Adam Thorn and the Top Buttons have soul. Let the teeny-boppers and fan club president’s argue whose mod mob is the maddest mob (and Top Button’s prez Tanya Goldsmith will make a strong and impassioned case for the Top Buttons and helmsman Adam Thorn). Forget the trappings of Thorn’s red and white, gear Stella 150 motorscooter, ignore for a moment that sharp two-tone belt and the ever snug top shirt button. Banish from your memory that image of Thorn in some nasty altercation with the traffic cop down on Greensboro’s Tate St. Mad mod, modern mod, what have you- Adam Thorn and the Top Buttons got soul. And it’s allright...in fact, it’s Soul Riot!
Somehow managing to enter College without having finished high school, future Top Button leader Thorn attended Greensboro’s Guilford College for the four years following 1998, though the word “attended†is used in the loosest terms possible. Showing up only for classes that afforded him the opportunity to slake his thirst for the dense, melancholic prose of the Russian Romantics our puckish, Pushkinesque, proto-punker quickly forsook his little green oasis to scuff the soles of his uppers on the endless sea of asphalt and cracked concrete Greensboro had in spades.
It’s hard to believe that the man who made it respectable to both have style and play in a band could be found kicking up broken bottles in the oil-stained stretches of college-town side streets and forty bottle decorated underpasses while wearing a black hoodie, safety-pinned patches and the ubiquitous black of the music scene that was almost “ITâ€- PUNK ROCK!! For Thorn, the speed was right, the boredom was right, the angst was right, but something was just not quite right. Wringing and winding his song writing ever tighter and tighter, finding the slenderest space in the stinging brevity of his tunes in which to pack an ounce of Nabokovian wit Thorn was determined to find what it was that was missing.
The opportunity afforded itself in the form of a study abroad trip to Post-Edwardian England. Immersing himself deeper in punk-rock stylings his racing mind couldn’t help but to search and at some point (most likely while wearing bondage pants and sporting a mohawk) between some Motown single, some well tailored trousers and someone elses’s generation the answer hit him like a giant can of soup.
Thorn arrived back in the States buttoned up. The battered Fender Mustang slathered in stickers (Oh, so punk rock) was transformed to a glowing Rickenbacker 330 and his first order of business was to assemble a group. A tightened up combo that could stomp down the frenetic soul and rhythm and blues of the mad new modern mod’s new sound. This wasn’t the thin white-boy R&B of the Artwoods, the High Numbers and early Yardbirds- it was something far more clever and steeped in the brilliant and disappearing asides of the speed-addled; something that found the common thread that ran from the Small Faces to the Jam but didn’t ignore Dylan, Billy Bragg or even (gasp!) Wire. Heady stuff. If The Creation’s music is red with purple flashes, Adam and his Buttons are likely to give you a purple flash beneath an eye and leave you red in the face…assuming you figure a way out of the circles your head will be going ‘round and ‘round in!
- Marcus Villano / Vicenza, Italy / October 2006
