A TRUE STORY BY MR. STEVE GRIMES
Let me tell you what it was like, young feller. Disney didn't have no punk label, there wasn't no punk section at the mall. "Punk rock faggot!" was about one word, and they usually ended that with a thrown beer bottle or fist. (Of course, the only correct Punk Rock response was "FUCK YOU, MAN!") We couldn't get no fancy green or purple hair dye at every drugstore. There was peroxide, and that was IT, and it would take HOURS, and for our troubles we'd just get our asses kicked. AND WE LIKED IT! Oh yeah, and I was in a band called the F.U.'s.The name means fuck you, of course, although we also told people it stood for fuckups (though that was a completely different band from San Francisco), frilly underthings, fundamentally ugly, etc., etc. (There was also a brand of designer jeans in the 80's called FU's jeans; we never figured out what that was all about.) It wasn't until a few years after we started that John (Sox, our singer) told me he got the name from a Wendy O. Williams interview, where she said that punk rock was " a way of saying F.U. to society." So have a moment of silence for Wendy O., source of our name; gone by self-inflicted shotgun blast, the same as Cobain but with far fewer mourners.
I first met John Sox and Bob Furapples (NEE HATFIELD) in the Summer of 1981 when I answered an ad they put out for a guitarist. I soon found out that Bob is the first (and up to now, the only) Albanian Orthodox person I've ever met. He's also one of the weirder people I've met. One time at the Media Workshop, Bob got up on stage by himself and started singing "Everybody's Going to the Zoo Tomorrow." Everyone kind of smiled nervously at this guy, clapping along like he asked, when all of a sudden Bob dropped to the ground, writhing around and screaming. Everybody crept closer, jaws hanging open. Except us, though. It was Bob; we were used to this kind of behavior. He was yelling, "AAARRGHH! HOW'D YOU LIKE TO BE A MONKEY AT THE ZOO, ASSHOLES STARING AT YOU ALL FUCKING DAY? ID BE THROWING SHIT AT PEOPLE TOO! AAARRGGHH! I HATE THE FUCKING ZOO!" John and Bob were both in college at the time; Bob was a local (Dorchester) while John was from Connecticut. I was from Connecticut, too, but I was just kind of bumming around town at the time. Together with the soon-to-join Wayne Maestri, a friend of mine from Somerville, and everybody else forming bands at the time, we were people who had been turned on by the early punk stuff, heard West Coast stuff (I had just spent a couple of years on the West Coast and had a collection of SoCal and Canadian punk), and were hearing the first bits of the D.C. scene. Thus, other scenes were actively happening and, despite what some snotty British critics may have said at the time, they weren't trying to recreate London 1977. The point was not to have some pointless exercise in punk nostalgia (like, say, these liner notes), but to make things happen yourself.
With John on vocals and bass, Bob on drums and me on guitar we started practicing in a classroom in the school where Bob worked. Imagine the cacophony: hardcore punk played badly in a noisy classroom. Yecchh. We got together a few songs and started playing out in the Fall. We adopted the upside-down black triangle, the Nazi badge for anti-social prisoners, as our symbol; however, everybody just figured we were gay. The only record of the existence of this Power Trio lineup was a four-song demo we recorded.
By December, either John had gotten sick of trying to play bass and sing at the same time, or I convinced the others to let Wayne join, or both. I forget. But we brought him in on bass, completing the lineup to be guilty of almost all F.U.'s product. Back then, Wayne was known as the shy, quiet guy in the band. Soon, of course, Wayne became known as "the annoying guy," or "the guy who convinced me to do something last night that I would never ordinarily do." So I guess we're partly to blame for Wayne's, um, flowering.
With this lineup, we got a for-real practice space, wrote more songs and played out whenever we could. Sometimes - and this was true of the hardcore scene in general - we would play in clubs, more often in independent spaces (the Media Workshop or Gallery East), parties or halls that we would rent out. I set up a few of these shows. It was more frustrating than it sounds-there weren't that many halls available, and clubs treated us like an annoyance: we didn't drink a lot (many were underage anyway); the meathead bouncers treated us like we were aliens. There certainly wasn't a lot of "support" for young people acting independently-on the contrary, the very idea was treated with suspicion. Our common complaint was, "No shows coming up. Might as well go play video games."
Nevertheless, we did have a legitimate Scene going. To document this, in 1982 Modern Method records put together the This is Boston Not L.A. compilation, which included our first releases. Conspicuous by their absence from this compilation was S.S. Decontrol, who believed more firmly that hardcore releases should be DIY. Ultimately, SSD was right, of course. However, Boston Not L.A. did put the scene, and many of its best bands, on the map. Also, like the Freeze's title song said, we were staking our claim to be an original scene from Boston.
While Boston Not L.A. was being released, Al from SSD came up with the Xclaim! concept. Xclaim! was to be an open label; a name Boston bands could use, on their own releases, to identify themselves with. As we were ready to put out our own stuff, we released Xclaim! #2, Kill for Christ, in late 1982 [?].
We thought Kill for Christ represented us much better than the Modern Method stuff did. My personal faves include "Me Generation", our theme song "F.U.", and John's stuff on "Die for God". I ought to explain that one. See, back when we were young and silly, we had this crazy idea that people who were sure God was on their side were capable of anything, say, I don't know, assassinating abortion doctors or bombing gay discos or something. What a bunch of paranoid punk rockers, huh? Anyway, we had been talking to Pushead about a cover. We came up with the basic Fightin' Jesus idea, which Pushead rendered gloriously. It's been a favorite of the Christian Right ever since. (I saw it pop up once in a presentation about "anti-Christian" rock music. One kid behind me summed it up thus: "F-U-S: Fucked Up Shit." Yeah!)
All had been recorded by this hippie engineer in his home studio, Active Sound. Listen to where the 2nd guitar track drops out late in "Die for God;" this was not intentional. (I played for the rest of the song, but apparently this was pointless.) Lou Giordano, who produced the record, couldn't believe it. "I think the guy dropped a joint right there," Bob said.
After Boston Not L.A. and Kill for Christ, we were getting noticed in the hardcore crowd, all right, but in a way it was almost too easy. We felt as though we were in the midst of a rising tide of hardcore conformity and self-satisfaction. There was too much knee-jerk anarchist sloganeering (as opposed to anarchist thought and action); far worse, there was too much feeling that we were superior to everyone else. I thought we were all going to turn into a bunch of smug hippies. John had written "Trendy Nazi Hypocrites", and I had written "Peer Police" on Kill for Christ, but still there was a feeling that our hardcore clique needed a good kick in the ass. Well, it's been said that if you're going to be an anarchist, sometimes you have to bomb your own troops. So in early 1983 [?] we dropped My America on the hardcore world.
Maybe it wasn't consciously meant to be a total assault on Hardcore Values, but that's how it was perceived. And maybe that's what it really was: a message that read, "Maybe the government isn't the real enemy. Maybe it's you and I." The cover elements were simple enough: an inspirational natural scene for a cover (a stock cover design for religious albums), a back cover shot from the movie Patton, a title from a tabloid column from a guy named Ed Anger (who always claimed to be "pig-biting mad"). Oh yeah, and the cover version of "We're an American Band."
The original music, on the other hand, is about as mean as we could get. Much of this is due to the roar that Lou Giordano was able to coax out of the tapes during his production. Beyond that, there was an enormous amount of vitriol being spewed out by the band and I, for one, reached my lifelong peak of nihilism. Never mind the pretty inspirational scenes. Everything was as nasty, brutish and short as possible, whether it concerned brutal cops ("Boston's Finest"), local thugs that get away with everything (the real-life story of "Choir Boy"), or celebrity-killing assassins ("Rifle"). We were not nice towards the hardcore crowd, either, depicting it as sheepish ("What You Pay For"), sniveling ("Poor, Poor, Pitiful You"), and gossipy ("This is Your Life").
As a result, we were variously accused of being Young Republicans, rednecks, and - my favorite - "fucking Normals." All of which was ridiculous: we were punk rockers, playing for other punk rockers, being discussed in the punk rock media and ignored everywhere else. We knew damn well we were going to be heard almost exclusively by people that "thought like us;" indeed, that was the problem. It's hard to imagine today how homogeneous the hardcore crowd was back then. This was partly a strength - it gave us an identity - but it's better to deal with, you know, other types of people.
We followed this release by touring North America. (Bob and I wanted to call it the "My Albania" tour and play "We're an Albanian Band," but we couldn't find the Albanian flag required.) We went in a van (Wayne's, actually) that ended up having its engine replaced in western Massachusetts and its transmission replaced in Idaho. Wayne soon thereafter rented the van to Husker Du for a tour. We held our breath but they didn't have a bit of trouble; go figure.
Bill Bartell of White Flag offered to put out our next release on his Gasatanka label. Do We Really Want to Hurt You was released in the Fall of 1984 [?]. It marks our loosening up the hardcore straitjacket a bit, trying some different things. I think it's more "punk" than strictly "hardcore", whatever those two words mean. Lyrically, we started putting down whatever strange thoughts were in our minds. "Warlords" was written when I had seen Road Warrior too many times; "Lick My Shiny Boots" gives away John's plans for world domination; "Promised Land" gives a peek into the mind of Bob Furapples, if that's what you really want.
We did another tour (with a rented van), but did it just before the album came out. Typical. Afterwards, we decided to get a lead guitarist, so Steve Martin was recruited. Then Bob decided he had had enough of the band life, and we ended up replacing him with Chris Jones, A.K.A. Bones.
We also decided to change our name. Why? Mainly, we were tired of being tagged with the dreaded "joke band" label. In retrospect, maybe this wasn't the best reason. The Dictators were called a joke band in their time, and yet today I'd ask, "How can you not take the Dictators seriously?" (Of course, if anyone were wondering about their lyrics, I'd ask, "How can you take the Dictators seriously?") In any case, in 1985 we changed our name to the Straw Dogs, after the movie by one of our fave directors, Sam Peckinpah.
Thus endeth the F.U.'s part of the story, and begins the Straw Dogs part, where we leave off. Straw Dogs had a different lineup, different name, slightly different focus, and lived in a different milieu. The hardcore "family" had pretty much dissipated, or merged into the general background of independent music. This development may have been for the better--obviously, we felt a little bit constricted by the format - or the worse, but it had to happen eventually before stagnation set in. The Straw Dogs toured North America and Europe and put out music for six more years that were somewhat less than trouble-free. Worst of all was the death of Bones in 1986, followed by a couple of years of unstable lineups, after which record companies wouldn't sniff at us. (We also didn't have the money to do it ourselves.) Luckily, the most stable and productive lineups, the ones that most people actually saw, were the ones that recorded. We put out an EP and an album (both on Restless) with Steve Martin and Bones, and a single (on Gawdawful) and an album (on Lone Wolf and Lost and Found) with Slade Anderson on guitar and Scott Moulaison on drums. (John, Wayne and I were always in there.) All of which are very solid releases, so check 'em out.
So here I am, years later, writing most of this way up among the fjords and mountains of Greenland. Hiding? Nah - doing science, man. That's what I do now. Our world today is different from what it was in the early '80's, in ways that sometimes resemble parts of a science fiction novel: the climate's changing, not that that's unusual but we're probably either causing it or making it worse; Reagan taught politicians everywhere that you could fuck up a whole country as long as you made everyone feel good; all government decisions are now business decisions only while the citizenry (that's you and me) is just interested in being passively entertained; we don't trust the government at all but we'll gladly pee into a cup for the first employer that comes along; the communists are gone, but now huge corporations have moved in and rule everything. Including most punk rock (and "independent" music). So is that worse? Were we better off when we ran everything ourselves and nobody heard of us? I think so. There's something to be said for independent action, in any field.
We're in a world of synthetic teen pop music mass-produced by a worldwide media which amounts to maybe three corporations. I'm not going to make a call for an Independent Youth Culture; first off, the phrase sounds like a fucking Pepsi commercial; secondly, it ain't my job no more, kids. Perhaps what we really need is an adult culture; SUVs and factory outlet malls certainly don't fit the bill. We desperately need independent culture, period. Which can be anything: music, film, websites, political action. And more than anything, we need people fiercely committed to thinking independently.
That's my hardcore lecture for the day. Now go forth and do some fucked up shit.
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