Zero Boys, VA - Can of Pork (Lookout! 1992), CRASS

Back to our regularly scheduled punk rock programming

Before we get started here, a request of you Dear Reader - are there other personal sites/blogs/newsletters related to music that you can recommend?  I’ve resolved to try to read more and not be inside of my own head too much - your suggestions in the comments would be much appreciated!

The quite fashionable Zero Boys

Zero Boys - “Blood’s Good” (1982)

This song is the first I had heard from Indianapolis’ ZERO BOYS, via mixtape, and it still stands out to me as a sterling piece of wild rock n’ roll, even separate from their well-considered (and only) LP, Vicious Circle.  The guitar workout here is so good. I can detect only one guitar track on this (besides the short solo), and to generate a superlative level of action and excitement without the multitrack layers often relied upon in modern scenarios, is special.  “Blood’s Good” is brimming with cool riffs and instrumental parts from all players, that could interest even your dismissive, traditional musician friends, yet smashes them all into a tight non-indulgent package.  Paul Mahern’s concluding, manic background howling and final utterance of “BLOODS GOOD” are even remarkable, totally fitting the self-harm hysteria of the tune - a trophy case nominee in the category of screaming over a guitar lead. 

The history of the US Hardcore explosion had participants going every which way artistically once the first 1-2 years of kids had proven to themselves they could accomplish a lot with very little.  There’s a similar experience I think with the first wave of UK punk, and the true test of the ideas, where the really interesting stuff happens, is what weirdness fulminates when the following class of isolated, novice teenagers in the rural Midwest or the outer UK counties absorb the slogans and are spurred into action.  It’s why the Bullshit Detector compilations, the result of an open invitation from CRASS, are a more intriguing listen for me - poetry, out of tune instruments, inept recording and all -  than the actual CRASS records.    

Anyway, immediately prior to disbanding, the Zero Boys were preparing recordings for a second LP, and it seems while many of their bigger peers were pressing further into new regions of speed and also metal influences, retreating into jangly college rock, or following their muse into whatever else, the band pressed harder on their formative connection to infectious proto punk - in interviews they tell stories about how, as kids in the mid ‘70s, they rode city buses for hours to get to the one record store in town with an import section, where they could ravenously digest the latest gray market Dictators, Dead Boys, Stooges and related releases.  Hence, tasty guitar licks and rock power!     

The Vicious Circle recording I’ve also thought had some interesting guitar things happening; with a stereo spread seemingly coming from a single performance.  I caught this rad tidbit from an interview the band did with Razorcake magazine:

Yeah, that’s a funny kind of unique guitar sound. I’ve had people email me and ask, “How did you do that?” He played a Hamer guitar through a Lab Series amp, which is a funny little ‘70s solid state amplifier that had a built-in compressor. It just had that kind of razor/ tin can sound. Then, in order to double track it and make it sound bigger—instead of playing it twice—we just wanted it to be really tight and we found that if we double tracked it, it became less tight. So, I remember being in the studio with a copy of G.I. and playing it for the engineer. This is what really developed that sound: he took an old Eventide Harmonizer; it was a rack mount studio device. He put Terry’s guitar dry hard left, and then the Harmonizer was three [mili?]seconds of delay hard to the other side. So, that is that sound. Kind of chord sounding, kind of harmony. You can’t really tell. It’s nebulous. But it’s awesome. It just cuts through. Then, the leads are very a la Sex Pistols or Dictators—where they’re just overdubbed—all the guitar fills and pick drags, so they’re twice as loud as everything else. Raw Power was the record that kind of started all that. It’s the whole concept of not being in balance. It’s funny because what I do for a living is I’m an audio engineer. I have worked on all kinds of records and people want to make things that have less and less character. They’re always smoothing things out more and more until they just don’t have any life to them.

Osaka spazzcore thrashers, JELLYROLL ROCKHEADS, who I can fully imagine being students of the Zero Boys, pulled off what might be a tribute with the stereo hard panned, single performance guitar sound on their Flowers for Nothing ep (2001) - check it out. 

VA - Can of Pork (1992)

As a teenager, I had my antenna up for anything remotely punk-looking arriving in the Used CD racks at my local record shop, and happened on this compilation.  The cartoony cover art was fantastic, and I instantly recognized the playful Lookout! imprint from the OPERATION IVY and GREEN DAY records that were trafficking heavily among the edgy cliques at my suburban Chicago high school.  In the landscape of non-mainstream music that made its way to me, there wasn’t much that one could qualify as “fun” in tenor - gloomy, angry, menacing, sexualized, tough, violent, dreamy, psychedelic, yes, but fun?  I suppose BAD RELIGION’s excessive pedantry was pretty amusing in its own way (the decision to author “quintessential mindless modern epicene” as lyrics to a punk song: what lines did they throw out as “too smart” or “too stupid??”).  It’s interesting that these were the dominant subcultural aesthetic modes for the time; maybe they reflect a reaction to the almost enforced US optimism of the 80s-90s (and underlying fear of nuclear apocalypse), and the natural inclination of young hormonal artistic types to manifest their art in these ways.  The victory of Lookout’s branding and art direction to me was a remarkable sense of inclusive fun, not to say anything of the also transcendent appeal of many of the East Bay’s musicians.  The Energy CD back cover image of Dave Mello in a tie-dye shirt, hunched over mid-drum pounding, next to the googly eye Lookout! logo face was magnetic and probably played no small role in directing the national gaze towards Berkeley.  I didn’t need to audition the disc at the listening station, I immediately plunked down the $8.

I bragged to my friend that I just bought a Lookout! comp with 30 bands, and he made a game of listing every big Lookout act to guess who was on it, with the score ending up being exactly zero.  No Queers, no Screeching Weasel, no Rancid (excepting the Downfall track).  I don’t know that COP is anybody’s favorite Lookout release, but it’s very high up there in the mix for me.

1. It sounds awesome.  Engineers Andy Ernst and Kevin Army I don’t think get enough credit for the general (and unusual for the punk world) high-gloss clarity and professionalization of the sounds for the label - and they presumably accomplished this regularly in an all analog studio environment, on shoestring budgets.

2. There are so many bands!  The range and diversity of sounds and genres is wide.  You could make the mistake of thinking ska and Ramonesism were the major columns of this regional scene, and there is some, but not much, of both on this comp.  Welcome to the world.  Every city has a zillion bands!  I did not appreciate this and here was my first indication of that notion.  As the story goes, there was some reluctance to release this comp as Very Small Records was releasing its own huge 20+ track regional comp Very Small World in the same year.

3. BRENT’S TV.  my first exposure to, and start of my lifelong love for, this band.  The early online days led me to a curious webpage devoted to this niche-iest of niche groups, curated by superfan and adventurer Kendra K, with whom I would years later play with in a Brent’s TV cover band. 

   

   Brent’s TV in their natural performance environment - the laundromat

4. Sacramento’s HORNY MORMONS.  Mike C’s other band the BANANAS was so fucking great and I’ll write about them more in a later post. I loved seeing them (and got to play with/ release a split cassette with them) when I moved to the Bay 10 years later.  Chris Woodhouse showed up in my other post about the fantastic FM KNIVES.    

5. MR T EXPERIENCE.  Again, a first exposure to a band that became a favorite for years and years.  On the infrequent times I sit down with a guitar, I inevitably end up playing and singing their “Sackcloth and Ashes.”

6. A personal top five of favorite Lookout! releases:  Go Sailor - Don’t Go 7”; Operation Ivy - Energy, va - Can of Pork, Brent’s TV/Sweet Baby - Hello Again CD, Mr T Experience - and the women who love them

It can’t be overstated how much influence the Bay Area punk community held over the punk world and larger culture in the 90s and slightly beyond, with exports like MRR, Cometbus, Lookout!, and the mythos of 924 Gilman.  Green Day was already so big in my circles, pre-major label signing, and then suddenly they were monstrous and ubiquitous. At my college orientation, I made the acquaintance of an otherwise non-punk classmate, that listened to Dookie and Kerplunk in an intense, trancelike way, like Manson dropping the needle on the White Album, and claimed he was receiving secret messages in the songs.  “Do you listen to Green Day?  But are you really hearing Green Day?” (Full disclosure, I was neither listening to nor hearing Green Day).

Many punks had adopted the ‘60s countercultural ideals and confusing discourse over authenticity and the perceived cardinal sin of “selling out” (an antiquated, almost foreign concept today); and here they were confronted in real-time with mass market adoption of their product.  As we all moved online, bands and scene personalities were viciously slandered by disgruntled punks not just in the pages of MRR, but in Usenet groups and messageboards for their engagement with show business or large corporations, and other real or alleged business conduct (and they were attacked in ways that eerily predicted the dystopian dynamics of the international social media explosion decades later - fake accounts, doxxing, blackmail, online pile-ons, online and real world stalking, threatening places of employment, etc were already pretty familiar tactics for online punk beefs by the early aughts).  While I think many of these same people would have loved to shoot their shot as musicians with the larger indies or major labels, they instead engaged in the destructive grievance of the old Russian proverb “I would rather have nothing than my neighbor have one ruble more than me” - also a familiar line of thinking from today’s red hat populism.

What often goes underappreciated is all the small time exploitation and ripping off going on inside of the underground.  As a typical example, my band had agreed to share costs for our record with a fairly credible and well-liked local label, only to find our discs being held hostage at the pressing plant due to unpaid bills, and the label totally incommunicado after collecting our share of the funds.  In negotiating the liberation of our product from the manufacturer, we learned the label’s Ponzi-like finances had collapsed and other related projects were similarly imprisoned.  I suppose getting robbed by family is in some ways more expected and tolerable than by the proverbial men in suits?

The era has been covered extensively and brilliantly in documentary film and numerous books.  I was inspired to revisit Larry Livermore’s excellent How to Ru(i)n a Record Label: The Story of Lookout Records, and related blog post The End of Lookout. The detail and insights there are naturally much better and more comprehensively reported and opined on than anything I could jot down here.  It does strike me in going through it, that as is seemingly the case for any major cultural phenomenon or movement, at the center are some bewildered humans, full of self-doubt, trying to do their best with extraordinary circumstances.  Speaking of CRASS, see also George Berger’s The Story of Crass, a narrative with which one could draw the same conclusion, despite all of the dogmatic certainty of that band’s politics and art.