(James June Schneider and Paul Bishow, US, 2020, 88 minutes)
"We dared to suck. In other words, we weren't afraid to be horrible."
--Randy Austin (Overkill)
The DC punk scene (1976-1984) takes the spotlight in James June Schneider and Paul Bishow's long-gestating, crowd-funded documentary.
To Patricia Ragan (Punk), "DC was just such an empty pit of misery. It was such a small community, I didn't see anything good coming out of it," but a scene coalesced in the 1970s, giving rise to bands like Overkill and the Slickee Boys. And it wasn't the only scene, since Go-Go, which emerged in the 1960s, was also making waves. As Jeff Nelson (Teen Idles, Dischord) puts it, "When you're working in isolation, sometimes you come up with the best stuff." When Bad Brains emerged, they tore the whole thing wide open.
As guitarist Darryl Jennifer explains, the band heard the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, and decided they wanted to do something similar--except faster.
To Kim Kane (the Slickee Boys), "They made the Ramones seem like they were asleep." Archival footage doesn't just show them racing through "At the Movies" (among other songs), but singer H.R., sporting a sharp grey suit, concludes by executing a perfect backflip--without his dreads, he looks a lot like Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Ian MacKaye (Teen Idles, Dischord) credits Bad Brains with the promotion of Positive Mental Attitude, aka PMA, a concept alleged conman Napoleon Hill introduced in his 1937 best seller Think and Grow Rich. If one thing set the DC punks of the 1970s apart from most others, like their UK counterparts, it was their embrace of positivity over negativity, though the scene would grow more aggressive as punk gave way to hardcore in the 1980s.
That isn't to say they were all about peace and love. Nelson caught MacKaye's attention by setting homemade explosions off on the school grounds, while MacKaye and Henry Rollins bonded over skateboarding and Hendrix. The three would form Teen Idles before moving on to other outfits, like SOA and Minor Threat. Not mentioned: Calvin Johnson was part of the same crowd, even if he's most closely associated with an Olympia-based band (Beat Happening), label (K Records), and radio station (KAOS).
Like many scenes, the DC iteration coalesced around sympathetic organizations, such as Yesterday and Today Records, a music store that employed several punk musicians, and Madams Organ (R.I.P.), an art collective and group house, where Bad Brains lived for a time and wrote "Banned in DC." The latter also served as a gathering place for Yippies, meaning longhairs, no-hairs, drug users, and straight-edge kids mixing and comingling--and not always happily.
The 1,200-capacity 9:30 Club debuted in 1980, just prior to the departure of Jimmy Carter and the arrival of Ronald Reagan. Naturally, the music grew harder and louder, but that's also the point at which Bad Brains moved to New York and Rollins traded SOA for Black Flag. That could have been that, except there were plenty of other bands, many of whom would find themselves on Dischord Records, home of the compilation Flex Your Head, the Faith/Void split, and Minor Threat's genre-defining Out of Step.
Instead of splintering, the scene blew up, making fans across the world, including Jello Biafro (Dead Kennedys) in the Bay Area, Tim Kerr (Big Boys) in Austin, and musician-turned-politician Joe "Shithead" Keithley (DOA) in Vancouver, all of whom appear in the film.
The MacKaye-associated concept of straight edge--"Don't drink, don't smoke, don't fuck"--also caught on. Whether Minor Threat fans knew it or not, the lyrics to "Out of Step" were contentious even within the band, since Nelson felt that the lack of the word "I," as in "I don't drink," made it sound as if MacKaye was issuing orders rather than explaining a philosophy.
As hardcore grew in popularity, audiences became whiter and less tolerant. Participants who leaned towards the egalitarian end of the spectrum got out while the getting was good. It's outside the purview of the film, but the transition laid the groundwork for riot grrrl, which stood in opposition to most everything hardcore's more extreme proponents represented.
Schneider and Bishow spent 15 years assembling their film's interviews, photos, posters, and Super-8 performance material (much of it shot by Jeff Krulik of Heavy Metal Parking Lot fame). There are several women speakers, like graphic designer Cynthia Connolly (Dischord), though most were behind-the-scenes players rather than performers. It's a subject they could have explored in more depth, though the the overwhelmingly male--downright homoerotic--nature of hardcore merits some rather humorous attention in Don Letts's Punk: Attitude (2005), which features footage Bishow shot in DC. In fact, they wouldn't make for a bad double bill.
The documentary ends in 1984, so don't expect any mention of Unrest, Fugazi, or Pussy Galore (a band that also relocated to NYC), though Ian Svenonius (the Make-Up) makes a brief appearance--and Half Japanese appears in archival footage. It's a matter of personal taste, but for me, that's when things really got interesting, strictly from a musical perspective.
Endnote: For a list of virtual and in-person screenings, please click here. The list includes Seattle's Grand Illusion Cinema, starting on May 21. Much like the DC punk scene, the Grand Illusion is a DIY affair, and they've stuck around through thoughtful, wide-ranging material programmed, promoted, and projected by people who are in it for the love of movies, not money.
Photo credits: H.R. by James June Schneider, Slickee Boys and Out of Step album cover (designed by Cynthia Connolly) from Discogs, Teen Idles from Still Got It, and Connolly (Erik Gibson) from Arlington Magazine.
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