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.

Secret Avengers #16

The best way to read a comic book is with lots of natural light. This makes spring and summer the best months. What I find is that a post-run endorphin high improves the experience as well. I stumbled upon this one evening after work. It was early summer. I was just back from a run in Fort Tryon Park. The light coming through my sixth floor studio apartment windows was ample and had a green-tinted aqueous quality. I dug into an Iron Man comic book. At that point I probably hadn't read a comic book in a decade. The experience was mind-blowing. Iron Man battled Mandarin and a bunch of dragons on mainland China. I was young, fit and my brain was coursing with natural opioids. I flew along with Tony Stark as he fought in mid-air with the dragons; plus, Mandarin blasting away with those damn rings of his. The green of the dragons was highlighted by the green light pouring through my open windows. From that point forward, this would have been 1991, I was convinced that comic books are much more than a juvenile, toss-off media. Now this is widely acknowledged not only by aesthetes but Wall Street as well since comic-book-derived blockbusters keep the big studios afloat.

Secret Avengers, currently in its third volume, has never been much more than mediocre. (Though that is not entirely true -- Rick Remender's volume one run was noteworthy for its exploration of artificial life.) I think Secret Avengers was designed to maintain a sinister vibe in Marvel's Avengers franchise once Dark Avengers, the seminal Marvel title during the early days of the Obama administration, was cancelled.

I must say I greatly enjoyed the last issue, Secret Avengers #16, of the second volume, seven scans from which you can inspect below. In the first four, Mockingbird fights a battle to the death with A.I.M. Scientist Supreme, Dr. Andrew Forson. It is always good to see a tertiary hero get some time in the spotlight. Artist Luke Ross outdoes himself here. He maintains Mockingbird's femininity but captures the brutality of the fight with Forson. She takes a knife to the pelvis and returns it by forcing the blade into Forson's face. Ross's use of multiple inset panels to capture the action is superb. As an example of the medium, I don't think it gets any finer.

Then, for the pièce de résistance, take a look at the last three scans of a wasted Mentallo sitting on an A.I.M. Island beach at sunset as nanobots trickle out of his ear and into the surf (capturing sort of what I felt like reading that post-work, post-run Iron Man comic book long ago). Writers Nick Spencer and Ales Kot are to be praised.