Adrenalin, aggression, and anger
Documentary film American Hardcore celebrates
punk’s pioneering disaffected youth
Music
It was the early 1980s and an increasing number of bored, angry suburban kids were
about to explode. Alienated, disconnected, and disenfranchised by what society
had to offer, they found a voice in hardcore punk’s primal power and energy.
Not since rock ‘n’ roll’s early days had there been a musical genre where talent
and proficiency could take a back seat to guts. All were welcome, with many
fans weighing in as heavily as the bands. Hardcore helped abolish the rock star
god. Hardcore was a statement. It was a reaction, it was a lifestyle. Most
importantly it was music; primitive, violent, visceral music.
But the political climate was changing, and some of hardcore’s associated violence
and exuberance began to overshadow the positive. By 1986 it was gone.
In his new
documentary American Hardcore, filmmaker
Paul Rachman reveals the holy trinity of music,
social upheaval, and community that gave birth to this influential moment in
20th century American music. Rare, live footage of bands including Bad Brains,
Circle Jerks, Black Flag, MDC, D.O.A., Minor Threat, and Agnostic Front, is
paired with current interviews with artists like Henry Rollins, Ian MacKaye,
Joey ShitheadKeithley, and
H.R., who were — and in many cases still are — there playing, listening,
reacting.
Rachman buzzed me on the phone from New York. We talked. Here’s an edited
transcript of what we said.
City Newspaper: So what was your background in regards to
the original hardcore scene?
Paul Rachman: I was a college kid at BostonUniversity.
I’m originally from New York.
But from ’78-’82 I was up in Boston.
My roommate was promoting shows there. I spent the summer of 1980 in Berkeley and San
Francisco and got turned onto that whole explosive
music scene out there.
When I came back to Boston,
the Boston
hardcore scene was just breaking. Bands like SS Decontrol, Gang Green, The Freeze. A year later the This Is Boston Not L.A. record comes out. I was 19 and I was going
to these shows at very alternative spaces like Gallery East, which was like
this small concrete room that was an art gallery. And on Sunday afternoons the
owner let these kids from the suburbs come in and do these hardcore shows. So
it wasn’t like a college-kid scene, it wasn’t an inner-city scene. It was 16-
to 17-year-old kids from the suburbs who came in and just played this kind of
anti-music. I went to my first show — Gang Green, The Freeze, and the
F-U’s— and just loved it.
What about it got to you?
You know, you went to
see this music and you either loved it or hated it. And it just struck me, kinda crept under my skin and I wanted more. And the thing
about the hardcore punk scene in the early days was it was very small and the
audience was really invited to participate or to be on the same level with the
bands. They weren’t on big stages. You interacted with the bands before and
after the show. The touring bands all stayed on our floors.
If you really wanted
to hear this music again, like, the following weekend, you had to participate.
Somebody had to be the promoter, help put on the show because it wasn’t in the
clubs, it wasn’t on the radio. There were a few DIY singles starting to appear,
like the early Minor Threat stuff, The Bad Brains’ “Pay To Cum,” and the stuff
from OrangeCounty
in California.
You got involved how?
So I was smitten and
in a few weeks I bought my first Super 8 camera and started documenting these
bands. And I became part of it. This also coincided with the whole home video
boom and, more importantly, the public access TV boom in the suburbs of Boston. All these little
towns are getting cable TV and with that they’ve got TV studios and this
equipment that was for the community. So you could go there and borrow
equipment for free, learn how to use it. So I would go there, take equipment
and go to punk rock shows.
How much of the vintage footage is yours?
I would say about 25
percent of it. A lot of the Bad Brains stuff, a lot of the Gang Green stuff,
The Negative Effects stuff. There’s a lot of footage we uncovered from this guy
in Philadelphia
who was a promoter there in the early days. And he happened to have access to
one of the early big VHS camcorders and he shot, like, every show in 1982 and
1983. It was basically these tapes that were in a shoebox in his closet.
You were documenting something you weren’t even aware
existed yet.
Right. When you hit ’84, every band had a guy with a video camera,
records are coming out, some of the bands are getting…not signed, but getting
on bigger labels, or getting more distribution. But ’80-’83
was very underground and it was very small. The film really specifically
tries to concentrate on telling the story of ’80-’83 because these were the
beginning years, the underground years, the poorly documented years.
Steve Blush’s book American
Hardcore suggests the hardcore movement was done by 1986.
Well, it’s not as
specific as that. I think the scene really started to fall apart in ’84. By ’86
you had the advent of the next generation. And in our film we really delineate
that with the Cro-Mags and the New York scene. They really represent this
next generation of hardcore, which kinda opens the
floodgates to what happens in the early ’90s with bands like Pantera and Rage Against The
Machine and all that stuff.
So what actually kicked it off?
The initial hardcore
movement, according to the way we researched it, really starts in OrangeCounty,
Southern California. And it’s really coming
from bored, angry teenage suburban kids. Now OrangeCounty
in the early ’80s, there’s, like, nothing to do. It’s not like The OC that you see on TV. It’s a
different world. It’s a wasteland. This music comes out of there from kids
listening to the punk rock that came out of the city; you know, the mid-’70s
with The Ramones and The New York Dolls and all that
stuff happening in New York ’73-’74. It gets exported to England and in ’75-’76
you have this explosion of punk rock in England with The Sex Pistols and The
Clash. That kinda falls apart; The Clash become a really commercial band, The Sex Pistols break up.
But that comes back
to America
and the kids from the suburbs — not the cities. The original punk rockers
were art school kids from the big cities, they were surrounded by culture and
they rebelled against that. Kids from the suburbs listen to this
music, become fans of it, try to imitate it, but they can’t play their
instruments as well so they just make it rawer, faster, meaner, and angrier.
And that’s really the birth of American hardcore punk.
In southern California bands like
Black Flag really cleared the way, and then the Circle Jerks. Black Flag does
this really important tour in early ’81 where they literally go out on the road
in a van for six months and nobody knows who they are and they play in tiny
little towns and they kind of pollinate. From playing shows in VFW halls with
50 kids, these kids start bands and start scenes, and it becomes this national
network though fanzines, through word of mouth. That’s really the early story
and in a way it was never properly documented, never properly told.
Do you think there are misconceptions to be cleared up?
I think a little bit
with the younger generation. I think the younger kids really admire this music
and because it had stayed underground for so long, it’s very important and
credible. But they weren’t there. It’s kinda like the
story gets told mouth-to-ear, mouth-to-ear like that game of telephone. By the
time it gets to the 50th person the story has changed.
I think kids today
look back and go, “Oh wow, Black Flag in ’80-’81, and The Bad Brains — that musta been so cool.” Cool is the wrong word. It was hard.
It was buried. These bands had an obstacle at every turn. The shows were in the
worst part of town. And it was hard to get the word out. And that’s the reality
view as opposed to the romantic view.
But I don’t think the film’s narrative is that harsh. The
interviews are fascinating.
The interviews were
conducted as conversations. These were people we knew and we wanted to get a
very comfortable, emotional response from these people — to let them say
their feelings. And it wasn’t so much pre-written questions to guide the film
into a pre-determined script format. I think the narrative structure really
comes out of culling out the beginning, middle, and end of this undocumented,
erratic moment in American subculture and history.
Political history as well as musical.
Putting into the context of the
time was really what I think places it in history. We start the film with
Ronald Reagan’s America.
This is a story about a generation that kinda fell
through the cracks between the failures of the Carter era and these phony new
ideas at the time of the incoming new conservative Reagan era. To us as kids, I
remember, Reagan came in and he was just trying to turn the clock back to the
1950s. And as kids we were like, “Screw that. We don’t want any part of that.”
Nothing that the
Carter administration did gave these kids any opportunities. There were no more
jobs, there was a failing economy, a lot of these
kids’ parents were losing their jobs. Reagan’s answers to this didn’t kick in
until the late ’80s really.
These are kids that
take their own beliefs into their own hands and create this new music and just
go balls out with it. And I think their stories about their music, their bands,
and their attitude juxtaposed against this early ’80s America sets
this very specific time capsule of this very influential music. These young
kids created a true American radical subculture that maybe wasn’t politically
sophisticated, but was sophisticated enough to reject what was around them.
Do we have this attitude around today?
In my opinion, we
don’t. In making the film we thought, “Wow, there’s a lot of parallels.” You
have a new conservative government now but you don’t have this angry, raging
youth.
Why not?
I think in the late
’70s, early ’80s the multinational corporations really set out to co-opt
lifestyle and sell it back to us. And now 25 years later they’ve really
succeeded, they’ve gone too far. Kids today are really insulated, they’re told
what to like and everything is pre-disposed. You know, they’re locked into the
Internet with MySpace, and iPods,
and iTunes. MTV really was a powerful bullet in this
all. I think kids today have less time to think and speak their own mind
because they’re so wrapped up in what they’re told they have to do.
There’s probably a
very small subculture out there of angry kids, but they’re not bored anymore.
The kids in the early ’80s were bored and had nothing to do and they dedicated
their life to this music. Kids today dedicate themselves to a lot of different
things. The DIY ethic still exists but it’s a lot easier, it goes a lot
further. You’re on your computer, you do your song, you can mix it, burn it to
CD, package it, and the next day you can bring it to school and sell it. It
wasn’t that easy back then.
DIY initially involved more of a team effort.
There’s always great
art, there’s always great aggressive music. I think what was important in the
early ’80s was that there was a really dedicated, aggressive audience, too. I
was an audience member who said, “I love this music and I’m gonna
be part of it.” And it kinda changed the course of my
life.
You really need this
intersection of great new art and a really avid audience that’s willing to make
something of it as well as a political or social atmosphere that allows for a
certain amount of rebellion.
What surprised you in the making of American Hardcore?
One thing is it
really reconnected me with music. I kinda started my
film career with hardcore, went to California
and was a music video director in Hollywood
for 10 years. The first three or four years of that were fantastic. But I just
hated working for record companies. It was very contrived, commercial. All of a
sudden everybody at the record company is a director,
everybody in the band is a director. It was more difficult for me as an artist.
So I really turned my back on the music business for several years. I went into
the indie film world in the early ’90s, co-founded
the Slamdance Film Festival, and made a lot of short
films.
It really got me back
into music. That was my personal surprise — that I still admired this music.
And what this music did to me emotionally, it was doing again.
And then going back
and seeing everybody and traveling around and interviewing these guys. Some of
them have been successful in other areas, they have real jobs now. Some of them
are still doing music, some of them are still sleeping
on people’s couches. They still have that same kind of arrogant, antagonistic
flame where it’s like, “Fuck it, I’m gonna do what I wanna do. I’ll still reject things around me if I feel that
they’re wrong.” And they still have that attitude and that was a bit of a
surprise.”
How did you set out to do American Hardcore?
It was important for
me that the story was told in the first person from the people who created
these bands and wrote the music. Hardcore was very raw, very real. It was very
first person. These were 16- to 17-year-old kids who didn’t believe in failure as
an answer — it was not an option — who spoke their word and went for it and
didn’t care what people thought of them. And that was very bold for young high
school kids who usually fall into sports or certain cliques. These were
outsiders. And it was important for that story to be told by them today and not
have experts explain it.
Will this movie make sense to those outside its fanbase?
At the initial
screenings we have had the avid hardcore punk fan base that shows up for the
film. But the fact that we’re setting it in context with the time and place…it
makes sense.
With the current world situation it’s like dรฉjร vu all over
again.
There are a lot of
similarities with today and I hope people walk out and say, “What the hell
happened? Why don’t we have an angry, raging youth?” Because as a society I
think we always need that. We always need somebody breaking down the barriers,
rejecting norms just to move ahead.
It’s that
intersection of a great audience, great music and the right environment. The
hippies had it, the beatniks had it, hardcore punk had
it. And it’ll happen again, it’s just a matter of timing.
American
Hardcore (R, 100 minutes)
shows at the Little Theatre, 240
East Avenue, starting Friday, December 8. For more information or film times check
www.little-theatre.com or call 254-0800.
This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2006.
