Post by Fuggle on Sept 22, 2006 22:08:45 GMT -5
Strange Days Indeed
The Gipper, Tricky Dick, American Hardcore, The U.S. vs. John Lennon and déjà vu all over again
By MATT COKER
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Photo by Barrie Wentzell
Watching the new documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon, with page after page of redacted FBI files on the former Beatle blowing toward the center of the screen, my mind drifted to a scene I’d caught a couple of days before in American Hardcore, a new documentary about the ultra-violent strain of punk rock born the same year Lennon died, 1980.
As Black Flag singer Henry Rollins was saying, “Punk rockers love to hate Ronald Reagan worldwide,” hardcore album cover after hardcore album cover featuring the Gipper in escalating forms of humiliation blew toward the center of the screen. And that’s when it hit me: goddamn, The U.S. vs. John Lennon and American Hardcore have a lot in common.
Rock musicians are at the center of both documentaries. Both were independently produced and picked up by studios (Sony Pictures Classics for American Hardcore, Lionsgate—the studio that rescued the Disney-abandoned Fahrenheit 9/11—for The U.S. vs. John Lennon). Both were enthusiastically received by film-festival audiences and will have already played in Los Angeles by the time you read this. And both open in Orange County next Friday. The one thing you can count on about local theatrical bookings is you can’t count on local theatrical bookings, but as this was going to press American Hardcore and The U.S. vs. John Lennon were slated to share the marquee at Regal/Edwards University Town 6 in Irvine, beginning Sept. 29.
Neither film has a narrator, instead relying on music, archival footage and talking heads who survived each era to push their respective stories forward. The seeds for both come from books, academic/journalist Jon Wiener’s Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files (1999, University of California Press) and rock-promoter-turned-journalist Steven Blush’s American Hardcore: A Tribal History (2001, Feral House).
These are Orange County stories as well—Hardcore because hardcore punk arguably originated here (followers were labeled “HB’s” after Huntington Beach), OC is Reagan country, and hardcore’s heyday ran concurrently with the Gipper’s evil reign. As for Lennon, Nixon is Orange County’s favorite disgraced son; we’ve got his library and birthplace up there in Yorba Linda to prove it. And those FBI documents flying at the screen might never have seen the light of day—let alone the dark of theater—were it not for Wiener’s dogged pursuit. The KPFK radio host, Nation contributing editor and history professor who specializes in the Reconstruction-era South and the turbulent 1960s can take a short walk from his cluttered office at UC Irvine to the University Town 6 and see his mug in The U.S. vs. John Lennon and his name in the end credits as “historical consultant.”
But most important are the nefarious undercurrents gurgling beneath each picture. One is about an unjustly paranoid, amoral Republican administration’s reaction to an internationally recognized radical rock & roller. The other is about justly paranoid radical punkers’ reaction to an internationally recognized amoral Republican administration.
Sadly, given this generation’s far more criminal and universally despised Republican administration, both films have something else in common: they make you nostalgic for the good ol’ days.
* * *
“I believe time wounds all heels.”
—John Lennon, after winning his immigration case and being asked if he harbored ill will toward Strom Thurmond, John Mitchell and other government officials who tried unsuccessfully to deport him
Jon Wiener first asked to see what the government had on John Lennon in 1981. Backed by the ACLU, a law firm working pro bono, the Freedom of Information Act and the U.S. Constitution, he’s won the release of hundreds of pages of secret FBI files—in fact, nearly all of them. When I interviewed Wiener six years ago (“Bigger Than the Beatles,” March 23, 2000), all that was left were 10 pages from the Bureau, which is under a 2004 federal court order to hand them over. Surprise: we now live in George W. Bush’s post-9/11 Patriot Act America, and Jon Wiener can pound linoleum as far as the feds are concerned. The case is headed for appeal.
It’s all quite silly, really, because what has been released shows John Lennon was guilty of nothing. He was followed, his phones were tapped and his concerts were infiltrated by agents who busily scribbled the lyrics of his Vietnam War protest songs.
The U.S. vs. John Lennon, which roughly chronicles the years 1966-1976, highlights the former moptop’s evolution into peacenik and then (nonviolent) revolutionary. This was during the most fractious period in American history since the Civil War, and with Nixon in office determined to “win the peace” (and clean house), a major clash between his “Silent Majority” and a perceived pop culture radical was probably inevitable.
Lennon first appeared on Nixon’s radar when the peace movement picked up “Give Peace a Chance” as its anthem. The same paranoia that ultimately brought Nixon down was in play when, with his 1972 re-election campaign drawing near, 18-year-olds won the right to vote. It was assumed millions of those teens were Lennon fans, and now the government was receiving reports that he was befriending anti-war activists.
One such friend, Abbie Hoffman, boasts in the film, “We’re a military threat.” In Nixon’s conspiratorial view, peaceniks and revolutionaries were working together to bring the country down. When FBI spies learned that another Lennon activist friend, Jerry Rubin, was bragging about snagging the Beatle for an anti-war rock tour that would follow the GOP campaign from city to city, the government threat level went to red—and the British citizen was now, unknowingly, an enemy of the U.S.
It was Thurmond who devised the plot to silence Lennon. The cracker U.S. senator from South Carolina sent Attorney General John Mitchell a letter advising Lennon be deported as a counter-strategy to the anti-war tour. The government released the spooks. Documents show the bureau’s reports on Lennon went all the way up to Nixon’s right-hand man, chief of staff H.R. Haldeman.
The media’s go-to Nixon apologist G. Gordon Liddy appears in The U.S. vs. John Lennon to defend the administration, calling Lennon “a tool being used to do harm to the U.S.” But an FBI agent also interviewed in the film admits, “It was wrong what we did. We were using the FBI to quell dissent.”
“Nobody in show business today has paid the price that Lennon paid—two years of deportation hearings,” Wiener says. “All he was saying was give peace a chance.”
Wiener—who besides Gimme Some Truth wrote Come Together: John Lennon in His Times (University of Illinois Press, 1994) has been asked to participate in various Lennon documentaries over the years. Most never got made or were, in his words, terrible.
“The problem with all these projects is that they couldn’t get the rights to Lennon’s music,” Wiener explained recently, “and how can you do a Lennon film without music?”
But the writers/directors/producers of The U.S. vs. John Lennon, David Leaf and John Scheinfeld, had secured Yoko Ono’s permission to use her late husband’s music. Wiener also liked Leaf and Scheinfeld’s documentary about Beach Boy Brian Wilson, Beautiful Dreamer.
“I concluded these guys could make a great film, and were much more likely than anyone else to actually do it,” says Wiener, who signed on as an adviser.
He gives the finished product a big thumbs up.
“I was amazed to see Walter Cronkite, George McGovern, Angela Davis and G. Gordon Liddy—not exactly the usual VH1 crowd,” he says. “Also, my name is spelled right onscreen—that’s a big plus.”
My dear pal George Will likes to chime in with that old history professor adage that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. I mention this to Wiener—and confess I’m not sure we learned a goddamn thing from Vietnam.
“Yes, the parallels between Vietnam in the ’60s and Iraq today are eerie,” he says. “The film makes the connections clear when we see Nixon saying that, as the Vietnamese take over more of the fighting, we will withdraw our troops. Remember that only 34 percent of Americans today think the Iraq War is a good thing—the rest apparently do remember something about Vietnam. It’s the military and the White House that didn’t learn the lessons of Vietnam.”
That puts this historian in a unique position: he has not only studied a period like the 1960s, not only lived through it, but now gets to witness firsthand history repeating itself.
So how’s that working for you, Jon?
“Frankly, it’s really depressing.”
* * *
Hardcore dive
“Everyone was saying it was ‘morning in America.’ Someone had to say, ‘It’s fucking midnight, man.’”
—Vic Bondi of the Chicago hardcore band Articles of Faith, in American Hardcore
Juggling a cell phone and a land line as he’s rushing out the door of his Manhattan pad for the Toronto Film Festival, Steven Blush is asked if this is a bad time to chat. He answers that he’ll make the time to get his story out to Orange County. The writer/co-producer of American Hardcore and its director/co-producer Paul Rachman insisted that OC share LA’s “official” opening date—this week’s previous Tinseltown showings were special, one-night screenings—because “Orange County is really important to hardcore.”
“This really incredible, rich music that has lasted more than two decades has its roots in these towns,” Blush says. “These families moved to the suburbs to protect their kids from reality, but the boredom created a new breed of monster. That’s why you’ve got guys like Jack Grisham and the HB’s and the whole rise of stage diving and slam dancing. That’s a product of these towns.”
If Blush ruled the world, somewhere on the South Bay/Orange County line—I don’t have the heart to tell him there is no such place—“you’d have a Mount Rushmore with Jerry Roach, Gary Tovar, Greg Ginn and Jack Grisham.” Roach ran the venerable Costa Mesa club the Cuckoo’s Nest, which hosted everyone from U2 to 999 and was the setting for the movie and the Vandals’ song of the same name, “Urban Struggle.” Tovar founded the Goldenvoice concert promotion company that takes its name from a brand of Thai marijuana he was importing before doing a dime in federal lockdown. Ginn, who hails from the Lawndale/Hermosa Beach area, founded the band (Black Flag) and indie label (SST Records) credited with pushing hardcore’s hard-driving music, DIY ethic and record distribution nationwide. And Blush includes Grisham, the leader of Huntington Beach’s notorious TSOL, “for just being the most intense character of this movement, a real-life Alex from A Clockwork Orange. They terrorized people with the music they were promoting and playing. That’s what our film is a tribute to, that attitude.”
Blush was a New York City kid who went to Georgetown, became a college DJ and then a successful promoter of Washington, D.C., hardcore shows. He says it was Orange County bands like TSOL, the Adolescents and Social Distortion that most turned him on initially. And OC is represented in American Hardcore with tons of old concert footage and recent onscreen interviews with Grisham, the Middle Class’ Jeff Atta and Mike Patton, and the Adolescents’ Steve Soto, Frank Agnew, Tony Cadena and Casey Royer (also of D.I.).
Blush echoes a point made in his film: the HB’s and other hardcore followers around the country and Vancouver (home of the band DOA, whose album title Hardcore ’81 officially stamped a name on the music) did not feel attached to the original punk rock scene ruled by the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Germs and X. As Fugazi/Minor Threat/Teen Idles’ front man and straight-edge forefather Ian MacKaye says in American Hardcore, “The Sex Pistols were great, but the focal point was Sid Vicious, a nihilistic junkie. And that’s not what we were. So we called ourselves hardcore punk.”
“We liked the music, but we were not really part of the culture,” Blush explains. “All the original punk rock from New York, LA, London—that still was traditional rock & roll; the Sex Pistols were like a crazy version of rock & roll. Hardcore was a new music, so when Black Flag comes on the scene with that style and sound, it was what the kid from the suburbs could relate to. It’s like [Circle Jerk] Keith Morris says in the film: you came in later to the intro, later to the outro and then you got out of it. Nothing was written at all.”
“Nothing was written at all” would also explain the impetus behind Blush’s American Hardcore book.
He’d left the music biz and returned to New York to launch his own magazine, Seconds—despite having no previous writing experience. It lasted a dozen years and 52 issues. He was freelancing for Spin, Paper, Interview, Village Voice and several other publications when he saw a PBS rock & roll special that cut straight from old school punk to Nirvana. “It was like none of the other stuff happened,” he says, still incredulous. Unsure whether hardcore had purposely been skipped, he began a five-year “journey of rediscovery” to get something about the music on record. But, like the music, he experienced a negative reaction. “Halfway through the book, my ex-wife said, ‘Why don’t you stop that shit, it’s not going to lead to anything.’ . . . On the other hand, honestly writing about China White records or the Negative Approach from Detroit, or the Freeze from Boston, I thought, ‘Who would care about this?’ while writing it. But the book still does great. It sells as much as it ever did.”
He wrote it for nostalgic 40-year-olds but has been pleasantly surprised by its reception from those young enough to be the offspring of the original HB’s. Many of those kids attend shows by the Circle Jerks or TSOL that are opened by neo-hardcore bands, something Blush has mixed feelings about.
“On the one hand, it’s awesome that kids are diving into this and validating the music of my youth,” he says. “On the other, get your own fucking music.”
He pauses.
“All kidding aside, the only point I’d like to draw with hardcore then and hardcore now is there was always a political aspect, a political intent, passive or overt, depending on your band. Show me a highly political, anti-establishment, dangerous hardcore band today. That’s what hardcore is.”
His book drives that point home in its opening chapter, “Living in Darkness,” which includes a flier with “HARDCORE” in militaristic capital letters and a portrait of Ronnie and Nancy Reagan—both bald—standing in front of an Oval Office window with a mushroom cloud off in the distance. The following text runs alongside the illo:
Ronald Reagan, another product of Southern California, won the presidency in 1980. He was the galvanizing force of Hardcore—an enemy of the arts, minorities, women, gays, liberals, the homeless, the working man, the inner city, et cetera. All “outsiders” could agree they hated him.
Early in the film, we see the full swearing-in of Reagan at his first inauguration in January 1981.
“In the early ’80s, there was a new order,” Vic Bondi of the Chicago band Articles of Faith says into the camera. “The Ronald Reagan white man order is coming back. We had that puppet Jimmy Carter, the feminists, Negroes getting uppity. The whole country goes into this really puerile ’50s fantasy. The cardigan sweaters. And we were just like, ‘Fuck you. Fuck you. Not us. You can take that and shove it up your ass.’”
Hardcore’s violent reputation—the very thing that drew kids to it in the first place—had the most to do with the scene imploding. Great bands like Bad Brains couldn’t deal and gravitated to new sounds. Others couldn’t sustain music careers as cops shut down venues. And then there was the clichéd self-destruction amid drugs, prison stretches, nagging spouses and the ravages of Old Man Time. But, as American Hardcore contends, Reagan’s re-election sucked the spirit out of hardcore.
Near the end of the film, we see the full swearing-in of Reagan at his second inauguration in January 1985.
“The first time was unbelievable,” Dave Dictor of the San Francisco/Austin, Texas, band Millions of Dead Cops tells the camera. “The second time was very disillusioning. Punk rock fragmented into many scenes.”
It is still fragmented.
“One thing that has been very distressing these last few months is looking at MySpace and seeing the incredible number of Christian hardcore and deathmetal bands,” Blush says. “It is staggering; there are hundreds and hundreds of them. That, to me, is scary. The one thing in hardcore was that everyone pretty much hated church and state. Every major hardcore band was blasted by evangelicals as the work of Satan. That churches have coopted this music makes me think we were right in the day, because to coopt punk rock to sell Jesus is pure evil.”
AMERICAN HARDCORE AND THE U.S. VS. JOHN LENNON WILL BE REVIEWED IN NEXT WEEK’S FILM SECTION.
The Gipper, Tricky Dick, American Hardcore, The U.S. vs. John Lennon and déjà vu all over again
By MATT COKER
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Photo by Barrie Wentzell
Watching the new documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon, with page after page of redacted FBI files on the former Beatle blowing toward the center of the screen, my mind drifted to a scene I’d caught a couple of days before in American Hardcore, a new documentary about the ultra-violent strain of punk rock born the same year Lennon died, 1980.
As Black Flag singer Henry Rollins was saying, “Punk rockers love to hate Ronald Reagan worldwide,” hardcore album cover after hardcore album cover featuring the Gipper in escalating forms of humiliation blew toward the center of the screen. And that’s when it hit me: goddamn, The U.S. vs. John Lennon and American Hardcore have a lot in common.
Rock musicians are at the center of both documentaries. Both were independently produced and picked up by studios (Sony Pictures Classics for American Hardcore, Lionsgate—the studio that rescued the Disney-abandoned Fahrenheit 9/11—for The U.S. vs. John Lennon). Both were enthusiastically received by film-festival audiences and will have already played in Los Angeles by the time you read this. And both open in Orange County next Friday. The one thing you can count on about local theatrical bookings is you can’t count on local theatrical bookings, but as this was going to press American Hardcore and The U.S. vs. John Lennon were slated to share the marquee at Regal/Edwards University Town 6 in Irvine, beginning Sept. 29.
Neither film has a narrator, instead relying on music, archival footage and talking heads who survived each era to push their respective stories forward. The seeds for both come from books, academic/journalist Jon Wiener’s Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files (1999, University of California Press) and rock-promoter-turned-journalist Steven Blush’s American Hardcore: A Tribal History (2001, Feral House).
These are Orange County stories as well—Hardcore because hardcore punk arguably originated here (followers were labeled “HB’s” after Huntington Beach), OC is Reagan country, and hardcore’s heyday ran concurrently with the Gipper’s evil reign. As for Lennon, Nixon is Orange County’s favorite disgraced son; we’ve got his library and birthplace up there in Yorba Linda to prove it. And those FBI documents flying at the screen might never have seen the light of day—let alone the dark of theater—were it not for Wiener’s dogged pursuit. The KPFK radio host, Nation contributing editor and history professor who specializes in the Reconstruction-era South and the turbulent 1960s can take a short walk from his cluttered office at UC Irvine to the University Town 6 and see his mug in The U.S. vs. John Lennon and his name in the end credits as “historical consultant.”
But most important are the nefarious undercurrents gurgling beneath each picture. One is about an unjustly paranoid, amoral Republican administration’s reaction to an internationally recognized radical rock & roller. The other is about justly paranoid radical punkers’ reaction to an internationally recognized amoral Republican administration.
Sadly, given this generation’s far more criminal and universally despised Republican administration, both films have something else in common: they make you nostalgic for the good ol’ days.
* * *
“I believe time wounds all heels.”
—John Lennon, after winning his immigration case and being asked if he harbored ill will toward Strom Thurmond, John Mitchell and other government officials who tried unsuccessfully to deport him
Jon Wiener first asked to see what the government had on John Lennon in 1981. Backed by the ACLU, a law firm working pro bono, the Freedom of Information Act and the U.S. Constitution, he’s won the release of hundreds of pages of secret FBI files—in fact, nearly all of them. When I interviewed Wiener six years ago (“Bigger Than the Beatles,” March 23, 2000), all that was left were 10 pages from the Bureau, which is under a 2004 federal court order to hand them over. Surprise: we now live in George W. Bush’s post-9/11 Patriot Act America, and Jon Wiener can pound linoleum as far as the feds are concerned. The case is headed for appeal.
It’s all quite silly, really, because what has been released shows John Lennon was guilty of nothing. He was followed, his phones were tapped and his concerts were infiltrated by agents who busily scribbled the lyrics of his Vietnam War protest songs.
The U.S. vs. John Lennon, which roughly chronicles the years 1966-1976, highlights the former moptop’s evolution into peacenik and then (nonviolent) revolutionary. This was during the most fractious period in American history since the Civil War, and with Nixon in office determined to “win the peace” (and clean house), a major clash between his “Silent Majority” and a perceived pop culture radical was probably inevitable.
Lennon first appeared on Nixon’s radar when the peace movement picked up “Give Peace a Chance” as its anthem. The same paranoia that ultimately brought Nixon down was in play when, with his 1972 re-election campaign drawing near, 18-year-olds won the right to vote. It was assumed millions of those teens were Lennon fans, and now the government was receiving reports that he was befriending anti-war activists.
One such friend, Abbie Hoffman, boasts in the film, “We’re a military threat.” In Nixon’s conspiratorial view, peaceniks and revolutionaries were working together to bring the country down. When FBI spies learned that another Lennon activist friend, Jerry Rubin, was bragging about snagging the Beatle for an anti-war rock tour that would follow the GOP campaign from city to city, the government threat level went to red—and the British citizen was now, unknowingly, an enemy of the U.S.
It was Thurmond who devised the plot to silence Lennon. The cracker U.S. senator from South Carolina sent Attorney General John Mitchell a letter advising Lennon be deported as a counter-strategy to the anti-war tour. The government released the spooks. Documents show the bureau’s reports on Lennon went all the way up to Nixon’s right-hand man, chief of staff H.R. Haldeman.
The media’s go-to Nixon apologist G. Gordon Liddy appears in The U.S. vs. John Lennon to defend the administration, calling Lennon “a tool being used to do harm to the U.S.” But an FBI agent also interviewed in the film admits, “It was wrong what we did. We were using the FBI to quell dissent.”
“Nobody in show business today has paid the price that Lennon paid—two years of deportation hearings,” Wiener says. “All he was saying was give peace a chance.”
Wiener—who besides Gimme Some Truth wrote Come Together: John Lennon in His Times (University of Illinois Press, 1994) has been asked to participate in various Lennon documentaries over the years. Most never got made or were, in his words, terrible.
“The problem with all these projects is that they couldn’t get the rights to Lennon’s music,” Wiener explained recently, “and how can you do a Lennon film without music?”
But the writers/directors/producers of The U.S. vs. John Lennon, David Leaf and John Scheinfeld, had secured Yoko Ono’s permission to use her late husband’s music. Wiener also liked Leaf and Scheinfeld’s documentary about Beach Boy Brian Wilson, Beautiful Dreamer.
“I concluded these guys could make a great film, and were much more likely than anyone else to actually do it,” says Wiener, who signed on as an adviser.
He gives the finished product a big thumbs up.
“I was amazed to see Walter Cronkite, George McGovern, Angela Davis and G. Gordon Liddy—not exactly the usual VH1 crowd,” he says. “Also, my name is spelled right onscreen—that’s a big plus.”
My dear pal George Will likes to chime in with that old history professor adage that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. I mention this to Wiener—and confess I’m not sure we learned a goddamn thing from Vietnam.
“Yes, the parallels between Vietnam in the ’60s and Iraq today are eerie,” he says. “The film makes the connections clear when we see Nixon saying that, as the Vietnamese take over more of the fighting, we will withdraw our troops. Remember that only 34 percent of Americans today think the Iraq War is a good thing—the rest apparently do remember something about Vietnam. It’s the military and the White House that didn’t learn the lessons of Vietnam.”
That puts this historian in a unique position: he has not only studied a period like the 1960s, not only lived through it, but now gets to witness firsthand history repeating itself.
So how’s that working for you, Jon?
“Frankly, it’s really depressing.”
* * *
Hardcore dive
“Everyone was saying it was ‘morning in America.’ Someone had to say, ‘It’s fucking midnight, man.’”
—Vic Bondi of the Chicago hardcore band Articles of Faith, in American Hardcore
Juggling a cell phone and a land line as he’s rushing out the door of his Manhattan pad for the Toronto Film Festival, Steven Blush is asked if this is a bad time to chat. He answers that he’ll make the time to get his story out to Orange County. The writer/co-producer of American Hardcore and its director/co-producer Paul Rachman insisted that OC share LA’s “official” opening date—this week’s previous Tinseltown showings were special, one-night screenings—because “Orange County is really important to hardcore.”
“This really incredible, rich music that has lasted more than two decades has its roots in these towns,” Blush says. “These families moved to the suburbs to protect their kids from reality, but the boredom created a new breed of monster. That’s why you’ve got guys like Jack Grisham and the HB’s and the whole rise of stage diving and slam dancing. That’s a product of these towns.”
If Blush ruled the world, somewhere on the South Bay/Orange County line—I don’t have the heart to tell him there is no such place—“you’d have a Mount Rushmore with Jerry Roach, Gary Tovar, Greg Ginn and Jack Grisham.” Roach ran the venerable Costa Mesa club the Cuckoo’s Nest, which hosted everyone from U2 to 999 and was the setting for the movie and the Vandals’ song of the same name, “Urban Struggle.” Tovar founded the Goldenvoice concert promotion company that takes its name from a brand of Thai marijuana he was importing before doing a dime in federal lockdown. Ginn, who hails from the Lawndale/Hermosa Beach area, founded the band (Black Flag) and indie label (SST Records) credited with pushing hardcore’s hard-driving music, DIY ethic and record distribution nationwide. And Blush includes Grisham, the leader of Huntington Beach’s notorious TSOL, “for just being the most intense character of this movement, a real-life Alex from A Clockwork Orange. They terrorized people with the music they were promoting and playing. That’s what our film is a tribute to, that attitude.”
Blush was a New York City kid who went to Georgetown, became a college DJ and then a successful promoter of Washington, D.C., hardcore shows. He says it was Orange County bands like TSOL, the Adolescents and Social Distortion that most turned him on initially. And OC is represented in American Hardcore with tons of old concert footage and recent onscreen interviews with Grisham, the Middle Class’ Jeff Atta and Mike Patton, and the Adolescents’ Steve Soto, Frank Agnew, Tony Cadena and Casey Royer (also of D.I.).
Blush echoes a point made in his film: the HB’s and other hardcore followers around the country and Vancouver (home of the band DOA, whose album title Hardcore ’81 officially stamped a name on the music) did not feel attached to the original punk rock scene ruled by the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Germs and X. As Fugazi/Minor Threat/Teen Idles’ front man and straight-edge forefather Ian MacKaye says in American Hardcore, “The Sex Pistols were great, but the focal point was Sid Vicious, a nihilistic junkie. And that’s not what we were. So we called ourselves hardcore punk.”
“We liked the music, but we were not really part of the culture,” Blush explains. “All the original punk rock from New York, LA, London—that still was traditional rock & roll; the Sex Pistols were like a crazy version of rock & roll. Hardcore was a new music, so when Black Flag comes on the scene with that style and sound, it was what the kid from the suburbs could relate to. It’s like [Circle Jerk] Keith Morris says in the film: you came in later to the intro, later to the outro and then you got out of it. Nothing was written at all.”
“Nothing was written at all” would also explain the impetus behind Blush’s American Hardcore book.
He’d left the music biz and returned to New York to launch his own magazine, Seconds—despite having no previous writing experience. It lasted a dozen years and 52 issues. He was freelancing for Spin, Paper, Interview, Village Voice and several other publications when he saw a PBS rock & roll special that cut straight from old school punk to Nirvana. “It was like none of the other stuff happened,” he says, still incredulous. Unsure whether hardcore had purposely been skipped, he began a five-year “journey of rediscovery” to get something about the music on record. But, like the music, he experienced a negative reaction. “Halfway through the book, my ex-wife said, ‘Why don’t you stop that shit, it’s not going to lead to anything.’ . . . On the other hand, honestly writing about China White records or the Negative Approach from Detroit, or the Freeze from Boston, I thought, ‘Who would care about this?’ while writing it. But the book still does great. It sells as much as it ever did.”
He wrote it for nostalgic 40-year-olds but has been pleasantly surprised by its reception from those young enough to be the offspring of the original HB’s. Many of those kids attend shows by the Circle Jerks or TSOL that are opened by neo-hardcore bands, something Blush has mixed feelings about.
“On the one hand, it’s awesome that kids are diving into this and validating the music of my youth,” he says. “On the other, get your own fucking music.”
He pauses.
“All kidding aside, the only point I’d like to draw with hardcore then and hardcore now is there was always a political aspect, a political intent, passive or overt, depending on your band. Show me a highly political, anti-establishment, dangerous hardcore band today. That’s what hardcore is.”
His book drives that point home in its opening chapter, “Living in Darkness,” which includes a flier with “HARDCORE” in militaristic capital letters and a portrait of Ronnie and Nancy Reagan—both bald—standing in front of an Oval Office window with a mushroom cloud off in the distance. The following text runs alongside the illo:
Ronald Reagan, another product of Southern California, won the presidency in 1980. He was the galvanizing force of Hardcore—an enemy of the arts, minorities, women, gays, liberals, the homeless, the working man, the inner city, et cetera. All “outsiders” could agree they hated him.
Early in the film, we see the full swearing-in of Reagan at his first inauguration in January 1981.
“In the early ’80s, there was a new order,” Vic Bondi of the Chicago band Articles of Faith says into the camera. “The Ronald Reagan white man order is coming back. We had that puppet Jimmy Carter, the feminists, Negroes getting uppity. The whole country goes into this really puerile ’50s fantasy. The cardigan sweaters. And we were just like, ‘Fuck you. Fuck you. Not us. You can take that and shove it up your ass.’”
Hardcore’s violent reputation—the very thing that drew kids to it in the first place—had the most to do with the scene imploding. Great bands like Bad Brains couldn’t deal and gravitated to new sounds. Others couldn’t sustain music careers as cops shut down venues. And then there was the clichéd self-destruction amid drugs, prison stretches, nagging spouses and the ravages of Old Man Time. But, as American Hardcore contends, Reagan’s re-election sucked the spirit out of hardcore.
Near the end of the film, we see the full swearing-in of Reagan at his second inauguration in January 1985.
“The first time was unbelievable,” Dave Dictor of the San Francisco/Austin, Texas, band Millions of Dead Cops tells the camera. “The second time was very disillusioning. Punk rock fragmented into many scenes.”
It is still fragmented.
“One thing that has been very distressing these last few months is looking at MySpace and seeing the incredible number of Christian hardcore and deathmetal bands,” Blush says. “It is staggering; there are hundreds and hundreds of them. That, to me, is scary. The one thing in hardcore was that everyone pretty much hated church and state. Every major hardcore band was blasted by evangelicals as the work of Satan. That churches have coopted this music makes me think we were right in the day, because to coopt punk rock to sell Jesus is pure evil.”
AMERICAN HARDCORE AND THE U.S. VS. JOHN LENNON WILL BE REVIEWED IN NEXT WEEK’S FILM SECTION.