, Or Fight Against Same: “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty

Even as a young teenager growing up in Lanarkshire, I was always listening out for music that sounded out of kilter, whether it was George Crumb’s Makrokosmos III (the closing section of which I heard on a Saturday afternoon on Radio 3) or anything which “irrupted” the top forty. From the first time that I heard “Baker Street” on the radio – I think it was Dougie Donnelly on Radio Clyde – I was immediately hooked, mentally noting that this song seemed to go as much against the grain of a standard pop record as anything coming out of punk or New Wave, and was probably just as angry, if not angrier. For forty years I harboured the notion – and this was from a time when visiting London, never mind living and working in it, was still a distant pipedream – that the song encapsulated the situation of the displaced Scotsman, marooned in a world he doesn’t really like or perhaps even understand. Make no mistake, this is undeniably a Scottish record, and seemingly all about someone...