People no longer understand how difficult it was to find music that was underground before the internet era. For instance, the first heavy music I got into was through friends who liked thrash metal and Metallica and Anthrax. I would go to record stores and look at album covers to decide what to buy. Eventually this lead to me buying Metallica's “Ride the Lightning”, I spent a really long time comparing the covers of two different metal cassettes. Metallica was recommended over Gorguts by a headbanger clerk in a mall in Indiana.
I had first read about the Sex pistols in Rolling Stone magazine in a retrospective. I had never heard of punk and my dad I don't think had heard of them. I got the cassette for “Never mind the Bollocks” for Easter. I was already listening to a lot of thrash metal so when I heard the Sex Pistols, I was underwhelmed by their lack of heaviness but intrigued by the kind of buzzing high pitched energy the music gave off.
This was my introduction to punk and in trying to find out which punk records to buy, I bought “England's Dreaming” by Jon Savage and “Ranters and Crowd Pleasers” by Greil Marcus.
There were some eventual dissatisfactions with this backwards method. Often the more mainstream Marcus would lead me astray describing things as more intense and frightening than they were and I had to adjust my expectations.
Strangely “Ranters and Crowd Pleasers” starts with a review of the Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter” which Marcus seems to think is a party record. Except for one moment on “You can't always get what you want” that casts a pall over the whole affair. A very Greil Marcus touch as he was big on finding little subversive moments that undo pop hegemony. But the record discussed is “Gimme Shelter” which was the Stones as their most apocalyptic singing about the collapse of society at the end of the 60's. The record starts with “War, Children, It's just a shot away!” not exactly my idea of a party record.
The other dissatisfaction was that very few record stores anywhere had the music I was looking for, I would eventually discover the giant Tower records in Lincoln park but until then I had to order music to get it delivered to a nearby record store.
I ordered a copy of “Double Nickels on the Dime” by the Minutemen, expecting it to be hardcore and was completely confused by the accessible funk. But the fact that I was forced to listen to the record for lack of other options made me realize its greatness. This also would cause similar affects on terrible bands that I liked such as Jesus Jones and Therapy?, who through repetitive listening I contrived a passion for.
Other than reading about it in books or in papers such as the Illinois Entertainer, the other options were thrift stores and garage sales. In this era, I became passionate about the Vanilla Fudge record “The Beat Goes on” because Vanilla Fudge were commonly at thrift stores.
I haven't been to a good garage sale in a minute but I will forever associate them with my father. He loved to look up garage sales in the newspaper, or later on craigslist and drive out to some remote suburban location. Through him, I loved them as well.
Our family moved to Ravenswood Manor, we began to enjoy the tradition of the manor garage sale. We lived on California which was kind of the entrance to Ravenswood Manor where streets were laid out in a much prettier way, enclosed on some sides by the river and one way streets. Yearly, to this day the Manor puts on a neighborhood garage sale which is really fun, although in recent years it has become quite overcrowded.
It was at one of these yard sales where someone who was hipper than most, perhaps a DJ was selling a bunch of records I recognized from the Greil Marcus book.
One was a sort of early “Art of Noise” style proto electro record with Ronald Reagan talking about Nuclear war over a drum machine. I think one of them might have been The Smiths “Meat is Murder”. I can't fully remember what the other records were but one of them was not mentioned by Greil Marcus and was my introduction to hardcore punk. The record was called The Master Tape and has a hand drawn cover of hands being x-rayed by a giant reel to reel in which skeletal humans are trapped.
This was a compilation put out by Paul Mahern of Indianapolis Hardcore band The Zero Boys. Although the Zero Boys and others were from Indiana, the compilation even included bands from Chicago (Articles of Faith, Learned Helplessness), Ohio (Toxic Reasons, Delinquents) Wisconsin (Die Kruezen), Virgina (Battered Youth) and Boston (The F.U.'s).
I discovered this record well before finding out about a lot of hardcore punk, so this record of mostly obscure bands was as formative as “Never Mind the Bollocks” or “London Calling” by The Clash. I eventually would start listening to pre-Rollins Black Flag and the Circle Jerks. But my idea of hardcore was shaped by a lot of weird and extremely local bands.
At the time, I thought of the bands just as something from Indiana, and still cutting my teeth on punk approached the record with a cynical air, not realizing my appreciation would last for my entire life.
The record starts out with Toxic Reasons, who are probably the most British sounding band on the record sounding like something that would be in UK/DK. A decent and fun street punk band, one that I probably liked the most when I first got the record but now I find the least memorable. The only thing that really stands out is their bizarre pronounciation of “Drunk and Disorderly” which becomes “Drunk s’awny, Drunk s’awny, drunk s’awny, not me!” in either a strange Ohio accent or an imitation English one.
The Slammies who were one of the Indianapolis bands, a very raw and suburban sounding bundle of angst. I didn't actually live in the suburbs but the neighborhood of Ravenswood Manor on the Northwest side was pretty suburban.
I could definitely relate to the idea of “Frustrated”, “Nothing to do but resort to crime, or sit at home;insanity is what you'll find” although I was way too much of a nerd to do any crimes that weren't just petty vandalism. Less relatable, but more musically interesting is “P.U.S” which describes a post-teenage singles bar in a kind of diary entry like rant;
“sitting alone (inaudble),
laughing at people ahahah,
that girl thinks she's a movie star, she drives a beat-up county car
join the people I look around
drunk just fell upon the ground
nothing to do but sit and drink
oh look at her her hair is pink
(inaudible)
there's some action over there
girls are dancing like fred astaire
girls just talk and they don't care
guys are jerks and they just stare
just look around its lot of fun
boys and girls for everyone
they're all so cool they get depressed
The Slammies feel authentically uncool in a very teenage boy way not unlike the “Milo goes to college” era descendants. But there's also a sharpness to it of the child looking at the barren world of adulthood and questioning why things have to be this way. Adding to it, is the sinister surfy guitar of the verses feels like a full body anxiety attack.\
But it was also this uncoolness, that I found funny. At the time, I saw hardcore as overly extreme and gauche in a way that 70s punk wasn't. I didn't realize when I first got the record that there was something incredibly raw in its beauty.
The Slammies also go the full mass shooter route in the song “Manager Breakdown” which is basically a fantasy of going apeshit at your job and killing everyone.
I hate my job it ain't no fun
I wish I had a shiny loaded gun....
I'll kill customers
laugh at the dead
look at them bleed
just chop off their heads
It's not unusual for someone in their teens to have these kind of fantasies, however if the singer from the Slammies had access to “a shiny loaded gun”, the song might have become a footnote in a true crime story. Or most likely, he would have forgotten about it.
So from the sporadically great Slammies we move on to the wonderful Battered Youth, who are pretty much as brutal as their name would suggest. Both songs have a kind of primitive edge which starts out with one of those fucked up sounding bass players who sounds as if he's stretched the bass strings over a tea chest.
The pictures of the band are great, while there is no group picture,only a series of snapshots. In every one, each member looks incredibly young; the drummers head is barely peaking over the drum kit and the guitarist looks dwarfed by his Gibson.
The first song “New Patriot” is a pretty straightforward anti-reagan rant standing out from the wrathfully shrill vocal:
Im a new patriot with nothing to do
think I'll join the army like the others I knew
So you think I'll fight for you what a joke
makes me laugh so hard I choke
the draft's just a form of legalized slavery
fight and be killed in the name of bravery.
It's the second song that's the short lived bands kind of theme song “We'll love you when your dead”
You were an unwanted child
couldn't be loved you were wild
just a product of pregnancy
been a battered youth since infancy
we'll love when your buried
when you're six feet under
we'll love you when you're dead
You live in a closet
on a bad day they'll lock it
blame it on stress
the psychiatrist did
We'll love when you're buried
when you're six feet under
We'll love when you're dead
A blackly comic fable of abuse that enjoys the plight of the victim as much as identifying with them, “We'll Love you when your dead” is an example of the bad taste of early punk. But bad taste was something that punk weaponized to talk about uncomfortable topics like abuse.
The song is fragmentary, even in the way the lyrics go from rhyming doggerel to disconnected sentences. This fragmentary nature seems to fit with the band which soon dissolved after the recording, the band members forming other hardcore bands which I need to check out.
Ohio's the Delinquents feel more like a “real” band than Battered Youth but their competence is also more rotely punk rock. “System Pressure” is a catchy tune though.
The record ends with the Zero Boys, who along with the F.U.'s and Die Kreuzen are one of the better known bands on the compilation. Their tracks on the record have to be some of their more obscure.
“High Places” starts out with what sounds like a sample from a western movie, not unlike the original beginning of “John Wayne was a Nazi” by MDC. This is a confusing introduction to a fairly standard class fable
See her all around town
in her pretty french gown
but she will never look down
she closed her ears to poverty's sound
While ahead of a time when American punk bands didn't explore class, the song is a bit silly that the mascot for privilege is a lady in a french gown. Wouldn't it have made more sense for it to be a businessman in Armani? It often feels like there's an equation with women with luxury that’s a misogynistic way to attack an individual woman and gain the moral high ground.
But where things pick up, is with the song “Human Body” which has weirdly mystical lyrics and a discordant verse structure. The guitars dissonantly chug in a kind of slow breakdown for the verse and then switch to a catchy hardcore part for the chorus:
Some people say there's nothing more
than what meets the eye
can't they see there's so much more
and us humans can only ask why
stuck inside this human body
living in a life of pain
stuck inside this human body
with a stupid human brain
the being inside me yearns to get out
of this mortal mess
but I can't wait for the day
when I lay this body to rest
I did try to live in Indiana for a couple years but the small town scene of Bloomington,IN wasn't for me. But my friend the artist Erin K. Drew at one point told me that one of the people from the Zero boys had a yoga studio in Bloomington. This doesn't explain the kind of mystical lyrics of “Human Body” but pondering the limitations of the human body might be something a Zero boy engaged in yoga practice would eventually do.
We leave behind these more aesthetic realms for the next song which is more in the bad taste wheelhouse, “Mom's Wallet” about a young kid robbing his mother to buy drugs
looking for some money at the bottom of her purse
I feel the urge inside of me I feel its getting worse
Mom's wallet! Where'd you find it!
Accompanied by a frenetic almost post punk guitar sting, it's a pretty fun but lyrically slight song. Zero Boys don't seem like a straightedge band but they certainly could have been.
If I could be old and complain about “the kids” a bit; one thing no one thinks about anymore with music is the idea of the a b-side. The idea that every record would start out great but perhaps you might put the less interesting parts of it at the middle to end of the b-side.
When I was younger, I didn't feel ripped off that my favorite record by Anthrax, “Among the Living”, only had one “good” song on the B side; “Indians” and the rest of it was a lot less catchy if not necessarily bad. I would just listen to the A side of the tape and then rewind. I was familiar with bands such as Bon Jovi (my favorite until age 14) putting mostly dross on the second side of a record.
For a long time I thought the B side of the Master Tapes was similarly mediocre because it starts out with two bands that are less interesting. Articles of Faith are an important band for the Chicago scene that I've never liked all that much. And the Repellents are a competent but forgettable punk combo.
However despite this lull, the B side can't be so easily dismissed. Things pick up with one of my favorite tracks on the album, the excoriating “Vegis” by Learned Helplessness. I like this song so much that my band “borrowed” Learned Helplessness's band name thinking it would never catch up to us. Well, no one ever called us to account; so I guess it falls to me to out Learned Helplesness (Oakland) for our lack of an original band name.
In our defense, the Chicago-based Learned Helplessness is incredibly obscure., From what I can find the band seems to only have recorded “Vegis” and then broke up. Joy, the singer of the band also drew the cover of the record. The drummer of Learned Helplessness has a biography for sale on Amazon which might shed more light on them but I currently lack the 3.99 to buy it.
Closer to a peace punk band like the UK's Dirt than the kind of Chicago punk such as the Effigies, the band feels like true freaks. This was the kind of punk spirit that inspired my band Coughs. I had just become vegetarian at age 21 and although I was never moral enough to be self-righteous about it, I loved the spirit of the way vocalist Joy growls “Grease and guts they are no food, meat-eater you are a killer.” Now I am that killer but I still love the song.
The guitar playing in the song really stands out, it is raw and uses a style similar to The Dicks “Dicks Hate the Police” of playing full chords on the guitar rather than the abbreviated bar chords used by most punk bands. The jangling of the open strings with the standard distortion adds a rattling hiss on top of the accusatory chord progression. Joy's vocals are reverby and seperated from the rest of the mix by her high pitch. When the lyrics end, the guitarist breaks in with a solo that is heavily double tracked making it a blistering section of noise.
I love the tendency of the compilation to put bass higher up in the mix than most punk records do. It seems all the bands were recorded by John Helms and Paul Mahern and I really like the way the record sounds.
The FU's are the next band and while they hew closer to hardcore orthodoxy than the rest of second side, they don't diminish the quality as Articles of Faith perhaps did. The song “CETA suckers” sent to me to my parents asking them what CETA was. (In this case, its the Comphrehensive Employment and Training Act signed into law by Nixon and repealed by Reagan.) At the time I took their word that it was a bad thing but now reading about it, I personally would love a WPA style program to make a return. And the fact that Reagan got rid of a program by Nixon says everything about the far-right turn of the Republican party.
While researching the FU's, I discovered that Tim Yohannon from Maximum Rock and Roll accused them of being fascist does make me kind of wonder about this song. Could their opposition to employment programs for youth be because of a hatred of “Big Government” spending. Granted, opinions seem to be divided about the FU's (and Tim Yohannon) but the F.U.'s biggest defenders seem to be saying “oh they were just joking around” which is a little too familiar in this day and age.
\It does feel like maybe the FUs were a less clever version of the sort of antagonism of bands like Black Humor. Yohannon also hated Black Humor, but Black Humor actually antagonized punks with much funnier and sharper satire calling them “Hippies in Black Leather Jackets” rather than appeals to patriotism
Admittedly “Ceta Suckers” does have a fast dry production of an ascending thrash riff played at a blistering (for the time) pace so it goes by quickly.
The second song “Death Wish” is more my speed. Starting out as a parody of a Flipper- esque rant over a similarly plunky hardcore bass and then turning into an upbeat and catchy stomp. Unfortunately, I can't find lyrics for any of these songs and understanding the singer at the breakneck pace is pretty hard.
The FU's are fun but I'm much more intrigued by the weirdness of the next band The Pattern. The Pattern was resolved against hardcore punk conventions to the degree that the FUs adhered to them. Although the riff of the abstractly named “Unnatural Silence” is really just the inverse of the ascending riff on “CETA suckers” it's played with a bass-forward dub reggae rhythm that shows an oddball musicianship. The singer bellows:
Gonna get a stake down your throat
gonna get a stake down your throat
you're gonna get a stake down your throat
gonna get a stake down your throat
ungwa-hoo! Ain't gonna take no more fo shi
ungwa-hoo! Ain't you take no more for shi
unnatural silence- gonna get a steel boot
unnatural silence- gonna get a stake
unnatural silence-gonna get a dick
gonna get a boot fuck it
The vocals have a kind of odd gutturalness predating power violence, added to by the incoherent grunts and eventually screeches of the backing vocal. These vocals switching unpredictably to an almost pop hiss of “Unnatural silence!”. The Pattern coming from the smaller city of Columbus, Indiana truly seem like suburban weirdos to the more citified Indianapolis punk.
Other than the vocalist Joy of Learned Helplessness, the Pattern have one of the only other female members, Jennifer Laemmer playing drums. “The Master Tape” is mostly a boys club but there were a few women involved. It must have been tough being them but they were there nevertheless.
The similarities to early grindcore continue with the second Pattern song “Michelob” which anticipates Napalm Death's “you suffer ” by being a long-winded 11 seconds
complain about the weekends when all you do is stand,
while you listen to the rockingest of bands
all that boring standing yet you call it fun
The actual lyrics of the song sound more like the frenetic nonsense of “Unnatural Silence” than what is printed on the lyric sheet. I again drew on these lyrics for the Coughs first group of songs where we covered “Michelob” drawing it out into a tedious jam session. The fact that two Jill bands were inspired by this obscure compilation shows that it loomed large in my imagination.
I think I wanted to use the lyrics because they express a childlike anger at what adults accept as fun. You mean just standing around counts as fun to you? That's an adult weekend?
The final group of songs are by one of the better known bands on the compilation Die Kruezen. The punk band from Rockford, IL had relocated to Milwaukee, they were eventually to morph into a kind of proto-alternative rock band. But in contrast to the best known band on the compilation; the Zero Boys, Die Kruezen didn't choose weirder songs to put on the compilation.
Rather the songs are some of the same that are on their debut album but the versions are universally wilder. In fact, I've often thought it a bummer that these versions of their songs are on such a relatively obscure record .
In keeping with the Helms and Mahern production, the versions on “The Master Tape” are more bass forward in the production and a much smaller studio. But the difference isn't only of budget; by the time Die Kruezen recorded these songs again in 1984, it seems to me that they were pretty tired and had outgrown the hardcore trappings of the “Master Tape” recordings. 3 years is a long time for a band to play the same material.
The empathetic and emotional vocals have been mostly removed and there's a lazy guitar sound sandpapered all over everything. Next year's “The October File” would find them going in a more interesting direction.
But while “The Master Tape” versions are more wild, they make very few conscessions to orthodoxy. Instead Die Kruezen sound like a post-punk playing at a hardcore velocity. There's a rowdy teenage boy energy to Die Kruezen's songs on the compiolation. This is displayed in the version of “White Room”, a song seemingly about confinement in a psychiatric facility that collapses into a morass of screeching vocals and musical flailing by the end.
God bless “The Master Tape Vol.1”, fittingly my copy was stolen from a group house in Oakland by a notoriously uncancellable housemate with light fingers. But it nevertheless made such an impact on my musical philosophy and artistic ideology that it's remained part of my soul.