This is a Call (5 page)

‘Ah-ha-ha,’ he laughed joylessly. ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Good night.’ His microphone clunked to the floor, and the Pistols’ great rock ’n’ roll swindle was over.

Among the audience at Winterland that night were 19-year-old Eric Boucher, a freshman at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and two friends from Hermosa Beach, California, 22-year-old Keith Morris and 23-year-old Greg Ginn, who played together in a Stooges/ MC5-influenced garage rock band called Panic. Far from feeling cheated, and unaware that the Pistols had just played their last show – Johnny Rotten would announce his exit from the group just four days later – all three young men walked out of Winterland feeling elated, energised and inspired by what they had seen. Six months later Boucher formed his own punk band, Dead Kennedys, and adopted the stage name Jello Biafra. Six months after that, Ginn and Morris changed the name of their band to the more militant, threatening-sounding Black Flag.

It would be a gross over-simplification to suggest that the American hardcore movement was born, like a phoenix from the ashes, out of the death of the Sex Pistols’ punk rock dream. By the summer of 1977, while the Pistols were finishing up the recording of their début album
Never Mind the Bollocks
at Wessex Sound Studios in London, there was already a fertile, diverse punk rock scene in Los Angeles, centred around the Masque, a dingy basement club just off Hollywood Boulevard. Here bands such as the Weirdos, The Zeros, X, The Bags and The Germs – the latter fronted by charismatic, nihilistic Iggy/Bowie acolyte Darby Crash and his guitar-playing best friend Pat Smear – played short, riotous sets for messed-up Hollywood club kids.

Keith Morris and Greg Ginn were occasional visitors to the Masque but found themselves out of step with the self-absorbed, narcissistic, peacocking club regulars, who took one withering look at the suburban beach kids with their long hair, faded jeans and T-shirts, and slammed doors in their faces.

‘We weren’t in it for the fashion,’ Morris told Black Flag biographer Stevie Chick, ‘we were in it for the music, its intensity, and the volume.’ The cliquish snobbery they encountered in Hollywood only enhanced the alienation felt by Morris and his friends, and strengthened their desire to create a new noise, without waiting for anyone’s permission or acceptance.

Black Flag’s début EP then was a startling declaration of independence, in both content and form. Released on guitarist Greg Ginn’s own newly created SST label in January 1979, the
Nervous Breakdown
EP featured four taut, wired tales of caucasian psychosis, delivered at breakneck speed, with extreme aggression. From Keith Morris’s agitated delivery of Ginn’s tension-filled lyrics – ‘
I’m about to have a nervous breakdown / My head really hurts / If I don’t find a way outta here / I’m gonna go berserk
…’ – through to the pen-drawn cover art (contributed by Ginn’s brother Raymond Pettibon) which depicted a terrified-looking man holding up a chair to fend off another visibly distressed, aggravated individual with clenched fists raised, it was a record every bit as viciously confrontational as The Stooges’ 1969 début.

By the time filmmaker Penelope Spheeris began documenting the LA punk scene for her 1981 movie
The Decline of Western Civilization
, Morris and Ginn were no longer playing together (the singer having bailed out to form his own band, the more frantic but less threatening Circle Jerks) but the
Nervous Breakdown
EP had become one of the cornerstones of a new punk rock community.

Born in South Bay towns such as Hermosa Beach, San Pedro, Santa Ana and Huntingdon Beach, American hardcore was, in its earliest incarnation, the sound of California screaming. Growing from childhood to adolescence while former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan reigned as Governor of California, teenagers in these towns were raised to believe that theirs was the golden generation, that they were the heirs apparent to the fabled American Dream: for many, such promises were a joke without a punchline. Living in the suburbs, and still dependent on their parents, these kids felt like flies caught in a jam-jar jail: they understood that a bigger world lay somewhere out there, but they themselves stood trapped in their everyday world, frustrated and constrained by the invisible walls they believed surrounded them.

To those with such a mindset, punk rock offered both succour and a sense of escape. It did not matter that by 1979 the mainstream was already pronouncing punk ‘dead’ – indeed this was the year that trailblazing fanzine
PUNK
ceased publication – it didn’t matter that the Sex Pistols were defunct and that The Clash had broken their chains with the expansive
London Calling
: for the kids who had just discovered the genre, this was a new form of music from which they weren’t about to walk away. Instead they stripped away the elements they didn’t like – the posturing, the obsession with fashion, the elitism – and rebooted the genre, amplifying its volume, simplifying its structure, accelerating the velocity, ratcheting up the aggression. What emerged was hardcore: music made by, made for and made about America’s angry, alienated youth, a true riot of their own.

In the 2006 documentary
American Hardcore
, based upon writer Steve Blush’s 2001 book of the same name, Keith Morris gave an eloquent summation of hardcore’s appeal for suburban teens.

‘I’m working Monday through Friday, here comes Friday night and I’m just gonna go
off
,’ said Morris. ‘I hate my boss, I hate the people that I work with, I hate my parents, I hate all these authoritative figures, I hate politicians, I hate people in government, I hate the police: everybody is kinda pointing the finger at me, everybody is picking at me, everybody is poking at me and now I have a chance to be with a bunch of my own type of people, and I have a chance to go off. And that’s basically what it was … BOOM!’

Dave Grohl’s first punk rock epiphany came not in one of the community centres, church halls or housing co-op basements that provided the setting for the incubation of Washington DC’s nationally regarded hardcore scene, but in Evanston, Illinois, a prosperous suburb of Chicago. Located on the shores of Lake Michigan, Evanston was largely populated by wealthy old money families, aspirational middle-class professionals and a transient student population taking classes at the nearby Northwestern University. It was also home to Virginia Grohl’s best friend, her former Boardman High School classmate and Three Belles bandmate Sherry Pelz, by then the married Sherry Bradford, and her teenage daughter Tracey, a sassy, feisty punk rock girl who within the space of ten days in the summer of 1982 turned Dave Grohl’s world upside down.

Tracey Bradford became a punk after seeing Dead Kennedys and Chicago’s own Naked Raygun and Articles of Faith destroy her hometown’s Club COD one ‘fun, crazy’ night in September 1981. An instant convert to the cause, within weeks she had shorn her long brown hair and swapped pretty, preppy dresses for bondage pants and ripped T-shirts. None of this, however, had been relayed to Dave Grohl before he knocked on the Bradfords’ front door that summer.

‘So we showed up that year,’ he recalls, ‘and Tracey came down to the door in engineer boots, bondage pants and an Anti-Pasti T-shirt, with a crew cut and a fucking motorcycle chain around her neck and spikes. And I was like, “You are my hero!”

‘We ran up the stairs of their mansion to her bedroom and she had, honestly, a collection of punk rock singles that would be worth like $100,000 today, singles that are considered impossible to find, like first-pressing Dischord singles, legendary shit you just don’t see. And I went through every single one of those records. And that definitely set my life in the direction it’s been in for thirty fucking years.’

Now a care home nurse living in Florida, Tracey Bradford has fond memories of her ‘cousin’ Dave’s visit.

‘It’s funny, I don’t ever remember thinking, “Wow, Dave thinks I’m cool!”,’ she laughs. ‘I don’t really recall him being really impressed. I just remember that Dave was always a really nice guy. He was pretty young the first time he came to visit – I remember him visiting with his little Winnie the Pooh bear – and he was a good kid, always super, super nice.’

As Grohl rifled through her record collection, Bradford dropped another bombshell: she wasn’t just a punk rock fan, she was also the singer in her own punk rock band, Verboten.

‘Verboten were a pretty cool little band,’ remembers Steve Albini, now frontman of noise rock provocateurs Shellac and a world-renowned recording engineer, then a journalism and fine art student at Northwestern University, taking his first faltering steps towards punk rock godhead with his misanthropic dorm room solo project Big Black. ‘Chicago had such a small punk rock scene and everybody knew everybody. That was a really inspirational period: it seemed like everything was permissible, like all the misfits and losers and people who couldn’t function in regular society could get along quite comfortably with each other and that sort of created a punk rock scene. There was nothing fashionable or chic about it like it was in Los Angeles or New York where you’d have hip socialites dropping in on the punk scene, or where wealthy patrons took bands under their wings. That didn’t happen in Chicago, it was very much a street-level scene and by the mid-eighties it had extended to misfits of all ages. The kids in Verboten would probably have been the youngest kids involved.’

Verboten, in which 14-year-old Bradford was joined by 10-year-old guitarist Jason Narducy, 12-year-old bassist Chris Kean and 11-year-old drummer Zack Kantor, played their first show at Chicago’s Cubby Bear, a dank, dark rock club opposite Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs baseball team, in January 1982, opening up for Naked Raygun and Rights of the Accused. Video footage of the gig shows Verboten to be a tight little unit, with their young guitarist emerging as the star of the show, ripping out a blistering Angus Young-style solo during a chaotic cover of ‘Louie Louie’ as stage invaders swamp his singer and front row punks take the piss with good-humoured ‘We’re not worthy!’ bows.

‘It was all a big laugh,’ remembers Bradford, ‘all about having a good time.’

As Naked Raygun and Rights of the Accused were back at the Cubby Bear while the Grohls were staying in Evanston, Bradford asked Grohl and Hinkle if they would be interested in coming along to see a punk rock show with her.

‘I had to sit them down and give them the Punk Rock 101 speech before we left,’ laughs Bradford. ‘And they had to look the part so we wouldn’t stand out. I’d dated the drummer of Rights of the Accused and then the guitarist, they were both boys that I knew, so it was important that I wasn’t bringing two little geeks to the show.’

Yet to release a single, in 1982 Naked Raygun were still one of the Chicago punk scene’s best-kept secrets. Influenced by second-wave British punk acts Wire, Gang of Four and Stiff Little Fingers, the band dealt in abrasive, scratchy, teeth-on-edge post-punk, with Santiago Durango’s metallic, drilling guitar lines tempered by vocalist Jeff Pezzati’s keen melodic instincts: the notoriously hard-to-please Steve Albini considered them the finest band in his adopted hometown.

Grohl was also blown away by the band, but more than that, he loved the tumultuous atmosphere in the Cubby Bear and the sense of community within its walls. Tracey Bradford introduced him to Pezzati and her friends in Rights of the Accused, and the Chicago punks adopted him for the evening, filling his head with stories of legendary gigs and must-have records, and scooping him off the venue’s sticky floor when the propulsive ebb and flow of the pit threatened to pull him under. It was an eye-opening, life-changing night for the youngsters from Virginia: ‘When we walked out I remember Dave saying, “That was fucking crazy!”’ says Bradford.

‘I stood there and thought, “I could do this, I can play drums, and you don’t even have to sing – you can just scream your balls off,”’ Grohl recalled two decades later. ‘I talked to the singer and I jumped on someone’s head and I felt completely at ease with the band and the audience. It was just a bunch of people having a good time.

‘Most people who were kids back then, when they talk about their first concert it’s like, “Yeah, I saw Dio opening for Ozzy,” or “I saw Fastway opening for Van Halen,” but mine was Rights of the Accused opening for Naked Raygun. That was my point of reference, and still to this day it remains some sort of reference as to how music should be experienced live.’

Before he left Evanston, Grohl had one more revelatory experience, one which would shape the rest of his adolescence, and provide a moral framework that continues to inform his life. It came with the discovery that, back on the East Coast, one of punk rock’s most vibrant, vital communities was virtually on his doorstep.

‘I remember looking at Tracey’s singles,’ he told me in 2009, ‘and picking up an S.O.A. single or a Minor Threat single – a Dischord single anyway – and looking at the address and going, “Woah, this one is from Washington DC!” And then Tracey said, “Dude, listen to this!” and she played me a Bad Brains record. And it was like, “Holy shit! They’re from DC too?” And then we listened to Faith and Void and all the real cool shit from Dischord’s early days. And a lot of these bands were still going at that time, so now I had a mission for when I got back home, to check out that scene. It took me about a year before I finally found it. And then I couldn’t get out of it.’