Hippies vs. Punks: The Lemonheads' Hate Your Friends (1987)

The best thing about life lately is sleep. This January has been colder than last year's. The radiator doesn't heat up until well after five in the morning. So the result is I have been staying in bed much later than I usually do.

Recently I was gifted a flat screen television. I had basically stopped watching TV, except for football on Sunday when I would scrunch up in front of my 13-inch old-fashioned analog with its digital-converter antenna. To this bonanza of a large flat screen, I added my cheap DVD player which I fished out of the closet. Subsequently, I have been on a binge of library videos.

One treat was season six of Nurse Jackie. The guy who directs most of the episodes is Jesse Peretz, son of longtime owner of The New Republic and prominent neocon Marty Peretz.

Jesse Peretz was a founding member of The Lemonheads, a band that was important to me in my twenties. I chatted with him casually one of the times I saw The Lemonheads perform at CBGBs. He struck me as an exceedingly nice guy.

So I started thinking about The Lemonheads again. I've mentioned them here and there on this page before. And when I get to thinking about The Lemonheads, I think about the time I "heard" about the band for the first time; it was when I saw a write-up of Hate Your Friends (1987) in an issue of Maximum Rock'n'Roll that was bathed in moonlight on the floor of my college lover's bathroom. I was puking my guts out, and I think she was watching me from the doorway; and all I could think about was the brilliance of that title, Hate Your Friends.

The Lemonheads -- Evan Dando, Ben Deily and Jesse Peretz -- formed while attending the elite private Commonwealth School in Boston. They took their name from a candy that is sour on the outside and sweet on the inside. (I think the most representative Lemonheads song is "Mallo Cup," another candy.) Their first album, the aforementioned Hate Your Friends, owes a lot to California Hardcore. If I had to cite another band, I would say Descendents. Short, sweet, abrasive, pining, pop Punk -- really an amazing pastiche that tapped into something we were feeling in 1987, a longing for the purity of early Hardcore.

Ben Deily and Evan Dando split the songwriting and lead vocals on the album. It is an excellent combination. Deily has a classic "ant-man" Hardcore vocal style, while Dando sings more like a crooner (on "Nothing True," he sounds like Morrissey).

The first Lemondheads album I really bonded with is the followup to Hate Your Friends, Creator (1988), which I purchased on its initial release. I think I picked up a colored-vinyl version of Hate Your Friends at a record store on St. Mark's Place in 1989.

In any event, listening to Hate Your Friends repeatedly this week has been a pleasure. The young have their egos and their aspirations, and, walking up the hill yesterday after work something that leaped into my mind -- the ability to drink alcohol and have sex all day long. If that isn't purity I don't know what is.

Hippies vs. Punks: ALL's Trailblazer

Recorded live at CBGBs during the summer of 1989 -- the same summer and venue I witnessed The Lemonheads perform music off their new album Lick (1989) -- and named after a portable camping commode (featured on the album's cover art), Trailblazer (1990) is my favorite album by the too-little appreciated Pop Hardcore Punk group ALL.

ALL is the band that was formed in the wake of the dissolution of Descendents after Milo Auckerman left the group to pursue a graduate degree in biochemistry. ALL is basically Descendents without Milo. At first Dave Smalley was Milo's replacement; then the able Scott Reynolds (who performs on Trailblazer) took over the lead vocals until leaving the band in 1993 (which is when I stopped buying ALL albums).

I listened to a lot of ALL after the breakup of my marriage and my return to the East Coast. I lived in a studio apartment in the Washington Heights neighborhood. By climbing my fire escape to the roof I could take in a soothing view of the greenbelt of Fort Tryon Park and Inwood Park hugging the Hudson River. Up in that northern tip of Manhattan there were hawk and raccoon. I would run in Fort Tryon and do my shopping at a Korean green grocer on 181st Street. I felt good up there.

Listening to ALL is like listening to the heartbeat of a late 1980s California young man nourished on SST Records. You feel yourself jogging out into the surf and butterflying through the breakers. If you ever want to get a sense of what our youthful sensibilities were at the end of Reagantime, Trailblazer is an excellent document.

The subject matter is the usual one for bubble-gum pop -- girl/boy trouble; but it is treated from a California Hardcore perspective, which is to say with a cynical honesty. So the combination that results -- a pining earnestness matched by withering self-deprecation -- is embracing and novel.

What is also unique about ALL as found here in Trailblazer are the bass and drums of Karl Alvarez and Bill Stevenson, respectively. Athleticism was always an essential, though never explicitly acknowledged, part of the California Hardcore ethos. In Trailblazer, with the sound of the CBGBs mob roaring its approval, one feels almost as if he is listening to a Punk Flashdance.