Hippies vs. Punks: Minutemen's Project: Mersh (1985)

I have developed a block about this post. I think it has something to do with a clear memory I have of playing this record, the Minutemen's Project: Mersh (1985) EP, on my 21st birthday. The summer sun was shining brightly. I drank beer from one of my high-school debate trophies. I stood in the living room of a second-story apartment near the U.C. Berkeley campus. My girlfriend was there, and so too was my father. My father had driven down from Solano County to celebrate the occasion. I was now officially a man.

Last month I finished reading Michael T. Fournier's 33 1/3 series book devoted to the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime (1984) double album.

To my mind the high point of the 1980s was 1984, when, between April and July, SST Records released Meat Puppets II, Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade double album and the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime. (Of the three, Double Nickels is the only one to make the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums list.)

Taken together it was as if a brand-new counterculture had been formed in the space of a summer, and I was part of it. But what was it?

It was Hardcore, but not of the clownish, reactionary, dress-coded Nazi Punk variety. The Hardcore of Double Nickels, Zen Arcade and Meat Puppets II welcomed everyone who wanted to listen. It was politically engaged, openly intellectual (Double Nickels devoted songs to Dmitri Shostakovich and James Joyce), guileless and egalitarian. Primarily, it espoused an ethic of do-it-yourself hard work.

Imagine the Hippies without all the "Summer of Love" marketing overlays and metaphysical pretensions, and the First Wave U.K. Punks without their perfunctory negativity, and you get a sense of what SST Hardcore 1984 was like. Another world is possible. So let's just do it. (Nike cashed in on "Just Do It" later in the decade. Without being preceded by the Hardcore avant-garde, I doubt the shoe company could have.)

Fournier's book reminded me of several things about Double Nickels that I had forgotten. I remembered that the double-album length was a response to Hüsker Dü's planned release of the double-album Zen Arcade ("Take that Hüsker!" appears somewhere on the gate-fold Double Nickels album cover), but it had slipped my mind that the Minutemen had copied Pink Floyd's Ummagumma (1969) in giving each band member his own side of the record. Double Nickels has a D. Boon side, a Mike Watt side and George Hurley side. The fourth side is labeled "Chaff."

Another aspect of the album that I had forgotten is that the title refers to butt rocker Sammy Hagar's 1984 smash hit "I Can't Drive 55." In Double Nickels on the Dime the Minutemen are saying "We drive 55 m.p.h. on Interstate 10. So what? Does that make us square? What does speeding have to do with making music?"

After listening to the double album again non-stop for two weeks, I realized that I couldn't do it justice. There were several years, probably 1985 to 1987, when I pretty much exclusively listened to Bob Dylan and the Minutemen at night, and Van Morrison in the morning. It was a dividing-line period in my life, a time when I came to believe that "doing-your-own-thing" in a do-it-yourself fashion was more important than status, than acquiring a four-year degree and then quickly moving on to graduate or law school.

While it's too daunting at this point to take on Double Nickels, I thought I could manage the follow-up, Project: Mersh, the six-song EP released the winter of 1985 that contains the last great Minutemen song before the death of lead singer/guitarist D. Boon in December of that year.

The EP is three A-side songs, and three B-side songs adorned with a painting by D. Boon lampooning cigar-chomping record executives, one of whom proclaims, "I got it! We'll have them write hit songs!"

The big departure from previous albums is that the songs, with the exception of the final track, "More Spiel," are more conventional in structure. Gone is the 90-second free-jazzesque deconstruction of the pop tune, like in "Polarity" off What Makes a Man Start Fires (1983). Most of the tracks on Double Nickels are approximately 90 seconds; in fact, the longest song on the double album is two minutes 55 seconds.

An important point about the Minutemen in particular, Hardcore Punk in general, and one that connects it with the psychedelic ballroom San Francisco Sound of Happy Trails (1969) and Anthem of the Sun (1968), not to mention Eno's ambient records or PiL's Metal Box , is the destruction of or attack on the three-minute pop tune.

In Project: Mersh the Minutemen embrace the three-minute pop tune. The two first cuts "The Cheerleaders" and "King of the Hill" are both overtly political.

The third and last cut on the A-side is a cover of Steppenwolf's "Hey Lawdy Mama."

The Minutemen were always reaching back and covering bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival, Steppenwolf and Blue Öyster Cult -- politically-engaged rock bands from the Hippie era. (If you don't think Steppenwolf was political, listen to Steppenwolf Live (1970) again sometime.)

These bands provide a clue into who the Minutemen were emulating among the Hippies. In choosing "Hey Lawdy Mama," a sexist rant about coitus with groupies on the road, the band is poking fun at its flavor-of-the-month status as top of the heap left of the dial.

The B-side starts with "Take Our Test," before arriving at the best song of the EP, and the last great song the Minutemen produced, "Tour-Spiel," performed by bassist Mike Watt. (The final studio album, 3-Way Tie (For Last), released the same month as D. Boon's death, is not that good.)

I've been reading No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead by Peter Richardson. One thing Richardson makes plain is that the Dead were a continuation of the Beats, of Kerouac and Cassady and On the Road (1957). The Hippies and the Beats are organically connected. (We visited this subject before.)

If "Hey Lawdy Mama" is Steppenwolf's tribute to life on the road, and "Truckin'" is the Grateful Dead's, then I would say that the Hippies had lost their way as early as 1970. But with a song like "Tour-Spiel," a song about life on the road that is much truer to the Beats, I think we can say that Hardcore Punks had rediscovered Ground Zero:

Now you got your guitar
And your practice amp
You travel the USA in a van
And Troccoli's counting on some situation
Are you going to write the song I demand?
And with the guitar turned off
And the gas tank empty
And the typewriter on
But my head is empty
And to really find me
I've got to look inside me

From there the song segues into a five-minute acid rave, the last cut, "More Spiel," part of an emerging rave or neo-paisley psychedelic scene.

If you had to neatly encapsulate the message of the counterculture -- from Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception (1954) to the Beats, the Merry Pranksters and the Acid Tests and Trips Festival, including Easy Rider, on up to George Harrison's Dark Horse and Patti Smith's Horses, before arriving at Project: Mersh -- it's those two lines: "And to really find me/I've got to look inside me."

Hippies vs. Punks: Hüsker Dü's Land Speed Record

Hüsker Dü's Land Speed Record was recorded live the summer of 1981 and originally released by New Alliance Records in January of 1982, about the same time that Sire Records released Tom Tom Club in the United States. In 1987 Mike Watt and Martin Tamburovich sold New Alliance Records to SST Records. Greg Ginn then promptly reissued Land Speed Record on SST. This is when I bought the album.

Nineteen-Eighty-Seven was generally a good year for me, a year I became a proto-burdened bachelor when my girlfriend, whom I would end up marrying a year later, moved out of the apartment in which we had lived together for five years. She would return six months later, but for the summer and fall I had the apartment to myself. 

Excepting the regular presence of buddies, who, like blackbirds swooping down on a morsel that had been dropped on the sidewalk, homed in once the girlfriend had vacated the premises, not to mention a cousin who split his time between Berkeley and Marin County, I felt freer than I had since my freshman year of 1982.

What I remember about Land Speed Record is side two. For some reason I was under the impression that "Data Control" spanned the entire second side of the album instead of the last five-and-a-half minutes. I liked the song. It was distinguishable, had a distinguishable beat, was slower than the rest of the material on the record; plus, it was menacing. After listening to side two I felt as if I had been through a trial by ordeal, made privy to secret information. For that reason, I mostly listened to Land Speed Record by myself in the sunny part of the day from 3 PM to 5 PM when the apartment building was largely abandoned.

By 1987 Hüsker Dü was in the process of falling apart. The band's time on a major label was modestly successful. The Hüskers were pioneers when they jumped the SST ship for Warner Bros. with the release of Candy Apple Grey in early 1986. The big migration of hardcore and No Wave independent label bands wouldn't happen for another couple of years. I had stopped buying Hüsker Dü records after New Day Rising (1985).

Until of course the reissue of Land Speed Record. (Then later during the zenith of Grunge I purchased a cassette of Metal Circus.)

Embarking on a work-week immersion of the album I was a little hesitant about making the commitment. I didn't know if I had the strength to absorb non-stop the sonic hydrochloric acid of early Hüsker Dü hardcore. At first, on Monday, after listening to the record on my iPod, I would intersperse a Nina Simone record or Frank Zappa's Sleep Dirt (1979) before repeating the process. But by Wednesday I was listening to Land Speed over and over on high volume to the point that Thursday morning I woke up with an earache.

I think Christgau gets it right when he says, 

Like a good Eno ambient, this raving nonstop live one provides just enough surface detail--recombinant noise guitar, voices tailing off like skyrockets, slogans such as "data control," "do the bee," and "ultracore"--to function as mood rather than trance music, though admittedly not for the same kind of mood. Guaranteed to assuage the nervous tension of co-op conversion, labor strife, bad orgasm, World War III, and other modern urban annoyances. In other words: aarrghhh! B+

What strikes me this morning is that by 1987 we were already vaguely aware that things had gone wrong, and we were looking backwards to the early '80s and the purity of hardcore.

Hippies vs. Punks: Bob Mould's Workbook

I immersed myself in Workbook (1989) this week; rather, I should say that I immersed myself in Workbook 25, the reissue of Bob Mould's first solo album on its 25th anniversary. I don't know why. I think the idea was to select another record, like last week's My War, that I tried to like, made an effort to enjoy, but never really did.

I have a very clear memory about this album because my wife's lover, the fellow she dumped me for who she ended up marrying and having children with, a really nice guy, an English traveling salesman of pewter animal brooches who was on the lam from collection agencies due to a mountain of credit card debt, told me how much he liked it.

I guess I had made a cassette copy of Workbook for my wife. Where she was living with her Englishman, a railroad apartment in a building on the northwest corner of 106th Street and Columbus not too far from Morningside Park, she didn't have a turntable, only a boom box. I can't remember when I bought the album; it couldn't have been too much longer after it had been released in the spring of 1989, a time I was still living with my wife (something I have been exploring sporadically on this page with "The Colt 45 Chroncile" posts).

I recall that my copy of Workbook was a cut-out, a sign that the album had been remaindered, which argues for my purchasing it the following spring or early 1990, the last months I would spend in cohabitation with my wife. I liked Mould's delicate, classical guitar on "Sunspots," which opens the record, as well as the next track, the outstanding "Wishing Well." But then my attention flagged as the rest of the album unfolded, the material never quite hitting the mark. In the end, Christgau's brutally dismissive criticism of Workbook is close to how I felt at the time:

Mould-Maimone-Fier are some kind of supersession, but they're no band, and between the cello and the acoustic guitar and the moderato and the lyric sheet that ought to have a little typeface note like at the end of a Borzoi book, I find myself disliking their record intensely. Until the raving finale, it's so respectable, so cautious, as if honest thought were a suitable substitute for wisdom, sarcasm, a good joke, or a suicide run for the next intro. C+

I wouldn't go so far as to say that I intensely disliked the record. It was after all Bob Mould, the sainted lead of Hüsker Dü, his first solo effort, and therefore worthy of study and respect. It's just that I never put a lot of effort into it. I tried to figure it out here and there, now and again, but never successfully.

Now, listening to Workbook again, my first reaction was in line with the one I had 25 years ago and with Christgau's critique: Elevator music for a maturing "adult contemporary" Hardcore Punk audience. Insufferable. But after listening to Workbook 25 nonstop all week I can safely pronounce the album a great one and certainly one meriting reissue. "Wishing Well" is truly an A+ track, as is the final cut "Whichever Way the Wind Blows."

I am drawn back to the assessment of Workbook by my wife's lover. He called it a great record. Trapped there in a dark flat with bars on the windows, he liberated me; he took a troublesome responsibility off my hands. I would blow in periodically -- this would have been 1991 -- on my way to a night out on the town and they always seemed so penned in and sullen. That's the dark side to pairing up. You're caught in a trap together.

The key to approaching Workbook lies here. Imagine yourself visiting an ex-wife and her traveling salesman lover in their dark third-floor walk-up right before you embark on a night of carousing in the big city. You're free, and they're not.

****

I'll be out of town for a few days. Back on Tuesday.

Hippies vs. Punks: Grant Hart's Intolerance

The Labor Day weekend draws to a close. It was a good one. I was able to scratch my way back to a semblance of balance after several weeks operating with an energy deficit.

I spent the three-day holiday weekend listening to a lot of jazz and Traffic. I also, as you know if you looked at this page over the last couple of days, have revisited some of the seminal recordings of SST Records.

This afternoon I am listening -- on repeat -- to Grant Hart's first solo full-length album after the demise of Hüsker Dü.

Intolerance (1989) appeared at a time when SST Records had lost its steam. I consider it the last great record the label put out. Greg Ginn was focusing his energy on the Cruz Records sub-label. Cruz featured Grunge and Pop Punk music before it became the next -- and probably the last -- Grand Barbecue for the major labels. 

Intolerance was released December of 1989, but I didn't purchase it until I moved to the Emerald City for the first time, the summer of 1990. (In the early '90s, after I returned to New York City from my Seattle sojourn, I was an acolyte of ALL, the top band for Cruz Records. I listened to ALL and Dinosaur Jr. religiously from 1990 to 1993.) 

My marriage was ending and I was living alone up the east flank of Capitol Hill, a mile or two from the University of Washington. I worked as a laborer for a drywall contractor. I had a tiny sublet apartment. I drank when I could. But I had the sunshine too, sonically represented by Grant Hart's Intolerance.

SST Records, the label that had created, more than any other, the American Hardcore Punk sound (think Black Flag), was, by the end of the 1980s, basically a purveyor of Hippie sensibility, albeit the kind found at the end of the Reagan era. And this sensibility, if I had to define it, which I believe I can since I was in and of it -- I  represented it more than most -- was a rejection of Yuppie career-track achievement and status in favor of alcohol and independent artistic/scholarly pursuits. -- Good homemade meals, I should mention that as well. As a young man who turned his back on the Academy, not only did I read my fair share of Bukowski and Kerouac, but I also spent a lot of time blendering basil and pine nuts for pesto and stir-frying tofu and snow peas in oyster sauce. (I used to spend a lot more time cooking; part of that was living with and taking care of women.)

So by the time the '80s draw to a close Punk has come full circle. The Punk is now a Hippie. The Hippie is in the vanguard once again. This is what makes Intolerance a standout, unique record. The opposition, the anger of Punk towards Hippie has disappeared. The progeny has assumed the forebear's identity; the son now wears the father's beard.

Listen to the album if you can; it is a great one.

Something to Hüsker

My holiday weekend of SST Records remembrances continues. Today after a morning heavy on jazz -- Gerald Cleaver's Detroit (2008) and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers' Ugetsu (1963) , to name a few -- I settled in and listened to Hüsker Dü's output on SST, minus Everything Falls Apart (1983), which I don't have and never owned on vinyl.

When Zen Arcade came out the summer of 1984 it blew everyone away. We hadn't heard anything like it. It was like a faster, edgier, heavier, ballsier, more intense R.E.M. Listening to "I'll Never Forget You" now (see above) I am reminded why we were so attracted to the Hüskers. Superb!

But the song that had us smitten, at least me and my cousin Colin, was the fourth cut on the first side of the double album. "Chartered Trips" wowed:

Hippies vs. Punks: The SST Tour 1985

This is a first-time Hippies vs. Punks post for Monday. I noticed that video of the 1985 SST Tour has appeared on YouTube.

My flying-the-flannel bonafides boil down to a devotion in the 1980s to the Minutemen. I saw them perform during the SST Tour. If you want to see what the Minutemen looked like in their prime, here it is.

I was at this show, featured in the video above, at The Stone on Broadway. My cousin and I along with a high-school friend who had come up from UC Santa Cruz drove over from Berkeley.

The YouTube video says the show was taped March 1, 1985. This means that it was a Friday night.

This is definitely the show I was at; I remember the young women in front of the stage that the camera catches during the Meat Puppets and Minutemen sets.

I remember we showed up right when SWA was finishing.

We caught Saccharine Trust, whose neo-Doors poetry didn't go over well with the crowd. The lead singer, Jack Brewer -- I remember well his red shirt, faded now on the old VHS tape -- was covered in spit by the time the band was through with the set.

I remember seeing the Meat Puppets and enjoying them. I owned their albums and recognized all the songs. I even congratulated Chris Kirkwood  as he left the stage walking through the crowd.

He laughed right in my face.

I remember slam dancing to the Minutemen. I remember how strong D. Boon seemed. They were by far the best band that night.

I remember when Hüsker Dü came out they were loud. Bob Mould created a wall of sound with that Flying-V guitar of his.

I remember all the people stage diving. But I don't remember the big "Louie Louie" all-band send off. And so far I can't locate myself in the crowd.

****

Update: I believe I have found myself. The young man clapping in the white t-shirt at the lip of Greg Norton's part of the stage at 1:05:48 of the video; his mic stand is partially obscuring my face.

Update II: I had difficulty identifying myself because I can't imagine myself as I appear in the video: tall and slender and looking slightly mean. I am with my cousin who appears to be about five-inches shorter and we're draped over D. Boon's monitor all throughout the last Minutemen song, a cover of the Meat Puppets' "Lost." Curt Kirkwood makes an appearance. I also notice myself at the beginning of Hüsker's "Diane." Minute 54:46 to 54:48 in the video. What's up with all the white cotton t-shirts?

It has given me a lot of joy today to discover that I am part -- albeit in an atomized way as one of the throng in the pit -- of the official record of the SST Tour. It was a great show. Those bands changed my life, changed a lot of lives.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #21

My friend Shale -- to whom this epistle, number 21 taken from a string-tied folder dating back to the end of the '80s, is addressed -- was and is a prodigious reader. We used to scour the used-book stores together in Berkeley. Other than that our time in college was spent drinking coffee and reading in one of the city's many cafes; either that, or drinking beer at night and talking about books. Hence my description in the fourth paragraph of my current reading projects.

I had stopped exercising the summer of 1989, probably the only summer in my adult life I didn't run at least on the weekends; and, with the regular malt liquor habit I had developed, it was beginning to have an impact on my health. The complaint -- the time crunch -- of the rat race remains just as true today, twenty-five years later, as it was then.

The final paragraph picks up the story of the apartment pot farmer described in letter number 16.

Summer 1989 

I've just finished a couple of cups of coffee and am now heading on to the beers. A cold quart sits waiting and watching just off to the left. The day at work is four hours long gone and HUSKER DU sings to me from the turntable; the ever-present girth of blubber is battering and lapping against my belt buckle.

It was good to hear from you the other day. What was that, a couple Sundays ago? I had just polished off my ritualistic two quarts of Coors and one quart of Colt 45. I was glad you tried me again because three days earlier I had called using your old number and got some boring cunt's answering machine; and of course since I have the gene porcine somewhere in my morphology, I was too lazy to promptly dial information. So anyway, I had just finished my three quarts and the phone rang and I was too bemused in malt liquor reverie to pick it up, and what you know? It's the good old berating flabbergasting voice of my soul buddy Shale.

The little anecdote that I'm trying to work up to is the one that I'm going to tell ya right now. You know how we had been jawing for so long into our respective receivers? Well, my bladder eventually came down with a considerable ache, but the deal is I didn't want to excuse myself to the pisser and waste your time and money. So I grabbed the pitcher that Ashley uses to water the plants and I worked my cow's udder out through the fly, and I let her rip. The only reason I mention this is that I got a call at work from Ashley. It was a Tuesday. You had called on Sunday I think. She calls me up and asks, "Did you pee in anything of mine?" I drew an absolute blank. The question meant nothing. What the fuck was she talking about? It was like a meat cleaver swooshed down out of an enamel blue sky while I played solitaire on a picnic blanket in a green cow pasture. Shit. I had absolutely no idea. And then she said, "Because today I went to water the plants and the water in the bucket looked really yellow. I thought it was just old, but then I smelled it, and it smelled like piss!" Okay. Sure. Now I remember.

I'm still doing my reading. The only problem is that I don't have enough time to get any of it done. With eight hours spent at work and an hour commute tossed in each way, you aren't left with a lot of time for intellectual pursuits, especially after you include the obligatory shower, shit and shave in the morning, and dinner preparations at night. Same old sob story. The titles I'm working on right now are ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE by Lucretius, and PHILOSPHICAL LOGIC, a compilation edited by P.F. Strawson. There's a bunch of stuff I need to finish, like Ryle's essay, "Systematically Misleading Expressions" and that Leibniz collection put out by Scribner's Sons, and Baudrillard's SIMULATIONS. What a fucking pessimist (in the most malevolent sense) that guy is; in fact, of all those poststructuralists (it should be said that Baudrillard considers himself a post-poststructuralist) I like him the least, if at all; he seems (now remember, I haven't read that much, only a hundred pages or so, so take this with a grain of salt) to be lathering himself up a pretty good self-satisfied sweat by sneaking into a hall closet and whipping Rousseau's skeleton-dead pony with a fat leather belt studded with paperback copies of McLuhan books in French translation. SIMULATIONS boils down to a banal, seltzer-water-and-lemon aping of the ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844, with a few fashionable points about the epistemology of the electronic media tacked on for a nice blow-job effect.

Fifteen minutes earlier a thought occurred to me, something that was certainly plenty true, and I was going to share it with you. But the sad thing is that I've already forgotten it. Blame it on the beer. I'm working on it though. As I write this very sentence, I'm trying to get it back. Dag nabbit, I can't do it just yet. It goes to show ya that that story about Hobbes is one true tale. Apparently Hobbes never went anywhere without pen or paper; this because he knew that no matter how powerful the idea, no matter how clear his construction, and no matter how hard he tried to remember what it was that he wanted to remember, there was no guaranty that he'd be able to keep it -- unless, of course, he wrote it down. Hobbes thought he did his best thinking on his long afternoon walks. So in the top of his walking staff he had a compartment that housed a tablet of paper and a little quill. Why the fucker didn't just carry them in his coat pocket, I don't know. But the overall idea is exactly right there and quite mature if you ask me, namely -- don't ever think you can beat or ignore the arbitrary crackle of the synapse, or, in better, more ethical words -- respect first, always, and ask questions later.

Jeff came up for the weekend a little while back. We ate a lot of pot. You see, Ashley is growing a bunch of plants in the living room and everyday they shed a substantial amount of leaf. So in the morning, Saturday morning, Jeff got up and circled the room with a Tupperware container and harvested the shake. Then he went into the kitchen, put a skillet on the stove, plopped in a touch of butter, added the leaves, cooked them for about ten minutes, and then served them up by forking them on top of a piece of rye toast covered with strawberry jam. After about a half hour we were completely wacked -- and we stayed that way for pretty much the rest of the day. We managed to stumble out of the apartment and make it down to a couple of hot dogs and Central Park. It was a good time. But going into work on Monday, on Tuesday, shit, all the way to Wednesday, I felt like my brain was a fat rump burbling on the back of an old Harley, like I was a black monkey fingering its turds in the pet shop window on Main Street.

Hippies vs. Punks: A Digression on the Avant-Garde

Every Friday evening we've been exploring that short period of time in the 1970's -- 1975 to 1979 -- when the Hippies were wiped out as the avant-garde in the West by the Punks. The hope is that by understanding why it happened -- and happened so quickly -- we might gain insight into how it is that the larger paradigm, what we have named neoliberalism, has us in a chokehold today. What's the connection you ask? Because neoliberalism was launched at the same time that the Hippies were wiped out by the Punks.

Tonight a digression; we're going to jump a decade forward to the late 1980's, the last hurrah of the Punks. I say Punk but what I'm really talking about here is underground rock'n'roll, and in particular hardcore as practiced by those bands featured on SST Records. If ever I considered myself belonging to an avant-garde it was when I was a young man in the late 1980's listening to hardcore.

I forgot how passionately I felt about guys like Mike Watt and George Hurley until I posted a letter that described seeing them play at Columbia in the spring of 1990. D. Boon had died at the end of 1985, but Watt and Hurley carried on as fIREHOSE with ed fROMOHIO handling the lead guitar and most of the singing. I considered them true artists, pure and above reproach. They were blazing the trail, and I was dutifully trying to follow along.

When I had a record player I owned a copy of If'n. It came out while I still lived in Berkeley, but I didn't get into it until I moved to New York City in 1988. The album cover represents everything about that time for me. I look at the album cover and I remember what it feels like to be of the avant-garde.

The kachina dolls, the flannel shirts, the pictorial homage to Hüsker -- add Surfer Rosa, drunken devotion to Neil Young's Ditch Trilogy and Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation and you get an idea of where I and a lot of other people were at; the same place that provided the last rock'n'roll "Great Barbeque" for the corporate Leviathan; the place that created Grunge.

It's painful to contemplate.

But before Grunge, and its corporate excess and crass commercialism, there was a hardcore vanguard in this country. Yes, it was predominantly white. Yes, it was urban and university-oriented. But it was a vanguard nonetheless. To hear what it sounded like listen to the last track off If'n, "Thunder Child," sung by Watt: