Daybreak



This is the daybreak
And this is the love we make
For love is the law here
You've got to know how I love it, yeah
It's more than a mover
You know it takes all fast all slow
Stone cold wild
Bring the love in son brother man
True nature child
I think I'll sing it

From Atlanta, Georgia to Longsight, Manchester
Everyone ready
So so willing and able yeah, yeah, yeah
For the love you make
I know sis' huh, yeah, wooh !

She built it to make ya
We all love makers anyway
Sister Rosa Lee Parks
Love forever her name in your heart
Forever in my heart, mm, yeah, woh, hey

As I sing on this song
Someone just got rolled on hey
Oh hey, yeah, wooh yeah
New York City to Addis Ababa(baba)
Keep on keeping strong
Keep on keeping on

So why no stack for black
On a radio station in this the city ?
Been going on so long, level on the line
I'm a leaf on the vine of time
Black bones are the original bones
And so this the whole wide world should know y'all
I came to sing this song in your city
Ooh for the dreamers, one more for the dreamers yeah


Lyrics by:
Squire / Brown / Mounfield / Wren

Music by:
Squire / Mounfield / Wren

Written:
1993

Personnel:
John Squire (guitar)
Ian Brown (vocals)
Gary Mounfield (bass)
Alan Wren (drums)
Simon Dawson (keyboard)

Producer:
Simon Dawson.

Engineer:
Initial recording by Mark Tolle and Al 'Bongo' Shaw.

Available on:
Second Coming (6.33)
Crimson Tonight Live EP: Daybreak (8:38) / Breaking Into Heaven (7:03) / Driving South (4:50) / Tightrope (4:39) (September 1995, Geffen, catalogue number of Japanese release: MVCG-13029)

First live performance:
Oslo Rockefeller Music Hall (19 April 1995)

Details:

 

 

 

Left: Screenshot of footage of Rodney King being beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers on 3rd March 1991. The racism still prevalent in America was transmitted worldwide in March 1991, when Rodney King, a Black American, was the victim of police brutality committed by LAPD officers. A bystander, George Holliday, videotaped much of the incident from a distance. The footage showed LAPD officers repeatedly striking King with their batons. A portion of this footage was aired by news agencies around the world, causing public outrage that raised tensions between the black community and the LAPD, and increased anger over police brutality and social inequalities in the black/African-American community and the worldwide community as a whole. Four LAPD officers were later tried in a state court for the beating, but were acquitted on 29th April, 1992, sparking the Los Angeles Riots. Smaller riots occurred in other cities such as Las Vegas and Atlanta. A later federal trial for civil rights violations found two of the officers guilty and sent to prison, while the other two officers were acquitted.
Right: In addition to the immediate trigger of the Rodney King verdicts, a range of other factors were cited as reasons for the unrest. Anger over the sentence (five years probation) given to a Korean-American shop-owner, Soon Ja Du, for the shooting and killing of Latasha Harlins, a 15 year old African-American girl, on 16th March 1991, was cited as a contributory factor for the riots, particularly for the African-American/Korean-American tensions witnessed during the disturbances. Also fuelling tension was the extremely high unemployment among the residents of South Central Los Angeles, which had been hit very hard by the nation-wide recession, and the high levels of poverty there. The video to 'Keep Ya Head Up' (1993) by 2Pac opens up with the words, "Dedicated to the memory of Latasha Harlins, it's still on."
Second row (both photos): Thousands of people in the Los Angeles area rioted over the six days following the verdict in the Rodney King case. Widespread looting, assault, arson and murder occurred, and property damages totalled approximately US$1 billion. In all, 53 people died during the riots and thousands more were injured.
Bottom left: Stephen Lawrence, an 18-year-old sixth form student from southeast London, was stabbed to death while waiting for a bus on the evening of 22nd April 1993. After the initial investigation, five suspects were arrested but never convicted. It was proposed during the course of investigation that the murder had a racist motive, and that the handling of the case by the police and Crown Prosecution Service was affected by issues of race, leading to an inquiry. In 1999, an inquiry headed by Sir William Macpherson examined the original Metropolitan police investigation and concluded that the force was "institutionally racist." The case is of extreme importance in British legal history as it heavily contributed to the creation and passing of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, that altered the centuries-old principle of double jeopardy - which stipulated that a person could not be tried twice for the same offence.
Bottom right: Reni's post-Roses band, The Rub, wrote a song - Juris Prudence - which criticized the police for its handling of the Stephen Lawrence murder investigation.

A song from Second Coming that sounded better fleshed out live than in the studio, with the latter having too much of an unfinished feel. The July 1995 issue of The Guitar Magazine details the recording approach:

 

 

 

Top left: A racist political campaign poster from the 1866 Pennsylvania gubernatorial election.
Top right: An African-American man climbs stairs to a theater's 'colored' entrance, Mississippi, 1939. The door on the ground level is marked 'white men only.'
Second row: The Ku Klux Klan was able to operate outside the law because in many communities, its members were the law.
Third row (left): The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly 'separate but equal' status for black Americans. In reality, this led to treatment and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. These segregation laws impacted upon all aspects of life: the U.S. military, public schools, public places, public transportation, restrooms, restaurants and drinking fountains. Even the prisons were segregated; "Desegregate this place ? It will be blood. Mixing white men with animals. Can't make us do that.", one guard commented to photographer Leonard Freed in Louisiana prison (right). These Jim Crow Laws were separate from the 1800 - 1866 Black Codes, which also restricted the civil rights and civil liberties of African Americans. State-sponsored school segregation was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954 in the Supreme Court's Brown versus Board of Education decision. Generally, the remaining Jim Crow laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Bottom left: On 4th September 1957, 15-year old Dorothy Counts took a walk that broke the 'color barrier.' She was one of the first black students admitted to the newly desegregated Harry Harding High School, North Carolina, in the United States. After four days of harassment that threatened her safety, her parents forced her to withdraw from the school. The harassment started when the wife of John Z. Warlickthe, the leader of the White Citizens Council, urged the boys to "keep her out" and at the same time, implored the girls to spit on her, saying, "spit on her, girls, spit on her." Counts walked by without reacting, but told the press that many people threw rocks at her - most of which landed in front of her feet - and that many spat on her back. More abuse followed that day. She had trash thrown at her while eating her dinner and the teachers ignored her. The following day, she befriended two white girls, but they soon drew back because of harassment from other classmates. Her family received threatening phone calls and after four days of extensive harassment - which included a smashed car and having her locker ransacked - her father decided to take his daughter out of the school. At a press conference, he said: "It is with compassion for our native land and love for our daughter Dorothy that we withdraw her as a student at Harding High School. As long as we felt she could be protected from bodily injury and insults within the school’s walls and upon the school premises, we were willing to grant her desire to study at Harding." The family moved to Pennsylvania, where Counts attended an integrated school in Philadelphia.
Bottom right: A sign in Durban stating (in English, Afrikaans and Zulu) that the beach is for white people only, under South African apartheid laws, 1989.

Love is the predominant theme of the song (the word is mentioned no less than seven times), a value which Martin Luther King, Jr. worked tirelessly for among the American people, despite the discrimination against black people. In a May 2011 Clash magazine feature, Paul Schroeder recalls Ian Brown playing a vinyl recording of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream....." speech, before penning the lyrics: "We listened to that great speech a couple of times, and it was fantastic to hear it in its entirety through those big speakers. It's a super emotional recording. You could feel the spirit coming down." The arrest of Rosa Lee Parks forms the basis of the song. Rosa Lee Parks was a black woman who, at around 6pm on Thursday 1st December 1955, refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. She was sitting in the fifth row (the first row that black people could occupy), along with three other black people. Soon, all of the first four rows were filled up, and a white man walked on. Since black and white people were not permitted to be in the same row, the bus driver wanted all of the black people to move. The other three black people complied, but Parks refused. When found guilty on 5th December, Parks was fined $10, plus a court cost of $4, which she appealed. This act of defiance came one year after the Supreme Court's Brown versus Board of Education decision that led to the end of racial segregation in public schools. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was planned - before Rosa Parks' arrest - by E.D. Nixon, president of the local NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Nixon intended to use any arrest as a test case to allow Montgomery's black citizens to challenge segregation on the city's public buses. With this goal, community leaders had been waiting for the right person to be arrested, a person who would anger the black community into action, who would agree to test the segregation laws in court, and who, most importantly, was "above reproach." When fifteen year old Claudette Colvin was arrested early in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat, E.D. Nixon thought he had found the perfect person, but the teenager turned out to be pregnant. Nixon later explained, "I had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with." Parks, however, was a good candidate because of her employment and marital status, along with her good standing in the community.

The Women's Political Council called for a boycott of all buses by every black person on a following Monday. On the afternoon of the trial (which contained the expected conviction and penalty given to Rosa Lee), the Montgomery Improvement Association was formed. The members elected as their president a relative newcomer to Montgomery, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hence, Rosa Lee was the "daybreak" of the Civil Rights movement.* "One more for the dreamers" is a tacit reference to the "I have a dream....." (see Tradjic Roundabout) speech by King, a dream shared collectively by all those suffering discrimination. Despite reprisals against Montgomery's black community (the Ku Klux Klan bombed King's house and burned several black churches), King called for non-violence from blacks: "We must love our white brothers no matter what they do to us". In effect, King was saying that "love" should be "the law" in Montgomery ('Love Is The Law', an Aleister Crowley maxim, would form the basis of The Seahorses’ Love Is The Law). Addis Ababa is the capital of Ethiopia and origin of 'near-modern' humans - Ian explicitly states this in the line "black bones are the original bones". The birthplace of Dr. King - Atlanta, Georgia - is linked to that of the Roses - Longsight, Manchester.

Pressure increased across the country, and on 4th June 1956, the federal district court ruled that Alabama's racial segregation laws for buses were unconstitutional. However, an appeal kept the segregation intact, and the boycott continued until, finally, on 13th November 1956, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court's ruling. This victory led to a city ordinance that allowed black bus passengers to sit virtually anywhere they wanted, and the boycott officially ended on 20th December 1956; the boycott of the buses had lasted for 381 days. Martin Luther King, Jr. capped off the victory with a magnanimous speech to encourage acceptance of the decision. The boycott resulted in the U.S. civil rights movement receiving one of its first victories and gave Martin Luther King, Jr. the national attention that made him one of the prime leaders of the cause. The progress of the Civil Rights movement was affected by other events, particularly those relating to the Cold War (King was particularly critical of how the Vietnam war was taking attention away from the issue of Civil Rights). The federal government under presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953 - 61) and John F. Kennedy (1961 – 63) had been reluctant to vigorously enforce the Brown decision of 1954, which ruled against segregation of schools but was not uniformly implemented, when this entailed directly confronting the resistance of Southern whites. While John F. Kennedy won a following in the black community by encouraging the movement's leaders, his administration lacked the political capacity to persuade Congress to pass new legislation guaranteeing integration and equal rights. It was not until the Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson (1963 - 68) that the Civil Rights Act was signed, in 1964. This was the most far-reaching civil rights bill in the nation's history (indeed, in world history), forbidding discrimination in public accommodations and threatening to withhold federal funds from communities that persisted in maintaining segregated schools. This was followed in 1965 by the Voting Rights Act, the enforcement of which eradicated the tactics previously used in the South to disenfranchise black voters. This act led to drastic increases in the numbers of black registered voters in the South, with a comparable increase in the numbers of blacks holding elective offices there.

 

 

Top: Police report (page 1) on Rosa Parks, 1st December 1955. Primal Scream used snatches of lyrics from Daybreak for 'Star', from the 1997 Vanishing Point album ("Sister Rosa"..."For the dreamers"..."Keep keepin' on").
Second row (left): Rosa Parks' police photo during her 22nd February 1956 indictment for organizing a boycott. "People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in. When I declined to give up my seat, it was not that day or bus in particular. I just wanted to be free, like everybody else."
Second row (right): Deputy Sheriff D.H. Lackey takes Parks' fingerprints, 22nd February 1956.
Third row (left): Martin Luther King, Jr. outside the Montgomery courthouse during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 19th March 1956. Two hours after the arrest of Rosa Lee Parks on 1st December 1955, she was released on $100 bail. By midnight, a plan had been hatched for a citywide bus boycott, which a young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. would later be elected to direct. The boycott lasted 381 days, until the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses was illegal; its success ignited the modern civil rights movement.
Third row (right): Rosa Parks on a Montgomery bus on 21st December 1956, the day after Montgomery's public transportation system was legally integrated. Behind Parks is Nicholas C. Chriss, a United Press International (UPI) reporter covering the event.
Fourth row: Martin Luther King, Jr. is arrested for loitering outside a courtroom where his friend and associate Ralph Abernathy is appearing for a trial, 1958.
Fifth row: On a downtown Montgomery, Alabama street, racial violence erupts, 1958.
Sixth row: Policemen use police dogs during civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, May 1963.
Seventh row: The Fire Department aims high-pressure water hoses at civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, May 1963.
Eighth row: President Lyndon Baines Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act in the East Room of the White House on 2nd July 1964. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., centre is behind Johnson.
Ninth row: Martin Luther King returning in the back of an open-top car, having just returned from collecting his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. A crowd has gathered on the street, eager to interact with King despite frowning policemen and the bodily intervention of King's security staff. His arm stretched out across the boot of the car, King's hand has become a hub from which radiate half a dozen eagerly grasping hands, seeming to symbolise King's role as the focus of so many of the hopes and expectations of a whole nation. One woman's hand is caught mid-motion. In a second, she will in all probability achieve her goal of fully embracing King's hand. For the moment, though, she has managed to bend one finger down and thus make contact with the back of King's hand. Her smile suggests a current of exultant energy has coursed up her arm. At the age of thirty-five, King was the youngest man to have received the award. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement. On the evening of 4th April 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.
Penultimate row: Hundreds of people from all over the country walk during the famous five-day civil rights march between Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, March 1965.
Bottom: Addis Ababa's 3-million-year-old 'Lucy' - named after the Beatles song 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' by its discoverers. The fossil’s discovery in 1974 was a landmark in the history of uncovering the origins of humanity, representing the most complete humanlike fossil found until that time.

Daybreak opens with some excellent interplay between the rhythm section, especially 0.47 - 1.03 and 1.27 - 1.44, but the remainder of the track loses direction and pales in comparison to the respective live performances, of which, Leicester and Leeds are two of the best (incidentally, Squire regularly used the riff from Ride On for the live performances of this track). Daybreak flowed into Breaking Into Heaven with some delayed drums, bass and guitar. The performance at Leeds (especially 4.49 - 5.28 and 6.26 - 6.33) is excellent. I also strongly recommend checking out the Brixton performance of this track on the first of the two nights they played in 1995 (8th December). If you have the video, look out for a moment during the Daybreak guitar soloing when Brown does a double take at Squire (to check he really is seeing this !) almost in amazement at Squire's phenomenal playing.

In a May 1995 'Sound On Sound' feature, Simon Dawson stated that the incorporation of a Hammond at the end of Daybreak was Squire's idea, in order to create a "Doorsy kind of feel." Perhaps Squire also had Hendrix in mind, as the close of the song emulates the guitar and organ jamming of 'Still Raining, Still Dreaming', from his Electric Ladyland LP:

 

There is perhaps a slight influence from Steppenwolf's 'Born To Be Wild', from the soundtrack to Easy Rider (which Ian cites as his favourite film ever) in the line "True nature child" (note that Ian uses the two same ending words ('child' and 'wild' - lines 7, 9) in his sentences as the Steppenwolf track: "Like a true nature's child. We were born, born to be wild."

* In 1994, Rosa Parks was attacked and mugged in her Detroit home by Joseph Skipper, and had a total of $53 stolen from her. Parks had asked Skipper "Do you know who I am ?" Before beating her, Skipper (himself an African American) was reported to have stated that he did know who Rosa Parks was, but did not care.


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