It’s always interesting finding out what punkers do when they’re all grown up. On occasion, it’s pretty said. Day labor and menial jobs aren’t fun for anyone, but when your earliest years were filled with beer and gigging around the States, the stasis levied upon oneself by a nine to five has to be something just sort of unbearable.
More than a few folks make it and somehow wade through the music industry in whatever role – sometimes folks even wind up heading a major label or work as a talent agent of sorts. Even as both of those posts seem distasteful, it’s probably better than serving fries.
Some folks remain engaged with a scene for the entirety of their lives – and while scenes are a gross and awful thing most times, being included in one might be a decent thing to experience, at least that’s what I can surmise.
This last road is apparently what Jordan Kratz wound up doing. And even though his roots in the Transplants place him firmly in an East Coast punker tradition, his move to Portland hasn’t distanced him from the music he loved during the formative years of his upbringing.
Back in the seventies, around Boston, the same story plays in as in whatever town you might be reading this from. Everyone’s tired of overblown rock stuff, someone stumbles on those Detroit bands, eventually gets a whiff of NYC, Cleveland and whatever other groups are kicking around and starts their own band. Kratz’s story is roughly the same. He just happened to start the Transplants, which eventually counted La Peste’s drummer Roger Tripp.
Of course, if his rhythm section were the most notable thing about the entire endeavor, this wouldn’t be worth writing – or reading. Instead, the Transplants solidified a set of original tunes and a few choice covers while briefly playing the Northeast.
Tracks like “Police State” and “Suicidal Tendencies” truck in traditional punk topics while the music is somewhere between hard-rock stuffs and the Dictators, making a less garagey DMZ an easy reference point.
What’s telling, though, are the few covers tossed in on Police State, a collection of studio and live work, from the band’s short career. Included is the Sonics’ “Strychnine” as well as the Eleveators “Levitation.” What’s interesting, though, is the fact that both covers wind up sounding like a combinations of the source material. Moreover, Kratz had some chops – more so than a great man other players recording at the time.
It’d be difficult to say that folks outside of the Boston milieu are going to find the Transplants to be an indispensible group. But it’s probably better than a significant portion of what was going on in your hometown around ’76.