Guys and Dolls: Rick and the Fairlanes - Danger (7 May 1993)

 

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Issued in 1959, the instrumental Danger was the only credited release for Rick Allen and his group, the Fairlanes. Curiously, they were not the only American group going by that name at the time. Over in Alabama, another group called The Fairlanes would go on to release a handful of singles between 1960-62, and to add a further level of confusion, they included a Rick of their own - Rick Hall, who would go on to work as a songwriter, producer and studio owner in Muscle Shoals. And to add a further layer of mystery, in the mid-1980s, another group called The Fairlanes, supported Bruce Springsteen at a 1987 concert in New Jersey. This was a band which featured Ernest Carter, who had played drums for Springsteen’s E Street Band in 1974. As to why Fairlane was so common as a band name*, this was probably due to the ubiquity and coolness of the car of the same name, which was marketed by Ford between 1955 and 1970.

Rick and the Fairlanes - by which I mean Rick Allen’s group and not Rick Hall’s group, do keep up…- hailed from New England and owed their spot on Peel’s playlist for this show to Danger’s inclusion on the compilation album, The Raging Teens Volume 2, which was part of a four volume set of “Wild New England Rock’n’Roll”  by various bands from the 50s and 60s, issued by Norton Records between 1992 and 2004.

I think that the track was recorded in reverse. Not in an I’m Only Sleeping lead guitar solo style, but the different parts of the song seem to tell the tale of the narrative in reverse. What’s the narrative in an instrumental, though? Well, for me, the song is called Danger, and opens with a suitably gloomy snippet of Chopin’s Funeral March, which implies that the danger caused someone to die, and if we follow the theory that 99% of 1950s rock’n’roll tunes are about one of girls, dances or cars, then the cause of death was a car crash. That covers the opening 9 seconds of the track, what we can establish from the remaining 126 seconds of music is that the final drive was a hell of ride. It’s packed with joyous screams, driving guitar, delirious saxophone and red hot piano. You can feel the wind in the hair, the liquor bottle being passed around and the female passenger planting a big kiss on the driver’s lips as they reach the highway. The reverse motif continues to work given that the closing drum fill sounds like someone slamming a car door shut. 

There is an alternative reading that could be floated, to say that Danger is actually a tune with religious connotations. The music after the funeral march could be the soul springing forth to Heaven…or maybe diving straight down to Hell so as to give itself to the Devil’s music for eternity.

It’s a wonderful record, and I bet it went down a storm whenever they played it live.

Video courtesy of Danger - Topic.

*And this is even before we start to consider other similarly named groups from the same period such as the Texan doo-wop group or the late 1960s folk group, who had one particularly brilliantly named song, which it wouldn’t be difficult to imagine Peel playing on Top Gear, in one of his more jaundiced moods.