“We’re certainly the most highly educated band in the world.” Those are the words of a man named Stephan Michelson, quoted in the Washington Post in 1979. At first blush, the statement seems preposterous, but it might not have been far wrong.

Red Shadow was an odd outfit performing polemical rock and roll from the mid-1970s. The core of the group was three ideologically minded economists who met at the University of Michigan in the early 1970s. They decided to form a band to preach the urgent message of left-wing economics. When three of the dudes in your band have a Ph.D., a label like “most highly educated” at least begins to seem plausible.

Red Shadow put out two albums, Live at the Panacea Hilton (1975) and Better Red (1978). The music on the tracks I was able to find is competent but by no means memorable; the songs are either out-and-out song parodies à la “Weird Al” Yankovic (only with a left-wing tilt) or else highly derivative. “Stagflation,” for instance, strikes me as more than a little Stones-influenced.

The three economists that made up the band were Michelson, Dan Luria, and Ev Ehrlich. All three, as far as I can tell, are still alive and active in the field of economics to this day. Michelson runs a firm called Longbranch Research Associates that supplies statistical analysis for litigation purposes. Luria is an economist at the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center, and as recently as 2014 took part in a round table hosted by the Boston Review on the topic of “How Finance Gutted Manufacturing.” Luria also runs a company with the suggestive name Occupy Dan LLC. And Ev Ehrlich (born Everett M. Ehrlich) has a website on which he describes himself as “one of the nation’s leading business economists.”

Red Shadow’s song “Gone Gone Gone” is a parody of the Beach Boys’ “Fun Fun Fun” in which the malign corporate overlords will be “gone gone gone when the workers take their power away.” Similarly, “Anything Good” reworks Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” to accommodate the following lyric:
 

They may know how to serve the ruling corporate brass
But they’ll never have the knowledge of the working class
No no, no they don’t know know know
Anything good

 
One of the songs is called “Commodity Fetishism”—it’s only 42 seconds long, according to Discogs. The same page notes that two of the tracks from off of Live at the Panacea Hilton are spoken-word pieces. I suppose two is about par.

Here’s a bit more info from that useful Washington Post profile mentioned above:
 

“All of us would rather be musicians,” says Stephan Michelson, a research economist at the Urban Institute whose stage name is Delta X. His fellow band members include Ev Ehrlich (Beta Hat), an energy economist with the congressional budget office, and Dan Luria (Al Phabar), an economist with the United Auto Workers in Detroit. Alpha, Beta and Delta are common coefficients used by economists.

Luria and Ehrlich began writing guerrilla theater as graduate students in economics at the University of Michigan in 1971. A couple of years later they met Michelson, who owns a recording studio in Cambridge and distributes records under the Physical label. All three, in their late 20s or early 30s, consider themselves radical economists, and some of their songs reflect their opinion of establishment colleagues.

 
Honestly, the music sounds like the fellas (quite rightly) spent most of their time hitting the books, but the tunes are still pretty fun. “Understanding Marx” was the best song I was able to get ahold of, it has a female vocalist and it’s also the most about textbook Marxism (obviously), which makes it a bit funnier.
 
“Understanding Marx”:

 
More musical Marxism after the jump…......