Upper Crust
Like most costume bands the Upper Crust is working a gimmick, but this one is sheer genius. Let Them Eat Rock, the band’s 1995 debut, merges the cliches of the spoiled rock star and the contemptuous nobleman; its witty rip-offs of AC/DC, Cheap Trick, and the Buzzcocks excoriate the poor and celebrate the pleasures of wealth and dissipation. As a parody of hard rock, the record ranks second only to This Is Spinal Tap. But as broader satire, it sinks its fangs into a truth most entertainment ignores. “Why not celebrate the fact that all rock stars are incredibly wealthy?” singer-guitarist Lord Rockingham asked Paper last year. “We consider ourselves the most honest band in the United States today.” Bruce Springsteen can sing about Tom Joad all he likes, but rock has long been the property of the leisure class and characters like Manson less demons than court jesters. In their periwigs, beauty spots, jabots, and knickers, the lords of the Upper Crust bring rock closer to what it ought to be: a sharp slap in the face, reminding us that the lords of entertainment are bona fide members of America’s ruling class.
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But perhaps the most interesting kink in the Upper Crust story is the band members’ backgrounds: Widmer’s father is headmaster of Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. Lord Bendover is Nat Freedberg, the son of a Harvard art history professor and the great-grandson of Joseph Pulitzer. The band’s new record label, Emperor Norton, is the plaything of Harvard grad Peter Getty, the son of oil baron philanthropist Jean Paul Getty; he named the label after Joshua Norton, an Englishman who came to San Francisco from South Africa in 1849, lost his money speculating in real estate, and in 1859 declared himself emperor of the United States. (Mark Twain was a reporter in California at the time, and Norton is said to have inspired the King in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.) Widmer–who wasn’t with the band Thursday and may have shed his lace and knickers for good–earned a doctorate in American civilization at Harvard, where he worked on the Lampoon with Conan O’Brien. The “old boy network,” as Freedberg called it in the Post, won the Upper Crust a plum gig performing on Late Night in 1995–an event the NSC must have overlooked in its background check on Widmer.
