I don't know who said it first, but credit usually goes to Frank Zappa: "Writing about music is like dancing to architecture." If that's the case, then reviewing a book about music must be like gettin' jiggy with wiring diagrams, so bear with me. My name is Dave. Several years ago, I was in a punk band. I traveled the U.S.A. in a van, slept on kitchen floors reeking of cat piss and worse, and got up in front of a few dozen appreciative fans who showed their love by spitting, throwing bottles and even chairs, or just simply telling me and my friends on stage that we sucked. I was damn self-righteous about not having enough money to even be noticed by the bourgeoisie, let alone feared and hated by them. Michael Azerrad brings it all back, "it" here referring to the vague sense that the suburban middle class is not so much a demographic category as an unexplored circle of Dante's Hell and liberation from that circle could best be achieved through music.
Our Band Could Be Your Life documents a period in the history of American music where the sound was so good it couldn't really be called "popular" music, and so obscure to the American mainstream it's hard to call it history, either. Still, Azerrad captures the period when Alternative Rock was actually an "alternative" to something. The subtitle, Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991, helps a lot. Azerrad revisits the decade in American music after British punk died and went to purgatory as New Wave, but before Kurt Cobain contracted a terminal case of fame with Nirvana, and Seattle suddenly could pretend that it was actually more cool than Peoria, which it really isn't. But Seattle won the battle of the scenes as presided over by record labels and glossy magazines, and thus became the hottest place in the country, whereas in the previous decades, great music was indigenous to several areas. Our Band focuses on 13 bands from 10 scenes (12 and a half if you're triskadekaphobic enough to want to count Fugazi as a variation on Minor Threat), and it offers no pretense of being the definitive, comprehensive history of this music. To do so, obviously, would in effect flip off the spirit of the musicians whose lives this book chronicles where the key to thriving is to make do with what you have. Azerrad has a baker's dozen of interesting bands and he tells their stories incredibly well.
This is a great book but Hardcore music attracts a fan base consisting mostly of the sort of people who can pick nits like a chimp grooming its mate, and no doubt Azerrad anticipated this potential irritation when he decided to approach his book the way he did. Surely some twit, upon going into his anti-local unfriendly non-neighborhood chain bookstore, is going to look at the bands (for the record, and in order, they are Black Flag, The Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Dinosaur Jr, Fugazi, Mudhoney, and finally, Beat Happening) and say, "Huh? No Meat Puppets? And where the hell are X? And what about Athens, Georgia or Akron, Ohio ..." etc., and then assume that the author is on the take or something. To be fair, my first thought was, "hmmm, I'd like to have seen a chapter on The Shitdogs from Atlanta, for instance. And if we're going to look at Chicago punk, I'd much rather read about Naked Raygun than Big Black."
But Azerrad is onto something, and that's why the key word is "scenes." He's not trying to tell the whole story, since that would be an encyclopedic undertaking far beyond the power of one writer. Instead, Azerrad shows a few bands that make interesting music and, most importantly, live an American Dream in a way that counters the typically materialistic underpinning of said dream. The phrase "Our Band Could Be Your Life" is taken from a Minutemen song, and it insists that, in our music, and in the music of our friends, there is a message of hope and a dream of community wherein the performer and the audience are united in the search for creative expression and, finally, truth. Writes Azerrad, "Corporate rock was about living large; indie was about living realistically and being proud of it. Indie bands didn't need million-dollar promotional budgets and multiple costume changes. All they needed was to believe in themselves and for a few other people to believe in them, too. You didn't need some big corporation to fund you, or even verify that you were any good. It was about viewing as a virtue what most saw as a limitation."
That's why, of course, this book concentrates more on the lives of these bands than on the music (Azerrad again: "If you'd like to know more about the music, you should listen to it"). His greatest accomplishment as a writer is visible in his portraits of these musicians. I've met members of eight of the bands mentioned here, and... well, the guys I thought were assholes come across as assholes in Our Band, and the guys I liked came across as likable guys. For example, Henry Rollins was, shall we say, a rather challenging person to be around in those days, and Steve Albini was (and by all accounts still is) the reality to which all phallic symbols point. [Dave--Ellen in Legal says the Rollins remark can slide, but you're wide open on a defamation suit from Albini, and that we should disavow even knowing you. Do you really know these guys? You sure you want to keep this in? Eds.] Ian MacKaye, on the other hand, is an all-round decent guy who would help anybody regardless of his or her haircut, and Bob Mould is the sort of guy you'd expect to be a regular in some bowling league. That diversity helped make the music great, of course, and to wish Albini or Rollins were more like Mould, or vice-versa, is to miss the point of punk. Which of course most punks did.
My own band, the justly un-chronicled Idiot Sons of Prominent Doctors, played a few dozen gigs in the midwest, appearing in college towns like Iowa City and Urbana and wherever the University of Missouri is located, as well as decidedly non-college towns like Keokuk, Iowa. We ran into the whole range of punk subculture, which was being damaged nearly everywhere by purists in search of the One True Path to Punkdom. People regularly thought we were rich kids because of our name (our parents punched timeclocks, and we actually thought we were pretty smart) but of course, we were looking for free food, so we could be skinheads in Kokomo (or was it Kickapoo?) one night and the next night be hardcore Straight Edge in St. Louis. Well, actually, we went hungry at the skinhead gig because we left when the band playing right after us opened by leading the crowd in chants of "White Power! White Power!" That was too much, but we did impress our straight-edge fans-for-a-night by being so rigidly pure that we only ate raw tofu. I learned two things that weekend: some punks were just stupid rednecks with funny haircuts, and one should never, EVER sleep in a van with five guys who'd earlier eaten a pound of fermented soybean curd. No ventilation system in any vehicle can handle the resulting flatulence. [Dave--Eddie down in the fact-checking dept. can't find any mention of such a group playing anywhere ever, or even existing. Are you sure you have the name right? The '80s were a rough time for you, we know. Eds.]
Two things did us in as a band: 1) our lack of vision and dedication necessary to become an important band and 2) total disgust with the fundamentalist punks who were taking over scene after scene. More the former than the latter of course. I mean, if we kicked ass, we could've put up with frequent idiot-encounters and regular shithead sightings. But the fact was, we were crap as a band. We had a good time, and we didn't get in the way of other people's fun, but as a band, we just didn't have it.
That knowledge, that your band kicks fucking ass, is what kept these great indie bands together. After 10 years of touring and recording, Black Flag was still "living in communal squalor." Which isn't to say that everything they did was great (in retrospect, bassist Bill Stevenson realized, "we were trying to play through the audience rather than to them" -- good call there, Bill). Still, the reason they persevered, as Rollins says over and over, is that they knew what they were doing was unique and, some nights, great. Similarly, the Butthole Surfers spent a good number of years living without any real cash flow, traveling around the US and Europe and staying in rather substandard lodgings. One of the most powerful portraits in the book occurs in the life of this band, where we see Gibby Haynes at one point so close to malnutrition that he begins to cry for milk, or another scene where Haynes and a few of his fellow Surfers are reduced to scrounging for cans and bottles in order to come up with a little bit of money. Why did they do this? Why did Haynes walk away from a cushy corporate job in order to live like a postmodern hobo? Well, first off, because he is Gibby Haynes, and not J. Gibson Haynes, Esquire. But also because, given the music they were making, it was worth it. There was something attained in living this way that made it worth while, something unavailable to people living a 9-5 job or to people bent on climbing the corporate ladder so that, as a result, they could shop more than other people could.
Yet there is still the problem of purity. It was a problem encountered by all these bands during their travels. Mission of Burma for instance would find out that Boston Punk was just as much an alien life form in Milwaukee as it was, back then, in genteel Boston. A good number of these musicians held down jobs of various sort. D. Boon of the Minutemen (masters of "jammin' econo," in Mike Watt's memorable phrase) was a substitute school teacher, as well as an auto-parts outlet employee. Is the late great D. less of a punk than someone else because he had a bank account? Sure, if you want to live in some sort of fantasy land wherein only people with the right hair cuts and the proper ancestral lineage (or lack thereof) are considered the RIGHT sort of people. But there's another name for that make-believe world: HIGH SCHOOL. And most people became punks in the first place not because they wanted to live according to a rigid code, but because they wanted to escape the sort of hierarchical jock-n-cheerleader bullshit that made their teen years such a miserable experience. In fact, there have always been several ways of being punk, and as far as I know, only one truly inauthentic way (cough cough GREEN DAY cough).
That's why the Minutemen are probably my favorite band from this era. They were before I read the book, and they remain so now: those guys really knew how to live. Jammin' econo: living low on the hog, treating other people like people and not property, etc. And having an open mind to music: the band's attraction to certain types of 60s music (Dylan, Creedence, etc.), for instance, often pissed off anti-hippy punks in L.A., but as one of the boys said, "this is music, not urban planning," meaning of course you don't destroy something just so you can call it "progress." As Azerrad writes, "for the Minutemen, punk was a fluid concept." Mike Watt explains: "we hoped to shake up the young guys because punk rock doesn't have to mean hardcore or one style of music or just singing the same lyrics.... It can mean freedom and going crazy and being personal with your art." This is why the Minutemen didn't hide their influences, no matter how embarrassing CCR might be to the average L.A. punk. And in my day, knowing a bit about older music came in handy: at a Butthole Surfer show in New Orleans I was able to talk down someone who was having a bad acid trip because I remembered Wavy Gravy from Woodstock the movie emphasizing the importance of getting the trippers to remember their names and to tell you something about themselves.
That was useful knowledge that came from the clown prince of hippies. And now that 80s Indie music is the older music, and that I'm a bit older myself, I'd like to see this music treated with respect. Not by becoming fodder for doctoral dissertations, not by being featured on VH-1's Behind The Music, and certainly not on the Indie Circuit's equivalent of pro golf's Senior Tour. But by being made available to later generations of fans, and by having writers like Azerrad keep the stories of these bands alive.
Azerrad's other accomplishment, besides writing a stunning narrative that makes for compulsive page-turning, is his redemption of the "music journalist" profession. At least, in so far as one guy who is not Lester Bangs reincarnated can redeem this field. Music journalism has been suffering since the deaths of Bangs and Robert Christgau (the latter of whom miraculously continues to fill space beneath his by-line) [Dave--Lance the janitor just got off the phone with Bob Christgau. Lance gave him your address and home phone. Expect a visit. Eds.] and is mostly given over to people who take advantage of a limited supply of stock phrases and who make themselves into outsourced copywriters for record company marketing departments. Maybe Azerrad is helped by the fact that he is writing about great bands for whom music was first and foremost -- even for those bands that went into the recording business like Black Flag. Maybe it's because he is constitutionally incapable of becoming an industry flunky. I don't know. But Our Band Could be Your Life is a memorable work, almost as memorable as the music that inspired it. And if you are going to write about music, that's about as good as anyone can do.
