Reviews for The Vinyl District- Cornershop's URBAN TURBAN, OFF!'s S/T and Daryl Hall's SACRED SONGS

Cornershop review here

OFF! review here

Daryl Hall review here



Judging a record by its sleeve: Black Flag's MY WAR LP as an hommage to Richard Meltzer, an examination of Raymond Pettibon and a celebration of the scene, maaaaannnnnn....



In the early 70s, Richard Meltzer began his slow journey away from rock criticism by submitting reviews that only dealt with the record's packaging, filling column space not with the dreary prose that his editors had come to expect and actually demand, but instead fixating in his canny and dyspeptic way on the minutiae of what had become almost integral in the atmosphere of the "business" of rock music, i.e. something that's unquestionably important yet almost never gets talked about. Because if "it" wasn't important, the "it" being the album cover, than they'd certainly all look the same. Important to whom, you might be asking? That's a big question, but for the purposes of this argument, the ogre of "financial interests", most definitely. Now, it's easily evidenced that album covers don't look the same. But "feel" the same? Oh yeah, at least a significant portion, and I'm not talking about the sensation of holding them in your hands, natch. When album covers begin to feel the same, what's that say about the music inside? Now, the roomy tract you're currently reading isn't going to follow Meltzer's paradigm very closely, but I wanted to mention him now because we'll return to him later. For the time being though, let's talk about Raymond Pettibon, the artist responsible for the cover of MY WAR.

Raymond Pettibon

In my eyes, one of the most interesting angles in the whole underground music milieu is the Who, What, and Why of the scene participant's various non-musical interests. Pettibon’s contribution is frankly one of the most appropriate alliances (in terms of style and subject matter) between music and visual art formed in the "punk" movement, yet this connection can prove rather elusive to easy synopsis. He is essentially an artist of discomfort, and his art is suffused with negativity and a profound preoccupation with bleakness and despair that made its adoption by the counterculture of the Reagan-era almost inevitable (and it surely helped that Pettibon was Black Flag guitarist and SST owner Greg Ginn's brother). However, the large bulk of his art from this period features so much depth and bitter intelligence that I can't help but think it was lost on the majority of those who felt it was "theirs". Or to put it another way, I can't shake the suspicion that so many were stoked over the shock value while sidestepping the critique that often concerned their contemporaneous social environs. But maybe I'm judging to harshly. One of the unique aspects of the punk/indie scene's extra-musical influences is how diverse they were. This fact often takes people with even a fair knowledge of this era's music by surprise. The lack of overt documentation on the specifics of what was happening in film, writing, and visual art within this subculture can lead some individuals to conclude that John Hughes films and Bret Easton Ellis novels were primary exponents of the period's underground rumblings.

To be blunt: Au contraire. Legitimate non musical contemporaries were definitely making contributions to the cultural landscape. The written word was represented by such disparate entities as Kathy Acker, the cyberpunk sci-fi of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Lewis Shriner, the late works of William S. Burroughs, musician littérateurs like Nick Cave, Lydia Lunch, Billy Childish, Chris D. and an inked-up baldy whose birth name was Henry Garfield; film was infested by Cinema of Transgression figures like Nick Zedd, Beth B. and Richard Kern, along with other names like Dave Markey and John Moritsugu; and visual art saw the paintings (and performance works) of Joe Coleman, the woodcuts of Billy Childish, the scrawl of Savage Pencil, the cross-media gestalt of Gary Panter, and of course a venerable gaggle of commix artists venting spleen and acting snide or aloof, probably the most successful example being a guy you may have heard of named Matt Groening. Raymond Pettibon falls into this sticky constellation, his personal aesthetic radiating like hijacked James Thurber one panels that have all the humor sucked out of them only to be injected with trepidation, existential dread and flashes of misery. Of course, punks and other non-conformists of this era (read: bohemians) also grabbed from history, and it's rather startling just how intense this plundering was. Contrast this to the hippies, where the distrust of older generations meant that only very specific artifacts were allowed entry into their playground (some Beats, some Huxley, and some Hesse, for example) and you can see just how non-rigid the '80s subculture really was. Lit kicks were satiated from sources as various as those Beats, hardboiled detective fiction, pulp sci-fi like Phil K. Dick and Samuel R. Delaney, post-mod word-fuckers like Pynchon, weird smut like Pauline Reage and De Sade in appropriately tough translation, pimp pulp from Iceberg Slim, Hubert Selby's sustained scream from the New York streets, Bukowski's fly in the ointment aesthetic, French absinthe poets and their sexually transgressing country folk like Jean Genet and certainly Georges Bataille. The pilfering of visual art was just as widespread: Dada and Surrealism, the less celebrated works of Warhol and his Pop-Art brethren, Chris Burden's bonkers performance pieces (amongst other things, he was shot in the arm from five feet away and nailed to the back of a Volkswagen; now THAT'S an example of the utilization of shock value that I fully endorse), and the equally berserk activities of the Vienna Actionists. But looking at film provides the most enlightenment into '80s bohemia's rabid selection. The explosion of home video viewing and the proliferation of midnight movie showings really boosted the situation. A hypothetic book on the subject could be broken down into the following chapters and would in no way be exhaustive: the blunt strangeness of Tod Browning's FREAKS, the early surrealist revolts of Luis Bunuel, Nick Ray's REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, oddball Hollywood and independent sleepers like Samuel Fuller's THE NAKED KISS and Leonard Kastle's THE HONEYMOON KILLERS, the films of Jean-Luc Godard (particularly the more difficult work like WEEKEND and SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the Psychotronic phenomenon from Ed Wood to H. G. Lewis to Andy Milligan, the gut-punch horror films of George Romero, Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven, idiosyncratic midnight movies like Lynch's ERASERHEAD and Jodorowsky's EL TOPO, controversial works by established commercial directors such as Kubrick's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and Scorsese's TAXI DRIVER, the films of John Waters and Russ Meyer, early Cronenberg, Andy Warhol's directorial efforts and those he produced with Paul Morrissey, and the avant-garde work of Warhol's contemporaries, particularly Jack Smith’s FLAMING CREATURES and Stan Brakhage's sublime autopsy film THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES. In addition to the simple availability of all this stuff were the long gaps in the emergence of contemporary work that could speak to this alienated and self-marginalizing audience. Sure, in addition to those mentioned a bit earlier there was Derek Jarman and ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL. Yes, there was a spate of non-fiction films that documented the scene. Alex Cox’s REPO MAN obviously deserves mention along with other unusual “Hollywood” films like Dennis Hopper's loopy OUT OF THE BLUE and Tim Hunter's THE RIVER'S EDGE. We can throw in “message-porn” like CAFÉ FLESH and the druggy/arty sci-fi of LIQUID SKY. But before long it starts to be slim pickings, in part because the distribution networks were more grassroots in this era. What's this have to do with Ray Pettibon and his cover for "My War"? Well, nothing. And yet everything. NOTHING because the last three paragraphs were essentially just a riff (I love jazz), an indulgence (so does Pettibon), a way of fleshing out some of the cultural terrain of a period where everything wasn't available at the click of a mouse, and people were forced to bring dimension to their way of life through constant digging and the passing around of artifacts while the culture at large looked in the other direction. It was so much more than mail ordering records. And EVERYTHING because context is essential; Did you know Pettibon also made films?

VHS cover to Pettibon's CITIZEN TANIA

He's been in bands, too (he's in one now, in fact). And his art for many years was collected into little low-budget pamphlets that could be ordered direct from SST. These small books could be used in a variety of ways; carried in backpacks and stared at in cars while waiting for something (nothing) to happen or strategically placed in the living space to ultimately trigger a reaction. Upscale trendies aren't the only people with coffee tables, you know. If there is a certainty in this universe, it is that PUNKS LOVE COFFEE, and I'm just as positive that one of Pettibon's chapbooks would look flat-out amazing next to a piping mug of shitty instant brew. But really, my digressions do at least provide emphasis that this specific movement generally disdained art that had any real relationship to fine-art aesthetics or any high (or middle) brow acceptability. Take photography for example: The main thrust of it within this scene was divided between stern documentation (Glen E. Freidman, SST's Naomi Pedersen, Jenny Lens, Cynthia Connelly, and later shutterbugs like Michael Levine and Charles Peterson for example) and the eventually stultifying application of collage art (more Dada influence) as statement (we could maybe call this the Maximum Rock 'N' Roll aesthetic). Art photography seems rare in the annals of the era, the only names really springing to mind being Robert Mapplethorpe, Joel-Peter Witkin, maybe Larry Clark (later of KIDS directorial fame) and possibly Robert Frank if we're being extremely inclusive. This isn't to infer that documentary photography lacked an artistic dimension (no way) or that the occasional collage didn't achieve its effect. I'm just trying to ram home the point of just how anti-establishment this movement was (and still kinda is, because I tend to look at the period between the counterculture's re-ignition around 1977 and the present day as one long and warped continuum) in relation to its defining principles. If the public at large is generally thinking glamour shot sheen or Ansel Adams (glamour shot mountains) in relation to photography, then it's no surprise that the post-'77 scene so thoroughly embraced a basically vérité approach. To extend this idea: When an ink on paper piece by Pettibon commands $66,000 at auction, it's impossible to think this won't somehow change how his art is perceived. In this case, his work had certainly developed but suffered no commoditization (i.e. sell out); it is simply the case that museum culture reigned him in as one of their numerous outsiders. But dig what happens when this occurs: the joy that's inspired by the strange reactions and dismissive tut-tuting over a freaky album cover is replaced with the feeling that smartly dressed people with too much fucking money have co-opted another goddamned thing.

Sour grapes over losing exclusive bragging rights to the fandom of some record/film/book/etc is generally not very attractive, and I tend to take a more pragmatic approach and cheer when some little niche artist/writer/band that I love finds a wider audience. But sometimes it's hard to not feel the sting. Like when an old SST mail order catalog falls out from an LP sleeve onto the carpet, for instance. I pick it up to ogle the listing for once affordable Pettibon chapbooks, and that leads me to look across the room at the thick and glossy paperback of his awe-inspiring later work that set me back $80. Damn right I feel the sting. But that's okay, because when that baby sits on my coffee table it looks just beautiful.

One of the positive things that Pettibon's integration into the art-world has inspired is a more accurate view into what it is exactly that he does. If I had a buck for every time I clarified to someone between 1988 and 1995 (an arbitrary cut off point, sure) that Pettibon wasn't a cartoonist or comic (or commix) artist, I'd buy you lunch. No, not you, YOU. It'd be cheap eats, but still. Pettibon was sometimes mistakenly lumped in with such u-ground comic scribes as Charles Burns, Dan Clowes, Wayno, Kaz, Los Bros Hernandez, and Peter Bagge, but what this wild-assed group did was basically adapt their working methods into a piece that could help an album sleeve or CD cover stand out from the majority while basking in the good vibes (and personal checks from record labels) that mutual appreciation inspires. The use of Pettibon's work is essentially different. The impression is that he worked on his own and his pieces were later adapted (and rather notoriously debased with scissors) to gig flyers and album covers. On one hand he's identifiable as an artist in isolation, yet he designed the Black Flag bars, which lends him the aura of collaboration. The work of the comic artists always felt more capitalistic than that: Clowes was quite blasé about it in interviews and Burns and Bagge submitted work for some really rotten mainstream albums. In the '90s there was an explosion of artist collaborators like Frank Kozik and Coop who seem more in league with Pettibon, but here the difference is less one of function and more one of effect. Both Kozik and Coop were all about the reinterpretation and subversion of iconography, the former turning established and seemingly benign images like cartoon characters into drugged out sex kittens or creepy street urchins, and the later ramping-up old standbys like salivating sex-crazed wolves, making the object of their lust-drenched blood-shot eyes the buxom and scantily clad women descended from hot rod culture that radiated like a twisted manifestation of R. Crumb's gargantuan libido.

A nutshell example of Coop's style

This duo was one of the prime examples of the ‘90s’ sub-cultural fascination with being politically incorrect, or more accurately they filled a need by some to adopt a deliberate stance that prized a type of apolitical hedonism. In addition, Kozik and Coop were essentially about surfaces and are basically formalist. They both actually sort of defy the punk ethos that anybody can play. One look at their work shows that a high level of discipline and trad-art skill was employed, even when the deluge of silk-screened show posters, magazine covers and limited edition record sleeves began to take on an almost Warhol-like assembly line feel. There was actually a bit of grumbling about Pettibon during this era, even from Kozik himself, the main thrust being that his stark, often minimalist work possessed a lazy, sloppy aura that a more precision-tuned artist like Kozik found unappealing. I took this in stride then and now, but still feel that it's similar to the attitude that The Ramones weren't any good due to their music's lack of solos. But the ultimate proof in the pudding regarding the difference between Pettibon and Kozik/Coop/etc is one of impact. Again, the more formalist approach of the later group never really gets beyond the level of eye candy, which is cool enough, but there was just so much of it on CDs and posters and the covers/pages of YOUR FLESH that it seemed the scene eventually OD-ed on the stuff.

It was everywhere for a while, then it suddenly wasn't. In contrast, Pettibon was never really that prolific, and an even better point would be that his work is so wrapped up in his personality and ideology that he never had a single imitator. And Pettibon's art has a depth that really lingers. The effect of a piece viewed once can last years, and other examples can put a damper on my day (in the best way possible) even if they are already quite familiar. Pettibon may not be the cause célèbre he once was, and his audience may now include wealthy art investors who don't give two squirts about the aesthetic worth of the So Cal punk rock scene that helped thrust him into prominence, but his presence is certainly still vital.

So there we have it. And in an attempt to not sound like a panting sycophant, I'll refrain from giving too much credit to the SST crew for their adoption of Pettibon's work as a visual signifier. The blood relationship between Pettibon (pseudonym from the French, petit bon, and meaning "good little one": thanks Wikipedia) and Ginn makes downplaying rather easy, plus the rather offhand way that some of the SST crew approached Pettibon's art doesn't smack of a reverential mindset to the man's stuff. I'll stop short of describing the appropriation as trying to just shock and instead opine into what I think was really being attempted: the desire to stand out in a field that was beginning to look and feel the same. You can apply this idea to the band's hairstyles and clothing choices as well. Countercultural conformity was starting to run rampant, and Black Flag really defined themselves as not belonging to any camp, and if there is any artwork from that era that promulgates alienation and the ideals of being a loner, it's Pettibon's. But in contrast to how the Minutemen used his work, Black Flag's collaboration, while certainly subversive, still seems significantly less profound. To relate this back to Meltzer, the whole punk rock impulse, and the west coast division of it in particular, actually got him inspired again by the potential of basic, dirty rock 'n' roll as a vessel of defiance and distorted beauty.

Meltzer reading publicly a few months back via Kevin Sampsell's blog

The contrarian streak never left him, but he hosted a radio show for a while ("Hepcats from Hell"), penned a whole bunch of rock related junk for small press publications throughout the '80s, talked some sweetly foul mouthed shit about Bill Graham's Mom on stage as the emcee for the Sex Pistols' final gig at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom, fronted the blink-and-you-missed-it punk band Vom with the future Angry Samoans, and inspired D. Boon to proclaim from the stage: "This song goes out to Richard Meltzer, he was our hero!". Righteous and individualist tactics like submitting cover art-centric record reviews to publications whose modus operandi was nothing more than insuring their print pages secured record company advertising was just one thing that made him so heroic. And that heroism manifested itself in the way SST operated (at least early on), which in turn impacted my teenaged consciousness as I ominously eyeballed the covers of MY WAR, SLIP IT IN and LOOSE NUT in a sterile mall record store, where they frankly stood out like radioactive artifacts in an ocean of insubstantiality. I can only hope that some impressionable upstart might stumble upon this modest bout of theorizing and get gobsmacked by the mighty inksmanship of Raymond Pettibon, and in turn elect to spend his life asking questions instead of dully and dutifully accepting the answers. We can only pass the torch one person at a time, right?



Fighting a war we can't win: Black Flag's DAMAGED (SST 007)

If I had a buck for every time Black Flag's DAMAGED was used as the soundtrack for some sort of hedonistic gathering or unhealthy activity, I'd never need to work again. And if I could gain a dollar for each time this same record was played by a single individual, angry and confused and plagued by solitude, staring at the walls or down at a blank sheet of paper that's purpose is to document thoughts expressed through words that somehow can't get through the haze or distortion of emotional desperation, I'd double my money. Easily. I'm sure there are people who own this record that have never punched a brick wall out of sheer frustration or looked at themselves in a mirror in disgust or stood amongst a group of individuals and felt light years away in temperament. Those people may even "like" this record. But they don't really know its power, what it's expressing so succinctly about the failure to fit into a world that shuns and shames those who can't or won't internalize or deny the sheer causticity of which daily life is capable. A whole lot of ballyhoo has been made about the legal bullshit that this record inspired, but the aspect of the whole situation that sticks out to me is what started it all, specifically MCA's refusal to release it, using the jargon "anti-parent". It's a nice tidy term that holds the messier reality that DAMAGED is like the aural essence of the quintessential "problem child". It's a seething rant to every mom and dad who'd half-assed reared offspring that didn't ask to be brought onto this planet, and also a balm to those same kids, informing each one that they were part of a multitude of fucked-up and scrawny and fat and acne-riddled teens who were teetering on the brink of implosion. It's easy to picture some well tanned asshole record executive hearing this music and being assaulted by exactly what it was/is, and immediately fearing that it could spread like a virus from pressing plant to record store to bedroom through speakers and headphones and into ear canals and oh, shit: the gig is up. Molly no longer hates the fact that she's overweight or feels inferior to the cheerleading squad. Nah, she's bought a leather jacket, cut her hair short, and doesn't hide that she's attracted to girls. Of course I'm romanticizing somewhat, but after taking in the bitter yet lovely pill that is this album, all that romantic jive slowly transforms into well earned tribute. The fact that the band plays with such feral atonal fury while always keeping a loose grip on the song's focus is still startling. The phrase "an untamed sense of control" was coined by Bob Dylan to describe the early country/pre-bluegrass Kentucky mountain music of Roscoe Holcomb. I'd like to momentarily hi-jack the compliment and apply it to this LP, because it fits like a pair of long johns. Only after a few decades of bands’ copping its moves does DAMAGED really reveal itself as the goddamned structural behemoth that it is. The rhythm hits with a deliciously pummeling elasticity, and Greg Ginn's guitar grinds, burns, and squalls all over the proceedings, reaching for twisted sounds that ring out with a "wrongness" that's just gripping. If you haven't heard the record, my description may lead you to think that its greatness is tied to a certain inspired monochromatic sensibility, ala certain first generation hardcore bands. If so, let me correct that impression. It's certainly not all over the map stylistically, but as the grooves lead to the label it displays a commendable variety, particularly on the second side: "Padded Cell" is just one example of the spastic perfection that this specific version of the band could cook up.

Black Flag live at Wilson Center, Washington DC with Chicago's Effigies and some of harDCore's finest

(almost too much of a good thing)

The record ends with a ranting Rollins presiding over a tweaked sub-bluesy lurch that points Black Flag to one of their subsequent directions. For many, the majority of songs contained herein were almost golden oldies, and it wasn't hard to see the appeal to the band of truly throwing them down one more time before moving on. Rollins-era Flag was a rapidly evolving beast, at times not even including the vocalist that for a large group of listeners is the first thing they think of when this group's name comes up. Unlike The Minutemen or even underappreciated yet championed SST groups like Saccharine Trust or Slovenly, opinions about Black Flag differ wildly. Each vocalist has their partisans, some love the pre-Rollins period and disdain the DC transplant's contribution ("Rollins ruined Black Flag"), others dig this record but think that the focus was lost with the later stuff, for a few the two live albums of the Rollins-era are where it's at, with the studio stuff falling short. The instrumental work is hated and loved by many for roughly the same reasons. This is only a few of the opinions held about Flag's discography (if I had a buck for every debate/argument this group inspired at parties or bars…..ah, you know the rest). In some ways this is unavoidable and part of the band's lasting appeal: I know I listen to MY WAR more than LOOSE NUT, and when I want a charge of primal punk rock the early stuff satisfies the need, not THE PROCESS OF WEEDING OUT. But DAMAGED stands apart (not entirely though; I've met a few stodgy Flag fans who say they don't like it) as the one document of the band that comes close to summing up what they were all "about". It has definite links to the early sound, the gunky two guitar mania (which Spot apparently hated), and includes enough off-kilter tics and weird flashes to show that they were so much more than just some ordinary punk band who happened to have a really great day in the studio. This is the sound of ‘80s style urban desperation boiled down to a science and fired like a shot from a bazooka to send the façade of normalcy falling down like the house of cards it most certainly is. It's a stone classic and one of the finest and most extreme examples of the sonic depth charge of which rock music is capable. I can only hope you're young and fucked enough to know just how special it is.

early '80's California punk and SST records: thoughts from someone who frankly wasn't there, man.

I'm in the process of slowly working through some of my old writings with the intention of eventually placing most of it under the happy banner of this here blog. I'm sometimes subtly/sometimes substantially tweaking these earlier pieces, knocking out a clunky turn of phrase or adapting the text to the open-ended free-for-all approach that defines this small blip in the cyber-realm. If you are one of the three people that were previously familiar with these new/old postings, I'm sorry for the redundancy. Continue to watch this space for fresh posts. 'kay?

1977 is a landmark year in the history of rock music, for it announced to the world at large the arrival of a striped-down approach to the form that had been brewing under the surface for a good while previous: inspired by The Stooges, '60's garage bands, and even rockabilly and Chuck Berry, it was a raw, fresh approach, a return to basic principles, a slap in the face to rock-star aesthetics and show-off technical proficiency. Obviously, I'm talking about punk rock. But flash forward to the dawn of the '80s, and a look at the punk "scene" finds it floundering in a variety of directions. Many of the great bands that defined the '70s punk rock sound had broken up, others had either watered down their sound to find commercial acceptance (the "new wave" phenomena) or moved into more complex or abstract territory (post-punk or experimental music), and some were playing in the same style with less interesting results. For a variety of reasons, pure punk rock never caught on commercially in the USA, and this fact had major impact on what was happening in numerous regional music scenes around the country. The effect this had on Southern California, one of the strongest locales in the history of early American punk, was huge. Some took the new wave route, with probably the most commercially successful example being The Go-Gos (yes, they were a punk band in the beginning, though there is sadly no recorded evidence of this, their early days existing as a part of Cali punk lore). Many bands broke up, in some cases with individuals simply disappearing into a mist of anonymity, others like Darby Crash and Black Randy dying young, and a few like X and the post-Dils band Rank and File adjusting and adapting with varying levels of success to a more traditional rock sound. By the start of the Reagan decade punk rock was in bad shape. Shunned by the major record labels, perceived by the public at large as yesterday's fad, and carried on by bands who were either inferior to the classic sounds of the initial impulse or were soldiering forward with diminishing levels of chutzpah, it was obvious that something needed to happen to reignite and refocus the whole shebang. And it did. For some it was the renewed energy and focus of what came to be known as hardcore. For others, it was the varied and less genre specific sounds that were later described as indie-rock. But interestingly, one "scene" can lay claim to being an essential influence on both of these developments. That's SST records.



The label's inaugural blast was released in 1978, the NERVOUS BREAKDOWN 7 inch, and compared to other examples of punk that were extant at the time, it's a major step beyond (sonically, only The Dils and The Middle Class come anywhere near the antagonistic blitz of SST's first release. I should add that Germs, at this point, were still more notable for being barely able to hold their sound together, and for the sheer spectacle of their live shows. 1979 saw the release of their GI album, which frankly does give NERVOUS BREAKDOWN a run for its money in the extreme sonic pandemonium sweepstakes, though the Flag still take the honors by a nose). 1980 saw the band continuing the template (the challenge?) they laid out on that first platter, and it was this year that saw them gathering momentum and documenting the harsh, angry, brutally direct sound that was so influential to so many kids all over the country, kids who were vital in developing the early hardcore scene. In fact, Black Flag were so important to the hardcore explosion that was ready to detonate that they are often themselves called a hardcore band. Personally, I think this a mistake, an example of inclusion due in this case to the wicked mania of their sound, a sound that was so distinct from the often goofy non-conformist fun of their predecessors, and also the band's image or presentation, which was notably subversive (owning a Black Flag record, even in the late '80s, had the same feel that owning Burroughs novels did. It felt dangerous and liberating for a young mind). No, I'll always consider Black Flag to be a punk band, though I'll add that their brand of punk in the FIRST FOUR YEARS-era is really the perfect example of the genre at its most extreme: get any more "out there" and suddenly you've become something else. And that something else is really what hardcore was in its earliest days. Still intrinsically tied to punk, hardcore was, at its beginnings, an undeniable step in a new direction. Fueled by youth, adrenalin, rage, and a helplessness inspired by the culture of the time, hardcore at its best was a music that could send the listener reeling with its intensity. This sound served for many as a clarion call, and for others it was like a line in the sand; it was like 1977 all over again, except this time many of these snotty-nosed instigators (those who were still around) were now on the receiving end of this take it or leave it hostility. It would have been easy for Black Flag to just get swept up in the tide, tailoring their sound to this new scene, and receiving the hosannas of these new hardcore brigades on tour after tour across the country. But Flag leader Greg Ginn, through his label, had other fish to fry. If hardcore is eternally indebted to the Flag, indie-rock is unimaginable without SST. Look no further that the labels early stable of bands: Minutemen, Husker Du, Meat Puppets, and to a lesser extent Flag themselves were all beacons in the decade long march of indie-rock to its eventual explosion into worldwide consciousness via the Pacific Northwest and all the sweet hell that ensued throughout the '90s (indie-rock Mk. II).



Considering that these four bands were there at the beginning, sticking out like sore thumbs in an increasing sea of mediocrity and generics, maturing and redefining their sounds, influencing and frustrating their fellow travelers, using the inspiration and friction of the closeness of the SST "family" to create such timeless art, it becomes easy to declare that SST Records was the most important label of the '80s. The Minutemen grew from their spastic, individualist punk beginnings into the best rock trio since The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Meat Puppets kept refining what they were until they arrived at a wonderfully approachable twist on psychedelia. Husker Du subtly adjusted the noisy assault of their early sound to influence a horde of bands, and the loud/soft dynamics of The Pixies and the underappreciated early achievements of indie long-runners Superchunk are intrinsically linked to Mould/Hart/Norton.



Black Flag continued to confound listeners and critics like the dysfunctional yet brilliant unit they were; there was no accepted line on this band. Many turned their backs on them and others would praise the band for a particular release only to be let down or perplexed by the next one. The all over the map, document everything tactic of Ginn easily lost them more fans than it gained, but this eclectic, dramatic evolution endeared them to a small but fervent few as the one American band to have come from the late '70s punk scene that not only retained their relevance, but actually increased it. And in addition, Saccharine Trust existed as an often ignored, yet defiant entity that sent countless fanzine scribes into spasms of purple prose that alternately attempted to get their readers to hippen the fuck up and to document for all time how clueless these readers were in comparison to these tireless writer/publishers.



Overkill and Wurm? They show just how unconcerned SST were with scene fashion and how invested they were with personal satisfaction, and regardless of how successful you or I feel those releases were, they exist as the fringe elements of a label that was nothing short of a goddamned juggernaut that ran rampant over the '80s and was as important to the history of rock music as Chess, Sun, Stax, or Dangerhouse. By the tail end of this decade, if you listened to hardcore, you probably thought that the majority of indie bands (who were still working without the comfortable catchall genre designation to lump them under) were, with a few possible exceptions, arty or pretentious. If you listened to Sonic Youth or Dinosaur Jr. or their confederates, you were quite likely to feel that the hardcore scene was nothing short of a near-total waste of time. I can just imagine Greg Ginn, one day around say 1987, after a grueling yet commonplace marathon practice session with his post-Flag group Gone, sitting down for a brief rest in the SST office. After lighting the fifth joint of the day, he looks over to his desk and sees two magazines. One is the latest issue of Maximum Rock 'N' Roll, where in the letters section Black Flag is dismissed by one of countless punk theorists as "sucking after 1981", and the other is the most recent Forced Exposure, which gives the critical smackdown to SST's new Das Damen LP. Greg smokes his joint in the silence save for the ringing in his ears and for a brief moment sits back and smiles with recognition at the sheer fucking catalyst he's been. Then he gets up, calls his dealer for another bag, places a full page ad for SWA in the next Option magazine, and "forgets" to send out past due royalty checks. Just a hypothetical snapshot of a moment in a day in the life of an unabashed weirdo punk.