“We were not trying to expand music. We were not trying to expand the vocabulary of music or the words or the subject matter or anything like that. We were trying to dig as deep a hole as we could to get into a blues-rock thing, made with a new view of the world.” (Charlie Pickett interview, Jim Camacho's Adventures in Songwriting).
The well of material that The Eggs were pulling from was evident from their first two singles on Open Records. The first featured a b-side of The Velvet Underground’s “White Light, White Heat.” The second, a cover of The Flamin’ Groovies’ “Slow Death.” But it wasn’t just a music style that the Eggs were pulling from on those records. It was a lifestyle.
Open Records was an offshoot business of Open Books and Records, an historically significant retail outlet in south Florida which strove to become something more. Initially, it seemed, they were a custom imprint for releasing Charlie Pickett and The Eggs records. There is, supposedly, a 12-inch EP by The Bobs (1981), but I’ve never seen one and no one is sharing it on YouTube if there is. Their only other LP after Live At The Button was a compilation of regional artists called The Land That Time Forgot. That was in 1982. A few Charlie Picket tracks were licensed to a European label in 1983 and there was a Charlie Pickett 12-incher in 1984 called Cowboy Junkie Au-Go-Go (later licensed to Safety Net Records as a bonus on the 1988 Peter Buck-produced Charlie Pickett & The MC3 CD, The Wilderness). Open Records had a shorter life span than Charlie Pickett’s career as a recording artist. The store, itself, lasted quite a bit longer, but eventually yielded to the market pressures that many independent book and record stores face. They closed in 1994.
The Wilderness was Charlie Pickett and guitarist Johnny Salton’s last stand together. Pickett would quit the business and become a lawyer. Salton, a truly great guitar player in his prime, would continue making records with The Psycho Daisies and chasing the Keith Richards myth. Salton would pass in 2010. Of the other members of the Eggs that appeared on Live At The Button, drummer Johnny Galway would precede Salton in death by 15 years. To the best of my knowledge, bassist Dave Froshnider still walks the planet. I don’t know that anyone ever expected long lives from the members of Charlie Pickett & The Eggs. They were a band full of junkies that scored their dope in the Overtown.
Overtown and Liberty City are the black neighborhoods in Miami that erupted into riot after the 1980 acquittal of four police officers involved in the beating death of a black salesman and former marine, after he ran a red light. In the words of the prosecutor at the trial, the police cracked his skull “like an egg.” The riots had an effect on the band beyond limiting their ability to score dope. Scoring dope in Overtown was a topic Froshnider had covered in a song written previous to the riots.
Live At The Button is an album of ferocious live rock ‘n’ roll. It’s an album that hit like a ton of bricks when I first heard it and it hasn’t spent much time out of playing rotation since. It’s steeped in the type songs that draw from the same well as their previous singles. But there’s more. Much more. Five songs into the record, the band slows down the tempo for the first and last time. It’s a cover of Manfred Mann’s “Mister You’re a Better Man Than I.”
“Could you condemn a man
If your faith he doesn't hold?
Say the color of his skin
Is the color of his soul?
Or could you say if men
For king and country all must die?
Well, mister you’re a better man than I”
Manfred Mann was one of the first rock/pop musicians to openly hold an anti-apartheid political view. He left his native South Africa in 1961 in protest and immigrated to England.
The final statement on Live At The Button, however, is an original called “Phantom Train.” It’s a dream sequence in which Pickett is riding on a train with dead poets and authors. Sitting in the back with Edgar Allan Poe and Aleister Crowley is Annabel Lee, a character from a Poe poem by the same name. “And she’s looking at me.” “Annabell Lee” is the last poem written by Poe and it explores deep love and death.
But there’s another passenger on the train, Arthur McDuffie. Arthur McDuffie is not a poet or author, nor a character from any of their writings. McDuffie was the black man that was murdered in the incident that led to the Miami riots of 1980. McDuffie is the only person on the train that Pickett engages in conversation. McDuffie tells him that it’s “suicide” for a black man to show even the slightest lack of respect to police. It’s what has become known as “the talk” that many black men and women give to their children.
Live At The Button isn’t just a great rock ‘n’ roll record. It’s a reminder, to this day, that Black Lives Matter is a long overdue movement.
[Note: The prosecutor in the trial of the four policemen charged in McDuffie’s murder was Janet Reno. The case was torpedoed from the start, when Reno failed to challenge an all male, all white jury.]
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