H.R. & the Human Rights

H.R. & The Human Rights band performed what may have been the strangest concert I have ever participated in on Tuesday, November 2, 2010, at the U Street Music Hall. After two hours of reggae and house music from the DJs, around 50 people had gathered in the cavernous basement space around two long bars. The band came out first and asked if people were ready for some live music. The enthusiastic “Yes!” from the crowd was maybe the most energetic moment of the evening. H.R. then waddled out, wearing a Human Rights hooded sweatshirt. However he was most certainly wearing what could only have been a thick, inflatable life jacket or a substantial bullet-proof vest underneath his sweatshirt. I waited for the punch-line, but his unnatural girth went unacknowledged the entire night. The bassist for the band had a knowing smirk on his face the entire time, likewise promising some revelation that never came. The keyboard player, named Sven or something Nordic, was wearing a sweatshirt of the controversial D.C. band Iron Cross, whose moniker was “Hated and Feared Since 1983.” Iron Cross has been accused of being neo-Nazi, “white power” advocates. H.R. and the guitarist being African-Americans, this confused me a little.

The drummer looked like the actor Karl Urban in Lord of the Rings, with long dark hair, a swirly short beard, and a fierce, feline face. His arms and legs were heavily tattooed and he wore a t-shirt with Andy Warhol-style reproductions of a figure whose identity I could not decipher. The guitarist was the least notable of the bunch, not in terms of musical chops but in failing to match the odd grouping of the men around him. He wore a red t-shirt under an unbuttoned, white, collared shirt.

The music was heavily reggae with none of the sing-along communalism inspired by Bob Marley’s best songs. H.R.’s debt to and obsession with Marley has been detailed before, but he now plays as a meek shadow of his vibrant elder. Lennon-esque, wire-rimmed glasses adorned his face, and a thick beard drooped down onto the unnatural flatness of his artificial chest. Four or five songs into the music, I realized that H.R.’s guitar—which he did not play in the early years of Bad Brains, although perhaps in the later, I don’t know—was not amplified. He ran his fingers up and down the scales, strummed along, and soloed a bit, but never could the audience hear him. Between songs about half way through the set, H.R. gestured to the sound engineer and said, “Man, you’d do that to me?” He turned his own amplifier up, giving us a tiny bit of presence, but he was again totally inaudible throughout the rest of the set. It left me with several questions: did H.R. know that his guitar was turned off, and did he just like to hold it and play it for his own sense of well-being? Does he know, perhaps, that he is not a good guitarist and should not be amplified, but holding a guitar gives him some feeling of security? Or, more cringe-inducing, has the band secretly acknowledged that H.R. can’t play worth shit and that he is so out of his mind that he might not even notice if they turn his guitar all the way down? Is there some in his monitor or in the other band members’ monitors? If so, does it screw their rhythm up with how terribly he plays?

On to H.R.’s state of mind: it appears to be enfeebled. He seems to be going for the Rasta-Man vibe, care-free and loving of all, respecting the Bible and preaching goodness. At one point he went over about twenty times the spelling of the Good Book. “B-I-B-L-E, Bible. Read your B-I-B-L-E, Bible. The Bible, Bible.” However he comes off not as a kind-hearted yogi but instead just a little senile. He forgot which songs to play and started to walk off-stage several times, but the band would call him back and he’d say, “Alright, we’ll do one more for Sven” (or whatever his name was). This was not the orchestrated encore that ends most live shows; this truly seemed to be a case of inter-band indecision. The band also at one point tried to play an old Bad Brains song, “Attitude,” at the original warp-speed, but H.R. stopped them, shouting on the mic, “No, no, it’s reggae man, reggae beat.” He told the crowd, “When you get to be older you appreciate different styles.” The few other moments when the band neared Bad Brains’ hardcore roots, it was clear that that was the style the crowd had been hoping for. An over-zealous mosh pit sprang into being after the first chords of another louder track, but it quickly dissipated. There was one notable straight-edge punk, home-drawn X’s on his hands, 30s, cue-bald, small and skinny. Another mosher was wearing a big puffy Misfits sweatshirt, and his girlfriend had her white-bleached hair softly gelled up into a faux-hawk.

The selection of tracks was illuminated after a conversation I had with a young man who grew up in Falls Church in the 1990s. He said that a reunion show of Bad Brains about 2 years ago involved a hardcore set, a reggae set, and then another hardcore set. It’s clear that H.R.’s interests remain in reggae, with the rift that originally separated Bad Brains still dividing H.R.’s musical direction from Dr. Know’s.

The guitarist of Human Rights shredded a bit in the vein of Dr. Know, and the bassist certainly thumped out excellent grooves, but somehow the music never gelled as interesting, danceable, or catchy. The entire night remains a maddening mystery. It’s undeniable that the documentary on H.R.—for which this concert was to raise funds—must be completed, if only to chart his own wild descent from frenetic front-man to burned-out hippy. It may not be original, but it’s certainly a story that needs to be told. Too few people know about this progenitor of the D.C. punk scene, and even fewer know that D.C. punk wasn’t synonymous with white-power skinheads from the beginning. That’s what makes his appearance on stage with Sven, or whoever, all the more confusing.