TOP Tower records, July/August 1998

RANCID
They may rip off the Specials but not their fans
by Jason Arnopp.


	"I never really thought of it as a pilgrimage, but that's 
pretty true, actually. When we went down to Jamaica, hangin out with 
Buju Banton, it probably was a kind of pilgrimage. You wouldn't have
got that in a LA studio."
	Bassist Matt Freeman is thinking back over the almost Def
Leppardian stretch of time it has taken to record Rancid fourth album, 
'Life won't wait'. Over the course of a year, the quartet previously 
responsible for the marvellous likes of 'Time bomb' roamed the US like
some kind of nomadic Mad Max mutoids. They recorded at home in San 
Francisco, in LA, New York, New Orleans and the aforementioned home of 
their beloved ska. "All those places have different energies and 
feelings," says Matt Freeman, in a sudden spiritual outburst. 
	And you fancied a bit of travelling, right? "We might as well 
enjoyed ourselves!" he laughs. "It just made it more interesting than 
locking ourselves in a studio and pounding it out. On 'Cash, Culture 
And Violence', we used a take where i was really pissed off. You can 
hear the strings popping against the fretboard."
	'Life won't wait' sounds like an energised celebretion, for two
reasons: (a) Its 22 tracks run over an hour, which suggests they didn't
want to stop -you'd call it the 'Use Your Illusion' of punk if you 
didn't fear a deft upper-cut from Freeman; and (b) There are myriad 
special guests, from Mighty Mighty Bosstones singer Dicky Barett, to 
Agnostic Front singer Roger Miret, to dancehall kingpin Banton, to... 
let Freeman tell you himself.
	"The Specials, man! It was really funny. After we recorded 
'Hooligans' with them, I played the song to a friend and said, 'Okay, 
okay, listen to this! Who does this sound like?'. He said, 'You got 
that Specials thing down! How did you do that?!'. And i said, 'It is 
the Specials!."
	Freeman goes on to recall meeting Specials bassist Horace 
Panter -a man he'd frankly ripped off blind. "Especially the first 
Specials record, when i was learning to play," he admits. "When you 
meet someone like that, you're fully prepared for the guy to kick your 
ass. But he was like, 'Oh, i know you ripped me off!'. He could have 
said, 'Listen you punk-i worked hard on that shit!'."
	Even when it comes to tour anecdotes, the terminally nice Mr 
Freeman is unable to deliver the kind of reckless, speed-addled, 
booze-whipped bollocks you'd expect from a man who co-founded seminal 
punks Operation Ivy in 1987. 
	"When i used to go and see bands, sometimes they'd be fighting,
or fucked up, whatever. I'd be like, 'i'm only gonna see this band once 
a year, maybe, and they suck!'."
	Ska/punk with his brothels creepers firmly planted on the 
ground? Yes.