Our Band Could Be Your Life: Part I

Michael Azerrad’s 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991, is as much a how-to manual as it is a history of hardcore, punk, independent and alternative music in America over the course of a formative decade. How-to what? While it doesn’t get into the nitty gritty behind making a ‘zine, starting a record label, going on tour, networking with venues, radio stations, and people across the country to knit together local scenes, it does showcase the people and personalities who did these things, what their motivations were, and how they went about creating their own alternative system for promoting music and culture, outside the dominant corporate system. They showed it could be done, and left their tracks behind for others to follow. Our Band Could Be Your Life is then a kind of sampler of the DIY methods employed by thirteen different bands who worked with what they had to get their message out into the world and leave their mark.

            For those fortunate enough to have access to computers, digital technology and the internet, getting work made independently out to the public has never been easier. Yet new difficulties arise with the ability to communicate and share creations at unprecedented velocities. There are so many people putting out material, sharing what they make and create, the signal to noise ratio is vastly increased. The internet has also created, with its speed, an attention economy. Because new books, records, movies and material is being released at such a pace, there is a tendency for people to sit with it less. There is also the tendency to not dig as deeply for content because so much material is directed to people through social media and streaming services. 

               Yet how long will they exist? The energy cost to run server farms, let alone AI, is sky high, and even without the limits to growth imposed on the future of the internet, people are clamoring for things they can hold in their hands and do in real life. So many of us want to get back to analog. 

            The independent network created by the bands chronicled in Azerrad’s book do still exist, as do other related scenes and networks, but in many instances the growth of the internet has caused the local  scenes to atrophy. Local and regional scenes have always formed the nodes on the backbone of the national and international network. The internet has allowed people of like mind and shared interest to congregate digitally. Locally, their tends to be more friction between people. If you don’t like someone online you can just drop them or block them. But if you are part of a group who is doing something in a place, you don’t always get along. Such friction is of course endemic to the human condition, but it also gives rise to some of the great tensions between people that can result in great artwork and positive movements. It also helps foster the ability for people who don’t always agree on everything to still work together and get along to make something do agree on happen.

            Those kind of creative tensions between people are also chronicled in Azerrad’s book, which makes it especially useful for digital natives who would rather ghost someone they don’t get along with anymore, than try to work out or resolve something, or to work together despite differences and see where the clash of energies brings something useful to fruition. Perhaps in punk music, where there tends to be an excess of aggression and energy, that kind of clashing of energy is apparent across so many bands.

            For this piece, since I am making the claim that the book can be used as a DIY manual, I will be looking at each of the bands that Azerrad writes about and try to draw some lessons. There were of course, many great bands who embody the independent ethos who we can all learn from, but I am focusing on this book, because I do think of it as a manual, and want to celebrate it and bring it to people who perhaps haven’t read it before or aren’t familiar with these groups. One of the other things I like about his book is how it centers the story on the people who were in these bands, how they came together, their motivations and various aspects of their personal lives. I’ve noticed a tendency among some music writers and critics to be critical of the other music writers who take this personal approach. As an artist and writer myself, I have always been interested in reading about the lives of other artists in any kind of creative field: what their lives were like, how they got started, what they did to get their work out to the public, and see what I can learn from them and use in my own life, or just as importantly, what I can avoid doing and where I can save myself some trouble.  All that is to say I think the historical and biographical approach to music writing is just as valid as the approach that puts an artist’s background in the background to focus on the aesthetics of their creation.

​            So grab yourself a copy of Our Band Could Be Your Life and let’s get to learning some of the skills that can stand us in good stead in the analog revolution. His book covers 13 bands, so I will be breaking down this essay into three parts. 

​BEAT HAPPENING

In looking at this book again, I started at the end and read the chapter on Beat Happening first because I was on a Beat Happening kick last month. I won’t hesitate to say they are probably one of my favorite groups covered in his book, though there are several others I’ll call favorite depending on my mood, and they can all coexist happily together.

The big idea here, for those of us interested in degrowth and downshifting to less energy intensive lifestyles, is the focus on regionalism and the very independent identity that emerged out of Olympia. That very specific Pacific Northwest identity went on to play a large role in the national and international scene with the kind of shambling lo-fi and primitive jangly rock pop that said “anybody could be a musician” that started to flower with Beat Happening and around some other groups like the Young Marble Giants in England, and The Clean in New Zealand. The lo-fi aspects and the sincere slice-of-life lyrics are features not bugs with Beat Happening. Thinking on that way helps place this kind independent punk music into the category of folk music.

Beat Happening got their start in 1982, but before that band member Calvin Johnson was swimming in underground music through the influence of KAOS-FM and Op Magazine, self-published by KAOS DJ and volunteer John Foster in the late seventies. As Azerrad writes, “At the time, the main genre of independently released music was grass roots folk, which happened to dovetail with two of the key ideas of the American independent rock movement: regionalism, as in the idea that a localized sound would both serve the tastes and needs of its community and defy the homogenizing effects of mass media; and egalitarianism, in that music didn’t need to be made by professionals as the big time entertainment business would have the public believe.” These two ideas are well embedded in the Beat Happening ethos.

The idea of the non-professional ties directly back into folk. Who are all the people playing banjos, fiddles and mandolins on the front porch? Non-professionals, but many of them were seriously accomplished as the first waves of folk music recordings, as collected by the likes of Alan Lomax, and compiled by the likes of Harry Smith, have proved.

On the other hand, virtuosity wasn’t always the point. Entertaining yourself, your family, and your friends was often the point. That meant singing songs while hanging the laundry or picking beans or doing some other chore, or playing an instrument after the work was done. Transfer that to the realities of life in a capitalist industrial society, with angry kids who don’t fit in to the rest of the system, and you have the perfect breeding ground for a new kind of folk music, namely, punk.

Folk music has always been regional. So have the sounds of independent music with each scene tending to produce a kind of specific style, even as it stays within the genre.

Calvin Johnson, Heather Lewis and Bret Lunsford hardly exhibited the kind of brutal energy that had bubbled up in other local scenes, such as the hardcore emanating out of the forgotten neighborhoods of Washington D.C. They did partake of another punk tradition forged by groups like Crass who had both male and female singers, and whose voices alternated on and between songs. Such an approach became a staple of punk that isn’t quite as common in many other genre outside of occasional duets -and folk music. With Lewis up there playing in front of people despite her shyness, she influenced the wave of feminist rock music that later came out of Olympia and Washington state in full force via Riot Grrrl movement.  

​At the same time Johnson exhibited extreme individual vision in the way he lived. Like his friend Ian Mackaye who he had met when his family briefly moved to D.C., he was straight edge at a time when the punk thing to do was get wasted. He hosted quirky pie baking parties and pajama spend the nights in place of going out and getting trashed. Their ability to wear their emotions on their sleeves led to them becoming “a major force in widening the idea of a punk rocker from a mohawked guy in a motorcycle jacket to a nerdy girl in a cardigan.”
And like many other independent bands, Beat Happening started their own label with Johnson heading up K Records, that helped them and others to live on the cheap, so they could put their energies into a creative bohemian life, all while staying dedicated to the local life where they started.

​BLACK FLAG

​Shifting back to the beginning of the book, we encounter a very different beast of a band, Black Flag. They kind of represent so many things Beat Happening are not. But that’s the beauty of the underground and of freedom itself: if you don’t like something, go off  and do your own thing, your own way with whatever tools you have at hand.

            Black Flag just hid their nerdiness anyway underneath layers of violence, chaos and copious bong hits that did nothing to mellow them out. Greg Ginn had started SST not even as a record label, but as an outgrowth of his involvement in the ham radio hobby. Total geek territory there. I mean, who gets on ham radio or listens to shortwave except total nerds? SST stood for Solid State Transistors and was a mail order business for the amateur radio gear that he made and sold. Ginn played music too, and had gravitated towards hard rock and heavy metal before the first wave of punk blew his mind. He wanted to get in on the action and he wanted to speed things up.

            Ginn was a nerd in another way too. He had a degree in economics, and his business sense put him in good stead when he decided to transform SST into an independent record label, and did it all by scratch, looking up vinyl pressing plants in the phone book, and seeing how to get everything done as cheap as they could. To that end, the band lived communally and subsisted on whatever they could scrape together. As communal living punks, they were some of the original pioneers of the punk house, a place where people live together and share expenses. In these times of exorbitant rent, which inhibits living a creative lifestyle centered on art and music, I wonder why more young people don’t band together to live in communal houses together of whatever kind, or find places to squat. These practices were what made the products coming out of the punk movement affordable to produce and share.

            But they weren’t just lazing about in their punk house. They worked hard, brutally hard. They had as much discipline as Sun Ra, and Ginn made the band practice up to eight hours a day like it was regular job. Their work paid off, not necessarily in financials, but in the way they rocked and could bring down the house with their visceral energy.

​            Black Flag toured relentlessly and they were one of the first punk bands to tour so vigorously across America, playing wherever they could. It was these forays in their van out into the wilds of the USA that helped build the network that other punk bands would then follow. They made tracks in space, wore down the path so that others could see it and go their themselves. A lot of those bands were SST bands, but because Black Flag networked so heavily across the country, other groups would call them up or ask about where to play in what towns. These venues, places like the Jockey Club in Newport, Kentucky, just across the river from downtown Cincinnati, became regional hubs that glued local scenes into place. They gave local bands places to play regularly, and touring bands a place to stop. It all helped tie the regional scenes back in to the national and international punk movement. Without the strength of a local scene, the larger regional and national scenes can’t be as easily supported. The great is in the small.

There was another Black Flag was like Beat Happening, but different. They challenged punk. Any subculture or movement will become ossified and what started out as rebellion and revolution is quick to become dogma that must not be deviated from. So when short hair became the norm in hardcore fashion, Black Flag grew their hair long. They also pushed the style of music, incorporating elements of jazz and metal into their sound, making them hard to pin down. It also helped keep what they were playing interesting to their own ears and as adventurous musically as they were on the road.

​MINUTEMEN

The Minutemen took the idea of combining musical styles and influences much further than Black Flag, and they did it in an even more economical way. The band came up out of the working class. Mike Watt and D. Boon’s fathers had both been in the navy. Watt’s father worked as a machinist for the military, and after D. Boon’s dad was discharged, he made money by installing radios in people’s cars. The pair met when Watt’s father was sent to the base in San Pedro and the family moved. Watt was walking around one day by himself in the park when D. Boon jumped out of a tree to ambush him. Boon thought Watt was one of his friends they were playing army with, but it wasn’t who he thought. None-the-less, the two quickly became inseparable and it wasn’t long before they started a cover band to play the music of their heroes such as Creedence Clearwater Revival. Later they were joined by drummer George Gurley.

Many of the original punk groups had been inspired by the hippies and had been fans of hippie music. What the punks disliked about the hippies was the way they had sold out, not necessarily their music or what they had once stood for. Now we can see the effect of that sell out at the generational level as the boomers gave up on projects such as the hippie-allied appropriate technology movement that could have changed the course of history if it hadn’t been abandoned when so many of them just decided to go corporate and get on board with Reaganomics. All these years later these gerentocrats are still holding the reins of power and trying to keep it as long as they can before passing it on, one of the issues effecting the cost of housing at the time of this writing. Understandably, many of the Gen X kids who would form the core of the independent music scene were upset with the direction the previous generation had taken after espousing such high ideals.

Minutemen took their name from two different groups, the militia from New England who fought in the American revolution, and as a lambast against them, the neo-reactionary Minutemen of the 1960’s who were stockpiling weapons in anticipation of having to fight a commie takeover. In this time of contracting wealth from the working and middle class further into the hands of an aging wealthy elite, the Minutemen have their own key revolutionary principle that we all can be learned from, how to “Jam Econo”.

The word econo was San Pedro slang for doing anything on the cheap. As a band they practiced extreme economy and frugality. This was as true of their songs that were often under the two minute mark, as it was for the way they recorded, the way the toured, for the way they tried to eke as much out of every penny as they could and stretch it far.

Some other terms from their oeuvre are also useful in todays compromised political environment. They didn’t just have lyrics, they had spiels. The spiel was a politically motivated lyrics and rants that they boiled down into their provocative short songs.

One of the things they railed against was when somebody compromised their values, like the hippies had done, to make things mersh, or commercial. This was something they wanted to avoid and did avoid. When pressed by their label to make something more widely appealing, they made an album called the Mersh Project that itself lampooned the very idea of commercial music. All of this was part of their fight against the boozh, or bourgeois. This was the biggest no-no of all for the working class band.

D. Boon was an avid reader of history and the ideas he read about informed their music just as much as the jazz, funk, and classic rock that they subverted into their own personal style of hardcore. It was a lyric from the Minutemen song “History Lesson” that the name of Azerrad’s book was taken from, and shows just how much the philosophy and music of a group can have an impact on culture.

Mike Watt boils down their philosophy. “We weren’t a lot of hot air -we almost did everything we set out to do… and in some way’s its because we kept our sights small. We’re not going to be the biggest band – we’re going to put on little shows, put out a little magazine, have a little label. We made it small enough that we could do it. And we held down jobs, paid our rent, and made a living.

​“I just hope that maybe some people will read about us and see how we weren’t manufactured. … that we were just three dudes from Pedro and that maybe they could do the same thing themselves.”

I’ll return with more lessons learned from the bands in Our Band Could Be Your Life in a future episode of Down Home Punk, right here on Sothis Medias.

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