More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 13 - December 17, 2023
Boston Rock interviewer Gerard Cosloy asked why they didn’t try to stop violence at their shows. Dukowski responded with a succinct summation of the punk principle of anarchy. “Do we have a right to act as leaders, to tell people how to act?” 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.”
I’d go, ‘Greg, I’m going to a friend’s house this weekend because she’s going to feed me. And I will be back on Monday and I’m not going to sing Saturday and Sunday because I’m going to give my voice a rest.’ And Greg would be kind of pissed. Greg would be in there seven days a week. That’s how Black Flag was. There was never any anarchy in our lifestyle.”
“I never talked a lot to Henry,” Ginn says. “Henry was always kind of the loner type of person.” Another part of Rollins’s isolation stemmed from the fact that he didn’t smoke pot and instead drank vast quantities of coffee, meaning he was amped up on caffeine while others were stoned.
“Understand another thing: Black Flag was never a group of friends,” says Rollins, “never a big camaraderie.”
“It was definitely a line in the sand,” says Mudhoney’s Mark Arm, who had been seeing Black Flag shows in Seattle since 1981. “It was sort of an intelligence test—if you could handle the changes of Black Flag, you weren’t an idiot. And if you thought they were just selling out, then you were an idiot.”
Even the crew was kind of loopy. After he and roadie Joe Cole drove a hundred miles in the wrong direction, chief roadie Ratman had to surrender the wheel to Cole because he was too upset to drive. “Then he spray-painted his face white and took all the garbage on the floor of the cab and lit it on fire,” wrote Cole in his tour diary, later published as Planet Joe. “We drove down the highway with a fire on the floor of the cab and when it became too big to control he opened the door and kicked it out. He shouted and slobbered for about 50 miles.”
The Minutemen’s effect was more like the old metaphor of throwing a pebble into a pond and watching the ripples widen and widen. While the Minutemen’s ripple never did come close to reaching the shore, they did make those influential first few rings, where the real sophisticates and musicians were. The Minutemen were a band’s band.
At the time, rock was still considered to be exclusively popular music—if you played rock music, you wanted to be a star ipso facto. Burma’s rejection of that was extraordinary.
Onstage Miller began wearing earplugs and headphone-style protection designed for people who fire shotguns, and that still didn’t prevent the ringing. Sound, it turns out, doesn’t just enter through the ear canal but also through the bones of the face and skull.
Black Flag may have been its godfathers and the Bad Brains may have revved up its tempo to light speed, but hardcore has no more definitive band than Minor Threat.
“I had intellectualized violence quite a bit,” MacKaye continues. “I had a philosophy of violence, which was that I bruise the ego. That was my theory. I fought a lot, but I never maimed people. I was not a cruel fighter. My concept was that I would never back down from a fight. I would just come at people. The idea was to break their will—I didn’t want to hurt nobody, I really didn’t want to hurt nobody. All I really wanted to do was tell them not to hurt me and not let them have the sense that they were going to dominate us.”
Minor Threat has a comparatively small legacy—two years and twenty-five songs, but it’s a powerful and enduring one.
Charles Thompson was listening closely to Hüsker Dü’s aggro-pop (as well as Hüsker Dü’s Scottish cousins the Jesus and Mary Chain) and would later use many of their ideas in his own band, the Pixies. In turn, a scruffy misfit from rural Aberdeen, Washington, named Kurt Cobain would hear Thompson’s band and transfer those ideas to his band Nirvana. Countless other key bands of the alternative era, from Soul Asylum to Superchunk, owe a huge debt to Hüsker Dü.
At one point someone hollered, “Hüsker Dü”—the name of a popular Sixties board game “where the child can outwit the adult.” (The phrase is Norwegian for “Do you remember?”) The name stuck.
125,000 copies in the U.S.—it hit the label’s sales target, and yet with various promotional expenses, the band made little more than they would have with less sales on SST. The major label gambit had failed. “As it turned out, it didn’t make that big of a difference in the long run,” Mould admitted years later. “The sales went up, but not enough to justify, you know, to say it was the smartest move ever made.”
“Making a marriage work with two people who are relatively sober is very difficult,” continues Mars. “Now you get four people that are with each other more than a married couple would be, because you’re traveling, you’re playing, you’re stuck in the same van, and then you add cocaine and booze into the mix. To get it to be able to last for any length of time is really a feat. You do have to give up a certain part of yourself in order to make it work.”
The real coup was the unspoken understanding that they were so cool that their chief function was as a magnet band, an act that would serve mostly to attract other, more successful bands. This move paid off beyond anyone’s wildest dreams when Sonic Youth brought a hot young band called Nirvana to Geffen/DGC Records.
“One thing Sonic Youth always did, almost to a gross point, was that they always knew who the hot journalists were and they always became really close,” says Bert. “You’d go to a party and Kim would know who the Village Voice writer was in the corner of the room and she’d make sure she went over there. They were really good at schmoozing in every respect. They always made sure they met as many popular, famous people as they could, whether it be the art world or the music world. They were always really good at that—they always knew who to meet, who to know.”
This was also a time when relatively conventional bands like R.E.M. and the Replacements were taking the avant edge off the underground. Someone had to come in and do something weird before things got too normal.
By coming to the aid of promising new bands like Dinosaur Jr, Die Kreuzen, Mudhoney, and Nirvana among countless others, Sonic Youth made itself a linchpin of the indie community—and as the scene’s premier tastemakers, they also became its kingmakers.
“[Performing] was always the high point of the day,” Ranaldo says. “We’d go through long drives and no sleep and bad food just in order to get to that moment where you can release. Rock in general is about that emotional release, so we never let the knowledge on the one hand contradict the idea of release on the other.”
But it wasn’t easy. “I remember Gibby getting the flu, and six months later he’s still got the flu,” Leary says. “That kind of stuff. It was bad.
“We’d try anything to get attention,” says Coffey. “But it wasn’t attention for attention’s sake; we were trying anything that would be as much of a spectacle as humanly possible.” The stage show grew gradually until one day they realized that all the props and special effects took up more space in the van than the instruments.
When an interviewer asked why Haynes electronically manipulated his voice so much, Leary explained, “It’s just because, y’know, he’s got knobs and he can do it. It’s like, why does a dog lick its balls?”
featured a grotesque assortment of films projected on a backdrop behind the band. Among the filmic arsenal: autopsies, atomic explosions, accident scenes, facial plastic surgery, meat-processing procedures, people having epileptic seizures, scare-tactic driver’s education films, etc. “We tried to get Operation Dry Pants,” says Leary, still ruing the missed opportunity, “which is about toilet training of Down’s syndrome [kids].”
rock music’s got to be something that your mom would hate—if you want it to be really satisfying. We made music that moms would really hate, shows included—like nudity and violence and belching flames and smoke and hideous, loud, damaging music.”
Buttholes’ chemical excesses unnerved even the bibulous Replacements. “I remember them showing up and asking me if I knew where they could find some acid,” recalls Replacements roadie Bill Sullivan. “They were really insane then. They actually scared us. They scared the hell out of us.”
either—“I can see there’s a point to getting good ideas into Rolling Stone,” Picciotto added, “but when you’re sandwiched between a thousand bad ideas, I don’t think it translates.”
Publicly declaring respect for Fugazi, then, was at best a way of sublimating guilt. Much of the rock audience, knowing full well they were complicit in a lot of what Fugazi was opting out of, held the band in high regard for similar reasons.
The indie community of the Eighties had developed largely outside the withering media spotlight, where it could hatch and thrive unmolested. That situation simply didn’t exist anymore. For a while, there effectively was no underground. “I thought that was the end of what you might call punk rock,” says Peter Prescott, “because punk rock is unique and individual and is not for everybody. So almost by definition it can’t be popular.”
