As ‘American Hardcore’ author Steven Blush makes his way to Portsmouth, locals like Al Barr, Jeff Morris and Matt Serven discuss the area’s ongoing hardcore legacy.

There’s debate about when, exactly, hardcore was born. Some say the first real hardcore album was Bad Brains’ 1980 record “Pay to Cum.” Others say it goes back to 1978 with The Middle Class’s “Out of Vogue.” The first time the term “hardcore” was applied to music may have been D.O.A.’s 1981 album “Hardcore 81.”

But it doesn’t matter much. Regardless of how it started, hardcore soon became a roaring underground movement that swept up disaffected suburban youths around the nation. Although it never approached commercial success and never attempted to penetrate the mainstream, hardcore defined the lives of thousands of American teens.

“It was much more than music. It was a social movement,” said Steven Blush, author of “American Hardcore: A Tribal History.” “It was an umbrella group for alienated kids of all sizes and colors and stripes to find themselves in this chaotic but exciting new subculture.”

Blush started working on “American Hardcore” in 1995 and the first edition was published by Feral House in 2001. Doing most of his research before the Internet age and studying a genre that received precious little public documentation, Blush gathered information from record collections, old fanzines, and upwards of 100 interviews.

“It was like archeology. I had to take the raw artifacts and create a narrative out of that,” he said.

The result was a book composed mainly of direct quotes from the mouths of people who were on the scene during hardcore’s peak years from 1980 to ’86. It also featured hundreds of flyers, album covers, band logos and photos, including the graphic cover shot of Wasted Youth’s Danny Spira screeching into the microphone while blood spills out of his mouth and runs down his chest in red rivulets.

Director Paul Rachman turned “American Hardcore” into a documentary film in 2006, generating waves of nostalgia for the movement. Blush went on to interview more people, including mainstream artists like Flea and Moby, and put together a second edition of the book, which will be released in November. It includes a whole new chapter titled “Destroy Babylon,” about some of the spiritual and religious elements that emerged in the hardcore scene.

Blush will discuss his book and present a slideshow during an event hosted by RiverRun Bookstore at Portsmouth Public Library on Thursday, Oct. 7, at 7 p.m. He plans to talk about “the rise and fall of the early American hardcore scene, the DIY movement, and Portsmouth’s small but obvious place in all this.”

the rise

To Blush, hardcore epitomized the “do it yourself” mentality. Even the biggest hardcore bands—Bad Brains, Black Flag, Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys—were virtually penniless throughout their careers in the ’80s. By that time, punk pioneers like The Clash and The Ramones were traveling the nation in tour buses and getting their songs played on mainstream radio stations.

But hardcore was utterly ignored by radio DJs, record labels and the general public. Musicians hyped shows through word of mouth and flyers. They played at house parties, in basements and abandoned buildings, and they slept on their friends’ floors during tours. They did all the work themselves, with no help from show promoters or managers.

“Hardcore took it to the heartland,” Blush said. “The whole rise of the DIY movement today can be traced back to this handful of bands 30 years ago.”

The movement came at a time when many kids were struggling to find meaning in their lives. They were disillusioned with disco, new wave and hair metal. They were outraged by newly elected president Ronald Reagan. They watched their parents lose their jobs and whole suburban industries collapse. The promise of a house with a two-car garage and three kids seemed surreally foreign to them.

“There was something going wrong with the American dream, and we weren’t smart or old enough to articulate it, but it came out through this music and subculture,” Blush said.

The movement did not sit well with mainstream society. While hardcore communities blossomed in cities like Los Angeles, New York, Boston and Washington, the nation, at large, remained hostile to punks.

“It was a tribal movement, and there were little pockets around the country that were safe havens for the bands, and everywhere else was like a war zone,” Blush said. “People wanted to fucking kill you.”

The police were no exception. Already having gone through a decade of hippie activism, authorities were eager to stamp out the hardcore movement before it gained steam. They often raided shows and brutally beat unarmed attendees with batons, often inciting riots.

Blush, who worked as a show promoter, band manager and indie label owner, said he frequently fell victim to the cops’ antagonism. Police once pulled him and a few other punks from a car and threw them to the ground, forcing them to say "I’m a fag" before setting them free. “That’s what we were dealing with,” he said.

Hardcore music, itself, was often of dubious quality. With few exceptions (notably Bad Brains), most hardcore musicians were not skilled instrumentalists or singers. The genre emphasized speed over technicality, with short, ultra-fast songs, shouted lyrics and, usually, no solos or bridges.

“Punk introduced this concept that you didn’t have to be a schooled musician to get onstage, and hardcore certainly ran with that,” Blush said.

Part of the music’s appeal was the “complete deconstruction of rock and roll.” Most hardcore songs were barely over a minute long and didn’t even have a chorus. “By definition, that’s not a song, so what is that? That’s what was really attractive about it—it was a non-music, it was a-melodic,” Blush said.

Instead, the music was mostly about an attitude, as personified by front men like Henry Rollins (Black Flag), Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat) and Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys). It was a loud and deliberate rejection of everything conventional, a forceful and defiant wakeup call to a materialistic society.

“We really were out to change the world,” Blush said. “We did fail, admittedly, but maybe in retrospect we didn’t do so bad.”

the scene

Al Barr remembers the first time he heard hardcore music as a teenager. The Portsmouth resident, now front man of Boston-based punk band Dropkick Murphys, was hanging out with some older kids who put on a Bad Brains record.

“I didn’t know that a band could play that fast. I had no idea,” Barr said. “I’d never heard something so voracious and crazy. I was hooked from the word go.”

By that time, Barr’s musical tastes had already evolved from classic rock like Hendrix and the Stones to fast-paced punk like The Ramones. But hardcore hit him like an epiphany, informing how he lived his life in high school.

“I didn’t hang out with jocks, I didn’t hang out with preps, I didn’t hang out with metal-heads,” he said. “I was a purist. I listened to nothing but hardcore. If it wasn’t hardcore, I didn’t want to hear it.”

In the early 1980s, when the hardcore craze was at its peak, Barr was the lead singer of a band called DVA (Direct Vole Assault). He said the band was mainly influenced by Social Distortion and primarily featured a punk sound, but they also played some hardcore songs. “We kind of dipped between the two styles,” he said.

DVA mainly played at Knights of Columbus halls and VFW posts around Portsmouth. The area’s hardcore scene was small but healthy, sometimes drawing kids up from Boston. Barr remembers organizing a show at the Masonic Temple in Portsmouth in 1985, billing a number of bands from New Hampshire and Maine and charging a few dollars at the door. About 400 kids showed up, he said.

About a year later, Barr took over vocal duties for a band called 5 Balls of Power, replacing former guitarist and singer Jay Fortin, who later went on to form legendary Portsmouth band Scissorfight. The band played more club shows than DVA, introducing Barr to the rich hardcore scene in Boston.

But it wasn’t long before he switched bands again, this time as a founding member of The Bruisers. Formed in 1988, the group also included guitarist Jeff Morris, formerly of Newburyport-based hardcore band NPD (No Police Dictatorship). Although The Bruisers booked most of their gigs at Boston clubs like The Rat and The Middle East, they also played frequently at Portsmouth’s now defunct Elvis Room.

“The Portsmouth hardcore scene was true to the first wave—no crossover or metal influence,” Morris said. “If you said hardcore in Portsmouth or Dover, you meant bands like Black Flag, DKs, Murderers, etcetera.”

The Bruisers started out as a working class oi! skinhead band—but don’t make the mistake of equating skinheads with racism. Their shaved heads were intended as a stylistic affront, part of hardcore’s tough, militant look.

“We were an oi! band, we were a skinhead band, but skinhead doesn’t mean white power,” Barr said. “It was never about race. We were always very vigilant about letting people know that we weren’t about that.”

Still, The Bruisers often had to battle against false perceptions. Even Blush, in his original printing of “American Hardcore,” characterized The Bruisers as a “white power” band, angering Barr and Morris.

“Apparently, we were reviewed in some white power zine, so Blush assumed that was enough to base his claim that The Bruisers were a white power skinhead band,” Morris said. “This is not just lazy, it’s criminally lazy.”

Morris contacted the book’s publisher and asked for a retraction, and Blush responded by deleting any mention of The Bruisers from subsequent printings—not the vindication Morris was looking for.

“Here’s the thing: Al, myself and several other past members of The Bruisers are still active in music today. We have children, wives, bosses, associates. We cannot allow such slander to exist in print,” he said.

In fact, Barr said, white power skinheads were never embraced in the greater Boston hardcore scene.

“The majority of the people in that culture are not racist,” he said. “If you’re a Nazi skinhead, you don’t go to shows in Boston. You can’t go there because people will beat the crap out of you, and the same goes for New York.”

Boston did, however, develop a particularly militant hardcore scene. There was a strong straight edge movement in the city, including SS Decontrol and its menacing front man Al Barile, as well as DYS and Negative FX. According to Blush, the “Boston Crew” was violent enough to even scare off Ian MacKaye, who pretty much coined the phrase “straight edge” in a Minor Threat song.

“Ian MacKaye saw what was going on in Boston and it almost scared him. Like, ‘Whoa, take it easy,’” he said.

At the same time, there was a contingent of other Boston bands that regularly drank and drugged themselves into a coma, including Gang Green and The Freeze.

But Barr said most of the violence in Boston did not involve straight edge clashes with drinkers. The worst scraps he witnessed involved a territorial “pissing war” between different hardcore scenes. Boston punks vocally rebelled against the L.A. scene and later sparred with the New York crowd.

Barr recalled a show in the basement of a Boston YMCA featuring New York bands Agnostic Front and Murphy’s Law. He said Dicky Barrett of The Mighty Mighty Bosstones got in a fistfight with Jimmy Drescher (a.k.a. Jimmy Gestapo) of Murphy’s Law, sparking an all-out brawl.

“There was a big throw-down between Boston and New York. People were smashing chairs over each other’s heads. It was a crazy night,” Barr said.

As The Bruisers moved deeper into the ’90s, their style began to shift from hardcore punk to hard “street rock,” and their lyrical content matured.

“With The Bruisers, we began writing about skinhead related subjects and then got into some ideas of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ideas of brotherhood and family and how they were more than bullet points for us,” Morris said. “Later on, we were doing songs about growing up and the American Dream, or death thereof.”

The Bruisers enjoyed an illustrious career, releasing seven CDs and touring around the United States and Europe. Over their 10-year existence, they shared stages with such legendary bands as Bad Brains, Agnostic Front, Murphy’s Law and Biohazard.

Morris stuck with The Bruisers until 1996 and joined them for a reunion show in 2005 before starting a new street rock band called Death & Taxes, which recently played its final show at the Dover Brick House. He now lives in Chicago.

Barr stayed with The Bruisers for a full decade, quitting in 1998 to become lead singer of Dropkick Murphys, one of Boston’s biggest current bands. The Dropkicks will soon record their seventh studio album and depart for a tour of Australia in December.

The Dropkicks and Death & Taxes represent markedly different styles from hardcore. Although both of their musical tastes have changed, Morris believes he and Barr are still carrying the hardcore torch. He recalled a comment about The Bruisers’ 1993 album “Cruisin for a Bruisin,” which reflected the band’s transition away from hardcore and toward rock.

“A friend of ours played it for Mark Noah of Anti-Heros, and his comment on the first song, ‘Till the End,’ was that it was as oi! in sentiment as anything ever written,” Morris said. “I’ll take that to the bank.”

the fall and new rise

Now 33, Matt Serven came of age after the first wave of hardcore had all but fizzled out. Unlike the original hardcore fans, who developed a taste for fast rock through bands like The Ramones and the Sex Pistols, Serven was first introduced to thrash metal in third grade.

“I kind of got into hardcore backwards. Most people listen to punk and then they get into hardcore. I didn’t like punk, at all. I hated it, in fact. So I listened to lots of metal and worked my way up to death metal and grindcore,” he said.

Then he heard Minor Threat, and it changed his life. He instantly identified with Ian MacKaye’s straight edge message, rejecting the drunken party attitude that characterized high school jock rockers.

“When I heard their music and read their lyrics, I was totally sold on the scene,” Serven said. “I was like, wow, here’s an aggressive band that has something to latch onto and something to say. It wasn’t necessarily positive, but it was something that I could be passionate about and could identify with.”

Serven and his brother Brian started Backstabbers Inc. about 12 years ago (like Minor Threat, Backstabbers is helmed by a pair of straight edge brothers). To ’80s purists, their metal-infused sound might not qualify as hardcore. But the music’s furiously loud, fast and abrasive tone accurately captures the hardcore spirit.

“Backstabbers might sound more like a grindcore band or a metallic hardcore band, but the way that we present ourselves and what we’re about are always going to be more hardcore,” Serven said.

He’s also in the process of starting a new band called Black Swan with Jeff Bernhardt and A.J. Dudick (of recently disbanded metal group Picnic Casket). The group will be more experimental and less hardcore than Backstabbers, he said. But, these days, hardcore is a difficult genre to pigeonhole.

“The term ‘hardcore’ is such a huge umbrella term,” Serven said. “The scene and the subgenre has grown so much, it could really sound almost like anything and still be hardcore.”

To Blush, the true hardcore scene died in 1986 and will never be recovered. Bands like Black Flag, Minor Threat and Dead Kennedys threw in the towel, while speed metal acts like Slayer and Metallica were on the rise. The hardcore movement was specific to the early ’80s Reagan era, Blush said, and would be impossible to replicate in the modern information age.

But Blush has softened his stance over the last decade. He now acknowledges that there are still a number of legitimate bands that bill themselves as hardcore.

“There are still bands inspired by it who raise the flag and love it, and who am I to say it’s not valid?” he said.

To Serven, hardcore is a concept that transcends time and place, adapting to each new political upheaval and cultural trend. Like hip-hop, the music has evolved to include numerous subgenres, but the flame at its core is still burning.

“As long as there’s gonna be something to be upset about, which there always will be, I think there will always be a place for hardcore,” he said.

On this point, Jeff Morris agrees. He takes issue with Blush’s doomsaying about the death of hardcore, calling it “ageist snobbery.”

“That’s an easy statement to make, and it’s typical of the old curmudgeon-core types,” he said. “Sure, Black Flag will never be equaled. But there are still bands out there doing some great stuff with the true spirit of hardcore.”

Aaron Scott, of local hardcore/metal bands Boring Kind of Guy and Whiskey Drinking Cow Tippers, said his music is heavily influenced by hardcore but not confined to any one particular style. He believes bands that attempt to precisely replicate the early ’80s sound are imitative and unoriginal.

“You’ve got your bands that are straight-up hardcore and you’ve got your bands that try too hard,” Scott said. “They just want to be like Hatebreed. They want to be like their favorite hardcore band. I don’t want to play like anybody.”

Scott may not take the hardcore vibe as seriously as Serven does. The Whiskey Drinking Cow Tippers will release their debut CD with a show at the Dover Brick House on Saturday, Oct. 9. Mixed in with a number of originals are hardcore versions of New Kids on the Block’s “Step by Step” and The Temptations’ “Stand by Me.” Like many other modern hardcore bands, they’re more into partying than politicking.

“It’s all fun, man,” Scott said. “If I have a chance to play in front of people, that’s all I really care about doing.”

The Brick House is perhaps the only venue on the Seacoast that frequently hosts hardcore and metal bands. Booking manager Chris Serrecchia said that although the crowd can get a bit rowdy, it’s nothing like the riotous Boston slamdancing pits of the early ’80s.

“To an outsider, the room probably looks out of hand, but the kids pretty much police themselves,” Serrecchia said. “It’s more organized than you’d think.”

At Backstabbers gigs, Serven said, the audience usually stands perfectly still and concentrates on the band—a far cry from the stage diving and moshing that characterized early hardcore shows.

Nevertheless, the impact of 1980s hardcore is undeniably evident in modern music. Components of the sound and attitude have permeated mainstream rock, from death metal to gangsta rap.

Hardcore fashion, too, is still pervasive. Originally a dismissal of the punk movement’s peacock hairdos and “look-at-me” dress, as well as the spandex pants and long hair of metal-heads, hardcore went with a stripped-down, shaved head, jeans and T-shirt look. Henry Rollins and others also helped introduce tattoos to rock culture. Most hard rock stars today look more like Rollins or Harley Flanagan (of Cro-Mags) than Steven Tyler or Eddie Van Halen, Blush said.

Serven has short hair and is covered with tattoos. Wrapped around his neck are the boldfaced words “I fight every day,” a lyric from a song by His Hero Is Gone. He often performs shirtless, screaming into the mike with uncontained aggression. He said he gets asked about the tattoo’s meaning all the time.

“It’s more or less about just personal battle. Everyone has something that they fight against every day, whether it be drugs, alcohol, getting up, the job—anything that can be facing you. It’s applicable to anybody, any time, really.”

And that, perhaps, sums up the enduring spirit of hardcore.

< Prev		Next >