Condition Red. The Goodees. 1967. Hip.

The death of childhood innocence is a necessary requisite for initiation into the rock and roll experience. Our passage into adolescence, marked by the hormonal flush, advances another tick on the global death clock, and an unidentifiable terror somewhere in the glandular regions of the earth’s core is released, sending an orgasmic shiver along the spine of children learning for the first time the excitement of self, the gift of our destructive inner power, the imagination. The Goodees, a Memphis girl group trio, released their single Condition Red after winning a local talent contest held by Stax as part of the inauguration of their offshoot label Hip in 1967. Condition Red is a slightly less melodramatic reworking of the Shangri-Las’ Leader Of The Pack, the great mid-sixties ballad of a young motorcyclist’s final ride, memorialized by his girlfriend Betty, whose parents martyrized Jimmy after forbidding her to see him. The concept of teenage rebellion, the pivot around which girl group dynamics is spun, is the shock-proof subtext of both songs; it’s the primal style of both doomed cyclists, the unpolished animal magnetism that both bereft teenaged girls grieve in lyric unison. A good part of what gives Leader Of The Pack its lasting strength is its unremitting appeal as camp icon. All rock and roll is of course camp, but there are certain records—from Hound Dog to Purple Rain—that survive as archetypes of the style; Condition Red does not. It’s too sensible in its recreation of the circumstantial events that lead to its protagonist’s death; it doesn’t overflow with an excess of emotion. And its romanticization of teen rebellion, though intact, isn’t quite the commercial enshrinement of adolescent hysteria that Leader Of The Pack asks its listeners to acknowledge—an enshrinement that the Damned would go on to appreciate when they quoted Leader Of The Pack’s opening lyric in their own landmark record, New Rose. By tenderly modifying the focal point of teen death and its reverberations from the scandalous and the shocking—“look out! look out! look out!—to the humane, the Goodees trace the long, perplexing travails of the rock and roll experience itself. Two of the decade’s most historically devastating political assassinations had already taken place, a third would follow the next year in the Goodees’ hometown, Memphis. The popular face of American rebellion had shifted from James Dean to Malcolm X and Che Guevara, and its totem from the motorcycle to the automatic firearm. Rock and roll had joined its founding nation’s headlong race to the abyss.




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