With a name like Crippled Pilgrims, it has to be good!
Perhaps, just as in the classic "Saturday Night Live" sketch that riffs on the longtime Smucker's advertising slogan ("With a name like Smucker's it has to be good!") with products such as "Painful Rectal Itch," "Nose Hair" and "Death Camp," early '80s D.C. band Crippled Pilgrims figured using a somewhat offensive-sounding name might distinguish them from the crowd.
They certainly sounded different from the artists that were topping the charts in 1984, such as Prince and The Revolution, Tina Turner, Culture Club and Lionel Richie. But they also were out of step with the well-known hardcore bands in their hometown, including Minor Threat, Bad Brains and Government Issue.
Sometimes jangly like contemporaries R.E.M., other times all guitar wanky like Television and yet also known to veer into psychedelia like The Dream Syndicate, singer-guitarist Jay Moglia, bassist Mitch Parker, guitarist Scott Wingo and drummer Dan Joseph put out only one EP and one full-length album in their brief career.
I had never heard of them before flipping through records one day at my favorite record store, Capitol Records (R.I.P.) in Hartford, back in the mid-'80s. The record jacket for Head Down - Hand Out is simple, but the bold lines and lowercase script caught my eye. As with other albums I picked out completely at random -- and which I've written about here and here -- I simply decided the album looked interesting, and I hoped for a return on my investment.
And I wasn't disappointed, especially with Wingo's fretwork.
"Black and White," Head Down -- Hand Out's opener, sets the tone, as Wingo pours forth a hypnotic lead before Moglia can open his mouth. The lyrics aren't all that deep, despite Moglia's serious tone: "When you don't see right / and you're off the track / when you don't see white / you don't see black." But I've never been a guy to care too much about lyrical content, as long as the music holds my attention.
And I'll admit that if Wingo's leads throughout "Black and White" and the band's entire catalog didn't sparkle so much, I wouldn't be writing about Crippled PIlgrims. Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not saying Crippled Pilgrims is on par with Television, or other noodle-heavy bands such as Dinosaur Jr. or Built to Spill.
But Wingo's (do you suppose people made fun of his name because of this?) fluid leads and noodling entice the listener and hint at darkness and mystery.
The second track, "Under the Ladder," is much mellower and more folk-rocky. It's in the same vein as Transformer's "You're Everywhere That I'm Not."
On "People Going Nowhere" the band gets a little bit funky -- but not too much, 'cuz they don't wanna confuse those college boys -- but once again it's Wingo's guitar flavorings throughout that drive the song.
"Out of Hand" is Wingo's biggest showcase. His fretwork is never showy (wow, when I started writing this, I didn't realize it was going to turn into a love letter to Scott Wingo). I like Wingo's licks because they don't seem all that difficult, although I'm sure they're more intricate than I realize. As someone who's played guitar for more than 30 years but never evolved beyond a good rhythm player who can play only the most basic leads, I appreciate guitar work that sounds as though if I practiced regularly, I could copy it.
"Dissolving" is another moody, somewhat downbeat song that, like all the songs on this EP, echoed my late-teen/early-20 angst about girls, college, the future, trying to figure out who I was, etc.
The mini-album wraps up with "A Side He'll Never Show," on which Wingo shines for the last minute or so, while Moglia plaintively wails, "It's just a side you will never show," a line that validated my own shyness and unwillingness to share too many details of my private life (traits that carry through to this day, although to a lesser degree).
I'll admit that all these years later the album doesn't work for me as well as it did when I bought it. Part of the reason I liked the album (and the subsequent Under Water) was that nobody else knew about them or cared. I lived in Connecticut and went to college in New Hampshire, far from Crippled Pilgrims' home base in the D.C. area.
I still listen to Head Down -- Hand Out and Under Water, perhaps more for nostalgia's sake these days, than for how much the music moves me. But still, I score this one a hit.
I couldn't locate any videos from the EP, but here's "Down Here" from the full length.
And here's a song by Rambling Shadows, which features Wingo and Moglia, along with a former member of Velvet Monkeys. The music is less subtle than the Pilgrims, fer sure. OK, they're a bar band, and Wingo's solos don't shine like they used to. But here it is anyway.
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