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June 3 - July 18, 2019
says Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo. “People got this idea that ultimately what mattered was the quality of what you were doing and how much importance you gave to it, regardless of how widespread it became or how many records it sold.”
The American underground in the Eighties embraced the radical notion that maybe, just maybe, the stuff that was shoved in our faces by the all-pervasive mainstream media wasn’t necessarily the best stuff. This independence of mind, the determination to see past surface flash and think for oneself, flew in the face of the burgeoning complacency, ignorance, and conformism that engulfed the nation like a spreading stain throughout the Eighties.
The Minutemen called it “jamming econo.” And not only could you jam econo with your rock group—you could jam econo on your job, in your buying habits, in your whole way of living.
At a 1982 show in Tulsa, two people showed up. Rollins was downhearted, but Dukowski straightened him out, telling him that although there might be only a couple of people there, they came to see Black Flag and it’s not their fault nobody else came—you should play your guts out anytime anywhere and it doesn’t matter how many people are there. That night Rollins dutifully gave it everything he had.
Dukowski replied. “The easy solution isn’t a solution, it’s the fucking problem. It’s too easy to have someone tell you what to do. It is harder to make your own decision. We put a certain amount of trust into the people that come to see us.”
says Ginn. “I never considered it rough. I considered it not having money, but I always think, if you’re asleep on a floor, how can you tell the difference anyway—you’re asleep.”
In terms of the peripherals, the attitude of do-it-yourself, that kind of thing, not being a remote rock star and having layers of management and record labels and all that—instead, booking your own shows, doing your own publicity if necessary. Not everything has to be so home industry, but being willing to do whatever is necessary and not considering one’s self remote, dealing with the guy at the distributor and respecting people for the job that they’re doing, not thinking they should conform to some narrow aspect. “I think,” Ginn concludes, “Black Flag promoted the idea of just jumping off
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Music journalist Chris Nelson once wrote, “Their friendship formed the living core of the Minutemen, while their loyalty to each other and San Pedro informed the overarching theme of brotherhood that permeates the band’s catalog.”
Fired up by the punk explosion, they wrote their first song—“Storming Tarragona.” Named after the down-at-heel housing development where Boon lived, the song was about tearing down the projects and building real houses for people to live in. Boon and Watt, it turned out, had a powerful populist streak. “D. Boon didn’t think our dads got a fair shake,” Watt says, “and I think he was kind of railing against that ever since.”
Sometimes the Minutemen got grief for being their own road crew. “But I never thought that you should play up to ‘the princeling,’ ” says Watt, referring to the prototypical pampered rock star. “So what if nobody sees you playing the fuckin’ hero or the star. I never fancied myself like that.”
“D. Boon believed that working men should have culture in their life—music and art—and not have it make you adopt a rock & roll lifestyle lie,” Watt says. “See, that’s punk. Having a set-up paradigm and then coming along and saying, ‘I’m going to change this with my art.’ ”
“We believe in average guys,” said Watt. “What happens is, the system makes them all fuckheads.” “And I want to try to snap them out of that,” said Boon. “That’s why I write these songs, OK?”
Artistically (and in many other ways), the band was liberated by the fact that they’d never sign to a major label. “In a way, we were cheating because we didn’t have that light at the end of the tunnel,” Prescott says. “And who knows? We were human—if the light had been there, maybe we would have turned crappy quicker. It’s a really hard thing to say. Now I’m glad that it was like it was.”
“When I became a punk, my main fight was against the people who were around me—friends,” said MacKaye in the essential 1983 hardcore documentary Another State of Mind. “I said, ‘God, I don’t want to be like these people, man. I don’t fit in at all with them.’ So it was an alternative.”
I wanted to be part of some vocal, active, revolutionary gang/tribe/family/community. I wanted to be a part of something, I wanted to have parameters of some sort that made me feel like I had a culture. And if I wasn’t going to be raised with a culture that went beyond my immediate family, then I damn sure was going to create one.”
“There’s no place like home / So where am I?” MacKaye sings with undisguised bitterness. “I just felt so betrayed by my friends,” MacKaye says, “for doing what I wanted to do, for doing what I thought was the right thing.” They performed the song only once, at their first show after reuniting. Afterward Baker and Preslar heaved handfuls of change at the audience.
MacKaye never told anyone to get off the stage. Sometimes this encouraged a rapid and irreversible descent into chaos, but usually it just meant a steady stream of stage divers and kids who just wanted a few seconds of attention while they did some silly dance for their buddies. Anarchy, it seemed, could work.
“I remember watching these kids getting up in the morning on my dorm floor, putting on a suit and tie and a briefcase, talking about this guy from California named Ronald Reagan and how he was going to be the next president,” says Mould. “And I’d be sitting there arguing with those fucks in speech class and poli sci and just hating that, thinking, ‘This is not acceptable behavior. This is not what we’re supposed to be doing with our late teens.’ ”
the cover of Land Speed Record is a photo of the coffins of the first eight soldiers killed in Vietnam; like many punks, the members of Hüsker Dü actually agreed with Sixties counterculture values but despised the hippies for selling out those values. “We’re doing the same thing that the peace movement did in the Sixties,” Mould said, “but the way they did it didn’t work.
“People have misconstrued the pessimism and anger in our songs,” Mould protested. “We’re really the opposite of all that; we’re not callous, insensitive people. But we’re frustrated by the fact that most people seem to end up that way—hopeless, defeated. We’re afraid of ending up that way ourselves, and that fear comes out in our songs.”
In retrospect, Hart believes that taking on so many responsibilities may have hurt the band in the long run. “The DIY thing, I don’t know, it’s like we handicapped ourselves in a lot of situations to maintain that,” he says. “There were things that, by all rights, we should have been able to let go of and oversee.”
“We don’t have to convince the world that we’re suffering to convince them that we’re artists,” Hart said, jabbing at Black Flag’s angst-ridden style. “There are those that choose to take that course. There’s nothing wrong with being happy.”
Says Sullivan, “Those guys used to get together in the van and put their hands all together and then Paul would say, ‘Where are we going?’ And the band would go, ‘To the middle!’ And he’d go, ‘Which middle?’ And they’d go, ‘The very middle!’ ” But it was all false modesty. The Replacements, it seemed, secretly believed in themselves and yet adopted a loser persona to insulate themselves against failure.
“We were in Nashville and the whole place was packed with country music executives. They played all their punk rock—just as loud and fast as they could until they virtually cleared the room until there was nothing left but punks. And then they played country music the rest of the night.”
Relationships are currency, something Sonic Youth had picked up on not only from the art world but from the camaraderie of the SST bands.
“It’s just that when you’re playing in standard tuning all the time,” Moore explained, “you’re sounding pretty… standard.”
“It’s as if Sonic Youth has gone back to the very beginnings of the process by which the world reveals itself as something other than its advertisement, as if the band has discovered the most marginal no,” Marcus wrote. “The power of Sonic Youth’s no will be negligible; few will hear this music. That the spirit of the act is still at work may not be.”
Gordon wrote in one 1983 essay. “As a performer you sacrifice yourself, you go through the motions and emotions of sexuality for all the people who pay to see it, to believe that it exists. The better and more convincing the performance, the more an audience can identify with the exterior involved in such an expenditure of energy.”
Leary and Haynes published a fanzine called Strange V.D., which featured the most horrendous medical photographs they could find accompained by captions describing fictitious diseases like “taco leg” and “pine cone butt.”
The best Haynes could do was line up perhaps a week of shows, a month in advance. So the band was never sure what the next few months would hold. They’d simply aim for parts of the country where they hadn’t been and hope for the best.
Still, the gross-out footage is what really embodied the band’s aesthetic. “Listen, man, one has no choice but to laugh in the face of terror,” Haynes explained. “I think probably most airline pilots, when they see the ground coming at them, just before they hit, go, ‘Oh my god, we’re in trouble! Ha-ha-ha!’ ”
“To me, it was just a matter of, if you want to do something, the only thing that’s going to keep you from doing it is giving up,” Leary says. “Because we were proof of that. If you just don’t quit, you will succeed—that is the bottom line.”
We never had a manager. We never had a booking agent. We never had a lawyer. We booked our own tours, paid our own bills, made our own mistakes and never had anybody shield us from either the truth or the consequences.”
Punk was not something to grow out of; it was something to grow with—it was a valid, sustainable way to live one’s life. “That’s when I started to focus on the idea of what we were doing as being real, of being a working model of a real community, an alternative community that could continue to exist outside of the mainstream—and legitimately, and self-supporting,” says MacKaye.
Picciotto recalled when he was a teenager writing to obscure English punk bands like Rudimentary Peni, Dead Wretched, and Blitz. “Those fuckers wrote us back, and it blew my mind,” recalls Picciotto. “It was so cool to feel that connection. I’ve always kept that in mind. If someone writes you, you send them a letter back. It’s just a cool thing to do.”
Pavitt’s goal was to build a national network of like-minded people to fend off what he called “the corporate manipulation of our culture” by the media centers of New York and Los Angeles.
“You’re advertising the fact that there’s a community here—it’s not just this industry that’s manufacturing bands, it’s a happening scene where people are feeding off each other.”
“They developed this influence and this clout and they shared it. It’s a very inclusive movement.”
for instance. “When we say ‘World Domination,’ ” Pavitt explained, “we’re saying, ‘Fuck you, we’re from Seattle, and we don’t care if the media machines are in L.A., we’re going to create our own.’ ”
“People made me feel bad when I was a kid,” says Pedersen, “so why would I want to go out of my way to make people feel rotten, like somehow they don’t belong or they don’t cut the mustard?”
“Beat Happening know that the deep moments in our lives don’t extract profundities from us; rather, it is clichés that are the endless, involuntary spew of the lover’s discourse.”
The revolution had been largely successful, but as it turned out, the struggle was much more fun than the victory.
