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I Was A Sellout Before You Were A Sellout
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Gather round kiddies and let's hearken back to those dark ages known as the mid '80's. Yes kids, before MTV was serving up your weekly Alternative hero, before Circus and Rip magazines changed their "formats" to suit the times. The year was 1984 and Punk was pretty much dead to me with Hardcore soon following suit (This decision was made at the ripe old age of 16). But as fate would have it, an opportunity opened to me that I had previously only dreamed about. A local "Hardcore" band called Life Sentence had called me up and asked me to play bass for them and do some touring, so I immediately dropped out of high school and said "later!" to my boring suburb (where else, right?) and headed out. I had grand visions of screaming groupies, packed houses and trashed hotel rooms, though I couldn't admit it, 'cause I was "Punk". On the outside I wanted to be Minor Threat, on the inside I wanted to be KISS. However, after three months of playing in people's living rooms, not making any money, not bathing and worst of all not eating, I went home ten years older than when I left. We were pissed off because we were good (relatively) and yet we weren't getting anywhere. Sound familiar, folks? We were confused as to why shit groups like GBH and The Exploited were pulling in $500 to $1,000 a show when we weren't even making gas money. So we said fuck it, we're going to attack every market in the Punk rock underworld syndicate. First, the new Metal-"crossover" scene was a virtual goldmine! It was truly ironic that all the same people who would beat you up for being Punk were now getting into it. Then again, today's Nirvana and Pearl Jam fans are yesterday's Def Leppard and Judas Priest fans. I'm a firm believer in genetics, and it's what I dub the "sheep" chromosome. Regardless, we were blessed with a stroke of luck when a friend of ours gave James Hetfield of Metallica a Life Sentence sticker, and the next thing you know it's stuck on the leather jacket he's wearing in Kerang! magazine and the promo poster for the "Master of Puppets" record. So we of course sent off more merchandise goodies to our 'ol pals Metalica, and BOOM! Lars is wearing our shirt in the "Cliff 'em All" video. Jackpot! Next thing you know Anthrax, Nuclear Assault and our touring buddies D.R.I. are Life Sentence fans and the snowball effect has started. We definitely made more money off our merchandise than off our guarantees from shows. We had serious Metal fans coming to our shows, and we would oblige them by playing Slayer's "Chemical Warfare" and Motörhead's "Ace of Spades". Ahh, but folks, man does not live by Metal alone. Our lust for Punk domination became insatiable and we were hungry for more! Our next target: skateboarders!
The Skate-Punk resurgence was ready to explode into the mainstream. We could smell it and we wanted in on the action! As luck (that's the key word) would have it, while we were in St. Louis for a show a couple of skateboard bigwig pros were in town for a "skaters camp". Steve Steadham, Monty Nolder and Christian Hosoi were hanging out at the show so we made our move, initiated by Steadham and our guitar player's love of spliff. Everybody was good 'n' high, so we had Steadham come up on stage and play drums with us for a "Blues" jam as our first song. Needless to say the kids loved it, and in the next issue of Thrasher, the skater's Holy Qu'ran, there's a photo of Monty doing a handplant with our colorful logo on his chest. We also got one of those hilarious Pushead adjective-abuse reviews. On tour we used to have this inside joke of asking locals where the nearest half-pipe was whenever we'd arrive in a new town. A review in a San Diego zine called Black Market described me as "Joe, who plays a mean bass and craves skating vert!" I can barely stand on a goddam skateboard! But of course we always had them on tour with us. To help move the amps.
The last factions of Punkdom we had to crack were the Straight Edge crowd and the Maximum Rocknroll P.C. army. I believe the Straight Edge crowd to be almost on par with the Metal crowd for generating laughs with their sheer ridiculousness. This was way past the Minor Threat, S. S. Decontrol days. This was more the Uniform Choice and Youth of Today era with plenty of hilarious T-shirt slogans that would have made Nancy Reagan proud: "Straight and Alert", "Drugs and Booze, the sure way to lose", etc. We sort of inadvertently got lumped in with Straight Edge 'cause our old singer made us sound like 7 Seconds (whom we also used to play with alot). I can remember a couple of occasions when we would literally fall out of the van drunk and completely bum out the 14 year old Straight-Edgers who were waiting for us to show up. For a humorous take on the Straight Edge movement, go to your local library and in the American Hardcore archives and look under "Crucial Youth."
The Maximum Rocknroll-Veggie-Leftist-Anarchist-Homo/Lesbian-Revolutionary crowd was pretty easy to infiltrate. We had been reading the magazine long enough to know what catch phrases we should use in our interviews. I can actually recall saying "Protest and Survive" in an interview which functionally translates in America as "Mom, if you don't buy me the new MDC album I'll kill myself." Our first album was chock full of politically Left anthems such as "Peacetime Death", "Men In Blue", "Election Day" and of course "Take A Stand". The funniest part was that our old singer who wrote those songs was one of the most politically ignorant people I ever met. Let's just say the skinhead he once was still lived in his heart. When we were being interviewed on MRR radio in Berkeley, I threw a curveball to my bandmates by saying that I was in the Revolutionary Communist Youth Party. Our drummer Tom, not to be outdone, went on to talk about the time he spent in El Salvador. Yes, we were full of shit. All kidding aside, a tip of my hat goes to MRR for teaching many bored suburban Punk rockers about more going on in politics than they possibly could have found out from the idiot box or the newspapers.
Of course there was the flipside of the MRR crowd: the dreaded SKINHEADS! The name alone sends people scurrying like mice. BOO! I scared you! When I was 12-13 years old, I lived for Skinhead "Oi!" music. My favorite bands in the world were The Cockney Rejects, Blitz, The Business and Peter and the Test Tube Babies, amongst others. But the Oprah wave of Skinheads, who would have never heard of the movement if it weren't for all the media attention and who were likely to be Nazis (despite the fact that the original English Skins were Black), seemed to be more into Agnostic Front, Murphy's Law and the Cro-Mags. Sure they were skins, but they weren't Oi! So every now and then we'd play "Oi, Oi, Oi!" by The Cockney Rejects and the Skins would go apeshit, but it was quite obvious that most of them didn't know the tune, but knew they were supposed to. When we played in Montreal there was a group of French-Canadian Nazi Skinheads(?) that were sieg heil-ing us as we played it. Not one of those morons could speak English so how the hell did they know what we were singing about?!!! For all they know we could have been singing "We are all homos! Oi! Oi! Oi! We love Commies! Oi! Oi! Oi! Being bald is stupid...etc." They're probably all hockey players or mounties now.
My point to this whole article is that there is no point...to any of it! Black Flag in '81, D.R.I. in '84 or Nirvana in '91, NONE OF IT MATTERS! Like those geriatric corporate machines said over 20 years ago "It's only Rock n' Roll!" So shove your twenty something-Slacker-Grunge-Generation X-Details-MTV-in it's eco-pak-bullshit up your ass, America! Throw in your Pearl Jam CD's and Docs too if there's room! Oh yeah, and here's a tip: If it goes platinum, there's nothing "underground" or "alternative" about it! Now get out of my room kid, visiting hours are over.