Ironically, though, slam dancing was a significant factor in the decline of the hardcore scene. When it started, hardcore dancing was only stylized violence, an expression of the clamor and aggression of the music, and of the participants’ adolescent inner tumult. “It was a lot of fun,” said Dischord stalwart Cynthia Connolly of a typical early Minor Threat show. “It was a group of people having a real good rowdy time. It wasn’t violent like L.A.” But as time went on, the difference between fighting and dancing became extremely hard to discern. Hardcore dancing became like sumo wrestling, with beefy contestants marching into the ring, defying all comers to knock them out. A whole new crop of kids had come in, attracted by the music, media hype about punk aggression, even the misleading term “slam dancing.” They neither knew nor cared about the style’s basis—“It was completely a reaction to the Bump, the Hustle, all these fuckin’ dances,” MacKaye explains—they only saw an opportunity to bash heads. By the summer of ’83, MacKaye had quit slam dancing—“I’m tired of being run into by fucking marines,” he grumbled.
“Whereas before I used to get in a lot of altercations with outsider people—jocks or hippies who were hittin’ people,” MacKaye said in 1983, “I now get in many more altercations with punks on the inside, which is a testament to maybe what the problem is.” As a result, many of the original faces began disappearing from the scene. “If they stop going to shows,” MacKaye warned, “then it’s the idiots’ domain.”
By the summer of ’83, the idiots were taking over. Hardcore’s regional pride gave way to mere territoriality and escalating competitions as to who was the toughest, who controlled the hardcore turf of their town. “Nobody knows each other anymore, so it’s not going to be nearly as fun and unifying and family-like anymore,” MacKaye said. “If people knew each other, it would just be more relaxed and it would be a lot better. But unfortunately, there’s new kids and pretty much the core dropped out of the scene here. The more idiots who came in and the more new people—although they’re not necessarily the same—the more the core dropped out. And you wind up with a hollow scene.”
One of the signal moments in the decline of the original D.C. hardcore scene came when MacKaye’s brother Alec’s beloved band the Faith broke up in August ’83. At the band’s last show, people wept. “Then it was like, ‘What is this?’ ” says MacKaye. “ ‘What do we have?’ ” Hardcore became hopelessly played out. “We realized it was done,” says MacKaye. “The cake was made. You can’t cook it anymore.”
Out in Seattle, young Mark McLaughlin was thinking the same thing. “That was what killed hardcore off for me, was how quickly people decided what was hardcore and exactly how to do it,” says McLaughlin, later known as Mark Arm. “It became this by-the-numbers, follow-the-rules sort of thing. By ’83 I was bored out of my mind with most of it. I was still listening to Minor Threat and a few bands, but you’d hear this new band like Stalag 13 or something that was just this fake Minor Threat band, what the fuck’s the point of this?”
Minor Threat itself was not immune to the forces tearing hardcore apart. All the kids jumping onstage and thrashing around were really starting to bother the band, especially Preslar and Baker, whose guitars were constantly getting knocked out of tune. “They just could not fucking stand being run into all the time,” says Nelson. “They wanted to be a bit more professional and just be able to play their stuff and not have to tune up all the time.”
Eventually they got fed up. “I remember them saying, ‘Fuck it man, that’s it! I can’t stand that shit anymore!’ ” says Nelson. “But sometimes they’d be jerks about it to the kids. They’d overreact or whatever. Their reaction to the kids—wanting to hit them or kick them offstage—maybe it rankled me, but I think it really pissed off Ian. It was just embarrassing for them to be so mean to somebody who was, in a way, just dancing to our music or appreciating it.”
Hansgen seemed to join in the disdain for the audience a little bit too much for a new boy, and this rankled MacKaye. Fortunately, Baker decided he wanted to play bass again, so Hansgen left, the band played a few well-received shows as a four-piece, and started writing new songs.
The only problem was Preslar, Nelson, and Baker had become big fans of U2. And MacKaye hadn’t. U2’s sound was even starting to creep into their music, but MacKaye simply didn’t have the ability to sing songs that were so melodic. “I didn’t know what to do with them,” he says. “I couldn’t sing to it. I hated it. And we just argued and argued about style. They’re like, ‘We have to evolve!’ And I’m like, ‘We are evolving! Don’t force evolution. It’s a big mistake—let it come, just play music. Let’s write but don’t try to sound like somebody else. We don’t need to sound like somebody else.’ ”
“A lot of the songs we wrote at the end were the best songs we’d ever had,” claims Nelson. “But some of them were way too much like U2.”
Things got to the point where MacKaye wouldn’t go down to the basement for practice. He’d just sit upstairs and work on the label while the rest of the band practiced songs he couldn’t possibly sing. Significantly, Preslar had traded his distortion-friendly Marshall amp, the backbone of the band’s sound, for a slick Roland Jazz Chorus amp, a favorite of new wave bands… like U2. To make matters worse, Preslar and Baker were unhappy that MacKaye and Nelson owned the label they recorded for, a potential conflict of interest. The issue was moot since there were no profits to speak of, but what if they got big? It was an increasingly valid question.
OPPOSITE: IAN MACKAYE AND FRIENDS ONSTAGE AT A MINOR THREAT SHOW AT THE WILSON CENTER IN D.C., 1983.
JIM SAAH
MacKaye had never been particularly close to Preslar and Baker, and now even his friendship with Nelson was disintegrating. “I really wanted to continue to move more subversively,” MacKaye says. “And he wanted to go more mainstream. I couldn’t understand.” The friendship hit a low point at a 1983 show in Calgary, when MacKaye sang all of “Betray” directly at Nelson.
And MacKaye was growing increasingly uncomfortable with his own celebrity. “Before, I knew everyone on the floor—I knew everyone, if not by name, at least by sight,” said MacKaye, “and have the same amount of respect for them that they had for me. Now I walk into a show and I’m ‘Ian MacKaye,’ which is not an easy thing for me to deal with.”
When Minor Threat opened for the Damned in D.C., MacKaye was disgusted by the steep $13.50 admission and voluntarily cut the band’s pay in half, just to drop the ticket price by fifty cents. Preslar was outraged.
The band was growing intensely fractious. Rehearsals often consisted of playing a song and then arguing for twenty minutes, playing another song and then arguing another twenty minutes. Sometimes the music would start back up again, or sometimes someone would fly up the basement steps and out onto the porch and get in his car and leave. MacKaye and the volatile Preslar got into more than a few screaming matches. “I hated arguing with those guys,” says MacKaye. “That’s effectively what ended the band—we just didn’t like each other by the end of it. It fuckin’ sucked.”
IAN MACKAYE AND BRIAN BAKER AT THE 9:30 CLUB, 1983.
JIM SAAH
Then one day in October, there was a note from Nelson on MacKaye’s door that read “The band has decided to break up, so just split the money up.” MacKaye wasn’t going to let the band go without a discussion, so he called a meeting in the dining room of Dischord House. The other three had some demands: They wanted to get a manager. They wanted to consider signing to a major label. And they wanted a two-tiered stage: “One tier would be for them,” MacKaye explains, “another would be for me, me and all the kids.”
MacKaye considered all of it. And he concluded that the band had gone in irrevocably separate directions. The band members had probably always harbored profound philosophical differences, but they’d only surfaced because of the band’s success. “Up until that point, our aspirations were to be in a band and to tour and do a record,” says MacKaye. “But all of a sudden we were in a
position where [commercial success] could be had. And what they wanted and what I wanted were two different things.”
They all agreed that Minor Threat had been a good band and an important part of their lives. And rather than sully the band’s name by continuing, they decided to break up.
But there was still an opportunity for one last argument. Nelson wanted to document “Salad Days,” a song they had played publicly for the first and only time at their final show—September 23, 1983, opening for D.C. go-go legends Trouble Funk at Washington’s Lansburgh Center. MacKaye bitterly refused and the two roommates quarreled until MacKaye finally agreed to record the song. They recorded their final release, the “Salad Days” single, on December 14, 1983. MacKaye came in, did his vocals, then left. The flip, a cover of the Standells’ Sixties garage classic “Good Guys Don’t Wear White,” was a nostalgic look back at their origins—in Minor Threat’s hands, the song was a pointed reminder that punks, for all their intimidating affect, weren’t necessarily thugs.
But the A-side delivered the most powerful punch. The song is incredibly poignant—a pensive bass intro launches into a brief propulsive new wavy section, then into a standard hardcore beat, albeit with an almost Motown-like lilt to it. “Look at us today / We’ve gotten soft and fat / Waiting for the moment / It’s just not coming back,” MacKaye hollers. For D.C. hardcore, the dream was over.
The song wasn’t released until a full year later. “The saddest time was when ‘Salad Days’ came out,” recalled Marginal Man’s Kenny Inouye. “At the time, everyone was bummed out at how stagnant and separated and elitist everything had become. Here it is, on vinyl, everything I was thinking then. When that part came in that says, ‘Do you remember when? / Yeah, well so do I,’ I just lost it.”
Minor Threat has a comparatively small legacy—two years and twenty-five songs, but it’s a powerful and enduring one. It has everything to do with the decision to stop before the band went downhill, not to mention the simple fact that those twenty-five songs are never less than very good; many are even great.
“I guess it’s the song ‘Straight Edge’ and ‘Out of Step’ and the philosophy and the unyielding way it’s presented which makes it still seem fresh,” Nelson says. “If you took away that particular message, maybe it would have faded more into oblivion.”
The hardcore bands that sprang up in the ensuing years played music that somewhat resembled Minor Threat and the other original hardcore bands, but there was a crucial difference. “We were trying to up the ante—we were hearing something, interpreting it, and throwing it back,” says MacKaye. “But then I started hearing bands who were just playing the same thing, they weren’t putting their own spin on it, they were just emulating it. And that’s when it lost its soul for me.”
There were vast numbers of bands still playing the music, and a self-sustaining subculture had sprung up worldwide, but as far as MacKaye was concerned, hardcore was played out by 1983. “You think about an explosion, there’s the thrust of the actual explosion, the heat of that is intense,” says MacKaye. “But the farther away you get, the colder it gets, until eventually it’s just shit drifting down to the ground. That’s the way I felt. I would never take credit for being at the initial blast. But I was pretty fuckin’ close to it.”
CHAPTER 5
HÜSKER DÜ
TAKING INSPIRATION FROM HÜSKER DÜ IT’S A NEW GENERATION OF ELECTRIC WHITE BOY BLUES!
—SEBADOH, “GIMME INDIE ROCK!”
On many levels Hüsker Dü never let anyone catch their breath. The band’s songs were unbroken walls of speed and noise; in concert they played number after number without any breaks in between; they recorded new albums just as the previous one was coming out. The band was in a headlong rush toward a lofty peak, and it was hard not to get swept up in the quest.
Hüsker Dü’s metamorphosis from fast ’n’ bilious hardcore band to nonpareil buzz saw tunesmiths did seem nothing short of miraculous, but truth be told, they were just one more indie band who made their first records before they figured out exactly who they were. It wasn’t until their 1983 EP Metal Circus that they took on the unmistakably magical sound of a group becoming themselves.
For all the speed and clamor of their music, Hüsker Dü was perhaps the first post-hardcore band of its generation to write songs that could withstand the classic acid test of getting played on an acoustic guitar. Widely hailed albums like Zen Arcade, New Day Rising, and Flip Your Wig injected other rock traditions into hardcore, crucially advancing the music, widening its audience, and placing Hüsker Dü at center stage in American indie rock.
Hüsker Dü played a huge role in convincing the underground that melody and punk rock weren’t antithetical. Over in Boston, for instance, Charles Thompson was listening closely to Hüsker Dü’s aggro-pop (as well as Hüsker Dü’s Scottish cousins the Jesus and Mary Chain) and would later use many of their ideas in his own band, the Pixies. In turn, a scruffy misfit from rural Aberdeen, Washington, named Kurt Cobain would hear Thompson’s band and transfer those ideas to his band Nirvana. Countless other key bands of the alternative era, from Soul Asylum to Superchunk, owe a huge debt to Hüsker Dü.
Among other things, they became the key link between hardcore and the more melodic, accessible music that would eventually be termed “college rock.” SST’s first signing outside of Southern California, Hüsker Dü quickly became the label’s star attraction, providing the struggling SST with a crucial financial leg up. Hüsker Dü shared the pragmatism (and the stage) of peers like the Minutemen, Black Flag, and Minor Threat, but just as their music was more pop, so were their ambitions. Their eventual move to a major label sent shock waves through the indie community. R.E.M. and U2 had paved the way, but no one from the community had ever made the leap. From then on, indie labels were perceived in a new light—not as a miniature parallel universe to the majors, but as farm teams for the mainstream. “College rock” was now a viable commercial enterprise.
But even this mighty band could not withstand the withering white glare of the major label spotlight and went down amidst tragedy, recrimination, and despair, still stubbornly clinging to their hard-won artistic freedom. Such is the fate of the pioneer.
Bob Mould grew up in Malone, New York, a sleepy farm town wedged between the massive Adirondack State Park and the Canadian border. His parents ran a grocery store. A Beatles fan, Mould delved further into Sixties pop when his dad found a source of used singles for a penny apiece. Mould grew up on bedrock classics by the Byrds and the Who, followed by a long, dark night when he got into metal in his early teens.
But then, when he was seventeen, the Ramones came into his life. “I thought, ‘Aha, this is the Beatles,’ ” says Mould, who quickly picked up the guitar. “I figured if they could do it, anybody could.”
In 1978 Mould began attending prestigious Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, on an underprivileged student scholarship. He’d chosen Macalester because in the Sixties the school had supported the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society; legendary liberal politicians like Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale had taught there, too.
But Mould was disillusioned as soon as he arrived—the Sixties counterculture had long ago vacated Macalester. In its place was a group of kids who called themselves Young Republicans. “I remember watching these kids getting up in the morning on my dorm floor, putting on a suit and tie and a briefcase, talking about this guy from California named Ronald Reagan and how he was going to be the next president,” says Mould. “And I’d be sitting there arguing with those fucks in speech class and poli sci and just hating that, thinking, ‘This is not acceptable behavior. This is not what we’re supposed to be doing with our late teens.’ ”
The experience galvanized Mould. “It wasn’t so much about ‘smash the system’ but ‘make our own system,’ ” he says. “We had to make our own system to live inside of, that doesn’t go along with this, because it’s going to be ugly…. Seeing that scary times were coming. That
was my particular awakening—watching the kids on my floor wanting to grow up and exploit the lower class.”
He quickly became a cog in the nascent Midwest punk network, a group of like-minded souls who worked hard, with little reward besides seeing the coolest bands of the day play their town. When a punk band visited Minneapolis, Mould was part of the welcoming committee, carrying their gear and even bringing sandwiches or beer or perhaps something stronger. Mould also “helped out” bigger names, like Johnny Thunders and Nico. (“John was a demanding person,” Mould recalls. “You’d think Dilaudids would be it, and he’d just throw them away and say, ‘You got anything better?’ ”)
Freshman year Mould started buying pot from a record store clerk, a plumpish kid with heavy sideburns and a black leather motorcycle jacket, named Grant Hart. The last of five children and the son of a credit union employee and a shop teacher, Hart came from a “typical American dysfunctional family,” he says. “Not very abusive, though. Nothing really to complain about.” But when he was ten, his older brother was killed in a car accident. Hart inherited his brother’s records as well as his drum set and soon began playing in everything from wedding bands to garage-rock combos. He largely avoided contemporary rock, opting instead for soundtracks and fifty-seven-cent compilations of Fifties and Sixties pop hits.
Our Band Could Be Your Life Page 20
