There were good cities, too—Washington, San Francisco, Lawrence, and Ann Arbor—but eventually the boredom of the road got to even this brainy band. They became fixated on a game that involved bouncing a large plastic soda bottle back and forth, hacky-sack style, at rest stops and backstage. “It was quite amazing,” Conley deadpans. “You could make sport of it.” On one dark night somewhere in Oklahoma, the band pulled off the road and shot off fireworks, a small but spectacular show seen only by a precious few.
Miller knew when he joined Mission of Burma that it was probably just a matter of time until he’d have to quit. He ignored his tinnitus until after the deafening Vs. sessions, when the condition became too pronounced to ignore.
Onstage Miller began wearing earplugs and headphone-style protection designed for people who fire shotguns, and that still didn’t prevent the ringing. Sound, it turns out, doesn’t just enter through the ear canal but also through the bones of the face and skull. On tour, late at night when it was very quiet, he could hear what was happening. “The tones would come in by beeping until they became stable,” says Miller. “And there would be this new tone. And by the end of this tour, it would be a constant beep. For the rest of my life. And it just freaked me out.”
Miller first broached the subject to the band in the fall of ’82 after a show in Washington, D.C. “It was a pretty awkward thing to talk about,” he says. “I was fucking with four or five people’s lives. And then eventually I just had to say c’est la vie.”
In early January ’83 Miller announced he would be leaving Mission of Burma because of his worsening tinnitus. In an interview with Boston Rock, Miller, ever the composition major, specifically identified the pitches of his tinnitus. “In September a middle E appeared in my left ear,” he said. “And in December a C-sharp below E formed. In my right ear, a slightly sharp E began in October. They’re forming fairly interesting chords that never leave. When it’s quiet at night, the notes are screaming.”
Amazingly, neither Conley, Prescott, Swope, or Harte was particularly devastated. In fact, Harte says they all felt what he calls “a twisted sense of relief.” The band had made amazing records, enjoyed plenty of college radio and press support, and yet no one was coming to their shows or buying their records. “It just seemed like it wasn’t working,” says Harte.
At first, though, Prescott felt differently. “It was probably more of a bummer for me because I felt it was a really good working situation,” says Prescott. “I liked playing with them, I loved what they wrote, I thought we could do some more. Then shortly after that I was kind of glad—I knew it was a thing that Roger had to do for his own hearing, and it was a good time for Clint to remove himself from music.”
Tinnitus was not the only hazard of rock & roll life to which Burma had fallen prey. Stage anxiety, strange hours, long stretches of boredom, and ready availability all made alcohol an attractive drug. And it nearly got the better of Conley. “Things were going great and we were having a blast and there was never any reason to turn it off,” Conley says. “But after a while I realized it was becoming a problem.”
Conley was not, as they say in recovery-speak, a “jackpot drinker,” prone to big, messy binges that leave disasters in their wake. “It was more of a controlled, low-level draining of my energies and output,” he says. “I could feel my songwriting falling off. I was just having a harder time finishing things, really getting a little stuck.”
During the mixing of Vs., Conley “had to take a little vacation” and did a brief stay in a rehab center. The claustrophobic “Mica” seems to be about that experience.
Conley spent the last year of the band’s existence clean and sober. “And very happy to be,” he says brightly. “It was not a grueling, white-knuckle experience for me even though I was in clubs, which is a strange way to get sober. I felt completely free and exhilarated that I was not in the grips. It was a very happy year, actually. It was challenging. I felt very lucky.”
So when Miller announced that the band would have to end, Conley wasn’t as crestfallen as one might think. “In a lot of ways, I felt my life changing,” he says. “I wasn’t attached to Burma forever. I was going through enormous changes in my own life, so I thought, ‘Well, maybe it’s time for something new here.’ At that time I definitely was thinking it was going to be more music. As it turns out, it just didn’t work out that way. But it worked out very well.
“I remember Roger saying [he was going to quit] and thinking, well, maybe this has run its course,” Conley says. “The band had accomplished what we set out to do and I felt really good about what we’d done, so it wasn’t a sense of incompletion or that sort of gnawing to it. I thought, ‘Hey, we did pretty good.’ ”
Still, it all might have worked out better if Ace of Hearts and Coffman had been a better team. “We weren’t in sync always,” Coffman admits. “It was like, he would do what he would do, and we would do what we would do. We would hope that we would all get it done, but it wasn’t that coordinated. We were just inexperienced.”
In January ’83 Harte hired twenty-two-year-old Mark Kates to work the press and radio for Ace of Hearts. Coffman claims that “they smoked way too much weed to get anything done,” but Harte vigorously disagrees. Kates, Harte says, was a godsend. “He had this way of just making things happen,” says Harte. “There’d be things in the paper and there’d be people at the gigs. He just had it, he made shit happen.”
Still, no matter how industrious Kates was, promoting Mission of Burma was an uphill struggle. “Although Mission of Burma and some of the other great Boston bands at the time were truly world class, the indie rock scene in Boston was pretty small and generally unknown to the populace at large,” says Kates. “In a city where money and education and insurance and things like that dominate the workforce, what we did wasn’t understood by the average person.”
When the band announced two farewell shows in the former ballroom of Boston’s old Bradford Hotel on March 13, Kates phoned up every media outlet he could think of and plied them with the intriguing news that Mission of Burma’s guitarist might be going deaf and drummed up some local TV coverage. One Boston newscast closed with a quick profile of the band and some cacophonous performance footage after which a stuffy anchorman quipped, “Some of our audience may be saying it’s about time they quit!”
Thanks to all the media attention, the Bradford shows were filled with curiosity seekers eager to catch a glimpse of the highly touted local heroes before they broke up. Although neither the all-ages matinee nor the regular evening show sold out, they were packed. But the shows weren’t very sentimental, perhaps because the reality of it was just not sinking in. “It didn’t register with people,” says Coffman. “People were like, ‘Yeah, they’ll get over it. They’ll come back. His ears will be fine.’ I think there was a lot of denial.” About the only nod to the finality of the occasion was the fact that Martin Swope made his one and only appearance onstage with Burma, playing guitar on the Kinks classic “See My Friends.”
As the band left the stage, Conley yelled out, “Stop going to discos, they’re bad for your health! Support live music!”
But that wasn’t the end. Coffman had lined up some high-paying shows after that, so they played Detroit, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., with Harte in tow, recording every show. In D.C. the hostile audience of hardcore punks chanted, “Oi! Oi! Oi!” throughout the set and heartily urged Conley to cut his hair. The audience at the Detroit show was far more friendly, probably because it mostly consisted of Miller’s family. The band always gave it their best—as documented on the live The Horrible Truth about Burma, the band tore off a positively explosive version of Pere Ubu’s “Heart of Darkness” in Chicago. But there were only six people in the audience to hear it. “It was horrifying, it was sad,” says Harte. “And I don’t understand it.”
Mission of Burma’s final show was at the Paramount Theatre in Staten Island, opening for Public Image, Ltd. The show was a disaster—“the Al
tamont to the Bradford’s Woodstock,” Conley cracks. At first PiL’s management wouldn’t allow Mission of Burma to use the PA, so the vocals came out the onstage monitors for the first half of the set. One of PiL’s roadies patrolled the front row with a bullwhip, menacing anyone who got too close, until Miller demanded he go away. To top it off, many of the die-hard Burma fans who had come down from Boston on two specially chartered buses had taken some bad acid.
Still, the band was in ferocious form, particularly on the final number, a version of “The Ballad of Johnny Burma” that sent the band into an incendiary state of abandon.
“That was a nightmare,” Prescott says of the show. “It should have been a really cool thing, but we had sort of played the last show in Boston. So this was bound to be a mess because we had to go one more. Yeah, that was sort of a bummer. It wasn’t very good. And [Public Image, Ltd. was] a band I admired a lot at the time. It was just kind of not a fun night.”
In typical self-deprecating fashion, the band jokes that “the horrible truth about Burma” was that their live shows were nowhere near as cohesive and coherent as their records, but The Horrible Truth was finally the raw, cacophonous document the band had been striving for from the start. Yet Harte still managed to make it an exercise in studio trickery. Although the various live performances were recorded on an old Crown two-track recorder, Harte split them up into twenty-four tracks, equalized each one, and then put them back together. The Horrible Truth was engineered in no less than seven different studios.
Although the band seemed like it was going nowhere, Coffman insists things were just about to turn around. “Things were starting to happen, whether it was the Rolling Stone [article] or whatever, you could just tell,” says Coffman. “Things were catching up to them. And all the groundwork that had been laid, whether it was touring or college radio or whatever, would have paid off.
“They were just about to break,” Coffman adds. “A lot of people were like, ‘What the fuck is wrong with these guys? They’re breaking! People love them now and they’re breaking up!’ So it was kind of a drag.”
Mission of Burma conducted their career in the most exemplary way. From the start, they insisted that Boston bands appear on the bill at local shows, a tradition they upheld until the very end. “We felt real strongly about supporting the local scene,” Miller says. “I’m not nationalistic, but if you’re in the area, you should work where you are. You have to support that which is growing around you.” Later on, when hardcore created a younger audience for punk, they also went out of their way to play all-ages shows, often hurting their draw by playing two sets a night.
Those practices were soon emulated by many bands across the country, but musically speaking, Burma wasn’t a group that a lot of bands copied directly. That’s because the bands that Burma truly influenced understood what Burma was about, which was to be original and true to one’s vision—and damn the commercial torpedoes. On their 1988 Green tour, R.E.M. covered “Academy Fight Song,” helping to touch off a comprehensive set of reissues of the Burma catalog.
Having mixed aggressive, noisy guitars, pounding drums, and positively heroic pop melodies way back at the dawn of the Eighties, Burma will forever be called “ahead of their time.” “I suppose it’s an honor, in a way, to be ahead of your time,” said Conley wearily. “But on the other hand, it would be nice to be right with your time.”
Mission of Burma helped lay the groundwork for the many, many bands that followed in their wake. “They helped to create a commercial environment where anyone would give a fuck about those bands,” says Gerard Cosloy. “And they helped to create a creative environment where those bands could do what they did.” So the minuscule record sales and attendance figures were not in vain. “Because of what they did, other bands, like Yo La Tengo or Unwound, bands like that, are able to do what they want, when they want,” says Cosloy. “That’s the legacy.”
But perhaps Mission of Burma’s greatest accomplishment is this, as Prescott puts it: “We never sucked.”
CHAPTER 4
MINOR THREAT
“A LOT OF PEOPLE I KNOW—EVERYONE, MAYBE—JUST FEEL A GREAT USELESSNESS. YOU’RE A HUMAN BEING AND THE WORLD IS SO BIG; EVERYTHING IS JUST SO UNTOUCHABLE AND UNREACHABLE. THEY JUST WANT TO DO SOMETHING THAT THEY CAN BE A PART OF AND THEY CAN MOLD AND THEY CAN MAKE.”
—IAN MacKAYE, 1983
Black Flag may have been its godfathers and the Bad Brains may have revved up its tempo to light speed, but hardcore has no more definitive band than Minor Threat. The band’s adrenalized rhythms, fierce attack, and surprisingly tuneful songs set them apart from anybody before or since. The music couldn’t have made more perfect sense to the shirtless teenaged boys who crammed their shows—it was an impeccable show of precision violence, awe inspiring in the economy of its aggression. And yet the band combined such bracing vehemence with an infectious bonhomie.
Minor Threat epitomized one of hardcore’s major strengths: It was underground music by, for, and about independent-minded kids. These kids weren’t on the hipster-bohemian wavelength, either because they weren’t hip or bohemian or because they simply felt the whole trip was needlessly exclusive and elitist. So it figures that hardcore would become popular in a definitively uncool city like Washington, D.C. Hardcore wasn’t some druggy pose copped from Rimbaud, it was about things its audience encountered every day, and it certainly wasn’t some lowest common denominator corporate marketing ploy; hardcore kids knew the consequences of the former and grasped the larger implications of participating in the latter. And it had a beat they could dance to.
Even as early as 1981, the underground was becoming balkanized. You had to be an insider to even know of Minor Threat’s existence, never mind actually hear their music. They were superstars of a subset (D.C. hardcore) of a subset (the national hardcore scene that Black Flag had created) of a subset (punk). And they made no effort whatsoever to cross over into anything larger—although at the end, the very possibility tore the band apart.
Inspired in no small way by the intensely spiritual Bad Brains, the band, particularly singer Ian MacKaye, brought a sense of righteousness to the American underground. For all the intimidating noise they generated, the band was actually composed of four nice boys from Washington, D.C., who worked hard, played fair, and were always happy to provide a leg up for anyone else who wanted to follow the path they had chosen.
But besides formal innovations, a social movement that lives on to this day, and some incredible records and heart-stopping shows, Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye and Jeff Nelson also fostered Dischord Records, the label that has set ethical standards, indie style, since its inception. The label made a mythos out of the D.C. scene, inspiring like-minded souls in cities across the nation to start their own scenes—after all, if it could be done in sterile Washington, D.C., it could be done anywhere.
When he was thirteen, Ian MacKaye and his family moved to Palo Alto, California, for nine months in 1974—his father had won a fellowship at Stanford University. While he was away, some of his friends began smoking pot and drinking. “I missed that little transition,” says MacKaye. “And if I had been there, I don’t know—I don’t think I would have gone with them, but I’ve always wondered. But what it did afford me was an opportunity to come home to see the results of this transition.”
The results, among other things, were that his friends had begun committing petty crimes and getting wasted. “I thought, ‘This is fuckin’ gross, man,’ ” he says. “ ‘These kids are twelve, thirteen years old and this is it? This is what they’re going to do for the rest of their lives?’ Because that’s what it felt like. This is the eternal quest to get fucked up. That’s entertainment? Fuck that. I was not interested.”
While MacKaye was away in California, somebody broke into the home of the new kid in the neighborhood, Henry Garfield, and stole some things. Garfield accused MacKaye’s friends and beat them up at every opportunity. And when MacKaye returned from California, Garfi
eld would even try to beat him up, too. “Every time I saw Henry, I had to run,” says MacKaye. “Because he would beat the crap out of us.”
Then one day, just before MacKaye turned fourteen, he and his friends were skateboarding when Garfield walked by. “He saw us and we said, ‘Come on!’ ” says MacKaye. Garfield dropped his grudge and joined them. After that Garfield and MacKaye were inseparable until they were in their early twenties, when Garfield joined Black Flag and became Henry Rollins; they remain close friends to this day.
MacKaye and Garfield got into hard rock, especially gonzo Seventies guitar god Ted Nugent. “We would read about the Nuge and the thing that really rubbed off on us was the fact that he didn’t drink or smoke or do drugs,” says Rollins. “It was the craziest thing we’d ever seen onstage and here’s this guy saying, ‘I don’t get high.’ We thought that was so impressive.”
They also learned a powerful lesson when they saw Led Zeppelin play. “My god, that was one of the gigs of all time,” says Rollins. “And we saw people passed out in their chairs. There’s guys drooling on their leg, asleep, because they’re ’luded out. We both said, ‘Well, that will never be us.’ We were on our bikes or skateboards until three in the morning, we were up in the attic listening to 45s until three in the morning. We were not interested in getting bombed or passing out.”
Rollins recalls that MacKaye would never blindly go along with the crowd. “Ian would go, ‘Well, let’s see: Why?’ ” says Rollins. “By the time we were all seniors in high school, every day of the summer was, ‘Well, it’s Monday morning, what’s Ian doing?’ Because that was going to make what we were doing that day.”
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