I didn’t discover Rollins Band until they supported Red Hot Chili Peppers back in 1991. When his subsequent End Of Silence album come out for me it was life changing, it was utter perfection to my ears. I bought up some back catalogue at this point but the Henrietta Collins and the Wifebeating Childhitters EP (Rollins’ 1987 pseudonym) did not do anything for me, another record I bought was live which I was unimpressed with and on the same day I also bought this.
Unfortunately for me that vinyl copy of Hard Volume is still my only copy and from the day I bought it the opening track, Hard, has been scratched to buggery, right up until the final five seconds or so. It’s so frustrating. I didn’t take it back as I’d never seen it on sale before or after for that matter and in the past when I had bought scratched vinyl from this particular shop back the owner was such a bastard about it he made me feel like I was ruining his business.
I consider Hard Volume a dry run for The End Of Silence, everything I love about the Rollins Band is there, it’s simply in a raw form compared to what was to come. The production is rough but bright enough that Andrew Weiss’ incredible bass playing bursts through the speakers and although Rollins drifted from his ‘I’m a hard bastard, me’ style of lyric writing later on, for Hard Volume there is still plenty of mucho posturing, which comes across heavy metal camp. It’s great. How I wish I could listen to Hard, with a title like that it has to be at best four minutes of brutal pain laid down on plastic or at worst brilliantly unintentionally hilarious. Either way it’s win win.
From what I can listen to Planet Joe is my most favourite. The drum and bass thump in unison as Henry screams “I don’t need no friend to tell me who my friends are, I don’t need some pig, to tell me what the rules are” it gets me every time. If you want a singer then look elsewhere but if you are looking for a man so full of rage that when he performs you can see the veins literally pump out of his neck then Mr. Rollins is the man for you. In the final two minutes of Down And Away he screams, shouts, rasps and almost croons the title of the song for a full two minutes, utterly convincing the listener of the despair he has gone through to get to the point in his life where he feels the need to pen the words “I’m a prisoner trapped in life, I am the loser in the game I play, I am the gar*age that I throw away, I’m alone in the place I stay.” It doesn’t sound like an easy place to come back from but I for one am so glad he did.
Whilst trying to find something of this record from youtube i actually found “Hard”. It’sjust as great as i always thought it would be.
lostinrock 