Day After Day #81: Rise

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).   

Rise (1986)

There are many ways to approach the making of an album. You can do it all yourself like Prince or Stevie Wonder. If you're in a band, the members of the group do all the work. Or if you're a singer, you can just get a bunch of session guys to play on it. 

John Lydon (the artist formerly known as Johnny Rotten) had forged a fairly successful and interesting path after leaving the Sex Pistols in 1978, forming the experimental "anti-rock" band called Public Image Ltd. He was joined by guitarist Keith Levene (an original member of the Clash), bassist Jah Wobble and drummer Jim Walker. PiL made three albums with different variations of that lineup until 1984, when everybody but Lydon had left. 

In 1984, PiL made an album called Commercial Zone with Levene, but it was re-recorded after he left the group. The resulting album This is What You Want...This is What You Get was made with session musicians and got middling reviews (it featured some songs written for the soundtrack of the 1983 movie Copkiller, starring Harvey Keitel and Lydon as a serial killer targeting cops). 

For his 1986 follow-up, Lydon had producer Bill Laswell recruit an all-star group of musicians. He had been working with a group of young musicians but felt they weren't up to snuff for the new material. Laswell pulled in a diverse group of pros including guitarist Steve Vai, cranky drummer Ginger Baker, Tony Williams (a drummer who had played with Miles Davis), Bernie Worrell and Ryuichi Sakamoto. 

The album was called Album in a nod to generic brand products that were being sold in the early '80s; the CD was called Compact Disc, the cassette was called Cassette, etc. Although the SF punk act Flipper had done something similar in 1982, releasing Album - Generic Flipper; they responded to the PiL release by calling their 1986 live album Public Flipper Limited Live 1980-1985.

The first single from PiL's Album was called "Rise" (although it was packaged as "Single"). Written with Laswell, Lydon said the song was about apartheid in South Africa, specifically about Nelson Mandela, who at the time was serving 27 years in prison for opposing the racially segregated government. He also referenced the strife in Northern Ireland.

Featuring Vai on guitar, Sakamoto on Fairlight CMI synth, Laswell on bass, Williams on drums and L. Shankar on violin, the song starts off with a simple drum beat leading the way.

"I could be wrong, I could be right/I could be black, I could be white/I could be right, I could be wrong/I could be white, I could be black/Your time has come, your second skin/The cost so high the gain so low/Walk through the valley/The written word is a lie."

While Lydon uses the old Irish saying "May the road rise with you" as the chorus, he also counters it with the hook "Anger is an energy," which is one of the great lines from a rock song ever.

Vai, who was playing lead guitar in the metal band Alcatrazz at the time, was flown in between live gigs to play his parts. Laswell asked Vai to listen to some different types of world music to get a different feel than the traditional hard rock solos he would play. Although Vai first came up playing in Frank Zappa's band, so he definitely knew from weird. And on "Rise," he played a sweeping solo that fit in with the airy feel of the song. It's objectively hilarious (and pretty cool) that a few months after Album was released, Vai was making his guitar talk to David Lee Roth on the singer's Eat 'Em and Smile record.

"Rise" was a hit in the U.K., where it was #11 on the singles chart and in Ireland, where it hit #10. It didn't chart in the U.S. but it got plenty of play on rock radio and on MTV. Album got up to #14 on the UK chart and #115 on the Billboard 200 in the U.S. 

For the subsequent tour, Lydon recruited guitarist John McGeoch (ex-Magazine and Siouxsie and the Banshees), guitarist Lu Edmunds (the Damned), bassist Allan Dias and drummer Bruce Smith (formerly of the Pop Group and the Slits). That lineup remained together to record 1987's Happy? and 1989's 9 (although Edmunds had departed due to tinnitus problems). I saw PiL open for INXS on the Kick tour at Radio City Music Hall in NYC in March 1988 and it was great, especially as Lydon was gleefully horrifying the audience of teenage girls there to see INXS.

PiL released one more album, 1992's That What is Not, before going on hiatus. Lydon reunited with the Sex Pistols for a tour in 1996 (and later again a few times in the 2000s) and released a solo album in 1997 that I honestly have zero memory of. PiL reunited in 2009. The band has released three albums since, including 2023's End of World. 

Lydon's image has evolved over the years. He's done commercials for butter, appeared on Judge Judy and The Masked Singer and entered the Eurovision Song Contest. He became a U.S. citizen in 2013 and voiced support for Barack Obama, but in recent years he's become a Trump supporter. He's also dealt with some tough personal travails, taking care of his wife as she battled Alzheimer's disease and eventually passed away last year.