Black Randy and his Metrosquad: Punk’s first supergroup
When you hear the word ‘supergroup’, what comes to mind? Millionaire white dudes in their 40s? Tasteful blazers? Concerts spent putting up with the new stuff in the vain hope they play songs from their old bands? Well, maybe not anymore. Boygenius did some serious work improving the reputation of famous folks going for a jam together. Not just because they actually had some decent tunes but also because they poked fun at the very idea of the supergroup.
From the name of the group downwards, Boygenius were all there to puncture the egos of those arrogant enough to call their creative union a super anything. However, what if there was another band who did pretty much exactly that nearly half a century earlier? One that was just too filthy, funny and acerbic to achieve anything like the stadium-slaying success of Lucy, Julien, etc? Let us introduce you to an LA scenester who did just that by the name of Black Randy (John Morris to his mother).
By day, he was a telemarketer hawking office supplies. By night he was a veteran scenester of the LA punk scene whose sense of humour and almost preternatural ability to piss people off—he was, after all, a telemarketer, as much as his hippie-ish look of Hawaiian shirts and pork pie hats did not match. His first impact was behind the scenes, putting together the label Dangerhouse Records and releasing the first singles of ‘X’ and ‘The Avengers’. However, Randy was made for the stage and in 1977, he tapped up members of The Randoms, The Eyes, and The Go-Gos to form Black Randy and his Metrosquad.
Nothing too out of the ordinary, except that Randy’s band wasn’t a punk band. Sure, they frequented the scene and played on the same bills as Germs and The Weirdos. After they’d finished their set, however, Randy and his Metrosquad would come on, who’d launch into a cover of James Brown’s ‘Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)’. It’s also worth mentioning here that Black Randy was as black as Black Francis.
In true So-Cal punk fashion, the Metrosquad were something of a perversion of what people were expecting, and not just because they had multiple songs about porn movies. The band was pretty slick funk/soul at their core, and when they did rock, it was less The Screamers and more early Who. More than anything, though, the band were an outlet for Randy’s sense of humour. Case in point, their snappy little number ‘Idi Amin’, which professes Randy’s love for, you guessed it, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Or ‘I Wannabe a Nark’, in which Randy takes revenge against the LA scenesters who derided him by becoming a cop.
Their live set was captured on their lone studio album, 1979’s phenomenally titled ‘Pass The Dust, I Think I’m Bowie’. Not that you ever could have heard about it at the time. It was barely released in the scene itself and ran out of print by the time So-Cal punk was completely overhauled by the overwhelmingly serious likes of Black Flag. The band staggered on until 1982, when Randy’s crippling heroin addiction brought everything to a crashing halt. Tragically, Randy himself would pass away from complications relating to AIDS a few years later.
However, if the internet’s good for one thing, it’s preservation. For years, the only clue to Black Randy’s legacy lay in the twisted humour of the Dead Kennedys, but today, no matter how out of print the record may be, his legacy still stands. Give the record a spin and raise a can to a true provocateur.
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