Foremen A Nashville Novelty

Political conservatives - particularly ones planning to run for major office next fall - are hereby advised to expect to soon find themselves in the cross hairs of a revolutionary Nashville-connected singing group: The Foremen.

What they do is write left-leaning songs lampooning or satirizing Rush Limbaugh, Ollie North, California Gov. Pete Wilson and the like. Already claiming their first victim in Wilson’s recent withdrawal from the Republican presidential race, they sing their material in a retro style harking back to the folk era of the early ‘60s.

For example, the opening cut on their first album defines the prevailing attitude of the ‘90s by prettily and briefly describing a man feeling sorry for himself because he has no shoes - until he meets another man who has no feet. He then asks the man with no feet:

“Can I have your shoes?”

“We take our cues from Tom Lehr and Phil Ochs and, to a lesser degree, I guess from Pete Seeger and the honest-to-God activism that was going on in music at that time (the ‘60s),” says Roy Zimmerman, lyricist and leader of the Los Angeles-based group. “There really isn’t a forum today for the kind of activism that was practiced back then. We’re trying to create one.”

Much of the group’s music is hilarious. “Hell Froze Over Today,” for example, runs through far-fetched news stories that it represents as having just happened along with the icing of Hades. These include the installation of a condom dispenser in the Vatican, a promise by Yassir Arafat not to “wear that hat again,” a plea from the rich to be more heavily taxed, the discovery of Jimmy Hoffa “on a houseboat on Lake Erie” and the disproving of the “single bullet theory.”