BOSTON HARDCORE - SOME OF THE WORST MUSIC EVER MADE

06/23/23

Photo via eyeofthestorm99

Happy 23rd. I was supposed to fly to Denver today for a week long poetry class at Naropa University in Boulder with Thurston Moore and Anne Waldman but had to bail much to my dissatisfaction and irritation and due to a variety of pains in my head and ass… I’ve folded and will stay in LA.

I forgot to write about the couple of days I recently spent in Boston and Beverly, Massachusetts for American Nightmare shows... At the end of this entry is a playlist we had on during The Middle East show. A lot of the songs on it are favorites and some are pretty terrible but we went for it with the Mass - centric music and I almost love them all. I do this for every show I play because you have to set the mood or it will turn out like the fateful day in 2018… when Cold Cave had a show in Dallas the day Vinnie Paul from Pantera died and the front-of-house was grieving through aggressive riffs... I had to approach the sullen sound booth with, Brother I understand your pain but we must read the room. Anyway this playlist - I romanticize a lot of it until I play it in front of Amy and then my skin starts feeling weird and tall and I scratch my neck for no real itch and then skip to the next tune and then I don’t even know if I like music at all.

Actually, the more I think about it, don’t even listen to it. If you must, put it on random shuffle as there is no rhyme or reason to the order.

Amy, Rainer and I landed in Boston on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 7th. Masek landed an hour later so we picked him up at Logan after getting the rental car. Drove into Cambridge and remembered how teen me would get anxious, in a good way, twisting down Storrow Drive, because it always meant I was getting closer to the life I wanted and further from the reality of the one I didn’t care for too much. Get to Cambridge and check into the usual hotel. Some stupid, overpriced hotel we’ve stayed at a dozen times, but walking distance to The Middle East and a few vegan options nearby. The person who checked us in seemed dead. Dodge day-drinking convention attendees in the lobby. Get take-out and Amy is in post flight migraine so we turn the lights off for her and give her time to recover, taking Rain with me to go rehearse at our drummer Alex’s studio in Medford. Still in-between time zones from Europe to the West Coast to the East Coast and this all becomes clear when we start playing and after singing for a few songs I realize I’m pretty worn out from traveling and tours. Got Tibetan takeout from a place near Alex’s I like in Somerville called Martsa On Elm. The person who rang me up seemed dead. Shit maybe it’s me.

Wake up Thursday, the day of the Boston show, with no voice. Walk to drug store, buy steamer for voice, grab a coffee, and realize I have to try everything to feel right to play that night. Schedule a nurse to bring a drip to the hotel room by noon. B-Complex Vitamins, Vitamin B12, High-Dose Vitamin C, Zinc Booster, High-Dose Glutathione. People have mixed opinions on if these IV treatments work. I don’t care if its a placebo or not… I felt instantly alive, could speak, and had floating energy afterwards and got through the show. Nothing is real!

So this venue, The Middle East, a landmark venue in Cambridge, has almost closed several times, through sales or reported sales of the property.. this time is supposedly real, even though it’s already been pushed from late ‘23 to sometime in ‘24 now. Regardless it’s not going to last and we wanted to play here one last time. The first Boston Hardcore show I ever went to was here: Strife, Ten Yard Fight and Hallraker. I don’t even know when that was. Early 1996? I don’t see it listed anywhere online.. Ian McFarland drove us down from Maine and the show ruled.

Anyway the show went off and we played with Fuming Mouth, a newer Boston-based band that Amy had met when they stopped by the store while on tour in Los Angeles, who are great and cool people, and The F.U.’s, the Boston hardcore band that formed in the early 80’s, recorded seminal records for X-Claim Records, were featured on This Is Boston Not L.A. compilation and morphed into Straw Dogs, whom Dylan Carlson of Earth told me he was a fan of, after he told me that Boston hardcore was some of the worst music ever made. !!! So good coming from him who makes the antithesis of it. Lanegan told him to watch his back… Also, the F.U.’s are certainly one of the earlier hardcore bands that are still playing. Who has longer? Agnostic Front? Zero Boys? Negative Approach? I don’t know. I loved the show. The drip must’ve worked. Energy arrived. All felt alive. Fuming Mouth, so sick.

Drawing of AN / The F.U.’s and Fuming Mouth via Showdrawn

Anyway, goodbye venue. Here is the staircase where thousands of unfortunate musicians made the choice to not sing, which resulted in arthritis from amplifier load-ins on such shit inconsiderate passages, which resulted in pain, which resulted in alcohol and painkillers, which you can’t get away with for too long. Also a crucial place to sneak into shows.

The next day we recovered which for me looks like pacing city streets around 7am for coffee and acai bowls and then reading or writing until I have to do something. We had planned to visit Anne Sexton’s gravesite this day but we left late and upon loading Rainer into the car between Masek and Jim, I placed the AN 10” record on the roof, meant for Anne, which flew off somewhere on the blocks between the hotel and MIT which is where I felt it missing. We drove back minutes later and it was nowhere to be seen. We cut our losses and drove to Beverly for the free Bridge 9 in-store which somehow took an hour and a half.

Chris Wrenn’s new Bridge 9 store and HQ in Beverly, MA is beautiful and it’s incredible to see a physical representation of the work and empire he has built for himself. I can say that from the moment I first met him and through the years we’ve worked together, it has always been clear that he would follow the vision and was going to build a world for himself. From the groundwork of art school and the early hustle-days of the label, to the chaos-days of slinging gear outside of Fenway Park, where I was no good at selling but decent at enforcing, it’s been a long road, and an entrepreneurial recipe of chance and instinct, to achieve the life goal of being your own boss in the class of passion. He made it.

Then:

Now:

The set was cool for us and Chris and all at B9 made it such a great experience for AN.. obviously we hadn’t played a floor show in a long time. It helped to think of it as the Agnostic Front and Muphy’s Law performances in Cremaster 3. I liked the juxtaposition of playing in front of 80,000 people a week prior and a hundred people here. Having run the spectrum of shows I think I’ve come to the conclusion that, for a variety of reasons, maybe the best shows that exist are hardcore shows in small venues to a few hundred people. There are pros and cons to everything but I think that may be true. Caught up with some old faces like Colin and and kicked it with some new ones like Alma and Mark/Fuming Mouth and people from the band Vein. Happy we did the show.

Photo via domdphoto

Random:

1. I just zoned out watching a public access performance of Kilsug from when they reunited a decade or so ago.

2. Now listening to the Fastbreak “Youth Pride” demo which kinda sounds good.

3. Somehow this train started with thinking about Upsidedown Cross.

4. Is it true that Tanya Donnelly was the person who answered the phone at Fort Apache studios for a while? I heard that back then.

5. Masek and I went to see Belly a few years ago at the Teragram. It was pretty good and they took an intermission.

6. Masek and I saw Yo La Tengo there too. They also took an intermission.

7. Now listening to The Sickness Caution 7”

8. Groinoids sounding pretty good right now in headphones too… riffs are very Minor Threat

9. I just thought of the band All Chrome who I thought was post- Hallraker but now I’m not sure. So strange how some bands arbitrarily had a following while others didn't so much. I had at least one All Chrome record when it came out in the late 90’s and listening now it sounds pretty decent, like Verbal Assault or Dag Nasty or Swiz or even Lifetime at times via Massachusetts VFW halls.

10. I love Boston Hardcore. Some of the best music ever made.

More soon…